The Screaming Staircase

He adjusted his glasses. “At the Archives yesterday,” he said, “I found a mention of the cross in an old Hampshire guidebook. They describe this as a fairly common depiction of the Last Judgment, when the dead rise up from their graves at the end of time. Here are the bones, look; and here are the saved souls rising.”

  “And the chunky guy in the middle?” Lockwood said.

  “An angel, presiding over it all.” George pointed. “Yeah, see these marks here? I reckon he once had wings.” He shook his head. “It’s no graveyard ghoul, no matter what Danny Skinner says. Whatever’s hanging around the village is something else.”

  “So maybe he is making most of it up…” I said. “Speak of the devil—there he is.” A figure had come out of the Old Sun Inn and was waving to us across the road.

  “He was right about the battle, though,” George said, as we walked toward the inn. “There was a ninth-century dustup between the Saxons and the Vikings in the fields east of the modern village. At one time, before the Problem, it was a popular spot for antiquaries to go digging—a couple of centuries ago they turned up quite a few shields, swords, and skeletons. Farmers would find bones caught in their plows, that sort of thing. Must have been quite a skirmish. But like you said, Lockwood, it’s not a massive battle by national standards—there are other, more recent sites that haven’t caused nearly as much trouble as this one appears to be doing.”

  “Our job is to find out why,” Lockwood said. “Assuming we don’t end up strangling our client first, which is a distinct possibility.”

  The Old Sun Inn was a timber-framed building, half swaddled with marauding ivy. Much of it seemed to be in a state of disrepair. The main entrance, in what appeared to be the oldest part of the house, faced toward the church; another door led to the pub garden and the green. On a post hung a dilapidated painted sign showing a massive bloodred sun, hovering like a beating heart above a darkened landscape. Our client was swinging on the garden gate below this, waving as we approached. In broad daylight his protruding ears had a pinkly see-through quality. He was grinning at us with a kind of fierce pleasure that contained both delight and anger.

  “At last! You took your sweet time. The Shadow was back last night, and the dead walked in Aldbury Castle, while the living cowered in our beds. And you all missed it again! You want lemonades? Pops will get you some.”

  “Lemonade sounds good,” Lockwood said. “Maybe after we see our rooms.”

  The kid swung manically back and forth. “Oh, you want rooms? But you’ll be out fighting Visitors all night, won’t you?”

  “Only some of the time.” Lockwood put out a hand and stilled the movement of the gate. “And you definitely promised us somewhere to stay. Rooms now, please.”

  “Ooh, I don’t know….I’ll ask Pops. Hold on.” He slouched away into the bar.

  “Is it just me,” Kipps said, “or does that boy need punching?”

  “It’s not just you.”

  Presently our client re-emerged, as perky as a ferret up a trouser leg. “Okay, I got you rooms.”

  “Excellent…Why are there only two keys?”

  “The inn has two guest rooms. One key for each.”

  We gazed at him, certain horrific permutations drifting through our minds. Lockwood spoke carefully. “Yes, but there are five of us, with a variety of needs, habits, and private regions that we don’t want shared. There must be other rooms.”

  “There are. They’re inhabited by me, my dad, and my mad old grandpa; I can tell you, his private needs and habits are well worth avoiding. There’s also a storage closet in the kitchen, but that’s damp, rat-infested, and haunted by the ghost. Cheer up—you’ve got five beds! Well, four, to be fair. One’s a double. Here’s the key for the double room; it’s also got a cot. The other’s a twin. I hope you have a lovely stay. I’ll leave it to you to settle in, and see you in the bar later.” With that, he departed.

  There was a heavy silence. I scanned the others, taking in Holly’s neat traveling bag, doubtless crammed with body lotions and skin cleansers; George’s ominously light backpack, which lacked room for any conceivable change of clothes; Kipps’s angular and palely ginger frame, the horrors of which were just hinted at beneath his turtleneck; and Lockwood. To share a room with any of them presented problems.

  The others were making similar swift calculations.

  “Lucy—?” Holly began.

  “You beat me to it. Don’t mind if I do.”

  “In that case,” Holly said, plucking a key from Lockwood’s hand, “we’ll take the twin room and leave you boys to it. Good luck deciding who gets the cot.”

  We left them standing in the hall and went up to our room.

  It was a small, neat space, surprisingly pleasant, with white lace coverlets on the beds, and a vase of fresh lavender on the windowsill. We put our bags down and stood at the window, looking out over the green. You could hear the jangling of the iron charms on the doors of the distant cottages and smell the lavender in the air.

  “You know something?” Holly said. “I’m glad it’s worked out like this. I’m pleased you’re here.”

  “Well, if I wasn’t, you’d have to share rooms with one of the boys,” I said.

  She gave a delicate little shudder and drew her coat elegantly around her. “True….But I didn’t just mean that. I’ve felt bad ever since you left. About you going, about the way it all ended back then. I felt responsible.”

  “Oh, don’t you start!” I said. “Everyone thinks I left because of you. And I really didn’t. If it was just about you, believe me, I would have stayed.” I gave her a stern glare.

  Holly lifted her hands in a peaceable gesture. “There you go with that look again! I just mean it was the arguments we had that brought it to a head—that made you lose control.” She was referring to the Poltergeist I’d conjured up during our blazing fight at Aickmere’s department store, and she was quite correct—but that didn’t mean I enjoyed hearing her say it. My frown deepened. “Oh, you’re getting angry with me again,” Holly went on, “and I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. All I’m saying—”

  “It’s okay. I know what you’re saying.” I let my face relax. “Thanks for saying it.”

  “And I hope you find the skull one day,” Holly added, after an unusually warm pause. “I know how important it is to you.”

  I could have denied it. I probably should have. “Yeah,” I said. “I kind of miss having it around.”

  “I can’t think why. It’s a horrible thing, and I don’t think it liked me.”

  I chuckled. “Well, no, it really didn’t.”

  “It made unpleasant faces whenever I went by.”

  “That’s nothing. It actively encouraged me to murder you once or twice. But don’t worry, I’m not going to take up any of its suggestions, even the coat hanger one.”

  Holly looked anxiously around the room. “The coat hanger one?”

  “It was a kind of garrote thing, using hangers like those ones over there….Anyway, don’t worry about that. Let’s get settled in. Which bed do you want?”

  “The one by the door.”

  Not long afterward we went downstairs again. At the foot of the stairs was a flagstoned hallway, dominated by its ancient entrance door. An arch beyond opened into the pub, a low-ceilinged chamber with a sweet, melancholy smell of stale beer. Here a broad-chested man with a pale, pained face and slate-gray hair was drying glasses behind the bar. From his protruding ears, I guessed him to be Danny Skinner’s father, the owner of the inn. A wild-eyed old man sat in a corner by the fire. Otherwise, aside from the rest of our team, the place was empty. Lockwood, with Danny at his side, was ordering lemonades. Kipps and George stood glumly by, each with a subtly harried look.

  I sat on a bar stool next to Lockwood. “I take it you took the cot,” I said.

  He nodded. “Leader’s prerogative.”

  “I didn’t sign up for this,” Kipps said. “Horrific phantoms, yes. Waking up next to Cubbins, no.”
>
  “As soon as it gets dark we’re going to have to deal with the inn’s ghost.” George, too, spoke with deep feeling. “Then Kipps or I will be able to sleep in the storage closet downstairs. All the other Visitors can wait.”

  Mr. Skinner, the innkeeper, nodded toward the arch. “Well, if you’re interested in our ghost, that’s where it happens, out in the hall. Glowing child, that’s what they say it is. The big door there’s where kids hear the knocking.”

  “They’re making it up!” A shout made us turn. The old man by the fire was glaring at us madly. “It’s nothing but the wind! Trees knocking on the window! Too much cheese at night! Claptrap and baloney!” He took a sip of beer.

  “That’s my grandpa,” Danny whispered. “Used to be vicar at St. Nestor’s Church, until he got too crazy. He’s too old to have ever seen a ghost, so he doesn’t believe in them—or in ghost-hunters, naturally. If he insults you, just ignore him.”

  “Oh, we’ll suffer in silence. You’ve given us plenty of practice at that.” Lockwood was gazing out at the dark and quiet hallway. “Okay, we’ll look into this midnight visitor for you. So there’s no one else at the Old Sun Inn?”

  “You’re our only guests.” The innkeeper shook his head sourly. “The Old Sun Inn…there’s an inappropriate name for you. If there’s a darker spot in all creation than Aldbury Castle, I wouldn’t like to see it. Come outside with me a moment.”

  He flipped his dish towel over his shoulder, pushed the bar flap open, and limped out across the lobby, ignoring the cries of the old man for another glass of beer. In the garden the sun was drawing clear of the beech woods, and the sky was a cold, pale blue. Two children were playing far off, thrashing through the long grass on the green.

  “Used to be kept mowed, this green did,” Mr. Skinner said, as we trooped outside behind him. “Nice and neat, it was; we had picnics, bands playing, and whatnot. Course, no one bothers with any of that anymore. The only communal activity now is when we gather to burn the clothes of the recently deceased. Never does any good, mind. More ghosts than people, Aldbury Castle has, and more being added every day.”

  He pointed out across the grass. “There’s a headless lady who walks under the chestnut trees,” he said. “See where the shadows are darkest? That’s supposed to be her grave. That bit of stained ground? That was where the gallows were. We destroyed them years ago, but the children say a shape still lingers there—the ghost of a peddler hung from one of the trees after selling pies with rotten meat.”

  “Bit severe,” George said, “but you can understand their annoyance. Anything else?”

  “The church has its ghost, of course. Fellow who fell from the tower while fixing the lightning rod, they say. And see along there? Half the cottages on that side of the green have been abandoned for years; an influenza epidemic one hundred years ago left too many unquiet souls in them. Then there’s the duck pond. A teacher took her own life in it, twenty years ago. I remember that myself. Miss Bates, a sad and quiet woman, she was. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Found her in the center of the pond on a bright spring morning, long hair floating out like river weeds….”

  “Oh, God, her spirit hasn’t got lots of hair, has it?” George said. “Long, lank, black hair? I can’t bear hairy ghosts. Or ones with tattoos.”

  “George.”

  “What?”

  “Shush.”

  “There’re dozens more. We’ve always been on the edge of things,” Mr. Skinner said, “where the barrier between this world and the next wears thin. Not surprising, really, given our history.”

  “You mean the battlefield?” Lockwood asked. “Where was that, do you know?”

  “Up Potter’s Lane, there, beyond the church. Through the woods and between the hills. When I was a boy, the farmers used to still turn up the occasional bone in the fields there. Sometimes they’d be ground up in the combine blades. Mind you, the Rotwell place has tidied up most of that now. We used to go into the woods for dares; in the dawn light we’d see the warriors’ ghosts standing in the mists, among the wheat. Passive things, they were; didn’t cause any trouble, unlike the Visitors nowadays. Well, you’ll have your work cut out for you here. You’ll want food, will you, while you’re alive? I can do you a tripe-and-turnip stew for supper.”

  “Oh…that sounds great. Is there anything else?”

  “Just stew.”

  “Well,” Lockwood said heartily as the innkeeper hobbled slowly back inside, “I think it’s in all our interests to get this village taken care of as quickly as possible, don’t you?” He smiled around at us. “And for Kipps’s and George’s sake, if there’s a ghost in the Old Sun Inn, that’s as good a place as any to start.”

  That afternoon, spurred on by a tasty bar-snack lunch of stale cheese sandwiches, pork rinds, and more lemonade, we got speedily to work. Holly and I interviewed the inhabitants of the inn, and got some useful info from Danny Skinner and his dad. As well as the apparition that Danny had once seen near the old door, they both reported a permanent chill in one area of the hallway, which lingered even when the radiators were on. Mr. Skinner had long ago stopped sitting in the armchairs in the hall, owing to feelings of faint depression and nausea. As for the kid, from his bed he regularly heard a loud hammering on the door as midnight came.

  We got nothing worthwhile from old Reverend Skinner. As his grandson had predicted, he couldn’t countenance the existence of ghosts. The cold spot was a draft; the spectral knocking was the drains; as for us, we were shameless hucksters pulling the wool over our clients’ eyes. Despite his contempt, he seemed fascinated by our efforts and hung around like a headache as we carried out our daytime survey.

  By and large, what we found backed up the Skinners’ story. Even in the late afternoon, certain primary phenomena—mainly chill and creeping fear—could be detected in the hall of the inn, and also in the kitchen, which was reached through an interconnecting door. Both areas were laid with the original flagstones. Other first floor regions seemed unaffected.

  The great front door was black with age. We unlatched it and inspected both sides. There were scratch marks on the external face, but they could have been made by anything. Beyond the dusty porch, a path led to an iron fence that barred the way to the churchyard.

  The afternoon wore on. Suppertime came, and stew was served. We sat at the mullioned windows of the public bar looking out over the darkening green. The trees that ringed the village were black now, the old cross glowing with the last light of evening. The atmosphere was dark and sinister. Much the same could be said for the stew.

  “I can see a couple of Visitors already,” Lockwood said. “See out there, on the far side of the green? Two faint shapes hovering by the road.”

  No one else could see them, but we believed him. He had the best Sight among us—those of us who had any Sight at all.

  “Well, this is where I become useless,” Kipps said. He was stirring his stew around and around, as if by some alchemy it might become edible. “I don’t know what I can do to help this evening, short of being tethered by the door like a goat to lure the ghost.”

  “That’s actually not a bad idea,” Lockwood said. “We just might do it. Alternatively, George has a suggestion. He’s brought something along for you.”

  “Yep,” George said. “You could try these.” His backpack hung on his chair; he ferreted around inside it and, with a flourish, drew out a heavy pair of rubber goggles with thick crystal eyepieces. He handed them to Kipps, who took them wordlessly, turning them over in his pale hands.

  “What are they?”

  “Rare and expensive items,” George said, “which I stole. Made by the Orpheus Society, used by John William Fairfax, late owner of Fairfax Iron. The lenses are crystal instead of glass. As to what they do—I have a theory. Try them.”

  Kipps was hesitant. “Have you put these on? What did you see?”

  “I saw nothing. But they’re not for me. I think they’re for old fogies like you. Go on.”

/>   With any amount of grumbling and struggling with the strap, Kipps eased the goggles over his head. The thick rubber hid half his face, which was an immediate improvement.

  “Does Penelope Fittes know you’ve got these?”

  “Nope. And she’s not going to, either. Quit moaning and look out the window.”

  Kipps did so. At once he stiffened; his fingers gripped the sides of the goggles. “I can see three dark figures out on the green….”

  “Are they there when you remove the specs?”

  Kipps tore them away. “No…no, they’re gone.”

  George nodded. “Excellent. That’s because you can’t see ghosts ordinarily. The crystals help your eyes—they refocus the light somehow. It bothered me for ages that I couldn’t figure out what these goggles did—but I was being stupid. The Orpheus Society is full of old codgers who have been searching for ways to join the fight against Visitors. An invention like this gives them that ability. And it will allow you, Kipps, to see psychically again.” He waved a hand. “It’s all right, you don’t have to thank me. At least not with words. Money will do fine.”

  Maybe it was the light, maybe it was the stew, but I almost thought Kipps’s eyes had actually filled up. “I—I don’t know what to say….” he said. “This is…” He broke off, frowning. “But—hold on, if somebody’s invented these, why doesn’t everyone have a pair?”

  That was what I wanted to know.

  “The Orpheus guy implied it was a prototype,” George said. “Maybe it hurts your eyes, maybe it’s not actually that effective on most ghosts. We don’t know. I was hoping you could test it for us, Kipps. We’ve brought a spare sword along, too.”

  “Even so,” Holly said, as Kipps placed the goggles reverently beside his plate, “can it be right that people are dreaming up important things like this—and no one knows anything about it?”

  Lockwood shook his head. “In truth,” he said, “there’s an awful lot about the Orpheus Society we just don’t understand yet. We’re going to have to look into it. But we’ve got other things to worry about tonight.” He gestured at the darkened hall. “And the biggest of them is what’s going to come knocking on that door.”