Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase (22 page)

The eyes were the worst. Sunk deep in hollow sockets,
they were bright and cold, and full of anger and intelligence. They moved ceaselessly, staring all about, scanning the surface of the blank glass wall. The man’s fury was apparent. His hands dug like claws into his knees. He was speaking, but I couldn’t hear the words.

‘Blake’s rich,’ Barnes chuckled, ‘and used to getting his own way. He’s not at all happy to be here. But that’s not your problem. Take a good look, Miss Carlyle. Let your mind empty; think back to what you got from the girl. Does this trigger anything?’

I took a deep breath, squashed my anxiety down. After all, it
was
going to be OK. He couldn’t actually see me. I’d do what Barnes wanted, then be gone.

I focused my attention on the face—

And as I did so, the old man’s eyes locked suddenly into mine. They became quite still. It was as if he saw straight through the barrier and knew that I was there.

He smiled at me. It was a smile full of teeth.

I jolted right back in my seat. ‘No!’ I said. ‘That’s enough! I don’t get anything. It’s triggered nothing. Please. Please stop now! That’s enough.’

Barnes hesitated, then pressed the button. The shutters drew together, unhurriedly blocking out the spot-lit, smiling man.

‘Lucy,’ Lockwood said. ‘Stop. You need to talk to me.’

‘No. No, I really don’t.’

‘Stop going so fast. I understand why you’re angry, but you’ve got to realize – I didn’t know Barnes was going to ask you to do that.’

‘No? Maybe you should have guessed. Thanks to your stupid article this morning, the whole
world
knows about my psychic link to Annie Ward. I’m suddenly considered central to the case!’

‘Lucy, please—’ Lockwood grabbed my sleeve, forced me to stop in the middle of the road. We were in Mayfair somewhere, about halfway home. The mansions were quiet, mostly hidden behind high walls and the swirling mist. It
was just gone midnight. Not even the ghosts were around.

‘Don’t touch me,’ I said. I shook myself clear. ‘Because of your article, I came face to face with a murderer tonight, and funnily enough, I didn’t enjoy the experience. You didn’t see his eyes, Lockwood. But I saw them – and it felt like
he
saw
me
.’

‘He can’t have done.’ George’s face was turned away from us; with his hand on his rapier hilt he watched the fog. We’d only seen one Visitor during our walk – in Green Park, a far-off figure drifting along a tree-lined avenue – but it always did to be careful. You could never tell what was round the next corner in London. ‘He can’t have seen you,’ George repeated. ‘You were behind the glass. Obviously he knew
someone
was there, and he just wanted to freak them out. That’s all there is to it.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said quietly. ‘Blake knew it was me. He’d have seen that article like everybody else. He knows all about Lockwood and Co., and how Lucy “Carlisle” has gained vital evidence against him. He can easily find out where we live too. If he walks free, there’s nothing to stop him coming after us!’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘Lucy, Blake is
not
going to come after us.’

‘Or if he does,’ George said, ‘it’ll be very, very slowly, hobbling on a stick. He’s over seventy years old.’

‘What I
mean
is, he’s not getting free at all,’ Lockwood
went on. ‘He’s going to be charged, found guilty and sent to prison, which serves him right. Meanwhile, so what if he’s got strange eyes? George’s are pretty odd too, and we don’t hold it against him.’

‘Thanks for that,’ George said. ‘I thought they were my best feature.’

‘They are – that’s the tragedy of it. Listen, Lucy. I can see why you’re mad. I’m furious too. Barnes had no right to put you through that against your will. It’s typical DEPRAC behaviour – they think they rule the show. But they don’t – or, at least, they don’t rule
us
.’ Lockwood raised his arms and gestured at the swirling fog, the silent road. ‘Look around you now. It’s past midnight. We’re alone in an empty city. Everyone else is asleep, with their doors locked and their charms hanging at the windows. Everyone’s afraid – except for you, me and George. We go wherever we choose, and we’re not beholden to Barnes or DEPRAC or anybody. We’re completely free.’

I drew my coat around me. What he said made sense, as usual. It
was
good to be out in the night again, with my sword and my colleagues at my side. The distress of my brief encounter at Scotland Yard was slowly fading. I felt a little better. ‘I suppose you’re right . . .’ I said. ‘You really think Blake’s staying in custody?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘By the way, Lucy,’ George said, ‘here’s something that
might cheer you up. We saw Quill Kipps while we were waiting for you. He’s part of a Fittes group working for DEPRAC tonight. Has to do it regularly – it’s part of the deal between the organizations. Well, let’s just say he’s been patrolling the sewers this evening. His team’s clearly had a close encounter with
something
nasty down there, and I don’t mean a Visitor. Yeuch, you should have seen them. Soaked.’

I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘At least Kipps still has a job. Our casebook’s empty now.’

‘Better to be poor than sticky,’ George said.

Lockwood squeezed my arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about tomorrow. Something will turn up. Let’s get home. I fancy a peanut-butter sandwich.’

I nodded. ‘Cocoa and crisps for me.’

The mist grew thicker as we went; it coiled about the iron railings, and wound around the ghost-lamps, muffling and twisting their intermittent beams. Our boots rang on the empty pavements, echoing strangely on the other side of the road, so that it sometimes seemed as if another trio walked invisibly alongside.

In Portland Row there had been a malfunction with the ghost-lamp; blue sparks flickered at the base of the headpiece and, instead of their usual fierce brightness, the lenses glowed a frail, resentful red. Most of our neighbours’ windows were dark, and all were shut and curtained. The mist clung close about us as we drew level with our door.

Lockwood was in the lead; he reached out his hand to open the gate and suddenly stopped dead. George and I both bumped into him.

‘George,’ Lockwood said quietly. ‘You had Annie Ward’s necklace last. What did you do with it?’

‘I put it on the shelves with all the other trophies. Why?’

‘Its silver-glass case was sealed? It wasn’t loose or anything?’

‘Of course not. What—’

‘I just saw a light in our office window.’

He pointed down over the railings. The basement yard was a pool of blackness, diagonally sliced by the faint orange glow from the street-lamp outside number 37. Half in and half out of that glow sat the window in question. By day it gave a glimpse of my work-chair, and the vase of flowers on the centre of my desk. Right now it was entirely flat, as if a black rectangle had been painted on the brickwork.

‘I don’t see anything,’ George breathed.

‘It was just for a second,’ Lockwood said. ‘I thought it might be a trace of other-light, but maybe— No, there it is again!’

This time we’d
all
seen the shimmer, faint and fleeting, glinting off the interior of the glass. Shock held us in its grip; none of us moved.

‘That was a torch,’ George said softly.

I nodded; my skin crawled. ‘Someone’s in our house.’

‘Someone,’ Lockwood said, ‘who’s not afraid of being out at night. Which means they’ll be armed. They’ll have rapiers or flares at the very least. All right, let’s think. How did they get in?’

I squinted up the path. ‘Front door looks OK.’

‘You want me to check out the back?’ George said. ‘They may have busted in through the garden door.’

‘But if they haven’t you’ll be stuck outside . . . No, we need to work together on this. We’ll go in the front as usual – only
quietly
. Come on.’

He flitted up the path, moving soundlessly on the tiles. At the porch he halted, pointing in silence to a little patch of splintered wood halfway up the door jamb. When he pushed the door, it swung slowly open. ‘They jemmied the lock,’ George hissed.

‘If this was their way in,’ Lockwood said, ‘we can trap them down below.’ He beckoned us close, whispered in our ears. ‘OK. We check the ground floor, then go down the spiral stairs. I don’t want to hear a sound.’

‘What about the upper floors?’

‘Can’t risk it. The landing squeaks. Besides, it’s clearly the office they’re raiding. So: rapiers ready? We find them, corner them, ask them to disarm.’

‘And if they don’t?’ I said.

Lockwood’s teeth glinted briefly. ‘We use what force we need.’

The hallway was black; no sound came from deeper in the building. We halted a moment, with the door pulled to behind us, letting our eyes adjust. The crystal-skull lantern grinned from its side-table; our coat-rack was a dark mass on the wall. Lockwood pointed with his rapier at the display shelves opposite. At first sight they were the same as ever; then I saw that some of the masks and gourds were slightly out of position, as if someone had sorted through them with a hasty hand. Far ahead of us, I made out the dull white glow of the thinking cloth beyond the kitchen door. I listened again, heard nothing. I realized I was automatically using
all
my senses, both outer and inner, as if we were away on business, doing the agent thing.

But this was
our
house,
our
home, and we had an intruder here.

Lockwood motioned with the blade to left and right. George flitted into the living room; I stepped like a shadow into the library. I could sense right away that it was empty: there was no trace of a lingering presence. But it hadn’t escaped our guest’s attention. Below the shelves, books and papers lay strewn upon the floor.

Back in the hall, Lockwood waited by the stairs. George’s report was similar to mine. ‘Someone’s working the place over,’ he breathed. ‘Hunting for something.’

Lockwood only nodded. We stole forward to the kitchen.

Whether or not our enemy had rifled our possessions here was hard to say, since the room was its usual mess. The table was strewn with the remnants of the meal we’d eaten before going out on the garden job, and the work surfaces were clogged with clutter. I noticed the pots of iron filings nestling by the cereal, and a little pile of salt bombs stacked where George had been preparing them. None of that was useful to us now: we went in search of human prey.

Lockwood advanced to the little basement door. It was very slightly open. With the tip of his blade he caught the handle, pulled it softly outwards. Darkness, silence, the top of the spiral stairs . . . Warm air rose from below, heavy with its smells of paper, ink and magnesium. The lights were out, and we didn’t try to switch them on. From somewhere came a little scuffling noise, like rats nosing through tight spaces in the dark.

We looked at one another, clenched our sword hilts tight. Lockwood set foot upon the topmost step. He descended, moving swiftly. George and I followed, boots barely making contact with the iron. In moments we were at the bottom.

The bare-brick room we stood in was an empty portion of the cellar, occupied only by filing cabinets and sacks of iron. Without the lights, it was entirely black, except for a faintly greenish glow shining from the archway on the right. From the opposite arch came the rat-like scuffling. A teasing hint of torchlight darted momentarily and was gone.

Drifting softly as Visitors ourselves, we double-checked the right-hand arch and found a scene of chaos. Files upended, cupboards opened, a sea of papers on the office floor. On George’s desk the ghost-jar had been uncovered. The skull was silhouetted in its luminous green plasm. Above it, the disembodied face spun dismally round and round.

The rapier room was empty, our storeroom door still locked. All that remained was the rear of the basement – where the trophy shelves were. We flitted closer. Ahead of us it seemed that someone grew impatient in their search. The rustling noises sounded rather louder than before.

We reached the final arch and looked in.

The trophy room was not entirely dark. It rarely is, by night, thanks to the glow of the cases on the shelves beside the door. Some of Lockwood’s prizes – the bones and bloodstained playing cards, for instance – are entirely harmless. You could give them to a toddler to play with because they have no supernatural power. But others are active Sources still, with spectral force that manifests during the hours of darkness. Soft lights glint beneath the glass – pale blues and yellows, lilacs, greens, maroons – shifting, ever-changing, always looking for escape. It’s a beautiful sight – but also eerie, and best not studied for too long.