Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase (34 page)

All at once, like a switch had been flicked or a plug pulled, the terrible noise cut out. We were alone.

The sudden silence made me flinch. I sat against rough stone, head raised, mouth open, panting for breath. My own blood hammered in my ears. My chest rose and fell in jerks; each movement gave me pain. Though it was utterly black, I knew the others were sprawled beside me in the tightness of the passage. Their wheezes mirrored mine.

We’d collapsed in a single heap, one on top of the other. The air was cold and sour, but at least the overpowering smell of blood had gone.

‘George,’ I croaked, ‘are you OK?’

‘No. Someone’s buttocks are flattening my foot.’

I shifted my position irritably. ‘I meant the
plasm
– where you got hit.’

‘Oh. Yes. Thank you. It didn’t touch my hand, though I think this jacket’s
ruined
.’

‘That’s good. It’s an awful jacket. Who’s got a torch? I just dropped mine.’

‘Me too,’ Lockwood said.

‘Here.’ George clicked his on.

Torchlight never shows you to your best advantage. In the sudden harshness, George and I crouched close together, eyes bulging, hair matted with sweat and fear. George’s arm was stained a livid white and green where the plasm had struck him. Smoke rose from it, and also from the rapier across my knees. When I looked down, I saw that my boots and leggings were spattered with the substance too.

Lockwood, miraculously, appeared to have escaped the worst of the assault. His coat was lightly stained, and the tip of his forelock had been burned white by a drop of plasm. But where George’s face shone bright red, his had just gone paler; where George and I gasped and groaned and flopped about, he lay calm and rigid, waiting for his breathing to grow quiet. He had taken off his sunglasses and his dark eyes glittered. His jaw was set. I could see at once that he had drawn his emotions deep inside himself, made them hard and steely. There was something in his face I hadn’t seen before.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s over for the moment.’

George angled the torch towards the inside of the secret opening. Seconds before, thick fingers of blood had been pouring down it. Now the wood was dry, dusty and unstained. There was no visual sign that anything had happened. If we’d gone back into the empty room, no doubt that would have been dry and clean as well. Not that we
were
going back there any time soon.

Lockwood sat up awkwardly, adjusting his bubble-wrapped loops of chain. ‘We’re in good shape,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost the heavy-duty chains and the stuff in the bags, but we’ve got our rapiers, iron and silver seals. And we’ve found what we wanted now.’

I stared at the clean, calm surface of the door. ‘Why couldn’t it come after us? Ghosts can pass through walls.’

Lockwood shrugged. ‘In some cases a Visitor is tied so completely to the room where it met its death that it no longer has any conception of there being any adjacent space at all. So . . . when we left its hunting ground, it was as if we ceased to exist, as if we ceased to be . . .’

I looked at him. ‘You haven’t really got a clue, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s a possibility,’ George said. He gestured with the torch. ‘See that ring we pulled to close the door? It’s made of iron. And look, there’s a lattice of iron strips all across the wood. And down the stone here too . . . They look old to me. Someone’s fixed them some time long ago as a way of
hemming in that particular Visitor. It keeps the passage safe.’

He circled the torch around us in an arc, allowing us to consider the space in which we were confined. It was a very narrow corridor, walled and floored with old, thin bricks. It ran a short distance, then hit the corner of the western wall – the one that showed up as suspiciously thick on George’s plans. Here, the bricks were replaced by solid stone and the passage turned to the right. The bend was almost entirely choked with swathes of webbing that hung like fat grey curtains from the roof of the passage to the floor.

‘Don’t like all those spiders,’ I said.

‘This side-passage is mainly clear of them,’ Lockwood said, ‘because of all the iron. But once we turn the corner, we’re back in the original priory building, and we’ll be getting near the Source. That means more spiders and stronger visitations. From now on we use all available weapons as soon as anything shows up.’

We struggled to our feet. I gave George back his rapier, and drew my own. I found my torch where I’d dropped it on the bricks, but the bulb had broken. Lockwood’s was gone, and George’s seemed dimmer than before.

‘Save it,’ Lockwood said. He brought out candles and distributed them between us; when lit, their flames were mustard-yellow, tall and strong. ‘They’ll be a good indicator of psychic build-up too,’ he added. ‘Keep your eye on them.’

‘Shame we can’t use caged cats, like Tom Rotwell did,’
George remarked. ‘They’re the most sensitive indicator of all, apparently –
if
you can stand the yowling.’

‘I can’t believe the Source isn’t in the Red Room,’ I said. ‘That Visitor was
so
strong.’

‘And
so
weird,’ George added. ‘Mix of Poltergeist and Changer. That’s new.’

‘No, it was just a Changer.’ Lockwood held his candle out, surveying the way to the corner. ‘It didn’t have telekinetic properties at all.’

‘You forget it closed and locked the door,’ I said.

‘Did it?’ Lockwood said. ‘I don’t think so.’

I frowned at his retreating back; he was already on the move. ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You think another ghost?’ The answer came to me. ‘You mean someone
living
did it? Deliberately locked us in? But that means—’

George gave a long, low whistle. ‘Fairfax or Starkins . . .’

‘But they wouldn’t come in here,’ I protested; ‘not after dark.’

‘
Starkins
wouldn’t,’ Lockwood said. ‘Come on, we’ve work to do.’

But I still stared at him. ‘
Fairfax?
But why? Lockwood—’

He held up his hand to hush me; he was at the corner now, ducking low to avoid the hanging webs. When he raised his candle to the webbing, dozens of shiny black bodies scurried to the margins, fleeing the sphere of light. ‘It’s
instantly colder here,’ he said, ‘once you step off the bricks. And there’s miasma too, and immediate malaise . . . George, do a temp check there, then cross over to the stones.’

George pushed past me and began the readings. I followed reluctantly.

‘I know you don’t like Fairfax,’ I said, ‘but if you’re saying he’s mad—’

‘Oh, he’s certainly not mad,’ Lockwood said. ‘Temp difference, George?’

‘Drops from nine to five in the space of a stride.’

Lockwood nodded. ‘It’s all in the stones. And it’ll only get colder when we go down
there
.’

He indicated the arch beside him: black and gaping like an open mouth. Our candlelight didn’t penetrate too far. George briefly switched on his torch to reveal the beginnings of another passage, taller and broader than the one we’d come from. It stretched away inside the wall.

Lockwood had been right about the temperature drop. For the first time, I really felt the cold. I pulled out my hat, put it on; zipped my coat up tight. The others were doing likewise. I glared at Lockwood as I did so, irritated by his refusal to talk about Fairfax and the Red Room door. Yet
again
he was keeping quiet, not sharing what he knew. He’d been like this for days, since Fairfax first came calling. Maybe even before that – since the burglary, even since we found the necklace . . .

I put my hands to my throat, checked the hidden cord around my neck. Beneath my coat the glass case pressed cold and hard against my chest. I wondered if it glowed, whether the ghost was emitting any light. Well, she was secure enough. It wasn’t Annie Ward we had to worry about now.

Lockwood put on his gloves; George crammed his head inside his foul green bobble-hat. We started up the passage, Lockwood taking the lead. He held his candle high. Drifts of cobweb danced above its meagre flame.

A few steps in, George called us to a halt. He pointed to the right-hand wall, at a rough arch of brickwork embedded in the stone. ‘There’s the original way through from the Red Room,’ he said. ‘Blocked up when they rebuilt the house. We’re in one of the priory passageways now.’

‘Fine,’ Lockwood said. ‘Let’s look at the map. Then we can see where—’

His head snapped round. The wick of his candle had quivered; its light shrank dim and pale. All of us had felt the change – the shift that comes when a Visitor walks near.

We waited, rapiers at the ready, hands hovering at our belts.

One moment there was nothing, and the next . . . a boy stood ahead of us in the dark. He shone with a frail glow. It wasn’t easy to tell how far away he was, or whether he floated or touched the stones. His other-light lit nothing but himself. When I listened, I thought I heard faint weeping, but
the apparition’s face was blank and clear. It looked towards us with that open, empty expression so many of them have.

‘Check out the
clothes
,’ Lockwood whispered.

The boy had been quite young, probably not as old as me. He was fair-haired and stocky, tending to the stout, with a soft and rounded face. If George had been scrubbed up and forcibly inserted into something smart and ironed, he might almost have been his cousin. He wore dark trousers and a long grey jacket, which seemed slightly too big for him. Something about the cut of the jacket and the trousers (I’m no good with fashion) told me that this was an apparition decades old. But there was no mistaking the essential uniform, or the Italianate hilt of the rapier at his side.

‘Oh Lord,’ I said, ‘it’s the Fittes kid. The one who died in here.’

The weeping sound grew louder. The apparition flickered; it slowly turned away from us and drifted off along the passage.

All sight and sound winked out. Nothing but darkness, silence, a sweet-sour smell fading in my nose. The candlewicks flared up bright as day. We remembered to breathe again.

‘I could
really
do with a mint now,’ George said.

‘Did he speak to you, Lucy?’ Lockwood asked.

‘No. But he was trying to tell us something.’

‘That’s the trouble with ghosts. They never spell it out. Well, it was presumably a warning, but we’ve got to keep on going. There’s nothing else we can do.’

We continued along the passage, more slowly than before. Not three metres further on, roughly where we’d seen the apparition, we came to a flight of stairs.

It was a spiral staircase, tight and narrow and heading steeply downwards. The passage led directly to it, and the entrance was fringed with smaller blocks of stone.

‘Four degrees centigrade,’ George said matter-of-factly. The light of his thermometer shone against his glasses and made his frosted breath plume green.

‘Seems we’re going down,’ Lockwood said. ‘Was this on the medieval floor-plan, George?’

‘I don’t know . . . Actually – yes, I think so. A connecting stair from dormitories to refectory. Want me to check?’

‘No. No, let’s get it done.’

We set off down the steps. Lockwood went first, then me, with George bringing up the rear. It was not a comfortable place. There was a strong feeling of being somewhere very old and very far from natural light. Despite the cold, the air was close, and the walls pressed tight on either side. We had to bend our necks to avoid the layers of cobwebs on the ceiling. The smoke from our candles made my eyes water, and their guttering wicks cast disconcerting shadows on the smoothly curving stones.

‘Don’t trip on a bit of the Fittes kid, Lockwood,’ George said. ‘He’s down here somewhere.’

I scowled back at him. ‘Ugh, George. Why would you even
say
that?’

‘I guess because I’m nervous.’

I sighed. ‘Yeah . . . fair enough. So am I.’

We all felt the strain now; our senses were on red alert, waiting for the slightest trigger. Outwardly it all seemed quiet – no sounds, no death-glows, no floating wisps of plasm. But this meant nothing. The Red Room had started the exact same way.

The staircase opened out briefly into a tiny square chamber, with blocked arches on either side, before continuing its way down. Lockwood paused. ‘We’re at ground level here,’ he said. ‘Must be right behind that tapestry. You remember – the one with the picture of that dodgy bear.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘This is where that cold spot was.’

‘Yes, we’re down to three point five degrees,’ George said. ‘That’s the coldest reading in the house.’ His voice was tight. ‘We’re getting close.’

‘We’d better go slow now.’ Lockwood handed out some spearmint gum. Chewing mechanically, we started down the steps again, spiralling towards the cellar level. A thought occurred to me.

‘This staircase . . .’ I said in a casual voice. ‘It’s not . . . It wouldn’t be
the
staircase, would it?’

Behind me, George chuckled. ‘No. Don’t worry. That was the other one.’

‘You’re sure? Did the legends definitely say it was the main staircase of the hall?’

‘Yes.’

We descended steadily, step by careful step, going round and round and down. Lockwood’s candle dimmed and flickered, then grew strong again.

‘Well,’ George continued, ‘they didn’t
expressly
say it, as it happens. They just mentioned some “old steps”. But everyone’s always assumed it was the main one, what with those carved dragons and skull niches and all the rest of it.’

‘Right . . . So they just
assumed
. . . But naturally, it would
have
to have been that main staircase, wouldn’t it, if it had been anywhere.’

‘Yep. That’s right.’

‘Though we didn’t get any psychic readings at all there, did we?’

‘No. And we’re not getting any
here
, either.’ George spoke with unusual firmness. ‘It’s just a legend.’

It certainly seemed so. I didn’t doubt it for a minute. And so it was only for my private reassurance that I took off a glove and tucked it in my pocket. It was only out of merest curiosity that I let my fingertips trail against the stonework as we spiralled slowly down.

To my relief, all I could feel was the chill in the wall. It
was a deep, dry, lifeless cold that had sunk into the stones over a great many years. It stippled my skin, and made an electric charge run up the hairs on the back of my neck. An unpleasant feeling – but that was all it was. Just cold.