Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase (8 page)

We walked up the valley in the late afternoon and reached it shortly after dusk. It was a warm summer evening and birds were calling in the trees. Stars shone overhead. The mill was a great dark mass in the middle of the valley, wedged between the rocks and the conifers. The stream idled down below the gravel road.

The main door to the mill had been secured with a padlock. The glass in the door panel was broken; a board had been roughly fixed over the hole. We gathered outside the door and checked our equipment. Agent Jacobs, as was his habit, looked for a seat and found one on a nearby stump.
He lit a cigarette. We used our Talents, and made our reports. I was the only one who’d got anything.

‘I can hear something sobbing,’ I said. ‘It’s very faint, but quite close by.’

‘What kind of sobbing?’ Jacobs asked. He was watching the bats flit past overhead.

‘Like a child’s.’

Jacobs nodded vaguely; he didn’t look at me. ‘Secure the first room,’ he said to us, ‘and check again.’

The lock had rusted with the years, and the door was stiff and warped. We pushed it open and shone our torches across a large and desolate foyer. It had a low ceiling and plenty of debris on the cracked linoleum tiles. There were desks and easy chairs, old notices on the walls, a smell of rotting furniture. You could hear the sound of the stream running somewhere below the floor.

We went into the foyer, taking with us a drift of cigarette smoke. Agent Jacobs did not come with us. He stayed outside on his stump, staring at his knees.

Keeping close together, we used our Talents once more. I got the sobbing noise again, louder this time. We turned off our torches and hunted about; and it wasn’t long before we saw a little glowing shape, crouching far off at the end of a passage that led deeper into the mill. When we switched the torches back on, the passageway seemed clear.

I went back out to report our findings. ‘Paul and Julie say
it looks like a little kid. I can’t make out the details. It’s very faint. And it’s not moving.’

Agent Jacobs tapped ash into the grass. ‘It hasn’t responded to you in any way? Not tried to approach you?’

‘No, sir. The others think it’s a weak Type One, perhaps the echo of some child who worked here long ago.’

‘All right, fine. Pin it back with iron. Then you can search the spot.’

‘Yes, sir. Only, sir . . .’

‘What is it, Lucy?’

‘There’s . . . something about this one. I don’t like it.’

The end of the cigarette glowed red in the darkness as Agent Jacobs drew on it briefly. As always these days, his hand shook; his tone was irritable. ‘Don’t like it? It’s a child crying. Of course you don’t like it. Do you hear something else?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Another voice, maybe? From a second, stronger, Visitor?’

‘No . . .’ And it was true. I didn’t hear anything dangerous. Everything about the visitation was wispy and frail, suggestive of weakness. The sound, the shape . . . they were barely there at all. Just a typical faint Shade. We could snuff it in a trice. All the same, I distrusted it. I disliked the way it cowered so
very
tight and small.

‘What do the others say?’ Jacobs asked.

‘They think it’s easy enough, sir. They’re impatient to get on. But it just seems . . . wrong to me.’

I could hear him shifting on the stump. Wind moved among the trees. ‘I can order them to pull back, Lucy. But vague feelings are no good. I need a solid reason.’

‘No, sir . . . I guess it’s OK . . .’ I sighed, hesitated. ‘Perhaps you could come in with me?’ I asked. ‘You could give me your opinion.’

There was a heavy silence. ‘Just do your job,’ Agent Jacobs said.

The others
were
impatient. When I caught sight of them, they were already advancing along the passage, rapiers up, salt bombs ready. Not far away, the glowing form sensed the approaching iron. It quailed and shrank, flickered in and out of vision like a badly tuned TV. It began to drift off towards a corner of the passage.

‘It’s on the move!’ someone said.

‘It’s fading!’

‘Keep it in sight! We don’t want to lose it!’

If the apparition’s vanishing point was not observed, locating the Source would be that much more laborious. There was a general rush forward. I drew my sword, hastened to catch up with the others. The shade was so faint now it was almost gone. My apprehensions seemed suddenly absurd.

Small as an infant, ever shrinking, the ghost limped forlornly round the corner, out of view. My fellow agents hurried after it; I speeded up too. Even so, I hadn’t actually
reached the turn when the vicious flare of plasmic light ripped across the wall in front of me. There was a squeal of tortured iron and a solitary burst of magnesium fire. In the brief illumination from the flare I saw a monstrous shadow rising. The light went out.

Then all the screams began.

I twisted my head, looked back down the passage and across the foyer towards the open door. Far off in the distant dusk I saw the cigarette’s pinprick point of red.

‘Sir! Mr Jacobs!’

Nothing.

‘Sir! We need your help!
Sir!
’

The pinprick flared as the agent took a breath. No answer came. He didn’t move. Then wind roared along the corridor and nearly knocked me off my feet. The walls of the mill shook; the open door slammed shut.

I cursed in the darkness. Then I drew a canister from my belt, raised my rapier high, and ran round the corner of the corridor towards the screams.

At the Coroner’s Inquest, Agent Jacobs was heavily criticized by relatives of the dead agents and there was talk of him being sent to court, but it never came to anything. He argued that he had acted entirely in accordance with the information I had brought him about the strength of the ghost. He claimed he had not heard my cries for help, or any other
sound from inside the mill, until I’d finally broken through the window on the upper floor and tumbled down the roof to safety. He had not noticed any screaming.

When I gave evidence, I tried to describe the original unease I’d felt, but was forced to admit that I’d detected nothing concrete. The coroner, in his summing up, remarked that it was a pity my report had not been more accurate as to the Visitor’s power. If it had, perhaps some lives might have been saved. His verdict was Death by Misadventure, which is usual in such circumstances. The relatives got pay-outs from the Fittes Fund and little plaques remembering their children in the town square. The mill was demolished, and salt strewn over the site.

Jacobs returned to work soon after. It was universally expected that, after a short rest to get over the incident, I would happily rejoin him. This wasn’t my opinion. I waited three days to regain my strength. On the fourth morning, early, while my mother and sister slept, I packed my belongings into a small rucksack, strapped on my rapier and left the cottage without a backward glance. An hour later I was on the train to London.

Lockwood and Co., the well-known psychic investigations agency, requires a new Junior Field Operative. Duties will include on-site analysis of reported hauntings and the containment of same. The successful applicant will be SENSITIVE to supernatural phenomena, well-dressed, preferably female, and not above fifteen years in age. Unsuccessful applicants will include time-wasters, fraudsters and persons with criminal records. Apply in writing, together with a photograph, to 35 Portland Row, London W1.

I stood in the road and watched as the taxi drove away. The sound of the engine faded. It was very quiet. Pale sunlight gleamed on the tarmac and on the lines of cars parked nose to tail on either side. Some way off a little boy was playing in a dusty patch of sun, moving plastic ghosts and agents across the concrete. The agents had tiny swords; the ghosts looked like little floating sheets. Other than the kid, there was no one around.

It was clearly a residential district, this part of London. Its houses were big-boned Victorian semis, their pillared porches hung with baskets of lavender, their basement flats reached by stairs directly from the road. Everything exuded a feeling of shabby gentility – of buildings and people looking back on better days. There was a little grocer’s shop at the corner, the cluttered kind that sold everything from oranges to shoe polish, milk to magnesium flares. Outside it rose a battered metal ghost-lamp, standing eight feet tall on its scallop-sided stem. The great hinged shutters were closed and blank, the flash-bulbs dark, the lenses hidden. Rust bloomed like lichen across the surface of the iron.

First things first. I checked my reflection in the side-window of the nearest car, taking off my cap and scuffling my fingers through my hair. Did I look like a good operative? Did I look like someone with the right history and qualifications? Or did I look like a tousled nobody who’d been rejected by six agencies in seven days? It was hard to tell.

I set off up the road.

Number 35 Portland Row was a white-fronted residence of four floors, with faded green shutters and pink flowers in the window boxes. Even more than its neighbours it had a faint air of dilapidation. Every surface looked as if it needed a lick of paint, or possibly just a clean. A small wooden sign clamped to the outside of the railing read:

A. J. LOCKWOOD & CO., INVESTIGATORS
.
AFTER DARK, RING BELL AND WAIT BEYOND THE IRON LINE
.

I paused for a moment, thinking wistfully of the smart townhouse of Tendy & Sons, of the spacious offices of Atkins and Armstrong; above all, of the glittering glass Rotwell building on Regent Street . . . But none of those interviews had worked out for me. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Like my appearance, this would simply have to do.

Pushing open a wonky metal gate, I stepped onto a narrow path of broken tiles. On my right a steep flight of steps led down to a basement yard, a shady space half overhung with ivy and filled with unkempt plants and potted trees. There was a narrow line of iron tiles embedded across the path, and from a post beside this hung a large bell with a dangling wooden clapper. Ahead was a black-painted door.

Ignoring the bell, I stepped over the line and knocked
sharply on the door. After an interval a short, fat, tallow-haired youth wearing large round spectacles looked out.

‘Oh, another one,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d finished. Or are you Arif’s new girl?’

I gazed at him. ‘Who’s Arif?’

‘Runs the corner store. He normally sends someone over with doughnuts about this time. You don’t seem to have any doughnuts.’ He looked disappointed.

‘No. I have a rapier.’

The youth sighed. ‘So I guess you’re another candidate. Name?’

‘Lucy Carlyle. Are you Mr Lockwood?’

‘Me? No.’

‘Well, can I come in?’

‘Yeah. The last girl’s just gone down. From the look of her, she won’t be very long.’

Even as he spoke, a scream of the utmost terror rang out from inside the house, and echoed off the ivy-clad walls of the yard below. Birds rose from trees up and down the street. I jerked back in shock, hands moving automatically to the hilt of my sword. The scream collapsed into a whimpering gargle and presently died away. I stared wide-eyed at the youth in the doorway, who hadn’t stirred.

‘Ah, there we are,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I say? Well, you’re next up. Come in.’

Neither the boy nor the scream instilled me with much
confidence, and I was half inclined to leave. But after two weeks in London, I was almost out of options; mess up here and I’d soon be signing for the night watch with all the other no-hope kids. Besides, there was something in the manner of the youth, a subtle impudence in the way he stood, that told me he half expected me to run. I wasn’t having that. So I stepped swiftly past him, and entered a cool, wide hallway.

It was floored with wooden tiles and lined with bookshelves of dark mahogany. The shelves held a mass of ethnic masks and other artefacts – pots and icons, brightly decorated shells and gourds. A narrow key table stood just inside the door with a lantern on it, its base shaped like a crystal skull. Beyond that sat a vast, chipped plant pot stuffed with umbrellas, walking sticks and rapiers. I halted beside a rack of coats.