Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase

5

Some people claim the Problem has always been with us. Ghosts are nothing new, they say, and have always behaved the same. There’s a story the Roman writer Pliny told, for instance, almost two thousand years ago. It’s about a scholar who bought a house in Athens. The house was suspiciously cheap, and he soon discovered it was haunted. On the very first night he was visited by the Spectre of a gaunt old man in chains. The Visitor beckoned to him; instead of fleeing, he followed the ghost out to the yard, where he saw it vanish into the earth. The next day the scholar had his servants dig at that spot. Sure enough, they soon uncovered a manacled skeleton. The bones were properly buried, and the haunting ceased. End of story. A classic Type Two ghost, the experts say, with a classic, simple purpose – the desire to right a hidden wrong. Just the same as you get today. So nothing’s really changed.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it. OK, it’s a decent example of a hidden Source – we’ve all known plenty of similar examples. But notice two things. First: the scholar in the story doesn’t seem at all concerned that he might be ghost-touched, and so swell up, turn blue and die a painful death. Maybe he was just stupid (not to mention lucky). Or maybe Visitors back in ancient times weren’t quite as dangerous as they are now.

And they certainly weren’t as common either. That’s the second thing. The haunted house in Pliny’s story? It was probably the only one in Athens, which is why it was so cheap. Here in modern London there are dozens of them, with more springing up all the time, no matter what the agencies do. In those days, ghosts were fairly rare. Now we’ve got an epidemic. So it seems pretty obvious to me that the Problem’s different to what went before. Something strange and new did start happening around fifty or sixty years ago, and no one’s got a damn clue why.

If you look in old newspapers, like George does all the time, you can find mention of scattered ghostly sightings cropping up in Kent and Sussex around the middle of the last century. But it was a decade or so later that a bloody series of cases, such as the Highgate Terror and the Mud Lane Phantom, attracted serious attention. In each instance, a sudden outbreak of supernatural phenomena was followed by a number of gruesome deaths. Conventional investigations came to nothing, and one or two policemen also died. At last two young researchers, Tom Rotwell and Marissa Fittes, managed to trace each haunting to its respective Source (in the case of the Terror, a bricked-up skull; in that of the Phantom, a highwayman’s body staked out at a crossroads). Their success drew great acclaim, and for the first time the existence of Visitors was firmly imprinted on the public mind.

In the years that followed, many other hauntings started to come to light, first in London and the south, then slowly spreading across the country. An atmosphere of widespread panic developed. There were riots and demonstrations; churches and mosques did excellent business as people sought to save their souls. Soon both Fittes and Rotwell launched psychical agencies to cope with the demand, leading the way for a host of lesser rivals. Finally the government itself took action, issuing curfews at nightfall, and rolling out production of ghost-lamps in major cities.

None of this actually solved the Problem, of course. The best that could be said was that, as time passed, the country got used to living with the new reality. Adult citizens kept their heads down, made sure their houses were well stocked with iron, and left it to the agencies to contain the supernatural threat. The agencies, in turn, sought the best operatives. And because extreme psychic sensitivity is almost exclusively found in the very young, this meant that whole generations of children like me found themselves becoming part of the front line.

I was born Lucy Joan Carlyle in the fourth official decade of the Problem, when it had already spread across the whole of our islands, and even the smallest towns had their ghost-lamps and all villages their warning bell. My father was a porter in the railway station of a little town in the north of England, a place of slate roofs and stone walls, set tight amongst green hills. He was a small, red-faced man, bent-backed, sinewy, and hairy as an ape. His breath smelled of strong brown beer, and his hands were hard and swift to punish any of his children who disturbed his usual taciturn indifference. If he ever called me by name, I don’t recall it; he was a distant and arbitrary force. After he fell under a train when I was five years old, my only real emotion was fear that we might not be done with him. In the event, the government’s new Untimely Death regulations were followed to the letter. The priests scattered iron on the tracks where the accident occurred; they put silver coins on the corpse’s eyes; they hung an iron charm around its neck to break the connection with his ghost. These precautions did the job fine. He never came back. Even if he had, my mother said, it wouldn’t have caused us any problems. He’d only have haunted the local pub.

By day I went to school in a little concrete building set above the river on the outskirts of the town. In the afternoon I played in the water meadows or in the park, but always kept an ear out for the curfew bells, and was back safe in our cottage before the sun had fully gone. Once home, I helped set up the defences. It was my job to place the lavender candles on the sills and check the hanging charms. My elder sisters lit the lights and poured fresh water in the channel that ran beneath the porch. All would then be ready for when our mother bustled in, just as night was falling.

My mother (think large, pink and harassed) washed laundry at the town’s two small hotels. What active maternal affection she possessed had largely been eroded by work and weariness, and she had little energy to spare for her brood of girls, of whom I was the seventh and the last. By day she was mostly out; after dark, she sat slumped in a haze of lavender smoke, silently watching TV. She seldom paid me any attention whatsoever, and for the most part left me to the care of my elder sisters. My only real point of interest to her lay in how I might eventually pay my way.

Everyone knew, you see, that there was Talent running in my family. My mother had seen ghosts in her youth, while two of my sisters had sufficient Sight to get jobs with the night watch in the city of Newcastle, thirty miles away. None of them, however, had actually been agency material. From the first it was obvious that I was different. I had unusual sensitivity to matters relating to the Problem.

Once, I guess when I was six, I was playing in the water meadows with my favourite sister, Mary, who was the closest to me in age. We lost her football among the rushes and hunted for it a long time. When finally we found it, wedged deep in the roots and sticky amber mud, the light was almost gone. So we were still trailing back along the path beside the river when the bell sounded across the fields.

Mary and I looked at each other. Since infancy, we had been warned what might happen to us if we stayed out after dark. Mary began to cry.

But I was a plucky little girl, small and dark and dauntless. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s early yet, so they’re still as weak as babes. If there are any about round here, which I doubt.’

‘It’s not just that,’ my sister said. ‘It’s Mam. She’ll beat me sore.’

‘Well, she’ll beat me too.’

‘I’m older than you. She’ll beat me awful sore. You’ll be all right, Lucy.’

Privately I doubted this. Our mother washed sheets nine hours a day, mostly by hand, and had forearms as vast as pig’s thighs. One smack from her and your bottom vibrated for a week. We hurried on in gloomy silence.

All around were the reeds and the mud and the deepening greyness of dusk. Up ahead, the town lights, twinkling on the spur of the hill, were an admonishment and a beacon to us. Our spirits rose; we could see the grass steps leading up to the road.

‘That Mam calling?’ I said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Is that her calling us?’

Mary listened. ‘I don’t hear anything. Anyway, our house is miles off yet.’

Which was true enough. Besides, it didn’t seem to me that the faint, thin voice I heard was coming from the town.

I looked off and away across the flats, towards where the river, invisible, flowed dark and deep between the hills. Hard to be sure, but I thought I saw a figure standing far out among the reeds there, a dark notch, crooked as a scarecrow. As I watched, it began to move – not very fast, but also not too slow – taking a line that would likely intersect our path ahead of us.

I found I didn’t much care to meet that person, whoever it might be. I gave my sister a playful nudge. ‘Race you this last bit,’ I said. ‘Come on! I’m getting cold.’

So we ran along the track, and every few yards I jumped up to take a look and saw that unknown someone making the greatest endeavours to reach us, loping and limping through the reed-stalks. But the long and short of it was, we went faster and got to the steps in safety. And when I looked back down from the railings, the water meadows were a monochrome grey vastness, with nothing in them as far as the river bends, and no voice calling us among the reeds.

Later, once my bottom had stopped tingling, I told my mother about the figure, and she told me about a local woman who had killed herself for love there, back when Mam was a girl. Penny Nolan was her name. She’d waded out into the reeds, lain down in the stream and drowned herself. As you’d expect, she’d become a Type Two, a needy one, and caused trouble from time to time to people coming back late from the valley. Over the years Agent Jacobs had wasted a lot of iron out there, looking for the Source, but he never found it, so presumably Penny Nolan walks there still. In the end they rerouted the path, and let the field lie fallow. It’s now a pretty place of wild flowers.

Incidents such as this ensured that before long my Talent was common knowledge in the district. My mother waited impatiently until I was eight years old, then took me up to meet the agent in his rooms just off the town square. It was excellent timing, as one of his operatives had been killed in action three days before. Everything worked out fine. My mother got my weekly wage, I got my first job, and Agent Jacobs got his new trainee.

My employer was a tall, cadaverous gentleman who had run his local operation for more than twenty years. Treated by the townsfolk with respect bordering on deference, he was nevertheless isolated from them because of his profession, and so cultivated an aura of occult mystery. He was grey-skinned, hook-nosed and black-bearded, and wore a slightly old-fashioned jet-black suit in the manner of an undertaker. He smoked cigarettes almost constantly, kept his iron filings loose in his jacket pockets, and seldom changed his clothes. His rapier was yellow with ectoplasm stains.

As dusk fell each evening, he led his five or six child operatives on patrols around the district, responding to alarms or, if everything was quiet, checking the public spaces. The eldest agents, who had passed their Third Grade tests, wore rapiers and work-belts; the youngest, like me, carried only kitbags. Still, it seemed to me a fine thing to be part of this select and important company, walking tall in our mustard-coloured jackets, with the great Mr Jacobs at our head.

Over the ensuing months I learned how to mix salt and magnesium in correct proportions, and how to scatter iron according to the likely power of the ghost. I became adept at packing bags and checking torches, filling lamps and testing chains. I polished rapiers. I made teas and coffees. And when lorries brought new supplies up from the Sunrise Corporation in London, I sorted through the bombs and canisters, and stacked them on our shelves.

Jacobs soon discovered that while I saw Visitors well enough, I heard them better than anyone. Before I was nine, I’d traced the whispers at the Red Barn back to the broken post that marked the outlaw’s grave. In the vile incident at the Swan Hotel, I’d detected the soft, stealthy footsteps creeping up the passage behind us, and so saved us all from certain ghost-touch. The agent rewarded me with swift advancement. I passed my First and Second Grades in double-quick time, and on my eleventh birthday gained my Third. On that famous day I came home with a rapier of my own, a plastic-laminated official certificate, a personal copy of the Fittes Manual for Ghost-hunters and (more to the point, as far as my mother was concerned) a greatly increased monthly salary. I was now the family’s major breadwinner, earning more in my four nights’ work per week than my mother did in six long days. She celebrated by buying a new dishwasher and a bigger television.

In truth, however, I didn’t spend much time at home. My sisters had all left, apart from Mary, who was working at the local supermarket, and I never had much to say to my mother. So I spent my waking hours (which were generally nocturnal) with the other young agents of Jacobs’s company. I was close to them. We worked together. We had fun. We saved each other’s lives a bit. Their names, if you’re interested, were Paul, Norrie, Julie, Steph and Alfie-Joe. They’re all dead now.

I was growing into a tall girl, strong-featured, thicker-set than I’d have liked, with large eyes, heavy eyebrows, an over-long nose and sulky lips. I wasn’t pretty, but as my mother once said, prettiness wasn’t my profession. I was quick on my feet, if not especially clever with a rapier, and ambitious to do well. I followed orders effectively, and worked smoothly in a team. I had hopes of soon getting my Fourth Grade, and so becoming a section leader, able to lead my own sub-group and make my own decisions. My existence was dangerous but fulfilling, and I’d have been moderately content – if it weren’t for one essential thing.

It was said that as a boy Agent Jacobs had been trained by the Fittes Agency in London. So once, clearly, he’d been hot stuff. Well, he wasn’t any more. Of course, like every adult, his senses had long ago grown dulled; since he couldn’t detect ghosts easily, he relied on the rest of us to act as his eyes and ears. This much was fair enough. All supervisors were the same. Their job was to use their experience and quick wits to help guide their agents when a Visitor was sighted, to coordinate the plan of attack and, where necessary, provide back-up in emergencies. In my early years at the agency, Jacobs did this well enough. But somewhere down the line, amid all those endless hours of waiting and watching in the darkness, he began to lose his nerve. He hung back at the edge of haunted areas, reluctant to go in. His hands shook, he chain-smoked cigarettes; he shouted orders from afar. He jumped at shadows. One night, when I approached him to report, he mistook me for a Visitor. In his panic he lashed out with his rapier, and took a slice out of my cap. I was saved only by the shaking of his sword-arm.

We agents knew what he was like, of course, and none of us cared for it. But he was the one who paid our wages, and he was an important man in our little town, so we just got on with it, and trusted to our own judgement. And in fact nothing very terrible happened for quite a long time, until the night at the Wythburn Mill.

There was a water mill halfway up the Wythe valley that had a bad reputation. There’d been accidents, a death or two; it had been closed for years. A local logging firm was interested in using it for a regional office, but they wanted it made safe first. They came to Jacobs and asked him to check it out, make sure there was nothing unhealthy there.

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.