Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase

9

It’s amazing how quickly a fire can spread in an average suburban house. Even before Lockwood and I toppled from the window, perhaps while we were still grappling with the ghost-girl, a neighbour must have sounded the alarm. The emergency services responded quickly too; they arrived in minutes. But by the time special night crews in their chain-mail tunics came charging into the garden, escorted by a troupe of Rotwell agents, the upper floor of Mrs Hope’s house was thoroughly ablaze.

White flames poured from the first-floor windows like upturned waterfalls. Roof-tiles cracked and shimmered in the heat, their edges glowing in the night like rows of dragon scales. Thin fiery pennants twirled and twisted from the chimneytops, sending sparks raining down on nearby trees and buildings. Below, the mists churned orange; agents, medics and fire-fighters ran frantically through a cloudscape of light and shadow.

At the centre of it all Lockwood and I sat hunched at the base of the bushes that had saved our lives. We answered the medics’ questions; we let them do their thing. Around us hoses gushed and timbers snapped; supervisors shouted orders at grim-faced kids in jackets scattering salt across the grass. Everything seemed unreal – muffled and far away. Even the fact that we’d survived was hard to comprehend.

It was fortunate for us that neither Mr nor Mrs Hope had ever been keen gardeners. They’d let the bushes behind the house grow large and sprawling, thick and tall and spongy-boughed. And so it was that when we’d struck them – smashing through the upper branches, ripping through the lower ones, coming to an abrupt and painful halt almost at the ground – our clothes had torn and our skin had been pierced, but we hadn’t done the obvious thing, which was to break our necks and die.

A gout of fire erupted from the chimney stack and fountained out across the roof. I sat there, staring into space, while someone wound a bandage around my arm. I thought of the girl behind the wall. There’d be little left of her by now.

So much chaos . . . and all because of me. We needn’t have confronted her ghost at all. We could have left her – no, we should have left her when we discovered how dangerous she was. Lockwood had wanted to pull back, but I’d persuaded him to stay and get it done. And because of that decision . . . it had come to this.

‘Lucy!’ It was Lockwood’s voice. ‘Wake up! They want to take you to the hospital. They’re going to patch you up.’

The side of my mouth was puffy. It was difficult to talk. ‘What . . . what about you?’

‘I’ve got to speak with someone. I’ll follow in a bit.’

My vision was woozy; my left eye had completely closed. I thought I saw a man in a dark suit standing just behind the crowd of medics, but it was hard to be sure. Someone helped me to stand; I found myself being led away.

‘Lockwood. This is all my fault—’

‘Rubbish. It’s my responsibility. Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you soon.’

‘Lockwood—’

But he was already lost amongst the mists and flames.

The hospital did their job. They patched me up OK. By morning my cuts were cleaned and covered; my rapier-arm was in a sling. Overall I was stiff and sore and out of joint; still, nothing was broken and I only limped a little. I knew I’d got off lightly. There was talk of keeping me in for observation, but I’d had enough by then. The doctors protested a bit, but I was an agent and that gave me leverage. Just after dawn, they let me go.

When I got back to Portland Row, the ghost-lamp had recently gone off; I could hear the hum of its electrics sounding inside the stem. At Lockwood’s the office lights were on in the basement, but the upper storeys of the house were dark and quiet. I couldn’t be bothered to look for my keys. I leaned against the doorway and rang the bell.

Running footsteps sounded. The door opened with violent haste. George stood there, cheeks red, eyes staring. His hair was even more dishevelled than usual. He wore the same clothes as the day before.

When he saw my scratched and swollen face, he made a small noise between his teeth. He didn’t say anything. He stood aside, let me walk in, and quietly closed the door.

The hall was dark. I reached over to the crystal skull on the key table and switched on the lantern. It threw a frail halo around us, the skull grinning at its centre. I stared dully at the ethnic knick-knacks on the bookshelf opposite: the pots and masks, the hollow gourds which, according to Lockwood, certain tribesmen wore instead of trousers.

Lockwood . . .

‘Where is he?’ I said.

George had stayed by the door. His glasses shone with lantern-light, and I couldn’t see his eyes. Something pulsed halfway up his neck. ‘Where is he?’ I said again.

His voice was so tightly wound I could scarcely hear it. ‘Scotland Yard.’

‘With the police? I thought he was at the hospital.’

‘He was. DEPRAC has got him now.’

‘Why?’

‘Ooh, I don’t know. Possibly because you burned someone’s house down, Lucy? Who can tell?’

‘I have to go and see him.’

‘You won’t get in. I asked to as well. He told me to wait here.’

I looked at George, then at the door, then down at my boots, still dusted with soot and plaster. ‘You spoke to him?’

‘He rang me from the hospital. Inspector Barnes was waiting to take him away.’

‘Is he OK?’

‘I don’t know. I think so, but—’ He changed tack abruptly. ‘You look terrible. What about your arm? Is it broken?’

‘No. Minor sprain. It’ll be OK in a few days. You just said “but”. But what? What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing much. Except—’

Something in the way he said it . . . My heart beat fast; I leaned back against the wall. ‘Except what?’

‘He’d been ghost-touched.’

‘George—!’

‘Would you mind not leaning there? You’re making black marks on the wallpaper.’

‘Stuff the wallpaper, George! He wasn’t ghost-touched! I’d have seen!’

Still he hadn’t moved; still he spoke in a quiet monotone. ‘Would you? He said it happened while you were dealing with the Source. When he was fighting off the Visitor, she got him with a curl of plasm. Touched him on the hand. They gave him a shot of adrenalin in the ambulance and stopped the rot. He says he’s fine.’

My head was awhirl. Could it have happened? Everything had moved so quickly in the study, and the period in the garden was a blur. ‘Was it bad?’ I said. ‘How far’d it gone?’

‘By the time they treated it?’ He shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

‘Well, how do I know?’ I snapped. ‘I wasn’t there.’

George gave a roar of fury that made me jump. ‘Well, you should have been!’ He slammed his palm against the wall so hard, an ornamental gourd fell off the bookcase and rolled upon the floor. ‘Just like you should have stopped him getting touched in the first place! Yes, I think it was bad! His hand had started swelling. He told me his fingers were bulging like five blue hotdogs by the end, but they still had to manhandle him into the ambulance. Why? Because he wanted to go and find you. See if you were OK! He wouldn’t be told, even though the ghost-touch was on him and he’d have died within the hour if someone with some common sense hadn’t jabbed a needle in his bum. He wouldn’t be told! Like he wasn’t prepared to wait for me to get back last night! Like he wasn’t prepared to let me do some proper research, so I could find out exactly what you were getting into. No! As always, he was in far too much of a hurry. And if he’d only waited’ – he kicked out viciously at the fallen gourd, sending it spinning away to crack in half against the skirting – ‘none of this stupid mess would have happened!’

Let’s see. In the previous twelve hours I’d almost been murdered by a vicious ghost. I’d fallen from an upstairs window into a small tree. I’d sprained my arm. I’d had a spotty bloke with tweezers pulling twigs and thorns out of sensitive portions of my anatomy half the night. I’d also set fire to a small suburban house. Oh, and Lockwood had been ghost-touched and, whatever state he’d been left in, was now being grilled by the police. What I badly needed was a bath, some food, a lot of rest – and getting to see Lockwood again.

Instead I got George having a hissy fit. That didn’t make my day.

‘Shut up, George,’ I said wearily. ‘This isn’t the time.’

He wheeled round on me. ‘No? Well, when is going to be the time? When you and Lockwood are both dead, maybe? When I open the door one night and see the two of you hovering beyond the iron line, plasm trailing, worms poking from your eyes? Yeah, fine. Let’s have our little catch-up then!’

I snorted. ‘Charming. I wouldn’t come back like that. I’d have a nicer guise.’

George gave a hoot of rage. ‘Really? How do you know what kind of Visitor you’d make, Lucy? You know nothing about them. You don’t read anything I give you. You never make notes on what you see. All you and Lockwood care about is going out and snuffing Sources, as quickly as you can!’

I stepped forward, close to him. Probably, if my arm had been less sore, I’d have prodded him in his puffed-up chest. ‘Because that’s what makes our money, George,’ I said. ‘Faffing about with old papers like you do gets us nothing.’

His eyes flashed behind the stupid round glasses. ‘Oh? Nothing?’

‘That’s right. If you were less obsessed with it, we’d have done twice as many cases in the last few months. Take yesterday. We waited all afternoon for you. You could have got back any time, come along with us. But no. You were too busy in the library. We left you a polite note on the thinking cloth. Didn’t go out till almost five.’

He spoke quietly now. ‘You should have waited.’

‘So what that we didn’t? What difference would it have made?’

‘What difference? Come on! I’ll show you what difference!’ He drew back and, turning, led me up the hall and into the kitchen. Ignoring my gasps of disgust at the piled dishes festooning the surfaces, he threw open the basement door and clattered away down the iron steps. ‘Come on!’ he shouted up. ‘If you can be bothered!’

The curse I gave would probably have curdled the milk if it hadn’t been sitting out on the table for thirty-six hours already. I was really angry now. I too banged down the spiral stairs. In the office the light was on over George’s desk; scattered papers, dirty cups, apple cores, crisp packets and half-gnawed sandwiches marked the scene of his recent vigil. The ghost-jar was sitting there too, uncovered, the skull faintly visible in the yellowish murk. For some reason the disembodied head was floating upside-down.

George plucked several of the papers from the desk. I didn’t wait for him to start, but launched right in.

‘You know what your problem is?’ I said. ‘You’re jealous.’

George stared. ‘Of what?’

‘Of me.’

He gave a harsh guffaw. Over in the corner, the head in the ghost-jar aped his outrage. It made a face of theatrical dismay. ‘Oh sure!’ George said. ‘You’re fantastic. You’ve just burned down our client’s house. You’re our best assistant yet.’

‘Too right I am. The last one’s dead.’

He hesitated. ‘That’s not the point.’

‘It’s exactly the point. Remind me how Robin died again.’

‘Met a Raw-bones. Panicked and ran off a roof.’

‘Right, whereas I’ve survived, and have done so out on the front line. Which is where you seldom go, George. And it’s starting to get to you, isn’t it? You’re feeling a bit left out. Well, tough. And don’t try to make me feel guilty for going out and doing things. This job’s not all about dusty books. It’s about efficient action.’

‘OK.’ He pushed his glasses up his pudgy nose. ‘OK. Maybe you’re right. I’ll have to think about what you said. While I’m doing that, perhaps you can take a little peek at this dusty old research I did yesterday, while you were back here efficiently forgetting to pack your iron chains. This first bit of paper’s from the Housing Registry. It’s for Sixty-two Sheen Road, where you’ve just been. Gives a run-down of all the owners of the house for the last hundred years. Look, there’s Mr and Mrs Hope at the end, but you knew about them. What you didn’t know about was this one: a Miss Annabel E. Ward, who bought it fifty years ago. Remember that name a minute. Now, the reason I was so long yesterday was that I was down at the National Archives, cross-referencing all these names against stories from the newspapers. Why? Because I don’t like surprises, and funnily enough, I did find a surprise. You see, I was just wondering if any of these owners had come to public attention for any reason. And – guess what? – one of them had.’

With ink-stained fingers he pushed another sheet of paper forward on the desk, a smudged photocopy of a small newspaper article. It was from the Richmond Examiner, dated forty-nine years before.

MISSING GIRL: POLICE APPEAL FOR HELP

Police investigating the disappearance of popular young socialite, Miss Annabel Ward, yesterday appealed for fresh information from the public.

Miss Ward, 20, of Sheen Road, Richmond, has not been seen since late on the night of Saturday 21st June, when she dined with a group of friends at the Gallops nightclub on Chelsea Bridge Road. She left shortly before midnight, and failed to keep an appointment the following day. Detectives have since questioned her circle of associates, but have yet to make a breakthrough with the case. Anyone with any information is urged to call the number below.

Searches for the missing girl, an aspiring actress a familiar figure on the society circuit, have been carried out in and around her home and surrounding areas over the last few days. Police frogmen are searching ponds and rivers. Meanwhile Miss Ward’s father, Mr Julian Ward, has issued a statement, offering a substantial reward for any

‘Having trouble reading it?’ George said. ‘Don’t blame you. Must’ve got, ooh, at least two paragraphs. Let me help you figure it out. They don’t mention her exact address, but I think it’s pretty obvious this Annabel Ward must be the same one from the Housing Registry. The dates fit too. So she lived at Sixty-two Sheen Road, the house where you and Lockwood were busy investigating an apparition. Coincidence? Maybe, but finding this made me sit up and take notice. So I hurried home to tell you – only when I got there, surprise, surprise, off you’d gone already. Even then, I wasn’t worried. I thought you were well equipped. It was only later that I saw you’d left the chains behind.’

Silence. The ghost in the jar had now devolved into a grainy, luminous mass of plasm, swirling slowly like green water at the bottom of a well.

‘So what about it?’ George said. ‘Any of this fit with your experiences last night?’

It was like a hole had opened in me somewhere, and all my anger had drained through it. I just felt very weary now. ‘Got a picture of her?’ I said.

Of course he had. He stretched out among the papers. ‘That’s all I’ve got so far.’

From another edition of the Examiner. A girl in a long fur coat, caught in flashlights as she stepped outdoors. Slim glimpse of leg, bright teeth, primped hair up in a beehive look. She was probably coming out of one of those society clubs or bars the papers loved so much. If she’d been alive now, she’d have been a glassy-eyed half-page feature in one of Lockwood’s magazines, and I’d have hated her.

As it was, I only saw that other face – eyeless, shrunken and cupped in cobwebs – propped behind the bricks. It made me very sad.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s her.’

‘Grand,’ George said. He didn’t say anything else.

‘It says they searched her house,’ I murmured. ‘They can’t have looked very hard.’

We stood by the table staring at the photo and forgotten newspaper, fifty years old.

‘Whoever hid her did the job well,’ George said at last. ‘And this was before the Problem was widely accepted, don’t forget. They wouldn’t have sent any psychics in.’

‘But why wouldn’t the ghost make trouble from the start? Why the long time-gap?’

‘Could be as simple as too much iron in the house. An iron bedstead in that room might have been enough. If the Hopes did a clearout, changed the furniture, that would have freed the Source again.’

‘They did make a change,’ I said. ‘He turned it into a study.’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now.’ George took off his glasses and rubbed them on his untucked shirt.

‘I’m sorry, George. You were right. We should have waited.’

‘Well, I should have gone out to join you. It’s so hard to get a night cab . . .’

‘There was no call for me to get so mad. I’m just worried. I hope he’s all right.’

‘He’ll be OK. Look, I shouldn’t have lost my temper – or kicked that fertility gourd. I broke it, didn’t I?’

‘Oh, he’ll never notice. Just put it back on the shelf.’

‘Yeah.’ Back went the glasses. He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry about your arm.’

We’d probably have carried on being sorry about stuff indefinitely, but right then I was distracted by the face in the jar, which had stealthily re-emerged and was now pulling expressions of extravagant disgust. ‘That thing can’t hear us, can it?’

‘Not through silver-glass. Let’s go back up. I’ll make you something to eat.’

I headed for the spiral stairs. ‘You’ll have to wash up first. That’ll take some time.’

I was right. So much time, in fact, that I’d bathed and changed, and come stiffly downstairs again before George had got the eggs and bacon on the plate. I was just parking my sprained elbow on the table and reaching gingerly for the salt when the doorbell rang again.

George and I looked at each other. We both went to the door.

Lockwood stood there.

His coat was torn and burned, his shirt ripped at the collar. His face was scratched; he had the bright staring eyes and hollow cheekbones of an invalid risen from his bed. Far from being swollen, as I’d feared, he seemed thinner than ever. When he stepped slowly into the hall’s light, I saw that his left hand was bandaged in thin white gauze.

‘Hi, George,’ he said, and his voice shook. ‘Hi, Lucy . . .’ He wobbled, seemed about to fall. We rushed forward to support him between us, and Lockwood acknowledged us with a smile. ‘Glad to be home,’ he said, and then, ‘Hey, what happened to my gourd?’