Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase

23

I woke suddenly, in a state of pain. My eyes snapped open, and for a long-held moment my sisters were there, and Lockwood, and Annabel Ward in her pretty summer dress with its orange flowers. They were all smiling at me; I saw them distinctly, their shapes gently overlapping. They probably floated in some kind of cloud.

I didn’t buy any of it; besides, I had a pounding headache too. So I stared at them grimly until they broke apart and faded, and I was left in a different, darker place.

Dark, but not pitch-black. It shone with a silver glow.

Quiet, but not entirely silent. I heard a ringing in my ears.

It was a high-pitched, tinny sort of ring, like a mosquito’s whining buzz, and when I heard it I instantly felt a kind of joy. Because it meant my ears were sore, and that in turn meant I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t in that silent place at the bottom of the well.

Additionally there was a strong smell of smoke and gunpowder, and a chemical taste on my tongue. The side of my face was pressed against hard stone.

When I moved, I hurt. It was like the fall from Mr Hope’s study window all over again; every muscle ached. I could feel a light coating of something dusty falling off my hair and skin as I rolled over and levered myself upright.

I was sitting in a far corner of that terrible underground chamber, where the force of the blast had blown me. My forehead was sticky with blood. I was covered – like everything else in the room – with a whitish layer of the ash and iron fragments that were still settling from the air. I coughed, spat the stuff out of my mouth. The cough made my head hurt even more.

A column of pale white smoke rose slowly from the well shaft in the centre of the room. It was lit by an angry silver radiance from the depths beneath, an eerie glow that pulsed and flared. The whole room shone with magnesium light. Somewhere, faint reverberations still sounded; I could feel the impacts in the stone.

At the well rim, several bricks had disappeared, and a curling crack now ran outwards from the edge across the floor. A portion of the floor had tilted upward. Where the crack met the wall, many stones had been dislodged; one or two had fallen, and others protruded at queasy angles. Smaller fragments of rock littered the chamber. Some rested on the bodies lying there.

Three bodies, covered with white dust. Three bodies, scattered by the explosion from the well. None of them was moving.

Which was reasonable enough in the case of the poor Fittes boy. He’d had a lot of practice at that.

But Lockwood and George . . .

I got to my feet slowly, carefully, supporting myself against the wall. Dizzy as I felt, it was a whole lot better than when the screaming had filled my head. There was a kind of hole in my mind from the psychic attack; I felt scoured out and hollow, as if I were a convalescent, newly risen from my bed.

George was nearest. He lay on his back with his arms and legs spread wide. He looked like a kid caught making an angel in the snow, except his glasses had been blown off and one of his hands was bleeding. He breathed heavily; his belly rose and fell.

I knelt close. ‘George?’

A groan, a cough. ‘It’s too late. Leave me . . . Let me sleep . . .’

I shook him firmly, slapped the side of his face. ‘George, you’ve got to wake up! George, please. Are you OK?’

An eye opened. ‘Ow. That cheek was the one bit of me that wasn’t sore.’

‘Here, look – your glasses.’ I scooped them out of the ash, put them on his chest. One of the lenses had cracked. ‘Get up now.’

‘Lockwood?’

‘I don’t know.’

I found him on the opposite side of the room, lying on his side with his coat blown outwards like a single broken wing. He was very still. With its coating of ash, his face looked like that of an alabaster statue, smooth and white and cold. A piece of masonry had struck him and there was blood in his hair. I knelt by him, brushed the ash from his forehead.

His eyes opened. He looked at me with a clear, unclouded gaze.

I cleared my throat. ‘Hi, Lockwood . . .’

Awareness returned. I saw bafflement first, then gradual recognition.

‘Oh . . . Lucy.’ He blinked, coughed, tried to sit up. ‘Lucy. For a moment I thought you were . . . It doesn’t matter. How are you, Lucy? You’re OK?’

I stood abruptly. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

George was watching me through cracked spectacles. ‘I saw that.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Saw what? Nothing happened.’

‘Precisely. Where was his slap round the chops? Where was his firm shaking? There’re double standards at work here.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll be sure to slap him next time.’

George grunted. ‘Great . . . Though that means you’ll probably kick me awake.’

‘I’ll certainly bear that in mind.’

The silver smoke continued to gout up from the hole, and by its light we got organized again. We’d escaped the force of the explosion relatively unharmed, though both Lockwood and George had been hit by pieces of debris, and all of us were shaky from what had gone before. We had our rapiers, but all our iron and salt was gone. George had his loop of iron chain; Lockwood and I had thrown ours down the well.

The first thing we did was share out the remnants of our jam sandwiches and energy drinks. George and I sat on a lump of masonry to eat our portions, huddling together to keep warm. Lockwood stood a little way off, staring stony-faced into the smoke.

‘We should have attacked the well from the start,’ George said. ‘I reckon we would have, if it hadn’t been for that hellish noise addling our brains. It had to be the Source, really. That’s where the monks’ bones are; that was where they died.’

I nodded without speaking. Yes, that was where they died – after being roped together and taken down the stairs. They’d known what was coming, all right. The terror of their final journey still infused the stones . . .

‘I reckon I see how it fits together now,’ George went on. ‘The monks’ spirits are so old, and their death so terrible, that their influence has pervaded the whole house. It underlies all the other Visitors. It’s because of what happened in this room that so many later inhabitants of the Hall went mad and did appalling things.’

‘All those murderous dukes and suicidal ladies that Starkins loves so much,’ I said. I swallowed my last bite of sandwich. ‘You think it’s over now?’

‘Hope so.’ George considered the roiling smoke. ‘That flare must’ve scattered a lot of iron, silver and magnesium down there. With luck it’ll be nicely mingled with the bones, and that’ll keep things quiet till we can get the well sealed up. The stairs will be safe. And probably the Red Room.’

‘You believe the blood in there was linked to the monks?’ I asked.

‘I believe it was them, manifested differently. They were Changers: they took different forms in each location. Gushing blood in the Red Room, screaming shadows on the staircase; down here they even became bodily apparitions, though it wasn’t their favourite guise. I say “their”. Really, their ghosts more or less acted as one. That’s why it was such a powerful haunting. Fusing like that’s not unheard of. Wasn’t there that famous case at Castle Sherbourne?’

‘Maybe. What do you think, Lockwood?’ I said. ‘You’re very quiet.’

He didn’t answer at first, just watched the smoke. His body was a thin, dark silhouette, his coat hanging limp and torn like the plumage of a storm-blown bird. ‘What do I think?’ he said softly. ‘I think that’s twice now we’ve nearly died.’ He turned to look at us, his face bloodied, hair dishevelled; as he moved, ash fell from him in a little cloud. ‘I think that we’re very lucky to be alive. I think that I’ve been far too slow on the uptake, and have severely underestimated our enemy. It’s been an unforgivable lapse in a leader, and I’m sorry for it. However’ – his voice grew harsh; he spoke between clenched teeth – ‘all that ends now.’

George and I stared at him. ‘Er, that’s good,’ I said. ‘So perhaps you could tell us exactly what’s going o—’

‘I need a lever!’ Lockwood cried, so suddenly that both George and I flinched. He burst into life, strode across the room, ragged coat flapping behind him. ‘A stick, a crowbar – something! Come on! Hurry! There’s no time to waste!’

‘I’ve got a bar,’ I said, scrabbling at my belt. ‘But—’

‘That’ll do. Hand it over.’ He snatched the crowbar from me, sprang across the room to the damaged wall and plunged it in between two stones. ‘Don’t just sit around,’ he growled. ‘What, are you having a picnic? We’re going to break out here.’

‘Hold on, Lockwood,’ George began, as he and I struggled to our feet. ‘We’re deep underground. How can you know that’s a possible way through?’

‘Look at the smoke!’ Lockwood wrenched at the crowbar, levered a loose stone clear, and jumped aside as it cracked on the flags between his feet. ‘If the smoke’s escaping, so can we!’

And it was true, though neither George nor I had noticed before, that the smoke from the well wasn’t pooling in the room; instead it flowed across the ceiling in a soft grey current, and was being sucked out between the stones of the damaged wall.

‘There’s a pressure difference,’ Lockwood shouted. ‘It’s being drawn out into a bigger space. That’ll be the cellar. The cellar must be through that wall. The explosion’s done half our job already. We just need to make a bigger hole. Come on!’

His energy stirred us into action. Shaking off our stiffness and fatigue, George and I set to with knife and crowbar, shifting the loosest blocks, prising the others free. Alongside us, Lockwood worked at speed, heaving on the crowbar and, where necessary, wrenching at the stones with his bare hands. His eyes glittered; his mouth was a taut white line.

‘We’ve been dealing with two separate problems tonight,’ he said, hacking at the mortar. ‘They seem connected, but really they’re quite different. The first, the haunting of Combe Carey Hall, is over. With the monks gone, the other apparitions can be steadily mopped up. The danger’s finished here. The second issue’ – he tossed his bar aside, and helped George pull a medium-sized stone free of the wall – ‘concerns our friend Mr John William Fairfax, and that story is not yet done.’

The stone fell, broke into segments. I pushed the debris clear. Lockwood and George returned to attacking the weakest area halfway up the wall.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Fairfax. What about him?’

‘It’s been obvious from the first that something’s seriously wrong with all this,’ Lockwood said. ‘His invitation to come here was more than a trifle odd. True, the terms were amazingly generous, but that just made it odder still. Why did he choose to come to us, when he could have had Fittes or Rotwell, or any of a dozen other agencies? Our record recently has been . . . patchy, but he claimed to have been impressed by it.’

‘He said he’d been an outsider too,’ I said, tugging on a lump of rock. ‘He said he liked our passion and – watch your feet! Oh, sorry, George – our independence of mind.’

Lockwood’s lip curled. ‘Yes, that’s what he said, didn’t he? A rather thin claim, particularly when you read about his youth and discover he inherited all his wealth from his father. But aside from choosing us, there were three other questions that bothered me. One. Why now? He’d owned the Hall for years, so why was he suddenly so desperate to resolve its haunting? Two. Why the blazing hurry? He gave us a ridiculous two days to prepare! And three. Why on earth were we forbidden to bring flares?’

‘Yeah, I couldn’t get over that last one,’ George said. ‘Nobody in their right mind would take on an A-grade Visitor without sufficient flares.’

‘We would,’ Lockwood said. ‘And Fairfax knew it. He knew we were desperate for the cash. And he was just as desperate for us to come, so much so that he offered to pay off our sixty-thousand-pound debt if we simply turned up at the door. To me that was either insanely generous, or linked to an ulterior motive, and I wanted to find out which. So my first act, the next day, was to pay a quick visit to the village of Combe Carey.’

‘We’ve broken through!’ George said. He’d wrestled another stone free: a small gap now showed in the centre of the fractured wall. Beyond was darkness and empty space.

Lockwood nodded. ‘Good. Let’s rest for a minute. What’s the time, Lucy?’

‘Three a.m.’

‘The night’s passing. We’ve got to be away from here by dawn. OK, so I went to the village. I pretended to be a travelling salesman, going from door to door.’

‘Selling what?’ George demanded.

‘Your comic collection, George. Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of any. I set the price too high. But it gave me an excuse to get talking to the locals.’

‘And how did you get on?’ I said.

Lockwood made a rueful face. ‘As it happens, my rustic accent didn’t go down too well. No one could understand me, and three burly carters took grave offence and chased me round the millpond. But once I’d modified my accent, all went smoothly, and I heard a few rumours about Fairfax. I learned he often came to the Hall with one of his company’s trucks. This would be full of new iron products; and local men were paid to help carry this kit inside. Most of it was ordinary domestic stuff – door-guards and window-hangings, you know – but there were things that must have been bigger, because they filled huge crates. A few days later he’d have it all taken away again. The locals had no doubt what he was doing – he was busy safety-testing new products on the ghosts of Combe Carey Hall. Which in itself,’ Lockwood said, smoothing back his hair and considering the wall, ‘isn’t wrong – all the corporations must do it. But again it raised the question. If he found the place so useful, why would he suddenly want to snuff it all out? Why call us in?’

‘And why not tell us more about the dangers?’ I added. ‘If he’s been experimenting here, he must have known stuff about the Red Room at least, if not the hidden staircase.’

‘Exactly . . . You know, I think we should do this big block next. If we can get it loose, even George has a chance of squeezing through.’

George’s brief response was lost in the sound of our crowbars striking stone. For several minutes more we laboured at the remaining block; with great exertions we managed to lever it halfway out before it jammed again. We all took another rest.

‘Anyway, the long and the short of it,’ Lockwood said, ‘was that I was deeply suspicious of Fairfax and his motives. I got further food for thought from George’s researches, which I read on the train. How Fairfax had started off quite wild as a boy. How his dad had wanted him to go straight into the business, but he’d spent years living it up in London, drinking, gambling and trying to be an actor. None of which would have meant anything to me at all, if it hadn’t been for Lucy’s crucial breakthrough.’ He paused dramatically.

‘Which was . . .?’ George said. I’m glad he asked; I didn’t know either.

‘She showed me this.’ He straightened and, rummaging in various pockets of his coat, discarded mint wrappers, candle stubs and bits of string before finally producing a crumpled piece of folded paper. He passed it across to us.

It was the photocopied sheet, the page from the magazine article George had discovered in the Archives. The one about the young, rich society kids who’d frequented London’s top cafés and casinos fifty years before. Annie Ward was there in the midst of the glossy crowd clustering by the fountain. In the individual portrait shot, Hugo Blake’s face smarmed smugly up at me.

‘Look by the fountain,’ Lockwood said.

It was hard to make out details in the soft magnesium light, so George switched on his torch. At the back of the crowd of merrymakers stood a group of young men, done up to the nines in white ties and tails. They surrounded the ornamental fountain. One had climbed onto the pedestal below the spout; others hung off its sides. They exuded wealth, exuberance, high spirits. The tallest of them stood partly in the shadow of the fountain, a little separate from the others. He was very big man, muscular and barrel-chested, with a resplendent mane of long dark hair. With all the hair and shadows his face was partially obscured, but the essential shapes – the great hooked nose, the heavy brows, the assertive line of the strong squared jaw – were clear enough to see.

George and I stared at the image in silence.

He’d lost a lot of weight in the intervening years, but it was him all right.

‘Fairfax . . .’ I said.

George gave a wise, contemplative nod. ‘I thought as much.’

I glared at him. ‘What? Don’t give me that. You had no idea!’

‘Well . . .’ He handed the paper back to Lockwood. ‘I thought he was damned fishy, anyhow.’

‘So when I showed this page to the ghost of Annie Ward,’ I began, ‘and she went mad with terror or distress—’ I broke off, bit my lip. Beneath my coat, the silver-glass case burned cold against my skin. ‘But this doesn’t prove—’

‘You’re right,’ Lockwood said. ‘It doesn’t prove much in itself. Except for one crucial thing. Fairfax is a liar. When he came to see us, he claimed he’d never heard of Annie Ward. He made a big deal about not remembering her name. But quite obviously he did know her. He was part of the same set when he was young.’

‘And not just that!’ My heart was pounding now. I felt dizzy; my head spun, like it had back on the spiral staircase, but this time not because of any ghostly tumult. It was my memory that screamed: I’d recalled a detail that had escaped me before. ‘She was an actor too,’ I said. ‘Like Fairfax. Do you remember, in the old newspapers, it said she’d had a promising acting career, but had given it up because of . . . something or other.’

‘Because of Hugo Blake,’ Lockwood said. ‘She fell under his influence, and so—’

‘If we’re going where I think we are with this,’ George said suddenly, tapping the protruding block of stone, ‘don’t you think we should keep moving? The night won’t last for ever.’

No one disagreed with him. In silence we mounted a final assault upon the block of stone. It took all our strength, and savage attacks on the stubborn mortar with two crowbars and a knife, before the block was loosed. It fell to earth. The sound of the impact faded. We stood staring at the hole.

Lockwood stepped close and squinted through. ‘Can’t see a thing . . . It’s probably the far cellar, where I saw the monk before. Fine . . . Once we get upstairs we’re out of the front door and away. Give me the torch, George. I’ll go through first.’

Holding the torch between his teeth, he hopped up and pushed himself head-first into the gap. A wriggle, a shuffle, a jerk of legs: he shot forward and was gone.

Silence.

George and I waited.

Dim light shone beyond the wall, and with it came Lockwood’s voice. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I lost the torch for a minute. It’s OK, it is the cellar. Come on – Lucy next.’

It didn’t take me long. Once my arms and head had reached the other side, Lockwood was there to pull me out.

‘Keep guard while I see to George,’ he whispered. ‘The night’s getting old, so I’d assume the other Visitors are growing quiet now, but you never know.’

So I stood by, with torch and rapier, while Lockwood wrestled George through the aperture. I could see only a little way. Thick shadows lay across the curved vaults of the cellar; beyond the nearest arch, shrouded lines of wine-racks stretched into the murk. All traces of ghost-fog had gone. Perhaps our attack on the well had already affected the entire cluster. It was impossible to say.

But ghosts, right then, weren’t my main concern. I was thinking of the blonde girl in the photograph, and the man beside the fountain. The implications battered at my mind.

‘Everyone ready?’ Lockwood whispered, once George was through. ‘We’re going to leave the house and cross the park, fast as we can. I want to reach the ruined gatehouse by the road. If we can get there by dawn, we’ll be—’

‘Tell me something first,’ I said. ‘You think Fairfax planned the burglary too?’

‘Of course. When that failed, he fell back on his second plan, which was to get us here.’

‘So he wanted the locket?’

He nodded. ‘It’s all about the locket, and what it proves.’

‘And what does it prove, Mr Lockwood?’ a deep voice said.

Metal clinked. Two figures stepped forward from beyond the arch. They had the shapes of men, but with monstrous, distorted heads. One held a revolver, the other a lantern that swung directly in our eyes; its strong beam blinded us, gave us searing pain.

‘Stop there!’ the voice said. Our hands had strayed to our sword hilts. ‘There’ll be no more rapier-play tonight. Put your weapons on the floor or we’ll shoot you where you stand.’

‘Do as he says,’ Lockwood said. He undid his rapier and let it drop. George did the same. I was the last to obey. I stared fixedly into the darkness, in the direction of the voice.

‘Quick now, Miss Carlyle!’ the voice commanded. ‘Or do you want a bullet in your heart?’

‘Lucy . . .’ Lockwood’s grip was on my shoulder.

I let the blade fall. Lockwood moved his hand away, and with it made an urbane gesture. ‘Lucy, George,’ he said, ‘may I present to you once again our host and patron, Mr John William Fairfax – Chairman of Fairfax Iron, noted industrialist, onetime actor and, of course, the murderer of Annie Ward.’