The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

  After our meal, and bidding the Skinner family go to the safety of their rooms, we gathered our equipment and went into the hallway. Night fell, the evening progressed. We made certain preparations.

  As midnight drew near, the atmosphere in the room grew heavy, and our vigil more alert. Lockwood lit the gas lamps. We watched their green flames flicker and dance against the dark-striped wallpaper of the ancient hall.

  “This is pretty scary,” Kipps said, “but infinitely preferable to getting in a bed with Cubbins.” He had the goggles on top of his head; every now and then he pulled them down over his eyes and squinted fiercely into every corner of the hall. “Think we’re ready?”

  “As ready as we’ll ever be.” Lockwood glanced up at the ceiling, from where the sound of slowly pacing footsteps could be heard. “All we need now is for the batty old fool to go to sleep.”

  Unusually for an adult in a haunted house, old Reverend Skinner had reappeared several times during the evening, asking questions and getting in the way. He had finally gone upstairs only after eleven, and was evidently not yet in bed.

  “He doesn’t trust us,” Lockwood said. “Just like he didn’t trust his own grandson. Wants to see things with his own eyes, which is ironic for a priest. Temperatures? I’ve got sixty degrees here.”

  George was over by the stairs. “Sixty-two.”

  “Fifty-three with me.” Holly stood near the fireplace. Kipps, by the kitchen door, had fifty-three, too.

  “Forty-two degrees here, and falling.” I was sitting in a Queen Anne armchair to the left of the wide front door. A standard lamp with one of those mangy tasseled shades cast uncertain light on the flagstones. “It’s got to be a focus. Woo! See that?” The light had flickered off, then on again. “Got electrical interference, too.”

  “Turn the light off,” Lockwood ordered, “then everyone come back into the circle.” We’d set out a big one with nice thick iron chains in the middle of the hallway. The feeling we’d had since arriving was that the Visitor here was strong. All our equipment was safely within the circle. Lockwood lowered the shutters on the lanterns, as George, Holly, Kipps, and I rejoined him. Dim light shone around the bottom of the stairwell from some lamp upstairs. Otherwise the room was dark.

  “I hear creaking,” I said.

  “That’s just old Skinner, wandering about upstairs. I wish he’d go to bed.”

  Holly stirred. “Did you put the iron chain across the stairs, Lockwood?”

  “Yeah. He’s safe up there.”

  A little noise sounded on the front door of the Old Sun Inn. It was half knock, half scratch. We stiffened.

  “Hear that?” I hissed. I always have to check.

  “Yes.”

  “Do we answer it?”

  “No.”

  The sound came again, a little louder. Cold air pulsed across the room.

  “I’m guessing we don’t answer that, either?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  A sudden ferocious hammering on the old oak door. All five of us stepped back involuntarily. “Blimey, someone wants to get in,” George said.

  “Third time lucky,” Lockwood said. “Lucy, if you could do the honors.”

  Don’t think I was dumb enough to leave the circle at this point. No way. You get cases of Shining Boys (and, occasionally, Shining Girls), and by and large you don’t mess with them. They’ve usually been wronged, and they’re never too pleased about it. I was going to stay well away. So I picked up the cord that we’d tied to the door latch earlier and gave it a gentle tug.

  The cord went tight. The door swung open.

  Outside was that soft, deep darkness you get in the dead hours of the night. We could see the faint lines of the iron fence beyond the path. The stone doorstep was worn low in its center from centuries of feet on their way to or from the inn.

  No feet on it now, though. There was no one there.

  “Of course not,” George said softly. “It’s already inside.”

  As if in answer, a faint light flared near the armchair, just above the floor.

  “I see it….” Kipps had the goggles on. His whisper was stiff with joyous fear. “I see it!”

  At first it seemed like a small fluorescent globe, no wider than my hand. It spun with other-light, slowly circling; as we watched, it swelled, took on the form of a tiny, radiant child with thin, thin legs and arms. The child wore a ragged coat and trousers; beneath the coat its chest was bare. It had a gaunt, malnourished face, and great round hungry eyes. All of us watching behind the iron chains suddenly found it hard to breathe; cold air stung our lungs, pressed on our skin like water fathoms deep. The shining child stood half in and half out of the armchair where I’d just been sitting, head bent, eyes lowered in a submissive attitude of shame or dejection.

  It looked like a hapless little thing. My heart bled for it.

  “I can hear faint sounds,” I said. “Like someone shouting angrily. An adult, I think, but it’s very far away.”

  “Very long ago, you mean,” Lockwood said.

  “It could never get past that iron fence outside,” George whispered. “It’s been in here all the time. The knocking on the door is some kind of re-enactment. It’s replaying whatever happened in this room.”

  I’ll tell you how it feels, hearing sounds from the distant past like that. It’s like words written in chalk on a bumpy wall. They’ve been almost entirely rubbed away. A few edges remain, some scraps and fragments, but the rest is eroded and gone, and you haven’t a hope of figuring out the message. I guess it’s also like an untuned radio, emitting flecks of noise that you know mean something, but you can’t tell what. It frustrated me as I stood there listening: I wanted to hear what the child had heard. The wan little shape kept flinching, so I guessed there’d been violence in the voice.

  “I’m so sorry,” I breathed. “I can’t make out the words….”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Lockwood was busy loosening the canisters in his belt. Now and then he glanced back up to check that the Visitor hadn’t moved. “The key thing now is we find out where it goes. If it leaves the room, we follow it. What do you think it is, George, a Shining Boy?”

  “Reckon so.” George had drawn his rapier; it gleamed coolly in the light streaming from the child. “It’s a Type Two, so we’ll have to spike it if it tries anything.”

  “I see it…” Kipps said again. “It’s the first apparition I’ve seen in years!”

  “Well, don’t get carried away,” Lockwood told him. “We don’t know what it’ll try.”

  From time to time I saw the child looking up, as if snatching fearful glances at whoever spoke to it. These glances were directed at the fireplace, and when I looked that way I noticed that, unlike the rest of the room, which was lit by the pale, trembling radiance of the ghost, this portion remained dark. My eyes were repeatedly drawn to the black and narrow space, wondering who had stood there; but, like the words spoken by the angry voice, that knowledge was forever lost and gone.

  “It’s moving,” Lockwood said. “Stand by.”

  The child had drifted diffidently out across the room, veering toward us, head down, great eyes gazing at the floor. All at once its head jerked up; it raised its thin arms in a protective gesture above its face, and vanished. The room was black; we stood there, blinking. But it seemed to me that in the instant before the radiance went out, the stubbornly dark portion of the room had shifted, and borne down at speed upon the child.

  “Think that’s it?” Holly whispered.

  I shook my head—a useless thing to do in a darkened room, but there you go. “No,” I said. “Hold on….” The atmosphere in the room hadn’t altered. The presence remained. And, sure enough, now the glowing child was back in its original position beside (and in) the Queen Anne armchair, exactly as before.

  “Replay,” Lockwood said. He suppressed a yawn. “This could go on all night. Anyone got any chewing gum?”

  “Lucy does,” George said. “Well—one piec
e, anyway. I ate the others, Luce. Sorry.”

  I didn’t answer. I was focusing my mind, trying to reach the child. It was a forlorn hope. To do so, I’d have to ignore the distant shouts, probe deeper into the hollows of the past, and also get beyond the psychic disruption caused by the iron chain. As always, that was part of the problem. The chain got in the way.

  At that moment, a querulous voice—not loud, but by its unexpectedness intensely jarring—broke in upon us. “What’s going on down here? Why is it so dark?”

  Our heads snapped around; a thin form was silhouetted in the stairwell. The Reverend Skinner—old, confused, reaching for the light switch.

  “Sir!” Lockwood shouted. “Get back, please! Don’t come down into the hall!”

  “Why is it so dark? What are you doing?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you know it?” George said. “He’s crossed the chain.”

  I looked back at the shining child, which had suddenly changed posture. Gone was its forlorn, abandoned look. The head had turned; it was looking toward the stairs with new intentness. The eyes were like deep wells. The child began to move across the room….

  Dazzling light burst upon us—harsh, electrical, and blinding.

  “Aah! Turn off the light! Turn off the light!”

  “We can’t see….”

  “What are you playing at?” the old man said. “There’s nothing there….”

  “Nothing that you can see, you mean.” With a curse, Lockwood jumped over the chains, ran for the stairs. I stepped out and, still half-blinded, threw a speculative salt-bomb on the flagstones in the center of the hall. Holly and George had done the same: triple starbursts, triple scatterings like snow.

  Lockwood was at the wall. He stabbed at the switch—darkness returned.

  And the radiant boy was right beside him, reaching out with tiny fingers toward the old man’s neck.

  Lockwood fell on Skinner, protecting him with his body. He lashed out with his rapier. The ghost moved back, then tried to dart around the blade, its eyeless sockets staring. Lockwood and the old man collapsed back onto a nearby table, knocking into a tall and intricate model sailing ship made out of matchsticks. The ship spun to the edge of the table and hung there, teetering on the brink.

  Lockwood’s sword moved so fast it could scarcely be seen, blocking the feints and darts of the ghost’s probing hands. George and I ran forward, blades patterning the air, seeking to create an iron wall above the table that the child couldn’t cross. The ghost was pinned in a narrow space between our whirling blades.

  Now here came Kipps, his goggles glinting. He had a salt-bomb in his hand. He threw it hard against the ceiling so that salt came down upon the ghost in a fiery rain. The iron and salt together was enough. The ghost trembled. It broke apart and fractured into plaintive strips that hung there, dancing.

  The model ship tipped over. It smashed into a million pieces on the floor.

  The fragments of the ghost grew faint. Its radiance drew together into a coiling wisp of light that fled across the hall and sank beneath a flagstone at the entrance to the kitchen.

  There was darkness in the room.

  “Fantastic…” That was Kipps’s voice. “I’ve been wanting to do something like that for years.”

  Lockwood flicked at the switch. “Okay,” he said cheerily. “Now we can have the light on.”

  As case finales go, it wasn’t the most decorous we’d seen: a pop-eyed old ex-vicar, bewildered, bruised, and winded, sprawled over an ornamental table with Lockwood’s elbow in his belly, a letter rack wedged in his pajamas, and the fragments of a matchstick tea-clipper ship made by (as we later learned) his favorite grandfather scattered all around him.

  It might have been even worse if we could have understood his breathless moans.

  I took a stab, though. He didn’t sound happy to me.

  “Oh, quit complaining,” I snapped. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, you’ve lost a model,” George said, “but you’ve gained an exciting three-D jigsaw. There’s always a bright side, if you choose to look for it.”

  It’s safe to say he didn’t.

  We resolved the case the following morning. With old Reverend Skinner confined to his room, Kipps and Lockwood took their crowbars and pried up the flagstone beneath the kitchen door. After half an hour’s digging they located a set of small bones, a child’s, complete with tattered fragments of clothing. George estimated them to date from the eighteenth century. His theory was that the boy had been a beggar, who, after having knocked on the door, was taken in by whoever owned the house and then robbed, killed, and stowed under the floor. Personally I didn’t think a beggar was a very likely candidate for robbery, but perhaps he’d been an unusually successful beggar. Up until then, anyhow. Whatever. It was impossible to know.

  So that was the Old Sun Inn cleared; we’d rid Aldbury Castle of one of its ghosts, and we hadn’t been there a day. It put us in a cheerful mood. Danny Skinner, though bug-eyed at the sight of the bones, was delighted, too. After a late breakfast, he volunteered to take us on a tour of the village, to point out the other supernatural highlights we had to look forward to.

  Our first stop was the church next door. It was a neglected-looking building of flint and brick, with a stubby tower and a vestry roof covered with a tarp. Its churchyard was clearly very old, surrounded in parts by a stone wall, in parts by hedges on a raised embankment of earth. The gravestones were of the same material as the cross on the green, and many were worn away, their inscriptions gone. Some hung at extreme angles; one or two had fallen. It was a peaceful place, if shunned and overgrown.

  “This is where the Creeping Shadow walks,” Danny told us. “Little Hetty Flinders saw it here, with the dead rising from their tombs at its command. That’s got to be high on your list, Mr. Lockwood, sir.” Since our success with the Shining Boy, the kid’s hostility had vanished; he was our jug-eared cheerleader, marching proudly at our side. “Reckon you’d fix it, no problem.”

  “You didn’t see the Shadow here yourself?” Lockwood stared up at the stone tower, where crows circled against the pale sky.

  “Not me. I saw it up in the eastern woods, on Gunner’s Top. That’s where that lane goes, see? Half a mile straight, you get to the place. Had spirits following it there, too—the dead from this churchyard, most like. Pale, shapeless things, caught up in the Shadow’s burning cloak. Well, you’ll see for yourself,” he added, seeming not to hear George’s skeptical sniff. “You’ll fix it, you will.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a word with Hetty Flinders,” Lockwood said.

  “Can’t help you there. She’s ghost-touched now. They caught her outside her house, with her best blue frock on, poor thing. The other kids in the village’ll back me up, though. Shall we head on?”

  As we descended onto the lane, the peace of Aldbury Castle was broken by the sound of revving engines. Four vehicles—three cars, and a small canvas-topped truck—had driven out of the woods from the direction of the station. They slowed to cross the bridge, honking their horns at a gaggle of geese that had strayed into the road, then sped across the green. The cars were black; the truck’s canvas side was stenciled with the Rotwell lion. Turning right at the Old Sun Inn, the convoy drove up the lane, past the church and into the eastern woods. Unsmiling men looked out at us as they went by. The noise faded. Clouds of dust slowly settled back onto the road.

  “That Rotwell bunch again.” Danny Skinner spat feelingly into the grass. “On their way up to the institute. They couldn’t give a fig about us. They’re not a proper agency. Not like Lockwood and Company. They don’t get things done.”

  “Quite so…” Lockwood was gazing up toward the woods. “Danny, I want you to continue the tour with Holly, George, and Quill. Show them the rest of the village. Lucy and I will just take a quick walk up to Gunner’s Top, where you saw the Shadow. I’d like to get a feel for the area. We’ll catch up with you shortly.”

  Lockwood and I watched as t
he little party continued on without us.

  “It’s not really Gunner’s Top you’re interested in, is it?” I asked.

  “The woods? That’s just some trees. No, I want to see what lies beyond it, in the fields where this ancient battle happened. Come on.”

  We took the lane below the church and followed it out of the village and into the woods. The lane crossed a narrow stream on a rickety wooden bridge; after that, as Danny Skinner had said, it proceeded more or less straight through the oaks and beeches up steadily rising ground. The woods still had its winter colors, its cloak of grays and browns; but here and there the spring rebirth was beginning—bright fronds breaking through the earth, the faintest green haze showing on the trees.

  It was no great hardship, walking with Lockwood through the countryside that spring morning. The air was clean and fresh, the birds were in business. It was a nice contrast to running or fighting for our lives. Lockwood didn’t say much. He was distracted, deep in thought. I knew the signs; the thrill of the chase was on him. Me, I was just happy for us to stroll together, side by side.

  After some minutes we came to a place where a narrow track, cut into the steep bank to our left, led away to an open quarry. A neat cairn of stones and cut flowers had been erected on the grassy verge. It was topped with a wooden cross and a photograph of a man, now faded by rain.

  “Someone ghost-touched here, maybe,” I said. “Or some accident in that quarry.”

  “Ghost-touch, most likely.” Lockwood had a grim expression; he stared across at the exposed rock face. “That’s what everyone’s dying of around here.”

  We went on in silence until, half a mile through the forest, we saw ahead of us the brightness of open ground. Here Lockwood slowed.

  “And now,” he said, “I think we’ll take to the trees ourselves. Just to be careful.”

  By leaving the lane and pushing up the slope among the trees, we soon breasted a wooded ridge—presumably Gunner’s Top—from which we could look down on the land below. There were places where we could have stood out in the open, but Lockwood avoided these; he kept to the shadow of the trees, crouching as he advanced, remaining low, walking without a sound. I followed as best I could; at last we lay together, on the lip of the ridge, bedded by wet grasses, and looked down over the Rotwell Institute compound.