The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

The path beside me curved faint and pale across the grass like a shining rib bone, and by following it, I saw where it crossed the other one. Close by, I could just see the low black bench and, by frowning, squinting—yes—make out someone sitting there.

  So he had come. Good. But was he alone?

  I took my time surveying the churchyard, letting my eyes roam the featureless ground. Everything was silent, everything fine. I could see no one else between the bench and the surrounding walls.

  Keeping off the path, avoiding the illuminated squares of spotlighted grass, I began walking slowly toward the bench. I kept my eyes fixed on the figure sitting there. It was Harold Mailer, all right; I recognized his raincoat and his narrow, spindly frame. He was sitting quietly, just waiting, staring at the ground.

  My boots brushed through dark grass; soundlessly I moved toward him.

  When still a ways off, I adjusted my approach so that I angled around behind him. Even from the back I could see how relaxed he was, his arms stretched out along the top of the bench, head slightly tilted, like a man taking a gentle doze.

  My feet slowed. I came to a gradual halt.

  He was as twitchy as they came, Harold. Nervy at the best of times, let alone at dusk, in a churchyard, on an illicit rendezvous, with his career—and life—hanging in the balance.

  All at once his utter relaxation bothered me.

  I stared at him. Why was he so chill?

  Come to think of it, why was his head at such an angle?

  Why didn’t he move?

  My hand stole to my sword. I was a statue planted in the grass.

  My scalp prickled; I heard a cold voice drifting on the wind.

  “Lucy…”

  Out of the corner of my left eye, I sensed a shape forming in the air. It was soft, hesitant, knitted from yarns of shadow. It gathered blackness around it as if clumsily clothing itself. It hung in the dark beside me, close enough to touch. Cold radiated from it, sharp as knives. My lips drew back in fear; my teeth grinned in ghastly welcome. I kept hot eyes fixed straight ahead, still staring at the bench and its lifeless occupant with the twisted, broken neck. I did not dare look at the drab thing at my side, and particularly not at the half-formed face I sensed so close to mine.

  My voice was barely a rasp. “Harold?”

  “Lucy…”

  “What have they done to you?”

  A tiny cracking noise was the only answer; looking down, I saw flecks of ice spreading across the wrinkles in my sleeve, pincers of frost encircling my boot. The left side of my face burned with supernatural chill; my breath plumed white. The shape was very near.

  “Who did this, Harold? Who killed you?”

  A mumbled flood of words, splashing against my brain. So full of anguish and confusion…I could not make them out.

  How thick my tongue felt, how dry and swollen. It was as if it were glued inside my mouth. “Tell me. If you tell me I can…I can help you….” But I couldn’t get the Lucy Carlyle Formula™ out. Not this time.

  “You did this, Lucy….”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a nebulous hand of cloud reach toward my face.

  “No, Harold, no, that’s not true….”

  “You did this.” Its fingers stroked the air close to my skin. I flinched away. Ice blistered across my cheek. I could feel it building across the hollow of my eye. My mind hurt; my grip closed on the hilt of my rapier.

  “No, Harold. Please don’t—”

  “It is at the place of blood.”

  “What?”

  The shape was gone.

  With a shudder, with bile rising in my throat, I lurched back and to the side, rubbing at my face, my boot tearing free of the frozen ground.

  As I did so, three men rose up from the grass.

  For a second I thought they were phantoms, too; the impossibility of their appearance numbed my brain. But I’d forgotten about the humps and ridges, the hollows left long ago, when the churchyard had been emptied of its graves. Some were deep enough to conceal a crouching man; they’d been hiding there while I’d merrily walked toward the body of Harold Mailer at the center of their trap. They were large men, dressed in black; large, but moving fast to encircle me. One was over to the left, back toward the gate where I’d come from; the others blocked the way to other exits. If I’d gotten as far as the bench, I would have had no chance of escape. They would have surrounded me with ease.

  But I’d halted. The space behind me was clear.

  I turned and ran.

  Not toward one of the churchyard gates, where the lamps burned so faintly, but to the black mass of high wall midway between them. In the coffee-colored dusk, it seemed a solid and impenetrable slab. But I’d done my homework, and I knew otherwise.

  Up a gentle slope, leaping over hollows, almost twisting my ankle on fragments of old stone, I reached the wall. Behind me, the three figures arrowed inward, converging on me where I stood.

  There was an old door there: locked, but usefully designed, with protruding hardware and crossbeams that I could get a foothold on. I launched myself up, grabbed the top of the door, where it was loosely set in a crumbling arch, and began scrabbling higher. One toe on a beam, one on the lock; I straightened my legs, reached up—my fingers connected with the top of the wall. That was all I needed. A kick, an unbecoming wriggle, and I’d pulled myself up and over. I hung there for a moment before dropping lightly down into foliage on the other side. As I did so, something impacted hard against the door.

  I was in the yard of an abandoned building, perhaps once the vicarage of the church. Stacks of bricks and piles of rusted scaffolding poles suggested that someone, at some stage, hoped to carry out renovations—but now it was deserted, as I’d noticed earlier that day. A first floor window gaped ahead of me, empty of glass, and I vaulted through it into a black space. I snatched a glance behind, saw figures hauling themselves over the wall, silhouetted for an instant against the stars.

  The interior of the place was a mess, full of debris. I flicked on my flashlight; I jumped, dodged, went slaloming from room to room. To my dismay, the windows on the other side had been securely sealed and boarded. I could not get out that way.

  Sounds behind me. They were already in the house.

  A broad, dilapidated staircase opened before me. I sprang up it, three steps at a time.

  There, at the top of the stairs, a window—glazed, but tempting. I pressed my face against it and saw a flat roof below, then a garden stretching away.

  Was that window a nice modern one, easy to open? No, of course not. It was a sash affair, old and rotten and warped; it was all I could do to lift it high enough to admit my head and shoulders. It squeaked, juddered in the grooves, then froze altogether. I was going to have to wriggle through.

  I looked behind me, and my heart nearly stopped. The three figures were halfway up the stairs. The leader had something silvery in his hand.

  No time for wriggling. Stepping back from the window, I launched myself forward through the gap, shunting myself out into the moonlight. As I fell out and down, a hand caught my boot and gripped it tight. For an instant I hung there; then I thrashed upward with my other foot, connecting sharply with something very soft. The hand let go and I tumbled onto the flat roof below.

  As soon as I landed, I flung myself violently to the side. Something struck the asphalt roof where I’d just been lying and stuck there quivering. I tore a canister of iron from my belt, turned, and lobbed it hard. It smashed into the window, just above a protruding head. Shards of glass dropped like dislodged icicles; someone screamed, the head whipped back into the house, and I was up and away along the low, flat roof, reaching the corner in five quick strides.

  From that corner, I could see a high wall extending away between two gardens, with expanses of grass stretching left and right like black and frozen seas. I didn’t relish being trapped in either garden, with no sure way out. The wall would do. It was three feet lower than the roof, and I had to turn and drop caref
ully onto the narrow crest of bricks. As I did so, I saw the first of my pursuers jumping from the ruined window.

  Along the crest I ran, scampering as a cat would, looking straight ahead, ignoring the drop on either side. There were trees in the gardens; you could see silvery ghost-wards hanging from them, smell the lavender bushes out there in the dark. Behind I heard a shout; something flashed past my shoulder and was gone.

  I got to a place where the wall split: it marked the end of the gardens of this street, and the beginnings of the ones on the next. To my right, a side wall sprouted off. To the left, a thick hedge stretched away. I looked back; one of the men had followed me along the wall, moving hesitantly, a small knife in his hand. Another had jumped down onto the lawn and was sprinting across the grass. He would have his work cut out for him, because the hedge would block his way. The third man was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he had been injured by the broken window. I hoped so.

  I continued straight, following the line I was on. I wanted to reach the road beyond. Ahead of me: the next row of houses. There, too, glinting coldly in the moonlight, an all-glass conservatory, where my wall came to an end. Beyond, I could make out the low roof of a garage, and perhaps a gap leading to the street.

  The conservatory roof was higher than the wall. As I slowed to consider it, something struck my forearm. I felt a sharp lance of pain, and the shock of it made me stumble. I almost toppled from my perch; instead, I pitched forward against the side of the conservatory. My arm stung as I pulled myself up onto its roof; when I touched the place, my fingers came away wet.

  Over the glass roof I ran, leaning inward, boots slipping and sliding on the tilted panes. Up off the glass, onto the roof of the garage. The street wasn’t far away.

  Another shout behind was answered by a second cry. I paused. Looking back, I saw the first pursuer had climbed onto the conservatory. He was bigger than I was, and considerably heavier; he couldn’t bring himself to run across it as I had. Dropping to a sitting position, he began to shuffle across the apex of the roof like a chubby-thighed kid riding a ghost-horse at the fair.

  I waited until he was halfway across, out of reach of either end. Then I took a magnesium flare from my pocket.

  It wasn’t a very nice thing to do, but I didn’t much care right then.

  When I chucked it, the flare hit the conservatory roof just in front of the shuffling man, exploding in a blaze of searing white light, and showering him in fragments of hot iron. He gave a cry and lurched back, trying to protect his face. Even as he did so, the glass under his knees cracked, then shattered completely. The roof collapsed; with a scream the man pitched forward into the silvery smoke and disappeared.

  Something bounced against the brickwork at my back; a knife spun past across the asphalt roof. The pursuer in the garden had broken through the hedge and was running over the lawn toward me.

  I gave him a rude gesture, then scrabbled away across the roof, dropped over the far side onto a car hood, and bounced down onto a cobbled driveway. As I hit the ground I was already running. It was a small mews, possibly quite pretty, but I couldn’t hang around to admire the architecture. I was out of it in moments and sprinting full tilt through the silent streets of Clerkenwell.

  It was only when I was a mile or so away, lost among the winding alleys near St. Pancras station, that I allowed myself to slow down a little. But I didn’t stop moving even then. My sleeve was wet, and the side of my arm felt numb. It was a cold night; to rest would have made me prey to shock and exhaustion. Plus, it might have set my mind working. And I really didn’t want to think about what had happened to me—and to Harold Mailer—right then.

  One thing I did know, instinctively, without deliberation, was that I couldn’t go back home. The men who’d tried to silence me knew full well where I lived. My little studio in Tooting wouldn’t be a healthy place that night.

  And so, by slow degrees, going by back roads, making a cautious loop through the northern districts of central London, I started on the long and painful journey toward the one refuge I could think of. The one place I knew I’d be safe.

  I didn’t need to think hard about this one, either.

  I was making for 35 Portland Row.

  It’s only three miles as the crow flies from Clerkenwell to Marylebone, but it took me several hours to cover the distance. Weariness dragged at me, and I often lost my way. Also, I was wary of pursuit, and so kept off the main roads, making lengthy diversions to avoid encounters with the living. I saw a few vehicles in the distance—mostly agency cars and DEPRAC vans—and in my state of mind I trusted none of them. My paranoia kept me safe, and no ghosts detected me, which was another plus, but I was a slow and sorry figure by the time I reached the familiar street at last.

  I trudged up the center of the road, past Arif’s corner store, past the rusty ghost-lamp, meandering listlessly between the silent chains of parked cars. Everything was quiet, dark, locked down. Midnight had come and gone. No one in their right mind was making house calls now—except for agents out on cases. It was only then, as I reached number 35 and saw its unlit windows, that I remembered it was quite possible—quite likely—that Lockwood and the others would not be home. The realization made me sway; but it was too late now. I crossed over to the gate.

  It was still crooked, and they hadn’t changed the sign:

  A. J. LOCKWOOD & CO., INVESTIGATORS.

  AFTER DARK, RING BELL AND WAIT BEYOND THE IRON LINE.

  I pushed it open, walked carefully up toward the house, over the uneven tiles. In the glow of the streetlight outside number 37, the iron barrier embedded halfway up the path glinted with a soft sheen. I could see the bell hanging from its post beside it. So many cases had begun with that bell clanging at odd hours of the night. Such different clients: the Slaine family’s doctor, calling us out after finding all six of them vanished from their beds; the one surviving member of the Bromley Wick shooting party…In the Bayswater Stalker affair, wicked old Crawford’s niece had pretty much swung from it in her desperation, with him floating behind her up the road.

  One thing held true every time: it made a heck of a racket.

  I reached for the clapper, looking back at the sleeping street—and for a moment a vestige of pride resurfaced. Perhaps I should wait until morning, for a more civilized hour. I could always find shelter somewhere, curl up on the step behind Arif’s store, maybe, and—

  Nope, that stupid idea didn’t detain me long. I needed help, and I needed it now.

  I grasped the clapper and swung it hard.

  George once told me there was a theory that ghosts disliked loud noises, particularly ones made with iron instruments. He said the ancient Greeks used to send evil spirits packing with metal rattles and tambourines. Well, if anything undead had been lurking in Portland Row that night, their ectoplasm would have dissolved the instant I began ringing. I nearly lost a few teeth myself. The appalling noise ripped a hole in the fabric of the night.

  I gave it a good twenty seconds, and when I stopped, my heart’s clapper kept pounding against my chest.

  A short time passed. To my great relief, movements sounded in the house. A faint glow showed in the semicircle of petaled panes above the door. That would be the crystal skull lantern on the hall table being switched on. I heard the chain being removed, the bolt pulled back. I stepped away from the door, back across the iron line. Best not to come too close. Some people could be mighty jittery if they saw a dark figure when they opened a door at night, particularly if those people were George.

  But it wasn’t George. It was Lockwood. The door swung back, and there he was in his long bathrobe and his dark blue pajamas, with the spare rapier, the one we kept with the umbrellas in the hall, ready in his hand. His feet were bare, his hair rumpled. His lean face was wary but relaxed. He stared out into the dark.

  I just stood there. I didn’t know what to say to him.

  “Lucy?”

  I’d not slept at all that night, and for only a short whil
e the night before. In the last few hours I’d fled from three killers, and come face-to-face with a newly murdered ghost. I’d been cut by a throwing knife; I’d sustained countless bumps and bruises during my escape, after which I’d walked halfway across London. I hadn’t eaten since…When had I eaten? I couldn’t remember. My leggings were torn. I was cold, stiff, and sore, and could barely stand. Oh, yeah, and my coat stank.

  It was after midnight. I stood on his doorstep, looking just swell.

  “Lockwood—”

  But he was already at my side, putting his arm around me, pulling me upright, ushering me up to the door and into the warmth and light. And talking, talking as he did so.

  “Lucy, what’s happened? You’re shaking. Come on. Come on inside.”

  The familiar Portland Row smell enveloped me: that mix of iron and salt, and leather coats, and that curious dusty, musty tang that came from the masks and pots and Eastern curios on the shelves. For some reason, I suddenly felt close to tears. That wouldn’t do. I blinked them away as the door clicked behind us, shutting out the night. Lockwood shot the bolt, pulled the chains across; he flipped the rapier into the old chipped plant pot we used as an umbrella stand. His arm was still around me; he led me up the hall.

  “Sorry to disturb you so late,” I said.

  “Don’t give it a thought! But you’re exhausted, I can barely hear you. Let’s get you to the kitchen.”

  Through to the kitchen we went; on came the light—bright and clean and hard enough to make me wince. I saw the cereals and salt bins, the cups and kettles. I saw George’s moth-eaten cushion on his seat. And I saw the Thinking Cloth on the table: a fresh one, with unfamiliar doodles and designs. That made my eyes prickle, too. Lockwood didn’t notice; he was saying something, pulling back a chair. As I sank into it, he caught sight of my sleeve, saw the congealed blood running from elbow to wrist. His face changed.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s nothing. Just a cut.”

  He knelt at my side, pulled my sleeve back with his long, quick fingers, exposing the laceration on my arm. He gazed up at me with searching eyes. “A knife made this, Lucy. Who—?” He stood up. “No—explanations can wait. I’ll get George; we can clean this, fix you up. You don’t have to worry anymore; you’re safe here.”