The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Another case, Penelope?” Lockwood asked.

  “Greater than that. A far greater honor. I would like you to join your agency with mine.”

  Just like that; no mincing of words, no wasting time. She was smiling as she said it, but the impact of what she said was like a missile striking right between the eyes. I think I physically reeled; George made an incoherent sound. Lockwood’s face was frozen. I don’t think I’d ever seen him quite so taken aback. If the opening of Mrs. Barrett’s coffin ranked as nine out of ten on the shock-o-meter, this was ten out of ten. Ten plus. He blinked at her; it was as if he didn’t fully comprehend the words.

  Ms. Fittes was too polite to acknowledge our stupefaction. “I was impressed with the way you tackled the very serious case in Ealing,” she said. “Impressed, but unsurprised. I have watched you since that matter of the Screaming Staircase two years ago. Time and again I have seen your team achieve small miracles of detection, overcoming great odds, defeating Visitors of considerable power. Your psychic Sight, Anthony, is superb, but it is not your only Talent; you are a leader I would love to have on my side. And Lucy”—her dark gaze switched to me—“I’m so pleased to see that you took my words to heart and have chosen to remain with Lockwood and Company. Your gifts are formidable, and I could help you develop them even further. Dear George”—the gaze switched again; I felt like a fish out of water that had suddenly been thrown back in—“you have already worked for my company once. Perhaps we didn’t fully appreciate your singular gifts. Come back to us and I will allow you full access to the Black Library at Fittes House—there are so many unread papers there, so much that is yet to be researched.” She leaned back in her chair. “There it is: my offer. I don’t make such proposals readily. But you have charmed me. Lockwood and Company is unique; with my help it could become immortal.” She smiled at us. “If you wish to consult with one another, please do so.”

  A log crackled in the grate. A wall clock ticked. I couldn’t look at the others.

  “Thank you, Penelope, thank you, Ms. Fittes….” When Lockwood spoke, his voice was thick; it lacked its usual fluency. “Thank you for the invitation. It is, as you say, an enormous honor.” He cleared his throat. “But I do not think we need to consult on this. I’m sure I speak for the others—and I certainly speak for myself—when I say that our independence is something we value above all else. We like being our own little agency. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we could happily become part of even such a tremendous organization as yours.”

  Ms. Fittes’s smile remained, but she was as motionless as a stone. When she spoke, her voice was velvety. “No? Don’t misunderstand me, Anthony. I would create a new division especially for you. You wouldn’t need adult supervisors—you would operate exactly as you do now, except that the resources of the Fittes Agency would be at your disposal. I would trust you implicitly. You could even continue to work from your charming little home.”

  Another silence in the reading room—this one stretched out even longer.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Lockwood said. “But again I must regretfully decline.”

  The smiled flickered. “Well, you know your own mind, of course. I will respect your decision.”

  “Please don’t take my remarks the wrong way, ma’am,” Lockwood said. “I mean no disrespect to you or your great organization. I hope there will be many more opportunities for collaboration between our agencies. We enjoyed working with Quill Kipps on the Guppy case,” he added. “Perhaps we can do so again.”

  Now the smile was gone. “That will not be possible. Mr. Kipps is no longer employed by this agency.”

  “No longer employed?” This time Lockwood didn’t bother hiding his astonishment; beside him, George and I were competing for whose jaw could drop the lowest. Kipps had made a seamless transition from agent to supervisor, and we’d assumed that he would go on to bore us for years with his rise through the ranks. “Did he—did he leave?” Lockwood asked. “Or was he—?”

  “Oh no, he left of his own free will,” Ms. Fittes said. “Soon after returning from the Guppy case. His reasons were…confused. I did not interrogate him. I have many agents. I cannot spend my time mollycoddling those misguided individuals who don’t appreciate their own good luck. That being so, I had better get back to work. Thank you for coming in today. If you ring that bell, the secretary will be pleased to escort you out.”

  Our visit to the Orpheus Society had not been as straightforward as we had assumed, and an air of unease hung over us on the journey home, a feeling that an important moment had just passed. It was disconcerting; nothing had actually changed, yet somehow the ground had insensibly shifted underfoot. We didn’t speak the entire way to Portland Row.

  Holly was in the office. “How did it go? Did you get your medal?”

  “Not exactly.” Lockwood flung himself down in his chair. “All okay here?”

  “Fine. I made that list of Rotwell Institute sites you wanted. There weren’t that many of them in the end. Just five or six. It’s on your desk.”

  “Thanks, Hol.” Lockwood picked up Holly’s list, glanced at it, put it down. He stared moodily out of the window.

  George and I filled Holly in on the events of our visit. Her expression darkened. “Obviously you were quite right to say no, Lockwood,” she said. “No question about it. It’s flattering, I suppose, but you can’t just give up your independence. This is Lockwood and Co.”

  “It was a strange offer,” I said. “Ms. Fittes was very complimentary about us, but it was like she just assumed we’d cave in and do her bidding. I don’t think she was very happy that we refused her, either.”

  “That’s typical Fittes behavior.” Holly normally maintained a facade of breezy good humor about everything, but now she was looking as cross as I’d ever seen her. “At Rotwell’s we always used to talk about it. Penelope Fittes acts like she has a divine right to get whatever she wants, just because she’s head of the oldest agency. Her grandmother was just the same.”

  “What about her mother?” I remembered the rather forlorn photograph I’d seen in Penelope Fittes’s study. “Didn’t she run the agency at one time?”

  “Not for long,” Holly said. “She was different, they say—a gentler character. But of course she died, and Penelope took over. When was that, Lockwood? You’ll know.”

  But Lockwood was still staring out of the window. He didn’t react even when the phone on his desk began ringing.

  George looked at me. “I can’t pick it up,” I said. “I don’t work here anymore.”

  “You never answered it even when you did work here.”

  George got up and answered the phone. Whoever was on the other end was talkative. For a long while George’s side of the conversation was limited to grunts and sighs. Holly took up a feather duster and began doing unnecessary things to the suit of armor behind Lockwood’s desk. Lockwood still didn’t move.

  At last George lowered the receiver and covered the mouthpiece with a hand. “Lockwood.”

  “Mmm?”

  “It’s that bloody Skinner kid again. He’s still talking about ghosts in that stupid village. It’s worse than ever, apparently. To hear him, you’d think they had Screaming Spirits jumping out of their breakfast cereal. Anyway, he’s begging me to ask you again.” George paused. “When I say ‘begging,’ it’s the usual mix of verbal abuse and desperate fawning. But somehow that works on me, I don’t know why. So I said I would.” He looked at Lockwood, who hadn’t moved. “You’re obviously doing some very important staring into space. I’ll just tell him to get lost….”

  “No!” With a jolt that made me spill my tea and Holly knock the codpiece clean off the suit of armor, Lockwood sprang upright in his chair. “Give me that phone! It’s Danny Skinner, from Aldbury Castle?”

  “Er, yes. Yes, it is. Why?”

  Lockwood grabbed the receiver and put his feet up on his desk. “Look up the train schedule! Pack the bags! Cancel any appointments for tomorrow! Is th
at you, Danny? Lockwood here. We’re going to accept your fascinating invitation after all.”

  Lockwood’s sudden enthusiasm for the Aldbury Castle case was startling, not to mention suspicious, but he was evasive when we interrogated him. “It’s clearly a fascinating cluster,” he said. “All sorts of interesting features. That weird Creeping Shadow story, for a start—didn’t you think that was worth investigating?” He gave us one of his widest smiles. “At the very least, it’ll get us away from London for a bit. We know the Winkmans were looking for Lucy a few days ago, and they’re bound to be after us all now that we’ve raided their night-market. It’ll get us out of harm’s way until the heat dies down.”

  “I don’t feel particularly threatened,” I said.

  “Ooh, anything could happen, Luce. Anything. Bit of safe country air will do us a world of good….” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “Will there be anything else?”

  “So the fact that there’s an outpost of the Rotwell Institute a couple of miles up the road from the village doesn’t have any bearing on it, then?” George said. That had been my thought, too.

  “Oh, you remember that?” Lockwood wore his blandest expression. He scratched the side of his nose.

  “Of course we do. Danny Skinner mentioned it, didn’t he? He said they’d paid no attention to the problems of the village. Is it one of the research facilities on Holly’s list?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact it is,” Lockwood said. “One of several, mind you, so there’s no guarantee it’s going to be relevant at all….” He shrugged. “Okay, look, I wouldn’t say the presence of that base has put me off, exactly. We might take a squint at it while we’re down there, assuming all the ghosts tramping around the place give us any peace. But the village is our primary concern. That’s what we’re being hired to sort out, and if we’re going to head down there tomorrow, we’d better get ready.”

  The rest of the day passed swiftly. Lockwood sent George off to the Archives to research anything to do with the village and its history; he sent Holly to Mullet’s to order fresh salt and iron and arrange for them to be delivered to Waterloo Station. And he himself departed on a couple of errands, about which he was uncharacteristically silent. The results of one of these trips was dramatically revealed the following morning when we arrived at the station and saw a gaunt figure in black waiting on the platform beside the sacks of supplies.

  “Hardly recognized you there, Kipps,” George said, “without your swanky jacket and sword. I thought if you took them off, you’d fall apart into separate wriggling pieces.”

  It was true that Kipps looked different. Perhaps more than any other operative, he had been defined by his connection to the Fittes Agency. His jeweled rapier, the unnecessary tightness of his trousers, the cocksure spring in his step—everything had always trumpeted his excessive pride in being a member of the organization. Today he wore black jeans, a turtleneck, and a black zip-up jacket. Perhaps his jeans were a trifle tight, his boots a trifle pointy, but it was fairly sensible attire, assembled almost without vanity. Fortunately he hadn’t entirely changed. He still possessed his air of ineffable gloom.

  “I just had a realization,” he said when we were on the train and rocking slowly through the south London suburbs. “After the Guppy job. I mean, there we were—in a house possessed by a wicked and powerful entity, and you all were running around like madmen—fighting, screaming, being fools—but dealing with it…and I was just a fifth wheel. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t hear it…I was too old to do anything useful. And that’s what being a supervisor is: it’s a life of sending others out to fight and die. I’ve known that for a while, but it took you to make me realize I couldn’t bear to continue with it. I couldn’t stay at the Fittes Agency. I’d rather do something else.”

  “Like what?” George said. “Art critic? Train buff? With that turtleneck, you could be almost anything.”

  “It was probably another dumb decision,” Kipps said. “Like agreeing to come along with you today. Lockwood says he wants my expertise, but I’m not sure what I can contribute aside from standing around like a fence post. Maybe I can make the tea.”

  “Actually, I think it’s admirable,” I said. “Your decision. It’s about being true to yourself.”

  He grunted. “You’re good at that, certainly. That’s why you’ve come back to Lockwood and Company, I suppose.”

  “As it happens, I’m only temporarily—” But the train was rattling over a particularly loud section of track, and then Lockwood and George were arguing over who would carry the salt bags, and Holly was handing biscuits around, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I sat in a corner of the compartment by the window, staring at the reflection of myself that ran like a ghost over the vista of gray roofs.

  How had it come to this, tagging along with Lockwood once again? Was I truly like Kipps, rudderless and cast adrift from purposes of my own? A subtle shift had come over me in the last few days; a realization that I had allowed myself to change direction. After the loss of the skull, after Harold Mailer’s murder and the pursuit through Clerkenwell, I’d needed help badly—and Lockwood had offered it. There’d been no one else to turn to. It had been a good decision. But after that—how one thing led to another!—it had seemed only natural to stay on at Portland Row, only natural to let Lockwood help me retrieve the skull, only natural to help him hunt for it in the night-market….And now—was it natural to accompany him to Aldbury Castle, too? Sure, I could invent plenty of excuses to justify it. I was keeping myself safe from the Winkmans. I was (perhaps) pursuing the Rotwell Institute and the missing skull. I was giving Lockwood & Co. the support they deserved….All that might well have been true. But it boiled down to the same thing in the end. I was simply happy to have the chance to be with them again.

  It was with inconclusive thoughts like these that I occupied myself as the train left London and dawdled its way into the countryside. By ten o’clock, without danger or alarm, we had reached our destination.

  For those wanting a detailed record of the horrors that subsequently unfolded, the village of Aldbury Castle occupied a pleasant rural location fifty miles southwest of London. It was set in chalk uplands, with wooded rolling hills on three sides, and a leisurely river winding on the other. The site was remote, reached only by a meandering road, and by a train stop (it would be a stretch to call it a station) on the main Southampton line, three quarters of a mile away to the west. There was no station office or building of any kind, just a white and winding path running off into the forest, to join the road on its way to the village.

  If there ever had been a castle in the area, it had long vanished. The road crossed the river on a stone bridge, and then bisected the village green—a broad expanse of long dark grass, surrounded by cottages. Sheep grazed here. Three great horse chestnut trees dominated the center of the green, casting into shadow the fourteenth-century market cross and the trough rotting beside it.

  On the other side of the green, the road forked outside the door of the one surviving pub—the Old Sun Inn, which our client, Danny Skinner, called home. All the other main buildings of Aldbury Castle were visible from here, too—the village stores, The Run (a row of terrace houses), and the church of St. Nestor, on a rise above the rest of the village. Outside the church, an ancient ghost-lamp, rusty and broken, stood on a low mound. A lane beyond the church led off through the woods to fields and hills.

  Those hills were bathed in sunshine when we walked over the bridge and entered the village for the first time, but the green was wet and frosted with cobwebs. Shadows of the eastern woods stretched like fingers across the grass. There was a smell of smoke in the air. It was a beautiful spring day.

  “Seems much too pretty to be a hot spot for ghosts,” Holly said.

  “You say that.” I pointed to a great circle of blackened ground in a prominent spot by the road. “They’ve been busy setting fire to something.”

  “Or someone,” Kipps said.

 
Holly wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yuck.”

  “Well, I don’t see any charred legs sticking out of it,” George said. “More likely to be objects that they think might be Sources. They’re panic burning. But first things first. That cross is the one the kid mentioned. I want to have a look at its sinister carving.”

  He led the way through the long wet grass, which whispered and spattered against our legs. When we got near the trees, we flung down the bags of salt and iron; we were hot despite the cool air.

  The base of the cross was stepped, and had been repaired, not very well, with modern bricks. The rest was ancient, weathered by the wind and frost of countless years. The stone had a grainy softness to it; pale green lichen extended over it in patches, like the map of an unknown world. You could see that the whole thing had once been intricately decorated—patterns of interlocking vines wound their way up the sides of the cross, with obscure objects cradled in their fronds.

  George seemed to know precisely where to look. Halfway up one face, the lichen had been picked away, revealing the traces of an image. In its bottom left-hand corner, a set of tiny figures clustered. They were no more than stick people, lined up like bowling pins ready to be felled. To the right was a pile of skulls and bones. Towering over the lot, crammed into the center of the available space, rose a huge misshapen figure with sturdy legs and arms and a squat, almost squared body. The head was indistinct. Whatever the creature was, it dominated the scene.

  “There he is,” Lockwood said. “The dreaded Creeping Shadow. The kid told me on the phone that it had been seen again the other night.”

  George grunted skeptically; he was tracing its shape with a chubby finger.

  “What do you think it is, George?” I asked.