The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

  I wiped my sleeve across my brow. “Well done, Holly. Think we can cross that ghost off our list. They’ll be having family picnics here by summer. What’s next?”

  Next was the Phantasm Kipps had seen on the bridge, and that proved equally easy to subdue. We followed it up with a Stone Knocker on the green, and a Lurker at a bus stop. Holly and I dealt with them all.

  George chuckled. “This tour is turning out to be a piece of cake. Okey-doke, you’ve each had turns at combat. How about I take care of the next one?” He consulted his map and notes. “Looks like there was the Shade of an old woman seen in the backyard of a cottage in The Run. I reckon I could keep some old grandma at bay. Let’s see if she’s around, shall we?”

  The Run was the row of cottages on the far side of the green. It didn’t take long to get there. At the edge of the grass, a gate in the boundary fence provided access to a sunken lane, with the cottage lights glimmering up ahead.

  It was dark in the lane; the hedges pressed close. Above us, tree branches carved black slices through the sky. We drew together as we walked; it wasn’t a place to linger.

  “The house is a bit farther along,” George whispered. “We should see it in a—” He came to a halt. “Uh-oh. Who’s this?”

  In the darkness of the lane stood a figure, half-turned away from us, its back lit by the flickering other-light of a nonexistent candle. Long strands of hair curtained the face. Its arms hung limp, the head bowed, the shoulders slumped in an attitude of piteous sorrow, but the hand at its side was balled into a tight white fist.

  We stood there. Neither we nor the apparition moved.

  “It’s got a nightgown on,” Holly whispered. “That’s never good.”

  “Is it a girl, do you think?” George breathed. “The legs don’t seem like a grandma’s legs. Not that I’ve looked at the legs of that many grandmas, obviously. I’ve got other hobbies.”

  Who knew what the thing had been? “Hang on,” I said, “it’s moving.”

  Bony feet shuffled on the dirt road. With miniscule jerky steps, and the flap of dirty cotton, the figure began to turn. The night’s cold corkscrewed inward, twisting around us like a winding sheet. We pressed closer together.

  “Visitors always rotate counterclockwise,” George said in a tight, high voice. “Did you know that? They never turn clockwise. Fact.”

  “Fascinating, George,” I said. “Now shut up a minute. Rapiers ready. I’ll try to talk to it. Watch the arms, watch the feet. Watch for changes of expression.”

  “It would help if we could actually see the face,” George muttered.

  Holly flinched back. “There’s blood on the front of the nightdress.”

  This was true: it was an apron of blood, a thick black staining, long and glossy and wet. Still the figure shuffled around, rocking gently from side to side; now it faced us fully, but the head hung low, so only its crown and its dangling lengths of lank black hair could be seen, shimmering in other-light. I heard a sound like the rustling of leaves.

  “Who are you?” I said. “Tell us your name. What happened to you here?”

  I waited. Just the rustling again, a little louder.

  Now George flinched too. “I can’t see the face yet. Can you see the face yet, Hol?”

  “No. No, I can’t. Lucy—”

  “Steady,” I said. I felt what they did, the swell of panic. It jangled down the nerve endings of my arms and sloshed in the liquid of my belly. “Steady, both of you. I’m getting something.”

  “Look at all that blood.”

  “Getting something…”

  A voice like dry leaves, whispered through sandpaper lips. This time I heard it.

  Oh.

  “My eyes. Have you seen my eyes?”

  The figure lifted its head. The hair fell back.

  I don’t know if it was George or Holly who screamed the loudest. Either way, they drowned out my own cry. Whether the Visitor actually lunged toward us, I don’t remember. Certainly I slashed at it with my sword. Then we were back through the gate and away across the green. We ran as far as the market cross and halted, lungs raking air, gasping, cursing.

  “Is it coming?” Holly asked. “Is it after us?”

  I peeked back through the blackness of the night. “No.”

  “I’m so pleased.”

  “Why did it have to be its eyes?” George said. “Why couldn’t it have been a less significant body part? Its thumb, say, or even an ear. That wouldn’t have been so bad.”

  “Where did that ghost come from, Lucy? It wasn’t on the map.”

  “Must be a new one. I don’t know.”

  “Its toes! It might have lost its toes! You can’t walk without toes. Then, if it went for us, it would just have fallen over.”

  “George,” I said. “You’re burbling.”

  “I am, yes. But, you know, I happen to think it’s justified.”

  I made a decision. Everyone needed a rest. I led them back to the inn.

  As it happened, Lockwood and Kipps were already there. Lockwood leaned against the bar, scribbling in his notebook. Kipps, with a Coke in his hand and the Fairfax goggles still enveloping his head, was striding exultantly around the taproom.

  “Two Specters!” he called. “Two Specters and a Wisp! I saw them all! I saw them and I dealt with them, quick as anything! Ask Lockwood, he’ll tell you.”

  “He’s been yelping in my ear all night,” Lockwood said. “I’m beginning to be sorry we gave those things to him. All the same, we’ve done okay so far. What about you all?”

  We told him. “Lockwood,” I said, when we were finished, “there’s an odd atmosphere hanging over the village, some distant psychic disturbance. I can just about hear it—it’s like a background hum. I’ve heard this sort of thing before, under Aickmere’s—and the bone glass was similar, too.”

  Lockwood tapped his pen on the bar; he didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I’d like to swap things around a little. Holly, could you take Kipps and George and go back to deal with that eyeless girl? Then continue where you left off. Lucy, I want you to come with me. We’ll see if we can’t pinpoint this disturbance of yours.”

  Lockwood and I took a walk around the village. The moon gleamed over the eastern woods now. You could see the smooth tops of the hills shining just behind the trees, silver crescents suspended in the dark. There was beauty to it, but it was a still night and the silence was oppressive; I longed for an owl hoot, or the ring of a corpse-bell, a human cry—something other than the distant psychic hubbub buzzing in my mind.

  Every hundred yards or so, we stopped and I tried to get a fix on it. No good; it never varied. Perhaps it was too far away.

  “We’ll try up by the woods,” Lockwood said.

  Our boots thumped on the hard dirt of the lane. We’d done a looping circuit and were coming level with the church now.

  “Hope they manage to snare that Specter,” I said. “Hope George copes with it.”

  Lockwood grinned. “He’s got a hang-up about girls with parts missing. I have a feeling Kipps will fix it, though. He’s champing at the bit, now that he’s got those new specs. And Holly did okay, too, you say?”

  “She was very good.”

  “I’ve been encouraging her to trust her Talents more. Her time with that oaf Rotwell didn’t do her any favors. She sort of crumpled up inside, lost faith in her own abilities. It’s nice to get her out in the field. You’re a great role model for her, Luce.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that….” I drew to a sudden halt; for the first time I felt a change in the background disturbance. It had lessened, then flared. We had passed the rusty ghost-lamp on its little mound and were below the embankment by the churchyard. The boundary thicket was above us. “Can we just nip up to the church a moment? I thought I felt something.”

  “Sure.” Lockwood grabbed my arm, helped me up the steep slope. “Might be worth taking a look. If Danny Skinner’s to be believed, the dead ought to be rising from t
heir graves just about now.”

  But the churchyard was quite still, a mouthful of crooked stone teeth shining under the moon. From where we stood by the hedge, at the top of the earth bank, we could see its whole extent, from the stubby church itself to the lych-gate leading to the lane. I listened. Yes, the hum was pulsing. It had a different quality now.

  “Quick question for you, Luce,” Lockwood said. “It’s about us. Are you still my client? Or should I be paying you for tonight? I’m confused.”

  “To be honest, I’ve lost track of that, too….” But my heartbeat was getting faster, responding to the pulsing of the distant hum. My mouth was suddenly dry. Why? All across the graveyard nothing stirred.

  “We’ll have to come to some kind of arrangement,” Lockwood went on. “Technically, we’re each helping each other right now. I’m helping you with the skull and the whole Winkman thing; you’re helping me here at the village. Two things are taking place at once. We’re going to have to figure out a very complicated client-agent relationship. Or”—he looked at me—“we could always do something much simpler….”

  I wasn’t listening. I shook my head, held up a hand.

  The moon glinted on the black stones in the dumpy tower. The animal rustlings in the hedges had ceased, the wind had dropped utterly. A silence lay over the moonlit gravestones, and I suddenly knew that we were not alone. From the quality of Lockwood’s silence, I realized he’d had the exact same feeling.

  We looked down on the churchyard.

  Something was coming toward us from between the stones.

  Far off we saw it first, moving among the tilted crosses. So slowly did it approach that to begin with I thought it was the shadow of one of the twisted yew trees that fringed the churchyard wall. It was very faint, bent-backed and stooping, with massive rolling shoulders and a shapeless, questing head that swung from side to side. The arms were outstretched; great legs moved with furtive deliberation, one step, then another, plowing through the dark. Cold air swept over the wall like a salt wave, crashing against us, making us gasp.

  “Look how big it is,” Lockwood breathed.

  The ghost of the Ealing Cannibal had been large. Even glimpsed through the kitchen door, its unnatural size and strength had been obvious. This thing was larger still: taller, reaching the top of the some of the tilted crosses; bulkier, with strange, stiff limbs grinding their way forward as if wading through treacle. The movement was awkward, and curiously mesmerizing. I’ve watched Raw-bones scrabble after me up concrete slopes; I’ve stood on high-rise apartment roofs while Screaming Spirits swirled around me like tattered hawks. I’ve seen stuff. But this giant figure in the churchyard—I’d never seen anything quite so alien and strange.

  Unlike many apparitions, it conjured no other-light; it did not glow as the Shining Boy had, or radiate darkness like the ghost out on the green. It was not solid-seeming like a Specter, or grotesque like a Wraith. In many ways it was scarcely there at all. It was formed of a translucent gauzy grayness, and you could see right through its body to the jumble of stones and crosses in the yard beyond. Its extremities—the hands and feet, even the details of the head, were faint to the point of vanishing; you picked them out only by a twist or reflux in the air. But at its edges the shadow’s substance seemed to dart and flicker, like quivering points of fire. It was as if the thing were continually, silently, coldly aflame. And from its back flowed a serpent of smoke that unwound across the graveyard like a magician’s cloak, steadily dispersing, flexing ever outward across the stones.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I whispered. “What is it?”

  Lockwood didn’t answer; he was staring at the spreading trail of mist that the Shadow left behind it. He motioned with his head; without looking at me, his fingers stole out and gripped mine.

  I looked where he directed. My lips parted; my mouth was dry as sand. Because the shape that crossed the churchyard was no longer alone. Other figures stood there now, rising in its wake from grass and mound. They stood beside crosses and carved angels, they hovered over tilted slabs. You could see the grave-clothes hanging off their bony forms. At a glance you could make out Shades and Specters there, Wraiths and Wisps and Tom O’Shadows. There were dozens of them. It was a congregation of the dead. The inhabitants of the churchyard rose and stood and looked toward the Creeping Shadow as it moved away, entirely disregarding them, out through the lych-gate at the far end of the churchyard and up the lane in the direction of the woods.

  Everything was still.

  Then the ghosts moved. First one, and then another; now the whole pack was rushing toward the lane as if summoned by a voice we could not hear. Some came surging up the bank. We could see their hollow faces, their wild and empty eyes. I believe I heard the creaking of their bones. It happened too fast; we had no time to react. Another second, and they would have been on us. But all at once the hellish company veered away, out over the hedge and through the air, to swoop down into the road and away after the Shadow. The creaking and clattering faded. A tail of cold air sucked and pulled at us as it withdrew along the lane.

  We stood there. The churchyard was quiet, empty, lit by nothing but the moon.

  A blackbird in the tree behind us let out a sudden full-throated song, loud and sad and beautiful. It fell silent. Lockwood and I stood transfixed at the top of the bank.

  Then I realized he was still holding my hand.

  He realized it at the same instant. Our fingers kind of fell away, swinging back into vigilant positions at our work belts, ready to seize a salt-bomb or rapier at a moment’s notice. Lockwood cleared his throat; I pushed my hair out of my eyes. Our boots did small, intricate shuffles on the frosty ground.

  “What the heck was that?” I said.

  “The Shadow?” Lockwood glanced at me from under his bangs. “Of course the Shadow…” He shook his head. “I have no idea. That was definitely the thing that Danny Skinner said would come. It had the size and shape, and it was burning—or seemed to be. But—but did you see behind it? The ghosts—?”

  “Yeah, and Lockwood, it’s just like he said. It’s the thing from the carving on the cross—the Gatherer of Souls. It was gathering them up from their graves!”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “What was it, then? You saw them rise up!”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “You saw them, Lockwood.”

  “We need to get back to the others. This isn’t the place to discuss it.”

  Over in the woods, a storm of birds rose shrieking into the night. They wheeled once and with a crack of wings flew off over the brow of Gunner’s Top. We stumbled down the embankment and in silence hurried back to the inn.

  In the depths of the night the others returned, having had great success with the eyeless ghost and several other Visitors around the village. Their raised voices preceded them, echoing outside the taproom door; then they bustled in, George and Kipps bickering contentedly about some minor detail on the map, Holly Munro in the middle of wiping her sword clean with a pretty blade cloth. They found Lockwood and me sitting in near darkness, lit a dull, dark, glowing red by the dying embers of the fire.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Lockwood said, once we’d told them. “We saw the infamous Creeping Shadow. That’s about the only thing we can tell you for certain.”

  “Other than it definitely stirs up the other ghosts,” I said. “Don’t forget that. Its cloak of mist was like a ladle stirring soup; they just came floating to the top as it passed by. Spirits came bursting out of the ground, before following it into the woods!”

  “I wish I’d seen that,” George said. “That’s unique! That’s fascinating!” His spectacles shone; he sat on a table, swinging his legs under him.

  “All the bodies in the churchyard rose up?” Kipps asked. “A spirit for every grave? Or just some?”

  “Lots,” I said, “but not all. Maybe that’s how it works, when souls are gathered….Lockwood won’t like me saying th
at,” I added. We hadn’t just been sitting by the dying fire. We’d been arguing.

  “Because it’s not gathering souls,” Lockwood said irritably. “I don’t know what the Shadow is, but it’s not some demon or angel visiting on the Day of Judgment. It comes back every night of the week, for heaven’s sake! I wish you’d get that stupid cross thing out of your mind.”

  “It draws the dead out of their graves, Lockwood!”

  “Oh, give it a rest.”

  “Hot chocolate, anyone?” Holly said brightly. “Nice and soothing? Mr. Skinner’s got a stash of packets behind the bar. Tell you what, I’ll just go and put the kettle on.”

  “Must have been something seriously weird about it,” Kipps said. He’d taken off his goggles and now tossed them stylishly across the room to hang from a coat peg. His swashbuckling finesse was only slightly undermined by the red rings they’d left around his eyes. “Must have been weird to have freaked you out, Lockwood. I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “I’m not freaked out!” Lockwood crossed his arms. “Do I look freaked out to you, George?”

  “A triple helping of yes. I’m with Kipps on this one.” George blinked and shook his head in unfeigned wonder. “This is a night of firsts.”

  “Well, maybe Lucy and I are right to be a little unsettled,” Lockwood said after a grouchy pause. “Because its raising of the dead is only one of several strange things about this ghost. The kid was correct in everything he said. The Shadow does trail some kind of smoke, and there do seem to be weird flames licking around its form. It moves oddly, too.” He sighed. “You ever read about anything like this, Kipps?”

  “Never. It’s not in any of the histories. Could be something about it in the Black Library at Fittes House. There’s all sorts of stuff there….” Kipps stretched back in his chair. “I must say I’m surprised that the Rotwell Institute hasn’t caught on to this Shadow. They’re missing a trick here.”