The Screaming Staircase

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Look at all this…” Kipps said.

  George whistled. “It’s like my bedroom.”

  Lockwood peered at a bulbous glass beaker in which a violet plasm boiled and bubbled above a flame. “Can you tell what they’re doing here?”

  “Ectoplasmic research, mainly,” George said. “They’re testing how it responds to stuff. To heat, to cold…This one’s suspended in a vacuum, look. That’s interesting: see how diffuse the plasm’s become….And they’re trying to galvanize this spirit with a succession of electric shocks.” He shook his head. “I could tell them that technique doesn’t work. Tried that on our skull a year or more back. Didn’t alter its plasm at all. Just made it grumpy.”

  I’d been listening out for the skull when I entered the room, but without success. Now I was staring at a rushing centrifuge, which whirled its imprisoned ghost on an endless loop. “It’s not right,” I said. “It’s not…healthy.”

  George looked at me. “I’ve been doing this sort of stuff for years.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “It’s all part of trying to understand the Problem, Luce,” Lockwood said. “Finding out what makes ghosts tick. It’s a bit extreme, but there’s nothing exactly wrong here.”

  I didn’t answer. Lockwood had no love for ghosts; neither he nor George ever spared much sympathy for them. Me? It wasn’t quite that simple. I gazed at the busy work tables, with their pads and pens, their thermometers and stacked tubes. For some odd reason I remembered the vision I’d had of Emma Marchment’s seventeenth-century workroom, filled with the pots and potions she’d used to help her in her witchcraft. This was more high-tech, but otherwise it didn’t seem all that different.

  “They’re certainly hard at work in here,” Lockwood said. “Everything mid-experiment. Which raises the question: Where are they?”

  Kipps grunted. “Must be something better going on next door.”

  This was obviously true, and the laboratory, with all its cruel marvels, did not detain us long. We moved toward the partition at the far side of the shed. As we did so, George gave a cry. He swooped to the nearest table. “Yes! Yes! That’s what I wanted to find!”

  Holly stared at the container beside him. “A moldy pelvis?”

  “No, you twit—these cigarette butts!” He picked up a jar that someone had been using as an ashtray, and gave it a quick sniff. “Yes, unmistakable—burned toast, a caramel tang! These are Persian Lights! The cigs we found at Aickmere’s. No doubt now. We’re dealing with our friends from Chelsea, for sure.”

  “You think that’s good,” Kipps said in a low voice, “you might want to take a look in here.”

  I could now see that the partition wall split the building neatly down the middle; the open arch led into a chamber that was almost the mirror image of the first, except with a tubelike passageway leading to another part of the complex.

  The room had three long tables in its center. These, in contrast to the madly swirling glows of the tortured ghosts behind us, gleamed dully with more consistent light. They were stacked with boxes and neat piles of objects, laid out in ordered rows. There were canisters and cylinders and firearms. And other things, stranger still.

  “Weapons room,” Lockwood breathed. “Check out these flares! Ever seen any that big, Kipps?”

  Kipps had pushed up his goggles and was gazing around the room in awe. “We used some pretty hefty ones in the East End once. These are bigger, though.”

  George whistled. “I’ll say. They’d do some damage if you chucked them. They’re as big as coconuts! Take the roof off a place, they would.”

  We walked along the aisles, opening boxes, peering into sacks. Professional fascination had overtaken us. This was ghost-hunting equipment designed for agents, but equipment we had never seen.

  “Got guns here that fire capsules of iron and salt,” Lockwood said. “They would have come in handy in Ealing….But what’s this?”

  He stood before a metal rack, on which was sat a large weapon. It had a black stock, a long barrel, and, just in front of the trigger, a silver-glass orb strapped to the magazine with iron bands. You could see tiny bones lying in the orb. It glowed faintly.

  “It’s basically a traditional shotgun,” Lockwood said, “but it’s been adapted. I may be wrong, but I think that if you fire it, a ghost flies out….” He shook his head. “It’s weird. I’m not sure DEPRAC would approve of it.”

  “They wouldn’t,” I said in a small voice. I was staring at a tray of neat little wooden cylinders—batons, really—each with a glass bulb on the end. “They wouldn’t approve of any of this.” I picked up one of the batons and held it up to them. Supernatural light swirled in the bulb at the end. “Recognize these, anybody?”

  No one spoke. They stared at the baton, openmouthed.

  I took that as a yes.

  The previous autumn, at a carnival in central London, two armed men had attacked a float on which Penelope Fittes and Steve Rotwell were riding. Guns had been used in an attempt on Ms. Fittes’s life, but the attack had begun with a bombardment by ghost-bombs just like these. When broken, Specters had emerged from them, threatening many lives. Where the ghost-bombs had come from was unknown.

  Until now.

  “Well…that’s interesting,” Lockwood said.

  “But—but surely,” Holly said, “Mr. Rotwell can’t be responsible. The assassins tried to kill him, too….”

  “Did they?” I said. “I don’t remember them turning their guns on him. It was Penelope Fittes they actually shot at—”

  “No! What are you saying? He fought against them! He killed one of the attackers!”

  “Yes, that was good of him,” Lockwood said quietly. “He came out of it quite the hero, didn’t he? Even though we saved Ms. Fittes’s life, and his primary purpose failed. It was always going to be a win-win for him.”

  “I knew the Rotwell organization hated Fittes,” Kipps said, “but I never thought they’d go that far.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Holly said. She had tears in her eyes. “No, I can’t. I worked for him.”

  Kipps frowned. “We’ve seen enough. We ought to get out of here. Go and find a phone, call DEPRAC, get Barnes over now.”

  “Not yet,” Lockwood said.

  “Are you insane? This is critical evidence, Lockwood.”

  “What would DEPRAC do? They wouldn’t just barge into a Rotwell site, would they? Even if they believed us, which is a stretch, they’d delay things by getting search warrants, talking with lawyers—by the time anyone actually set foot in here, all this would be gone.”

  Kipps slapped the work table in frustration. “So what do you suggest? Keep strolling around in here until Rotwell finds us and stuffs one of these ghost-bombs up our nose?”

  “The only place I want to stroll,” Lockwood said, “is that central building. We’ve got to see the main event. That’s where it is—through there.” Eyes shining, he jerked his thumb toward the opening in the sidewall. You could see the ribbed interior of one of the makeshift canvas passageways stretching away, lit by dim lighting.

  “Yeah, it’s there,” Kipps said, “and so are all the Rotwell crew. It’s suicide to try it. We’ve done what we can.” He looked around at us. “Am I really the only one who thinks so?”

  No one answered. We were loyal enough to Lockwood not to want to stand against him. Even so, the logic of Kipps’s argument couldn’t be denied.

  “Let me make it even easier.” Kipps plucked one of the batons from the pile. “We take one of these babies with us. We keep it as proof of what we’ve seen. We hold it under Barnes’s mustache so even he can’t deny the evidence of his eyes. That’ll get the DEPRAC vans rolling out of London fast enough, I can tell you.”

  Lockwood shook his head. “No. We can’t miss this opportunity. The stakes are too high. These batons are nothing compared to what’s down that passage. You know it, and I know it. And we’re wasting time—”

  “What I know,” Kipps interru
pted, “is that you’re putting your own curiosity over the safety of your team! Risk your own skin if you must, but—Holly’s? Lucy’s? Do you want any other deaths connected to your name?”

  It seemed for a moment that Kipps had gone too far. Beneath the makeup, Lockwood’s face was swept clean of expression. He took a step in Kipps’s direction; then the emotional safety-switch went off inside him and he regained control.

  “No, you’re quite right,” Lockwood said softly. “I won’t deny it. I’ve not been thinking straight.” He took a breath. “Okay, this is what we’ll do. The rest of you are going to leave. Take the baton, go to DEPRAC, do what Kipps says. He’s right; we’ve got to make sure word gets out. Me, I’m going to have a look in that central building. Shut up, George—don’t argue. If they catch me, I’ll provide enough of a distraction to ensure you get away. That’s all. Get going now.”

  It would have been a significant test of his leadership, that moment, with Holly, George, and me all opening our mouths to challenge his decision. But as we did so, we heard a distant clang, and a burst of psychic energy wafted down the passage at our backs, strong enough to make the hairs rise on my arms. And with it came voices, footsteps hurrying toward us.

  There’s nothing like imminent disaster for putting an end to bickering. We scattered. Lockwood ran low, rolled across an aisle, came to a halt in a crouch at the far end of a table. Kipps and Holly vanished; George skidded past me in the opposite direction. I threw myself under the nearest table, wriggled between boxes, and kept on crawling as two sets of boots entered the room and went by. I looked back. Between the metal table legs I saw a man and a woman, both middle-aged, both with thick spectacles pushed up on their heads. They wore white lab coats, emblazoned with the rearing lion.

  “How long now?” the woman said as they walked up the aisle.

  “Ten minutes at the most. He’s been away twenty. It’s never more than half an hour.”

  “Better do this quick and get back, then.”

  Their footsteps continued to the partition door; they went through into the lab.

  Something made me turn. There was Lockwood at the end of the table. He was crouching opposite me. His hair was tousled, his face smudged with makeup, but his eyes and smile were very bright. He met my gaze, waved a swift good-bye.

  Then he was away, keeping low, ducking through the arch and up the passage.

  I looked back into the room and caught sight of Holly, squeezed flat under the farthest table. Kipps was nearby, sandwiched between two racks of salt-spray guns. And, in the far corner, it was either the world’s biggest salt-bomb or George’s bottom poking out from behind a crate of magnesium flares. As I watched, his spectacled face rose up into view and blinked across at me.

  They’d be all right.

  You know what I’m about to say. It was another of those occasions. Those big/not thought-through/spur-of-the-moment/more-intuition-than-rational-analysis occasions.

  The occasions that make us who we are.

  I too got up and ran out of the room and into the passage.

  The wind had picked up outside; the canvas walls were cracking and fluttering against the metal ribs of the tube. Weak bulbs hung from the roof. The passage was one long curve, smelling of salt and iron. It led me swiftly to the center of the site.

  At its end was a swinging door, made of solid iron. A psychic barrier, like the one to Jessica’s room at Portland Row. Lockwood was crouching there, rapier gleaming at his belt, clearly about to peep through. I fell into place beside him.

  He started, cursed, rewarded me with a scowl. “What do you think you’re doing? I told you to go.”

  “You forget,” I said. “I’m not part of Lockwood and Co. I don’t have to take your orders, do I? Anyway, you operate in a certain way, and so do I. You should know that by now.” I flashed him a Carlyle grin.

  “Oh, God. Yes, I suppose I should.” He shrugged, then smiled; his excitement was too great to be sidelined any longer. He turned his attention to the door. “Well, I can’t see what’s in here, so we’re going to have to chance it. Get your rapier ready.”

  But luck was with us, because when we pushed the door open a crack, gasping at the sudden psychic force, we saw no supernatural terrors or Rotwell agents; just the backs of many wooden crates, open, empty, stacked in piles. The floor was heaped with salt and iron filings, spilling out of the crates. Above soared a great high roof, glowing with pale light.

  We’d arrived. The buzzing in my head that had bothered me since first stepping out of the inn that evening now reached its zenith. The din made me woozy; for a second I had to steady myself against the wall. Then Lockwood eased the door wider. Stepping through, we worked our way swiftly through the maze of crates until we came to the final stacks.

  There was a narrow cleft between them. Beyond was brightness, movement, an enormous space.

  We stood behind those crates, and looked.

  “Oh my,” was all I said.

  From somewhere, Lockwood had produced the pair of black sunglasses that he only used for the brightest death-glows, the fiercest supernatural light. He flicked the frames open, one-two, in a hard, sharp action, like the double drawing of a knife blade. He was exultant; the remorseless drive and determination that Kipps had criticized, that Rotwell had understood, that had swept me up since I first met him, shone fulfilled in Lockwood’s face that moment. It had led him to this.

  “There it is,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been after, all along.”

  Laughing softly, he put the glasses on.

  How to describe what we saw in that cavernous warehouse at the heart of the institute? It’s hard, because even at the time the exact contents—what was and wasn’t there—were oddly hard to fathom. For a start, the space was mostly empty; except for our end, where all the crates had been shoved, there was very little in it at all. Metal walls towered over us; soft lamps clung to the soaring roof. It was like being in the skeleton of a great church, looking down the abandoned center aisle. A passage similar to the one we’d come through opened off along the right-hand wall. At the far end, dimly, I saw the double doors we’d spotted from outside, open to the night. I say dimly, for despite the place’s emptiness, something in the very center made them difficult to see.

  Where we stood, the ground had been lined with a raised platform of wooden boards, but most of the building had no floor, just bare black earth. The grass that had grown there had long since died; the surface was hard soil, scattered with bones. This place had been the heart of the ancient battle; that was why it had been chosen. It gave the institute a head start with what they planned to do.

  An immense circle of iron chains had been placed in the middle of the earth floor. It was wider than any circle I’d ever seen, maybe thirteen feet in diameter. And the chains themselves were vast; they were like the ones you saw at the London docks mooring ships to the harbor posts. They must have weighed a ton.

  The reason for all this iron was instantly apparent. Inside the circle were Visitors.

  Many of them.

  Perhaps because of the restrictive power of the chains, they manifested only as pale gray shapes, superimposed upon each other and moving from side to side, like schools of fish in an undersized tank. Faint as they were, I could tell they weren’t Shades or Lurkers or other feeble Type Ones. These were forceful spirits. It was their collective energies that I’d felt all the way back in Aldbury Castle.

  Their Sources had been piled up inside the circle. You could just see them, lying on the ground below the restless, drifting forms. I knew at once that these were the objects looted from the furnaces, taken from the relic-men, purchased and stolen and gathered across London. They had been removed from their protective jars and cases and placed inside the chains, to create a single Source of monstrous power.

  The skull had to be somewhere in there, but I couldn’t spot it. Everything inside the circle was curiously hazy, as if light lost traction the moment it crossed the chains.
The effect was almost like a thick column of mist blocking the center of the hangar, but that was too definite. It was more like a dullness of vision. You felt like you wanted to rub your eyes every time you looked at it. Mainly you just wanted to look away.

  “What have those idiots done?” I murmured. “What’s it all for?”

  Lockwood nudged my arm. “Look at the chain, Luce. It’s all about the iron chain.”

  Not far from the end of our wooden platform, a metal post had been hammered into the earth. Attached to it, at about (I guessed) the height of my shoulder, was a length of medium-weight iron chain. This chain stretched away from the post, maintaining the same height, passed across the boundary of the iron circle, and went between the piles of Sources. What happened to it after that was curiously hard to see, owing to the peculiar light in the center of the room. It must have been connected to something, but what that was, or where it was, I couldn’t tell. The iron of this chain kept the Visitors in the circle at bay; the air around it, hazy as it was, was free of them.

  The chain must have been of great significance, because the men and women of the Rotwell Institute who were present—I counted twelve in total—all stood near the metal post. Some had clipboards, and were dressed like the man and woman who had passed us in the weapons room; others wore thicker suits of protective gear, with plastic hats and oversized gloves. Among them was bland-faced Mr. Johnson (his clipboard much in evidence) fussing around, checking their data, looking repeatedly at a stopwatch in his hand. There, too, was Steve Rotwell, decked out like the rest with hat and coat, but recognizable by his bulk, his glittering rapier, and his shiny shoes. He stood apart, drinking from a silver flask.