Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

either side. Shadow fingers swooped and plunged; the stairs went on for ever; and still the screams tore into our skulls like stakes of red-hot iron, so that all I wanted was for the terrible noise to cease—
    At which we fell out at the bottom of the steps into a small square room.
    We collapsed upon the floor. Our candles fell from our fingers, went skidding along the stones. Our heads spun; wecould not get up, thanks to the noise and the sickening giddiness of the descent. The screaming had not stopped. And now the racing shadows spilled out from the stairs along the margins of the room, their silhouettes swooping faintly across the walls as they danced and capered in a hellish frenzy. Shadowy ropes swayed broken on their wrists.
    ‘The monks,’ I gasped. ‘It’s the monks! The ones they killed here.’
    Seven monks, the story said. Seven monks, for crimes of blasphemy, had been thrown into a well.
    I raised my head, looked across the tilting floor. There, lit by horizontal candlelight: a broad, round, stone-lined hole of fathomless blackness, set into the centre of the floor. And close beside it . . .
    Between us and the well a small and shrunken figure lay: a huddled heap of bones and rag, its outlines softened by successive layers of cobwebs. The neck was twisted at an odd, unnatural angle. One hollow jacketed arm reached out towards the hole as if it wished to drag itself forward and slip down into the dark.
    The Fittes boy had almost made it to the foot of the stairs, then, before the screaming killed him. I guessed he’d tripped and tumbled in his frantic flight, and ended up breaking his neck.
    At least it had been a quick end for him. The sound was driving me mad. I pulled myself to my feet. It was hard to doit; it was hard to move or think. At my side, Lockwood and George did likewise. Blood was trickling from Lockwood’s ear.
    Like a drunken man, he grappled us by the collars, pulled us in close. ‘Find the Source!’ he shouted. ‘It must be here. Somewhere in this room!’
    He shoved us away. George stumbled and, as he did so, drew close to one of the silhouettes upon the wall. At once a translucent hand stretched out of the stonework beside him, long-fingered and bony, with white hairs on the arm and a frayed rope-end dangling from the wrist. It reached for George. Lockwood was faster; he wrenched a salt bomb from his belt and threw it at the stones. Grains ignited, burning green. The arm drew back. On the wall the shadow flexed and undulated furiously like a snake.
    Out across the room we went, Lockwood, George and I, stumbling, flailing, searching to and fro. It wasn’t any good. The room went nowhere. It had no exits, no shelves; there was nothing in it but the walls and the stones and the deep, dark, waiting well.
    A flash of whiteness, an explosion of salt and iron. George had flung a canister of Greek Fire at shadows in the far corner of the room. Mortar fell from the stones; the chamber shook. For a moment the nearest silhouettes flickered, then their dance went on.
    Desperation took us. We were all at it now, mounting alast attack. Iron filings, salt bombs, flares – we threw them at the walls, trying to obliterate the ghostly shadows, trying to silence the dreadful sound. Stones cracked, smoke licked outwards, curtains of cobwebs went up in flames. Burning particles of salt and iron skimmed and spattered across the room in a dozen colours. And still the shapes of the murdered monks kept dancing, still their screams went on.
    No good. A great heaviness suddenly engulfed me. We’d never find the Source, and now our belts and shoulder-straps were empty, our ammunition used up, our energies spent . . . I slowed, came to a dragging standstill. Elsewhere, George had drawn his rapier and was striking blindly all around him, scarcely conscious whether he made contact with the wall or not. Lockwood stood close beside the well itself, brow furrowed, looking about wildly, evidently still hunting a solution.
    Poor Lockwood. There was no solution. Our Talents were useless, our weapons gone.
    My arms dropped; my head hung low. We’d never find the Source. We’d never find it and the noise would never, ever stop.
    Unless . . .
    I looked dully at the well.
    How stupid I’d been. There was a way to make the screaming stop. To go at once from noise to silence, from pain to peace and quiet. And it would be so, so easy to achieve.
    Over by the steps George had dropped his rapier. He’d flopped