Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

smoke from the well wasn’t pooling in the room; instead it flowed across the ceiling in a soft grey current, and was being sucked out between the stones of the damaged wall.
    ‘There’s a pressure difference,’ Lockwood shouted. ‘It’s being drawn out into a bigger space. That’ll be the cellar. The cellar must be through that wall. The explosion’s done half our job already. We just need to make a bigger hole. Come on!’
    His energy stirred us into action. Shaking off our stiffness and fatigue, George and I set to with knife and crowbar, shifting the loosest blocks, prising the others free. Alongside us, Lockwood worked at speed, heaving on the crowbar and, where necessary, wrenching at the stones with his bare hands. His eyes glittered; his mouth was a taut white line.
    ‘We’ve been dealing with two separate problems tonight,’ he said, hacking at the mortar. ‘They seem connected, but really they’re quite different. The first, the haunting of Combe Carey Hall, is over. With the monks gone, the other apparitions can be steadily mopped up. The danger’s finishedhere. The second issue’ – he tossed his bar aside, and helped George pull a medium-sized stone free of the wall – ‘concerns our friend Mr John William Fairfax, and that story is not yet done.’
    The stone fell, broke into segments. I pushed the debris clear. Lockwood and George returned to attacking the weakest area halfway up the wall.
    ‘So,’ I said. ‘Fairfax. What about him?’
    ‘It’s been obvious from the first that something’s seriously wrong with all this,’ Lockwood said. ‘His invitation to come here was more than a trifle odd. True, the terms were amazingly generous, but that just made it odder still. Why did he choose to come to us, when he could have had Fittes or Rotwell, or any of a dozen other agencies? Our record recently has been . . . patchy, but he claimed to have been impressed by it.’
    ‘He said he’d been an outsider too,’ I said, tugging on a lump of rock. ‘He said he liked our passion and – watch your feet! Oh, sorry, George – our independence of mind.’
    Lockwood’s lip curled. ‘Yes, that’s what he said , didn’t he? A rather thin claim, particularly when you read about his youth and discover he inherited all his wealth from his father. But aside from choosing us, there were three other questions that bothered me. One. Why now? He’d owned the Hall for years, so why was he suddenly so desperate to resolve its haunting? Two. Why the blazing hurry? He gave us aridiculous two days to prepare! And three. Why on earth were we forbidden to bring flares?’
    ‘Yeah, I couldn’t get over that last one,’ George said. ‘Nobody in their right mind would take on an A-grade Visitor without sufficient flares.’
    ‘We would,’ Lockwood said. ‘And Fairfax knew it. He knew we were desperate for the cash. And he was just as desperate for us to come, so much so that he offered to pay off our sixty-thousand-pound debt if we simply turned up at the door. To me that was either insanely generous, or linked to an ulterior motive, and I wanted to find out which. So my first act, the next day, was to pay a quick visit to the village of Combe Carey.’
    ‘We’ve broken through!’ George said. He’d wrestled another stone free: a small gap now showed in the centre of the fractured wall. Beyond was darkness and empty space.
    Lockwood nodded. ‘Good. Let’s rest for a minute. What’s the time, Lucy?’
    ‘Three a.m.’
    ‘The night’s passing. We’ve got to be away from here by dawn. OK, so I went to the village. I pretended to be a travelling salesman, going from door to door.’
    ‘Selling what?’ George demanded.
    ‘Your comic collection, George. Oh, don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of any. I set the price too high. But it gave me an excuse to get talking to the locals.’
    ‘And how did you get on?’ I said.
    Lockwood made a rueful face. ‘As it happens, my rustic accent didn’t go down too well. No one could understand me, and three burly carters took grave offence and chased me round the millpond. But once I’d modified my accent, all went smoothly, and I heard a few rumours about Fairfax. I learned he often came to the Hall with one of his company’s trucks. This would be full of new iron products; and local men were paid to help carry this kit inside. Most of it was ordinary domestic stuff – door-guards and window-hangings, you know – but there were things that