Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

lit the lights and poured fresh water in the channel that ran beneath the porch. All would then be ready for when our mother bustled in, just as night was falling.
    My mother (think large, pink and harassed) washed laundry at the town’s two small hotels. What active maternal affection she possessed had largely been eroded by work and weariness, and she had little energy to spare for her brood of girls, of whom I was the seventh and the last. By day she was mostly out; after dark, she sat slumped in a haze of lavender smoke, silently watching TV. She seldom paid me any attention whatsoever, and for the most part left me to the care of my elder sisters. My only real point of interest to her lay in how I might eventually pay my way.
    Everyone knew, you see, that there was Talent running in my family. My mother had seen ghosts in her youth, while two of my sisters had sufficient Sight to get jobs with the night watch in the city of Newcastle, thirty miles away. None of them, however, had actually been agency material. From the first it was obvious that I was different. I hadunusual sensitivity to matters relating to the Problem.
    Once, I guess when I was six, I was playing in the water meadows with my favourite sister, Mary, who was the closest to me in age. We lost her football among the rushes and hunted for it a long time. When finally we found it, wedged deep in the roots and sticky amber mud, the light was almost gone. So we were still trailing back along the path beside the river when the bell sounded across the fields.
    Mary and I looked at each other. Since infancy, we had been warned what might happen to us if we stayed out after dark. Mary began to cry.
    But I was a plucky little girl, small and dark and dauntless. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s early yet, so they’re still as weak as babes. If there are any about round here, which I doubt.’
    ‘It’s not just that,’ my sister said. ‘It’s Mam. She’ll beat me sore.’
    ‘Well, she’ll beat me too.’
    ‘I’m older than you. She’ll beat me awful sore. You’ll be all right, Lucy.’
    Privately I doubted this. Our mother washed sheets nine hours a day, mostly by hand, and had forearms as vast as pig’s thighs. One smack from her and your bottom vibrated for a week. We hurried on in gloomy silence.
    All around were the reeds and the mud and the deepening greyness of dusk. Up ahead, the town lights, twinkling onthe spur of the hill, were an admonishment and a beacon to us. Our spirits rose; we could see the grass steps leading up to the road.
    ‘That Mam calling?’ I said suddenly.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Is that her calling us?’
    Mary listened. ‘I don’t hear anything. Anyway, our house is miles off yet.’
    Which was true enough. Besides, it didn’t seem to me that the faint, thin voice I heard was coming from the town.
    I looked off and away across the flats, towards where the river, invisible, flowed dark and deep between the hills. Hard to be sure, but I thought I saw a figure standing far out among the reeds there, a dark notch, crooked as a scarecrow. As I watched, it began to move – not very fast, but also not too slow – taking a line that would likely intersect our path ahead of us.
    I found I didn’t much care to meet that person, whoever it might be. I gave my sister a playful nudge. ‘Race you this last bit,’ I said. ‘Come on! I’m getting cold.’
    So we ran along the track, and every few yards I jumped up to take a look and saw that unknown someone making the greatest endeavours to reach us, loping and limping through the reed-stalks. But the long and short of it was, we went faster and got to the steps in safety. And when I looked back down from the railings, the water meadows were amonochrome grey vastness, with nothing in them as far as the river bends, and no voice calling us among the reeds.
    Later, once my bottom had stopped tingling, I told my mother about the figure, and she told me about a local woman who had killed herself for love there, back when Mam was a girl. Penny Nolan was her name. She’d waded out into the reeds, lain down in the stream and drowned herself. As you’d expect, she’d become a Type Two, a needy one, and caused trouble from time to time to people coming back late from the valley. Over the years Agent Jacobs had wasted a lot of iron out there, looking for the Source, but he never found it, so presumably Penny Nolan walks there still. In the end they rerouted the path, and let