Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

really was too cold.
    And not the ordinary dank middle-of-November kind, either. It was the sort of cold that causes your breath to plume above you as you sleep. It was the sort that causes little crystal webs of ice to grow on the inside of your window-panes. It was a spreading, numbing, lung-scouring chill, and it was very well known to me.
    I opened my eyes wide .
    Darkness. I saw the faintest outline of the gable window and, through it, the orange-tinted London night. I listened – heardonly the blood pounding in my ears. My heart beat against my chest so hard I guessed the quilt above was jumping in response. All my muscles tensed; I’d become super-aware, feeling every inch of contact on my skin – the brush of my cotton nightie, the warm, smooth pliancy of the sheet, the press of the plasters on my wounds. The hand that lay on the pillow twitched involuntarily; sweat broke out on my palm.
    I’d seen nothing, heard nothing, but I knew .
    I was not alone in the room.
    A small part of my mind screamed at me to move. Throw off the heavy duvet, get to my feet. What I’d do then I didn’t know – but anything was better than just lying there, helpless, clenching my panic tight between my teeth.
    Just get up. Throw open the door. Run downstairs . . . Do something!
    I lay quite still.
    A trickle of cold memory told me that making for the door might not be wise. Because I’d seen . . . What had I seen?
    I waited. Waited for the light.
    Sometimes three minutes takes a long, long time.
    Down by the corner store, in the ghost-lamp’s hidden circuitry, the electronic switch clicked on. Behind the great round lenses, magnesium bulbs ignited, bathing the street in cool white light. High up at my attic window, the glow returned.
    My eyes flicked in the direction of the door.
    Yes. There. The chair and heap of clothes. They formed a black and shapeless blot – but it was higher than usual, far higher than it should have been. If I’d taken all the clothes I owned in the world and piled them there with my skirts and jumpers at the bottom and my socks teetering at the top, they wouldn’t have been anything like as tall, or thin, as the shape that stood just visible in the dark place by the door.
    It didn’t move. It didn’t have to. I stared at it for thirty seconds, lying frozen in the bed. And I did feel frozen too. The ghost-lock had stolen up on me so subtly, so stealthily, that I’d been entirely unaware of it till now.
    The light from the street went out.
    I bit my lip, ignited my concentration, drove the feeling of helplessness from my mind. I wrenched my muscles into action, threw my bedclothes off me. I hurled myself sideways, rolled off, landed on the floor.
    I lay quite still.
    All my muscles throbbed with pain; the violent action hadn’t done my stitches any good. But I’d put the bed between me and the door, and the thing that stood beside it, which was good. It was all that counted now.
    I was pressed low against the carpet, head resting on my hands. Ice-cold air bit the exposed skin of my feet and legs. The carpet was covered with a faint luminosity, a thin, white,swirling haze: ghost-fog, an occasional side-product of a manifestation.
    I closed my eyes, tried to calm down, open my ears and listen .
    But what’s easy when you’re fully clothed and kitted out, and have a gleaming rapier at your side, isn’t so simple when you’re in your pink-and-yellow nightie, sprawling on the floor. What’s fine when entering a haunted house on agency business doesn’t work so well when you’re in your very own bedroom, and have just seen something dead standing a metre or two away. So I picked up no supernatural sound at all. What I got were life’s essentials – my beating heart, the pumping of my lungs.
    How the hell did it get in? There was iron on the window. How could it get so high?
    Calm down! Think . Did I have any weapons in my room – anything I could use?
    No. My work-belt was on the kitchen table, two full floors below. Two floors! It might as well have been in China. As might my rapier, lost back at Sheen Road, burned and melted in the fire. All our spares were in the basement, and that was three floors down! I was completely defenceless. There was probably plenty of kit scattered nearer in the house, but that was useless too, because the thing was hovering by the door.
    Or was it? Air shifted. My skin crawled.
    Lying on my stomach as I was, I couldn’t raise my head too far, not without