Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

I got back, the air in the practice room had chilled. Joe and Esmeralda were swinging gently from their chains.
    ‘Annie Ward?’ I said.
    Nothing – no response, but I felt a tightness against mytemples, a faint force gathering in the room. I stood a little distance from the chains, with a bag of salt in my pocket and a paper in my hand.
    ‘Annie Ward?’ I said again. ‘I know it’s you.’
    A shimmer of silver light inside the circle of iron chain. A faint outline of a girl in two dimensions, folding, bending; now here, now gone.
    ‘Who killed you, Annie?’ I said.
    The outline warped and flickered as before. I listened, heard no voice. The tightness in my head was painful now.
    ‘Was it Hugo Blake?’
    No change – at least not visually . For a fleeting second I thought I picked up the slightest murmur, as if someone were talking quietly in a distant room. I strained hard, listened; my forehead throbbing with the effort . . . No. Gone. If it had ever been there.
    Well, it was too much to hope I’d pick up anything. If interrogating the dead were as simple as that, all the great Talents would have mastered the art. As it was, only Marissa Fittes had ever done it, in her legendary conversations with Type Threes. No, who was I kidding? In a moment I’d get the salt grains out, get this mess cleared up.
    Still, I had one last thing to try.
    I already had George’s photocopy in my hand, held hidden behind my back. Now I brought it round, unfolded it and stepped close to the chains. I flipped the paper so thatthe photographs of Blake faced the circle. There he was twice over – in that main mug-shot, grinning away in black tie, hat and gloves, and ditto in the group pic beside the fountain, standing close by Annie Ward.
    ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Was it him? Was it H—’
    A piercing psychic scream, a howl of grief and fury, knocked me off my feet. Air blasted out across the room, forcing the iron chains outwards into a perfect circle, blowing brick dust from the basement walls. The straw dummies swung up so far they struck the ceiling; I skidded on my back almost to the door, crying out as I did so, for the pressure in my head was so great I thought my skull would split. I looked up, saw the ghost careering back and forth inside the chains, colliding with the boundary, spurts of plasm fizzing off whenever it touched the rim. Its shape was grotesquely distorted, the head long, misshapen, the body spindly, cracked like a broken bone. All semblance of a girl had gone. And still the psychic wail rolled out, so that I was stunned and deafened.
    I’d dropped the paper when I fell, but the salt bomb was still in my pocket. I scrambled into a sitting position and lobbed it hard into the circle.
    Plastic burst, salt scattered; the thrashing, mewling thing vanished. Instantly, the noise in my head snapped off.
    I sat sprawling on the floor, mouth open, eyes blinking, hair in my eyes. Opposite me, the two straw dummiesswung madly back and forth; they swiftly slowed, hung still.
    ‘Ow,’ I said. ‘That hurt .’
    ‘I should just about think it did.’
    Lockwood and George stood in the archway, faces blank with astonishment, staring down at me.
    ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Stop talking, George! Wait! I’ll show you!’
    Two minutes had passed, and I hadn’t got a word in edgeways. OK, I’d been busy: my first job, once my head had stopped ringing, had been to retrieve the locket from the circle – which was easier said than done, since it was covered in frozen salt flakes that almost blistered my skin. Then I had to get it back in the case – again not easy, when you’ve got George Cubbins shouting in your ear. But I needed to speak, and do it fast. Lockwood hadn’t said a thing to me. There were spots of colour on his cheeks, and his mouth was tight and hard.
    ‘Look,’ I said, picking up the paper from the floor. ‘I did what we should have done originally. I showed Annie Ward these pictures. What are they of? Hugo Blake. What did she do? She went ballistic. I’ve never heard such a scream.’
    ‘You deliberately let her free?’ Lockwood said. ‘That was a stupid thing to do.’
    When I looked at his face, my heart quailed. ‘Not free,’ I said desperately. ‘Just . . . freer. And it got results, which nothing else has done so far.’
    George snorted. ‘What results? Did she actually speak with you? No. Did she sign a legal document that would stand up in court? No.’
    ‘The reaction was clear,