Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

to the village of Combe Carey is a fairly simple business. All it takes is a quick taxi up the road to Marylebone Station, a leisurely wait at platform six, and finally a gentle forty-minute train ride – through rolling, grey-brown suburbs, then the wintry Berkshire fields – before you arrive below the mossy flanks of St Wilfred’s Church in old Combe Carey station. An hour and a half’s journey, tops. Easy, quick, straightforward, and as pleasant as a trip can be.
    Yeah, right. That’s the theory. But it isn’t so much fun when you’re helping carry six super-massive duffel bags weighed down with metal, plus a rapier bag with four old ones stuffed inside as spares, and you have a brand-newrapier at your belt getting in your way. It also doesn’t help if your leader and his deputy both conveniently mislay their wallets, so it’s you who have to fork out for the train tickets, and pay supplements for the heavy luggage. Or that you spend so much time haggling you end up missing the first train. Yes, all that really improves your mood.
    Then there’s the small matter of heading towards one of the most haunted houses in England, and hoping you aren’t going to die.
    This last factor wasn’t improved en route by George giving us a full briefing on the things he’d discovered over the previous two days. He had a ring-binder filled with neatly written notes and, as the train pootled cheerily past the spires and ghost-lamps of villages hidden in the wooded folds of gentle hills, he regaled us with nasty details from them.
    ‘Basically, it seems what Fairfax told us was right,’ he said. ‘The Hall’s had a bad rep for centuries. You remember it started off as a priory? I found a medieval document about that. It was built by an outfit known as the Heretic Monks of St John. Apparently they “turned awaye from the laweful worshippe of God to the adoration of darke things”, whatever that means. Before long a group of barons got wind of this and burned the place down. They took over the priory’s land and divided it amongst themselves.’
    ‘Possibly a set-up?’ I said. ‘They framed the monks in order to nick the land?’
    George nodded. ‘Maybe. Since then it’s been owned by a succession of rich families – the Careys, the Fitz-Percys, the Throckmortons – all of whom benefited from the wealth of the estate. But the Hall itself is nothing but trouble. I couldn’t find too many details, but one owner abandoned it in the fifteenth century because of a “malign presence”. It’s almost burned down two or three times, and – get this – in 1666 an outbreak of plague killed off its inhabitants. Seems a guest turned up at the door and found everyone inside lying dead, except for one little baby, left crying in a cradle in a bedroom.’
    Lockwood whistled. ‘Grisly. That could be your cluster of Visitors, right there.’
    ‘Did they save the baby?’ I said.
    George consulted his notes. ‘Yeah. He was adopted by a cousin and became a school teacher. Which is a tough break, but he was lucky to get out. Anyway, the bad vibes in that house continue right up until this century. There’ve been a succession of accidents, and the last owner before Fairfax – a distant relative – shot himself.’
    ‘No shortage of potential Visitors for us, then,’ Lockwood mused. ‘Any mention of this Screaming Staircase, or the dreaded Red Room?’
    ‘One fragment, from Corbett’s Berkshire Legends .’ George turned a page. ‘It claims two children from Combe Carey were found unconscious at the bottom of the “old steps” inthe Hall. One died right away, but the other recovered sufficiently to report being beset by a “foul and devilish ululation, a cruel and unholy outcry”.’ He snapped the folder shut. ‘Then she died too.’
    ‘What’s a ululation?’ I said.
    ‘That would be the screaming.’ Lockwood stared out at the passing landscape. ‘Stories, stories . . . What we badly need is facts .’
    George adjusted his glasses in a complacent manner. ‘Aha. Maybe I can help you there too.’ From inside the folder he brought out two pieces of paper, which he unfolded and set on the little table beneath the window of our compartment. The first was a hand-drawn floor-plan of a large building, showing two extensive levels, each with walls, windows and stairs carefully rendered in ink. Here and there were annotations, written in blue: Main Lobby, Library, Duke’s Chamber, Long Gallery . . . At the