Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

‘And I’m not going to lose any sleep over deceiving him. He’s laid out the rules so far. This is where we start to adjust them in our favour.’
    ‘I’m not arguing, Lockwood,’ George said. ‘This is great work. But you know that if we set fire to so much as the leg of a Queen Anne chair, we won’t be getting the rest of our money. In fact Fairfax will probably sue us, like the Hopes did, so we’ll be right back where we started.’
    ‘Oh, he’d sue us, all right,’ Lockwood agreed. ‘But who cares? This Greek Fire might well save our lives. Remember what happened to the last group of agents who spent the night here? No one’s finding us stone-dead on the floor. Which brings me to my last little purchase yesterday . . .’
    He tapped the upturned packet. Out rolled a seventh cylinder, slightly larger than the rest. Like the others, it had the Sunrise Corporation’s rising sun logo stamped on its side, but the paper wrapper was dark red instead of white. It had a long fuse at one end.
    ‘New type of flare,’ Lockwood said, fixing it beside the other canisters on his belt. ‘The guy at Satchell’s said Fittes and Rotwell agents have begun using them on cluster cases – Blitz victims, plague sites and so on. It sends out a broad blast-wave of silver, iron and magnesium. We’ll have to be well away when it goes up, because it’s industrial strength, apparently. I hope so; it cost enough. Now – where can I hidethis rubbish?’ He crumpled up the wet packet, and stuffed it inside the opening of Fairfax’s Han vase. ‘Good,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s get to work.’
    We chose the library as our base of operations. It was close both to the main exit and to the door connecting to the safer wing, and its profusion of iron chairs would likely dampen Visitor activity. We dragged our bags inside and set up an electric lantern on one table. Lockwood turned it down low.
    ‘Well, we’ve had a quick look round already,’ he said. ‘Any thoughts?’
    ‘The whole place is heaving with them,’ I said.
    George nodded. ‘Particularly?’
    ‘The corridor near the Red Room?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Did you hear anything, Lucy?’
    ‘In that corridor? A lot of whispering. It was too quiet to make out any of the words, but the voices were . . . wicked, I think. Everywhere else, just silence. But it’s a silence that I know is going to break as the night goes on.’ I gave an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry, that doesn’t make much sense, does it?’
    Lockwood nodded. ‘Actually, it does. It’s just the same with me. I can sense death-glows everywhere , but I can’t quite see them yet. What about you, George?’
    ‘I’m not as tuned in as you two,’ he said, ‘but one thingI have noticed.’ He unclipped his thermometer and held the reading towards us. ‘When we were in the library, with Fairfax, the temperature was sixteen degrees. It’s down to thirteen now. That’s dropping fast.’
    ‘It’ll go a lot lower yet,’ Lockwood said. ‘All right, we’ll be systematic. We’ll map temperatures and record sensations. Ground floor first, including the staircase – then the cellars. Then we’ll take a break. After that: the other floors. The night’s long, and it’s a big house. We stick together at all times. No one wanders off alone. For any reason. If you need to take a leak, we all go. Simple as that.’
    ‘No more tea for me, then,’ I said.
    I was right. The place was heaving with them. And it wasn’t long before the ghosts began to show themselves.
    Thanks to the iron furniture, the library – where we started – had relatively few paranormal traces. But even here, with the lantern briefly switched off and us standing in darkness, we started to notice little flecks and threads of light darting across our vision. They were too faint and fleeting to build into a true manifestation, but they were plasmic traces all the same. Following the traditional Fittes technique, George took temperature readings in all four corners and in the centre of the room. He noted them carefully on his floor-plan. I stood guard with the rapier while he did so; Lockwood and I then used our Talents to check sensations.We didn’t pick up much. The silence blanketed my ears. Lockwood reported some faint illuminations that he guessed were ancient death-glows. He seemed more interested in the cheesy theatrical photos on the wall.
    In the lobby, George’s readings gave an average of eleven degrees. The flecks of