Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

plasm were noticeably stronger now, shooting around us like fireflies in the dark. Here too came the first glimpse of green-white ghost-fog, a haze so subtle that trying to focus on it hurt your eyes. It clung close to the floor and built slowly in the margins of the room.
    And now the other phenomena began to gather pace. When I concentrated, I began to hear a low-lying crackling sound, like radio static, at the far edge of perception. It died and swelled repeatedly, forever threatening to cohere into meaningful noise, but never quite doing so. For some reason its obscurity disturbed me. I did my best to shut it out.
    Meanwhile Lockwood had detected three death-glows in the lobby, each one disconcertingly bright.
    ‘Recent, you think?’ I said.
    He took off his sunglasses and clipped them to his coat. ‘Or a record of an old but horribly traumatic event. Impossible to say.’
    The great staircase itself provided surprisingly low-key readings. Its temperature (George made measurements on several steps, then took the average) was no different from the lobby. I detected no variation in the underlying soundsthere, and certainly no screaming. When (rather tentatively) I touched its stonework and sought psychic impressions, I got nothing except a sensation of strong unease, which – speaking frankly – I was already feeling anyway.
    In the Long Gallery the far wall was lost in shadows and the air was chill. The roaring fire in the grate had shrunk down to a single palsied flame; it shook and quivered, but never quite went out. George consulted the thermometer again. ‘Eight degrees,’ he said, ‘and falling.’
    ‘I’m starting to detect malaise,’ I said. ‘Anyone else pick that up?’
    They nodded. Yes, it was starting. That old familiar drooping of the spirits, that leaden weight pressing cruelly on your heart, so that all you wanted to do was curl up in a ball and close your eyes . . .
    We drew close, hands on rapiers, and walked together down the room.
    The feelings of despair grew stronger as we proceeded, past the tea table and the fireplace, towards the faded tapestry at the far end of the gallery. The temperature dropped fast. Ghost-fog drifted at our ankles and lapped against the sofas. And now, when we looked back, the first true apparitions came into view, dim figures standing in the centre of the lobby.
    By the peculiar rule of weak Type Ones, they were clearest when viewed out of the corner of your eyes, granularnotches of grey and black that flickered briefly and melted into nothing. Two were child-size, one was adult: aside from that you couldn’t tell anything about them.
    Ignoring them as best we could, we took turns standing guard while we did our readings at the furthest wall. It was noticeably colder here. Lockwood raised a corner of the tapestry and looked beneath it.
    ‘I wondered about that too,’ George said. ‘Anything?’
    Lockwood let the tapestry drop. ‘Just stone. This is a cold spot, though.’
    ‘Yeah. Six degrees, going on five. OK, we’re done here. Let’s keep going.’
    By the time we’d finished with the ground floor and arrived back at the staircase, we’d been exposed to a whole range of sinister mists, sounds and odours, not all of them courtesy of George. Nowhere else had proved to be quite as chilly as the Long Gallery, or so baleful in atmosphere, but supernatural phenomena extended throughout the wing. The malignant static noise had grown louder. Several other death-glows had been mapped. Apparitions were frequent. They never came close to us, but always materialized at the far ends of corridors, in places we’d just been, or were just about to go to. Their details could not be picked out, though some were clearly children. The impression they gave was typical of your standard Type Ones: unresponsive, unaggressive, just a little sad.
    ‘They’re the small stuff,’ George said as, with the frail orb of Lockwood’s candle out in front, we descended the narrow cellar stairs. ‘Shades, Lurkers, Hazes . . . They’re just the outlying manifestations that have gathered around the original, deeper haunting. Nothing we’ve seen so far is the Source itself, or even close to it, except maybe the cold spot by the tapestry. And you know what room that’s directly under, don’t you?’
    I didn’t answer. None of us had mentioned the Red Room for over an hour, even though it was clear to all where our investigation was likely to lead.
    It was pitch-black in