Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

profile hung at the edge of his patch of torchlight. He was frowning, wrinkling his nose.
    ‘Smell what?’
    ‘Something sweet but sour . . . I can’t think what it is. It’s familiar, but strange.’
    ‘Sounds a lot like Lucy,’ George remarked. He was behind us, in the centre of the room.
    The minutes passed. Lockwood’s hand met mine in the darkness; we’d reached the middle of the wall. After a moment we each started going back the way we’d come, this time rapping the surface with our knuckles.
    ‘A few wisps of plasm building,’ George called.
    ‘You want us to stop?’
    ‘Keep going for now.’
    At last, near the end of the wall, at the corner by thewindow, I detected a slight variation in the quality of sound. The ring of my knock seemed higher and more resonant, as if echoing from a space within.
    ‘I may have something here,’ I said. ‘There’s a place that sounds hollow. If you—’
    ‘What was that ?’ George said. We’d all heard it: somewhere in the dark, a soft, decisive tap . Lockwood and I turned round.
    ‘Come back to the circle,’ George said. ‘And keep your torches off. We’ll use mine.’
    His beam cut slowly, carefully past us as we hurried back to join him, strafing the ceiling, walls and floor. All seemed exactly as before.
    Or did it? Discreetly, insidiously, something in the atmosphere had changed.
    We stood back to back in the centre of the circle, shoulders pressing tight together.
    ‘I’m going to turn off the torch,’ George said.
    He did so. We gazed out into the blackness of the empty room.
    ‘Lucy,’ Lockwood’s voice said, ‘what do you hear?’
    ‘The whispering’s kicked off,’ I said. All at once it was very loud. ‘It’s like before. A host of wicked voices.’
    ‘Can you tell where?’
    ‘Not yet. Seems all around.’
    ‘OK. George: what do you see?’
    ‘Wisps and whorls of light. Bright, but brief. No one location.’
    There was a pause. ‘And you, Lockwood?’ I said.
    He spoke heavily. ‘I can see the death-glows now.’
    ‘More than one?’
    ‘Lucy, there are dozens . I don’t know how I didn’t see them before. The whole room’s a death chamber . . .’ He took a breath. ‘Everyone draw your rapiers now.’
    Three sets of shoulders bumped and shifted. There was the collective rasp of iron.
    ‘It sensed that,’ George said. ‘The wisps went into a frenzy. They’ve calmed again.’
    ‘Lucy?’
    ‘The whispering got louder, angrier, then it died back. What do we do?’
    ‘That smell!’ Lockwood said. ‘It’s there again. So strong! Surely you can—’ He gave a little cry of frustration. ‘Don’t either of you smell it?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘Lockwood – concentrate. What do we do? Do we leave?’
    ‘I think we’ve got to. Something big’s coming. Ahh . . . these glows are bright!’ I could hear him fumbling with his sunglasses, hurrying to put them on.
    ‘But didn’t Lucy say she’d found a door?’ George said. ‘Shouldn’t we—’
    ‘Not a door,’ I said. ‘I got a hollow thump, like the wall was thin, somehow.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter either way,’ Lockwood said. ‘We’re leaving the room now.’
    A tap sounded in the darkness, soft but heavy, the same as the first. Another followed. And then another.
    ‘That’s between us and the door,’ George said.
    ‘No it isn’t.’
    ‘Quiet,’ Lockwood said. ‘Just listen.’
    Tap, tap, tap . . . Slow and regular: I timed five fast heartbeats between each sound. It wasn’t easy to tell where the noise was coming from, or what it might be, but it seemed familiar. I’d heard the like before. For some reason the bathroom back in Portland Row came to mind – the lower one, where I sometimes took a shower, and where George’s discarded underclothes lay in wait for unwary feet. At first I thought it might be the shared sense of danger and foreboding that made me make the connection; then I realized it was something else. The showerhead in that bathroom was faulty. It dripped.
    Tap, tap, tap . . .
    ‘Switch on your torch, Lockwood,’ I whispered. ‘Direct it in front of you.’
    He obeyed without question. Perhaps he’d realized too.
    The beam fell on the floorboards like a delicate ring ofgold. Something black and irregular lay in its centre. It looked rather like a large misshapen spider with innumerable legs. Tap . A new leg grew, splayed out to the side. Tap . Another leg: longer, thinner, stretched far across the wood . . . With each