Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

on, we’ve work to do.’
    But I still stared at him. ‘ Fairfax? But why? Lockwood—’
    He held up his hand to hush me; he was at the corner now, ducking low to avoid the hanging webs. When he raised his candle to the webbing, dozens of shiny black bodies scurried to the margins, fleeing the sphere of light. ‘It’sinstantly colder here,’ he said, ‘once you step off the bricks. And there’s miasma too, and immediate malaise . . . George, do a temp check there, then cross over to the stones.’
    George pushed past me and began the readings. I followed reluctantly.
    ‘I know you don’t like Fairfax,’ I said, ‘but if you’re saying he’s mad—’
    ‘Oh, he’s certainly not mad,’ Lockwood said. ‘Temp difference, George?’
    ‘Drops from nine to five in the space of a stride.’
    Lockwood nodded. ‘It’s all in the stones. And it’ll only get colder when we go down there .’
    He indicated the arch beside him: black and gaping like an open mouth. Our candlelight didn’t penetrate too far. George briefly switched on his torch to reveal the beginnings of another passage, taller and broader than the one we’d come from. It stretched away inside the wall.
    Lockwood had been right about the temperature drop. For the first time, I really felt the cold. I pulled out my hat, put it on; zipped my coat up tight. The others were doing likewise. I glared at Lockwood as I did so, irritated by his refusal to talk about Fairfax and the Red Room door. Yet again he was keeping quiet, not sharing what he knew. He’d been like this for days, since Fairfax first came calling. Maybe even before that – since the burglary, even since we found the necklace . . .
    I put my hands to my throat, checked the hidden cord around my neck. Beneath my coat the glass case pressed cold and hard against my chest. I wondered if it glowed, whether the ghost was emitting any light. Well, she was secure enough. It wasn’t Annie Ward we had to worry about now.
    Lockwood put on his gloves; George crammed his head inside his foul green bobble-hat. We started up the passage, Lockwood taking the lead. He held his candle high. Drifts of cobweb danced above its meagre flame.
    A few steps in, George called us to a halt. He pointed to the right-hand wall, at a rough arch of brickwork embedded in the stone. ‘There’s the original way through from the Red Room,’ he said. ‘Blocked up when they rebuilt the house. We’re in one of the priory passageways now.’
    ‘Fine,’ Lockwood said. ‘Let’s look at the map. Then we can see where—’
    His head snapped round. The wick of his candle had quivered; its light shrank dim and pale. All of us had felt the change – the shift that comes when a Visitor walks near.
    We waited, rapiers at the ready, hands hovering at our belts.
    One moment there was nothing, and the next . . . a boy stood ahead of us in the dark. He shone with a frail glow. It wasn’t easy to tell how far away he was, or whether he floated or touched the stones. His other-light lit nothing but himself. When I listened, I thought I heard faint weeping, butthe apparition’s face was blank and clear. It looked towards us with that open, empty expression so many of them have.
    ‘Check out the clothes ,’ Lockwood whispered.
    The boy had been quite young, probably not as old as me. He was fair-haired and stocky, tending to the stout, with a soft and rounded face. If George had been scrubbed up and forcibly inserted into something smart and ironed, he might almost have been his cousin. He wore dark trousers and a long grey jacket, which seemed slightly too big for him. Something about the cut of the jacket and the trousers (I’m no good with fashion) told me that this was an apparition decades old. But there was no mistaking the essential uniform, or the Italianate hilt of the rapier at his side.
    ‘Oh Lord,’ I said, ‘it’s the Fittes kid. The one who died in here.’
    The weeping sound grew louder. The apparition flickered; it slowly turned away from us and drifted off along the passage.
    All sight and sound winked out. Nothing but darkness, silence, a sweet-sour smell fading in my nose. The candlewicks flared up bright as day. We remembered to breathe again.
    ‘I could really do with a mint now,’ George said.
    ‘Did he speak to you, Lucy?’ Lockwood asked.
    ‘No. But he was trying to tell us something.’
    ‘That’s the trouble with ghosts. They never spell it out. Well, it was presumably a warning,