The Screaming Staircase Read online

  Every agency worked like this. Every agency in London, except one.

  Mr. Toby Farnaby, my supervisor from the Rotwell Agency that evening, was typical of his breed. He was a man well into rotund middle age, and thus hadn’t seen anything remotely supernatural for more than twenty years. Nevertheless, he considered himself indispensable. He had parked himself in the marble foyer of the house, close to the exits, and safe within a triple circle of iron chains. When I slowly emerged, limping, onto the second floor balcony, I could see him squatting below me like an enormous potbellied toad. His ample backside rested in a folding canvas chair; a hip flask and a stack of sandwiches sat on a trestle table beside him.

  At his shoulder stood another man, slight, willowy, a plastic clipboard in his hand. His name was Johnson, and I’d never seen him before that night. He had a soft, forgettable face and nondescript brown hair. He also worked for Rotwell’s, and as far as I could make out, was supervising our supervisor. It was that kind of company.

  Right now Mr. Farnaby was busy lecturing the other members of the team, who had evidently slinked down to report to him when I disappeared into the wall. Tina and Dave were standing slumped in attitudes of bored dejection. Ted, conversely, stood at attention, an expression of fatuous concentration on his face.

  “And it is paramount,” Farnaby was saying, “that when you go back up, you proceed with the utmost caution. If Miss Carlyle is dead, which is more than possible, she will only have herself to blame. Keep close, and watch each other’s backs. Remember, Emma Marchment poisoned her stepson and attempted to kill her husband! If she was so cruel and vengeful in life, her restless spirit will be worse by far.”

  “I think we should hurry, sir,” Dave Eason said. “Lucy has been gone for ages. We ought—”

  “To follow regulations, Eason, which are there for your protection. You have earned two demerits for interrupting.” Mr. Farnaby put soft, plump hands together and cracked a knuckle; he reached for a sandwich. “The girl chose to rush off on her own instead of reporting back to me. This is the problem with freelancers. They haven’t been properly trained, have they, Johnson?”

  “No, indeed,” said Johnson.

  I called down from the balcony. “Hello, Mr. Farnaby.” I took a bleak satisfaction from seeing them all jump.

  Farnaby dropped his sandwich in his lap; his little eyes glinted as he gazed up at me. “Ah, Miss Carlyle has elected to join us. I heard about your reckless behavior! At Rotwell’s, we work in teams! You cannot be a maverick here.”

  I tapped my fingers slowly on the parapet. Below me, Farnaby’s lank black hair glistened in the lantern light; his stomach cast a shadow like a lunar eclipse. Sacks of iron and salt littered the floor at his feet. Officially he was guarding our supplies; unofficially, they were guarding him. “I’m all for teamwork,” I said, “provided it’s the right kind. Field agents need to be left alone to use our psychic Talents.”

  Farnaby pursed his lips. “I hired you this evening for your admirable Listening skills, Miss Carlyle, not because I need your shrill opinions. Now, you will do what I asked for an hour ago, and that is to give me a proper report on your actions, which—”

  There was a stirring in my backpack. “This guy’s a drag.”

  I spoke under my breath. “He sure is.”

  “Know what I suggest?”

  “Yep. And the answer’s no. I’m not going to kill him.”

  “Oh, you’re no fun. There’s a plant pot over there—you could drop it on his head.”

  “Hush.”

  Farnaby looked up at me. “Sorry, Miss Carlyle—did you speak?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I was just saying that I’ve got the Source. I’ll bring it down to you now. Save me a sandwich; I’ll be with you shortly.”

  I limped off, found the stairs, and descended to the foyer. Ignoring my fellow agents, who were all gazing at me blankly, I strolled across the lobby, the silver bundle under my arm. When I got to Farnaby, I dumped it on the table with a flourish. It made a satisfying thud.

  The supervisor drew back. “This is the Source? What is it?”

  “Take a look, sir. You might want to move your snacks back a little.”

  Farnaby lifted a corner of the net. He gave a cry and sprang away, bowling over his chair. “Fetch a silver-glass box, quickly! And put that thing on the floor! Don’t bring it anywhere near me!”

  A box was found, and the head placed inside. Sweating, dabbing at his pate, Farnaby returned to his seat. He inspected the box from a distance. “What a hideous thing! You think this was Emma Marchment?”

  “It’s not her head,” I said. “But it most definitely belonged to her. I got a flash of what the secret room was like, back in her day. Lots of pots and herbs, weird books and charms. She was into some kind of nonsense sorcery, that’s for certain. This old head was one of her prized possessions, which is why her ghost is so attached to it.”

  “Fascinating.” Bland-faced Mr. Johnson made a note on his clipboard. “Well done, Carlyle.”

  “Thank you, sir. It was a joint effort. Everyone played their part.”

  Farnaby grunted sourly. “It’s certainly an unusual specimen. The sort of thing your boys at the institute would like, eh, Johnson? Want to take it home?”

  Mr. Johnson smiled thinly. “Sadly, that’s no longer possible under the new DEPRAC regulations. It will have to be destroyed. I’ll make a report that the premises are now clear. A notable success for your team, Farnaby, despite your lack of personal control.” He patted the supervisor on the shoulder, stepped out of the circle, and drifted off toward the doors.

  Mr. Farnaby sat in silence for a moment, brooding. When he spoke, it was to Ted, who was nervously standing near. “I blame you for this, Daley,” he said. “You were in charge of the team. You should have kept Miss Carlyle on a tighter leash. It’ll be five demerits for you.”

  Annoyance flared within me. I could sense Ted shrinking away. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “The team achieved its objectives. Our actions were entirely correct.”

  “Not according to me,” Farnaby said. “And that’s all there is to it. We will begin packing up now.” He waved me away and made to take up his hip flask, but I stood my ground.

  “There was no time for me to consult you,” I went on. “I had to pinpoint the exact location of the Source before the Specter disappeared. It was the most efficient thing to do. And the team worked very effectively in the initial confrontation. They helped me locate the secret room, and Dave helped drive away the Specter. You were an agent once, sir; you remember how you have to make certain decisions on the ground. It’s good practice to trust your fellow operatives. Isn’t that right, Ted?”

  I looked around to find Ted some ways off, busily lugging a sack of iron toward the door in preparation for departure. I blinked at him. “Tina?” I asked. “Dave…?”

  But Tina was packing away some unused salt-bombs, Dave folding away the iron chains. They were silent, disconnected, intent on their work. They paid me no attention.

  I found myself suddenly cast into shadow. Farnaby’s stomach blocked the lantern light; with ponderous finality he was rising from his chair. His eyes were burned raisins at the best of times; now they had shrunk even more to become fragments of glass, black, malevolent, and glittering. I stepped back, my hand instinctively moving to my rapier.

  “I know where you worked before, Miss Carlyle,” Farnaby said. “I know why you act the way you do. It is a mystery to me why DEPRAC has never moved to shut down that ramshackle, disreputable little outfit. An agency run by children? The idea is absurd! It will end in disaster soon enough, mark my words. But, Miss Carlyle, you are not at Lockwood and Company anymore. Whenever you work at Rotwell, you will find it a real agency, where child agents know their place. And if you wish to be hired again, you will keep silent and in future do as you’re told. Do I make myself clear?”

  My lips were a tight white line. “Yes, sir.”

  “In the meantime, since yo
u’re so keen to improve our efficiency, you can finish tonight’s job for me. As Mr. Johnson said, new DEPRAC rules demand that all Type Two Sources be destroyed immediately. There is a black market for precisely this kind of vile object, and we cannot take any chances.” He nudged the silver-glass box with his boot. “Here is the mummified head. Take it to Fittes furnaces and see that it is burned.”

  I gazed at him. “You want me to go to Clerkenwell? Now? It’s four o’clock in the morning.”

  “All the better—the furnaces will be roaring. When you send me their stamped certificate tomorrow, I will pay you for tonight’s work, and not a moment before. You others”—he glanced at the industrious trio—“I was going to give you the rest of the night off. But since Miss Carlyle has such a high opinion of your energies, we will see whether we can’t fit in a second job. I believe there is a Changer in Highgate Cemetery that needs tackling. I shall drive you there. So, hop to it and finish your tidying!”

  He turned away from me and began packing up his sandwiches. My fellow agents, with evil glances in my direction, wearily did as they were told. I was otherwise ignored. I picked up the silver-glass box.

  “Skull,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You had a point about that plant pot.”

  “There you are, see? Didn’t I say?”

  Without further words, I tucked the mummified head under my arm and left the house. I was tired, I was angry, but I didn’t choose to show it. Arguments with supervisors were nothing new; I had them almost nightly. It was just how things were, part of the deal of my new freelance life.

  From the start I’d done things properly. I’d gotten myself a card, nicely laminated, with a classy silver-gray border. Here’s what I handed out to all my employers, and why they all wanted me, even if I did annoy them.

  LUCY CARLYLE

  Consultant Psychic Investigation Agent

  Flat 4, 15 Tooting Mews, London

  Psychic Surveys and Visitor Removal

  Aural phenomena a speciality

  I could have gone for a swanky logo, with crossed rapiers or skewered ghosts or something, but I preferred to keep it simple. Just being a consultant was enough to get me noticed, because that meant I was independent. There weren’t many psychic investigation agents working solo in London, on account of most of us ending up dead.

  As a freelancer, I could hire myself out to any agency that wanted my services, and let me tell you, during the course of the Black Winter, a lot of them had wanted those services bad. My special sensitivity—Listening was my particular Talent (and between you and me, I was better at it than any agent I’d ever heard of, except perhaps one)—gave almost any group an additional edge. An extra bonus for them was that I knew how to survive. I knew when to Listen and look, I knew when to use my rapier, and I knew when to get out. That’s what it always boiled down to, in the end. Three options, and simple common sense. It’s how you stayed alive.

  In short, I was very good at what I did. Of course I was. I’d learned my trade with the best.

  And I wasn’t with them anymore.

  The Black Winter had been a decent time to start a business. Right now, in late March, there were signs of seasonal respite. The weather was improving, the days were lengthening, pretty spring flowers were showing their heads beside crusted flecks of ancient snow, and you were marginally less likely to be fatally ghost-touched when venturing out for an evening pint of milk. We hoped the ordeal was easing for a time.

  Over the previous few months of seemingly endless nights, however, the Problem—the epidemic of ghosts that had long beset our country—had intensified considerably. No single cluster of hauntings as bad as the infamous Chelsea Outbreak had taken place, but the winter had been unrelenting. Every agency had been sorely stretched, and many agents, young and younger, had fallen in the line of duty and been buried in the iron tombs behind Horse Guards Parade.

  Nevertheless, the difficulties of the season had enabled some companies to thrive. One of these was Lockwood & Co., the smallest psychic detection agency in London. Up until the beginning of the winter, I’d worked for them. It had just been me; Anthony Lockwood, who ran the show; and George Cubbins, who researched stuff. We’d lived in a house in Portland Row, Marylebone. Oh, there’d been another employee as well. Her name was Holly Munro; she was new, a kind of assistant to the rest of us. She sort of counted, too, I guess, but it was George and Lockwood who had meant the most to me. Meant so much, in fact, that in the end I’d been forced to turn my back on them, and go a different way.

  Four months earlier, you see, a ghost had shown me a glimpse of one possible future. It was a future in which my actions would lead directly to Lockwood’s death. The ghost itself was malignant, and I had no reason to trust it, except for one thing: it echoed my own intuitions. Time and again, Lockwood had risked his life to save mine, the line between success and disaster growing finer and less definite on each occasion. Coupled with that, even as my psychic Talents had grown strong, my ability to master those Talents had become frayed. Several times during cases I had lost control of my emotions—and this had dangerously strengthened the ghosts that we were fighting. A series of near catastrophes had ended with me unleashing the power of a Poltergeist; in the ensuing battle, Lockwood (and others) had nearly died. I knew in my heart that it would take only one more mistake and the ghost’s prediction would become a reality. Since that was something I could never bear, it stood to reason that I had to avoid it. Hence I’d left the company. That had been my decision, and I knew I was right.

  I knew it.

  And now, assuming you didn’t count a talking skull, it was justme.

  As far as I could judge from reading the papers, my departure from Lockwood & Co. had coincided with a period of great activity for my former colleagues. In particular, their success in locating the Source of the Chelsea Outbreak—a room of skeletons buried deep beneath the Aickmere Brothers department store—had earned them the publicity that their leader had long desired. They were rarely off the front page, with photos of Lockwood particularly in evidence. There he was, with George, standing among the broken masonry of the Mortlake Tomb; there he was, alone, posing beneath the blackened outline that was the only remnant of the St. Albans Ghoul. And there he was, finally, in perhaps my least favorite image of the sequence, receiving the coveted Agency of the Month award at the Times offices in London, with the slim and elegant figure of Holly Munro standing picturesquely beside him.

  So they’d done well, and I was happy for them. But I’d thrived, too. My part in the Aickmere’s department store case had not gone unnoticed, and no sooner had I rented a room and placed a small ad in the Agencies page in the Times than I began to acquire customers of my own. To my surprise, from the first, most were other companies. I worked with the Grimble Agency on the Melrose Place Murders, and with Atkins and Armstrong on the Phantom Cat of Cromwell Square. Even the mighty Rotwell Agency had used me several times; and whatever Farnaby might say, I knew that they’d turn to me again.

  Yes, I was flourishing.

  I was succeeding on my own.

  And did I mind being on my own? Not really. For the most part, I got along fine.

  I kept busy. No one could say I didn’t get out much, or didn’t meet all corners of the community; it was just a pity that most of them were dead. In the past week, for instance, I’d seen a ghost child on a swing; a skeleton bride sitting in a church; a bus conductor floating past without his bus; two squashed workmen; a phantom dog being led up Putney High Street by a vast black shadow; a headless librarian; a suitcase containing three nimbuses, two Glimmers, and a Wisp; a wandering severed hand; and a semi-naked neighbor.

  That last one had been alive, by the way. I kind of wish he hadn’t been.

  Yeah, the nights were always frantic, packed with incident. It was the days that sometimes felt a little hollow. Particularly at dawn, after just finishing a case, when I walked back through the empty streets, bruised and weary, w
ith the weight of the solitary hours ahead pulling at my insides. I couldn’t even rely on the skull in the jar for a chat; he often dematerialized during the day. That was when I really missed the company of others, those moments when I was quietly heading home.

  Not that, on this particular night, I was going home. Not yet. Thanks to Mr. Farnaby’s sour vindictiveness, I had another place to visit first. I was taking a Source in a silver-glass box to one of the most terrible locations in London, and it wasn’t even a haunted house.

  Quite the opposite.

  It was the place where ghosts were destroyed.

  The Greater London Metropolitan Furnaces for the Disposal of Psychic Artifacts—the Fittes furnaces, as they were generally known—were located in the eastern industrial district of Clerkenwell. They had been created by Marissa Fittes, legendary founder of the Fittes Agency, more than forty years previously, when the need for the safe destruction of psychic Sources was becoming clear. In those early days, the furnaces had occupied the site of an old boot factory, sandwiched between a printer’s studio and a hat warehouse. Now they filled two full city blocks in which the furnace halls rose like great brick temples, and a forest of tall, thin chimneys blew ash toward the river and the sea. That, at any rate, was the idea; as often as not, the wind dropped it on the surrounding districts, peppering people’s coats and hats with gray-black powder. “Clerkenwell snow,” as it was called, was mostly tolerated for being harmless.

  High walls, topped with iron spikes, bordered the yards where agency vans pulled in each morning with fresh deliveries of Sources gathered during the night. Originally intended for Fittes operatives alone, the complex had for decades been open to all agencies. It was neutral ground. The fierce rivalry that existed between companies, which on the street could end in shrill disputes and sometimes violence, had no place within these walls. Rapiers were left with aged doormen, and agents’ behavior was closely monitored by grim-faced attendants who threw out anyone creating a disturbance.