Lockwood & Co: The Screaming Staircase Read Free Page B

standing in a garden. The woman, Mrs Hope, was an older, happier version of the daughter we’d met outside: round-faced, neat-clothed, wearing a radiant smile. Her head was level with the chest of the man beside her. He was tall and balding, with sloped, rounding shoulders and big, rather cumbersome forearms. He too smiled broadly. They were holding hands.
    ‘Seem cheerful enough there, don’t they?’ Lockwood said.
    I nodded dubiously. ‘Got to be a reason for a Type Two, though. George says Type Two always means someone’s done something to somebody.’
    ‘Yes, but George has a nasty, gruesome little mind. Which reminds me: we should find the phone and ring him. I left a message on the table, but he’ll probably be worrying about us, even so. Let’s finish off the survey first.’
    He didn’t find any death-glows in the little sitting room, and I couldn’t hear anything, and that was the ground floor done. Which told us what we’d already guessed. What we were looking for was upstairs.
    Sure enough, the moment I set foot on the lowest step, the knocking began again. At first it was no louder than it had been before, a tiny hollow tap-tap-tapping, like a fingernail on plaster, or a nail being hammered into wood. But with every step I climbed, the echo increased a little, became a little more insistent in my inner ear. I mentioned this to Lockwood, who was treading like a formless shadow at my back.
    ‘Getting nippier too,’ he said.
    He was right. With every step the temperature was dropping, from nine degrees, to seven, to six here, midway up the flight. I paused, zipping up my coat with fumbling fingers, while staring upwards into the dark. The stairwell was narrow, and there was no light above me at all. The upperregions of the house were a clot of shadows. I had a strong desire to switch on my torch, but resisted the impulse, which would only have made me blinder still. With one hand on my rapier hilt, I continued slowly up the stairs, the knocking growing ever louder and the cold biting at my skin.
    Up I went. Louder and louder grew the knocking. Now it was a frantic scratching, tapping sound. Lower and lower dropped the number on the dial. From six degrees to five, and finally to four.
    The blackness of the landing was a formless space. On my left, white banisters hung at head height like a row of giant teeth.
    I reached the final stair, stepped out onto the landing—
    And the knocking noise stopped dead.
    I checked the luminous dial again: four degrees. Eleven degrees lower than the kitchen. I could sense my breath pluming in the air.
    We were very close.
    Lockwood brushed past me, flicked his torch in a brief reconnaissance. Papered walls, closed doors, dead silence. A piece of embroidery in a heavy frame: faded colours, childish letters, Home Sweet Home . Done years ago, when homes were sweet and safe, and no one hung iron charms above their children’s beds. Before the Problem came.
    The landing was L-shaped, comprising a small square space in which we stood, and a long spur running behind usparallel to the stairs. It had a polished wooden floor. There were five doors leading off: one on our right, one straight ahead and three at intervals along the spur. All the doors were closed. Lockwood and I stood silently, using our eyes and ears.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said at last. ‘As soon as I got to the top, the knocking noises stopped.’
    Lockwood took a while to speak. ‘No death-glows,’ he said. From the heaviness in his voice I knew that he too felt malaise – that strange sluggishness, that dead weight in the muscles that comes when a Visitor is near. He sighed faintly. ‘Well, ladies first, Lucy. Pick a door.’
    ‘Not me. I picked a door in that orphanage case and you know what happened then.’
    ‘That all turned out fine, didn’t it?’
    ‘Only because I ducked. All right, let’s take this one, but you’re going in first.’
    I’d chosen the nearest, the one on the right. It turned out