Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Screaming Staircase

And, with her, the force that filled the house went too. There was a sudden release of pressure. My ears popped. Wind died. The room was full of burning scraps of paper, drifting slowly to the floor.

Just like that. It’s what happens when you successfully neutralize a Source.

I took a deep breath, listened . . .

Yes. The house was quiet. The girl had gone.

Of course, when I say it was quiet, I only mean on a psychic level. Fires raged throughout the study. The floor was alight, smoke hid the ceiling. The piles of papers we’d dumped beside the door roared white, and the whole landing was aflame. There was no way out in that direction.

On the other side of the room, Lockwood waved urgently, pointing to the window.

I nodded. No time to waste. The house was going up. But first, almost without thinking, I turned back to the hole, reached under the net, and (closing my mind to what else I touched there) grasped the little gold necklace – that one uncorrupted reminder of what the living girl had been. When I pulled, the chain came free as easily as if it had been unclasped. I stuffed it all – chain and pendant, webs and dust – into the pocket of my coat. Then, turning, I zigzagged between the fires to the desk below the window.

Lockwood had already vaulted onto it, booting a stack of burning papers to the floor. He tried the window. No go – stiff or locked, it didn’t matter which. He kicked it open, splintering the latch. I jumped up beside him. For the first time in hours we breathed in fresh, wet, foggy air.

We knelt there on the windowsill, side by side. Around us, curtains hissed, went up in flames. Out in the garden our silhouettes crouched in a square of swirling light.

‘You all right?’ Lockwood said. ‘Something happen by the hole?’

‘No. Nothing. I’m fine.’ I smiled wanly at him. ‘Well, another case solved.’

‘Yes. Won’t Mrs Hope be pleased? True, her house will have burned down, but at least it’s ghost-free . . .’ He looked at me. ‘So . . .’

‘So . . .’ I peered over the sill, hunting vainly for the ground. It was too dark and too distant to be seen.

‘It’ll be fine,’ Lockwood said. ‘I’m almost sure there are some whopping bushes down there.’

‘Good.’

‘That and a concrete patio.’ He patted my arm. ‘Come on, Lucy. Turn and drop. It’s not like we have a choice.’

Well, he was right about that bit. When I glanced back into the room, the flames had spread across the floor. They’d already reached the chimney breast. The hole – and its contents – were being greedily consumed by tongues of fire. I gave a little sigh. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you say so.’

Lockwood grinned a sooty grin. ‘In six months, when have I ever let you down?’

I was just opening my mouth to start the list when the ceiling above the desk gave way. Burning spears of wood and chunks of plaster crashed down behind us. Something struck me on the back. It knocked me out and over the windowsill. Lockwood tried to grab me as I fell. He lost his balance; our hands snapped shut on air. We seemed to hang there for a moment, suspended together between heat and cold, between life and death – then we both toppled forward into the night, and there was nothing but rushing darkness all around.

II

Before

5

Some people claim the Problem has always been with us. Ghosts are nothing new , they say, and have always behaved the same. There’s a story the Roman writer Pliny told, for instance, almost two thousand years ago. It’s about a scholar who bought a house in Athens. The house was suspiciously cheap, and he soon discovered it was haunted. On the very first night he was visited by the Spectre of a gaunt old man in chains. The Visitor beckoned to him; instead of fleeing, he followed the ghost out to the yard, where he saw it vanish into the earth. The next day the scholar had his servants dig at that spot. Sure enough, they soon uncovered a manacled skeleton. The bones were properly buried, and the haunting ceased. End of story. A classic Type Two ghost, the experts say, with a classic, simple purpose – the desire to right a hidden wrong. Just the same as you get today. So nothing’s really changed.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it. OK, it’s a decent example of a hidden Source – we’ve all known plenty of similar examples. But notice two things. First: the scholar in the story doesn’t seem at all concerned that he might be ghost-touched, and so swell up, turn blue and die a painful death. Maybe he was just stupid (not to mention lucky). Or maybe Visitors back in ancient times weren’t quite as dangerous as they are now.

And they certainly weren’t as common either. That’s the second thing. The haunted house in Pliny’s story? It was probably the only one in Athens, which is why it was so cheap. Here in modern London there are dozens of them, with more springing up all the time, no matter what the agencies do. In those days, ghosts were fairly rare. Now we’ve got an epidemic. So it seems pretty obvious to me that the Problem’s different to what went before. Something strange and new did start happening around fifty or sixty years ago, and no one’s got a damn clue why.

If you look in old newspapers, like George does all the time, you can find mention of scattered ghostly sightings cropping up in Kent and Sussex around the middle of the last century. But it was a decade or so later that a bloody series of cases, such as the Highgate Terror and the Mud Lane Phantom, attracted serious attention. In each instance, a sudden outbreak of supernatural phenomena was followed by a number of gruesome deaths. Conventional investigations came to nothing, and one or two policemen also died. At last two young researchers, Tom Rotwell and Marissa Fittes, managed to trace each haunting to its respective Source (in the case of the Terror, a bricked-up skull; in that of the Phantom, a highwayman’s body staked out at a crossroads). Their success drew great acclaim, and for the first time the existence of Visitors was firmly imprinted on the public mind.

In the years that followed, many other hauntings started to come to light, first in London and the south, then slowly spreading across the country. An atmosphere of widespread panic developed. There were riots and demonstrations; churches and mosques did excellent business as people sought to save their souls. Soon both Fittes and Rotwell launched psychical agencies to cope with the demand, leading the way for a host of lesser rivals. Finally the government itself took action, issuing curfews at nightfall, and rolling out production of ghost-lamps in major cities.

None of this actually solved the Problem, of course. The best that could be said was that, as time passed, the country got used to living with the new reality. Adult citizens kept their heads down, made sure their houses were well stocked with iron, and left it to the agencies to contain the supernatural threat. The agencies, in turn, sought the best operatives. And because extreme psychic sensitivity is almost exclusively found in the very young, this meant that whole generations of children like me found themselves becoming part of the front line.

I was born Lucy Joan Carlyle in the fourth official decade of the Problem, when it had already spread across the whole of our islands, and even the smallest towns had their ghost-lamps and all villages their warning bell. My father was a porter in the railway station of a little town in the north of England, a place of slate roofs and stone walls, set tight amongst green hills. He was a small, red-faced man, bent-backed, sinewy, and hairy as an ape. His breath smelled of strong brown beer, and his hands were hard and swift to punish any of his children who disturbed his usual taciturn indifference. If he ever called me by name, I don’t recall it; he was a distant and arbitrary force. After he fell under a train when I was five years old, my only real emotion was fear that we might not be done with him. In the event, the government’s new Untimely Death regulations were followed to the letter. The priests scattered iron on the tracks where the accident occurred; they put silver coins on the corpse’s eyes; they hung an iron charm around its neck to break the connection with his ghost. These precautions did the job fine. He never came back. Even if he had , my mother said, it wouldn’t have caused us any problems. He’d only have haunted the local pub.