Jonathan Stroud - Lockwood & Co - The Screaming Staircase

By day I went to school in a little concrete building set above the river on the outskirts of the town. In the afternoon I played in the water meadows or in the park, but always kept an ear out for the curfew bells, and was back safe in our cottage before the sun had fully gone. Once home, I helped set up the defences. It was my job to place the lavender candles on the sills and check the hanging charms. My elder sisters lit the lights and poured fresh water in the channel that ran beneath the porch. All would then be ready for when our mother bustled in, just as night was falling.

My mother (think large, pink and harassed) washed laundry at the town’s two small hotels. What active maternal affection she possessed had largely been eroded by work and weariness, and she had little energy to spare for her brood of girls, of whom I was the seventh and the last. By day she was mostly out; after dark, she sat slumped in a haze of lavender smoke, silently watching TV. She seldom paid me any attention whatsoever, and for the most part left me to the care of my elder sisters. My only real point of interest to her lay in how I might eventually pay my way.

Everyone knew, you see, that there was Talent running in my family. My mother had seen ghosts in her youth, while two of my sisters had sufficient Sight to get jobs with the night watch in the city of Newcastle, thirty miles away. None of them, however, had actually been agency material. From the first it was obvious that I was different. I had unusual sensitivity to matters relating to the Problem.

Once, I guess when I was six, I was playing in the water meadows with my favourite sister, Mary, who was the closest to me in age. We lost her football among the rushes and hunted for it a long time. When finally we found it, wedged deep in the roots and sticky amber mud, the light was almost gone. So we were still trailing back along the path beside the river when the bell sounded across the fields.

Mary and I looked at each other. Since infancy, we had been warned what might happen to us if we stayed out after dark. Mary began to cry.

But I was a plucky little girl, small and dark and dauntless. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘It’s early yet, so they’re still as weak as babes. If there are any about round here, which I doubt.’

‘It’s not just that,’ my sister said. ‘It’s Mam. She’ll beat me sore.’

‘Well, she’ll beat me too.’

‘I’m older than you. She’ll beat me awful sore. You’ll be all right, Lucy.’

Privately I doubted this. Our mother washed sheets nine hours a day, mostly by hand, and had forearms as vast as pig’s thighs. One smack from her and your bottom vibrated for a week. We hurried on in gloomy silence.

All around were the reeds and the mud and the deepening greyness of dusk. Up ahead, the town lights, twinkling on the spur of the hill, were an admonishment and a beacon to us. Our spirits rose; we could see the grass steps leading up to the road.

‘That Mam calling?’ I said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Is that her calling us?’

Mary listened. ‘I don’t hear anything. Anyway, our house is miles off yet.’

Which was true enough. Besides, it didn’t seem to me that the faint, thin voice I heard was coming from the town.

I looked off and away across the flats, towards where the river, invisible, flowed dark and deep between the hills. Hard to be sure, but I thought I saw a figure standing far out among the reeds there, a dark notch, crooked as a scarecrow. As I watched, it began to move – not very fast, but also not too slow – taking a line that would likely intersect our path ahead of us.

I found I didn’t much care to meet that person, whoever it might be. I gave my sister a playful nudge. ‘Race you this last bit,’ I said. ‘Come on! I’m getting cold.’

So we ran along the track, and every few yards I jumped up to take a look and saw that unknown someone making the greatest endeavours to reach us, loping and limping through the reed-stalks. But the long and short of it was, we went faster and got to the steps in safety. And when I looked back down from the railings, the water meadows were a monochrome grey vastness, with nothing in them as far as the river bends, and no voice calling us among the reeds.

Later, once my bottom had stopped tingling, I told my mother about the figure, and she told me about a local woman who had killed herself for love there, back when Mam was a girl. Penny Nolan was her name. She’d waded out into the reeds, lain down in the stream and drowned herself. As you’d expect, she’d become a Type Two, a needy one, and caused trouble from time to time to people coming back late from the valley. Over the years Agent Jacobs had wasted a lot of iron out there, looking for the Source, but he never found it, so presumably Penny Nolan walks there still. In the end they rerouted the path, and let the field lie fallow. It’s now a pretty place of wild flowers.

Incidents such as this ensured that before long my Talent was common knowledge in the district. My mother waited impatiently until I was eight years old, then took me up to meet the agent in his rooms just off the town square. It was excellent timing, as one of his operatives had been killed in action three days before. Everything worked out fine. My mother got my weekly wage, I got my first job, and Agent Jacobs got his new trainee.

My employer was a tall, cadaverous gentleman who had run his local operation for more than twenty years. Treated by the townsfolk with respect bordering on deference, he was nevertheless isolated from them because of his profession, and so cultivated an aura of occult mystery. He was grey-skinned, hook-nosed and black-bearded, and wore a slightly old-fashioned jet-black suit in the manner of an undertaker. He smoked cigarettes almost constantly, kept his iron filings loose in his jacket pockets, and seldom changed his clothes. His rapier was yellow with ectoplasm stains.

As dusk fell each evening, he led his five or six child operatives on patrols around the district, responding to alarms or, if everything was quiet, checking the public spaces. The eldest agents, who had passed their Third Grade tests, wore rapiers and work-belts; the youngest, like me, carried only kitbags. Still, it seemed to me a fine thing to be part of this select and important company, walking tall in our mustard-coloured jackets, with the great Mr Jacobs at our head.

Over the ensuing months I learned how to mix salt and magnesium in correct proportions, and how to scatter iron according to the likely power of the ghost. I became adept at packing bags and checking torches, filling lamps and testing chains. I polished rapiers. I made teas and coffees. And when lorries brought new supplies up from the Sunrise Corporation in London, I sorted through the bombs and canisters, and stacked them on our shelves.

Jacobs soon discovered that while I saw Visitors well enough, I heard them better than anyone. Before I was nine, I’d traced the whispers at the Red Barn back to the broken post that marked the outlaw’s grave. In the vile incident at the Swan Hotel, I’d detected the soft, stealthy footsteps creeping up the passage behind us, and so saved us all from certain ghost-touch. The agent rewarded me with swift advancement. I passed my First and Second Grades in double-quick time, and on my eleventh birthday gained my Third. On that famous day I came home with a rapier of my own, a plastic-laminated official certificate, a personal copy of the Fittes Manual for Ghost-hunters and (more to the point, as far as my mother was concerned) a greatly increased monthly salary. I was now the family’s major breadwinner, earning more in my four nights’ work per week than my mother did in six long days. She celebrated by buying a new dishwasher and a bigger television.