Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

George was in the dining room, fiddling with some small device that looked like a silver bell suspended from a wire frame. He nodded at me as I joined him but didn’t speak. Both of us just got on with the tasks in hand.

Curiously enough, Holly Munro had been the most animated of all of us, the least affected by the strained dynamics of the team. She passed me in the hallway later, as I stood there listening. She smiled, offered me a piece of chewing gum, and went on.

Upstairs, the long landing echoed the hall below. Near the top of the stairs, Kipps stood in the circle of chains, gaunt as a vulture, picked out by a ring of candles. The bedroom behind him was hollowed out pinkly by the gleam of streetlights.

I listened…from somewhere there came a faint clicking noise that I could not identify.

Click, click, click …It faded.

On the way along the landing, I pointed my flashlight into the bathroom. The sink, the bathtub, and the toilet were soft with dust. You could see scuff marks on the floor where agents, including us, had walked in recent days. The toilet bowl was dry and empty, crusted with lime rings. I moved to the bedroom at the end, looked down into the matte-black garden.

From elsewhere in the house came a thudding noise that made the floorboards jump. It was not repeated. It might have been one of the others; equally it might not. I checked my watch. It was just approaching nine.

I finished my tour of the bedrooms and came back onto the landing. Kipps was still there, his hand held ready on his rapier, and it occurred to me again how hard it must be for him, waiting there unsighted, deaf, and helpless, his Talent having long ago abandoned him.

“Nothing yet,” I said.

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

I started down the stairs. Light came from the lantern left burning on the porch; it shone through the glass of the front door and smudged along the hall. I could see the glow of the living room candles showing under the closed door. Snuff-lights flickered on the stairs, but they projected no strong radiance. Halfway down, standing in blackness, I listened, fingers trailing on the paper. I heard the creak of the wooden step as my weight paused on it; I heard Kipps coughing on the landing, a door slamming up the street, George whistling softly in the kitchen.

All innocuous enough. So why had the hairs on the back of my arms prickled?

An uneasy thought occurred to me. “Kipps,” I called, “where are you?”

“Just above you, where you left me.”

“Lockwood?”

“On the cellar steps. Is everything okay?”

“Where’s Holly? Is she there, too?”

“She’s here, behind me.”

I looked toward the kitchen, where the gentle whistling still sounded. “George,” I called, “tell me where you are.”

The living room door opened just below me; a shape poked its head out. “Right here. Taking readings. Why?”

I didn’t answer, but craned my head over the banister and stared at the kitchen door. It occurred to me that I should have been able to see the lights of the kitchen candles showing through the glass. But the panes were completely black. The whistling noise continued, soft and husky. And now there came a rhythmic chopping, a knife impacting a wooden surface, which told me someone was working in the kitchen.

None of the others heard anything, neither the tuneless whistling nor the sound of the industrious knife. The skull in my backpack must have sensed the presence, too, of course, but it was still huffy with me. I tried rousing it, but it refused to answer my whispered questions.

We gathered silently in the hall. Lockwood stood at the door with his ear to a glass pane and his rapier held ready. Even up close, the glass was jet-black: whatever was in there sucked all light into itself and let nothing out again.

“I can still hear it,” I said. Every now and then the chopping paused, as if the knife were forcing its way through something particularly hard, but it always resumed.

Lockwood’s eyes met mine. “Then let’s see who it is who’s joined us.”

He reached for the handle, turned it, sprang forward into the room. As he did so, the sounds cut out. I was at his side, a salt-bomb in my fist; George and Kipps were pressing at our backs. We came to a halt, surveying the empty kitchen, where the sharp shadows of the cypress trees hung in moonlight on the countertops, and the candles flickered gently around our circle on the cracked linoleum floor.

“Nothing?” Kipps breathed.

My own breath had been pent up; I forced it out hard. “It stopped, the sound, as soon as we came in.”

Lockwood touched my arm. “It’s playing tricks, which is to be expected.”

“Nothing,” Kipps said heavily. He looked at me.

“I did hear it,” I snapped. The sudden deflation we’d all felt on entering the room had made us edgy. George was swearing colorfully under his breath, Holly was visibly shaking.

“No one’s saying you didn’t, Luce.” Of all of us, only Lockwood seemed unaffected. He remained quite still, eyes narrowed, gazing around the kitchen. Then he clipped his rapier to his belt and glanced at his thermometer. “Temp’s normal,” he said. “There’s no visual phenomena that I can see.”

“You’re forgetting the glass door,” I said. “No light shone through it a moment ago.”

“True.” He rummaged in a pocket of his coat, produced a paper bag of chocolates. “Everyone take two, and let’s get the thermoses out. High time for a cup of tea.”

We stood there, drinking, calming down. It’s never good to let your emotions get the better of you in a haunted house. Ghosts feed off them and grow strong.

“So, it’s nine-o-three p.m., and that’s our first proper phenomenon,” Lockwood said. “Looks as if Fittes and Barnes were right—this thing mainly manifests via sounds. That means Lucy’s going to bear the brunt of it. You’re okay with that, Luce?”

I nodded. “That’s why you brought me in.”

“I know, but you need to be happy with it.”

My heart was still pounding, but I kept my voice cool and professional. “It’s not a problem.”

Lockwood nodded slowly. “Okay…so we go on much as before. We’ll meet again at eleven thirty, see if anyone has a clue to the Source. Those of us on stationary posts can swap rooms then. Meanwhile, we call to each other whenever we have the slightest doubt about anything.”

One after the other, everyone slipped away—everyone except George and me. We remained standing in the kitchen. It seemed the obvious place for me to concentrate my efforts, and George had clearly had a similar idea. From a bag he brought out the odd little contrivance I’d seen before—a silver bell suspended from a wooden frame on a lattice of thin wires. With extreme care, elbows out wide, fingers clinically spread, he placed it on a butcher-block table in a shaft of moonlight, and stood back to consider it.

I could contain myself no longer. “George, what is that?”

He ran a hand distractedly through his mop of sandy hair. “PEWS. Psychic Early Warning System. New item from the Rotwell Institute. Half of these zinc wires are standard, and half have been coated with spider’s silk, which reacts with special sensitivity to ghostly emanations. The movement differential between them disturbs the balance of the central bar, which…” He glanced at me and shrugged. “It’s supposed to ring before the ghost appears, basically.”

“And does it work?”

“Can’t say. First time I’ve tried it.”