Jonathan Stroud - The Creeping Shadow

“You think it’s more sensitive than our own Talents?”

“I don’t know. Better than mine, maybe. Maybe not as good as yours.” His voice was flat. He turned away to survey the circle in the center of the room. “I think we should reinforce the defenses here. I don’t know why, I just do. Can you fetch me those chains over there?”

“Sure.” I did so. “George,” I said, “you know I’m very happy to be working alongside you all again.”

There was a silence. “Are you?” he said. “That surprises me.”

I set the chains down with a clatter. I didn’t look up. I could feel him gazing at me. “And why wouldn’t I be?”

He didn’t answer for a time, but knelt to adjust the chains, pulling them around to envelop the existing circle. He did so methodically, carefully, in that way he tackled every important task, creating a wall of double thickness. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s Holly.”

“Not you as well!” I let out an angry oath. “I keep telling everyone. I didn’t leave because of her . Didn’t you see us earlier? Didn’t you see us chatting at the café? We smiled and laughed and everything.”

“Just because you managed a fleeting conversation without strangling each other with your bare hands doesn’t make you bosom buddies,” George said. He took off his glasses and rubbed them thoughtfully on his sweater. “I think we’ll add some snuff-lights, too—got any handy?”

“In the plastic Mullet’s bag.” I found it, took some, threw the bag over to him. “We get along fine now, actually,” I said. “Holly and I get on like a house on fire.”

George nodded. “ Sure you do. As in savage destruction and widespread loss of life.” He tossed me a box of matches.

“ That ,” I said stiffly, “was before the Poltergeist. Afterward, we sorted things out.”

“The Poltergeist was you sorting things out,” George said, and in a way he was quite right. “You left because you got so mad at her.”

“No. I left because I lost control of my Talents,” I said. “Because I roused ghosts and endangered you all, and I couldn’t face doing it again.” I lit some candles and stood back. “Anyway, I’m here tonight.”

George’s face was expressionless. “Oh, yes. So you are. See how grateful I am.” He broke off and looked at me. “ Now what?”

I’d raised a hand for silence. Slow, heavy footsteps were passing overhead. With each impact the ceiling vibrated and the hanging light (it was a single naked bulb) jerked from side to side. I heard the creak of a door. Then silence.

I looked at George. “Hear any of that? See the light?”

“I caught it swinging. No sounds. What was it?”

“Footsteps. In the back bedroom. Think Kipps would be strolling around in there?”

“Not a chance. He’ll be safe in his circle.”

“That’s what I think, too. We should go upstairs and take a look.”

George made a nervous adjustment to his glasses. “Yes…we should.”

“So let’s go.”

We passed swiftly along the narrow hallway to the stairs, turned and went up, two steps at a time, until we came out onto the landing. Kipps, sitting with his rapier on his knees, raised his eyebrows as we passed him, but we didn’t stop. The corridor was quiet and dark; the door at the end was open, revealing a sliver of the back bedroom, softly contoured by the moonlight. We moved swiftly, silently toward it. Halfway along, I heard the clicking sound again. Click-click-click —three clicks, a pause, and then the same sound repeated. It was a crisp, pearly little noise, intimate and oddly familiar. It was impossible to tell where it came from.

I shone my flashlight into the bathroom as we passed. As the light moved across the wooden floor, I thought I saw someone lying in the bathtub. I jerked my hand up; the swell of shadow fell away, dropping in sync with the rising beam. No, it was empty, just a hollow space of dust and cobwebs. A trick of the mind and light.

George had moved past me, making for the bedroom. Suddenly he drew up short, grimacing in pain. “Ow! Ah!”

My rapier was in my hand; I was right by him. “What is it?”

“Stepped into a cold spot—just cut straight through me.” He scrabbled at his belt, stared at the thermometer. “Came and went in a flash…Ah, it really hurt….Now it’s gone.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. Just shocked me. Temp’s normal now.”

The bedroom was quiet, too, though one cupboard door seemed to have opened of its own accord since we’d last been in. Also, the clicking noise had stopped. Neither of us could detect anything out of the ordinary.

“Lockwood was right,” George said. “This thing’s playing tricks, most of them with sounds.” He looked back along the corridor, gave the watching Kipps a wave. “Don’t you have that foul skull with you? What’s it got to say for itself? It never used to be short of an opinion.”

“Hard to get anything out of it tonight,” I said. “It’s in a grump. It can’t believe I’m working with Lockwood and Co. again.”

“Jealous,” George said. “Acting like a jilted lover. It probably thought it had you all to itself. You’re the only thing that ties it to the living world. Well, we’ve all got our problems. Right, I’m going to put another PEWS in the lounge. You might want to encourage the skull to talk. This place gives me the creeps, and I haven’t the first clue what the Source could be.”

Nor did I. Nor did any of us, and the pressure of that ignorance weighed most heavily on me. Our vigil wore on; and steadily the repertoire of noises I experienced in that house began to multiply. I heard the footsteps several times more, always when I was downstairs, always echoing from the floor above. It was a peculiar, shuffling, slapping step, both abrupt and dragging, the kind that might be made by loose-fitting carpet slippers on a pair of swollen feet. Twice, once when I was in the basement and once in the living room, I heard a snatch of heavy, labored breathing, as if a very large person was struggling to move around. And once, when standing in the hallway, I heard behind me a soft, continuous rasping, as might have been caused by cloth, pressed against misshapen flesh, brushing along the wall. Any one of those would have been enough to unsettle me; taken together, and with none of the others hearing anything, they began to prey on my mind.

As haunted houses went, it was a noisy one. I understood why Penelope Fittes had wanted me there.

Penelope Fittes. Not Lockwood. Whenever I thought of that, annoyance speared through me. But these last few months I’d become good at damping down my annoyance in perilous places. And nowhere in this house was as perilous, it seemed to me, as the dowdy wood-and-mustard-colored kitchen. I wanted to survey it properly; connect with what had happened there. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it was the fastest way to get to the heart of the haunting. I would clear my mind, do the job, and go home.

Eleven thirty came; we rendezvoused in the living room again. For everyone else, it had been a quiet couple of hours, with nothing but low-level malaise and creeping fear to disturb their vigil. I recounted my experiences, and Lockwood again questioned me closely, probing to see if I was still calm. Again I reassured him. After that, people swapped roles: George went to the basement, Holly to the first floor. Lockwood would be the roving anchor, connecting everyone during the midnight hour. I returned to the kitchen.

As I entered, I thought I heard the briefest snatch of whistling, followed by the three rapid clicks. Then nothing.

“Skull?” I said. “Did you hear that?”