Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase

Thirty-five Portland Row, the building that would function as both home and headquarters for the operatives of Lockwood & Co., was an unexpected sort of place. Appearing squat and squarish from the street, it was actually positioned at the top of a slight slope, so that its rear elevation jutted out high over a jumble of brick-walled gardens. It had four floors, which ranged from tiny (the attic) to sprawling (the basement). Technically the upper three levels were our living space, while the basement contained the office; in fact, such divisions seemed rather blurred. The living areas, for instance, had all sorts of hidden doors that opened onto weapons racks, or swung out to become dart-boards, or spare beds, or giant maps of London festooned with coloured pins. Meanwhile the basement itself doubled as a scullery, which meant you’d be practising Wessex half-turns in the rapier room with a row of socks hanging from a clothes line beside your head, or filling canisters from the salt box with the washing machine rumbling loudly in your ear.

I liked it all immediately, though it puzzled me as well. It was a large house, filled with expensive, grown-up things, and yet there were no adults present anywhere. Just Anthony Lockwood and his associate, George. And now me.

On the first afternoon, Lockwood took me for a tour. He showed me the attic first, low-slung beneath steep eaves. It contained two rooms: a minuscule washroom, in which sink, shower and toilet practically overlapped; and a pretty attic bedroom, just big enough for a single bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers. Opposite the bed, an arched gable window looked out over Portland Row as far as the ghost-lamp on the corner.

‘This is where I slept when I was little,’ Lockwood said. ‘It hasn’t been occupied for years; the last assistant, God rest him, chose to live out. You can use it, if you like.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’d be pleased to.’

‘I know the bathroom’s small, but at least it’s your own. There’s a bigger one downstairs, but that’d mean sharing towels with George.’

‘Oh, I think I’ll be fine here.’

We left the attic, trooped down the narrow stairs. The landing below was dark and sombre, with a circular golden rug in the centre of the floorboards. Bookshelves in a corner were crammed with a random mix of paperbacks: battered copies of the Fittes Yearbook and Mottram’s Psychical Theories, an assortment of cheap novels – mostly pulp thrillers and detective fiction – and serious works on religion and philosophy. As in the hall and living room below, various ethnic artefacts decorated the wall – including some kind of rattle seemingly made from human bones.

Lockwood caught me staring at it. ‘That’s a Polynesian ghost-chaser,’ he said. ‘Nineteenth century. Supposed to drive away spirits with its raucous sound.’

‘Does it work?’

‘No idea. I’ve not tried it yet. Might be worth a go.’ He pointed to a door alongside. ‘That’s the bathroom, if you need it. This one’s my room, and that’s George’s. I’d tread with caution there. I once walked in on him doing yoga in the nude.’

With difficulty, I drove the image from my mind. ‘So this was your house, as a kid?’

‘Well, it belonged to my parents then. It’s mine now. And yours, of course, for as long as you work here.’

‘Thanks. Tell me, did your parents—’

‘I’ll show you the kitchen now,’ Lockwood said. ‘I think George is making dinner.’ He started down the stairs.

‘What’s through there?’ I asked suddenly. There was one door he hadn’t mentioned: no different from the others, set close beside his own.

He smiled. ‘That’s private, if you don’t mind. Don’t worry, it’s not very interesting. Come on! There’s still lots to see down here.’

The ground floor – comprising sitting room, library and kitchen – was clearly the heart of the house, and the kitchen was where we would spend most time. It would be the place we’d assemble for pre-expedition tea and sandwiches; also where we’d gather for a fry-up late the morning after. Its appearance reflected this fusion of work and leisure. The surfaces had all the usual domestic clutter – biscuit tins, fruit bowls, packets of crisps – but also bags of salt and iron, carefully weighed and ready to go. There were rapiers propped behind the bins and plasm-stained workboots soaking in a bucket. Oddest of all was the kitchen table and its great white tablecloth. This cloth was half covered with a spreading net of scribbled notes, diagrams, and also drawings of several Visitor sub-types – Wraiths, Solitaries and Shades.

‘We call this our thinking cloth,’ Lockwood said. ‘It’s not widely known, but I located the bones of the Fenchurch Street Ghoul by sketching out the street-plan here, over tea and cheese on toast at four o’clock in the morning. The cloth lets us jot down memos, theories, follow interesting trains of thought . . . It’s a very useful tool.’

‘It’s also good for exchanging rude messages when a case hasn’t gone well and we’re not talking to each other,’ George said. He stood by the cooker, tending the evening stew.

‘Er, does that happen often?’ I asked.

‘No, no, no,’ Lockwood said. ‘Almost never.’

George stirred the stew implacably. ‘You wait and see.’

Lockwood clapped his hands together. ‘Good. Have I shown you the office yet? You’ll never guess where the entrance is. Look – it’s over here.’

It turned out that the basement offices of Lockwood & Co. were reached directly from the kitchen. It wasn’t exactly a secret door – the handle was in plain view – but from the outside it looked like nothing more than an ordinary closet. It had precisely the same size, colour and handle shape as all the other kitchen units set around the walls. When you opened it, however, a little light came on, revealing a set of spiral stairs curling steeply down.

At the bottom of the iron stairs lay a string of open, bare-brick rooms, separated by arches and pillars and stretches of plastered wall. They were lit by a large window looking onto the overgrown yard at the front of the house, and by angled skylights set into the ground along the side. The largest area contained three desks, a filing cabinet, two tatty green armchairs and a rather wonky bookshelf that Lockwood had assembled to hold his paperwork. A big black ledger sat resplendent on the central desk.

‘Our casebook,’ Lockwood said. ‘It’s got a history of everything we investigate. George compiles it and cross-references everything with the files up there.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘He likes that sort of thing. Personally I take each assignment as it comes.’

I glanced at the box-files on the shelf. Each one had been neatly labelled by type and sub-type: Type One: Shades; Type One: Lurkers; Type Two: Poltergeists; Type Two: Phantasms – and all the rest. At the end of the row was a thin file marked Type Threes. I stared at this.

‘Have you actually encountered a Type Three?’ I asked.

Lockwood shrugged. ‘Hardly. I’m not even sure they exist.’

Through an arch off the main office was a side-room, completely empty except for a rack of rapiers, a bowl of chalk dust, and two straw-filled Visitor dummies hanging from a ceiling beam on iron chains. One of the dummies wore a bonnet, and the other a top hat. Both were full of holes.

‘Meet Joe and Esmeralda,’ Lockwood said. ‘They’re named after Lady Esmeralda and Floating Joe, two of the famous ghosts from Marissa Fittes’ Memoirs. Obviously this is the rapier room. We practise here every afternoon. Of course, you’ll be proficient with a sword already, if you’ve passed your Fourth Grade . . .’ He glanced at me.

I nodded. ‘Of course. Yes. Absolutely.’

‘. . . but it doesn’t hurt to keep in shape, does it? I look forward to seeing you in action. And over here’ – Lockwood led me to a padlocked metal door set into the wall – ‘is our high-security storeroom. Take a look inside.’

This store was the only separate portion of the basement – a small, windowless room filled with shelves and boxes. It was here that all the most essential equipment was kept – the range of silver seals, the iron chains, the flares and canisters ordered direct from the Sunrise Corporation. Right now, it was also where the ghost-jar, with its clamped brown skull and ectoplasmic host, was stored, concealed beneath its spotted cloth.

‘George gets it out to do experiments sometimes,’ Lockwood said. ‘He wants to observe how ghosts respond to different stimuli. Personally I’d rather he destroyed the thing, but he’s got attached to it, somehow.’

I eyed the cloth doubtfully. Just as during the interview, I thought I could almost hear a psychic noise, a delicate hum on the fringes of perception. ‘So . . . where did he get it from?’ I asked.

‘Oh, he stole it. I expect he’ll tell you about it sometime. But actually it’s not the only trophy we’ve got down here. Come and see.’

In the back wall of the basement a modern glass door, fortified with iron ghost-bars, led out into the garden. Alongside it, four shelves had been riveted to the brickwork: they housed a collection of silver-glass cases, with objects inside each one. Some of these were old, others very modern. I noticed, among them, a set of playing cards; a lock of long blonde hair; a lady’s bloodstained glove; three human teeth; a gentleman’s folded necktie. The most splendid case of all contained a mummified hand, black and shrivelled as a rotten banana, sitting on a red silk cushion.

‘That’s a pirate’s,’ Lockwood said. ‘Seventeen-hundreds, probably. Belonged to a fellow who was strung up and sun-dried on Execution Dock, where the Mouse and Musket Inn stands now. His spirit was a Lurker; he’d given the barmaids a lot of trouble by the time I dug that up. Well, this is all stuff George and I have collected over our careers so far. Some are actual Sources, and very dangerous: they’ve got to be kept locked up, particularly at night. Others just need to be treated with caution – if you’re a Sensitive – like the three I gave you in the interview.’

I’d seen them on the bottom shelf: the knife, the ribbon, the unspeakable watch.

‘Yeah . . .’ I said. ‘You never told me what they were.’

Lockwood nodded. ‘I’m sorry the impressions you got were so gruelling, but I didn’t expect you to experience them so strongly. Well, the knife belonged to my uncle, who lived out in the country. He took it with him on walks and hunting expeditions. Had it with him when he dropped dead from a heart attack during a shoot. He was a kind man; from what you said the knife still had something of his personality.’

I thought back to the peaceful sensations I’d picked up from the knife. ‘It did.’

‘The ribbon came from a grave they opened in Kensal Green Cemetery, when they were building one of the iron barriers around the perimeter last year. Coffin had a woman in it – and a little child. The ribbon was in the woman’s hair.’

The memory of my feelings as I’d held the slip of silk returned; my eyes filled with tears. I cleared my throat and made a big business of studying the nearest boxes. It wouldn’t do to show weakness to Lockwood. Frailty was what Visitors fed on; frailty and loose emotions. Good agents needed the opposite: firm control and strength of nerve. My old leader Jacobs had lost his nerve. And what had happened? I had nearly died.

I spoke in a cool, matter-of-fact voice. ‘And the watch?’

Lockwood had been observing me closely. ‘Yes . . . the watch. You were right to sense its sinister residue. It’s actually a memento of my first successful case.’ He paused significantly. ‘No doubt you’ve heard of the murderer Harry Crisp?’

My eyes grew round. ‘Not the coin-in-the-slot killer?’

‘Er, no. That was Clive Dilson.’

‘Oh! You mean the one who kept heads in the fridge?’

‘No . . . that was Colin Buchanan-Prescott.’

I scratched my chin. ‘In that case, I’ve never heard of him.’

‘Oh.’ Lockwood seemed slightly deflated. ‘I’m a little surprised. Do they have papers in the north of England? Well, it was thanks to me that Harry Crisp got put away. I was doing a sweep of the neighbourhood in Tooting, out hunting Type Twos, you see, and I noticed all the death-glows in his garden. They’d been missed because he’d cunningly scattered iron filings everywhere after the killings, to suppress the ghosts. And it turned out later that, while wearing that watch, it had been his beastly habit to lure—’

‘Dinner!’ George was leaning over the top of the spiral stairs, a ladle in his hand.

‘I’ll tell you about it another time,’ Lockwood said. ‘We’d better go. George gets tetchy if we let the food get cold.’

If I knew straight away that I liked the oddities of my new home, I soon formed opinions about my fellow agents too. And right from the outset these opinions diverged markedly. Lockwood, I already liked. He seemed a world away from the remote and treacherous Agent Jacobs; his zest and personal commitment were clear. Here was someone I felt I could follow; someone perhaps to trust.

But George Cubbins? No. He bothered me. I made heroic efforts not to get annoyed with him that first day, but it wasn’t humanly possible.

Take his appearance. There was something about it that acted as a trigger to one’s worst instincts. His face was uniquely slappable – a nun would have ached to punch him – while his backside cried out to heaven for a well-placed kick. He slouched, he slumped, he scuffed his way about the house like something soft about to melt. His shirt was always untucked, his trainers extra-big, the laces trailing. I’ve seen reanimated corpses with better deportment than George.

And that flop of hair! And those silly glasses! Everything about him irritated me.

He also had a particular trick of staring at me in a blank, expressionless sort of way that was somehow also rudely contemplative. It was like he was analysing all my faults, and simply wondering which I was going to display next. For my part I did my best to be polite during the first evening meal, and restrained my basic instincts, which were to hit him over the head with a spade.

Later that night, coming down from my bedroom, I lingered for a moment on the first-floor landing. I glanced through the bookshelves, inspected the Polynesian ghost-chaser . . . and suddenly found myself standing outside the other bedroom door, the one Lockwood had said was private. It was a very ordinary-looking door. There was a faint pale rectangle marked on the wood grain, just below head height, where a sign or sticker had been removed. Otherwise it was entirely blank. It didn’t seem to have a lock.

It would have been easy to peep inside, but clearly that would have been wrong. I was just regarding the door speculatively when George Cubbins emerged from his room, a folded newspaper under his arm. He glanced across. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but that’s the forbidden room.’

‘Oh – the door?’ I stepped away from it casually. ‘Yes . . . Why does he keep it shut?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have you ever looked in?’

‘No.’ The spectacles regarded me. ‘Course not. He asked me not to.’

‘Of course, of course. Quite right. So . . .’ I smiled as amiably as I could. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘About a year.’

‘So you obviously know Anthony well?’

The plump boy pushed his glasses briskly up his nose. ‘What is this? Another interview? It had better be a quickie. I’m on my way to the bathroom here.’

‘Sorry, yes. I was just wondering about the house and how he came to have it. I mean, it’s got all this stuff in it, and yet Lockwood’s here on his own. I mean, I don’t see how—’

‘What you mean,’ George interrupted, ‘is: where are the parents? Correct?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘He doesn’t like to talk about them – as you’ll find out, if you last long enough to ask him. I think they were psychical researchers of some kind: you can tell that from all the objects on the walls. They were rich too: you can tell that from the house. Anyway, they’re long gone. I believe Lockwood was in care for years with a relative of some kind. Then he trained as an agent with “Gravedigger” Sykes, and got the house back somehow.’ He adjusted his newspaper and marched across the landing. ‘No doubt you can use your psychic sensitivity to find out more.’

But I was frowning after him. ‘Into care? So does that mean his parents—’

‘One way or another, I should think it means they’re dead.’ And with that he closed the bathroom door.

Well, it isn’t hard to guess which colleague I favoured, as I lay awake that night under the attic eaves. On the one hand: Anthony Lockwood – vigorous and energetic, eager to throw himself into each new mystery; a boy who was clearly never happier than when walking into a haunted room, his hand resting lightly on his sword hilt. On the other: George Cubbins, handsome as a freshly opened tub of margarine, as charismatic as a wet tea towel lying scrumpled on the floor. I guessed he was never happier than when surrounded by dusty files and piled plates of food, and – since he was prickly with it, and seemed to find me irksome – I resolved to keep away from him as far as I could. But it already pleased me to think of walking into darkness with Lockwood at my side.