“Watch the candles.” It was the skull’s voice in my ear. “Watch their light.”
And sure enough, the candles were twitching, responding to a minute agitation of the air. I could feel the hairs on my arms rise, my breathing tighten. My ears hurt, as if I were descending in an elevator, too far, too fast. I closed my eyes and listened. From somewhere came a cry of mortal pain.
I opened my eyes. “George?”
An almighty bang. I jumped where I stood. The noise echoed up the staircase, was swallowed by the dark. I knew it had come from below, from the basement. The candle auras had stilled; they gleamed like the irises of sightless eyes.
“George?”
No answer. I cursed, drew my rapier, stepped out of the circle into the freezing dark. I crossed to the banister, and looked down.
Two flights below, something was coming up the stairs. I could see dark smears appearing on the steps. Whatever made them was invisible, but it moved slowly, spattering them as it went, extinguishing each candle as it passed.
Darkness in the basement; no red glow from George’s lantern. I gripped the banister, craned my head out to see if I could—
The last candle on the basement stairs died. Gleams of wetness appeared on the floorboards of the hall. Was that a cloudy hand gripping the banister for support…?
No—there were two hands, one some way behind the other. And now first one, and then the other, flowed suddenly forward, picking up speed, angling around to the flight that would bring them up to me.
“Lucy…” It was the voice from the jar. “I’d step over here sharpish, if I were you.”
Still I clutched at the rail. How cold it was, tearing at me through my gloves. It was so hard to think of moving. My limbs were far too heavy, my body somehow far away.
On the stairs, two racing, cloudy forms dragged darkness up behind them like a cloak. Fast as you could snap your fingers, the candlewicks they passed snuffed out.
“Bet Holly would have the wit to get back to safety,” the skull remarked.
Something needling jabbed inside me; indignation cut through ghost-lock. I shoved my body backward, threw myself across the landing. Tripping over the chains, I fell into the circle, on top of my bags, and sprawled there as two shapes erupted past me.
They moved in utter silence, pale other-light flowing off them in swirling ribbons. The first, so small and fragile, the cloudy imprint of a child. How thin the body was, how slight the shoulders! You couldn’t see any details. It was only as solid as a candle flame, and the lower half tapered into nothing. The head was bowed; it thrust itself desperately forward, tiny hand trailing on the banister.
And now, pooling out of the darkness at its back—a second shape, luminous also, as if woven from the same substance as the first. But larger, much larger, a bulky adult form, and the other-light streamed around it more darkly. Again, no sense of the face or appearance, only of a great arm reaching out, a bull head swinging to and fro.
The child’s form passed by, darting up the next flight with the pursuer closely following, and away they climbed toward the third floor. Out went the candles above me, quick as blinking. Cold followed in their slipstream and with it, sound: a thin sucking movement of dead air. They were gone. I waited, hunched forward on my knees, teeth clenched, lips bared. Still the cold deepened; and now, from high in the house, came a final dreadful screaming. Something fell past me. I sensed its bulk, I heard the rush of air beyond the banister, and tensed, waiting….But there was no sound of impact from below.
It was only then I saw the black, wet marks that defaced the boards beyond the chains. The straggling stains of bloody, running feet.
I was still there, crouching, staring at them, a minute or two later, as the temperature grew warm, the scent of smoke and candle wax trailed into the circle, and I heard the calm voice of Lockwood calling from above to say that the manifestation was over.
The footprints lingered for one hour and seventeen minutes. George timed it on his watch. They were formed of a thin black ectoplasmic substance that radiated extreme cold. When Lockwood touched one with the point of his rapier, it steamed and spat fiercely, sending snakes of black vapor coiling up the silver blade. It was an interesting phenomenon. George mapped them; I made sketches of some of the clearer prints, the ones that weren’t too faint, or too awash with blood.
“They’re small feet,” Lockwood said. “Not tiny, like a young child’s, but pretty slim and slender. Must be Little Tom’s, not Robert Cooke’s.”
“We should measure them, really,” I said. “But I don’t want to get too close.”
“Good point, Luce.” He wore gloves, and had pulled a dark blue scarf out of his bag, his only concession to the chill on the stairs. “I guess we could do a comparison….Who’s got the smallest feet among us?”
“Holly has,” George said, without looking up. “No question.”
I spoke through gritted teeth. “She’s not even here.”
Lockwood nodded. “You’re right, George. They are petite, aren’t they? I bet they’re about that size. We should measure Holly’s feet tomorrow.”
“On it.”
“Of rather more importance,” I said tartly, “is where to look for the Source of all this. Where do we think Little Tom died?”
In the ordinary way, the best place to look for a Source is near where the death took place, but this manifestation presented problems in that regard. Even our surveillance hadn’t helped much. The servant had first been stabbed in the basement, and the haunting had certainly begun there, with a sudden ferocious blast of energy that sent George flying in his circle and his lantern crashing against the wall. He hadn’t seen the two figures, as I had. Lockwood, waiting at the top of the house, had glimpsed them briefly. As they reached the attic, the shapes—moving fast—had seemed to merge. Then there’d been the deafening scream—then nothing. But I’d heard something falling through the air.
“If Cooke pushed Tom off,” George said, “as Lucy reckons, he would have died when he hit the basement floor.”
“Unless he was already dead from his wounds,” I said. “Poor little guy.”
“So the Source could be at the top or the bottom,” Lockwood said. “We’ll look tomorrow. And let’s have less of the ‘poor little guy,’ please, Lucy. Whatever he was in life, Tom’s ghost is part of this dangerous haunting. Think of what happened to the night-watch kids.”
“I am thinking of them,” I said. “And what I’m also thinking of, Lockwood, is that horrible monster chasing the child. Cooke’s ghost. That’s the evil driving this. That’s what we need to tackle.”
Lockwood shook his head. “Actually, we don’t really know one way or the other. We’ve got to be careful with all Visitors. I don’t care if a ghost’s friendly, or needy, or just wants a big cuddle. We keep it at a safe distance. All the big agencies follow that policy, Holly says.”
I didn’t intend to be angry. Basically I knew that Lockwood was right. But my emotions felt stretched right then; it had been a long night—and, back at Portland Row, a long few days. “This ghost is a lad being chased to his death!” I snapped. “I saw him as he passed; he was running for his life. Don’t shrug at me like that! He was so desperate. We’ve got to feel sympathy for him.”
That was a mistake—I knew it at once.
A light in Lockwood’s eyes flicked out. His voice was cold. “Lucy, I don’t have sympathy for any of them.”
Which, let’s face it, was a bit of a conversation killer. The argument stopped there. Because, like the closed door on our landing, the circumstances of our leader’s past were both un-ignorable and impossible to tackle. His sister had died by ghost-touch. His sister. When that subject came up, there wasn’t really anything more to say. So I dutifully shut my mouth and hung around with the others, until, at around one thirty-four in the morning (George timed it), the plasmic footprints grew faint, then softly luminous, then faded clean away. Those footprints had the right idea. We more or less did the same.