“No, not at all,” I said. Why should I mind? It was just like her to assume I had some problem with it. I gestured at her outfit. “Is this wise, though? What experience in fieldwork have you had?”

“I went out on plenty of assignments at Rotwell’s,” she said. “In fact, when I started out, I got my First and Second Grade certificates, and afterward did rapier training so that—”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you should know that this visitation isn’t a Type One or anything. It’s much more formidable than that.”

Holly Munro pushed a stray hair or two behind her ear. “Well, I’ve seen some things. I was there in the Holland Park Cellar case, when our party got blockaded underground by those seven spectral dogs. It was quite a tight spot. And after that—”

“I heard about Holland Park, Holly, and I can tell you the thing that makes the bloody footprints is ten times worse. I’m only saying. I don’t want to frighten you. I just wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

Her bland smile flickered. “I can only do my best.”

“I just hope it’ll be enough,” I said.

Lockwood came out of the living room, stepped between us, and swung his overcoat down off the rack. “Everyone happy?” he said. “Great. I’ve left a note for George. Jake should be here with the taxi any minute, so let’s get the equipment outside. Are those bags yours, Holly? Please—don’t bother yourself. Let me.”

Fifty-four Hanover Square was no more and no less welcoming than the day before. Dull shafts beamed down from the skylight high above, illuminating odd corners of the staircase, facets of wood, worn steps, random portions of the wall. I listened, as I always do when I enter such a house, but it was hard to hear with all Holly and Lockwood’s twittering: he softly explaining the locations of our previous vigil, she asking endless questions and laughing at his remarks. I tried to block it out, and simultaneously stifle the annoyance that twisted deeper in my chest. Annoyance had to be avoided, along with other negative feelings. Bad things happened to agents who didn’t keep their emotions under control.

I consoled myself with the thought that we’d soon be too busy trying to stay alive to worry about any of that. Plus, George would turn up, and the dynamics would change.

But George didn’t show.

We got on with it anyway, hunting for possible Sources, first in the basement, then in the attic. The basement I disliked intensely: two people, to my certain knowledge, had fallen to their deaths there. The kitchen itself, separated by a kind of arch from the bottom of the stairwell, was modern and inoffensive enough, but the tiled area made my skin prickle and our thermometers drop. We probed the tiles with penknives and tested the risers of the stairs, but found no hidden cavity where a relic of the original tragedy might be found. I tested the walls for hollow spaces; Lockwood got down on his hands and knees and crawled inside the little closets that had been built beneath the staircase itself, exploring them minutely with his flashlight. We found nothing. Holly Munro discovered a nearby storeroom containing a lot of old black furniture, but on inspection we thought it early twentieth century rather than Victorian.

“It’s possible that the tiles themselves are the Source,” I said, “if that’s where the final act of the tragedy played out. We could lay a chain net here and see if the haunting still takes place.”

Lockwood rubbed dust off his trousers. “Good idea. But first, we’ll search the attic.”

In some ways the top of the stairs mirrored the bottom: the actual area of interest was very small indeed. The servants’ rooms lay beyond a paneled corridor and didn’t have much to do with the tiny attic landing, which was little more than a set of polished floorboards, perhaps twelve feet square, bounded on one side by the final neat elm balustrade. Wan blue sky showed through the skylight. As I’d done the day before, I looked over the banister and saw the stairs’ great flattened spiral corkscrewing smoothly down through the gray interior of the house, around and around, deeper and deeper, all the way to where shadows enfolded it in the basement four floors below.

It was a terrible drop. Poor Little Tom, to have fallen there.

If anything, the attic was even less fruitful than the basement had been. We found a cold spot, and a loose floorboard, which got Lockwood excited, but when we pried it up we found nothing but dust. A few spiders scuttled out, which might have meant something. There were no dried bloodstains, no dropped knives, no sinister fragments of clothing; and the rest of the landing was bare.

“Just a thought,” Holly Munro said, “but might the staircase itself be the Source? If the boy bled all over it, if the terror he felt as he ran up it was still fused into the wood…”

“…the whole thing could be the channel to the Other Side,” Lockwood said. He whistled. “It’s possible. Not sure how that’s going to go down with our client, if we tell her she needs to rip her precious staircase out.”

“I’ve never heard of a Source that big,” I said.

Lockwood was staring up at the sky beyond the glass; it was like a slab of uncooked bacon now—gray and pink, laced with pale striations. “There have been cases. George would know….I wish he’d hurry up. You said he only had a couple of journals to look through.” He checked his watch, came to a snap decision. “All right, we need to get cracking. We’ll lay out chain nets in the basement, like you suggested, and on the landing here. If that stops the haunting, all well and good; if not, we’ll think again. I want us to observe as we did yesterday, and not engage. I’ll take the basement this time, see if I spot anything different. Lucy, you can watch up here. Otherwise candles, defenses, everything as before.”

“What can I do?” Holly Munro asked.

I smiled at her, leaned against the banister. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m really parched. Could you get the kettle on, do you think, Holly? And, if you can stretch to it, I’ll have a couple of biscuits, too. Thanks so much.”

Our assistant, after only the most minuscule hesitation, nodded. “Certainly, Lucy.” Smiling her compliant smile, she pattered down the stairs.

“She’s good,” I said. “I’m glad you brought her.”

Lockwood was watching me. “You need to be a bit more generous. She doesn’t have to be here tonight.”

“I’m just worried for her sake,” I said. “You felt the energy of the apparitions last night. She’s a novice at this. Look—she doesn’t even know how to attach a rapier to her belt. She nearly tripped over it then.” I allowed myself the smallest grin, saw Lockwood’s gaze on me, and looked away.

“Well, you needn’t worry too much,” he said slowly, “because I’ll keep an eye on her. She can stand beside me in my circle. That’ll keep her safe. You’ll be all right, I know. So get your chains set up now. I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes.” And with that he was off, spiraling away down the stairs, his long coat drifting—and me watching him go, hot-eyed.

Nothing in the next few hours contributed much toward improving my mood. The house went dark, and our lines of snuff-lights bloomed into soft, pale life, marking the route for our ghosts. We ate, rested, checked our supplies. George didn’t turn up. This was perplexing; we worried that events in the containment zone had somehow spilled over to delay him. Certainly, I missed his company, as Lockwood remained distinctly chilly toward me over sandwiches and biscuits. Holly’s presence unsettled me. She was at once submissive and assertive, her inexperience overlapping with her smooth self-confidence. Both these aspects, in different ways, contrived to snare Lockwood’s attention. It left me out on a limb, feeling awkward and exposed.

Lockwood had laid out a silver chain net on the basement tiles with, a little way off, a loop of iron chains. True to his word it was a capacious one, just right for two. As night set in, he and Holly retired to it, still chatting softly, while I had to trudge off to my lonely vigil at the other end of the stairs. Part of me knew I was being unreasonable. Nothing Lockwood was doing was essentially wrong. But the rightful pattern of events—of him and me working side by side—had been disrupted, and my disapproval chafed at my belly, as if I’d swallowed a bucketful of sharp stones.

Up on the attic landing, I sat inside my iron chains, between two shuttered lanterns, with my rapier set out in front of me like a dessert fork at a table. A chain net lay close by, in the center of the floor. I got out a book. I’d known I was in for a long wait, so this time I’d brought something to keep me occupied. It was a battered paperback thriller from Lockwood’s shelves. Perhaps it had once belonged to Jessica, or to his parents, Celia and Donald Lockwood, the eminent psychic researchers, who had died in some tragic incident long ago….

Anger surged through me. I shut the covers with a snap. In thirty seconds that single bald paragraph in the Archives had told me more than Lockwood had managed to in all the months I’d lived with him! The names of his parents! The circumstances of his sister’s death! It would have been funny if it weren’t so pathetic! What was he scared of? He seemed quite incapable of properly opening up, of giving me the trust that I deserved. Oh sure, he was charming enough, when he wanted to be. But it meant nothing. You could see it in his behavior now, the ease with which he mollycoddled his new assistant, while turning his back on me.

They were probably still chatting down in the darkness, side by side. Me, I had no one. I didn’t have George. Heck, I didn’t even have the skull (since Holly was unaware of my connection with it, we couldn’t easily bring it along this time). There was nobody here to talk to. I was entirely alone….

I shook the self-pity away. No, I was being stupid. Lockwood’s behavior didn’t mean anything. I turned the lantern up a notch and opened the book.

I didn’t care.

Even so, black thoughts lingered over me as I began to read.

And so the night progressed, following its familiar pattern. Across long hours, the atmosphere of the house declined, insensibly, like a noble family brought low, down the generations, to a state of inbred madness and decay. The air grew cold and clammy, bringing hints of foul sensations.

Everything was happening exactly as before.

I kept my head down, chewed gum, turned the pages of the book.

Midnight came. Doors opened between worlds. Presences arrived.

I waited. Only when the crash in the basement told me Lockwood’s lantern had blown over did I pick up my sword and get to my feet.

Silence rose through the building, pouring up over the stairwell, blanking everything out. I waited for what I knew was coming, rushing toward me up the stairs.

Waited…

Out went the candles on the flights below me. Out, out, out, out…one after the other, fast as you can blink. And up swept the shapes, just as before, the frail lad stumbling, and the monstrous hulk behind him, hand grasping for his flowing hair. This time I heard them as they came: the wrenching rasps of the pursuer, the despairing panting of the doomed boy. Up to the top; and here he was, framed for an instant in my sight: a lad no older than Lockwood, with a beautiful, bone-white face and lips drawn back in terror. I felt—in that moment—as if his eyes met mine, as if he looked out beyond the hideous replay of the chase and saw me. Then he was gone. The brutish shape behind fell on him as they reached the banister; bright streams of other-light enveloped them in the moment of their final struggle. A thrust, a scream that pierced my heart, and the landing went pitch-black. From further down came crashes, the splintering of wood as something hit an intervening level—then a sickening impact far below.

I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the sweat off my face. I was cold and shaking, sick with pity. I flicked the lanterns high—and stopped, looking at the floor.

There were bloodstained footprints all around my circle. Not over by the silver net, but close beside the chains. Thick and bloody, and overlapping, like someone was pacing there. Desperate to get in. Desperate for a connection….

When I closed my eyes, I still saw that poor pale face.

“I think it’s in the basement.” Lockwood spoke quite matter-of-factly; he seemed as calm and unmoved as ever. “I saw the figure hit the ground—not where my net was, in the middle of the tiles, but over by the wall where the arch leads to the kitchens. I don’t think we checked there. That’s where the Source must be. I’ll dig around.”

We’d rendezvoused in the room of paintings, where Lockwood had made us all a reviving cup of tea. Holly Munro looked like she needed it. Her customary smile was gone; her face was strained. “It was horrible,” she said. “From beginning to end. Quite horrible.”

I leaned against the table with my cup. “You saw something, eh?”

“It wasn’t what I saw; it’s what I felt. The presence of the thing.” She shuddered.

“Yeah, it gets you that way,” I said, “the first few times. What do you want me to do, Lockwood?” I didn’t look directly at him.

“Even if I don’t find anything downstairs, I’ll soak the area with salt solution, and lace it with iron. That should be enough, but I’d like you to salt-wash the attic landing too, please, Luce, just to be on the safe side. If I find the Source, all well and good. Otherwise we’ll treat the whole staircase the same way. You can stay here, Holly. You look exhausted.”

“I’ll do my share,” Holly said. Her voice was all weak and quavering. She made it sound like it was a big deal, like she had only one leg and we were making her dance a hornpipe up the stairs.

I rolled my eyes, drained my drink, and went off to get the job done.

On the attic landing I kicked my circle of chains to one side, got out my water bottle and a canister of salt, and began mixing some solution in a plastic bowl from one of my bags. Perhaps I stirred it harder than was strictly necessary. Some slopped over the sides and landed on one of the bloody marks, which fizzed and bubbled like soup on a hot stove. I found a cloth wipe, carried the bowl over to the head of the stairs. Then I got on my knees and, slapping the cloth around angrily, began wetting the floor.

Trouble was, this was Lockwood’s solution to every haunting. Eradicate the ghost. Don’t engage with it. Destroy it. Cooke’s ghost was dangerous, yes. We had to stamp it out. But that meant Little Tom had to go as well, without a second thought. I could talk to the foul skull in the jar till I was blue in the face, because it was safely constrained, but Lockwood would never let me try the same techniques in the field. It was such a waste.

I understood why he was so hard-line about it. Or did I, quite? Her younger brother was unable to stop the attack….Was it still grief that affected him? Or a deeper guilt?

I sat back on my heels and wiped my hair out of my eyes. It was then I noticed that the bloody footprints had vanished. All across the landing, at the head of the stairs, the boards were clean once more. I checked my watch. Yesterday it had taken more than fifty minutes longer for them to go. That was a clear shift in the pattern of the haunting. I listened, newly alert. And now, as I sat there, I felt a pricking in my fingers, and cold air gently brushing my face. And noises, too. Something breathing—