Read Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase for Free Online Page B

are already on the brink. So it was that I didn’t get much of a look inside the cavity before we toppled over together, arms locked, legs tangled, Lockwood above and me below, beyond the protection of the iron.
    But I’d seen enough. Enough to have the image seared upon my mind.
    She still had her blonde hair; that was the same, though so smirched with soot and dust, so choked up with cobwebs that it was impossible to tell where it finished or began. The rest was harder to recognize: a thing of bones, bared teeth and shrunken skin, dark and twisted as burned wood, and still propped snugly in the bed of bricks where it had rested maybe fifty years. The straps of the pretty summer dress hung loose upon the jutting bones. Orange-yellow sunflowers glinted dimly within a shroud of webs.
    I hit the floor. The back of my head struck wood and thedark was seared by light. Then Lockwood’s weight drove down onto me. My breath burst through my mouth.
    The brightness faded. My mind cleared, my eyes opened. I was lying on my back with the silver chain-net still clutched tightly in one hand. That was the good news.
    I’d also dropped my rapier again.
    Lockwood had already rolled off me and away. I rolled too, knelt back into a crouch, looked frantically for my blade.
    What did I see instead? A mess of iron filings, scattered by our fall. Lockwood kneeling, head down, hair flopped forward, struggling to pull his sword clear of his long, heavy greatcoat.
    And the ghost-girl, floating silently above him.
    ‘Lockwood!’ His head jerked up. His coat had got twisted tight beneath his knees, and was preventing access to his belt. He couldn’t free his sword in time.
    The girl dropped low, trailing wreaths of other-light. Long pale hands stretched out towards his face.
    I tore a canister from my belt and hurled it without a thought. It passed straight through the stooping shape and struck the wall behind. The glass tab broke; sheets of magnesium fire licked out and sliced across the girl, who vanished in billowing plumes of mist. Lockwood threw himself sideways, iron sparks flickering in his hair.
    Greek Fire’s good stuff, no question. The mix of iron, magnesium and salt hits your Visitor three ways at once.Red-hot iron and salt cut through its substance, while the searing light of the ignited magnesium causes it intolerable pain. But (and here’s the snag) even though it burns out fast, it has a tendency to set other things on fire as well. Which is why the Fittes Manual advises against its use indoors, except in controlled conditions.
    The present conditions involved a study filled with papers and a very vengeful Spectre. Would you call that even the slightest bit ‘controlled’?
    Not really.
    Something somewhere wailed with pain and fury. The wind in the study, which had perhaps died back a little, suddenly redoubled. Burning papers, ignited by the first surge from the canister, were plucked aloft, blown directly at my face. I batted them away, watched them whirl off, willed by something unseen. They blew in squalls across the room, landed on books and shelves, on desk and curtains, on curls of wallpaper, on bone-dry files and letters, on dusty cushions on the chair . . .
    Like stars at dusk, hundreds of little fires winked into being, one after the other, high, low and all around.
    Lockwood had risen to his feet, hair and coat both smoking. He flicked his coat aside. A flash of silver: the rapier was in his hand. His eyes were fixed past me on a shadowed corner of the room. Here, in the midst of whirling papers, a shape was starting to re-form.
    ‘Lucy!’ His voice was hard to make out against the howling wind. ‘Plan E! We follow Plan E!’
    Plan E? What the devil was Plan E? Lockwood had so many. And it was hard to think straight with every other stack of magazines going up in flames, and those flames leaping higher, and the way back to the landing suddenly blocked by smoke and flaring light.
    ‘Lockwood!’ I cried. ‘The