I listened for a moment before starting up the stairs. Nothing. Candle in my left hand, pistol in my right, and stairway so narrow that my elbows on each arm brushed the walls, I moved quietly up the steps.

Halfway between the ground floor and first floor, I paused to light the first wall candle.

There was no candle there, although one of our parlourmaid’s daughter’s jobs was to replace them regularly. Leaning closer, I could see scratches and gouges on the firmly fixed old sconce, as if something had ripped the half-burned candle there out with claws. Or with teeth.

I paused to listen again. The softest of scuttling sounds came from somewhere above me.

The woman with green skin and tusked teeth had never made a loud sound before, I realised. She had always glided up and down stairs, towards or away from me, as if her bare feet barely touched the steps.

But that had been in my other houses. This servants’ stairway may have had more resonance for such malign spirits.

How had Shernwold died? She had fallen down these very steps and broken her neck, but why had she been in the servants’ staircase?

Investigating the sounds of rats?

And why had she fallen?

The candles missing from their sconces as if eaten?

I continued up to the first storey, paused in front of that doorway a moment—the doors were old and thick, and no sound came through, but there was a reassuring sliver of light at the bottom—and then I went on up the stairs.

The second candle was also missing from its sconce.

Something scuttled and scraped most audibly from not too far above me now.

“Hallo?” I called softly. I confess to feeling some sense of real power as I extended the pistol. If the woman with green skin had been corporeal enough to leave scratches on my neck—and she had—then she was corporeal enough to feel the effects of one of these bullets. Or several of them.

How many bullets were in the cylinder?

Nine, I remembered from that day Detective Hatchery had pressed the pistol into my hand, telling me as I went down to King Lazaree’s den that I should have something to defend myself from the rats. I even remembered what he had said about the calibre.…

“They’re forty-two calibre, sir. Nine should be more than sufficient for your average rat… four-legged or two-legged, as the case may be.”

I stifled the giggle that rose in my throat now.

At the second-storey door, the staircase behind and beneath me, only dimly illuminated by my flickering candle, seemed so steep as to be vertical. It—and perhaps lack of breakfast and the after-effects of my three glasses of morning laudanum—gave me a sense of vertigo.

Something sounding far too much like claws on plaster or wood scrabbled above me.

“Show yourself!” I cried into the darkness. I confess that this was mere bravado, a hope that George, Caroline, Besse, and the girl, Agnes, might hear me. But they were, presumably, two storeys below me now. And the doors were very thick.

I began climbing even more slowly, the pistol directly in front of me and swinging from side to side like an absurdly heavy weather vane in variable winds.

The scrabbling was not only louder now, but it seemed to have a direction. I could not tell if it came from the third-storey landing, where the staircase turned back in the opposite direction, or from somewhere between me and that landing. I made a mental note to have at least one window set into the thick brick-and-masonry outer wall there at the landing if no place else.

I took three more steps.

I cannot tell you, Dear Reader, from where the apparition of my woman with green skin and yellow tusk-teeth had originally come from, only that she had been with me since my early childhood. I remember her entering our nursery when Charles was sleeping. I remember seeing her in the attic of my father’s house when I had been so imprudent as to explore that dark and cobwebbed space when I was nine or ten years of age.

They say that familiarity breeds freedom from fear, but that is not quite the case. The green-skinned wench—her face was not of any living woman I had ever known, although I sometimes thought that she reminded me a bit of the first governess Charley and I had ever had—gave me the shudders every time I encountered her, but I knew from experience that I could fight her off when she lunged at me.

But no one else has ever heard her before. She’s never made a sound before.

I took another three steps towards the third-storey landing and stopped.

The scraping and scurrying were much louder now. The sound seemed very close above me, although now the pale circumference of candlelight extended almost to the landing itself. But it was very loud and—I understood George’s fear now—very ratlike indeed. Scrabble-scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble scrabble scrape. Silence. Scrabble scrabble.

“I have a surprise for you,” I said, cocking the massive pistol one-handedly with some difficulty. I remembered Hatchery saying that the large bottom barrel was a sort of shotgun. I wished now that he’d given me shells for it.

Two more steps up and I could see the landing. It was empty.

The scrabbling came again. It seemed to be above and even behind me.

I raised the candle over my head and peered straight up.

The scrabbling had turned to wild screaming and I stood there, frozen, listening to the screaming for a full minute or more before realising that it was coming from me.

Turning to flee, I pounded down the stairs, reached the second- storey door, shook it while screaming, looked up over my shoulder, screamed again. I fired the pistol at least twice, knowing that it would do no good. It did not. Running and clattering down the stairs again—the first-storey door also locked from the other side—I screamed as something moist and foul dripped from… from above… and then I was hurtling down the stairway again, ricocheting from wall to wall. I dropped the candle and it went out. Something brushed my hair from above, curled along the back of my neck. Whirling in the absolute darkness, I fired the revolver twice more, tripped, fell headfirst down the last dozen steps.

I do not know to this day how I managed not to lose the pistol or shoot myself with it. Screaming more loudly now, I lay in a heap at the bottom of the steps and pounded at the ground-floor door.

Something strong and thin and very long wrapped itself around my right boot and ripped it off my foot. If I had buckled the boot properly before coming in, I would have been dragged back up the staircase with it.

Screaming again, I fired a final shot up into the darkness, tore open the door, and—blinded by the light—fell forward onto the long boards of the kitchen floor. Flailing wildly with both feet, I kicked the heavy door shut behind me.

George ran in despite my earlier commands for no one to be in the room. I could see Caroline’s and the other two female faces staring white and round and open-mouthed from the doorway to the hall.

I almost pulled George down to the floor as I fiercely grabbed his lapel and whispered wildly to him, “Lock it! Lock the door! Lock it! Now!”

George did so, throwing the totally inadequate tiny bolt home. There was no sound from the other side. My panting and gasping seemed to fill the kitchen.

Getting to my knees and then to my feet, the pistol still raised and cocked, I pulled George back tight against me and hissed in his ear, “Get as much lumber as you need and as many men as you need. I want all the staircase doors nailed shut and then boarded over within the half hour. Do you understand? Do… you… understand?”

George nodded, pulled himself free from my grip, and ran out to get what he needed.

I backed out of the kitchen, never taking my eyes from the far-too-frail door to the stairway.