The Screaming Staircase

Annabel’s necklace is a multilayered symbol and plot device. It represents all Sources and emphasizes the spiritual connection between the living and the dead. More specifically, it symbolizes Annabel’s ties to the man who killed her. Lucy intuitively realizes this truth upon hearing the spirits’ voices and feeling Annabel’s cold death, and she knows that she must bear the burden of the necklace until Annabel’s murder is solved. She carries Annabel’s Source around her neck, and in doing so, she begins to form a spiritual bond with Annabel: a trust that gives her the confidence to release Annabel and allow her to exact revenge upon Fairfax. Accordingly, the necklace itself reacts to Annabel’s emotions, which Lucy then feels: “The locket was blisteringly cold; so cold it burned my skin” (356). In a broader sense, the necklace is also a source of mystery, suspense, and intrigue, as well as a driving force of the plot itself, for it contains many surprises and clues that Lockwood and the others slowly uncover. These include the necklace as the Source, the Latin inscription on the locket, and the code inscribed within it. Each element acts as a piece of the puzzle that leads the trio closer to solving the mystery of Annabel’s death.

35 Portland Row is the home that Lockwood inherited and grew up in. It belonged to his parents, is a formidable labyrinth of rooms and artifacts, and acts as both a house and a business headquarters. Stroud spends considerable time taking Lucy and the reader on a tour through 35 Portland Row and makes it known in his foreword how precious the creation of this house of the macabre is to him personally. Stroud states, “It was an extraordinary feeling to visit the house on set in Ealing Studios, to walk up the steps, cross the iron line, and step straight into Lockwood’s hall” (ix), thus gaining the unique experience of visiting a physical manifestation of a place he originally imagined, thanks in part to the inevitable interplay between the novels and the movies and shows that are born from them. Within the more modest scope of the written novel, the Lockwood home becomes the setting for much of the characters’ growth and the building of their friendship. It also acts as a physical extension of Lockwood’s enigmatic personality, as it represents his family history in the realm of the occult, his fascination with the darker things in life, and a fort of safety and solace against the dangers of the outside world. It is also at 35 Portland Row that Lucy finally finds a home and a place to belong.

Iron is both a symbol of protection and an homage to the trappings of classic Victorian ghost stories. The traditional lore of ghosts imprisoned by the mistakes they made in life by iron chains is commonly known, and in his novel, Stroud twists this cliché around and turns iron into a formidable tool of protection. The children make use of iron shavings and iron chains, and most houses are fitted with iron barriers in the doors and windows. In an early attempt to emphasize the vital importance of the metal, Stroud shows Lockwood’s disastrous error of forgetting the iron chains on the night of the Hope investigation to be nearly fatal to the main characters. Later, at Combe Carey Hall, the spirits that haunt the mansion prove the immensity of their combined strength by overcoming the iron barrier around the children and bleeding sticky plasma onto them. In yet another (more practical) manifestation of iron’s importance in Stroud’s dystopian world, Mr. Fairfax, the owner of Fairfax iron, is extraordinarily wealthy thanks to profiting from the urgent need for iron that followed the onset of the ghost plague. Thus, he uses an iron cane, and when he finds the children at the end of their mission, he is clad in an iron helmet and chainmail.