The Servants (8 page)

Mark took a couple of steps down the corridor. The soft creak of his feet on the broken floorboards grounded him. It was just an empty space, less frightening even than a London side street. Someone could suddenly appear from the other end of one of those, or from an alleyway you hadn’t seen. The only way into this place was through the door Mark had just shut behind him. It was safe. Very dirty, and strangesmelling, but safe. He was all alone, and could explore.

He was just about to take another step when something caught his eye. He peered more closely at the narrow door to the butler’s pantry. It was hanging open, just a little. Hadn’t she shut it, when they’d been in here the other day?

Yes, he thought so—to show him where the wax had been, the way they sealed it in the old days. So . . . why would it be open now? It could be that the floor wasn’t level, and the door had fallen open the way they did sometimes. Though . . . when Mark pushed it lightly with his finger, it didn’t fall back to where it had been. Maybe the old lady had been in here again by herself and opened it.

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t h e s e r va n t s

It could be that, maybe. It must be.

Mark found he was breathing a little more shallowly than before.

He turned from the door and took a couple more steps along the corridor. There was something else on his mind now. He’d begun to notice a quiet sound. A cooing sound, he thought. Another pigeon, or maybe even the same one, had found its way through a broken pane in the skylight and down into the kitchen. Maybe it knew, somehow, that birds had once lived there, and so thought it was okay to be there as well, even though the chickens were long gone. But the sound wasn’t actually quite right. It was
like
a pigeon, but more muffled. A pigeon went
coo-coo
. Or sometimes
coo-coo-coo
. This noise was longer and had a different rhythm.

He leaned forward, peered cautiously around into the side corridor. It was utterly black. There was no way the dim light from the kitchen could make it around the corner, and that part had no windows to the outside. He squinted, letting his eyes adjust, trying to see if . . .

Then he took a hurried step back.

For a moment, he thought he’d seen a faint yellow flicker from the end of the corridor.

Like a candle, far back in the shadows.

He closed his eyes tightly. Opened them again. He couldn’t see the light anymore.

It had probably never been there. It was just his eyes trying to make sense of the darkness, forming something out of nothing. He heard the pigeon once more, or something

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h like it. Now it sounded more like a quiet laugh. Not a man’s laugh, but like a young woman, or a girl, amused by something a friend had said, but trying to keep her laughter soft and low so nobody else could hear it.

But it must just be a pigeon. He could hear a faint flapping sound now, too. That proved it.

He’d just heard a bird. That was all.

He took a few more steps, moving even slower. The flapping sound hadn’t stopped, and he knew that being confronted by a bird suddenly flying out of nowhere would be more than scary enough.

Maybe he should actually stop here, go back out. He’d had another look—he didn’t need to see
everything
. . . The noise sounded less like flapping now, too. It was getting louder. Not as if whatever was making it was doing so more vigorously, but as if it had started off a long, long way away and was getting closer. Like a pop song coming out of a car’s windows: starting off around the corner, very quiet, then turning into the same street, then getting closer and closer . . .

Mark whipped his head around quickly. The sound had jumped in volume suddenly, and it definitely wasn’t a bird. What
was
it?

He reminded himself to blink. He was keeping his eyes open too long at a time, and they must be drying out, because the light was . . . The light seemed different. Whereas before it had been gray, now it was a little warmer. Perhaps he was just getting used to it, seeing some of the mottled brown of the walls, but . . .

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t h e s e r va n t s

He was standing very close to the left-hand side of the corridor now, and realized there was probably someone’s apartment on the other side of the wall, in a house where all this old stuff had been done away with and turned into somewhere people could live. Was he hearing sounds from someone else’s life, or from their television?

He heard the laugh again, but now it seemed to be coming from the end of the corridor, around the bend to the kitchen. It was lower, too, throaty. Someone passing by outside the house, maybe, the sound echoing around and through the broken glass.

Mark found it difficult to move his feet. In the background, he could still hear the thing that had been flapping, but now it had low notes and high notes in it. Things that sounded like clanks, and clattering, and . . . in fact . . . It sounded like voices.

Suddenly it got
much
louder, and the warmth in the shadows burst like the world’s smallest firework, seen through fog.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” a voice said, very clearly, and someone came striding out of the short corridor. It was a man, dressed in a suit that was black and very tight.

He was moving quickly. He was talking fast, too, but it was hard to make out what he was saying. He walked straight past Mark and quickly into the kitchen at the end. Mark fell backward against the wall. He couldn’t feel his legs. His jaw was trembling. The corridor was
full
of noise now, and candles and oil lights flickered dimly along walls now obscured behind thin smoke.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Someone came sweeping out of the kitchen, coming in the opposite direction to the figure Mark had just seen. She was middle-aged and short, with a bundle under her arm. She turned to shout something over her shoulder, then laughed low and hard, her face blurred—and walked past Mark as if he wasn’t there.

Mark tried to stand up straight. The corridor was even warmer now, but his stomach felt as if it was full of ice. He could hear blood beating in his head, the pounding of his heart, but these were now just sounds among many. There were clanging, slapping, and thudding noises from the kitchen, and the harsh clamor of someone barking orders toward the front of the house. The tinkle of a bell too, somewhere, not like a doorbell in a shop down a side street, but a stern
jingle-jingle-jingle
—a noise designed to capture attention. Even after it had stopped, it felt as if it was ringing, as if it had become a substance more than a sound, something you could touch. Mark realized that the air itself had begun to seem thicker in texture, pressing him down. It was hard to take into his lungs, too, as if too full and hot and wet. Someone else went past him then, and then another, but by the time Mark had turned his head, there was nothing to see. Everything was moving so
fast,
and always at the corner of his eye. There were smells coming at him, too: candle wax, something sweet cooking, a hint of sweat—and a low, meaty tang hanging in the air, buffeted by the constant movement as shapes and sounds went back and forth around him, pinning him to the wall. The first man went by him again, more slowly now, mut 

t h e s e r va n t s

tering something darkly under his breath. Mark had slipped down low enough that what he mainly saw was a hand at the end of a suit sleeve, going past his face—the rustle of starched cloth, a gleam of polished shoe leather.

Another bell jangled in the kitchen and the short woman hurried back along the corridor from behind Mark. She shouted something through to the parlor room, opposite where Mark was crouched, before darting into the kitchen. The sounds from down there were clearer than any of the others. Maybe
everything
was clearer down there—perhaps that was the center, where it all came from. Mark started to move slowly in that direction, feeling the weight of the air and the smell of smoke pushing against him. It was as if sensations were falling on him, like heavy rain, making it hard to go forward, hard to take stock of where he was. There was so much coming at him that he couldn’t think, just notice things—like the fact there was no dust here now, on either the walls or the floor. No dust, and yet it was not clean. It was as if a film of something had been laid over every surface, something sticky and earthy-smelling. A door slammed; a woman yelled angrily; there was a sharp hiss as something was thrown on a hot stove—and then someone came running out of the side corridor, straight at Mark.

She was dressed in a crumpled white blouse and wore a black skirt and a white apron. Her hair was a soft red and tied up on the back of her head, and she looked eighteen, perhaps nineteen, tired but unbowed, as if she had been moving this quickly, and with this much purpose, all her life.

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h She came quickly into the main corridor, and Mark noticed how she used the curve in the join of the two passageways to save a split second on the journey, scooting at top speed to fulfill whatever task had been shouted at her by the short woman as she bustled past.

As she passed Mark, the girl’s eyes suddenly flew open wide, and for a moment they were looking at each other directly. And she let out a tiny little scream.

That was enough for Mark.

The sound of her cry cut through the swirling confusion in his head—and he was suddenly upright and running down the corridor, away from the kitchen and its thudding sounds. He hurtled past the pantry door, which was now open wide. He glimpsed shelves lined with tall bottles and short bottles and cheese, and between them, a man’s back, bent over. The man started to straighten and turn, as if he’d heard footsteps behind him and wondered who it might be. Half a second before his face started to come into view, Mark jumped over the threshold and shut the big door behind him as quickly and quietly as he could.

He was there only two seconds, panting, eyes staring wide. Then he stuck the big key in the lock with trembling hands, turning it in the same motion. By the end of the hollow
clock
sound, Mark’s vision had started to return to normal, scalded by the electric light above. The noises from the other side of the door fell away instantly, too, as if dropped off a cliff. Mark ran to the old lady’s door, pushed it wide—and saw

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t h e s e r va n t s

she was still asleep in her chair. He didn’t know how that could be. She must have been able to hear all the noise, surely?

The short, busy woman must have come right out here!

He dodged over to the drawer and dropped the key back in, then quickly left the room, closing the door behind. He limped into the narrow front passage and let himself out into the cold night air.

It hit him like a wave, washing smells and sounds out of his hair. He took a series of deep, slow breaths, bent forward with his hands on his knees.

Finally, he was very, very scared.

He ran up the narrow metal stairs, remembering only as he was about to unlock the front door of David’s house that he couldn’t go in that way. He hitched himself up onto the metal fence and slipped carefully down the other side. He was frightened of the drop. But he was
more
scared of being out here. He wanted to be back in his room. He wanted to be there right away.

He jumped and landed lightly on the windowsill. He edged around to the front, hooked his fingers under the window, pulled it up, and hooked his head beneath the sash. Within five seconds, he was inside, the window was firmly shut, and everything was sane again. There was his bed, his television, his clothes, the packaging from his video games. There was a litter of torn-up pieces of the book. There was the plastic bag he had found it in.

There was the chair, still wedged under the door. He moved over and pulled it away. Opened the door and went through to the kitchen, where he grabbed a can of Diet

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m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Coke from the fridge and drank it all in one go. His throat felt parched until he’d got halfway through another can, which, he was slightly annoyed to see, was the last—David only bought about three each time he went to the shops. But by the time he’d finished it, his chest had stopped heaving, and his breathing had returned almost to normal. Upstairs, everything was quiet. The low murmur of the television.

Everything was as usual in the kitchen, too. Calm, silent. Nothing but the sound of him blinking.

By the time he was back in his bedroom, he’d realized something else peculiar. The microwave in the kitchen had a digital clock built into it. It said the time was twenty-five to nine. He checked the clock on the video recorder under his little television, and the watch he rarely wore but kept by the side of the bed. They said twenty-five to nine also. He watched as the numbers on his watch changed, going from 8:35 to 8:36.

He didn’t see how that could be.

Barely aware he was doing it, he picked up all the pieces of paper from the floor in front of the bed and put them in the plastic carrier bag. He hid this at the bottom of his suitcase. He changed into his pajamas and got into bed. He found he was breathing in shallow, rapid breaths again, which probably might not be a good idea, but he didn’t know how to stop it. Also, it was comforting.

He turned the light off and pulled the covers right up to his chin. He had to remind himself to close his eyes, and after

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t h e s e r va n t s

he’d done that he felt a little better. He could smell the laundry detergent that had been used on the sheets, and nothing else: no smoke, no cooking, no wax. He could hear the sound of a couple of men walking past in the square outside, on the way to a pub called The Temple Bar—he heard one of them say this to someone on a cell phone, and he heard the sound of their feet on the wet sidewalk. In the very far distance, he could hear a siren.

He listened to all of these things, as hard as he could. They were the only things there were to hear, and all of these sounds behaved in the way he expected them to. He kept listening to them, and to the sound of his breaths, as they gradually became less frequent, and deeper. He concentrated on the feeling of air entering and leaving his body. Very soon, he fell asleep. At some point in the night, he woke, thinking he could hear the sound of coughing from upstairs.