The Servants
Authors: Michael Marshall Smith
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Fantasy fiction, #Fiction - General, #Haunted houses, #Ghost, #Psychological, #Psychological Fiction, #Brighton (England), #Boys, #English Horror Fiction
THE
M I C H A E L
S M I T H
For M.R.S.
And in memory of the W.P.
Contents
Mark sat on a ridge of pebbles and watched as…
7
By the time Mark had walked over the
pedestrian crossing…
13
The next morning, Mark left the house early, skateboard under…
21
While they waited for the old lady’s kettle to boil—it…
31
He followed the old lady as she stepped through the…
38
It started to rain again, however, and soon it became…
47
The weather the next morning was no better. When Mark…
55
His hands were shaking and hurt a little from what…
62
The first thing he noticed after he’d shut the door…
75
By lunchtime, Mark barely remembered what
he’d seen, much less…
86
It took him a long time to come up with…
94
It was less dark this time. The weather outside was…
100
Mark drank another cup of tea with her—strangely, the pot…
110
He did not sleep well, and when he woke the…
120
But when he went up to her room at mid-morning…
133
He didn’t return to the house for lunch. He didn’t…
141
The feeling came on as Mark was having his shower. 153
Emily grabbed his hand and tried to pull him toward…
162
The first thing Mark heard the next morning was a…
170
He had nearly two hours to kill, and so he…
179
They got her home as quickly as they could. Then…
186
The old lady didn’t say anything on the way down…
193
All at once everyone was in motion.
199
Two weeks later, in the middle of the afternoon, Mark… 209
Other Books by Michael Marshall Smith
If you live long enough, everything happens. As she walked up the last stretch of sidewalk toward the house, the old lady felt cold. Not so much on the surface—
her thick coat, scarf, and hat were holding their own against the chill, aided by the exertion of a battle along the wintry seafront—but inside. The older you get, the colder your bones become, as if turning slowly back to stone—readying themselves for the unexpected day or inevitable night when you’ll try to move your limbs and discover they are now forever still, that there’s nothing to do but wait for someone to gently close your eyes. The body accepts aging with resignation, never having expected to last forever. The mind has different ideas, and no respect for time.
Sadly, the body almost always wins.
She paused at the top of the stairs down to her apartment, and looked back toward the sea, remembering years when she had run down the pebbled shore to dive into the waves. She had not always been old, of course. Nor always a lady, either, m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h if the truth be told. Age is an excellent camouflage, however, turning those who wear it into spies, sleepers deep in enemy territory. No one imagines that the person wrapped inside that pale, dry tissue paper might have sweated and yelled and ran in their day, that they might know secrets yet to be discovered in younger lives. Least of all the young themselves, who—for all their gangly verve, and the raptor-like acquisitiveness of their gaze—seem to find it impossible to see much beyond the tips of their noses. Not all of them, of course, and not always. But mainly.
Eventually, the old lady turned away from the sea, and started down the steps.
She let herself into her little basement home, a place she had lived so long that it was hard sometimes to remember that it was physically separate from her. She never forgot how fortunate she was to have it, though, having seen her contemporaries (those still alive, at least) exchanging a lifetime of independence and accumulated possessions for some bare cell in an old persons’ facility, surrounded by crabby strangers: stripped of everything but memories that in time came to seem more real than the world had ever been; condemned to tea that was never made quite how they liked it, enduring the consensus choice of the television channel. Yes, her apartment was tiny. But it was
hers
. She switched on the electric fire as soon as she was inside. She knew she was lucky, also, to feel as well as she did, that her aches and pains often faded if not exactly overnight then during the course of a few days. Lucky, but not just that. You
t h e s e r va n t s
do not get to be old without learning some things, glimpsing a little of the way the world works—assuming you keep your eyes and ears open, at least, and she always had. She understood that every life involved bargains and exchange, and recently she had started to believe there were new things to be seen and heard.
Lately, in the last few weeks, she had found herself unsettled from time to time. Waking in the night as if disturbed by movement that had just that moment stopped. Aware of the weight of the house above her, like a dark cloud pregnant with rain. Convinced that, just below the threshold of audibility, someone had raised their voice. Silly ideas, all of them. She hoped so, at least. Because otherwise it would be hard to believe that any of these promised good things.
After a few minutes, the room started to warm up, and the old lady removed her coat and hung it neatly on its hook on the back of the door. The key to living anywhere is to know
how
to live there—just ask any snail. She took from her coat pocket a brown paper bag holding the snack she habitually took at this time in the late afternoon. Rhythm, order, ritual. The old and the very young understand the importance of these things. It’s only in the intervening years that people think they can escape life’s structures, not realizing how this apparent freedom traps them in a permanent here and now. She took a plate from the small cupboard above her sink. She frowned a little, and hesitated before setting the plate down. It felt cold to the touch. The room wasn’t warming as quickly as it usually did.
m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h She stood at the counter for a moment and listened to the sound of feet on the sidewalk above her window, as they moved past the house along the rails of their own lives. The footsteps seemed both distant and somewhat loud against a silence in the house that seemed to grow fuller all the time. Something was up. She was increasingly convinced of it. She put the kettle on, to make a cup of tea. Half an hour later, comfortable in her chair and with enough cake inside her, she found herself dozing. She didn’t mind. The room was nice and warm now. Resting her eyes for a few moments might be as good a way as any to wait and see what was coming next.
If you live long enough, everything happens. And then some of it happens again.
Mark sat on a ridge of pebbles and watched as the colors over the sea started to turn. It had been a bright, clear afternoon, the sky hard and shiny and blue-gray. A line of pink had now appeared along the horizon, and everything was slowly starting to get darker, clouds detaching themselves one by one to come creeping over the rest of the sky. It was only a little after four o’clock, but the day was already drawing to a close. It was ending, and the night would start soon. Normally, Mark found you couldn’t sit on the rocks for too long before your behind started to hurt. Today that didn’t seem to be bothering him, possibly because the rest of him hurt too. Some bits hurt a little, others hurt a lot. They all hurt in slightly different ways. Skateboarding, he had discovered after extensive trials, was not as easy as it looked. He’d owned his board for over a year—it was one of the last things his father had given him—but Mark hadn’t had the chance to start learning how to use it while they were back in London. There had been too much confusion, too many new things to deal with. It hadn’t seemed very impor-m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h tant, what with everything else. When they’d driven down to the coast in David’s car, however—Mark, his mother, and David, naturally—he’d sat all the way with the skateboard on his lap. A form of silent protest, which he was not sure they’d understood, or even noticed. In the three weeks since, Mark had finally confronted the process of trying to teach a piece of wood (with wheels attached) which of them was the boss. So far, the piece of wood was winning.
Mark had been to Brighton before, on long weekends with his mother and proper dad. He knew the seafront fairly well. There was a promenade along the beach, about forty feet lower than the level of the road. This had long stretches where you could walk and ride bikes and rollerblade—almost as if to make up for the fact that there was no sand on the beach, only pebbles, and so you couldn’t do much there except sit and look out at the waves and the piers, adjusting your position once in a while to stop it from being too uncomfortable. There were cafés and bars dotted along it—together with a big wading pool and a playground. Mark was eleven, and thus too old now for these last two entertainment centers. He had still been taken aback to discover that the pool had been drained for the winter, however, the cheerful summer chaos of the playground replaced by a few cold-looking mothers nursing coffees as toddlers dressed like tiny, earth-toned Michelin Men trundled vaguely up and down. Walking past the playground felt like passing a department store in the evening, when the doors were locked and most of the lights were off—just a single person deep inside, doing something at the cash register, or adjusting a pile of books, like a tidy ghost.
t h e s e r va n t s
So Mark had spent most afternoons, and some of the mornings, on a stretch of the promenade where there was nothing but a wide, flat area of asphalt. Once this area held the original kiddie pool, he’d been told, built when the seafront was very fashionable: but it had been old and not safe—or just not brightly colored enough, Mark’s mother had suggested—and so had been filled in and replaced. There were usually other boys, a few years older than Mark, hanging around this area, and some had laid out temporary ramps. They scooted up and down on their boards, making little jumps, and when they made it back down safely, they peeled off in wide, sweeping arcs, loops of triumph that were actually more fun than the hard business of the tricks themselves—though Mark understood you couldn’t have one without the other. These boys crash-landed often, too: but not as often as Mark, and not as painfully, and Mark fell when he was only trying to
stay on
the thing, not do anything clever.
A lot of the boys seemed to know each other, and called out while they were watching their friends: encouragement, occasionally, but more often they laughed and shouted rude words and tried to put the others off. Mark understood that was how it was with friends when you were a boy, but he didn’t have anyone to call out to. He didn’t know anyone here at all. He skated in silence, and fell off
that way too.
When the sky was more dark than light, he stood up, the pebbles making a loud scrunching sound beneath his feet
m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h and hands. It was time to go home—or back to the house, anyway: the place they now seemed to be living in. A house that belonged to David, and which did not feel anything like home.
From where he stood, Mark could see the long run of houses on the other side of the Hove Lawns and the busy seafront road. These buildings all looked the same, and stretched for about six hundred yards. They were four stories high, built nearly two hundred years ago, designed to look very similar to each other, and painted all the same color—pale yellowish, the color of fresh pasta. Apparently, this was called “Brunswick Cream,” and they all had to be painted that way because they were old and it was the law. The house Mark was staying in was halfway up the righthand side of Brunswick Square, bang in the middle of the run of buildings. In the center of the square was a big patch of grass surrounded by a tall ornamental hedge, the whole sloping up from the road so that the houses around all three sides had a good view of the sea. Mark had almost never seen anyone in the park area in the middle. It was almost as if that wasn’t what it was for.