“How long?” David asked. He appeared from the bedroom, as he seemed to enjoy doing. He was not holding a towel but one of the small white boxes that lined the mantelpiece, boxes that had nothing on them but writing, in a typeface that did not seem designed to communicate anything fun. He was peering down at it, and Mark felt a violent twist of anger at him, amplified by the strange, anxious feeling he still had in his head and chest. David didn’t look like the man he’d seen in the park now, not at all.
“Long, long, long,” Mark said. “All the way to the other pier.”
“You were told that you weren’t allowed to—”
“I know,” Mark said cheerfully. “Then I went into the big hotel and had a cup of tea.”
His mother and David glanced at each other. Mark knew he was asking for trouble, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. He felt as if he had started to tremble deep inside. The room seemed far too warm.
“Can I open a window?”
David shook his head firmly. “Your mother needs to be protected,” he said.
Right—and you’re the only person who can do that.
His mother smiled at him again. Usually it was nice when she did this, but for a moment Mark wondered whether she’d just forgotten that she’d already done it, and had a horrible suspicion she was going to ask him what his day had been like.
“So, what are we eating?” he said, to forestall this. “Are we going out?”
His mother made a face as if she was genuinely considering the idea, and David made one too, as if he was waiting to hear what she thought. Mark knew the decision had already been made.
“Okay,” he said, to save either of them having to say no. “So…?”
“There’s food in the fridge,” David said. “Cold cuts and stuff. I wondered if maybe you’d like to put together something for us all?”
This was a strange request, but Mark bounced up off the couch, glad of the chance to get out of the room.
“Okay.”
He went downstairs and into the kitchen. Yes, there was food in the fridge. No Diet Coke, obviously, but plenty of things to eat. He went to the cupboard and got down one of the big serving plates. He could hear quiet voices through the ceiling now, probably David pointing out what a pain Mark was being.
He stacked three dinner plates next to the serving dish and started ferrying stuff out of the fridge. There was cold beef, and chicken. There was a kind of pork pie. There was cheese, and little tomatoes, and salads—one made of weird-colored rice and another with potatoes and yet another with beetroot, which Mark thought was vile. He started ladling spoonfuls of each onto the big plate, however, remembering how he’d seen his mother do this when friends had come to the house in London—arranging stuff out of packets or brown paper until it looked like something different and better, like a real meal.
He moved faster and faster, becoming absorbed. Slices of meat around the edge. Cutting square chunks of cheese, arranging them with the tomatoes, cut in half. He only realized how hot he was getting when a drop of sweat fell from his forehead and onto the plate.
It was really, really boiling now. He wiped his face with his sleeve. Had David done something stupid to the heating?
Mark ran upstairs. They were sitting either end of the couch, not saying anything. As if they had just stopped.
“What’s wrong with the heating?” Mark said.
“Nothing. Are you okay? You look kind of red in the face.”
Mark ignored him and ran downstairs again. Finished preparing the big plate and then stood for a moment in front of the fridge with the door open. It helped, a little. He went over to the radiator against the wall and put his hand on it, expecting it to be white-hot—but it wasn’t even switched on, though it sounded as if something was thudding in the building somewhere. Maybe there was a problem with the system, as well as everything else.
As he left the room with the plates and a pocket full of silverware, he thought he heard the sound of flapping, but it was only the television being turned on in the room upstairs.
HIS mother was really impressed and kept saying what a lovely job he’d done. David nodded judiciously and said “Good job,” too, running the two words into one. He certainly took enough onto his plate. Obviously this was the kind of food he liked.
Mark picked at his own meal. He still seemed to be getting hotter and hotter. It was stopping him being properly hungry. He watched as his mother ate a couple of pieces of tomato, and a small piece of cheese and then stopped. The television was showing the news, and the grown-ups watched it. Mark gazed into space instead, wondering what was wrong with him, if maybe he’d finally caught a cold or flu from all the time he’d spent outside.
And then suddenly he focused, and all at once he did not feel hot anymore. He was looking in a different direction from David and his mother, across at the other corner of the room. There was something floating in the air. Something small and nearly weightless.
Something dark.
Mark blinked, hoping it was something in his eye, a shadow floating across the inside in the way they sometimes did. But it wasn’t.
He watched the speck as it slowly, slowly spiraled down toward the carpet.
It was a piece of black ash.
He put down his fork, intending to get up and look at it. He didn’t have a chance to even stand up, however, before he realized it was not the only one. Another piece was floating down in the opposite corner of the room. It was a little larger, maybe the size of Mark’s thumb. Like, he now realized, the one he’d cleaned off the surface down in the kitchen a couple of nights before.
It drifted down past the television screen, but neither of the grown-ups said anything.
Then there was a third. This was much closer to where he was sitting, and he watched it as it came down. It got lower, and lower.
It landed on his mother’s face.
A sound came out of Mark’s mouth.
His mother turned to him. “Are you okay?” she asked.
The ash was hanging off her cheek. Most of it still looked dry, like solidified smoke. But around the edges it was starting to glisten, like a black snowflake that was beginning to melt.
Mark tried to say something, but nothing came out. David turned to him, still chewing, and Mark saw that he had ash on him now too, a piece right across the bridge of his nose.
How could they not feel it? How could they not see?
“What’s up?” David said.
“I’m not hungry,” Mark said.
He kissed his mother on the cheek, sticking to the side that wasn’t now scored with thin, green-black tears running down from the melting ash. “Going to go and read. Good night.”
He ran downstairs.
HE sat tight for an hour, watching the air in his bedroom carefully. Nothing happened for a long time, but then he saw the first piece, dropping slowly down by the window. He noticed the smell, too, finally: sour and acrid, very faint at first, but insistently pushing its way up his nose.
He couldn’t just sit here. He had to do something. Maybe the world downstairs wasn’t even his problem, but…
He wedged the chair under the door the way he’d done it the other night. Got out onto the windowsill. It wasn’t as wet as the first time, and he had a better idea what to expect. He launched himself toward the metal railings with a lot more momentum, grabbed and held on tight, jamming a foot down to stop the slide. He got enough purchase to lever himself over, and then ran quickly down the stone steps.
He didn’t have a cake, of course. It was eight in the evening, too. She’d think it was weird. It was weird. But…it didn’t feel that he had any choice. He’d just have to tell her what he was doing, if necessary.
He ran down the metal stairway and straight up to her door. He knocked on it, gently but firmly. Nothing happened. Her window was dark.
Mark knocked on the door again, more urgently. No light came on, no sound of feet.
Oh God, of course. She had gone out for
the evening.
How could he have forgotten? Desperate, he grabbed the doorknob and twisted it. The handle turned.
This was so unexpected that he yelped as the door opened inward an inch. Then he pushed it open further, and stuck his head in. “Hello?” he said, only then realizing that he didn’t know the old lady’s name. “Are you there?”
No sound. Mark stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He turned the handle of the inner door, and that opened too. He knew one of his grandmothers had been like this, leaving things unlocked because she claimed everyone did when she was young, that everyone knew everyone and wouldn’t steal from anyone else. She’d lived in a tiny village, however, not a town, and in the end had gone full-tilt “doolally”—her own term—and believed her armchair was talking to her about her younger brother, who had died in the War.
So, Mark was unclear whether people had really once left their doors unlocked or not. Right now it didn’t really matter. He needed the key, but he also wanted to check that the old lady was okay, hadn’t come back early and lying ill alone there in her room, needing help.
Thankfully, her door was unlocked too, and the room was empty, everything squared neatly away. No sign of ash in here, though the air felt thick and heavy enough.
He took the key from the drawer.
THE corridor was burning hot as soon as he entered, and this time the light did not start out gray but was a sticky yellow-orange immediately. It felt as if there was lightning in it, too, sparking dangerously just out of sight.
Mark shut the big door behind him and hurried straight for the kitchen, where he could hear the sounds of thumping. The corridor was bad enough, but the kitchen was much, much worse. All the bells were ringing together, so loud it was like every car alarm in Brighton going off in your head at once.
Martha was at the range, her back to the door. She was cutting a big piece of meat, smacking the cleaver down into it again and again. Her hair had started to escape from the bundle on her head and was coiling wetly over her neck.
When she turned to grab something from the table, Mark saw her face was dripping with sweat, and blotchy like eczema, and there were dark circles under her armpits. Her hand reached for something on the table, brushing aside the piles of thick black ash…but it didn’t seem so much like solidified smoke here. It was something far more moist, and very thick, like black fat congealed in the bottom of roasting pans. Globs of it stuck to her hands and were smeared over the meat when she went back to chopping at it.
Almost the whole of the kitchen floor was covered in the stuff now, collecting in drifts around the walls. In parts it was coming down so thickly through the air that it was as if there was a storm cloud in the room. It took Mark a few desperate seconds to realize that the pile of it in the corner by the dairy store wasn’t quite what it seemed.
The scullery maid in the gray dress was lying under it, propped against the wall, close to the sinks, which now towered three feet high with filthy pans and plates and silverware. Most of the scullery maid’s body was covered in ash, and some of her face. Her eyes were open, and the only part of her that moved.
He was moving cautiously in that direction, when suddenly a pale oval loomed out of the air in front of him. Mark jumped back.
“You must go,” said a woman’s voice. “It isn’t safe.”
eighteen
Emily grabbed his hand and tried to pull him toward the main corridor, but Mark dug in his heels.
“I can’t go,” he said. “I have to help.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
The housemaid tugged at him again, but then seemed to give up. Her hair was running with black ash, and her lips, and when she opened her mouth to speak again, Mark saw it had got inside there too.
There was a terribly loud banging noise then, like all of the doors in the world being slammed at once.
The housemaid thought better of whatever she had been going to say, and yanked Mark across the kitchen instead, toward the meat store. He followed her this time, scared by the noise, and crouched down as she did, hiding from he knew not what. It was even hotter in here and he saw there were pieces of…some animal or other, hanging from metal hooks. The meat was purple and green, dripping. The smell was awful.
Mrs. Wallis came into the kitchen, already shouting. Mark saw Martha’s shoulders flinch, and she immediately stopped whacking the cleaver down and started doing something else.
“Yes, Mrs. Wallis,” she mumbled. “Of course.”
Food was piling up on the table behind the cook now, all of it blackened with ash.
The housekeeper stared at it, grabbed a handful, and threw it to the floor. “Do it faster,” she screamed. “Do it faster, can’t you hear?”
“But I was told to…”
“I don’t care what he told you. You do what I say, do you understand? This is my house.”
Mark could feel the housemaid next to him trembling.
“What’s going on?” he whispered, assuming the horrendous clanging of the bells on the wall would cover the sound.
But Mrs. Wallis whirled around immediately. “Who’s there? Is that you, Mr. Maynard? Do you wish to speak with me?”
Her eyes swept over the grille in the meat-store door, and Mark glimpsed something terrible in them. Then she stormed to the far corner of the kitchen and disappeared. Mark could hear the sound of her feet as they thundered up invisible stairs.
“Quick,” the red-haired girl said. She pulled Mark out of the storeroom. “Do you see? It’s all wrong. You’ve got to go. There’s nothing you can do.”
“But what’s happening?” Mark said, as they ran into the passageway.
The housemaid suddenly stopped dead. Mark saw what she was looking at. The door to the butler’s pantry was open.
“Oh no,” she said, and started backing away.
Mark let her go. He kept pushing through the drifts of rotten ash on the floor, now almost at knee height. It made a wet, sticky sound. The walls were almost black now too.
He moved around carefully so he wasn’t too close to the door, and looked inside.
AT first he thought the pantry was just full of ash. Then he realized a portion of it was moving and muttering to itself.
“Breakdown,” the voice said querulously. “Clear systems, need to be followed. Order must be kept.”
Mark recognized the voice.
“Mr. Maynard?”
There was a sudden movement, and a head of steel-gray hair emerged from the ash. The butler’s shirt and tie still looked neat, even with the smears running down his face. Mark saw that he was holding a wine bottle in one hand, and that the bottle had no cork.
“Stock-taking,” the man said defensively. “Counting. Systems.”
“What’s wrong? What’s happening down here?”
“Happening?” the butler asked, standing up. His eyes looked shadowy and his breath smelled strong. “Happening? Can’t you see? Isn’t it crystal-clear?”
Mark heard the sound of heavy footsteps from the other end of the corridor. Someone was stomping down the back staircase.
Mr. Maynard’s face changed. He smiled, in a thin, dark way.
“It cannot continue in this manner,” he said. “One of us…must go.”
He threw the bottle to one side, and marched toward the kitchen.
THE piles of ash didn’t seem to impede his progress in the way it did Mark’s, and by the time Mark got to the kitchen, the butler and the housekeeper were already standing face-to-face.
Both had their hands on their hips. Both were shouting, so fast and so loud that you couldn’t make out a word of what either was saying. It was so hot in there now that the air seemed to burn your skin, and the range was making a continual rumbling and coughing sound. The whole floor was vibrating. It felt as if the walls themselves were in pain.
Emily was trapped in the corner, trying to get away. She was down on her knees and using her hands to tunnel in the fallen ash, trying to g
et into the vegetable storage room.
Martha was still bringing the cleaver down onto a piece of meat that was now a pulped and bloody mess, while with the other hand she put things in and took things out of the oven, burning herself, the smell of her seared flesh spiraling out into the rest of the room—joining the underlying odor of pigeon shit and something that reeked like warmed vomit. The bells rang louder and louder and faster and faster, and in the other corner, the girl in the gray dress was almost completely covered now, only one pale hand and her nose and mouth protruding from the ash, her chest hitching up and down, breath whistling in her lungs.
And still Mr. Maynard and Mrs. Wallis shouted and screamed at each other, their voices joined into one rushing wind. The ash and black snow falling from the air started to pick up the swirling rhythm of recrimination and counter-accusation, slowly beginning to sweep in a spiral around them, like the beginning of a hurricane, one that could only build and build until it tore everything around it apart.
Mark started to shout at them, at Martha, at Emily, but no one seemed to be able to hear him. Or, if they could, they didn’t listen. They were trapped in the noisy chaos of the gathering storm, thrown away from each other by the cyclone of ash and blackness and fear.
Mark ran up to Mr. Maynard and shoved him in the back, but the butler’s body had become utterly rigid, like stone, and the finger that Mrs. Wallis was jabbing into the man’s chest time and again kept landing with a slow, hollow ring, like a rusted iron girder crashing into a wall. Their voices were approaching a kind of appalling harmony, like two people shouting their last at the same time.
“For God’s sake!” Mark shouted.
Both heads snapped down and around to stare at him.
“You,” they snarled, at once. “Again.”
“Look—”
“Your doing, I assume,” Mrs. Wallis snapped, but she was not talking to Mark now. “Have you decided that friends of the family have the run of the entire house now, including the quarters? Will you stop at nothing to ingratiate yourself upstairs?”
“His presence is nothing to do with me,” Mr. Maynard shouted. “Order below-stairs is your responsibility, I believe, housekeeper—or perhaps you have forgotten that?”
The Servants Page 12