The Servants Read online

  ALSO BY MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  Only Forward

  Spares

  One of Us

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book was originally published in 2007 by Earthling Publications.

  THE SERVANTS. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Marshall Smith. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  FIRST EOS EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2008

  Eos is a federally registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Designed by Susan Walsh

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dara

  Smith, Michael Marshall.

  The servants / Michael Marshall Smith. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-06-149416-1

  l. Boys—Fiction. 2. Brighton (England)—Fiction. 3. Haunted houses—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.M5225S47 2007

  823'.914—dc22

  2008000456

  * * *

  08 09 10 11 12 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 3 2 1

  For M.R.S.

  And in memory of the W.P.

  contents

  prologue

  PART I

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  PART II

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  PART III

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  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, 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 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.

  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.

  PART

  I

  one

  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 lo
ng 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 important, 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.

  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 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 right-hand 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.

  As you looked along the front to the right, the buildings changed. They became smaller, more varied, and after a while there were some that looked completely different and not old at all. A few tall buildings made of concrete, two big old hotels (one red, one white), then eventually the cinema, which looked as if it had been built in the dark by someone who didn’t like buildings very much. Or so David said, and as a result Mark found he rather liked its featureless, rectangular bulk. You could see movies in there, of course, though Mark hadn’t. He was only allowed to go along the front in the area bounded by the yellow buildings. He was only permitted down here by himself at all because he’d flat-out refused to stay in the house the whole day, and after enduring a long lecture about talking to strangers. Mark had just stared at David during this, hoping the man would get the point—that he was a stranger too, so far as Mark was concerned. He hadn’t.

  It was getting very cold now, but still Mark didn’t start the walk up to the promenade. He stayed a little longer on the border between the sea and the land, wishing he wasn’t there at all. He’d liked Brighton in the past. When he’d come with his mother and dad, they’d stayed at a modern hotel down past the cinema. His mother spent hours poking around the Lanes, the really old area where the streets were narrow and twisted and most of the stores sold jewelry. They had spent long afternoons on the pier—the big, newer one, with all the rides, not the ruined West Pier, which was closer to Brunswick Square and which someone had, a few years before, set on fire. More than once. But now they were staying in David’s house, and all Mark could see was the way the town came down to the sea, and then stopped.

  London didn’t stop. London went on more or less forever. That was a good thing for towns to do. It was a good thing for everything to do, except visits to museums, or toothaches, or colds. Why should things go on for a little while and then stop? How could stopping be a good thing? Brighton ran out. It was interesting and fun for a while and then you hit the beach and it was pebbles and then it stopped and became the sea. The sea was different. The sea wasn’t about you and what you wanted. The sea wasn’t concerned with anything except itself, and it didn’t care about anyone.

  Mark watched as the starlings began to fly along the front, heading for the West Pier, and then finally started for home.

  two

  By the time Mark had walked over the pedestrian crossing and up the sidewalk around the square, it was almost completely dark. It looked nice that way, he had to admit, lights coming on in the other houses.

  When he got to David’s house, he noticed another light there, too.

  The building they were living in was tall like the others, three big stories above street level with a further lower one at the very top. To the right of the wide steps leading up to the front door there was a little curving staircase that headed downward. It was made of metal that had been painted black more than once but was now leaking rust. Losing a long battle against the salty air, like everything else on the seafront.

  At the bottom of this staircase was a tiny basement courtyard, about four feet deep by eight feet wide, and under the steps to the main house was another door. There was a window in the front of this section, a smaller version of the big, bow-fronted windows above. It was covered with lace curtains, which meant you couldn’t see inside. Apparently, someone else lived there, an old woman.

  David, who liked to explain everything—like the fact his acce
nt sounded weird at times because he’d spent a long time living in America—had explained that although he owned the whole house, the basement was a self-contained apartment that he hadn’t even been inside. The woman who lived there had been there for years and years and years, and so he’d agreed to let her stay. Mark had never seen any actual evidence that anyone lived there, and had half-wondered if the whole story had been a lie to keep him out of that part of the house.

  But tonight there was a glow behind the curtains, dim and yellow, as if from a single lamp with a weak bulb.

  He let himself into the main house with his keys. The hallway felt cold and bare. David had the whole place painted white inside before they moved down from London. He had never lived here himself, having bought it only six months ago with all the money he’d made while he was away doing whatever boring thing he’d been doing in America.

  Mark shut the door very quietly behind him; but not quietly enough.

  “Mark? Is that you?”

  His stepfather’s voice sounded flat and hard as it echoed down the wide staircase from the floor above. Mark put his skateboard in the room that was serving as his bedroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor, and slowly started up the stairs.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Who else was it going to be?

  HIS mother’s bedroom was on the second floor, the highest level currently in use. The top two floors were closed up and used for storage, the rooms uncarpeted and bare, with heating that didn’t work. Mark got the idea that David didn’t have enough money left to do anything about them right now.

  His mother was in the front room when he walked in. “Hello, honey,” she said. “How was your day?”

  She was on the couch, which had been put in the middle of the front room on this floor, the one with the wide bay window looking over the square. There was a thick blanket over her. The television in the corner was on, but the sound was turned off.