The Servants Read Online Free PDF Page B

us. He doesn’t understand.”
    The old lady just kept swirling the teapot around. The room was warm now, almost stuffy. The clock on the bedside table ticked loudly. Each tick seemed to come more slowly than the last tock, and Mark suddenly felt very homesick. He didn’t want to be here, in this tiny apartment, in this house, in this town. He wanted to be back in London, in his old room, watching television or playing a video game and knowing that his mother and real father were downstairs. Even
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    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h if once in a while voices had been raised, it was home. It had been real. This was not. This was a place where you just marked time.
    When was he going back to school? When was he going to see his friends again? When was he going to see his dad?
    He needed to know the answers to these questions, but every time the clock ticked it seemed to get louder, as if each tock was a bar in the cage that held him here. He grabbed the remaining chunk of his portion of the cake and put it all in his mouth at once, chewing it quickly. It was dry and leached all of the moisture out of his mouth, but once he’d swallowed it, he could go. It didn’t matter where. There were covered benches down on the promenade, like the one he’d dreamed about the night before. He could sit sheltered in one of those, watch it rain on the sea. How pointless was that, by the way—raining on the water? Why did it even bother? He was feeling miserable now, and everything seemed stupid. He just wanted to go.
    But when he glanced up, ready to start making his excuses, he saw the old lady was looking at him with a curious expression on her face—partly smiling but also serious, as if making an assessment.
    “How would you like to see something?” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “Just . . . something you might find interesting.”
    She went to a small drawer in the counter, took an object out, and held it up to show him. It was a large key. He frowned. “What’s that for?”
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    t h e s e r va n t s
    “I’ll show you,” she said. “It’s all right—you can bring your tea.”
    Mark followed the old lady out into the corridor. He assumed she was going to go left, into the narrow passageway that led to the outer door, that perhaps there was something stored in a cupboard there. He had a horrible suspicion she was going to give him something . Old people did that sometimes, thinking they were being nice but in fact making you accept something that you didn’t understand or value and didn’t know what to do with.
    Instead, she turned right and walked to the big, solid door. She fitted the key into its lock and turned it with an apparent effort. It made a loud, hollow sound, like a single horse’s hoof landing on the road. She turned the knob and pushed, and the door opened away from her, slowly receding, without any sound at all.
    There was darkness on the other side, the faintest hint of a very pale, gray glow in one corner.
    “Ready?” she said.
    She reached into the gloom and flicked a switch on the wall, and suddenly a couple of dim lights came on beyond, hanging from the ceiling of whatever lay on the other side of the door.
    Mark’s mouth dropped open slowly.
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    five
    He followed the old lady as she stepped through the threshold and into the corridor beyond. It was the same width as the one they’d entered from, and ran toward the back of the building. Where the first corridor had been merely grimy, however, the walls here were almost brown. Mark looked more closely and saw that the color was mottled, as if caused by years and years of smoke, under a thick layer of dust. There were two openings on the right of the corridor. The first was a narrow door, which was shut. The second, a couple of yards farther on, was the entrance to a short side corridor. There was a door on the left of this, and another opening at the end.
    Past this, the main corridor ran for a few more yards and then took a