The mist closed around him. A small beetle ran into a hole in the sand.
She turned. Mrs. Hubbard put the cane into her hand. “You’re a menial!” She took a huge pinch of snuff out of an open desk. “What are you?”
Silent, Sarah watched the cane. It grew a tail, and back legs.
“What are you?” Mrs. Hubbard snapped ominously.
Front paws. A great head, its jaws wet and slobbering, growling, the red eyes opening, nostrils fuming with smoke, and as she turned, it sprang on her and she screamed, and yelled, “A menial!”
Sarah opened her eyes.
She was soaked with sweat. The fire was out, a gray gather of ashes, and through the curtains the dimness of a winter afternoon filtered.
She sat up, dressed in a furious rush, and ran down the stairs.
The servants’ hall was empty. Here too the fire was out. There was no sign of the cook and nothing to eat; she picked up some bread from the table, but it was stale, rock hard. Annoyed, she flung it at the ashes.
“Scrab!” she yelled.
No one answered.
The library was a mess. Somehow the wind had gotten in and whipped everything out of order; it would take days just to sort it out. Dumping armfuls of pamphlets on the desk she marched through to the laboratory, and flung the door open.
The room was completely empty.
She stared in disbelief. It was all gone: the benches, alembics, astrolabes, boxes, charts. The walls were bare. Even the telescope had gone. All she saw was a dusty space, with an old clock ticking on the mantelshelf and the curtains thick with cobwebs. As if none of it had ever been here at all.
“Azrael?” she whispered.
A cold fear moved inside her, a sickening emptiness in her stomach.
She turned and ran out, into other rooms. Everywhere it was the same. The house was deserted. And more than that, it was transformed. Time had come back. Decay had resumed. It was a palace festooned with webs, the doors warped from long neglect, the Trevelyan portraits lost under grime. In the hall the black-and-white tiles were cracked, choked with leaf dust and melted snow that gusted under the door.
Her face white, she went into the drawing room.
It was cold. Through the tall windows she could see nothing but snow, swirling in silent cacophonies of storm outside. Far out in it the sun was setting, a sliver of scarlet into the invisible sea.
The piano was covered in dust. On Azrael’s footstool a small white card was pinned. She pulled it off quickly.
ALL YOU WANT IS YOURS. MY SOLICITORS WILL SORT OUT THE LEGAL PROBLEMS. BE GENEROUS. ON THE LAST STROKE OF THE CLOCK ON THE LAST NIGHT OF THE YEAR IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS LOOK FOR ME.
He hadn’t signed it.
Folding the corner over in her fingers she looked around, bewildered. She had done it. She had the house. Her father could come home. Azrael had gone.
It must be some sort of mania, she told herself. All his studying, all those years of guilt and disappointment, all that medieval nonsense about spirits and elements and demons had deranged him. She should have seen it before. Everyone else had.
But as she stood there in the empty house all she could hear in the silence were the clocks, ticking.
They had never seemed so loud.
fourteen
It was his bedroom all right, but something had happened to it.
For a start, all the walls had turned to glass. Tom sat up in the bed, swung his feet out, and whispered, “Simon!”
No answer.
Pulling the bedcovers back, he saw his brother’s warm, empty place. Tom got up, crossing the worn carpet. Carefully he reached his hands out and felt for the invisible wall, and it was there, behind the football posters, smooth and cold and curving in slightly as it rose. Like a dome. Or a jar. Even standing on the bed he couldn’t reach the ceiling.
Outside, it was dark. Vast dim shapes moved, spheres and planets, an enormous far-off door opening and closing, and then the sudden nightmare swelling of a great whiskered cat, that made him crumple back with terror against the pillow. The creature’s vast soft mouth and nose were pressed against the glass. It mewed, its rough pink tongue rasping hopelessly, so close he could see the tiny hooks on it. Wide green eyes watched him.
Then it was gone.
After a second, pajamas drenched with sweat, he said, “Simon. Please. I need you.”
Something large and dark swished outside, and he ducked. Sounds came to him, distorted and filtered, of footsteps and a distant roaring that might have been water. And voices, asking some question. Scared, he plugged the lamp in quickly and switched it on, and Simon sat up in the bed, tousled and sleepy. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I think this is a dream.”
Simon stared over his shoulder, eyes widening. “Look!” But Tom could see her. Her face was huge, an enormous pitted surface of skin, vast nostrils, stretched eyes. Her breath misted the glass. With a yell he leaped away, and the room shook; it toppled over and fell and plummeted into darkness, a huge warm darkness and—
A heart was beating.
Loud. Really loud.
It was thumping all around him, and he and Simon were tiny, lying close, curled in its rhythm, in a red landscape of tunnels and caves and hollows, veins and womb, all breathing, rising and falling. Beside him then he felt his brother’s warm, empty place.
And the jar was falling; he was tumbled roughly, buffeted against its sides, great hands clasping him, pulling him out into the terrible light, a light that made him scream, and the huge face said, “One’s alive, Doctor. Just the one.”
He sat up, sweating. “Simon?”
His brother was on the window seat, reading a football magazine. “At last,” he said, without looking up. “You’d better get up. Mam’s been calling you.”
Of all places, it would have to be the post office. Tom chewed his toast and looked down at the package in cold despair. “Now?”
“Well, the post goes at ten. And when you’ve sent it, come up to the Hall and I’ll get the new caretaker to sign you on for a few hours’ work, if you want. I’m desperate for the help, Tom.”
His mother took the tray out to the kitchen, and Tom shoved the package between the cereal box and the sugar bowl, and ran his hands through his hair in terror. “Oh God. Not there,” he whispered.
Simon was lounging on the sofa. “It’s all right. We’ll be quick. And he might not even be there.”
“He’ll be there.”
It was Steve Tate he was afraid of. Steve’s dad kept the post office, and Steve helped there during the holidays. Or rather, he loitered around the cash register drinking beer with his friends. Little Mark Owen, the sneaky one. And Rob Trevisik, big and thick. Tom dreaded them all. He never, ever went near the place.
His mother came back, rolling her apron into a plastic bag. “Don’t forget. Pound of potatoes. Margarine. And the package.”
“Can’t you drop that in?” he asked, too casually.
“Tom, I’m late as it is. You’ll come to the Hall after?”
He shrugged, appalled. “Nothing better to do.”
Paula kissed him on the head, not listening. “Good. Think of the three pounds an hour.”
She went out. They heard her wheel the bicycle out of the shed. Then Simon stirred. “Come on, lazy.”
Tom scowled at him. He cleared the table and dumped the dishes in the sink, seeing his own double reflection in the shiny taps, his face twisted and scared. As the hot water gushed out he thought that his mother never noticed when he was being sarcastic. He had plenty of things to do. Course work for one.