Free The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith Page A

noise sounded less like flapping now, too. It was getting louder. Not as if whatever was making it was doing so more vigorously, but as if it had started off a long, long way away and was getting closer. Like a pop song coming out of a car’s windows: starting off around the corner, very quiet, then turning into the same street, then getting closer and closer . . .
    Mark whipped his head around quickly. The sound had jumped in volume suddenly, and it definitely wasn’t a bird. What was it?
    He reminded himself to blink. He was keeping his eyes open too long at a time, and they must be drying out, because the light was . . . The light seemed different. Whereas before it had been gray, now it was a little warmer. Perhaps he was just getting used to it, seeing some of the mottled brown of the walls, but . . .
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    t h e s e r va n t s
    He was standing very close to the left-hand side of the corridor now, and realized there was probably someone’s apartment on the other side of the wall, in a house where all this old stuff had been done away with and turned into somewhere people could live. Was he hearing sounds from someone else’s life, or from their television?
    He heard the laugh again, but now it seemed to be coming from the end of the corridor, around the bend to the kitchen. It was lower, too, throaty. Someone passing by outside the house, maybe, the sound echoing around and through the broken glass.
    Mark found it difficult to move his feet. In the background, he could still hear the thing that had been flapping, but now it had low notes and high notes in it. Things that sounded like clanks, and clattering, and . . . in fact . . . It sounded like voices.
    Suddenly it got much louder, and the warmth in the shadows burst like the world’s smallest firework, seen through fog.
    “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” a voice said, very clearly, and someone came striding out of the short corridor. It was a man, dressed in a suit that was black and very tight.
    He was moving quickly. He was talking fast, too, but it was hard to make out what he was saying. He walked straight past Mark and quickly into the kitchen at the end. Mark fell backward against the wall. He couldn’t feel his legs. His jaw was trembling. The corridor was full of noise now, and candles and oil lights flickered dimly along walls now obscured behind thin smoke.
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    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Someone came sweeping out of the kitchen, coming in the opposite direction to the figure Mark had just seen. She was middle-aged and short, with a bundle under her arm. She turned to shout something over her shoulder, then laughed low and hard, her face blurred—and walked past Mark as if he wasn’t there.
    Mark tried to stand up straight. The corridor was even warmer now, but his stomach felt as if it was full of ice. He could hear blood beating in his head, the pounding of his heart, but these were now just sounds among many. There were clanging, slapping, and thudding noises from the kitchen, and the harsh clamor of someone barking orders toward the front of the house. The tinkle of a bell too, somewhere, not like a doorbell in a shop down a side street, but a stern jingle-jingle-jingle —a noise designed to capture attention. Even after it had stopped, it felt as if it was ringing, as if it had become a substance more than a sound, something you could touch. Mark realized that the air itself had begun to seem thicker in texture, pressing him down. It was hard to take into his lungs, too, as if too full and hot and wet. Someone else went past him then, and then another, but by the time Mark had turned his head, there was nothing to see. Everything was moving so fast, and always at the corner of his eye. There were smells coming at him, too: candle wax, something sweet cooking, a hint of sweat—and a low, meaty tang hanging in the air, buffeted by the constant movement as shapes and sounds went back and forth around him, pinning him to the wall.