What Abigail Did Tha Summer, Ben Aaronovitch [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt] 📗

‘We’ll see what’s in the kitchen, though, won’t we?’ I say.

Nothing is in the kitchen, not even the cabinet units, although you can see where they’d once been. Wires dangle from the ceiling and spew out of gaps in the wall. The old lino is still in place, marked with clean rectangles outlined with sharp-edged grease stains.

There’s a back door and windows, but I can’t see out to the garden because of the plastic sheeting.

‘Upstairs?’ I say.

So up the stairs we are going, but slowly and quietly because something is jarring me. Indigo scampers up to the landing and stops – ears pricking. The treads and risers are bare wood and the white paint of the balusters is chipped and scarred. It’s really quiet, like ‘too quiet’ quiet.

‘I’ll be right back,’ says Simon, and laughs for no reason.

‘There’s nothing up here,’ says Indigo, but we check anyway and find two more big rooms, stripped and cold in the milky light from the windows. A third room that obviously was a bathroom – no en suite, I notice – has white tiles still clinging to the walls in patches, a pile of rubble under the window, and a pair of copper pipes rising out of the floor.

There are two more floors above us – the second storey and the attic conversion.

I look up the stairs and I swear it looks darker.

‘This house is empty,’ I say. ‘They’ve gone somewhere else.’

‘They might have gone through a soft spot,’ says Indigo.

‘What’s a soft spot?’ I ask, but I already think I know the answer.

‘It’s where you can fall through.’

‘Fall through to where?’

‘We don’t know,’ says Indigo. ‘We never fall through.’

‘You’re telling me this now?’

‘It was just theoretical,’ says Indigo, bobbing her head from side to side. ‘Something we covered in training. It wasn’t something I expected to run into here.’

I’m about to ask exactly where Indigo expected to run into a soft spot exactly, when I realise Simon isn’t with us any more. I call his name.

‘Up here,’ he says from the landing above. ‘I’ve been all the way to the top and it’s all empty.’

I look up, and behind Simon it’s definitely getting darker and it ain’t the sun going behind a cloud.

‘Simon!’ I shout. ‘We are leaving!’

He trots down the stairs and the darkness follows him and suddenly I’m more prang than I was that time I was dangling over the railway tracks at Acland Burghley. Simon reaches me with a look of cheerful incomprehension, and I grab his hand and drag him down the next flight of stairs to the ground floor, Indigo streaking ahead of me towards the front door.

I can feel it at my back as we run down the hall. An engulfing need piling up behind us like a pushy school crowd at dinner-time.

I reach the door and yank at the handle, but it doesn’t move.

And then everything is dark and silent.

I see nothing, but I can feel the door at my back. I stretch out my arms in all directions, but all I can feel is the rough texture of bare brick or old wallpaper.

‘Simon?’ I call. ‘Indigo?’

I’m thinking that the door to the front room must be less than a metre to my left, and to the left of the doorway will be the front windows. If I wrap my fist in my rucksack, that and its contents should save my hand when I smash the glass.

People have died trying to break windows with their hands.

Break the window, get out, get help, rescue Indigo and Simon.

Why is it so hard to move?

A light appears down the hallway, a candle flickering in a blue and white tea saucer. It’s being held by Nerd Boy. I recognise his pale face and bad hair.

‘Good God,’ he says. ‘Have you been waiting down here long?’ His voice is all wrong, proper posh and old – like he’s an elder. ‘It’s like the blackout in here, isn’t it? Still, now you’re here we can get on with it.’

23

Three-day Week

It takes more than a power cut to stop a Hampsteadite throwing a dinner party, although God knows how I’m going to get back to Kilburn. Julias has offered to run me home in his Renault, and the thought of that fills me with a strange combination of excitement and disgust, but for the life of me I don’t know why. He meets me at the door with a blue and green handmade candle guttering in a saucer and takes my coat.

*

Oh God, how did I let him talk me into coming tonight. This is going to be truly frightful and I didn’t have to say yes. But now I’m going to have to sit across the table from Grace and make pleasant conversation. Julias leads me into the recently knocked-through dining room/lounge lit by candles, where the other guests are eating canapés and drinking lukewarm German white wine. There is Grace now, sidling up with a plate of canapés and how lovely to see you, white or red, and I choose red because at least it might be the right temperature even if it is South African. Grace drifts away to fetch the wine and I’m looking around the room. I see the kids – Jan and Helena – God, they’ve grown. Jan in particular looks like his father when he was young and Helena is flushed from her first proper glass of wine. More than one glass, I think. I feel I should know the other guests, but their faces are only half familiar and they blur into a tangle of green corduroy, purple shirts and luridly coloured kipper ties.

*

Now I see Charles, splendid in a white linen shirt and a grey-green Nehru jacket, and his smile is like the moon emerging from behind a cloud. He’s holding court amongst a circle of laughing young . . . I can’t tell if they’re men or girls. Oh God, I’m getting old. Soon I’ll be knitting socks, rinsing