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

Whatever it is keeping us here wants us happy. I’ve tried getting angry and lashing out, but it just seemed to redirect those emotions – used them to tighten its grip on my mind. If external doesn’t work, then I’m going to have to try what my humanities teacher called ‘internalisation’.

And for that I was going to need something much sharper.

I can feel the House’s attention move from room to room, floor to floor. It’s not looking for me. It knows where I am, it has Simon and Indigo – it can wait. It likes happy. Simon is good at happy. It’s not going to let go of Simon without a fight.

Genii locorum can feed off things like emotions – why not happiness?

Why does it want me, then? Nobody ever accused me of being good at happy.

I’m good at making other people unhappy, at least that’s how it seems to me. Mrs Georgiou who runs the after-school Latin club sat me down when I asked to join and said that she was worried about letting me attend. She said that she was worried I would get bored and disruptive, and I said, well, don’t let me get bored then. And she said that was the problem right there. She said that in the staff room the teachers made bets about whether it was going to be a good Abigail class or a bad Abigail class. They wanted me to join the club in the hope that it would help tire me out.

‘So are you going to let me into Latin club?’ I asked.

‘I have no choice,’ said Mrs Georgiou. ‘The other teachers said they wouldn’t let me in the pub if I didn’t.’

That memory cheers me up enough to get me to my feet. I turn and ram the sharp end of the doorstopper into the crack between the leaves of the dumb waiter’s doors. Even as I get it open a crack, I can feel House coming for me in the drumming of children’s feet as they shout and whoop their way down the stairs. I smack the fat end of the doorstopper with my palm, and there’s a cracking sound and a sharp pain in my hand. The noisy children retreat for a moment before coming tumbling back with the swish of kites and kittens and string.

I smack the doorstopper again and the pain drowns out the laughing children and the doors wedge open with a crack that I feel all the way down to my heels. I wrench the doors open, throw my rucksack down the shaft and, before I can change my mind, I dive after it.

It’s a tight fit and lined with metal, tin I think. I can feel it sliding past my shoulders. Not a dumb waiter, I realise, a laundry chute – who puts a laundry chute in a private house?

If only it were a couple of centimetres wider – then I’d be swooshing down with an improbably slow-motion explosion chasing me. Instead I’m wriggling and scraping my knuckles on what might be the hatches to the ground floor. By my calc, that’ll be right by the front door. I give it a thump, but it’s sealed tight – worth a try. My face is getting heavy with blood, and dust goes in my nose and makes me sneeze, once, twice, and then one of those will-it-won’t-it sneezes. I can hear clanking and rattling and muffled voices below.

Nearly there.

Suddenly the walls have gone and I fall the last two metres head first – fortunately into laundry.

It’s dirty, but it doesn’t smell – that’s important.

30

The Ghost Kitchen

I’m in a kitchen full of ghosts.

The stuff is all real enough, I’ve just had a splinter from a big rough wooden table dominating the centre. There’s a thing that looks like an Aga’s big brother that goes across half the room. The walls are whitewashed and the floor is covered in grey unglazed tile. Black iron skillets and frying pans hang from the walls and there is steam and smoke and shouting.

But the people doing the shouting are ghosts, empty shapes of transparent grey. Sometimes barely there and visible only because the human brain tracks movement better than shapes. It feels like it should be hot in here and full of smells but both are faint, like echoes. Like a daydream of a lost memory.

Like whoever is telling the story never got into the kitchen much.

But there are knives on the table and that’s what I was looking for. Because it’s only a matter of time before . . .

‘Hello, Abigail.’

Charles is standing in the doorway, holding a deformed-looking red terrier with a long snout and pointy ears. Charles is wearing a long pink nightshirt and a nightcap with a floppy point that dangles down by one ear. He looks happy to see me.

‘I thought you were coming to visit,’ he says.

I’ve got my back against the kitchen table, but Charles is staying in the doorway as if he don’t know whether it’s safe or not. Like he don’t want to get into a beef with me in case he gets mash up. Which is interesting and also, I’ll admit, gives me a bounce. But not enough to make me stupid.

I shift slightly so that the kitchen knives I saw on the table are right behind me. They’re ghost knives, but the ghost cooks are still banging pots and stirring shit so I’m hoping Charles’s being here means they will be real enough to both of us.

‘Is that you, Simon?’ I ask.

‘Never mind Simon,’ says Charles, but the deformed terrier flattens its ears at the sound of my voice.

‘Whine,’ it says sadly.

‘You like Simon ’cause he’s happy, innit?’ I say. ‘What’s with the rest of the kids?’

Charles takes a step into the room.

His face is several faces at the same time, not blended but superimposed like a freaky phone app – Snapchat for hive minds. I think I can see a bit of Simon’s hair,