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

In Nightingale’s background I hear the antique clunk of the Jag’s door closing, then its engine purring into life.

‘Why two hours?’ he asks, but I know he’s stalling and it’s too late because sometimes you’ve got to do stuff now and worry about the consequences later. Because what I didn’t tell him is that I’m worried that House is getting much stronger and that while right now it might be anchored to the bricks and mortar of the real ting house, it might soon be able to move all of itself to somewhere else.

And then nobody is going home.

25 Called a Halligan tool in North America.

33

The Bouncing Bed

I am standing on the scaffolding four floors up, looking into what was probably a rear-facing bedroom through one of its two sash windows. It’s hot here in the gap between the glass and the polythene sheeting that shrouds the house from view. The air is still and smells of brick dust, old paint and damp plastic. The scaffolding itself is reassuringly solid, with wooden walkways and aluminium ladders between levels. Climbing up was easy, but my problem now is that it stops short of the attic. If my plan is going to work, I need to start at the top.

There are two galdem in the bedroom, one is Natali and one is a thicc white girl with blonde hair that I don’t know. They are bouncing up and down and laughing like little kids on a bed. Only there’s no bed. The room looks stripped, the electrical sockets ripped out, layers of wallpaper and carpet torn away. I’m looking at the real ting house, but the girls’ feet stop half a metre above the bare floorboards.

And they is bouncing as if there’s springs under them, or a mattress or a bouncy castle.

If I go inside – which reality will I be in?

From below I hear a sharp high-pitched bark, then two more – that’s the prearranged signal that the Feds, or worse, Nightingale, have reached the back garden. I step to one side and, careful to keep my arm clear of any scatter, smash the window with the hooley bar. Then I quickly scrape the top, the left and the right and then clear all the fragments from the bottom. From there it’s simple. You just check where you put your hands as you climb in, and ignore the somebody calling your name from the garden below.

I slide across the top of a dressing table that wasn’t there before, dragging its blue and purple floral print cover and the oval wooden vanity mirror with me. We all tumble down onto a dusty-smelling rug in green and yellow. I scramble up to find two young white girls standing on the bed and staring at me. Both are dressed in blue and white silk dresses with off-the-shoulder necklines, cinched waists and knee-length skirts. The one with dark hair has a flower pattern embroidered along the hem. Her blonde friend has a leaf pattern picked out in grass green and olive.

‘Who are you?’ they cry.

I’m in what I reckon is Victorian times. At least it looks like a Dickens adaptation, not Jane Austen. My mum loves Jane Austen, so I’ve sat through a lot of them and anyway my English teacher is dead keen on putting our set books in historical context, so I know the difference between Regency and Victorian. I bet Ms Sylvestor would be well pleased to know that the classes we spent researching what it was like to be Martha Cratchit were actually coming in useful.

‘Who are you?’ I ask.

‘That’s rude,’ says the blonde child. ‘You should answer the question first.’

‘I’m Mary,’ says the one I think is Natali. ‘And this is Lizzie.’

Lizzie turns on Mary.

‘Silly,’ she says crossly. ‘She should tell us her name first – it’s only polite.’

Currently I’m not being sucked into whatever happy childhood memory this is, but I got that sick feeling in my stomach. The one you get when you’re balancing high up and don’t want to think about what happens if you slip.

Like the gap between the trees where Simon nearly fell.

But I’ve never been so far into one of these memories/
stories/whatever and still been one hundred per cent me. Never had a chance to ask questions.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say. ‘My name is Abigail – do you live here?’

The girls nod.

‘Our father is Mr John Brown,’ says Mary, and beams proudly at me.

Little blonde Lizzie is frowning – she gives me a very sceptical look.

‘Why did you come in through the window?’ she asks – obviously the brains of the pair.

‘I work for the Window Inspector,’ I say, and risk a glance at the window I broke to get in. In this reality it’s still intact, and beyond it the world is white with snow under a grey sky. No wonder the kids are reduced to bouncing on their bed.

Later, says a voice in my head, there will snowmen and mittens and hot chocolate.

‘And your windows look fine to me,’ I say. ‘Are you the only children that live here?’

‘No,’ says Mary, ‘we have three sisters and one brother.’

‘And what are their names?’

‘Selina, Henrietta and Phoebe,’ says Mary. ‘And Charles.’

‘Are they here at home with you?’ I ask, and both girls solemnly nod their heads.

‘Our sisters are downstairs,’ says Lizzie. ‘Shall we go and see?’

The girls jump off the bed, both landing on the floor with louder thumps than I’d expect from five-year-olds.

I beat them to the door and out into the landing. As I expected, the stairs to the attic are separate from the main staircase and there are two more doors off the landing. I open the first to find another bedroom, and the second to a room decorated in yellow and cream with a wardrobe, washstand, vanity and a purple chaise longue that doesn’t match anything else.

‘What’s this?’ I ask the girls as they skip heavily towards me.

‘That’s Mama’s dressing room,’ says Mary.

‘So where does Charles