The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith Page B

of the same books David had bought last time. He hadn’t even noticed . Hadn’t been looking or caring when he bought it the first time, or when he’d bought it again today. He was faking it, pretending to do the right thing. Mark could just picture him coming back into the house, his mother asking what was in the bag, and his stepfather shrugging, saying just a little something for the boy, and Mark’s mother thinking how nice he was . . . Mark picked up the book. He yanked the covers off first, then tore the pages out from the middle, and then ripped and shredded these until the floor was covered with tiny pieces and the book was no more.
     
    eight
    His hands were shaking and hurt a little from what he’d just done, from the blurred fury they’d discovered within themselves. He could hear voices upstairs through the ceiling, mainly David’s. Mark couldn’t make out any words, but he could hear the music of them, the tune of utter calm, the sound of a man who was always right.
    Suddenly, and all at once, Mark realized the enormity of his position. When he’d stood at the back of a small room, under protest, and listened as his mother and this man had been declared man and wife, he’d known what it had meant. Of course. But he hadn’t taken it seriously . His dad was his dad, and that meant—whatever this event declared to the contrary—his mother and real dad were still married in some way, still joined, remained the fabric of the world. This unspoken assumption had stood firm all the time they’d still been in London. London was London. It didn’t stop. It continued on. Things had to work the way they always did there, despite appearances. On the drive down to the coast, he now realized, this belief had started to waver, deep inside him where t h e s e r va n t s
    he wasn’t always aware of what was going on. David being around in London was one thing. His presence in Brighton was different. It said that even in the place where you came to get away, he would be here.
    It said everything about how the world had changed. This person—who nine months ago had been unknown to Mark—now had control over his life. Over his mother, even worse. The voices upstairs were already quietening. His mother wasn’t defending Mark, and David wasn’t coming down here to apologize. David had won. Again. He was upstairs with Mark’s mother, and Mark was stuck down here in this cold room with nothing but old books and a television that didn’t get cable.
    Abruptly, he grabbed the other book from the bed, but before he’d even tensed to shred it, he knew that wasn’t the answer. Instead he threw it against the wall and turned around. The book wasn’t the real problem. The problem was being stuck here, stuck in this situation.
    He walked quickly over to the window.
    If he opened the door to his room, the gatekeeper would hear and come back down to give him a hard time. So instead Mark flipped the catch on one of the three big sashes. It was stiff, but once he got his shoulder under it, he was able to shove it up a couple of feet. It was dark outside, though it was only half past four. Spitting with rain, too. The sidewalk outside the house was deserted, as was the rest of the square. It wasn’t walking weather.
    There was no one to see.
    He went and got his coat, then came back to the window.
     
    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h Put one foot up onto the sill, pulled the other up. He slipped under the bottom of the window, and then he was outside. The exterior sill was over a foot deep—plenty of room. He half-turned and quietly pushed the window down, leaving it open a couple of inches. He’d have to come back this way, too. If he pulled the chair away from his bedroom door, then David would be able to enter the room and discover that Mark had disappeared.
    Then he started to sidle around to his left, toward the front door to the house. When he got to the end of the sill, he realized he hadn’t quite