The Servants by Michael Marshall

Author:Michael Marshall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Ghost, Brighton (England), Psychological Fiction, Boys, Fantasy Fiction, Fiction, Psychological, Fantasy, English Horror Fiction, Fiction - General, Haunted houses, General
ISBN: 9780061494161
Publisher: Eos
Published: 2008-08-28T23:00:00+00:00

when he'd walked a few hundred yards he was very close to the rusted supports of the West Pier. He stood with his hands pushed into his pockets and looked out at the twisted spider of lopsided metal, looming over the water. The last time they'd been to Brighton with Mark's real father, a lone wooden hut, perhaps a ticket booth, had still been clinging to life, a final remnant of the way things had once been. Since then it had disappeared, the victim of some storm, fallen apart and into the water. When you walked along the line of the Brunswick houses, if you glanced down into the little basement courtyards you sometimes saw pieces of wood or metal down there, pieces of the old pier--often quite large--which had been washed up onto the shore and which people had picked up and brought home. Souvenirs, perhaps, as if people were trying to keep the memory of it alive.

Mark was in a daze. He was going over and over what had just happened, trying to make sense of it. Somehow, after he'd stepped through that door, something had happened. What that actually was he didn't yet understand--but he no longer believed that the other night had been a dream. Not all of it, anyhow. It was clear from the way the girl--Emily--had looked at him that she recognized him, as he had recognized her. Somehow, unlike the other people he'd encountered, she'd seen him the first time he'd been there (or the second, if you counted the time the old lady had shown him around). There was something else in common between the last two visits, too. The more Mark pondered it, the more he realized it simply made no sense that the tea in the old lady's pot could still have been warm. It had been sitting there for at

? ? ?

m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h least ten minutes after she'd last topped it up, before she even fell asleep. Okay, the room was warm--but if you added the time he'd been in the . . . other place, it just had to have gone cold.

But he remembered something about his previous visit now, too. When he'd woken in the old lady's room, it had been twenty-five minutes past eight. Yet after being in the back area for at least ten minutes, then returning the key to the drawer, getting back up to his room, and getting a drink from the kitchen, it had only been eight thirty-five. He was sure of these times. It was one of the things he'd used to prove to himself that the experience could only have been a dream.

Now it had happened again, and he knew what had just occurred could not be a dream. Dreams did not leave dust on your hands, or smudges on the shoulders of your jacket. Whatever he'd just seen, wherever he'd just been, it had been real.

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