The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith

that came right to the door. The little room at the end looked the same, too, the one in which he’d (dreamed he’d) glimpsed a candle’s light, far away in the darkness. It was dead, cluttered, and smelled of mildew. It was hard to believe that anyone could ever have spent any time in there.
    He followed the main corridor toward the kitchen. There was no pigeon in residence this time, and it was empty and quiet—though there was still a low, rank smell, maybe even worse than before.
    Something caught his eye as he entered, and he squatted down to see a glint of something half-hidden beneath a small pile of rotten wood in the corner. It was a teaspoon. Very small, tarnished, and slightly bent.
    A definite souvenir, though—and he kept it in his hand as he straightened up.
    He poked around the room for ten minutes, feeling both relieved and disappointed. The dust in here was very real, and made him remember something else he’d noticed in the dream the other night. It hadn’t been dusty. Smoky, and thick with smells, and with some kind of unclean film everywhere. But no dust. He should have realized that before. He also noticed that if he stood in exactly the right position, slightly to one side of the skylight, there was a fragment of one of the panes, which was clean enough—having somehow avoided being broken, or crapped on by a bird, or covered in decades of grime—through which he could glimpse a section
      
    m i c h a e l m a r s h a l l s m i t h of the frosted window of the toilet on the first floor of David’s house. Being able to see that, connecting visually from here to a recognizable element of the outside world, made all the dream-stuff harder to believe.
    He looked around for a little longer, however. It was still pretty cool. When you stood in the tiny room where the meat used to be stored, you could almost believe you could still smell it, though you knew it was just pigeon poo with a sour metallic tang from the rust, which covered most of the surfaces. He went back out into the center of the kitchen, turning the spoon over and over in his hands, watching it catch the light from above, trying to imagine a time when it had been one of many pieces of silverware in constant movement in this room.
    Finally, he held the spoon still, looking into its scarred inner surface, thinking it was probably time to go.
    “What are you doing with that ?”
    Suddenly the spoon was gone from his hand, and Mark looked up to see a man standing in front of him. The man, in fact—the one in the tight black suit. He was glaring at the spoon he now held as if its existence signaled a grave and possible terminal overthrow of all of God’s laws concerning what was acceptable in the world. Mark stared at him.
    “And who might you be, more to the point?” the man demanded, swiveling his head to peer intently down at Mark, like an eagle that knew it had pinioned its prey. The man was tall and angular, with a high forehead and steel-gray hair that
      
    t h e s e r va n t s
    looked as if it had been cut and styled using scissors and a ruler. “And what on earth are you wearing?”
    Mark was quite unable to say anything. He was too busy noticing that the quality of the air had started to change—
    that the light from above had become muted, as if the rays of the sun he’d walked under that morning were no longer able to penetrate, as if something thicker and more viscous had taken their place.
    The man in the suit pivoted smartly about, held the spoon up high, and waved it imperiously.
    “Martha,” he said. “One of yours, I assume?”
    A gloriously fat woman suddenly appeared from Mark’s right. Her hair was gray and bundled up chaotically on top of her head. She seemed to start talking in mid-sentence, or as if her speech had emerged out of the low but growing hubbub of generalized sound—a noise, something like flapping, that Mark recognized.
    “. . . and make sure them trays are proper clean this