Read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox for Free Online

mother's workbox and examined the threads of coloured silk. She rolled back the carpet and spent a long time sliding in her stockinged feet. She discovered that she could slide all the way from the claw-footed chest to the drinks cabinet. She unlocked the glass bookcase and took down the leather-bound volumes, sniffed them, felt their gold-edged pages. She opened the piano and performed glorious glissandos up and down the keys. In her parents' bedroom, she sifted through her mother's jewellery, eased the lid off a box of powder and dabbed
some on her cheeks. Her features, when she looked up into the oval mirror, were still freckled, her hair still wild. Esme turned away.
    She climbed on to the polished end of her parents' bed, held out her arms and allowed herself to drop. The mattress came up to meet her – bouf! – her clothes billowing out, her hair flying. When the bed had stopped shaking, she lay there for a while, a disarray of skirts, pinafore, hair. She bit at a fingernail, frowning. She had felt something.
    Esme straightened up, climbed back on to the bed-end, raised her arms, closed her eyes, fell to the mattress and – there. There it was again. A soreness, a tenderness in two points on her chest, a strange, exquisite kind of pain. She rolled on to her back and looked down. Under the white of her pinafore, everything was as it always had been. Esme raised a hand and pressed it against her chest. The pain spread outwards, like ripples on a pond. It made her sit up, meet her own eyes in the mirror again and she saw her face, flushed and shocked.
    She wandered along the veranda, kicking at the dust that collected there every day. She would ask Kitty about it. The nursery, when she walked in, was dim and cold. Why weren't the lamps lit? There was a movement in the gloom, a rustle or a sigh. Esme could make out the muted white of the cot, the humped back of the settee. She stumbled forward into the dark, coming upon the daybed sooner than she'd expected. 'Jamila,' she said, and touched her arm. The
ayah's
skin was sticky with sweat. 'Jamila,' Esme said again.
    Jamila gave a slight jerk, sighed, and muttered something that contained 'Esme', and the name sounded as it always did when Jamila said it: Izme, Is Me.
    'What was that?' Esme leant closer.
    Jamila muttered again, a string of sounds in her own language. And there was something in those unfamiliar syllables that frightened Esme. She stood up. 'I'm going to get Pran,' she said. 'I'll be back in a minute.'
    Esme ran out of the door and down the veranda. 'Pran!' she called. 'Pran! Jamila's ill and—' On the threshold of the kitchen, she stopped. Something was smouldering and cracking in the low stove and an oblong of light filtered in through the back door.
    'Hello?' she said, one hand on the wall.
    She stepped into the room. There were pots on the floor, a heap of flour in a basin, a knife buried in a sheaf of coriander. A fish lay filleted and ready on its side. Dinner was being prepared but it was as if they had all stepped outside for a minute, or vanished into the dirt floor, like drops of
ghee.
    She turned and walked back across the courtyard and, as she walked, it dawned on her that there were no voices. No sounds of servants calling to each other, no footfalls, no opening and slamming of doors. Nothing. Just the creaking of branches and a shutter banging somewhere on its hinges. The house, she realised, was empty. They had all gone.
    Esme hurtled down the driveway, her lungs burning.
Darkness had fallen quickly and the branches overhead were black and restless in the sky. The gates were padlocked and beyond them she could see dense undergrowth, punctured by tiny lights moving in the dark.
    'Excuse me,' she shouted. 'Excuse me, please.'
    A group of men were standing in the distance, beside the road, the flare of a lamp illuminating their faces.
    'Can you hear me?' she shouted, and rattled the gates. 'I need help. My
ayah
is ill and—'
    They were moving