Read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox for Free Online Page A

off, muttering to each other, glancing back at her, and Esme was sure, she was absolutely certain, that one was the gardener's boy who used to give her rides on his shoulders.
    In the nursery, she fumbled with matches and the lamp. The glow spread from where she was standing across the floor, up to the ceiling, along the walls, picking out the pictures of the gospels, the nursing chair, the bed where Jamila lay, the stove, the table where they ate, the shelf of books.
    When there was enough light, she walked to the cot and the movement seemed to hurt her legs, as if she'd been sitting for a long time. At the edge of the cot, she discovered she was still holding the matches. She had to put them down before she could pick Hugo up and there was nowhere to put them so she had to bend and place them on the floor. And when she tried to pick him up it was difficult. She had to lean over and there were so many wraps and blankets and his body seemed much heavier and he was so cold and so stiff that it was hard to get a grip on him. He was frozen into the shape
in which he always slept: on his back, arms stretched out, as if seeking an embrace, as if falling through space.
    Later, Esme will tell people that she sat with him in the nursery all night. But they won't believe her. 'That's impossible,' they will say. 'You must have slept. You don't remember.' But she did. In the morning, as the light began to slide between the shutters, the matches were still on the floor next to her shoe, and the nappies were still drying beside the fire. She was never sure at what point Jamila died.
    They found her in the library. She had locked herself in.
    She remembers long hours of silence. A silence more absolute and powerful than anything she had ever imagined. The light fading and resurging. Birds passing through the trees like needles through fabric. Hugo's skin acquiring a delicate, pewter tinge. She thinks she just switched off, slowed down, an unwound clock. And then suddenly her mother was there, howling and screeching, and her father's face was pushed up close, shouting, where is everyone, where did they go. She'd been there for days, they said, but it felt longer to her, decades, or longer, infinitely long, several ice ages.
    She wouldn't let them take Hugo. They had to prise him from her. It took her father and a man they'd got from somewhere. Her mother stood by the window until it was all over.
     
    Iris, a nurse and the social worker descend in a lift. It seems to take a long time. Iris imagines they must be sinking into
the bedrock that shores up the city. She steals a look at the social worker but her eyes are fixed on the illuminating floor numbers. In the nurse's pocket there is a small, boxed electronic device. Iris is wondering what it's for when she feels the lift do a gentle bounce and come to a stop. The doors open. There is a ribcage of bars before them. The nurse reaches out to tap in a code, but turns to Iris. 'Stay close,' she says. 'Don't stare.'
    Then they are outside the bars, on the other side of the bars, the bars sliding shut behind them, in a corridor with striplighting and red-brown linoleum. There is the prickling stink of bleach.
    The nurse sets off, the rubber grips on her shoe-soles squealing. They go through a set of swing doors, past rows and rows of locked rooms, a yellow-lit nurses' station, a pair of chairs screwed to the floor. On the ceiling, cameras blink and swivel to watch them go.
    It takes Iris a while to work out what's odd about this place. She doesn't know what she expected – gibbering Bedlamites? howling madmen? – but it wasn't this ruminative quiet. Every other hospital she's ever been in has been crowded, teeming, corridors full of people, walking, queuing, waiting. But Cauldstone is deserted, a ghost hospital. The green paint on the walls gleams like radium, the floors are polished to a mirror. She wants to ask, where is everyone, but the nurse is entering a code into another door and