Page 101 of The Secret Christmas Library
The two girls nodded.
‘The pipes run up the north side; it’s a long branch off the mains water. Your great-great-grandfather got us off the well system about the same time as the railways came. And I don’t think anyone’s looked at those pipes since . . . well, Jamie, have you even looked at the schematics?’
Jamie looked very guilty, as the creaking grew louder. ‘They’ve burst before,’ he said defensively. ‘Loads of times.’
‘And been patched up, here and there. But they haven’t been heated over a flame before.’
The creaking and crackling was growing louder. And then Mirren turned to look behind her.
From the laundry behind them, where the scullery and store rooms were, came a faint trickling noise. And suddenly she could see it: a line of water, moving terrifyingly quickly, seeping under the door.
‘Okay, no time to grab anything,’ said Bonnie, authoritatively. ‘Let’s head out.’
‘Where?’ said Esme. ‘The cottages are closer to the fire.’
‘I know,’ said Jamie, ‘but if we take the extinguishers . . . ’
Already one side of the kitchen floor was covered in water, moving at lightning speed, like a living thing, spreading over the floor, and they ran through to the main section of the house to leave by the front door.
What they saw there dismayed them utterly.
There was water cascading down, pooling at the bottom of the staircase; desperately flowing downstairs, looking for an exit.
But that was not the worst of it. Years of neglect, of lack of money, lack of care – centuries of the house being there, put up in bits and pieces – meant that it was bodged, crumbling, held together with sticky tape and hope, birds’ nests and layers of peeling paint and wallpaper.
They watched, horrified, as cold water cascaded around their heels, at first very slowly then faster and faster; and then, horrifyingly, a crack appeared above the ancient door, running swiftly upwards, straight to the ceiling.
Jamie rushed forward and pulled at the great door, but the water pounding against the wood that had warped was holding it fast; he twisted the great handles, without success.
They charged back to the kitchen, just in time to see a huge eruption of black, filthy water from the butler sink, pounding against the ceiling with full force. The ground was trembling now beneath their feet.
Jamie looked at Mirren. ‘Might this . . . come down?’
‘I said we all needed hard hats,’ said Mirren.
They turned backwards, pursued by the filthy, sticky water that had started to move things – chairs, plates, and most of all books, coming at them menacingly out of the dark. Mirren gave a silent prayer of thanks that the electricity was not on, to spark, but as it was things were bad enough.
‘Break the windows?’ said Theo, but the water was now over their knees, kept pouring out from every sink, every loo, every hole in the place, like a river breaking its banks.
They waded back to the main hall, where things were worse than ever: the grandfather clock had lifted off the floor, was slowly subsiding in the water.
‘Oh, God,’ said Esme. ‘Quick. Up the stairs.’
Nobody had a better idea, and they ran up, against the water crashing down. The smell was terrible as water cascaded through every wall or ceiling with a crack in it, which was all of them. Masonry was tumbling now, falling from the cornices, the elaborate plasterwork on the ceiling. A large chunk caught Theo on the head, and he cried out.
‘We have to get out of here,’ said Jamie.
‘The turret,’ said Mirren and Esme both at once. With a tremendous bang, a picture fell off a wall that was cracking in half. Jamie’s torch was wobbling, its batteries running low.
‘Quickly then,’ said Bonnie, and they tore along the corridors, wading through the water and a sea of books. Mirren’s heart was sad to see them floating by: a life’s work; a memoir of a great hero, now forgotten; a history of wars in which nobody now was left alive; incomprehensible jokes from long ago; compendiums of butterflies; stories of kings and queens of foreign lands, unimaginably long ago. AnAlice in Wonderlandcrossed her vision, looking surprised to be off on an adventure of its own; great long lists of cricketers eddied around her; a Shakespeare floated past peaceably, as if content to know that nothing could sink him forever. She passed the door of the East Library just in time to watch the great chandelier come crashing down.
The small door in the corner was also jammed, but all five of them together hurled their weight on it, and they spilled through it, almost falling down the stairs in their eagerness. This wasthe far corner, the very far edge of the castle, and it was built of ancient, thoroughly solid stuff, stones laid hand over hand. There were no curlicues, no plaster cherubs or fancy borders, no light fittings to crash, no pipes to unleash chaos.
Even with the torches it was black as pitch down the hole, and the noises from the rest of the house were harrowing.
‘Nobody lose their footing,’ said Esme, as they started down the spiral stairs. ‘You’ll fall all the way down.’
Her voice echoed, and Mirren shivered, terrified, holding tight to the external wall, even as, on the other side of it, all hell was breaking loose. She couldn’t feel her feet – the water was cascading all down their ankles – and she couldn’t see them either in the dim light; but she felt, all the way down, the comforting hand of Jamie’s in hers, pulling her onwards. He never let her go, even if he would have balanced far more easily on his own.
