1600 Myopia: I Mistook the SCP Monsters for the Spoiled Billionaires novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Flood

At the first family dinner Winnie scolds Jasper and Goldie, the dining room floods, and Roake summons her.

At seven o'clock sharp, the Thornwick heirs came to dinner in what I assumed were their best clothes.

I could tell because Jasper's jacket glittered so hard it hurt.

Goldie's gown was dry for once, in a color like the inside of a shell.

Ambrose wore the same black coat, but he had taken the hood off.

I counted that as a win.

"You're late," I told them, and they were not late at all.

"We're early," Jasper said. "I've been standing outside the door for an hour. I wanted to see how it felt."

"How did it feel?"

"Like being expected."

He said it lightly, and then he looked down at his plate as if it had told a joke he didn't get.

The cook had made roast chicken.

She set it down and left the room at a speed I associated with fire drills.

I carved.

I'm not a good carver.

But nobody at that table had been served by a person in years, and every one of them watched my hands.

"Eat," I said.

Goldie ate.

Jasper ate.

Ambrose did not eat.

The candle at his elbow bent toward him, the flame stretching sideways.

"Does your candle have a draft?" I asked him.

"It likes me," Ambrose said.

"Then get a different candle. That's a fire hazard."

"I will look into it."

"Don't look into it. Do it."

He made a sound I couldn't identify.

I suspected it was the first laugh he'd had since the Eisenhower administration.

"Jasper," I said. "Stop staring."

The glitter had turned toward me, and he'd gone motionless, a glittering wall of attention.

"I'm not staring," he said.

"You're staring at me with every one of your forty-one pairs of sunglasses. It's rude."

"They're not all pointed at you. Some of them are looking at the ceiling."

"Then tell them to stop too."

His voice cracked a little.

"You're not lying," he said. "You think I'm rude. You really do. You don't think I'm... any of the other things."

"Which other things?"

"Never mind."

He ate a bite of chicken so hard he nearly broke the fork.

Goldie started to cry.

She did it politely, with one hand over her mouth, and I thought she'd gotten a bone in her throat.

"What's wrong?" I said, getting up.

"No one's said anything to me in forty years that wasn't an instruction," she whispered. "And you said I should get a dryer."

"That was advice."

"It was the nicest thing anyone's said to me."

"Okay," I said. "That's sad. That's very sad. Don't cry."

She cried harder.

There was a rushing sound in my ears, and then the sound was everywhere.

Water poured across the tablecloth, over the edge of the table, down the legs of my chair.

It rose to my ankles in two seconds flat, cold and clean and smelling of a river.

My shoes filled up.

The candles all went out, one by one.

I was standing in a flood in the dark with three billionaires.

"I'm so sorry," Goldie wept. "I'm so sorry, I do this, I always do this, please don't be afraid."

"Why would I be afraid?" I said. "You've got a pipe somewhere. Where's the shutoff?"

"There isn't a pipe."

"There's always a pipe."

Goldie stopped.

I waved my arms.

I think it made her laugh, because the rushing slowed.

The water stopped rising at the top of my shoes.

"Good," I said. "Now clean it up."

"I'm sorry?"

"You made the mess. You can mop. There's a closet by the stairs."

There was a very long silence, in which I heard Jasper make a sound.

"You can't ask her to mop," he whispered. "She's the Lady Marigold."

"She's the lady who flooded dinner," I said. "I flooded a laundromat once. I mopped it myself and I'm better for it."

Goldie got up.

She walked, trailing water, to the closet.

She came back with a mop, and I swear she held it like a scepter.

She started to work.

The water drew back from the floor in long, neat ribbons and followed her mop out the door.

She hummed while she worked.

"Thank you," she said to me, over her shoulder. "Nobody has ever let me fix it."

Ambrose was standing, though I hadn't seen him rise.

He was a tall black shape with the dark pooling around him.

The dripping sound that came off him had gone very slow.

"Miss Garrick," he said.

"Yes?"

"Come here."

I walked to him through the puddles, and I looked up at where his face should be.

He didn't touch me.

He stood there, a whole wall of cold, and his voice was lower than I'd heard it.

"The candle has stopped leaning," he said.

I looked.

The flame at his elbow burned straight and gold, and he hadn't moved.

An intercom crackled over our heads, and Mr. Roake's smooth voice poured out of the ceiling.

"Miss Garrick," it said. "My office. Now."

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