The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  A match flared and he saw a young man with dark skin looming over him, staring into his eyes. When his attacker was sure M’Gregor was not going to struggle any more, he jerked his head sideways and pointed with his chin.

  M’Gregor was too dulled by sleep and the previous evening’s brandy, and too horrified by the rude manner of his wakening, to understand what he was being told.

  “He wants you to look at me,” said a scratchy and unfamiliar woman’s voice. “He wants you to see what will happen to her if you cry out.”

  He looked into the eyes above him. The young man nodded. M’Gregor looked towards the spot where his wife habitually snored away the long hours of the night.

  She was lying very still, eyes bulged out in terror as she was pressed down into the feather bed by a madwoman. The Ghost of the Itch Ward, long labelled by him as one of the deeply resented Useless Mouths that he had to feed on account of her being too soft-witted to work at bone-grinding or stone-breaking, was straddling her with a knife resting point-first on her windpipe.

  His wife’s eye strained sideways and found his. A tear leaked out of it and slid down the unfortunately porcine curve of her cheek.

  The man took his hand away from his mouth. M’Gregor gasped and breathed in, trying to calm himself.

  It was useless. His heart was beating nineteen to the dozen and there was a shamefully warm wetness leaking over his thigh and puddling around his buttocks.

  “What do you want?” he gasped.

  His assailant looked at the Ghost.

  “I want what you took from me,” she croaked.

  “I took nothing from you.”

  “When I came, I had possessions. You took them.”

  “That was years back—”

  Amos prodded him gently with the knife.

  “I don’t remember. Who can remember that long ago?”

  He sounded desperate. Near tears. Not a man. A boy about to blubber helplessly under the pressure of the knife and her relentless gaze.

  “I do,” she said. “I had a book. I had a chain around my neck. I had a pendant on a chain. And I had a ring.”

  The wife had said nothing. Amos looked at her and caught a guilty flicker in her eyes. He reached out to her mind and felt a kind of reptilian movement in her thoughts, as if there were thick coils slowly slithering against each other in the depths as the mind tried to hide something from even itself. And then he caught what she was thinking, the thing she was trying to find a way not to admit out loud. She was wondering how to keep her money and her goods and deciding whether she would say anything if they started cutting her husband. Because he, Amos saw in her thoughts, did not know where she hid what she had stolen. And she was now deciding she trusted her future to the hidden loot more than she trusted the man whimpering beside her in a puddle of his own piss. She was not going to say where she kept it concealed. She had looked at the hand fate had dealt her and decided her husband would have to go on the forfeit pile.

  She keeps what she has stolen in a small casket under the floorboard under the left front leg of the linen press.

  The Ghost nodded.

  “I heard.” She looked down at the woman pinned beneath her.

  “If you tell me where you have hidden what you steal, I will spare your husband. If you do not, we will slit him from ear to ear. What do you want? Plunder or husband?”

  “There is no plunder!” squealed M’Gregor. “Not here!”

  The Ghost stared into the eyes of the woman.

  “Please God!” M’Gregor choked. “Yes, there may be some mistake in the accounting! Perhaps there is a small overage in our bank account that should perhaps be in the account of the poorhouse itself, but I cannot give that to you now. I can get you gold tomorrow if you spare us or, if not gold, a draft—”

  “I do not want a draft. Or gold. I want what is mine. I am not a thief. I am not like you. I am vengeance.”

  She cocked her head at the woman beneath her. The small eyes had hardened.

  “Love or money?” said the Ghost. “Which is it to be?”

  “There is nothing,” said the woman. “If there was, do you not think I would tell you to save my husband’s life?”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “So. Not love then.” The Ghost shrugged.

  “She’s telling the truth!” blubbered M’Gregor. “Can’t you see… ?”

  “No,” said the Ghost. “She’s lying.”

  She nodded to Amos.

  “Get it. I will keep her quiet. He is too unmanned now to do anything but she would scream for help if I took the blade from her throat, wouldn’t you, my piggy darling?”

  Mrs M’Gregor’s eyes tried to say no, but they were distracted by Amos’s movements as he stepped off the bed and began to move the leg of the linen press across the bare floorboards. The sound of wood scraping on wood was punctuated by a gasp.

  “How did—?” began Mrs M’Gregor, sounding more outraged than scared.

  “I looked into the foul stew of your mind, piggy dear,” said the Ghost.

  Amos pried the floorboard up and retrieved a small ironbound casket, about a foot in length by half that across. It was secured by a padlock.

  “You bitch,” gasped M’Gregor in disbelief, staring at his wife. “You’d have let them cut my throat for what—?”

  She looked away.

  “Where is the key?” said the Ghost.

  Mrs M’Gregor clamped her mouth shut. The Ghost laughed.

  “You don’t understand, do you? We can read your thoughts. You will never be alone. You will never be unwatched. You will never be safe from us. EVER!”

  Mrs M’Gregor flinched. But to do her credit, she had one last spark of rebellion left in her, perhaps all she had now that her venality was fully exposed, or perhaps it was merely a despairing clutch at the last straw of sanity being whirled beyond her reach by the storm of circumstance assailing her on every side.

  “You cannot read my mind.”

  “Of course not,” said the Ghost. “Why, if I could read your mind, then up would be down, the real would be artifice, the shadows peopled by concrete things and not mere insubstantial fears and you–you would be haunted by more than the spectre of vengeance for the rest of your days. And I would know where you hid the key…”

  “But you don’t,” said Mrs M’Gregor.

  “Of course not,” said the Ghost. “That would be impossible.”

  She stabbed the knife viciously downwards.

  Mrs M’Gregor grunted in terror. The knife ripped into the bolster beside her head. The Ghost angled the knife and ripped upwards, gutting it in a cloud of goose feathers. She reached in, found a sewn-in pocket and cut it open. She retrieved a small iron key and held it out to Amos.

  Mrs M’Gregor’s eyes were wide and twitching. Where they had been sharp with resolution they now became oddly blunted and unmoored.

  “Oh yes,” said the Ghost with a grim smile. “The ghoulies, the ghosties and the long-leggedy beasties and all the unhallowed things that go bump in the night? We’re real. And from us, nothing can deliver you!”

  Mrs M’Gregor’s eyes rolled back, white as twin moons in the abundant folds of her eyelids.

  “Fainted clean away,” said the Ghost, sounding disappointed, looking at M’Gregor who was now staring back at her from beneath a light sprinkling of goose-feathers. “Thought she had more in her, seeing as how she was willing to sacrifice you for a… for what?”

  Amos brought the casket to her, holding the lid open.

  She tipped it onto the bed. Three gold sovereigns, some silver, a lot of copper, some cheap jewellery, six wedding bands of dubious metal and some chains, equally dubious. It was not a king’s ransom.

  M’Gregor choked at the sight, despite himself.

  “You fucking whore-bitch!” he rasped at his wife.

  “Why, Warden M’Gregor! You should thank us,” said the Ghost. “It is not many who know precisely how much they are valued by their lo
ved ones…”

  She was scrabbling through the mess, looking for something. Her voice became tighter.

  “It’s not there.”

  She slapped Mrs M’Gregor. Twice. Then again as her eyes came back down and into focus. She held the better-looking of all the chains in front of her face.

  “The pendant?”

  Mrs M’Gregor fishmouthed at her. Unable to speak. Amos caught the unvoiced thought.

  It was just glass. Not an emerald. She had it tested at a jeweller in Salisbury. He gave her money for the gold band it was mounted in. It’s gone.

  The Ghost slapped the woman again, in fury this time.

  Don’t. It wasn’t a real jewel…

  “But it was MINE!” she shouted, drawing her knife hand back for a murderous slash across Mrs M’Gregor’s throat.

  Amos grabbed her wrist, twisted it and caught the knife as it fell from her spasming fingers.

  You agreed. No killing.

  “I didn’t know they’d lost everything they stole!”

  She only stole the chain. The book and the ring were taken by the man who left you here.

  “I didn’t see that,” she said.

  I did.

  “What kind of man?”

  Tall. A blue coat. A fine carriage. That’s all she remembers.

  She looked at him, appraising as her breathing came back under control.

  You saw that?

  He nodded.

  “You can see deeper into her mind than I. Come. We must go then.”

  And as simply as that she scissored off the bed, took the candlestick from the bedside table, an ebony-handled hand mirror from the dresser, and walked through the smaller of the two doors into the bedroom, the one they had not entered by. He followed her, backing in, keeping his eyes on the two stunned M’Gregors, making sure that they in turn kept their eyes on his knives.

  There was a flare of light behind him as the Ghost lit the candle, and in the same moment he caught a flash of surprise and intent from M’Gregor’s mind.

  This is a dead end!

  He turned and found it to be so. She pulled the door to before he could back out, and then moved swiftly past him with a grim smile on her face. They stood in what was no more than a long attic space angled beneath the mansard roof. She placed the hand mirror on a small shelf and then held the one she had retrieved from the water butt in her hand so its plane was parallel with it, about three feet away. She bent her head and looked at the infinity of reflections thus revealed.

  Amos heard both M’Gregor’s thoughts and the shift and scrape as the big man came off the bed in the next room.

  There is no exit! This is a dead end.

  “We’re still leaving. They’ll eventually look in and we’ll be gone and the impossibility of it will drive them quite mad.”

  He has a pair of horse-pistols under the bed. He is priming one now!

  “A horse-pistol?”

  The Ghost was alarmingly unconcerned by this new development, he felt.

  He has a horse-pistol. Like a blunderbuss.

  In the bedroom, Mrs M’Gregor watched her husband fumbling with the large and ancient wide-bored pistol he had retrieved from its hiding place under the mattress.

  “Hurry up, you fool!” she hissed.

  He lashed out sideways without looking.

  The heavy metal barrel swung into her temple with a nasty crunch. Her hand reflexively clutched air as she fell backwards, but nothing could stop her as she toppled back off the bed, and by the time her head hit the wall and the weight of her following body snapped her neck, she was already mercifully unconscious.

  Inside the attic they heard the thump and the crack and the muttered “bitch” that was all M’Gregor could manage by way of epitaph for his wife.

  He hit her.

  “You were right. This was better than killing them. Having a conscience seems to be… diverting”

  She smiled.

  “Give me your hand,” said the Ghost.

  He is going to shoot us in here. Like rats in a barrel!

  “Your hand. Come with me.”

  There was a creak and some muttering from outside the door.

  Amos looked at the madwoman.

  Come with you how? We are stuck in a dead end.

  “Then I hope I remember how to do this,” she said.

  Do what?

  “Hold my wrist,” she said. “We’re going into the mirrors.”

  There was a scraping noise and a double click of metal on metal from outside.

  Amos grabbed her wrist as she reached out and put her hand on the surface of the mirror.

  It stayed there.

  “Oh,” she said.

  What?

  “Oh dear…”

  Oh dear what?

  She turned her face to him, a look of childish incomprehension washing across it that made her look younger and madder than she had before.

  “I thought we would go into the mirrors.”

  Into the mirrors?

  Mad as a March hare.

  “It doesn’t seem to work.”

  There was a crash as M’Gregor kicked the door in and filled the space, outlined by the moonlit room behind him.

  “You bastards are dead,” he said flatly. “Dunno what else you are and what trickery you’re up to, but it don’t matter a tuppenny fart. Dead as yesterday’s fucking mutton is what you are…”

  Amos stepped in front of the Ghost. He did not know why. He stared into M’Gregor’s mad, shamed eyes and saw nothing but death.

  The sound of the gun firing in the confined space was deafening, the percussion so loud that it jolted one of the loose diamonds of glass out of the lead window and sent it falling to the path below where it smashed as a sharp tinkling counterpoint to the gunshot itself.

  Outside the M’Gregor’s bedroom, the sound was loud enough to wake the under-warden in the gatehouse and send him searching for his clubbed stick and night lantern.

  Inside the attic-closet, the blood was dripping off the ceiling, along with thicker gobbets of something more substantial. The gory matter splashed to the floor on either side of M’Gregor’s feet, which were still planted firmly in the doorway.

  The Ghost stared at Amos.

  How did you do that?

  Do what?

  What you did. You looked into his eyes and… did something.

  I didn’t want him to shoot us.

  So you made him put the gun under his chin and pull the trigger.

  I just—

  They were both too deafened to hear so they were talking in their heads.

  Amos bent over and retched. The Ghost stared at M’Gregor’s body in the doorway, legs locked in death, still upright, the top of his head blown into the roof above.

  As she looked, the first death tremor spasmed through the half-headless corpse and then gravity took over as equilibrium was disturbed, and M’Gregor joined his wife on the floor.

  I have never seen anyone do that.

  I didn’t know I could do it.

  I didn’t know anyone could do it.

  She yanked him upright. She looked at the dripping ceiling and the soaked floor.

  “So. I was right. And you were wrong. You should trust me: you are the Bloody Boy after all. Come. We must go now, and go fast.”

  Amos wanted to scream. He also wanted to fold in on himself and close his eyes and sleep because then he would not have to think or see all this blood, all this death he seemed to have caused by trying to stop it happening. But most of all he wanted to scream. But Amos was mute by birth, and could make no noise at all, even in his own defence. And because he was a Templebane by adoption, he was trained to think first and foremost about his own survival. So he followed the Ghost into the night, the unvoiced howl of protest and horror trapped for ever inside the confines of his own skull.

  CHAPTER 7

  SHARP, BLUNTED

  Mr Sharp was not used to being bested, or lost, and he was not at all in the
habit of going barefoot. He was, above all, absolutely not accustomed to being a victim. Duty, practice and the warranted degree of personal pride he took in controlling his more violent competencies had long inured him to the sensation of being the most dangerous thing in the dark streets down which his duties as a member of The Oversight conspired to send him. The passage through the mirrors had, however, clearly undone him.

  That was it, he thought: it was the mirrors. He was used to the shadows. There was altogether too much light in the wilderness of repeating images in which he had now gone deeply and irrevocably astray. Everywhere he looked revealed a lesser version of himself disappearing up an infinite tunnel of reflections: too much light, too little variation, nowhere to hide, nowhere to truly rest. Certainly there was nowhere to get a bearing. He knew he had slept at least twice since he had woken from the attack that had deprived him of his get-you-home, the Coburg Ivory and his knives and–most humiliatingly of all–his boots.

  Being bested was one thing. Being robbed another. But stripping a man of his boots was an entirely different order of humiliation. Taking a man’s boots was to mark him as an impotent discard in the great game of life.

  The man Dee–if he was indeed Dee–had gulled him like the most callow dupe, and his bare feet were a badge of his humiliation. Head down, he watched them stumble along the mirrored floor, his brain still woolly and disconcertingly unrefreshed by his last sleep.

  These unsatisfactory sleeps were worrying to him because he was normally blessed with the soldier’s knack of taking five-minute naps whenever he could and waking from them promptly and revived. The mirror-bound sleeps–he was almost sure there had only been two but was not even convinced of that, so muzzy was his head–were different: he had no sense of how much time had passed while he was insensible and thus vulnerable. In fact he woke more tired than when he had let his head drop in the first place. Sleeping in the mirrors was draining him, sapping him not only of the very energy that repose was meant to restore, but also somehow enfeebling his ability to think straight. There was no doubt about it: he was losing track of time, just as surely as he had lost any sense of place and direction.

  It was all this damned light.

  And just when this thought came to him, he saw the black mirror. It came so conveniently that he wondered–fuzzily–if he had somehow called it into being as a respite from the unrelenting glare of the mirrored world. He stopped and turned at ninety degrees to stare in relief at the dark blankness.