The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  Sara nodded.

  “It would have been better for you,” she agreed.

  “I always had a weakness for the handsome ones,” he said. “So fair thou seemed…”

  He smiled a terrible black-toothed grimace at her.

  “… so fell thou wert. And so fell I, never to rise… etcetera, etcetera. You have quite killed my capacity to epigrammatise, I fear…”

  He made a tired, flowery gesture with his hand and something sly seemed to shrug in resignation behind his eyes.

  “I took you to be a lady…”

  He dropped the knife into the pool of blackening gore surrounding his legs like treacle. Sara just watched, hard-eyed, as he began to cough gobbets of blackness onto the front of his waistcoat. He pulled off his wig and ran a tired hand up over his eyes and across the cropped white stubble of his skull.

  “… but you took us for a pair of fools. And poor Ned the Bowman didn’t even like wenches…”

  Sara looked down at him and showed him the rings on her finger.

  “As I said, we are The Oversight. We do not get to be The Oversight by being unprepared. Or untrained. Or unwilling to shed blood.”

  He looked down at the blackness surrounding his splayed legs. It might have been a trick of the light but she noticed one thing that was certainly true and another that may have been her imagination. The certain thing was that the black pool of blood did not overlap more than the mirrored rectangle he sat in. It filled right up to the straight edges but did not overspill to the next mirror. And the second thing was that he appeared to be sinking slightly.

  “You would not shed blood so carelessly if you heeded my words,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “If I heeded your prattle I would be dead or dying.”

  “I just wanted a little blood,” he sighed. “Just the Blood Toll.”

  “You had plenty of your own,” she said. “Look at it all.”

  “You are hard,” he croaked.

  “Thank you,” she said, and walked back down the mirrors to retrieve her knives, keeping an eye on him as he coughed and twitched, and then, as she took her eye off him just for a moment while she bent to retrieve the last one, he jerked and disappeared.

  Or rather, what she thought she saw was something black rear up and engulf him, before dragging him down into the floor. It was a thing whose shape her mind was unable to let her eyes make sense of. The infinite “wrongness” of it was somehow much too large for the space it momentarily invaded, and it juddered distressingly in and out of vision, both there and not there at the same time, as if it could not keep its purchase on the “here” and kept being tugged back into a “there” it was trying to escape from. She was halfway to telling herself that she had imagined it when her body rebelled at what she had seen and she had to control an impulse to retch, as if the thing had left a psychic stench or stain behind it, having tainted this world just by shuddering in and out of it for a mere moment.

  All that was left was a black mirror with the obsidian dagger resting on it.

  When she turned to look at the dead bowman, she found the second Mirror Wight had also disappeared. All that remained was his bow and a scrabble of arrows which had fallen out of his quiver as he himself had dropped to the ground. The mirror he had sprawled on, and more significantly bled on, was now black, as black as the obsidian dagger, as black as the arrow tips she knelt slowly to gather up. It was so black that she realised she was making a point of not looking directly at it, in the way that at the other end of the scale of brightness you did not look directly at the sun.

  She looked at the arrows in her hand, and the bow at her feet. After a moment she put them down in a neat pile.

  Having more weapons was theoretically a good idea, but she knew having a weapon she had no expertise with was going to be more of a problem than a help. False confidence could be fatal.

  She walked back to the spot where the cavalier had disappeared. Another black mirror had replaced the silvered one that had been there, like a missing tooth in a perfect smile. The stone dagger sat on the surface, almost invisibly blending in when viewed from on top. Something made her not want to reach for it, so she went back and picked up the bow and used it to snag the obsidian blade and drag it within reach, off the jet-black rectangle. It felt ice-cold in her gloved hand, and she was about to drop it when it warmed, almost fast enough to make her think she had imagined it. It was unexpectedly heavy yet it did not feel cumbersome. She stuck it in her belt. True, she had never touched a blade like it other than the ancient stone knife that The Smith kept in his workshop, but a blade was a blade, and she was comfortable with it in a way that she wasn’t with the bow, which she skittered back across the glass to rest with the arrows.

  Then, because she had always made it a point of honour to face things that scared her, she tried to look down into the black mirror. For a moment she saw her own reflection, but something seemed to swim in the depths beneath it which was impossible of course since the black was perfect and unrelieved. Nevertheless she felt the urge to retch again and look away, and so she did, not least because she had the distressingly rank feeling something polluted was looking back out at her.

  She knew she was going to hate crossing the mirror, so she took a run up and jumped it. She felt relief on landing safely on the other side, but found herself looking quickly back to make sure the surface was still glassy and not writhing up and reaching after her.

  The Raven hovered over the black mirror and peered down at it, its sable feathers and hard, shiny eyes matching the darkness beneath. It did not blink, and it did not hurry. Instead it released another prodigious squitter of bird’s mess that splattered contemptuously across the window, partially obliterating the darkness beyond, before flapping unconcernedly after Sara.

  She grinned.

  “Tough bird, aren’t you?” she said with something dangerously close to affection.

  The Raven landed on her shoulder and clacked its beak.

  “Thank you,” said Sara. “From you, that’s a compliment…”

  It was only then that she noticed something had changed beneath her feet. She could no longer feel Sharp’s trail resonating beneath them.

  In fact she could feel nothing.

  It was as if no one had ever passed down this passage before.

  Either the black mirror had cut the flow and erased all trace of what had gone before, or Sharp had taken a turn she had missed. It took backtracking across the two black mirrors a couple of heart-stopping times to confirm what she feared. The trail remained strong up until the first black mirror, which sheared it cleanly off.

  She had lost the trail, eradicating it with her acts of violence. Either that or, even worse, Sharp had made a turn into one of the mirrors that had turned black with the Mirror Wight’s blood.

  Everything–the trail, Sharp–and Sara herself–was lost.

  CHAPTER 12

  GHOST BY DAYLIGHT

  Amos had washed the blood off in the chalk stream running through the water meadow as they had hurried from the Andover Workhouse, but days later he was still tainted by the feel of it, as if his hands were still sticky and besmirched. He had not left the madwoman yet, though he had the strong feeling he should do so before too long.

  The trouble was that she knew things about him that he wished to understand better, and was able to talk directly to his mind, and he back to her: for the first time in his life his muteness was no obstacle and the speed of conversation was exhilarating enough in itself for someone who had previously had to communicate in writing or by dumb show. The things she was able to talk to him about were what really hooked him though, he knew that. She knew about his gifts, and though he resented her for calling him the Bloody Boy and then having so gleefully enjoyed the way her gory prophecy had come true, the glimpse of the world she had revealed to him was addictive.

  He knew he ought to leave her soon because there was a malignity and a danger hanging about her like a fizz in the air,
but before they parted he wanted to learn as much as he could of what she had to teach him. And so as they walked they talked, though more often there were no audible words since they thought to each other, or occasionally, when she was tired of thinking her side of the conversation, there were only words on her side, which made her seem all the madder to any of the few people they passed on the way.

  Amos had returned to his habit of keeping off the better travelled roads and where possible took to the woods and the downland, following the old drovers’ paths. He had to hold her elbow as they walked because she was tiring fast. Indeed if she became any more exhausted he knew he would have to carry her or leave her. And the trouble with leaving her somewhere out of the way was that he was certain she would die, and then her blood too would be on his hands. And so, having begun the journey, he steeled himself to its completion, as much in defiance of her certainty that he was the Bloody Boy as out of any instinctive kindness.

  She had said they should walk to the sea. He didn’t know where the sea was, and neither did she, but he decided that if they followed the general flow of the rivers and kept on a southerly bearing, they would get there soon enough.

  The other reason they kept off the more heavily travelled roads was in case a hue and cry had been raised on discovery of the gory events at Andover, but in truth there was no need for caution: the discovery of the dead husband and wife, the one with the self-administered gunshot wound and the other with the distinctive bruising of a domestic beating, had persuaded the local magistrate that M’Gregor, after a long and provoking marriage to an admitted termagant and virago, had finally snapped. He had clearly beaten his wife and then, consumed by an excess of remorse at her death, intended or accidental, taken his own life. Messy, it was agreed, but conveniently neat.

  The disappearance of the Ghost of the Itch Ward was not connected with the events at all. Her absence was almost unremarked by the under-wardens, who decided she must have wandered off in the uproar that had followed the discovery of the M’Gregors’ bodies. Her demise had been long anticipated, her affectless demeanour being consistent with other inmates who had turned their faces to the wall and faded away, the only difference being that, face to the wall or no, she had inexplicably and somewhat provokingly remained. Somehow she had escaped the Eel House and wandered off. No one asked after her, she had no family and after a while the under-wardens, already a little unwilling to admit they had been in the habit of disciplining a frail old charge by locking her in the dank building overnight, marked her as “deceased” and forgot her.

  So the only things that actually pursued the Ghost and Amos were the memories of the blood dripping from the ceiling and Amos’s sense he had made some avoidable and fatal mistake which had led to the carnage, an error whose precise shape he could not quite clearly ascertain.

  They were not uncomfortable as they travelled, the Ghost having taken Mrs M’Gregor’s best weatherproof cloak from the closet when they left, and he had blankets and an oilskin in the tinker’s pack he was already travelling with. And they had the contents of the chest Mrs M’Gregor had used to store up her stolen goods. As noted, it was not a king’s ransom, but neither of them was used to a regal lifestyle, and it was more than enough to buy food and milk and suchlike from the occasional farms or hamlets they allowed themselves to visit on their way across the countryside.

  At night they would find a dry spot in the woodland and Amos would make a fire, and though he always wanted to ask her more questions, the tiredness that attended their day-long walks usually only allowed a brief moment of unguarded calm while he heated some food before they’d both wrap themselves up and let the warmth of the crackling flames lull them quickly to sleep. And then dawn would wake them once more, stiff and cold, backs to the now extinguished fire.

  There was something in the relish with which she called him the Bloody Boy that fascinated him horribly: she had been impressed by what he had done to M’Gregor’s mind, and as surprised at it as he had been. She had also been deeply disappointed at her own inability to effect an escape from the dead end via the mirrors, a trick she claimed once to have thought no more of than stepping through a normal doorway. He would have been able to dismiss her claims as delusions, were it not for his inability to discount the truths she told him about his past, truths that were linked by the thing that gave him his unwelcome nickname: blood.

  I have been mad a long time, she admitted on the second night, as he stirred an improvised pease porridge in one of the tinker’s battered pannikins over a fragrant beechwood fire beneath the vaulting branches of an old oak. I was wronged and pursued and after much torment and anguish, deposited by my persecutor at the door of the Andover Workhouse. I was in such a reduced state, physically and mentally that they thought I would die within the month. I certainly believe that was the plan: that I should die legally, defensibly but largely unremarked. They had taken from me what was most valuable, most precious, most loved. My children were torn from me. You will not know this, but the love a mother has for her children winds its roots tight around the heart. And I loved them both, though some might have thought I had reason to love the one less than the other since she came unbidden, and the seed from which she sprung was not of my choosing or consent. Nevertheless the love took root, deep and firm, twined around the core of me, unbreakable, that affection as much a part of my life as when the children had been when I carried them within my belly, buttressed from the unkind shocks of the outer world by my flesh and fed by my blood.

  And then they were taken, or rather I was taken from them.

  What happened to them I do not know. It was long ago and a pall of unreason hangs between me and then. But I felt them snatched from me, and the wounds of that savagery have never healed and smart just as sharply now as they did half a lifetime ago. And like a sentry who puts a sharp stone in his boot so as not to fall asleep through too much comfort, that pain has stopped me slipping away into oblivion. I spent years in a fog, and in that fog only two things allowed me to endure. The first was a determination to be avenged. And the second was the lingering vestige of a trick I once had the way of. It is a trick of which I was almost as summarily and completely dispossessed of as I was of the little lost ones ripped away from me, but I retained one aspect of it, and that was the blood link. And it was the blood link that brought you to me, whether you credit it or not.

  Her eyes had sparkled as she spoke of the trick and the “blood link”, and he had understandably pressed her on it, but she had turned away from the fire and gone to sleep, holding her secret close to her as she did so, curled round it like a miser in the dark.

  She told him the same story the next morning, as if unaware she had spoken of it the night before, and then the following afternoon as they had walked up a long downland slope, open to a warm and cleansing wind that scoured over the sheep-cropped grass and smelled, he realised when they reached the crest and saw the distant flash of water far below, of the sea.

  Seeing the Channel raised her spirits, but she did not hurry forward. Instead she sat and looked out at the immensity stretching to the horizon ahead. It was a sun-deckled expanse of water over which the shadows of the clouds moved like the passing silhouettes of sky-bound leviathans.

  However much I could travel in my head, she said, I could never achieve something as nourishing to the soul as this. To walk hard, to tame a relentless slope with all its false horizons, and then to gain such a breathtaking expanse of the world by the action of aching leg muscles, that is something I could never do. Oh, I remember this, when I was free and wild and my body was vigorous and the world was my joy! Oh, I have missed this… !

  And he heard a strange noise, so strange that he thought someone must have crept up on them, for it was the sound of laughter, a young woman’s laughter. And once he had looked wildly around to find whoever it might be and ascertained that they were, as he had thought, alone, he focused on her face and saw it was she who was laughing, her eyes shining and tears s
treaking down her cheeks.

  He looked away before she caught him looking, and left her to it. He listened to the wind nickering past as he watched two distant boats plough past each other close to the horizon, one under full sail, its white canvas brightly reflecting the sunlight, the other a thin, funnelled steam packet streaking the air behind it with a grimy smudge as it passed. Not speaking was the right thing to do, because she eventually filled the silence in his head.

  I could travel outside my body. With my mind. When I was small I thought it was a kind of waking dream or an act of the imagination. I even worried then that I might be a little mad, little knowing that later in life I would taste the bitter reality of true madness. I was found out by one who knew all about such things, and was told that there was a kind of blood, supranatural blood, that runs strong in some people and gives them abilities that once were much more common than they are now. And so I was trained in this ability to travel in my head. And it was glorious and exhilarating, because once I realised that what I saw was real, and more, that I could control how and where I went to see it, the world became vast to me. To be able to do this was tiring, and so I did not do it all the time, but at night, knowing there were long hours of bedrest ahead of me, I would go. And the things and the people I saw were as much an education as the books my father bombarded me with.

  She paused and he thought she was going to stop talking of this, but she asked for water, which he gave her, and then she continued.

  Those ships out there on the trackless sea, they navigate by compass and stars, using charts and sextants and all manner of devices to get from port to port. When you travel the wide world beyond your body, travelling with your mind, you also need to keep bearings. Otherwise you cannot control where you go, although you can always return home to your head, however lost you may be, since there is a chain of belonging that will snap you back like a stretched spring, because the self likes its home more than it does the outer wilds. So to keep bearings you develop waymarkers, milestones of the mind. These can be events or people or places, sometimes all three. Do you understand?