The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  And then she stopped, so suddenly that he bumped into her.

  “Here,” she said. “It was here. She went through here.”

  She pointed a finger at the mirror to her left.

  To him it looked like every other mirror that he had walked past, another infinitely repeating reflection, another passage they could walk along for ever.

  “How do we walk through the mirror and not just along the passageway of reflections?” he said, struggling again to find the right words to express himself.

  “Did no one tell you how?” she said, her black eyes looking him up and down in disbelief.

  He tried to remember. He must have known this once. His skull was full of thick flannel again.

  “You have to see it again as a mirror and not part of an endless tunnel,” she said. “You must do this in your head. You decide it is a mirror again, and it will be, and as a mirror it becomes a portal back into the normal world.”

  She stared at him.

  “You understand this. I found you leaning against a solid mirror, did I not? A black mirror. You had decided not to walk through it, surely? If you had decided to walk on through it, you could have, you know. And then you would have been truly lost…”

  The memory of the black mirror and the awareness that he could have fallen into it chilled and confused him.

  “I had a device,” he murmured. “I had an Ivory, a thing of spheres within spheres–it helped me traverse this looking-glass wasteland…”

  He was very tired.

  She shook her head, turned away and leant into the mirror. She made a little spy-glass of her fist and pressed her eye against it, peering through what was clearly and tangibly to her now a solid mirror.

  “Here,” she said. “Look.”

  He did as she had done, and squinted through his fist. There was just darkness beyond the mirror.

  “I can see nothing,” he said.

  “It is an unlit room,” she said. “So take one careful step in and then stop before proceeding further in case you stumble over something.”

  She reached into her habit and removed a stub of tallow and a small tinderbox.

  “I will follow and light a candle,” she said.

  He felt the pressure of her hand on his back and found he was stepping forward without quite meaning to or indeed believing that he was crossing back out of the mirrored world. There was a faint popping sensation, as slight as if he had just walked through the membrane of a giant soap bubble, and in that instant all the brightness of the mirrors was gone and he was in darkness.

  More than just darkness, he was in cold air that had a dank fustiness to it, a gut-wrenching mucid stink that assaulted his nose and coated the back of his throat at the same time, shockingly rekindling a sense–smell–that had atrophied through disuse as he had wandered lost in the odourless sterility of the mirror-maze. He gagged and stumbled forward, and as he stumbled his foot hit nothing and he fell further, retching, in a sudden horrid lurch that ended in a hard, crunching impact among an unseen tangle of iron-hard branches and twigs. He heard them crunch and snap beneath him, and felt the sharp jag as they poked and cut into his side.

  He lay there, sprawled and winded, waiting for the nun to follow with her candle so that he could see how to extricate himself from the jumble he had clearly become ensnared in.

  She did not come. He waited in darkness and pain and discomfort, but she never followed him through the looking-glass.

  Back in the mirrored maze, the nun stood in front of the glass into which she had pushed him. She raised her eyes and examined herself. She did not look triumphant as she gazed at her face, the black orbs of her eyeballs scanning slowly up and down.

  She shuddered.

  “Father, forgive me,” she muttered.

  Then she stepped sideways and, after a deep breath, walked into the next mirror and disappeared.

  Sharp had got unsteadily to his feet. The uncomfortable snarl of sticks and branches did not provide anything like a firm footing, slithering and cracking under him. Once more he cursed Dee for stealing his boots.

  And then he saw a light, high above him–a small chink of dim candle-flame wavering through an opening in a high and unreachable ceiling to whatever room he had become trapped in. It wasn’t enough light to show him what was the nature of his prison, but it was sufficient to illuminate the face of the nun peering down at him.

  “Are you there?” she called.

  He bit off a curse and tried to calm himself enough to think straight.

  “What have you done?” he shouted back.

  “I have trapped you,” she said simply and without guile, satisfaction or indeed the faintest hint of guilt. “I am sorry.”

  Her apology was disconcerting, not least because her tone was quavering but sincere. Her face moved back from the hole and her hands flickered in and out of the candlelight in a movement that initially perplexed him until he saw she was reeling something in, pulling it up on a string. As it neared the hole in the roof, it caught the light beyond the opening and he understood in a cold flash both what it was and why she was pulling it out of his reach.

  It was a wood-framed mirror, the very mirror he had come through, the only way in–and possibly out–of his prison.

  “Wait!” he shouted, and the percussive strength of his yell was enough to stop her for a moment. The mirror swung uncertainly a couple of feet below the hole in the roof.

  Enough of his normal self remained for his hand to be moving even as he shouted. He retrieved his last blade, the one the thief Dee had missed, the one that The Smith had made for him as a farewell gift, and without time to think, threw it with every ounce of strength left in his arm.

  The knife whirred into the darkness, flying straight, fast and true. The Smith had sharpened it to a razor-like keenness, and it cut through the string three inches above the mirror.

  The knife spanged into the stone curve of the roof, sending sparks, and the mirror dropped straight down.

  The nun jerked the string an instant too late as Sharp realised that the mirror was going to smash unless he caught it, rendering his hastily improvised plan as dangerous as if she had taken the thing away. He leapt forward, hands stretching for where he estimated the now unseen mirror would land.

  He sprawled painfully on the tangle, skittering and snapping more branches as he did so, and then received a sharp blow as the mirror glanced off the side of his head and hit his shoulder.

  He twisted and grabbed for it in the dark, and was surprised and delighted, despite the pain he was in, to find he had broken its fall and stopped it shattering.

  He stood shakily and looked up at the chink of light. The nun peered down at him, blinking.

  “One mirror is no good to you, you know,” she said sadly. “You can step out of any mirror, but to step into one you need another to open a passage.”

  He decided not to argue with her. One mirror was better than none, and there had to be a reason she had been retrieving it. He’d work out why later. As it was, frustrating her in something was a small victory and given the huge setback she had just inflicted on him, he would take it.

  “You lied to me,” he said.

  “I did not lie,” she replied, and he detected a surprising note of sadness in her voice. “I told the truth. You asked for a hand bearing a ring like yours. Feel around you. You will find a ring. You will find many rings, many hands too, I’m sorry to say, among the bones.”

  Bones.

  He was not teetering on top of a sprawl of wood.

  He was on a bone pile. He reached a hand down. The twigs he had snapped were ribs; the boulder he had banged his head against was a skull.

  He found eye sockets, a jawbone.

  Teeth.

  “What have you done?” he growled.

  “Many things,” she said. “But not this. This was done by others a long time ago. And the multitude trapped here, killed here, they carried rings like yours. They were men and women. I did
not lie to you.”

  A multitude of rings like his. His throat suddenly felt raw, as if he had been sobbing. He knew what the mucid stink was now, why it was familiar, why it was so bad. It was old rot, bodily rot, the rot of death, the smell of crypts broken open and defiled. And there was, of course, only one event that had led to such a wholesale and concentrated slaughter of The Oversight in its long and uncanny history. And he was standing in the evidence, knee deep in it.

  He didn’t want to see what he was amongst, who he was amongst. But he had to, even though he now knew the answer from what she had said. The Smith had been right warning him about the mirrors. They were lethally dangerous. And he must see the proof of it, the truth at the end of the great riddle that had decimated The Oversight a generation past, even though the prospect of holding that knowledge in his head filled him with sick dread.

  “Give me the candle,” he said. “Throw it down.”

  “No,” she said. “I am sorry. But I have thought hard on this. I chose this trap with care. One mirror inside the cavern to let you in, only this small opening in the roof, too small for you to escape even if you could climb up here.”

  “Well, I have your mirror,” he said icily. “I am most sorry to disoblige.”

  He was lying. The thing he was most sorry about was that he could not find his blade in the dark and send it whirring into her damned throat.

  “I was taking the mirror for your own protection. So that nothing could follow you in there,” she said. “For I am afraid you are stuck and so quite at my whim.”

  Her strange politeness was disconcerting. He strove to subdue the mind-killing rage that was rising in him like a dark, incoming wave of grief and frustration, and think clearly.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “A new deal,” she said. “Again I am sorry, but I need blood to drink from time to time, and I am quite frail and so must use guile rather than violence to survive. You, now you are out of the mirrors, will require water and food to survive. So I will feed you and you will feed me.”

  He thought of what she was saying, of what it would be like. It did not need much thought.

  “No,” he said. “I will not be your damn milch cow.”

  Now he was out of the mirrors, their influence on his head seemed to be evaporating. He felt bruised, cheated, exhausted and–knowing whom he had fallen among–despairing, but he also felt a familiar and sustaining edge of anger returning to him.

  “But then you will die…” she said, and there was no threat in her voice as she spoke, rather a kind of tremulous disbelief. “You will starve here for there is no other way out.”

  He did not reply.

  “But I did not lie,” she said. “I have misled you but I did not lie.”

  Again he declined to answer. Sometimes, the only power one has is in withholding, in declining to join the fight. His decision not to engage seemed to bewilder her. Her voice, when it came again, had a new and peevish crack in it.

  “But my word is good. If I say I will keep you alive, I will. I offer you life!”

  He let the silence hang there in the fetid gulf of air that separated them.

  “A life by itself is of no interest to me,” he said. “For my word is as good as yours, and I gave it to another. If I cannot use my life to find her hand and save her, then as well to end it now.”

  “What are you saying?” she said.

  “I am saying the life you offer to sustain for me is not my own, for I am sworn to find my friend’s hand, one Sara Falk of the Free Company for The Oversight of London,” he said. “She is not here. It is not here. It was severed by the mirrors and lost within them. And if you leave me imprisoned in this charnel house then that life has no purpose and I am happy enough–nay honoured–to die among the` remnants of better men and women than I.”

  He was standing on the remains of the Disaster. He had entered the mirrors to find the Harker girl, regain the hand and thereby save Sara, but had instead discovered the members of The Oversight who’d gone into the mirrors themselves decades earlier, to fight an unimaginable threat that had instead simply disappeared them from the face of the earth.

  “Unless my word is true, I am nothing,” he said. He was aware as he said it that he sounded stiff and sententious, but was surprised to find that he meant it. “And if I cannot save my friend, then the sooner I become that nothing the better. Keep your food and your water, and your pettifogging hair-splitting about whether you lied or just deceived me: I repeat, I will not be your damned milch cow.”

  This time the silence was hers.

  “I do not need much blood,” she said querulously. “You have seen that.”

  Her candle went out. He stood in the darkness and listened to her scumble about and fuss with her tinderbox until there was a scrape and a flare, and the chink of golden light overhead reappeared.

  “I did not choose to become the abomination I am,” she said. “I have tried to remain true to what I was, in that I have taken pride in not being as the other Mirror Wights. I have tried to keep myself human and kind.”

  “Then let me out,” he said. “Help me.”

  Her face disappeared. He looked up at the chink. As far as he could see, the space beyond was a rough-hewn passage cut through bare rock. He could see no sign of blocks or bricks. Her face edged back into view.

  “If you describe the girl who stole this hand to me, I will look for her and it for you. And I will bring them here. Or if you tell me where Sara Falk is, I will find her and bring her here,” she said. “But you must let me have a little blood when I ask for it, to sustain me as I pursue your quest.”

  He thought about it and shook his head slowly.

  “There is no point bringing Sara, for she is in London and her health has already tied her to her bed. And the deal is not a good one besides, for you would pretend to look for me and milk me as you intended,” he said. “There is no incentive for you to fulfil your end of such a deal.”

  “I do not lie,” she said. It was clear that she took pride in this. He would like to believe her. “But I do have an incentive: if I restore your friend to you, will you in turn give me your word that you will hunt out my enemy for me beyond the mirrors, you and The Oversight?”

  “Why would you trust me if I agreed to that?” he said. “We are trapped in a hopeless loop of mistrust. I would say anything to get you to find Sara Falk’s hand, and you know that… there is no point us talking further, because lie will pile upon lie and neither of us are fools.”

  “You will keep your side of the bargain,” she said, “for my persecutor is one of the men who set this trap for those who died here before you.”

  Sharp went cold and still.

  “Who is he?” he said.

  She told him.

  “The Citizen Robespierre is dead,” he said after a long pause, his voice leaden with disappointment. “They cut his head off long before the Disaster. In sight of thousands. With a guillotine.”

  “No, monsieur,” she said. “His death was a conjuring trick on a public and bloody stage. He lives. And though now beyond his natural span, he not only lives, but lives in your precious London.”

  Sharp looked up into the distant black eyes. Her look was level and true.

  “Just as saving this Sara Falk is your reason for living, besting The Citizen is mine. You can find your friend. What he took from me can never be returned. Find him, destroy him and I will be as happy as you are to depart this life.”

  Sharp was not a man of inaction: he was better making decisions and adjusting later if they turned out to be wrong. And then again, she may have deceived him but there was truth in the fact she had not lied to do so.

  Which is why, with care and great detail he began to tell her everything he could think of about Lucy Harker that might help her recognise her, and when he had exhausted that he told her about Sara Falk too, in case the hand thief proved unfindable.

  Sometimes life was certain; most of the time, i
t was just a stab in the dark.

  ON THE CHANGELING

  … changelings work in “cells” of two or three and they operate together to achieve what is, in very tangible terms, a barefaced cheat on death itself. The whole mechanism of changelingry is designed and adapted to create a continuum of life beyond the bodily decay that all flesh is heir to. Simply put, changelings are able to move their consciousness into new bodies, and then are able to make the physiognomies of the new vessel shift and “change” to mimic another person. It is not clear why the changelings do not just cuckoo their consciousness into someone else’s baby, but they do not. It is perhaps part of the unknown mechanism by which their blood operates that minds can only be passed into bodies which are receptive to them by virtue of being flesh of their flesh, fruit of their seed. Which is to say that as an aged changeling nears the terminal decrepitude of its current body, it fathers or mothers a child with the male or female member of its cell. If, say the changeling about to die is male, then the mother gives birth after an unnaturally short term (at five and a half months, it is said by authorities such as Henricus Khunrath) and the baby either has no mind of its own, or its mind is pushed aside by the parent requiring use of the new body, very much in the manner of the aforementioned cuckoo. Both Bernard of Treves and Khunrath suggest that in fact the minds are swapped… so that the seeming baby has a consciousness that is often centuries old, whereas the decrepit body of the old man or woman ends its days with the confused and figuratively dribbling mind of an uncomprehending baby trapped in a senile body that dies in a matter of months, with consciousness that has never grown beyond a very unsteady grasp of bodily functions and linguistic skills that enable it only to mow and chatter at the cruel trick played on it by fate, through the agency of its parents. Who knows how many old worthies mumbling out the last days of their lives stuck away in the corner are in fact the victims of such a horror?

  As to why changelings substitute their babies with those of normal people, there are several theories: some ascribe it to mere malice or a love of mischief. This can be discounted since there is no sense to it, and the trouble the changelings go to in order that they might pass their minds forward is too great an enterprise to be put at risk entirely on a whim or a love of malign discord. It would seem logical that leaving the changeling babies to the care of unsuspecting parents serves some practical purpose whose mechanism is at present opaque to us. It may be that changeling mothers cannot nurse their own offspring, and so require that others perform the service as unwitting wet-nurses. Or it may be that by putting a changeling baby into the crib of a well-favoured family, the changeling cell ensures that its members accrue wealth and power over time through inheritance, and thus do not have to toil for their keep and future security. In this they are very much human cuckoos… It is the opinion of this writer that the unnatural act of birthing a body and then shifting and discarding its original consciousness leaves some kind of taint upon the mother/child combination that requires the covert and enforced “fostering”. Certainly the testimony of one changeling taken by The Oversight in the early 1600s was that “she would not on any account suckle the baby born to her, since the presence within it of the very man who had swived it into being made such an act unnatural to the mother and irreparably bitter to the child”. That said, once the changeling baby has grown beyond puberty, the fleshes seem to have no repugnance to each other and by their subsequent conjunctions the cycle of procreation and vicious substitution continues… whatever the truth of it, it is certain that changelings do not raise their own children. Some do raise the stolen natural children; most, it is to be regretted, dispose of them in a variety of ways that range from abandonment, murder or sale. The incestuous cuckooing that characterises changeling practice makes them some of the most pernicious offenders against Law and Lore, since their very modus operandi and means of propagation axiomatically necessitate predation across the line between natural and unnatural.