The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “I can’t think how you favour it,” said Hodge. “It truly is a place for ghosts and little else.”

  “I have always sat ill in the city, you know that,” rumbled The Smith. “And these marshes are close to, but not of the city. And then again, it is the only island in London, with the Thames on three sides and the old Running Cut and the new docks on the other: there is much to be said for being surrounded by the protection of running water. I am safer here than they are in Wellclose Square, almost as safe as you in the Tower. Why have you come?”

  He handed Hodge a pewter tankard, which he filled from the jug.

  “A girl was brought to the Safe House this evening.”

  “A girl?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “A Glint. Though she knows little of what she is and seems as if her mind has been turned. Sharp found one of the Night Walkers close by…”

  The Smith choked on his ale and sat back against the anvil in the centre of the room.

  “Sluagh? In the city? But they hate the city. Too much light and iron, too many people, too much flowing water in sewers and culverts, the place must be a maze to them…”

  “Sharp has him in the Privy Cells. You can come and see him if you don’t believe us,” said Hodge, holding out his mug for more ale.

  As The Smith poured he watched his face.

  “They want you to come and see the girl’s ring.”

  “Why?”

  “They want to know who you made it for.”

  The flow of ale jerked and splashed onto the ground. The Smith looked up into Hodge’s face.

  “She has one of our rings?”

  “So Sharp says. And she doesn’t know a damn thing about us.”

  The Smith walked to the back of the workshop and opened the door to a cupboard. The shelves within were lined with books and scrolls. He took a thin green leather-bound book from the top shelf and riffled through the pages. They were full of drawings of rings, all similar in that they contained a bloodstone carved with a lion and a unicorn, but each subtly different in the way the stone was set, the style of the ring and the way the creatures were carved.

  “I will bring my book.”

  “Come in the morning,” said Hodge. “I have an errand in the city and the girl is sleeping now. You can give them the bad news about your recruiting drive first hand. Don’t see why I should be the bearer of bad tidings.”

  CHAPTER 25

  WHAT THE HOUSE HEARD

  As Lucy slept, the house was still and silent. And for a long time there was no sound at all…

  … and then there was a noise so quiet that it was not a creak or even the ghost of a creak, but maybe the memory of a ghost of a movement–and a very dim memory at that.

  It was the air riffling past Lucy Harker walking through the night, silently. Her eyes were open but unseeing, as if still asleep. As she walked her gloved hand flexed repeatedly, as though loosening up for some delicate operation, like a pianist before a recital, and then closed purposefully on the door-handle to the Red Library and began to turn it.

  CHAPTER 26

  BUNYON’S BLESSING

  Mr Sharp could see that Emmet was finishing nailing the last horseshoe into place on the Sluagh’s horse as he entered the small stable adjoining the Safe House. The horse was still slick with sweat and quivering as if all its nerves were on the surface, but the giant clay man held it still with the foreleg clamped between his knees as he worked with his customary blend of speed and tirelessness.

  A golem is a rare thing. Mr Sharp knew for a fact that this was the only one that had ever been made on this island, and he knew that Sara’s grandfather had made him. Mr Sharp was never quite comfortable with Emmet, perhaps because the power that made him had bound him to protect and serve Sara just as Mr Sharp had been charged–in his case of his own free will–with the same task. There was a love of freedom buttoned tight behind Mr Sharp’s leather waistcoat and somehow he could never quite get himself comfortable with the idea that Emmet was bound to his particular task as a slave. A long time ago, The Smith had tried to explain this to Mr Sharp, that Emmet was not alive in any meaningful way: “a mere automaton without visible internal workings” was how he described him, as if Emmet was some species of marionette or puppet, just a piece of showman’s trickery such as to be found in the sideshows of any large county fair. Mr Sharp did not have that sense of Emmet. Rather he sensed that whatever the animating power was that moved the clay man, it was a power bound rather than a power given. And in that difference lay his unease.

  Emmet could move and obey orders. He could understand, but he could not speak. Nor could he write, which Mr Sharp knew because he had once provided him with pen and paper and ordered him to do so, something he had not managed. Yet despite all this he believed there was more to Emmet than anyone had realised, or perhaps divulged. Mr Sharp had an affection for him which he could not imagine feeling for a mere thing, the kind of vital affection one can only have for a fellow being. As a man who needed less sleep than most normal people, Mr Sharp had spent long watches of the night sitting companionably with the golem and never felt alone while so doing. In fact he found the golem’s presence relaxing and strangely comforting to his nerves whenever they were frayed or stretched by too much activity or worry. Because of this he never gave Emmet an order, certainly not in the abrupt and harsh tones in which Samuel Falk had addressed his creation. Instead he asked him to do things in the same tone as one might use to address an equal. It was this tone he adopted now as he walked into the stable.

  “Emmet, would you be so good, once you have put the horse in a stall, to watch the house with extra care tonight. And if The Smith should come before I return, give him this note?”

  He held out a piece of paper that had been first folded into a narrow strip and then been bent through a series of right angles to produce a sort of flat knot.

  Emmet nodded, pocketing the note. And turned back to the horse, taking a blanket off the stall side and beginning to rub it dry.

  Mr Sharp tried to remember if he had told Emmet to dry the horse before putting it away. It was undoubtedly the correct and humane thing to do. Then, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened in his absence, the golem would guard the house, he turned his feet towards the Privy Cells, but not before picking a new iron horseshoe off the small farrier’s table close by the door.

  He entered the public house by the side door and slipped down to the cellar without troubling William Bunyon, who was entertaining a small smoke-wreathed knot of regulars with a humorous tale about his earlier career in the late king’s navy. One of Mr Sharp’s many abilities was that of not being noticeable when he wished it by blending in with the shadows as if he were one himself.

  He passed through the main cellar and into the dark passage beyond without even the slightest clink from the keys he used to open the door. He twirled the horseshoe in his hand as he walked, and then rapped it on the wooden wall as he approached the cell.

  “I have some questions for you. I hope you weren’t sleeping,” he said cheerily. “Oh, of course. I forgot. You don’t sleep, do you?”

  Something crunched under his foot and he stopped dead.

  “Hello?” he said, his hand slowly drifting inside his coat as his nostrils wrinkled at something wafting towards him from the floor. His hand emerged clutching a candle.

  “Light!” he said.

  The candle snapped into flame, filling the narrow passage with a bright flickering light.

  There was a thunk as the horseshoe dropped from his fingers and a snick as the hand that had held it darted inside the other side of his coat and came back with a blade in it.

  “I’ve been a fool,” he hissed.

  The fragments of the bone pet were spread across the floor like a scrabble of white islands in the sea of black that was the Sluagh’s blood.

  He raised the candle and saw the arm of the Sluagh sticking out of the judas hole into the passage, pinned in place by the wooden
spike between a now visible radius and ulna, blackened flesh rotted back to the very skeleton within. The Sluagh’s hand was frozen in a gesture that might have been a blessing or a curse, pointing at the blank wall opposite.

  “Damn you!” said Mr Sharp, stepping through the pool of blood and quickly unbolting the door. He jerked it open to see the body suspended on the other side like a sagging animal hide hung on a hook. The shells and bones in the rotting dreadlocks rattled against each other with the sudden motion. Mr Sharp yanked the head back and looked into the already rotted face of the Sluagh, into eyes that were already just empty holes in a skull.

  He shook his head as he put the knife away and let his finger touch the judas hole thoughtfully.

  “William Bunyon,” he said sadly. “Your kindness is blessing for some, but for this poor creature it was a curse. Though why he would kill himself, or indeed why anyone else might want to stop him talking I do not know.”

  A thought hit him with the suddenness of an arrow from the dark.

  “Sara…”

  And he turned and ran for the door with such speed that the blood on the floor was still splashing from his passage through it by the time he hit the street above.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE MURANO CABINET

  Lucy did not enter the dark library like a thief in the night: she didn’t skulk or sneak or even tiptoe, but walked straight in as if she had every right to be there, though she did turn and click the door closed behind her, calmly picking up a chair and wedging it beneath the door-handle.

  She had no need to light a candle to see her way through the cluttered space because of an orangey-light which kindled and blazed out from her sea-glass the moment she crossed the threshold. This unnatural brightness threw stark shadows that lurched threateningly across the walls as she threaded her way past the tables and cabinets, making inexorably for the black cage at the centre of the room.

  When she got to the obsidian plinth she stopped abruptly, her hands splaying out and moving across the slick enamelled surface of the woven metal cube as if they were doing the seeing for her eyes, which were fixed and open, but still somehow asleep and not focused on anything in particular: indeed if she hadn’t moved with such clear purpose (and if there had been anything other than the dark to witness her progress) it might have been thought she was either stone-blind or trance-walking.

  She found the door in the side of the lattice, and a second later the lock and catch. Her fingers moved in a light exploratory dance across the mechanism, and then nimbly manipulated it so that something pinged and the door jumped open a crack. Her fingertips quickly found the edge of the door and pulled it open.

  An angry hiss emerged from the depths of the cage.

  Lucy instantly went still.

  But a very thin wire attached to the door on the inside had been pulled upwards by the action of the door opening.

  The path of this wire descended through a small tube in the floor of the cage and continued on a zigzag path–via an intricate series of pulleys, quadrants and tubing–all the way downwards through ceilings and floors and walls to the main servants’ bell-board in the basement. On this rectangle of polished mahogany were lines of curlicued springs attached to shiny brass bells. The lines of bells were split into floors, and each bell had its own label describing the room from which it was being rung. There was only one bell that was different. It was a dark iron bell, larger than the rest, and its label, reading “LIBRARY”, was not written in black but red ink.

  This bell clanged into life as the wire was pulled taut, the sound shattering the deep quiet of the sleeping house.

  It was so loud that the bell could be heard two floors above, though Lucy’s head was cocked and listening to something else entirely: the angry hissing coming from the half-buried urn in the floor of the cage.

  Something was flowing out of the urn like a black river crossing the dark volcanic sand. The light blazing from her sea-glass cast a grid of shadows across the interior of the cage, which made it hard to see precisely what the thing was until it began to coil its body beneath the hanging key and rear up, its hood flaring out in warning.

  It was a black cobra, jaws stretched wide, revealing the shockingly pink interior of its mouth and the needle-white bone-jag of two venomous fangs held ready to strike.

  Angry red eyes looked at her.

  The snake was unmistakably guarding the key.

  Lucy did not step back.

  She didn’t close the cage door.

  She didn’t show any fear at all.

  Instead she leant in and put her face to the opening, her eyes still dreamy and half seeing, and she spoke very softly.

  “Shhh,” she whispered. “Shhh. Soyez calme, mon petit. Tout va bien…”

  The snake continued to hiss at her, quivering with the tension of muscles held ready to strike its blunt nose forward and bite.

  Lucy held the stillness for a long time, waiting for it to set.

  Then she took a deep breath.

  And reached carefully into the cage.

  The snake didn’t move.

  Her hand slowly approached the key.

  And still the snake didn’t move.

  The red eyes seemed hypnotised by the soft pink flesh on the hand reaching between it and the key.

  The hissing stopped.

  Lucy’s fingertips reached the key, felt iron beneath them.

  And the snake struck.

  Death-filled fangs stabbed at the back of her hand.

  Whiplash fast.

  Her hand moved faster.

  The cobra hit the key exactly where her hand had been, but that hand had lifted out of the way and now dropped to grip the snake on either side of its head before it could swirl around and bite at her again.

  “Non, non. Soyez calme, j’ai dit…” she whispered.

  And with a final muscular convulsion all the tautness left the snake and it went limp in her hand.

  She carefully withdrew the cobra from the cage and held it clear of her body as she reached in with her other hand and lifted the key from the hook in the roof of the cage.

  She grunted in surprise at the weight of the thing, which was more than its size hinted at, and as the weight came off, the hook sprung upwards and the cage simply fell to bits in a tinkling shower of metal, revealing that it was a cunning construction of short pieces of sprung steel that had been interwoven with each other and only held in place by the heft of the key, which had acted as a kind of anchoring keystone or counterweight.

  More cunningly, or perhaps just more maliciously, those pieces of steel had razor-honed edges.

  Three pieces of metal sliced cuts into her forearm as they fell, and the damage would have been worse had she not been wearing Sara’s gloves.

  The pain seemed to cut through the sleepiness in her eyes and she winced and looked round as if seeing things for the first time.

  Her eyebrows cocked in surprise at the nightmare into which she had woken.

  In one hand she held a snake.

  In the other a key.

  Blood dripped onto her bare foot from her arm.

  And the floor around her was now strewn with scalpel-sharp strips of curved steel.

  “Merde,” she breathed. “Quel bordel…”

  The cobra began to move in her hand, its tail curving upwards and finding her arm, trying to wrap around it as if it too was waking up again.

  She stepped back and winced sharply as one of the metal shards cut into the ball of her foot.

  “Salopard!” she hissed.

  There was the sound of feet outside the door and a crunch from the chair wedged under the handle as someone tried to get in.

  “Lucy!” shouted Sara Falk. “Is that you?”

  Lucy grimaced silently. The cobra writhed against her firm grip, and its hood began to flare again as she looked desperately around the room for a place to hide.

  “What are you doing, child?” shouted Cook. “It is dangerous in there!” />
  Lucy saw the shuttered windows next to the ornate glass cabinet at the far end of the room. She took a deep breath, swore under her breath one last time, then flung the writhing snake far into the shadows behind her and leapt forward onto the manuscript-strewn tabletop beside the black plinth.

  Her feet skidded on the loose paper but she kept her footing and ran the length of the room, nimbly hurdling piles of books and jumping from table to table towards the windows.

  Outside, on the landing Sara was pounding on the door as Cook leapt to the bannisters, red flannel nightgown billowing round her like a spinnaker, and roared down the stairs.

  “Emmet! You lollygagging lump of useless sod, shift yourself!”

  In the library Lucy skated to a stop by the shutters and reached up to unbar them, only to discover they were padlocked shut.

  She hissed in frustration and looked round.

  Something else hissed at the far end of the room.

  And then hissed again. Closer.

  Lucy bit her lip in frustration. And then her eyes fell on the Murano Cabinet.

  Outside, Cook heard heavy boots clattering up the stairs so she turned back to the door and joined Sara’s efforts to break it open by throwing her shoulder against it. She only managed to bounce off and drop the blunt end of the boarding axe held in her free hand onto her shoeless foot.

  “Bugger,” she winced.

  Inside the library all was now dark.

  There was the sound of someone large clumping up the stairs onto the landing, and then a sharp crack as the chair wedged under the door-handle smithereened shards of wood in all directions as the door flew open and Emmet tumbled into the room, followed by Sara Falk and Cook.

  The room was pitch-black, bar the shard of light now lancing across the room from the door behind them.