The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “No,” said The Citizen. “I see no virtue in anyone witnessing the means of your departure.”

  “Indeed,” said Dee. “Until I return then.”

  And he stepped into the cabinet, pulling the door closed behind him.

  The Citizen waited a beat, and then opened the door again. It was empty. He smiled, closed it and sat down on the bed. He suddenly looked ancient and exhausted, as if he had been keeping up a façade for Dee, which he now was able to drop. He squinted at the room, taking in the dark wood panelling which ran around the perimeter at chest height, and the white plaster wall above. The decoration had not a hint of a woman’s hand in it, but it was clean and handsome, if a little spartan.

  He stood up and crossed to the door, which he locked, taking the key and pocketing it. Then, with a great deal of sighing and wheezing, he bent and removed his buckled shoes one after the other. He registered a mild, surprised disgust at the state of his stockings, which were soiled and foul-smelling with a pungency beyond that of being merely unwashed, reeking of something closer to real corporeal rot. He flung back the bedclothes with a snap of newly pressed linen, and buried his feet beneath the sheets and blankets and then lay back on the pillows, turned his face away from the light and began to snore.

  Some hours later, when the shadows had moved across the room, there was a rattling at the door.

  The Citizen stared at it with sleep-filmed eyes, for just a moment vulnerable as his consciousness swam back up from whatever stygian depths in which it had been sunk, and then he blinked and scowled.

  “Shoes,” he rasped to himself, swinging his legs stiffly back onto the bedside rug.

  The rattling of the handle stopped and was replaced by an angry voice.

  “Hé, mais c’est quoi ces bêtises? Qui diable se trouve là-dedans? Qui est là?”

  The Citizen opened his mouth to reply but was hit by a racking series of coughs. He pulled the key from his waistcoat and unlocked the door to find himself looking up at a large, ursine man with a red face and a full beard which was quivering with shock and indignation.

  “If you’d be so kind as to come in, sir,” he smiled.

  The red-faced man’s eyes goggled at this decrepit old gentleman shrugging into his coat.

  “Who the devil are you?” he choked. “And what the blazes are you doing in my house?”

  The Citizen smoothed his coat and flicked an imaginary piece of dust from his sleeve before deigning to give him the most wintry of smiles as he pulled himself together and became something still and deadly.

  “I am the man who has paid for this house.”

  “The devil you are! Are you mad?” said the man, turning to bellow down the stairs behind him. “Jean-Marie! Baptiste! Venez ici immédiatement! Et apportez-moi une cravache!”

  “There is no need of a horsewhip,” said The Citizen, and he pulled down the stock which normally encircled his neck displaying a clean silver line, like a tattoo that went all the way around, as clean and straight as a knife cut.

  “I am the man who has paid for your eminence and your success. I am the Shareholder,” said The Citizen.

  “But, no … you are Sir Robert Spears?”

  The man’s eyes widened, his jaw dropped and then whatever he was trying to say got jumbled into a series of gulps and choking noises as he dropped to one knee and bowed his head. There was the noise of two pairs of boots thundering up the stairs behind him, and he turned his head and shouted urgently.

  “Non, non—oubliez tout ça. Retournez en bas, tout va bien.”

  The Citizen waved him to his feet.

  “It was understood that I might appear at any moment, without notice, and that you would know me by the silver line around my neck,” he said in French. “This should not be a surprise to you.”

  “But I have not had time to, er … prepare suitable chambers for you and your entourage.”

  “I have no entourage. I shall require a young, healthy maid, one without family here in the city,” said The Citizen. “You will no doubt have one available immediately, since that is one of the ongoing stipulations of our agreement, no? Good. And have no fear, this room will do very well. The featherbed is more than acceptable.”

  “But—but this is my bedroom, sir!” protested the man.

  “Not any more,” said The Citizen. He pulled a sheet of paper from his baggage and handed it over.

  “Everything on this list is to be brought up here as soon as possible. We will need all the rooms on this floor, in fact.”

  The man’s eyes bulged as he perused the inventory, clearly both shocked at the peremptory nature of his eviction as much as the strange items he was being sent to acquire.

  “Cages?” he said. “Scalpels … are you a surgeon, sir?”

  The Citizen smiled indulgently.

  “Do you like your tongue?”

  “My tongue?” he said, confused.

  “Your tongue, sir.”

  “Well, yes, sir.”

  “Then stop wagging it,” said The Citizen. “The top two items on the list are to be here within the hour, as are the Wachman brothers.”

  “The Wachmans?” said the man.

  “The Wachmans. I trust they are close by, as your reports have always indicated,” said The Citizen, sudden steel in his voice.

  “Yes, sir. But …”

  The Citizen shook his head.

  “Nothing has changed in your life, sir, except you now play host to the principal in your company, who is paying a visit. You will sleep elsewhere which should be no problem since the factory is a large one according to your reports and what I see of it out of this window. You tend to the business; I will attend to my researches and my new maid will convey my wishes if I am busy or indisposed. Is that clear?”

  “Yes but I don’t quite underst—” began the man.

  “It is not important that you understand. Only that you obey. Have the boards, the weights, the maid and the brothers here within the hour or you can pack your traps and live on the street,” said The Citizen. He saw a flicker of rebellion in the man’s eyes and leant in to extinguish it with a hiss. “Oh yes, I can do that, monsieur. Read your contract. I have made you rich. I can make you a pauper in an instant.”

  The man swallowed, nodded and left the room.

  The maid, when she appeared, was clearly greatly to The Citizen’s liking. He walked around her, complimenting her on her fine, well-rounded figure, her firm muscles, the lustrous sheen of her thick hair, and the overall glow of healthy milk-fed vitality she exuded. She blushed at his compliments, her downy cheeks pinking prettily, and allowed that she had been raised on a farm close by the city. Her name was Clothilde. She was now an orphan.

  He bade her stand by the fire and then took up the chair opposite her and explained that no impropriety was intended in what he was going to explain to her, nothing her dear departed parents might object to at any rate. He just wished to avail himself of her utility.

  The word “utility” sent a small cloud of incomprehension across her biddable features, one that he dispelled with the warm sunny glow of the large gold coin he produced from his waistcoat pocket.

  “The utility is something for which you will be well-rewarded, and as I said, nothing that you or a parent could possibly object to will be requested of you. Nothing,” he continued, raising a finger to stall her. “Not even what I am going to ask you to do when the two gentlemen I have sent for arrive. It may be a momentarily distressing thing, but it will pass, and once done for the first time, you will see that it has no lasting negative consequences.”

  And then he told her what he wanted her to agree to. And she found she was suddenly sitting without having asked leave due the shock and directness of the request, and that the glass of liquor he had fetched from the flask in his baggage to recruit her somewhat overcome sensibilities was spreading a warmth and calmness through her which made it all seem much less terrible than she had at first thought.

  The Wachman broth
ers were twins, hulking men in their thirties, blond-haired, stoop-shouldered, with mouths that seemed wider than the norm, like bullfrogs somehow, an amphibian effect accentuated by their unnaturally pallid skin and chins which disappeared into thick necks without any discernible delineation between the two.

  They arrived in what was clearly now The Citizen’s bedroom, each carrying a wide pine board, like a small tabletop. They looked dull-eyed at The Citizen as he pointed to the floor in front of the fire.

  “There,” he said. “We’ll do it there. Where are the weights?”

  They stared at Clothilde, who quailed a little at the nakedly evaluating nature of their gaze: she felt she was being weighed up as cold-bloodedly as any farm animal on market day, so lacking in human contact was the look.

  “Won’t need them,” said the closest one to her. “Two of us, more than enough.”

  “Sie müssen sie nicht töten,” said The Citizen, “oder alle Knochen brechen.”

  “We will break nothing,” said the other. “We are gentle.”

  “Ich möchte ihre Vitalität wieder und wieder zu nutzen.”

  “Yes, yes,” the other brother replied. “Better to drink from a well many times than drain a bottle once and for all. We know what we are about and we know the best way to be it.”

  The Citizen nodded and beckoned Clothilde. The liquor he had provided had made the world a little fuzzy to her, not in a way that made her queasy or dizzy, but just as if everything that had previously had sharp edges was soft and unthreatening. He smiled, and the effect of the tincture made it a less wolfish smile than the one she had previously remarked. She smiled back.

  He held out a small apothecary’s measuring glass which he had taken from the bag with the flask and filled to the lowest mark etched on its side.

  “This will help, Clothilde,” he said. “There is nothing unseemly in what is asked of you; no indecency or impropriety. It is by way of a curative therapy, a medical remedy, if you will.”

  She took it, and though a submerged part of her baulked at the idea of taking it without question, the previous drink had made her biddable and quietly reckless, and she drank it in one. It too burned warmly as it went down her throat, but it stopped in the region of her chest and the heat seemed to tingle out in all directions from there, so that the warming effect appeared to soften her bones and make her very pleasantly wobbly and pliable. She heard herself giggle, and wondered what was so funny. And then she saw the wall turn into the ceiling and was aware she had been gently lowered on to one of the pine boards in front of the fire.

  The change of perspective struck her as whimsically odd rather than alarming, and she again heard her muted laughter as one of the frog-faced Germans placed a soft pillow behind her head and pulled a very hard sheet on top of her. She craned her head to look at the bedclothes to see how something could be so profoundly starched and ungiving, and then she saw why and tried to sit up.

  It was already too late. As she raised her hands to push at the pine board which had been placed on top of her, she found that her arms were unaccountably heavy, and that she could not lift them from her sides.

  And though she was enough in control of her rubbery bones to lash her head from side to side, the firm grip on her chin taken by the Alp kneeling at her side was enough to clamp her in shocked place as he lowered his gaping fishmouth over her own lips and nose, sealing around her face like a limpet as the other one climbed gently on top of the board and began to press the breath out of her.

  Clothilde felt the air being forced from her lungs as if her chest was caught in a vice, inexorable pressure increasing steadily as reflex made her try desperately hard not to give up and exhale. Her will bent, her perception of the world softened and her body almost completely unresponsive and unable to defend herself, she still found the strength to struggle against giving up the last spark of what she was suddenly convinced would be her final breath.

  At least, she thought, in a slow helpless panic, it would be the last breath and the inability to take another due to the compression on her lungs would do for her, but it then occurred to her that it might be a cracked rib spearing her heart, as the pressure increased, achieving a final, undrugged moment of resigned clarity—

  —and then she choked and lost control of her airways and felt the Alp suck and suck and suck until her insides burned as if on fire with the acid pain of oxygen deprivation, and all she could hear was the pounding of her blood, and the world first went grey and then pinpointed down to black as her heart slowed and a horrible internal silence swept in and took her.

  Clothilde did not see the Alp who had stolen her last breath rise and walk to the bed where The Citizen had reclined, propped on one elbow as he watched the procedure. She did not see him lie back and let the Alp lower its face onto his, and she did not hear the explosive hiss and the unusually long and drawn out groan as the Alp breathed her last inhalation deep back into The Citizen’s lungs. She did not see The Citizen shudder and his fists clench. She did not see his parchment-pale skin pink and plump, his eyes brighten as the Alp rolled away and lay exhausted on the bed beside him. She did not see him sit up, delight and wonderment in a face suddenly younger, suddenly alive in a way that underlined how dead he had looked a minute or two before.

  She did not hear his laughter pealing around the room, vigorous and celebratory.

  And she did not feel the other Alp take a huge breath of its own as it stepped off the crushing board and knelt quickly beside her, clamping her nose shut with one hand while breathing deeply into her mouth at the same time.

  Instead she felt the kick of her heart and heard the pounding of her blood again as her eyes fluttered back open and saw the Alp looking down at her, a concerned look in his eyes.

  “Breathe, Miss Clothilde,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t move. Just breathe. You are safe; you are well. It is over.”

  And then The Citizen was leaning over her too, looking strangely different than she had remembered, but before she could quite pinpoint what it was that had come over the now not-quite-so old man, he had raised her head and poured another measure of something into her mouth, and this time it was cold and icy but also comforting in the way it radiated through her body and brought a gentle feeling of falling asleep beneath a snowfall that turned into a gentle rain of goose feathers that whited her world out and sent her peacefully into a deep and restorative sleep.

  “That was well done,” said The Citizen, looking at the Wachmans. “I have never felt so revived after a new breath. And I, you may know, have tasted the breath of a queen.”

  They looked at her on the floor.

  “She has good, rustic vitality,” said one.

  “And we are very practised at this,” said the other. “As I told you.”

  “As I have always paid your family to have you be,” said The Citizen sharply. “And I have paid that commission for a very long time. Now carry her to the next room so that she can sleep. If I have dosed her correctly, she will not remember much of this, and nothing unpleasant when she awakes.”

  “Very humane of you, good sir,” said the one of them lifting the head end of the board as they prepared to use it as a stretcher to take her away.

  “I’m not interested in humanity,” said The Citizen. “I just want her to keep letting you do this as often as we can, without damaging her.”

  “Then not much more than once a week or ten days,” said the Alp. “She must recover fully.”

  “For now,” said The Citizen. “For now anyway.”

  He stretched his arms wide and laughed as they bore Clothilde from the room.

  “Gods, but I feel young again! I feel so young that one world alone does not feel enough to conquer!”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE KINGLESS COUNTING-HOUSE

  The king was in his counting-house,

  Counting out his money;

  The queen was in the parlour,

  Eating bread and honey.

  The mai
d was in the garden,

  Hanging out the clothes,

  When down came a blackbird

  And pecked off her nose.

  Amos propelled the staggering Ghost through the pelting rain away from the burst awning which had so comprehensively soaked them and towards the gaunt building he knew waited for them just a little further down the street. And then as they approached it, on the other side of the road, he stopped dead and stared at something he had not anticipated in his wildest imaginings.

  “What is it?” said the Ghost.

  My father’s house.

  “But I thought we were not to draw attention to ourselves,” she said. His face was slack with shock.

  The building was shuttered and blank-eyed. The wide gateway which led to the inner courtyard and coach house was closed and the lantern below the discreet sign above the main door was shockingly unlit. It was shocking to Amos because in all his life he had never seen it extinguished. Indeed, it remaining alight was viewed as a symbolic talisman and proof of the truth of the Templebane brothers’ promise so painstakingly picked out in gold leaf below the sign that read “Templebane & Templebane,” the assertion that “We never sleep.”

  Amos, as the youngest of the adopted brothers, had been given the perilously heavy responsibility of keeping the reservoir of lamp oil which fuelled this hitherto unquenchable flame full: this office was given the highly humorous title of “The Wise Virgin,” from the Parable of the Ten Wise and Foolish Virgins, and just as the foolish virgins had been subject to damnation for their lack of foresight in keeping their oil bottles full, so any son of Templebane who held this weighty office did so in permanent fear of the same sentence of paternal anathema, no doubt garnished with a sound thrashing. He had checked the oil reservoir on waking, at midday and at night, and every time he did so he cursed the fathers for not installing a modern gas globe in its place. If ever the reservoir had become too low, in the elastic opinion of his brothers, he had been thrashed anyway with a birch kept hanging in the counting-house for just such an occasion. So it had literally been drummed into him that this flame was eternal and inextinguishable.