The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Even you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” said Sara.

  “Like the Dark Ages,” said Cook. “They weren’t worth any bloody omelette, were they?”

  “After London burned in the Great Fire of 1661, there wasn’t another Dark Age,” said Sara. “There was the Age of Reason and Wonders. Natural philosophers. Drains. Steam engines. An industrial revolution. That’s no Dark Age.”

  “Isn’t it?” sniffed Cook. “Well, I’m sure you think you know best. But you don’t.”

  “Have I told you that I love you?” said Sara.

  Cook looked at her in shock, like a great square-rigged galleon in full sail which has suddenly been taken aback by a sudden change in the wind.

  “Well, I do, and always have,” said Sara. “You have been a mother to me since I was orphaned. I don’t think I have ever said it before, because that’s not how we talk, but I have always assumed you knew it. Same as me and Sharp. And I told him I love him too, while you’re looking so shocked.”

  “I’m not shocked,” said Cook, betraying herself by blowing her nose again.

  “But love isn’t the point,” said Sara. “It’s a point but it’s not the point. It makes us weak. We cannot truly afford to let it cloud our judgement. And that’s what any new Oversight will have to make clear to those who swear to join it.”

  “What do you mean?” said Cook.

  “I mean Jack Sharp went into the mirrors to save me. Not The Oversight, not those we protect, not those we are sworn to preserve from the predations of the supranatural: he foolhardily and irresponsibly went into harm’s way to save just me! He loved me and he went into the direst peril to find my severed hand and my heart-stone ring. And you know what? By every possible criterion, he failed! That boy who just left, he and Lucy Harker returned my hand, they saved me. They brought back my hand. Not Sharp. And I was just as foolish as he was: I went into the same damned maze of mirrors thinking to rescue him in my turn. Out of love. And through the weakness of love, through a judgement clouded by … an indulgent sentimental affection, the Last Hand would have been broken anyway, had not sheer luck provided this trouser-wearing Laemmel girl from the top of who knows what bloody mountain in the middle of Austria!”

  “Do you want another steak?” said Cook.

  “No, I do not want another steak!” said Sara.

  “Then stop flailing around with that fork in your fist or you’ll put your own eye out,” said Cook. “What did you mean by ‘any new Oversight’?”

  “The one that comes after we fail,” said Sara.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Have you decided we must fail then?” said Cook.

  “No,” said Sara. “Others have made that decision. The Citizen and his creatures have made that decision. Since I do not know how powerful the forces he has manoeuvred into action against us are, I cannot say we can survive. And I suspect we will not. But I do say we go down, if we go down, doing our damnedest to take him with us. This is life. This is reality. This is no fairy story. It has no happy ending. The great truth, the truth I am afraid you all forgot when you cobbled together a Last Hand consisting of the three of you and two children is that we are sworn to protect! Not to survive. The ones that follow us will carry on. The Smith endures. He will find the next Hands. The Oversight will survive without us. Our job is to protect what we can for as long as we can. And in this case, this Hand of The Oversight can protect the next one by removing this present enemy so that our successors can grow strong, free from his shadow.”

  “You’re wrong,” said a voice from the door.

  She turned to see Hodge standing in the light, Jed sitting patiently at his feet as his friend fussed at his cutty pipe, trying to light a wad of damp tobacco. Behind him Sharp leaned on the opposite doorpost. Sara decided not to be embarrassed or wonder exactly how long they had been standing there.

  “You’re right about what we must do but you are wrong about love,” said Hodge, drawing on the pipe and nodding in satisfaction. “You’re wrong about something else too: you didn’t fail when you went into the mirrors. You saved Sharp. You brought him home.”

  “Nothing truer than that,” said Sharp. “I’d be dead, done and drowned in the dark if it wasn’t for you.”

  Hodge sucked another lungful of tobacco smoke and then breathed it back out with a hacking cough.

  “You’re wrong about love too,” he said with a rueful grin. “Don’t look at me like that, Sara Falk: I know plenty about love. Damn sight more about it than you know about me, I reckon, but that’s by the by and the way I’ve chosen to live, private like.”

  He pointed at the terrier sitting patiently at his feet. Jed looked back and thumped the lintel with his tail.

  “But look at Jed then: he loves me same as I love him. Loves you all in his way, he does. Being a dog, he can’t help seeing you all as his pack, I reckon. But love don’t soften him, does it? And he fights without an ounce of back-off in him. You can fight for love. Doesn’t have to be in spite of love. Damn sure doesn’t have to be instead of love. And it doesn’t have to be weakened by love. In fact, if you’re not fighting for something you love, you’re doing it wrong.”

  Sara stared at him, preparing her response and studiously avoiding looking at Sharp. And then the spell was broken as Ida and Charlie appeared at the other door, preceded by Archie who bounced in front of his father and barked excitedly. Jed, in no mood to play, growled back at him. Archie barked again and then retreated to sit between Charlie’s legs, his tail thudding on the floorboards.

  “Right,” said Sara, standing decisively. “I didn’t get up this morning intending to have a debate. I intend to act, and to act with purpose and despatch: I suggest you, Hodge, take Mr. Sharp to interview this Coram Templebane again at the Bedlam Hospital, and I will go and see precisely how abandoned the Templebane’s wretched nest actually is. And if it is as abandoned as you say, I will search it and see if there is a clear connection to The Citizen.”

  “Search it?” said Sharp. “You mean—”

  “I will take my glove off and touch every brick in the damned building if I have to,” she said. “If that French bastard has been there, he will have left a foulness in the stones that I can glint the memory of.”

  “You are too … your energies are overly depleted to glint much,” said Sharp.

  “True,” said Cook. “My powders just help you ignore how low your defences and your reserves of stamina actually are. You still need to take care of your energy.”

  “Plenty of time for taking care of my energy when I’m dead,” said Sara. “You said it. Till then I intend to spend what I have. Like a drunk sailor if need be. Come on, Charlie Pyefinch, and you too, Ida Laemmel. They’re not going to make more daylight just because we’re sitting here wasting it.”

  She looked at Hodge.

  “Can we use your lodgings at the Tower as a meeting place later?”

  He nodded.

  “Then let us meet there at sunset. And if we have no more information at that point, we will take the next step as one.”

  “What is the next step?” said Sharp.

  “We will go and find the noble lord who was so keen to see what was in our library. This Mountfellon. He seemed to be Templebane’s partner or perhaps his sponsor. Let’s see what’s in his damned library.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE VIGIL

  And so it was, after the death of his hopes in Wellclose Square, that Amos had joined the Ghost in haunting the environs of Chandos Place. On the first night, they had slept in the lowered area of a shuttered house opposite and listened to the subterranean gurgling of the municipal drains as they attempted to deal with the unprecedented volume of water the storm had tipped into the city during the day. They watched Mountfellon’s house with its strangely regular but unsymmetrical façade. There was no sign of life within it, no lights, no noise, no toing or froing from either the front or the side. Neither he nor the Ghost could hear any
human thoughts, though he at least thought he could hear some animal in pain which seemed to be beneath the house.

  “A cat or a dog, swept into the sewers, like as not,” sniffed the Ghost, who professed to be unable to hear it. “One of the thousand little tragedies that beset the city every day. Is it a human mind?”

  He shook his head. It was just a voiceless panic. And he couldn’t be sure if it came from the house or the one behind it anyway.

  No

  “Then it isn’t Mountfellon,” she said, and jammed herself into a corner of the area, looking through the railings, blanket over her head, only her eye peering out at pavement level, locked on the house opposite. “And if it isn’t him, who cares? Not, I said, the fly …”

  Amos wondered if she would give him one of the two blankets she was wrapped in. She didn’t. He was too numb to mind much.

  “We will watch,” said the Ghost. “Turnabout: one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on the house.”

  Amos knew that a day before he would have baulked at this, but was too taken aback by the revelation of The Oversight’s demise and the extinction of his last coherent hope that he agreed. He kept just enough of his own kernel of selfhood to be sure that he would not kill for her, no matter what. But watching gave him some purpose, and without purpose he knew he would drift rudderless into even deeper shoals of despair.

  On the first night and the first day, he was mechanical and dazed, but as time passed he began to think about the implications of the end of The Oversight. He had not realised how strongly he had clung to the idea that there was a group who might be able to parse the perils of the unknown, and protect him from it.

  He had only really come into contact with the supranatural proper when he had been sent to deliver the letter to Mountfellon and been pursued by the Sluagh. They had not caught him but they had chased him into a dark world from which there seemed to be no escape: he could not undo what he had done, or un-see the things he had witnessed. Innocence cannot be un-lost. He could not un-know that the night in fact held worse things in its shadows than his city-bound imagination could have possibly conjured up. He had heard all the stories told by his adopted brothers about the recondite aspects of his fathers’ business, and had put them down as stories of ghouls and boggarts told to frighten small children in general and himself in particular, being the youngest child. And now he knew it was all true and worse, he felt naked and unprotected in a wilderness of darkness and thorns.

  The Oversight had seemed like the possibility of more than protection. Even the simple idea of it alone had been a kind of armour against the malignity of this newly revealed occult world: it implied order could be imposed on the chaos of real terror lurking just beyond the lintels of his rational mind.

  So he watched, he slept, he went out into the city and stole food and brought it back to share. And apart from that he tried to be no more, for a while, than an unthinking pair of eyes. The day was long and boring, and they were moved on from the area several times, but returned to it after dark. Sleep was almost as absent as Mountfellon, and when what came did grudgingly arrive, it was not restful.

  Abchurch Templebane haunted his dreams, standing over him and conversing nastily with the partially headless overseer of the Andover Workhouse, M’Gregor. And when Amos turned from their grisly tête-à-half-tête, knowing he was asleep but hoping the Ghost would tell him it was a dream, he found not the Ghost but Mrs. M’Gregor, rattling her empty safe-box accusingly at him, her broken-necked head lolling and bobbling hideously aslant on her shoulder as she did so. And then he found the bed he lay on was not a bed but a pool, and the pool was not water but blood, and when he dipped his hand in it, he saw it was not red blood but black blood and the figures around him were not his victims but Sluagh and then he woke with the Ghost’s hand over his mouth and a warning finger in his face.

  You were moaning. Don’t moan. It draws attention.

  And of course the only rule of his newly curtailed existence, the alpha and the omega of the vigil was that any attention there was should be their own, wholly focused on the building opposite.

  Privately, as his mind healed, he realised that Mountfellon was probably never going to come. But he didn’t mind that. It wasn’t his vengeance. It was hers. And no harm could come of just sitting out of sight, hidden among the flotsam and jetsam of the city, unremarked, unnoticeable, not even part of the background, just lost in the cracks. There was a comforting routine to their pointless lookout.

  No harm could come of it.

  CHAPTER 30

  HUNTER’S MOON

  The Herne was moving fast across the rolling landscape, heading broadly south again. He had the hunter’s lope, a steady long-legged pace which he could maintain effortlessly for whole nights at a time. The bone dogs flowed over the rolling fields ahead of him, silent and determined. In a pursuit like this, where the Nose led, the Sight Hound ran alongside, half a body length off the lead, adjusting his speed to the slower pace of the other dog. In this way, if the Nose brought them on to a prey and flushed it, the Sight Hound could explode into action and accelerate to killing speed in less than a heartbeat. They were well-practised as a team, and did not need to bay or bark to communicate with each other, or the Herne. They also ran off the line of scent, parallel with it, keeping station but always nose to the drift of scent being pushed towards them by the prevailing breeze.

  They were following the strangely familiar fat man’s carriage as it sped back from Mountfellon and Gallstaine Hall to wherever he had come from.

  Since it was dark, the Herne knew they would meet few if any people on the road, so he whistled the dogs in and ran them down the road itself, right on the scent line. And as he ran, he wondered, as he always did when tracking as yet unseen prey, whether he was doing the right thing in following this fat man back to his lair. It had been Badger Skull’s suggestion that the way to get to Mountfellon might be through his confederates which had made him break cover and follow the carriage, but there was also a familiarity to him. Though the Herne had never seen him, he looked and smelled like a Templebane, and that was a family which Hernes and Sluagh had been dealing with for generations. Why he had been meeting Mountfellon was something that Badger Skull might well be interested in finding out. And from his surveillance of Mountfellon’s moated retreat, it was going to take something unusual to get to him. So he ignored the stitch in his side and just ran through it, determined not to let the coach escape.

  CHAPTER 31

  SILENCE IN BEDLAM

  Coram Templebane was greatly reduced, and not merely due to the amputation of his leg. He had been abandoned by his adoptive father at the very moment he most needed rescuing, and had been pitched into the hard stone kerb with his knee agonisingly shattered by a crossbow bolt, staring in disbelief at the senior Templebane’s carriage racing away while the blood pooled around him and drained into the gutter. He’d tried to escape, dragging himself into the protective dark of the sewers, and then his memory blanked and the next thing he remembered was waking in the Bedlam ward with a horrible, unbelievable absence where his leg should be. He still felt violated by the surgery, which he registered as a brutal theft, and more than that he could feel that his vital force had been severely diminished by the traumas he had undergone. In the dark of the wards at night, he still cried, mourning the lost limb quite as much as if it had been a beloved person. Coram had not loved anything or anyone in his life with which this love could be fairly compared, raised as he had been as an orphan and then pitched into the venal and competitive adoptive family of the Templebanes. But, too late, he found he had very much loved being a whole man, something he never could be again. He could see the physical evidence of his decline every time he swung himself on his crutches past a reflective surface: his appetite had disappeared, which, given the standard of the food offered to the inmates of the Bedlam Hospital was no great loss to one who had previously prided himself on his epicurean tastes, and he had lost a great deal of
weight in consequence. His hair, once thick, had been shorn so close to the head that, given the permanent hollows beneath his eyes and the gaunt cheeks below, he thought he now resembled nothing more than the skull that comprised the central part of the Templebane’s family seal, the one which sat above the cheering motto “As I am, you will be.” If Coram had been disposed to speak, he would have said the motto now seemed more like a prophecy, and one whose truth he was painfully beginning to incorporate.

  But Coram did not speak. The doctors said it was shock. Coram felt more as if speech was an island he kept swimming towards, but never quite reached due to an insurmountable rip tide keeping him adrift in a sea of silence.

  He was unaware that The Oversight, in the person of Hodge, had worked on his mind so that the idea of escaping the confines of the hospital would never occur to him, despite the fact that in almost every other way bar speech he had control of his faculties and memories. In fact, it might have been a mercy had Hodge worked on him more and deadened his capacity to recollect his past or reflect on what his future might hold, for the conjunction of these two streams of thought created a mighty river of dread which threatened to drown him at every hour of the day or night: he was jumpy and distracted when waking, and when what sleep might come did come to him with its illusory promise of rest in the long and lonely marches of the night, it was a sleep laced with nightmares through which he was pursued by things so terrifying that even nightmares proved too fragile to hold them, so that he repeatedly woke sweating and shaking in the darkness, and often met the morning even more exhausted than he had been at bedtime.

  The only respite he had, and it was a strange kind of relief, was in the friendship and attentions of one of the porters, a kind of supernumerary nurse’s aide called Bill Ketch. Coram was unaware that Ketch too had had his mind worked on, in this case by Mr. Sharp, as a consequence of his attempt to sell a girl—Lucy Harker, in fact—to The Oversight. Because of this, Hodge had set Ketch to watch over Coram, but he did so in an attentive and disarmingly kind way. It was disarming because Ketch looked like what he had been, which was a drunk and a bruiser, so that his acts of kindness were unexpected and somehow all the more poignant. His broken face was so at odds with his placid and serviceable demeanour that Coram did not get the full benefit of his kind actions, since he had been raised to mistrust everyone, and could never rid himself of the fear that Ketch was playing a game with him.