The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  It was the precise opposite of all the repetitive brightness in which he had been beset. It was nullity; it was void; it was a sovereign relief as relaxing to his eyes as it was to his mind, and he leant forward, hands splayed against it, and stared into the welcome lacuna, drinking it in with his eyes, greedy as a man in the desert who had stumbled on a well full of clear, cool water.

  The blackness was not merely calming and refreshing, it was intoxicating. The longer he looked into it, the more he felt the tense muscles of his shoulders begin to relax, and with time his stiff back slackened enough to allow him to sway forward a little, almost as if swooning with relief.

  He hung there for a very long time, staring deeply into the vacancy. Just gazing into it and allowing the void to fill his field of vision seemed to revivify him more than any of the unsatisfactory sleeps had done.

  He would stop staring at it in a moment, when he was quite refreshed. He was certain he would do so. There was no urgency in the matter: he had not, he told himself in a voice that seemed to be getting fainter, been looking at the dark for so very long after all. He deserved respite, and his quest would indeed be easier and more prone to success if he allowed himself this brief interlude of replenishment.

  He would definitely stop looking into the black mirror in a moment. He was determined on this. It was just so very… pleasant, looking into the featureless void. It demanded nothing of him. There was no harm in it. No harm at all. No harm in… and then his mind drifted away, briefly wondering exactly what it had been that there was no harm in… and then asking himself what he meant by harm… and then forgetting that question too.

  CHAPTER 8

  TO THE ISLE OF DOGS BY GOLEM

  The second time Lucy Harker went to sleep in the Safe House she slept better than she had on the first occasion. This was partly because she was exhausted by the journey and adventures that had brought her back to the very house she had attempted to plunder at the outset of that whole series of small disasters. But mostly it was because, having been bitten once and thus deciding to be at least twice shy, Cook had tripled the sleeping draught in the hot milk she had been given before being sent to bed.

  Her sleep was deep but not dreamless.

  She was so tightly wrapped in slumber that she was unaware of the large figure in the high-collared coachman’s cloak which entered the room, his dark face shadowed by the tricorn hat he wore day and night, inside or out. She did not feel the very careful bundling of bed sheets and blankets as he wrapped them across her, cocooning her still-sleeping body in a way that both kept her warm, insensible and–perhaps accidentally–bound. She only shifted a little as he lifted her in his arms and carried her down the stairs without a sound. The night air did not wake her as he bore her to the carriage he had prepared at the rear of the house, and she did not notice him lay her gently on the rugs spread on the floor between the two seats. He climbed to the driver’s bench where The Smith sat waiting.

  “Isle of Dogs,” was all that The Smith said, and he gently eased the horse into motion. The rocking sensation of the well-sprung coach actually deepened Lucy’s sleep and made her dreams flow more smoothly. And so, as the carriage passed along the Ratcliffe Highway, she dreamed of a life beyond the sea in France and, in the way of dreams, some of what came to her was what was, and some was what might have been.

  When Lucy finally woke, hours later, she stayed very still, immediately aware that she was regaining consciousness somewhere entirely different from the place in which she had gone to sleep. This was not as distressing to her as it might have been to another person since she had become used to the worrying blanks in her mind. True, she had recently been able to maintain a clear continuum of recollection, but she had a history of unexplained holes in her memory that she had learned to live with. They came and went, and it was her practice, whenever she had quiet time to herself, to audit the ragged fabric of her past and see if, as occasionally happened, one of those holes had been patched as she slept. This morning she found she did indeed seem to remember more. She closed her eyes as she performed her review since experience had taught her it was best to keep as close to the dream state as possible when doing this. Waking too sharply led to the wisps of new memory dissolving, like dawn mist evaporated by the full sunlight of morning.

  She saw the house in Paris, the blue door, the shutters, the dark hallway where she had glimpsed the very last of her mother as she was pulled inside by men whose uniforms matched the colour of the door. That hallway not only swallowed her mother, it seemed to have eaten a large chunk of Lucy’s life too, because her next memories were of a farm and fields and she was bigger, big enough to carry water from the well in a heavy bucket, and after that was mainly sunshine, and no more city. The farm belonged to an Antoine and a Sylvie, and though she was encouraged to call them Aunt and Uncle, she always knew they weren’t because Dagobert the farm-hand told her so, and they looked so different to her mother, dark where she was fair, angular where she was soft and rounded. They were, however, kind and though they may or may not have been blood, they were what she thought of as family as she grew and the seasons turned and the years whispered past like wind through the barley fields that surrounded the house.

  It was Sylvie who gave her her mother’s ring with the broken unicorn in it, and it was Sylvie who put it on the leather thong around her neck and told her to keep it beneath her clothes, hidden from strangers, in case greedy eyes saw the gold and tried to take it. The piece of sea-glass was the only other thing she had from her life in the city, and she didn’t remember how she kept it, only that it was always in her pocket, always reassuringly close to hand.

  Lucy remembered how much she had loved the countryside, and this was a fresh memory, covering a hole that had been there when she went to sleep. She was exhilarated by this. She now recalled how much she had loved the way the landscape changed through the year, each season containing the seeds of its opposite within it, always old beneath the gaudy spring, always new beneath the winter snow. It was in the woods beyond the farm that she discovered she had a skill that others didn’t. At the time she thought that the reason she could move so quietly and yet so fast was because she was a child and thus smaller and nimbler than the grown-ups who surrounded her. She believed she was like the fish she saw when hunting for frogs beneath the overhanging ferns in the stream by the watermill, the tiny sticklebacks darting away so much faster than the fat, brown trout. She reasoned, in her childlike way, that smaller meant faster.

  It was Antoine’s reaction when she walked into the stable one afternoon to show him a live rabbit that she had plucked from a patch of cow-parsley that made her realise that she had done something unusual. He had not believed her when she told him she had just seen the rabbit and then gone and picked it up. So she’d let the rabbit go and then gone and fetched a partridge from beneath the hedge in the field by the millrace. This time he’d taken her in to Sylvie and made her explain what she’d done. After a lot of questioning, all she had been able to say was that she had gone very slow and very fast at the same time. A look had flickered between the two adults, and then Antoine had laughed and ruffled her hair and told her she would be useful when he went hunting for the pot. He never did take her hunting, however, and when he walked into the woods with his old gun bumping on his shoulder he went alone. So her ability to go slow-yet-fast was something she only used for catching frogs and in delicately capturing butterflies that she would take to show Sylvie before releasing them back into a sky that was, in those memories, always blue and cloudless.

  Lucy was big enough to harness the plough horse and lead it to and from work by the time she hit another blank, and after that one it seemed to be always rain, and Antoine was gone and Sylvie was full of sadness and something else as her stomach swelled through a wet and blustery autumn, and when the baby came just before Christmas, snow was definitely in the air as Lucy saddled the plough horse and rode into the small town for a doctor.

  It was whe
n she dismounted and touched the newly plastered wall by the doctor’s house that she first glinted. The past slammed into her and she saw three men in torn velvet and silk with their hands tied behind them put against the wall and shot down as a crowd hooted and mocked behind the ragged firing squad. The force of the thing knocked her off her feet, and the doctor found her on his doorstep twitching as if having a fit. She’d managed to tell him that Tante Sylvie was in labour and some distress, and then he’d given her a foul-tasting draught of something that had made her sleep, and then she remembered nothing more of the farm and sunshine, and all happy memories ceased, washed out by the greyness of her next period of clear recollection in the convent school for pauper children, a place so soaked in unhappiness and tragedy that she became scared to touch anything in case the past bit her again and sent her into another fit.

  In the convent school she began to wrap her hands in rags to protect herself from the past. The nuns would unwrap her hands and take away the rags, and she would find more and do it again. When there were no rags, she tore her clothes and used strips of her dress instead. Eventually they left her to it, but it was a rare victory for her. In the convent she had nothing. Her ring was taken from her as was her lump of glass, and when she asked where they were the Mother Superior told her it was kept safe in the locked drawer in the heavy oak desk in her office, in case it was of use one day as proof of her identity should someone come looking for her. Something in her smile made Lucy angry, and she had insisted on seeing it. She had not been allowed to. Instead she was beaten for her insolence.

  The nuns were not patient with Lucy, perhaps because they too feared the Mother Superior, and when she told them of what she had seen of the past they shrilly told her she was a liar, or that a demon was already in her causing the visions of what was not there. It didn’t matter much which, because the remedy for demons or lying was an identical beating from the same whippy birch followed by the insistence that she thanked and prayed for a blessing on the sister who had wielded the rod for doing so.

  It was in the convent that she discovered another use for her ability to go slow-yet-fast: there were no butterflies to catch, no rabbits to pluck warm and surprised from cushioning clumps of cow-parsley and no clear blue skies at all, but there was a kitchen, and a constant hollow in her stomach that the bread and scrapings they were given to eat did not even begin to fill. So Lucy became the thing she was, the thing she had thought of herself as before Sara Falk had told her she was a Glint: she became a thief.

  The first things she stole in the convent were the dry heel of a French loaf and three tomatoes. The second-to-last things she stole were her mother’s ring, her sea-glass and the birch rod that hung in the corner of the Mother Superior’s room. And the very last thing she stole was the key to the gate in the high convent walls.

  She remembered unlocking the gate at midnight and slipping out onto the moonlit road to freedom, leaving the broken halves of the rod in the hallway inside. She remembered that the silvery road led past a millpond, because she had a very clear memory of shattering the perfect moon on its mirrored surface into a thousand pieces as she flung the heavy key –with which she had of course conscientiously re-locked the gate from the outside–far out into the muddy depths beneath.

  No further new memories revealed themselves as she sped over the familiar ragged landscape of the past that followed this, the oft-recalled incidents and the well-known holes that punctuated the broken chain of recollection which led from the hated convent to London and the present. Nevertheless she opened her eyes again, both excited by the fact she at least regained some memories and newly saddened by the immediacy of loss and betrayal that came with them.

  She was on her side with half of her face sunk into a well-stuffed feather pillow, but the unobstructed eye took in a wall entirely lacking the pattern of the wallpaper that had lined the room she had gone to sleep in. This wall had no paper on it at all, being instead whitewashed and deckled with reflected sunlight that was constantly in motion in a way that told her the sea or a river was close by. She listened carefully. For a mad moment, for no other reason than that her head had been full of it all night, and just recently so, she wondered if she were back in France. It did not feel like she was in the city, and if not in London, why, she might be anywhere…

  She could hear a light wind rattling the casement behind her, and felt the hint of a breeze on her neck. She could hear the lap of water in the mid-distance, but no waves, which made her think she must be by a river, or perhaps a lake. And then she heard someone moving in the room below. She turned on her back and looked at the ceiling. More rippled sunlight and one spider slowly moving from corner to corner. She flexed her hands, aware of the tight kidskin gloves she had been given the previous evening in the other house.

  The room was spartan but clean. She looked down at herself and was surprised–given that she was in an entirely new room–to find the distinctive lemon-coloured blanket she remembered from the night before was still covering her. She sat up, swung her legs over the side of a bed that was half the width of the one she’d gone to sleep in, and then became very still again.

  The casement window looked out on a broadly curving reach of river with marshy land on the distant shore. Sun glistered off the water, and three sailing barges were working their way from left to right against the flow.

  It was not the riverine activity that stopped her moving. It was the golem sitting calmly against the wall beside the window, looking at her.

  She recognised him. He was still dressed like an antiquated coachman and the empty eye sockets atop the well-defined cheekbones in the skilfully made clay face seemed pointed right at her. His mouth was set in a firm line that was neither grim nor quite a smile. The last time she had really seen him she had opened a door while trying to escape the Safe House and had run into him. He had not moved and she had bounced back into the room she had been trying to exit. It had been like running into a brick wall which, since bricks were made out of clay and so was he, was not so surprising.

  She did not know how to address a golem so she settled for raising a hand in greeting.

  “Hello,” she said.

  And then, after a suitable pause.

  “Where am I?”

  The golem cocked his head as if thinking, then made a wide and expansive sweep of his arm. The meaning, though unvoiced, was clear.

  “I know I’m here,” she said. “But where is here? And why?”

  Something was wrong. More wrong than merely waking up in a different house from the one she’d dozed off in: she couldn’t put her finger on it, maybe because she was dislocated and woozy from such a deep slumber and the confusing dreams that had peopled it, but the wrongness was there, like a bad tooth about to flare into pain.

  “Am I a prisoner?” she said.

  The golem shook his head.

  “I was told I would be safe,” she said.

  The golem nodded and patted his chest. Clearly not only did he think she was safe, but claimed credit for ensuring that was the case by his watchful presence.

  “So I can get up?” she said. She wanted to see Charlie Pyefinch and find out what was going on.

  The golem nodded, but when she said, “Is Charlie Pyefinch here too?” he shook his head decisively.

  “I’m going to find him,” she announced, and stepped onto the cold floorboards. As she walked to the door she felt herself gently stopped by a large hand on her shoulder.

  She rounded on the towering clay man.

  “I thought I wasn’t a prisoner—” she began, and then closed her mouth.

  The golem was holding something out for her.

  Boots.

  He pointed at her feet.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He stepped back and pointed at the clothes hung over the top of the bedrail at the foot of the mattress. He pointed out of the window and mimed a shiver.

  “Cold,” she said unbidden. “Oh. You’re saying get dressed, it�
��s cold.”

  He nodded.

  “Right,” she said. “Good idea, but I’m not going to get und—”

  He was already walking to the door, which he exited with the hint of a bow. She wondered if it was a trick of the light, but the severe line of his mouth seemed to have twitched upwards a fraction at one end.

  “Er… thank you,” she said. “I’ll be quick.”

  He closed the door behind him, and she tore off the nightshirt and began pulling on the clothes left for her. It was only when she was cinching the laces on her second boot that the cause of the wrongness hit her.

  She dropped the untied lace and sat bolt upright.

  “My sea-glass!” she gasped. And then underlined her distress in the rural French dialect that instinctively overtook her in such moments. “Merde…”

  She patted her pockets, looked beneath the narrow trundle bed and then ripped the bedclothes off the mattress, shaking them but finding nothing.

  She sat on the stripped bed, heart hammering.

  She was a Glint. She’d always been one but it had taken Sara Falk’s gentle explanation to make her understand that the capacity she had to touch stone and relive events recorded therein was not a torment but a skill that could be mastered. The gloves she wore were Sara’s own, to protect her from accidentally glinting against her will. All this was newish knowledge: what was old news to her was that her safety was inextricably tied up in always staying in possession of the piece of wave-tumbled sea-glass that she had been given by her scarcely remembered mother a lifetime ago. Sara had called it her heart-stone and told her all Glints were preserved in their health and sanity by their own glass: it was to return Sara’s glass that she had risked everything by coming back to London. And it was her own heart-stone, the lump of glass that perfectly matched the shade of her eyes, that was now so alarmingly absent. And not just that, but the ring, the broken ring she also had from her mother, was missing.