The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Now look at that,” said Cait, poking the infant. “Is that any way to treat your sister. Or your mother. Or your lover, for that matter?”

  The baby hissed at her.

  “How do you get your heads round that nasty stew anyway?” said Cait.

  The baby coiled on the mattress and stared balefully at her.

  “IF I WAS GROWN I WOULD KILL YOU BUT NOT BEFORE I HAD—”

  Cait raised a warning hand. The baby choked off its stream of bile.

  “Well, you’re not grown, little vileness,” she said, “so keep a civil tongue in your head or I’ll be having you over my knee and skelping you your bare bum till you learn better manners.”

  She turned to The Smith, and handed Charlie the pot.

  “Now, sir, do you think Cook has any more of that delicious pie left?” she said as she rose.

  “With Cook, pie is always a strong possibility,” he said. “Now cut along, youngsters, for I believe Hodge is keen to take you out and about this afternoon, and you could do with some fresh air after all this fetidness in here.”

  Lucy fell in with Cait as they walked back along the passage.

  “Would you really have put the changeling in the pot?” she said.

  “Without a qualm,” said Cait. “Well, maybe a bit of a qualm because it’s a nice enough pot and Cook seems to prize it, and it seems a shame to dirty it up with one of them, because they do, you know, tend to lose control of their thingies when they’re in there.”

  “What thingies?” asked Lucy.

  “Faculties,” said Charlie.

  “And their bladders and bowels,” said Cait. “They spew like fire hoses from both ends. That’s why I always use a lid.”

  CHAPTER 20

  A DISTINCT ABSENCE OF ALP

  Although he took a pride in keeping an opaque veil over his true feelings and did not like to share his emotions with anyone, The Citizen did admit to himself that he had been more than a little deflated by the death of the Green Man. It had been a long and well-planned experiment, and had initially seemed promising. The sudden demise of its subject was irksome and sapped his energy–energy that he was especially rigorous about husbanding carefully. He had cheated death once, and though not by any means–not by any means that he was conscious of at least–a superstitious man, he did often wonder, strictly in a spirit of scientific contemplation, if the fact he had exceeded the normal span of years meant he had also outlived his bodily appetites. Power he was still hungry for, but food and drink seemed to revivify and nourish him less and less with each passing year.

  It was this that had made him addicted to the effects of the Alps, and wherever he had travelled he had arranged that one of these breath-stealers would also make themselves available to him, for a fee paid to their family in the customary way. Breath-stealers, Alps (or maras as they were known across central Europe) had the ability to restore their own reserves of vital essence by bearing down on their unsuspecting victims–animal or human–as they slept and sucking the exhalations from their mouths. From this, the belief that a bad dream or nightmare (night-mara) leaves the victim pale and exhausted from being “ridden” all night can be seen to have a very real antecedent. Alps have the added ability to store this vital breath and exhale it into the mouths of others, transferring the regenerative benefits of their activities.

  The Citizen’s latest Alp had been installed in an empty town house on Golden Square. The house was another of Mountfellon’s properties, and there was a network of secret tunnels and untravelled alleys leading to an entrance so that The Citizen could move from Chandos Place to Golden Square without being seen on the city streets. Despite the fact that anyone who might have recognised the old Jacobin was long dead, he shunned public exposure and had become, through habit, a creature of tunnels and shadows. But sapped as he was by the death of the Green Man, and disappointed as he also was by the failure of Mountfellon’s stratagem against The Oversight, he had determined that he needed another draught of energy from his tame Alp.

  And so, on an afternoon when the sun was already low in the sky, a section of panelling in the dusty grandeur of the forgotten mansion on Golden Square cracked open, and The Citizen emerged into the silent house. He walked to the chaise-longue that stood at the centre of the room, stepping over the heavy stone weights that were scattered on the floor and trailing a hand along the board that was propped against it. By the use of those weights and that board, he had ridden the Alp, mouths sealed together, the pressure crushing the breath out the creature and into his own mouth. He felt a quickening of his vitals at the very thought of it. It had been a surge of life through his old frame that had an almost erotic charge to it, progenitive in its very essence, he supposed.

  He wanted that now. But the house was empty. And as he looked around, he realised it was much more than emptiness he was feeling: it was a distinct absence of Alp. The house was abandoned. Something about the stillness told him the breath-stealer was gone and would not return. He tried to react scientifically to this sense, to see what the unnoticed and subliminal cues were that made him feel this. He looked at the patch of scrubbed floor where the Alp had cleaned blood from the sprung parquet, blood that The Citizen had spilled as he cut the unsuspecting throat of a hired helper. He walked slowly around the room, replaying that first meeting, remembering where everything had been. He walked into the dust-filled hall and noted that the only footsteps disturbing the dirty grey layer of stour went from the door into the main room and back. No sign of occupation. No sense that the Alp had returned after disposing of the hired man’s body.

  His face tightened. Despite himself he called out.

  “Hello?” he cried.

  And then to kill the hatefully empty echo, he spoke in the Alp’s own tongue.

  “Bist du hier, mein Freund?”

  No reply. He grimaced. Even though there was clearly no one there to answer him he felt he had betrayed a weakness.

  He moved to the front door and tried it. It was locked. He was about to turn away when he saw a movement in the light at the bottom of the door, and he became very still.

  There was something outside. Something sniffing–more than sniffing: inhaling deeply–a dog, a damned dog trying to smell him, smelling him. He took a step backwards and heard a growl from the other side of the door. And then he heard the rough man’s voice coming up the steps.

  “Hoi, Jed, what you got there, boy?”

  There was a spyhole in the door, and on instinct The Citizen reached out to move the swinging flap out of the way so he could see who it was on the front step. And then, just as he was about to touch it, there was a scratching noise and it moved.

  On the other side of the door, Charlie stood with his eye to the spyhole, a long, thin knife blade in his hand at his ear, levering the trap open so he could squint into the building that had got Jed’s attention.

  He could see the empty hall, the dusty steps on the once grand staircase behind it, a door leading to a clearly derelict room and not much else.

  Hodge and Lucy climbed the steps behind him.

  “What is it?” said Hodge.

  “Empty,” said Charlie. “Grand. But derelict.”

  “Shouldn’t we go in?” said Lucy.

  Jed barked.

  On the other side of the door, The Citizen was bent double, having ducked down the very instant he’d seen Charlie slide the spyhole cover out of the way. His eye was now level with the keyhole. He peered through it.

  He could see no faces but there was a hand–Charlie’s–right at the level of the hole.

  And on the hand was a ring. The Citizen stared at it, eyes widening.

  The wretched dog barked again.

  “Are we going in?” said Charlie.

  There was a pause.

  “No,” whispered Hodge. “Something in there Jed wants to get at, but his barking’s likely drawn attention to itself, hasn’t it?”

  Jed dropped his head as if embarrassed.

  �
��Terriers is always head-on and no back-off in them at that, but not so good for stratagem, is they?” sighed Hodge, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. “We come back tonight, get in through the roof, see if there’s more of the bastards, though an Alp’s a solitary thing more often than not, and the one I killed didn’t look like a sociable cove…”

  The Citizen’s blood, never particularly warm, ran colder at this. His Alp, his lifeline, gone. And more than that, if he could not contact the people who had provided him, the only other source of Alps he knew of was far away in Lower Canada, where a rump of his old associates from Paris had fled a long time ago. He was not even sure their successors would respond if he sent for an Alp, so he would have to get to Canada himself, and he had a horror of drowning, which made sea voyages unthinkable.

  “Going in through the roof sounds fun,” said Lucy.

  “Not for you, missy,” said Hodge. “You’ll be tucked up nice and safe on the Isle of Dogs.”

  The Citizen heard them walk off, and only after a minute did he rise to full height and make his way back across the hall, over the floor of the great room and out through the secret door in the panelling.

  And then he ran. Ten minutes later he was locked in his underground study, the door barred. He was writing a note, the steel nib of his pen providing the only sound as it scratched and slashed his message across the paper. He folded it into an envelope, melted sealing wax and sealed it with his ring.

  Then he unlocked a trunk at the back of the room and removed a metal-bound chest. He unlocked that and took out what at first looked like a black japanned deed-box.

  He stood the box upright on the narrow end and carefully unlatched one of the two largest sides, as if opening the cover of a book. This revealed that the top was pierced by a series of ventilation holes. More than that, it revealed a black wax candle set into the base beneath the holes, and a simple clockwork mechanism that was attached to a small bell and striker. He hurriedly wound the key to the mechanism, tightening the drive spring. Then he lit the candle and rested the letter against the inside of the box which was clearly, now the candlelight was reflecting it, mirrored. He took a small folding scalpel from his pocket, nicked his thumb with a grimace and splashed the resultant tiny droplets of blood against the inner glass. And then he pulled a small lever on the clockwork releasing the mechanism, which began to strike the small bell and emit a series of regularly spaced silvery chimes. Then he closed the cover of the box, making the two internal mirrors face each other as he did so.

  He stood with a shudder, and left his study to the sound of the small silvery bell, locking the door behind him as he left.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE MATTER OF BOOTS AND THE PASSAGE OF IRON

  Sara Falk found time strangely elastic within the mirrors. She walked and walked without ever getting tired enough to stop, and she didn’t really even have the natural clock of her stomach working strongly enough to give her a sense of time passing. In some ways it felt as if she were out of time entirely, in a dream. All she had to keep her moored was the strong sense of purpose to find Sharp.

  Having lost his trail, she had quailed at the immensity of the task, but had decided that her choice was simple: to be crushed by that immensity or to explore it. She chose the latter course, and was walking in what she visualised as a right-angled spiral. She walked ahead for fifty paces, then turned right for another fifty paces, then another right for fifty, then another for sixty and so on, gradually extending her spiral quartering of the maze in the hope that eventually she would cut Sharp’s trail again. Keeping track of the counting was hard, and she was in the thousands when tiredness and perhaps desperation finally took their sudden and inevitable toll.

  She simply sat down. So fast she was not sure if she had not actually fallen. She slumped against the mirror at her side and looked at the Raven.

  “Three thousand, seven hundred and fifty,” she said blankly. “I think. I’m losing count.”

  She yawned.

  “Have I been walking for hours or days?” she said.

  The Raven just blinked at her.

  “I don’t care,” she said. Her eyes were dark shadows.

  “If I sleep will you stand watch?”

  The Raven clacked its beak and hopped closer as Sara drew her largest blade and laid it ready beside her.

  “Just in case we have more unwelcome visitors while I sleep,” she said. “I don’t want to stop and rest. But I think I have to. I think I may feel less…”

  She lost the word and shuddered. Her eyes felt moist but she was not going to wipe them in front of the Raven. It might misinterpret the gesture for sentiment.

  “I may feel less hopeless,” she said. “I may wake with a fresh plan. Three thousand, seven hundred and sixty perhaps it was. Remind me when I…”

  Her eyes closed and she was gone. The Raven hopped a little closer, and then was still too.

  Time passed.

  Nothing moved.

  Something changed.

  No one noticed.

  And more time passed.

  Sara woke with the immediate certainty that she was being observed. She opened her eyes and found almost her entire field of vision was filled with a man’s boot.

  The boot was familiar and Sara’s first sensation on seeing it was to be flushed with a potent but contradictory mixture of relief and disbelief.

  “Jack!” she said, pushing herself up on her hands. “Why, Jack—”

  “John,” rasped an unfamiliar voice. “No one calls me Jack, and most call me ‘doctor’…”

  She looked at the man looming over her–the boots giving way to a long and unfamiliar coat and an even less familiar grey goatee and medieval-looking skull-cap.

  She covered her confusion by looking round for her companion.

  “Where has it gone?” she said.

  “Where has what gone?” he said.

  “The Raven,” she said.

  He looked around before he spoke.

  “There is no Raven.”

  She stood up. He stepped back half a pace, suddenly tense, as if preparing to fight. Or flee.

  Her gaze swiftly swept the repetitively sterile space.

  “There’s always a Raven,” she said.

  “Not here,” he said. “Here, there’s always just mirrors.”

  Her eyes finished their short tour of the limited horizon and rested on him.

  “And you,” she said.

  “And me,” he agreed.

  “You are not a Mirror Wight,” she said.

  He smiled, whether from amusement or to confirm the truth of her statement by a mirthless display of his definitively white–and thus not black–teeth, it wasn’t clear.

  “And neither are you,” he said. He pointed to her rings. “You are from The Oversight of London.”

  She kept her teeth hidden behind the taut line of her lips.

  “I am Sara Falk.”

  “And I am John Dee.”

  “Doctor Dee was a member of The Oversight in the Elizabethan era,” she said after a beat. “That is not possible.”

  “No,” he said. “Not possible anywhere but here.”

  Sara’s hand had found the handle of the knife beneath her coat and was resting on it. He looked at her as if he could see through the dark material and knew exactly what she was doing.

  “If I may speak plainly, time is strange in the mirrors. It flows differently. There are worlds within worlds, spheres within spheres, revolving at different speeds, perhaps.”

  “You cannot just ‘survive’ in the mirrors,” said Sara. “Not if you are not a Mirror Wight.”

  He opened the neck of his coat and showed her the chain he wore beneath it. There was a ring on it. A gold ring with a bloodstone, incised with the familiar unicorn and lion. He inclined his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “I told you so,” and then reached inside his shirt and pulled out another chain which ran through a hole drilled through a piece of rough whi
te stone, and next to it a small silver bell, such as a cat might wear.

  “I move in and out of the mirrored worlds. Judiciously. And I carry an amulet, a white counter-stone if you will, a thing that affords me protection from the lixivial effects of the glass.”

  “Lixivial?” she said. “If you think that is speaking plainly, sir, you delude yourself.”

  “Ah. It means ‘leaching’. The mirrors leach colour and vigour from their inhabitants. The word is from the—”

  “I do not care where the word is from,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I am evading the pull of mortality by endeavouring to understand the currents of time as they are affected by the mirrors.”

  She shook her head.

  “I know the history of The Oversight, sir. Dee is two and a half centuries gone from the world. You are not Dee—”

  “But I am. Both gone from the world, and standing in front of you. Behind the world, as it were. I told you: time is elastic in the mirrors. Let me show you the trick of it,” he said, reaching out a hand.

  “Why would you do that?” she replied, stepping back.

  “The Oversight is, among other things, a society given to mutual aid,” he smiled. “Especially in extremis.”

  “If you were Dee, if you were a member of The Oversight, you would have stayed in touch.”

  He said nothing.

  “If you are indeed John Dee,” she repeated.

  “Why would I not be?” he said.

  “You could have taken his name. As easy as stealing someone’s ring. Or someone’s boots…”

  “I did not steal the boots,” he said. “I found them.”

  “The immemorial excuse of every thief since time began,” she said.

  “I am not sure time began. I begin to think it was always there. Or perhaps it is curved and cyclical,” he mused, then waved his hand as if to banish the digression. “But that’s another thing altogether. I found the boots on a black mirror. They were lying on top of this and these.”