The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  What is this?

  The Ghost answered him.

  This is a mist pond. Some call them dewponds. Be silent now. Something is happening.

  He stared at the mirror-smooth expanse of water, seeing the perfect reflection of the great eye of the moon staring back up at him as if it were trapped in a hole beneath the ground. He looked around at his strange travelling companions. Their eyes were all shut, their heads tilted back, as if partaking in some silent communion from which he and the Ghost were excluded.

  He looked beyond the ring of horsemen and saw a distant light beyond the gibbet, beyond the high estate wall he could now make out in the moonlight. The light came from a window in the squat mass of what must, he realised, be Gallstaine itself, and he wondered with a shudder if the man he was being sent to kill was sitting up late by the light of that distant lamp.

  Badger Skull broke the silence, pulling his horse around to look out over the farmland behind them. He pointed.

  “There are cows in those fields. And in the two fields beyond the copse over there. A bull too, if my nose isn’t playing tricks. Bring them.”

  Without another word, the Sluagh reined their ponies around and spread away into the distant fields.

  Why do you need cows?

  “I don’t need cows especially, boy,” said the Sluagh. “But cows are what are closest to hand.”

  Closest to hand for what?

  “For blood,” said the Ghost. “He needs blood.”

  Badger Skull nodded and looked at Amos.

  “Lots of blood will be spilled before the moon sets, Bloody Boy. And you must start the dance. Come.”

  And with that he leant down and took the reins from Amos’s hand and led the pony towards the gates to Gallstaine, as if he thought Amos could not be trusted, at the last, to follow instructions.

  The plan was simple. Too simple to Amos’s way of thinking, but the Sluagh and the Ghost were of the confirmed opinion that either his mind would be powerful enough to make any more complex stratagem redundant, or it would not work at all, in which case again there was no sense in confusing things.

  “It will work or it won’t work,” said the Ghost. “And I’ve seen the power you have when your own survival is threatened. It will work.”

  He scratched at the band around his neck as they emerged from the field and the ponies clattered down the metalled road to the gate. When he had first come here, it had been in the teeth of a howling rainstorm on a night when the clouds had done their best to drown Rutlandshire and wash it away into the adjoining Lincolnshire fenlands. He had not seen much except by lightning flash, other than rain, darkness and mud.

  They stopped and looked at the gatehouse. It was a curved indentation in the high, iron-spiked wall that guarded the perimeter of Mountfellon’s parkland. The gatehouse was almost buried by an unchecked growth of ivy, and the gates were of iron, unadorned as a jailhouse door, except for a single shield that bore the Mountfellon arms embossed on it.

  All the things that Amos had pushed to the side of his mind chose this moment to rise up and demand his attention. He was going to kill a man. He did not like the man, but the only thing that Mountfellon had done to harm him was to nick his thumb with a scalpel in order to test his blood. That, and treating him with the unsurprising aloofness and haughty disdain that one of his class would naturally feel towards one of Amos’s lowly state, were the only demerits he had accrued. And yet he was expected to enter his well-guarded fastness and persuade him to kill himself, or if not to die by his own hand–and this was worse–to work on his mind so that he would not defend himself against Amos’s fatal attack.

  Amos was not the Bloody Boy. He had determined not to be the Bloody Boy ever since the Ghost had so gleefully given him the name, even though the sight and, worse, the sound of M’Gregor’s brains dripping off the ceiling in the Andover Workhouse now reasserted themselves horribly in his mind to prove the contrary. He could feel his heart pounding unnaturally fast, and a nasty prickling heat seemed to have spread from the damned white tattoo and fanned out across his whole body. He tried once more to tell himself exactly why he wasn’t the Bloody Boy, chapter and verse, but all the reasons he had gone over in his mind as they had wound their way across the dark countryside to reach this sharp point of decision came down to one thing: Amos could live with himself, was able to push the horror of who and how he had killed to one side of his mind because he had not meant to kill. He had defended himself on both occasions without thought, without time to develop a thinking, considered intent. The tinker had been about to cut his throat; M’Gregor had been about to empty a blunderbuss through his face. And Amos had instinctively defended himself. So far, so lucky. So far, in fact, so natural.

  This thing lying ahead of him was not reflex. This was not instinct. It was of course self-preservation because the white tattoo unfulfilled would, he was quite sure, kill him. But it was not the same thing as the other deaths. He had had time–even though he had spent much of it trying not to do so–to think about the bargain he had been forced into. And having been forced into it, he had had to weigh his own life against another’s. On the animal level there was no reason to think much about it: for Amos to survive, to just keep breathing, Mountfellon must die.

  But betrayed and trapped though he was by the tattoo, Amos had been trapped for far longer by his muteness. That muteness had made him turn inwards and develop the habit of talking to himself for want of others. And this lifelong habit of reflection, of turning things over and over in his mind, was a double-edged thing. It made him look at things from all angles. And though he undoubtedly intended to survive, he had thought this through. The price of his survival was not killing Mountfellon. It was a price that he would only pay afterwards: the true price was that he would then have to live out the rest of his life as the one who had killed a man, and done so thoughtfully, with considered intent. He would have to live with himself, knowing he had valued his unsteady vital flame at higher rate than another human’s. And so the price he would pay would be that of not being Amos any more. This coming murder would not just be the end of Mountfellon, it would be the death of Amos’s innocence, of his essential sense of who he was. What it would be the birth of he could not know, but he had the nastiest feeling deep within him that the Amos he still was would not like the Amos he would emerge as. And if he did not like that future Amos, the true Bloody Boy, then would the game he was about to embark on be worth the candle?

  “You think too much, Bloody Boy,” said the Ghost.

  “Live or die. Black or white. Night or day. The biggest decisions are the simplest,” grunted Badger Skull.

  And perhaps because the sense that they had both been inside his head observing his thoughts made him doubly nauseous, on top of the dread of the blood to come, his stomach rebelled and he vomited copiously into the road.

  They sat and watched him, unmoving as he stumbled from the pony and retched up again into the ditch. He found a kerchief in his pocket and wiped his face. Remembering that it was one he had found in the tinker’s pack, he balled it and threw it into the bushes. He felt childish doing it, as if it was a last act of rebellion that meant precisely nothing to anyone, not even really himself. Then he turned and looked at them.

  “There is no choice,” said the Ghost. And there was the faintest undertone of a gentler self in her cracked voice, a whisper, perhaps, of apology.

  He waved her quiet and strode towards the gatehouse, rubbing the itch that was extending around his neck.

  I know. Enough. Mountfellon must die.

  Decisiveness is a wonderful thing. It banishes the destabilising mists of uncertainty and clears the mind, eliminates havering on the edge of something and restores a sense of direction and forward motion.

  Amos grasped the bell pull at the side of the gate and yanked it resolutely, three firm pulls. The accompanying jangle of bells within the gatehouse produced not the barking dog, nor the angry and unpleasant gatekeeper he remembered f
rom his first visit, but the diminutive figure of the Running Boy, the messenger servant whose name, Amos was surprised to remember, was Whitlowe. He also remembered that the Whitlowe he had glimpsed in the lamplight what seemed like a long lifetime ago had been a snivelling child with a persistent dewdrop of nasal drip hanging from the end of his nose. On second meeting, it was clear this drop was a permanent rather than a merely persistent feature.

  Whitlowe sniffed it back into the inner mysteries of his nostrils and wiped the back of a much-used cuff across his nose as he peered out into the rain.

  “’Oo is it?” he said, voice querulous and piping. “Only the gatekeeper’s away and I ’as orders not to open the gates for any but ’isself and the master.”

  Amos held out the letter the Ghost had provided him with.

  “For Viscount Mountfellon, to be delivered by this messenger’s hand to his and no other,” Whitlowe read with a slow deliberation, and a degree of pride mixed with relief as he reached the end of the inscription without encountering any words that were beyond his capability.

  He looked up at Amos.

  “But …’e ain’t here, sir! ’E’s away down to London. ’As been for weeks now.”

  Amos was listening to the boy’s thoughts as he spoke, and knew the absolute truth of the bad news the moment he delivered it.

  Decisiveness is a wonderful thing at restoring a sense of direction and forward motion, so much so that it can make you feel unstoppable. And that works right up until you smack into an immoveable object.

  The flash of horror in Amos’s mind made him invade the boy’s head without thinking he was going to do it.

  Stay there.

  Amazingly Whitlowe did. His face went slack and he allowed the dewdrop to reappear without noticing it as he stared out into the night, a night that was free of any sign of Amos.

  Amos was around the corner, stumbling towards the Sluagh and the Ghost who were sheltering in the shadows under the outflung canopy of a tall elm.

  He could not believe that none of them could have anticipated this most simple and humdrum of obstacles, that Mountfellon might simply not be at home.

  We must go to London. He is not here.

  The Ghost looked as if she had been hit, swaying in the saddle.

  “But…” she said.

  Amos could see the simplicity of the means by which her plans had been confounded was hitting her too.

  “We can go to London, but we cannot enter it,” said Badger Skull. “And you can enter it but not get there in time. There is not enough night left in the sky for even the fleetest horse to make the journey before first light, and at sunrise…”

  He shrugged and rubbed his throat.

  Amos felt the fiery itch at his own neck and tore open the collar. He thrust himself at the Ghost, baring his throat to the moonlight.

  How much is gone black?

  She stared at him, then dropped her gaze.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Her eyes said more, but none of it offered anything like relief. He could see that the white tattoo had nearly bruised black and joined up into the final lethal band.

  You have killed me.

  He staggered back and looked up at the moon. He felt as if he were trapped in the hinges of a great and adamantine door closing on the world, crushing him to nothingness, as if he had never even been. All that valuable time he had wasted wondering if he could, if he would kill Mountfellon, only to see the vainglorious, self-deluding presumption of that inner debate: if Mountfellon was in front of him now he would despatch him without a thought. He would do anything to live. Life, especially the brief weeks of early autumnal freedom that he had just stolen for himself, was inexpressibly sweet. It was the most desirable thing imaginable; even the grimmest moments in his curtailed life in the counting-house among his unkind “family” were sweeter than the alternative, because there were still moments when he could imagine future happiness. He knew this now without a moment’s hesitation: life was sweet because the opposite was a blank and bitter darkness in which nothing grew, not even hope.

  And it was that darkness to which he was now irrevocably condemned, simply because neither the Ghost nor Badger Skull had been able to imagine Mountfellon might not be where they assumed he would so conveniently be.

  He looked at them.

  You have both killed me.

  FOURTH PART

  THE DEATH OF WATER

  CHAPTER 36

  THE DROWNING GLASS

  Had he not been able to hold onto the raft of barrel staves, Mr Sharp would have drowned long before the flood rose to the roof of the cave. As it was, he was lifted by the buoyancy of the wood to which he clung, which was just enough to keep him afloat but woefully inadequate at enabling him to keep any part of his body other than his head and shoulders clear of the sapping cold of the water. That chill relentlessly leeched the bodily warmth from him until he felt his numbed and shivering fingers begin to lose their grip on his tiny liferaft, at which point he decided the time had come to jam one hand beneath the belts that held it together, effectively lashing himself to it in order that he would stay afloat even when, as was now inevitable, he drifted into moments of unconsciousness.

  He loosened a belt and wedged his left forearm beneath it. Then he awkwardly cinched the buckle tight again, a process that involved more kicking and swivelling in the dark water than he would have liked. The more he moved, the faster his energy would be used up, and since his only hope, so infinitesimally unlikely as to be scarcely worth the name, was in staying alive until and in case the nun returned to the chink above his head and somehow rescued him, he resented every unnecessary expenditure of that dwindling vital spark.

  The chill was relentless and worked itself deep into him, a dull bone ache that felt irrevocable. It was the kind of coldness that not only banished warmth, but destroyed the very idea and memory of it.

  He tried to keep still. In the dark he hung there, now thirty or forty feet above the bottom of the cavern, in a rapidly decreasing airspace, tightly clenched in the grip of a cold that he knew would ultimately be fatal. He attempted to clear his mind of the fear that was jumbling his thoughts, but he couldn’t. Maybe it was an effect of the cold on his thinking, but he changed his mind about conserving his strength because the impotence of just floating and waiting for the inevitable was suddenly claustrophobically intolerable; if there had been something to do, some action, however futile, that would take his attention he would have gladly thrown away that last reserve of energy in pursuing it, but there was nothing more to be done. He heard himself stifle a groan. He would just have to wait.

  But then again, what was he saving the candles for? He might have to die, he was going to die, but he didn’t have to do so in the dark.

  He reached his free hand inside his waistcoat and retrieved one of the candles stored there. He snapped his wrist and lit it while still underwater. It was one of the features of the fire that he was able to raise and hold on the candles that it was unquenchable, and he stared dully downwards at the sudden paradox he had made flower in the stygian darkness.

  “B-b-brighter,” he croaked, shocked to hear the reedy weakness in his voice.

  The submerged flame flared and twisted in the current whirling slowly beneath the surface. He saw its glow reflected and distorted across the walls of the cavern around him and was shocked to see how narrow that circumference of water had become. The level had risen much higher and faster than he had imagined, and because he had risen with it, he had not experienced any sense of velocity. Craning his head back and lifting the candle out of the flood and into the air, he was able to see the roof of the cavern perilously close.

  “Damn,” he said, and then adding inexplicably, even to himself. “Sorry.”

  As he floated there, with the candle flame flaring close to his head, he felt something else: the heat of the flame. It felt good.

  He could think of no reason to save the other candles now. He would run out of air a
nd drown long before he burnt his way through them. So he clenched his teeth to stop them chattering and began to retrieve candles from his pockets and set about lighting them. He was able to clasp six in the hand lashed to the staves, and hold them there. Then he lit another one but fumbled and dropped it from his shivering hand. He watched the flame tumble away from him into the water beneath, water that was clear enough for him to see it all the way down until it landed on the sunken floor of the cave far below.

  The six flames clenched in his hand wavered and flared in front of his face. He felt the welcome heat and held his free hand carefully over them, warming it, trying to loosen the ice-block dullness which had made it so fumbling and clumsy. He smiled, or tried to. It was, he suspected, more of a grimace.

  “Well. I shall not die in the dark at any rate.”

  As the rising water moved, he was being swirled in the slow eddy created by the in-gushing flow beneath so that he spun lazily around and around. It was a mark of how tightly the incipient hypothermia had him in its grip that he watched the chink in the roof swing past him at least half a dozen times before he noticed that something new was happening and that the water had–could this really be so?–stopped rising.

  He waited for the slow vortex to spin him round again, and then kicked towards the small hole. It was perhaps seven inches wide at its biggest, just enough to get an arm through, maybe up to the shoulder. It was acting as an overflow for the rising water, which was now spilling healthily over the lip of the hole and audibly splashing down into the unseen space beyond. Sharp felt a flutter of something akin to hope move in his chest. He clamped it down and concentrated on the chink. It was not large enough to jam a head through, certainly not enough to offer any kind of escape route, and yet it was slowing the rise in the water in a way he had been too dulled to realise was a possibility. There was only eighteen inches or so of air pocket left to him, but if the hole kept on providing an outflow for the water as it evidently was now doing, and also providing an inflow of air, things might not end as fast as he had feared. The reason he clamped down on the hope was because this was a delay, not a stay of execution. The cold would eventually do for him as fatally as suffocation, but every second saved was one in which help might arrive. It was the most risibly unlikely of eventualities, his rational mind knew that, but he was discovering that rationality was of limited utility at this furthest extreme of survival and that even the tiniest fraction of hope was worth fighting for.