The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “What was in the letter?” said the girl.

  Frau Wachman sealed her lips and clenched her teeth together. She would not give them that. She would not tell them of the strange man Dee who stepped out of a mirror to deliver it, and then left the same way before they could read its contents. Her mourning was private. Do what they liked, she would not—

  “Who died?”

  Frau Wachman kicked another cascade of scree down the slope to their side. The yank on her chain made her gasp in pain as the cuffs bent her thumbs the wrong way and she had to spin round so she was facing backwards to stop her shoulders dislocating. This brought her face to face with the Schattenjäger who did, as she had feared, have the crossbow aimed right at her.

  “Who died?”

  “My son,” gritted Frau Wachman. “May you rot for making me tell you. One of my sons. If he were here, you would answer to him for what you do to his helpless mother.”

  The girl laughed, low and humourless.

  “Oh, you are not so helpless as you seem, Frau Wachman. If you try and warn your husband again by kicking scree down the slope, you will be hurt and then you will be carried, and all that is going to happen will happen anyway.”

  “How did he die?” said the Schattenjäger, indicating with a jerk of the crossbow that she should turn and walk on.

  The cursed letter from London seemed to burn into her skin below the bodice where she had stuffed it.

  “And why do you learn of it in a letter from London?” said the girl. “London is a long way from here. What business would your son have among the English?”

  Frau Wachman said nothing.

  “It’s not important,” said the hunter. “Keep silent now.”

  They reached the trees without further delay. Frau Wachman was helpless: helpless because the uncanny girl could read her thoughts so any plan was useless the very moment she made it, and helpless because the hunter would, she knew, have no compunction in shooting her the instant she tried anything. She did not have to be a mind-reader to know that. It was why he carried a crossbow and not a gun. It would be silent; it would be just as fatal as a bullet over such short range. And he would not miss. None of the old, dark stories ever included a moment where his aim was anything other than fatally true.

  Her only hope was that her husband was rested and replenished. They had come to the lonely, high pasture and the unvisited cabin to recruit his failing health. If he was returned to his usual vigour, there was still a chance that, if awake, he might hear them coming and be alert enough to save himself. She, she now knew, was beyond saving. These night monsters had her, and whatever her fate would bring was in their hands.

  “We are not monsters,” said the voice ahead of her. “We are different from you, that is all. And you are wrong: your fate is in your own hands even now, because if you stay quiet, this need not end quite as badly as you fear…”

  CHAPTER 38

  THE LAST BREATH

  “Ici,” said the nun. She tapped the mirror to her right and then rummaged in her habit, emerging with a short, red candle stub and a tinderbox. The redness of the wax was unexpected, Sara’s eyes having become used to the almost monochrome world of the mirrors: it seemed ominous and unchancy, a harbinger of blood and death.

  Sara looked at the nun. At the mirror. This was the moment the trap would be sprung, if the old Mirror Wight was lying.

  “The moment of truth,” she said. The nun lit the candle and then looked up at her. Sara wondered if perhaps she had used the wrong phrase. Maybe it didn’t translate into French.

  “My whole life is a moment of truth,” said the nun with an innocent shrug. “Even when I have been forced to deceive, I have never lied.”

  This was clearly an important distinction to her. But it was a nicety Sara had neither time nor inclination to indulge in, especially when she had no idea what or who was waiting beyond the mirror in question.

  “Sharp is on the other side of that?” she said.

  “A passage is on the other side,” said the nun. “And in the wall of the passage is a hole that will allow you to see into the cavern in which he is trapped.”

  Sara thought of questioning her further. But all that would produce was more words, and words without proof were just more tinder for the fires of uncertainty crackling away in the back of her head.

  “Good,” she said.

  The nun smiled, beatific.

  Sara sized her up.

  “We go through together,” she said.

  Before she could protest, Sara snaked an arm round the nun’s middle and hoisted her unceremoniously off the floor. The nun’s feet thrashed in the air. She was as light as a child. Sara drew a knife from her boot-top. The nun stopped kicking.

  “Again, if there is an ambush on the other side of that mirror, I will likely cut your head clean off,” Sara said conversationally. “I shall most probably do the same if Sharp is not there.”

  “But I thought… I felt… you were a kind, a nice person! I thought—” spluttered the nun.

  “Then you were mistaken,” said Sara, “for I am neither kind nor nice.”

  And before the nun could confuse things with more words, Sara stepped through the mirror.

  She gasped as the water hit her, hip-deep and cold as glacier-melt. The nun shrieked and spluttered, arms flailing and splashing. In the moment before the candle was blown out by this, Sara saw the passage was some kind of bone-stacked catacomb, half submerged in a river, and that they had just emerged from a mirror placed opposite a twin on the other side of the flow.

  She hoisted the nun higher to keep her clear of the water.

  “Be still,” she hissed.

  “I did not know,” wailed the nun. “This is an accident!”

  “Do you still have the candle?” said Sara.

  “Yes, but—” began the nun.

  “Give it to me,” said Sara.

  The nun fumbled it into her hand, finding it in the darkness.

  “Don’t let me go!” she gasped, sensing a loosening of Sara’s grip. “I cannot swim.”

  Something in the dark caught Sara’s eye just before she snapped her wrist and lit the candle. She left it unlit.

  “Then hold on to something,” she said, jamming the nun against the hedge of bones and letting her go.

  The nun shrieked and scrabbled at the femurs, trying to find a purchase. Sara turned from her and peered at something just below the surface of the water. She had been right. There was something.

  On the other side of what must be the hole of which the nun had spoken, there was a faint and flickering illumination. It was submerged, it was dim, but it was definitely—

  “Light,” said Sara.

  The candle nub in her hand flared into life, and without a moment’s hesitation she crossed the passage and plunged it beneath the rising water, stabbing her arm through the opening and into the drowned cavern.

  “Brighter,” she choked, and began waving her arm backwards and forwards.

  Nothing happened. All she felt was the pressure of water as it swirled around the cavern past her outstretched hand.

  The only sound was the water flowing out of the narrowed gap she was now partially clogging, a distant roar as it flowed off down some other passage, and the sobbing of the nun.

  “Be quiet,” snapped Sara.

  The nun stifled her weeping.

  “You do me wrong,” she snivelled.

  “I shall do you more than wrong if you have drowned him,” said Sara, meaning every word. “How much air space is in there above this hole?”

  “Air space?” said the nun. “The hole is not at the top of the cavern, it is a little to one side and a bit lower, how much I can’t say–half a metre, maybe a whole one…” Sara was saved the chore of explanation by the impact of a leg against her hand. The leg was moving sluggishly with the centrifugal motion of the water in the cavern, and it was disconcertingly lifeless and unresponsive, but without thought she grabbed it and tugged, l
etting the candle end fall.

  Sharp was indeed dead in the water.

  If she had not pulled at him, he would have continued his descent into the long sleep, but instead he spluttered awake, banging his head on the rock ceiling and opening his eyes to see the candle that Sara had dropped tumbling down into the depths beneath him.

  His first thought was that something was biting his leg, nipping and worrying at it, and he had visions of some kind of subterranean river eel attacking him. He jack-knifed and tried to wrench it free, then stopped when his hands found fingers instead of fangs.

  And more than fingers, a glove, and on the glove two rings, rings he knew well, rings he had been looking at his whole life.

  The gloved hand released its hold on the trousers, found his hand and gripped it tight.

  He took a deep lungful of too-stale air from the thin sliver of breathing space above him, and then let the hand pull him down to the hole. He gripped it and stared blearily through the water.

  He could see nothing. There was no light in the passage.

  He wrenched his other arm free of the lashing that attached him to the barrel-stave raft and took his last candle from his waistcoat. He lit it.

  Sara’s heart was thumping dangerously fast.

  When the candle blazed and light came through the hole she wanted to shout out, but she didn’t. Instead she bit it back behind her teeth and stared down at the familiar features staring blindly at her from beneath the water.

  “Jack…” she said, hoarse with despair. “Oh, Jack, what have you done?”

  On his side he hung there in the flooded cavern, his vision blurred but staring up out at her face suspended in the life-giving air that was so heartbreakingly close yet unreachable above the water beyond the small hole.

  It seemed to Sara that they stared at each other for a lifetime, but in reality it was only for as long as the lungful of air lasted, and then he pushed away and disappeared back inside, kicking for the surface and the sliver of air waiting beneath the shallow dome of the cavern.

  It was gone.

  Sara turned to the nun.

  “Is there another way into there?” she snapped.

  “Yes, but no…” said the nun in horror. “There’s a single mirror at the bottom of the raft, but if you go in through it you’ll…”

  “How do I go through it?” said Sara.

  “Through the next mirror… on the right. But…”

  The nun’s eyes skittered in panic.

  “… but then you’ll both die,” she choked. “There’s a way in, but no way out.”

  Inside the cavern, Sharp saw silvery bubbles trapped beneath the roof, swirling like mercury, some as big as his hand. This was the very last of the air, trapped in the irregularities of the rock roof. He knew he was done for, but he swam up to them and carefully sipped the air from the two largest ones.

  He was going to die now, but where that had seemed unbearable only moments ago, the simple, joyous fact that Sara lived–and now knew he had come into the mirrors to find her–eased his distress more than he would have imagined possible. And though she would now never hear him say he loved her, he felt something of that had passed between their clasped hands and the held glance they had shared across the impassable watery barrier. And more than anything, he had been good to his word. He would die true, and he would die with that truth recognised by the person whose regard he most valued.

  That was something to savour as he sipped the last bubbles of air, a thought to soften the pain of parting.

  Sara heard none of what the nun had shouted after her. All she could hear was the urgent drumming of her blood in her ears as she emerged back in the mirror-maze. Water splashed off her soaked jacket sleeve, spattering and pooling on the floor as she took one fast pace to the side, sucked in a huge breath and plunged into the next mirror along.

  Sharp felt something large tumble and churn out of the mirror on the bottom of the raft. He held out the candle and watched as, to his horror, the billowing black cloud that emerged resolved itself into Sara’s skirts, and legs and then the unmistakeable thick white snake of her plait as the rest of her followed.

  Everything in him screamed in despairing protest at the sight.

  He had just made his peace with death.

  This shattered that hard-won calm like a sledgehammer dropped through a looking-glass.

  Dying was bad enough, but that she should have come to perish with him was a brutal cruelty beyond comprehension. It made a nonsense of everything he had done, all that he had pledged life and heart to.

  They found each other’s shoulders and stared into one another’s faces through the clear water, lit by the flare of the last candle. He shook his head at her, the thin half-lungful left to him beginning to fail and burn with the keen acid pain of oxygen deprivation. There were only moments before his body took over and broke his will and he reflexively sucked in the final treacherous mockery of a breath that would be only water and death.

  Sara was gesturing at him, short angry movements of her hand.

  Why?

  His head was thick and confused. All his brainpower was going to fighting back the fatal final reflex that would lead to that water-filled in-breath.

  Her gloved hand gripped his chin and pointed.

  She was pointing at the mirror on the bottom of the raft.

  The one she had come through.

  The one that had no twin to make a passage of reflections through which they could escape.

  He felt the reflex begin to spasm his throat, his body unable to believe what his head knew, that there wasn’t air outside it, that relief for the burn in his chest wasn’t one simple breath away.

  He clamped his hand over his mouth desperately.

  Bubbles began to escape from his nose, unbidden, the exhalation the harbinger of that final paroxysm.

  Sara ripped his hand from his mouth.

  His eyes went wide in horror.

  His body betrayed him, belching out the held breath, and then, as the reflex took over and he began to breathe in, his mouth filled with air. Sweet air, warm air, not water.

  Sara’s mouth was clamped over his, and she gave him her final breath, then raised his hand to his mouth and pushed it back into place.

  Eye to eye, without words, the message was clear.

  Don’t waste it.

  He wouldn’t. He would die with that air in his lungs, sealed in place by the memory of those lips, for the first and the last time locked on his own.

  She pointed at the mirror and beckoned.

  He shook his head and held up one finger.

  There was only one mirror.

  He pantomimed a shrug.

  They were stuck in here.

  She shook her head. No. Held up two fingers. And then did something unimaginable. She took the candle and held it between her teeth, and then with both hands free, she reached over and twisted her wrist.

  Her hand, the lost hand that he had been too confused to realise she had clearly been reunited with, came loose.

  He was so shocked he nearly opened his mouth and wasted her last breath.

  He watched, agog, as she turned and showed him the perfectly flat surface of the cut.

  It was a mirror.

  She held it in front of the mirror on the bottom of the stave-raft and beckoned him urgently.

  He didn’t need a second invitation. He launched himself over to her, gripped her by the waist to steady himself and looked into a wavering passage of repeated mirrors reflected there.

  Because she had to hold herself steady against the raft with her other hand he went first. Wasting no time, he reached out, kicked hard and swam into the mirror.

  Sara saw him go and smiled, her own empty lungs screaming in protest as her heart sang a victorious counterpoint.

  Sharp tumbled out into the mirror-maze, gasping for breath. He sucked air and turned to receive Sara.

  He stared at the reflection of himself, willing her to break it as
she too fell out of the cavern, but the reflection remained unwavering and unbroken.

  In the cavern, underwater, Sara reached out to steady herself against the wall. She was going to hold the mirrored stump of her wrist in place to make the passage, and then thrust herself through. She wasn’t quite sure how it would work, but she trusted she would go through and her hand and stump along with her.

  It was a good plan, but steadying herself against the cavern wall was an unthinking, bad mistake.

  Her glove buttoned at the wrist. Her action scraped one of the buttons loose and it fell away. The slit it normally secured gaped open a little bit, and her skin touched the stone.

  The reaction was instantaneous and shocking.

  She glinted.

  The jolt of the past spasming into her sent her eyes wide and her mouth wider.

  She gagged and breathed in the water, but was able to do nothing about it.

  She saw the cavern.

  Still underwater.

  But peopled.

  A churn of drowning humanity.

  Shadows and fragments.

  Lit by tumbling candles.

  Like a maelstrom of fish.

  Seething into a feeding frenzy, but not fish.

  Men and women.

  Wreathed in bubbles.

  Bubbles made by last breaths, drowned cries and curses, pleas and prayers.

  Bubbles rising past people sinking.

  Eyes wide in horror.

  Faces screaming silently.

  Hands waving.

  Clasping. Clawing.

  Punching.

  Feet flailing.

  Boots kicking.