The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  It wasn’t mine anyway. It never brought me luck.

  “Luck is made, not brought,” said Badger Skull. “But for what you have done for us, I wish it for you.”

  “Wait,” said a voice. The Ghost stumbled up the hill.

  “Our business is done,” said Badger Skull.

  “No,” said the Ghost. “I have just been inside Gallstaine. You need to see it. And now that iron cannot bar you, you may.”

  Badger Skull crinkled his brow, then looked a question at Amos.

  “Do I need to see inside the Hall?” he said. “If Mountfellon is not there, what can there be of interest?”

  Amos didn’t answer. He was done with them.

  “Bones,” said the Ghost. “There are bones you must see.”

  Amos squatted on the hill and waited while they went down the tunnel. He didn’t want to go until he saw which direction the Sluagh were headed, so he could go the other way. And he really wanted to sleep.

  The Ghost and Badger Skull were gone a long time. And when they returned, she was smiling and the Sluagh was seething. He carried something wrapped in a hide, a hide covered in tattoos. Amos realised with a sick lurch that it was the bones and skin of the Sluagh from the display cabinet. Badger Skull’s knuckles were cut and bleeding.

  He held up the skin and bones.

  “He flayed one of us, and displayed his bone cage to the world. Manacled with iron in a glass case for all to see.”

  The other Sluagh roared disapproval.

  “I have left him a surprise,” said Badger Skull.

  He looked one last time at Amos.

  “And they say we are the monsters…”

  And with no more ceremony than that he snapped his fingers and within a minute Amos and the Ghost were alone on the hill among the cowless fields.

  Where do you go now?

  He felt exhausted. But he knew he needed to put miles between him and this place before the countryside woke up.

  “London,” she said. “If Mountfellon is there, then it is in London he must die.”

  She set off without more ceremony, heading for the high road.

  He caught up with her.

  “Are you coming to help me, Bloody Boy?” she said as they crossed the ditch and stepped on to the moonlit strip ribboning south.

  Maybe, he lied.

  In almost every way imaginable, London was the last place he wanted to go. But she had told him about the Free Company which opposed the Sluagh. He had spent too many nights thinking the Sluagh had killed him with the white tattoo to be well disposed to them, and they had worked a different kind of magic on his mind too, making him begin almost to feel a kinship with them as time had gone on. But then they had come to Gallstaine, and he now realised it must have been a way they had of keeping him docile on the road. Because after what he had seen, he was sure he had nothing in common with them. He couldn’t possibly have. And now after what he had witnessed, every night would be filled with the fear of them.

  Perhaps finding those who could fight them could end the nightmares he knew were coming.

  CHAPTER 40

  THE LAST ROOM

  Sharp and Sara staggered through the endless low tunnels that snaked through the catacomb. They were weak and soaked and shivering badly with the cold, too chilled to talk, too fatigued to move faster than a dogged shamble. It was all they could do to keep moving. Sara kept one hand clenched on his arm, and the other held protectively across her body: partly this was to try and hug whatever remaining warmth there was in the core of her body, but mainly she knew she was keeping her hand clear of the bone piles they were hemmed in by. Even though she was wearing her gloves, she didn’t want to touch them. The pull of the past was all around her and if she glinted again she thought she might never find her way back from that past to the present. Glints did go mad if they were unable to escape the visions, and she had no intention, after all she had gone through, of losing what was left of her rational mind.

  The stacks lining the passage were the ordered-looking walls of femurs and tibias laid end out, but the candlelight shed enough illumination into the recesses behind the regular bone hedge to see that all the other smaller bones had been tumbled behind them in an unending, disordered jumble. The people who had laid the ossuary had, perhaps as an attempt to relieve the innate grimness of their trade, on occasion indulged in flights of macabre decorative whimsy, and every now and then the bone hedge was broken up by designs made of carefully placed crania, inlaid into the knuckle ends: they passed crosses, diamonds and heart shapes made from grinning skulls, and one skull placed piratically atop a pair of crossed bones. They came to forks in the tunnels and, without needing to discuss it, always took the tunnel that seemed to rise.

  They passed several dead-ended chambers, each again decorated in their own individual manner in the style of cathedral side-chapels, with bone altarpieces and freestanding pillars wrapped in mosaics of skeletal remains. They did not linger on these morbid cavities, but shuffled onwards.

  Eventually, just when Sharp was beginning to think he would have to carry Sara, and was wondering if his remaining bodily strength would allow him to do so, they stumbled into a wider space, like a low-built hall. At the centre of it was a sturdy pillar made from tiers of bones, interspersed with bands of skulls, like a grotesque barrel-shaped layer cake.

  They stopped and stared at it. Sara’s legs sagged and she clasped herself tighter to his arm. In the strangest way, he took strength from her need and reached around her to support her.

  “This is a bad place,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  Her hand flexed, and she shivered.

  “No,” she said. “Not because of the poor dead ones piled here. Something truly bad happened in this room.”

  He saw her eyes becoming glassy and felt her beginning to sag again.

  “Come,” he said, and walked her to the door on the other side of the pillar. She seemed to drag her feet, almost as if she did not want to leave, as if the horror of it was exerting a powerful magnetic pull.

  They ducked under a low lintel and found, to Sharp’s enormous relief, that they had stepped down into another room, a wedge-shaped space that was entirely free of bones. Something eased in him and he paused for a moment.

  “Where are we?” she said, looking round at the smooth-hewn walls.

  He turned and looked back at the doorway they had just emerged from. It was an ominous black maw into which his candle was seemingly unable to cast much light. There was writing incised into the lintel above it in deep capital letters:

  ARRETE! ICI, C’EST L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT.

  “The Empire of Death,” said Sara quietly.

  “I don’t think we are under London,” said Sharp.

  She shook her head. Her eyes dropped from the writing to stare back into the darkness beyond the door.

  “No,” she said. “No, we are not.”

  He pulled her away towards the rising passage at the far end of the wedge. She craned her head backwards, watching the door into the catacombs until the circle of candlelight moved too far for her to see it. He thought he felt something relax in her, and after a hundred yards he noted a renewed vigour in her stride. She gently slid out from under his arm and walked under her own steam. They picked up speed and soon felt something new. The candle flickered and a fresh breeze winnowed down the passage, cold air from above. Sharp turned a corner a pace before she did and stopped.

  A ladder had been nailed to the wall, and thirty feet above their heads he saw daylight through a metal lattice.

  “We’re free,” he said, turning with a smile. “We can go home.”

  Motes of dust seemed to be falling down the chimney-like shaft, and as he turned his face upwards some of them began to land on his face and melt. He held his hand out in wonderment.

  “Sara,” he said. “Snowflakes. It is snow. It isn’t winter. How can that be… ?”

  He turned to look at her. She was n
ot looking up at the snow. She was looking back down the dark tunnel.

  “Come,” he said, making room for her at the bottom of the ladder. “You go first; I will follow close in case you miss your hold.”

  “No,” she said. “No. I cannot go. Not yet.”

  “Yet?” he said, dumbfounded.

  She nodded and walked back into the dark passage.

  “Sara,” he said, reaching for her arm. She shrugged him off and kept striding down the slope.

  He followed her, this time grasping her shoulder and not allowing her to shake him off. She turned her face to him. Her eyes were wide and despairing, but her jaw was set.

  “I have to go back into that last room. I have to enter the Empire of Death and touch the walls—”

  “No. Absolutely not,” he said. “I will not allow it.”

  Something hardier than despair glimmered into her eye and replaced it.

  “It is not yours to allow.”

  “I am sworn to pr—” he began and stopped, shocked to find her gloved fingers on his lips. She shook her head sadly.

  “You do protect me, Jack. You have always protected me and I have always known it and esteemed you for it, even when you think I have not noticed you doing so, and especially when I have seemed to resent it most. But there is one thing you can never, must never protect me from…”

  “Death,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Duty.”

  She smiled up at him, face tight.

  “Death? Death you are more than welcome to protect me from any and all the time. I’m no martyr, Jack. But duty? Never. Whatever else we are, we are first and most importantly The Oversight. Others rely on our protection.”

  She turned and strode off.

  He followed.

  “Sara,” he began.

  “I have to go in there and glint,” she said without slowing down. “I have to. I need to…”

  “You are weak,” he said. “You are too weak–let us get out of here, get dry, warm, eat, sleep and then maybe—”

  “In the cavern,” she said.

  “What?”

  “In the cavern. Under the water. Alone. Before you came back through the mirror and plucked me out. I…”

  Her voice faltered but her stride did not.

  “What?” he said. She cleared her throat.

  “In the cavern. I touched the wall. I glinted.”

  Her voice was ragged.

  “That’s why you didn’t follow me,” he said.

  He saw her nod her head. She cleared her throat again. He knew enough not to stop her and turn her. The rawness in her voice was clue enough as to why she would not thank him for seeing her face as she spoke.

  She cleared her throat for a third time and took a deep breath.

  “I saw the moment of the Disaster. I saw what happened after all those good… those good, misguided hearts went into the mirrors via the damned Murano Cabinet, all those long years ago, thinking that they were going to save us all. I saw it. I saw a churning cavern full of water and the dead and drowning trapped in it. I saw them all, the lost ones, the faces you and I grew up with. I saw them in the final moment no one should witness.”

  The pain in her voice was unbearable to listen to.

  “I saw them dying.”

  “Sara,” he said again.

  “I saw my mother die,” she said. “She tried, she fought to the last, and then she tried to break the mirror so no one else would come through it and be trapped and die as they did. If we had not needed to escape through it, I would have shattered it for her. Even in the teeth of her own death she did her duty. How can I do less?”

  She stopped and turned and looked him straight in the face, unashamed of the tears streaking down her cheeks.

  “And I need to know why there is something in that hellish chamber that wants me to touch it.”

  He stared back at her.

  “I know all the things you want to say to stop me doing it–that it’s dangerous, that I am weak after our ordeal, that it’s your job to think straight when I can’t–but—”

  “Do it,” he said. “You must do it.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise.

  “But I’m coming with you,” he finished.

  She nodded slowly, then grinned through eyes too bright to be just smiling. She wiped them.

  “So I should damn well hope.”

  He handed her the candle.

  “Lead on,” he said. “And hurry up. That candle’s nearly done.”

  She began to run, moving into the darkness in her own circle of bobbing light.

  “It’ll be all right,” she said, breath coming in short jerks. “I saw the Disaster. I saw her die. Nothing could be worse than that.”

  CHAPTER 41

  THE DYING BOY

  The boy is dying. He can feel it. He’s lying helpless on his back, and the great weight on his ribcage is squashing him down into the thin mattress so hard that he can feel the stones beneath the straw digging into his shoulder-blades. He feels the compression on his lungs, that his ribs must start snapping like dry firewood if the thing sitting on him does not raise itself and let him inhale.

  Only he knows that the thing will never let him inhale again. The thing told him this. It told him to breathe in deeply, because it would all be over in one short breath, and all he had to do was be still and breathe out only one last time, and then sleep. The thing had said sleep, but the boy knew it had meant death. And so the boy had fought. He had struggled and scratched and hit and bit, and then the thing had punched him, knocking all the wind from his lungs, and then, when he had taken his first deep breath, it had clamped its hands over his mouth, hands that smelled strongly of tobacco and chicken shit, and it had pinched his nostrils closed and pushed him back onto the thin mattress.

  The boy screamed silently in his head for his mother and father, the parents he knew now he would never see again, and then the thing leant over him, kneeling on his chest.

  The thing now bent about him looked like a man, a grey, bearded man whose skin and pale eyes were as devoid of pigment as his hair, drained of all colour and vitality, leaving him with the slack and silvered fish-belly pallor of a lifeless thing. And he was a thing, not the man whose shape he appeared to have. The boy knew this. He was one of the monsters which people the dark, the shadow things from the fairy tales, the ones that were spoken of to frighten young children.

  The boy was frightened. Scared to death. And now that the fight had been knocked out of him, he was dying. He was dying because the thing leant down and stretched its mouth wide, placing it over both the boy’s nose and mouth, clamping over them as it pressed down. At first the boy had tried not to breathe out, and had resisted the burn as lactic acid flooded his oxygen-deprived lungs, but then the thing had readjusted its bony old-man’s knees on his chest as if settling in for a familiar and welcomed ritual, and the boy had breathed out into the thing’s mouth.

  Even over the defeated gagging noise that accompanied his final surrender, he felt the thing swell and purr. It gurgled with a nasty, liquid noise of exultation as he felt it grow warm on top of him. It shivered and pressed down even harder, like a greedy drunk squeezing the last drops from a wineskin. The boy’s lungs were shrieking with pain, and his last tears were literally jumping from his eyes, like water under pressure. He felt them splash back down on his face. He tried to think of God, to ask forgiveness for all and any of his childish sins, knowing he was going to Judgement now, but all he could think of was his mother and father. Maybe there was no God. He panicked, thinking this was a terrible thought to die on…

  … he didn’t hear the door open. But he felt the cool breeze on his cheek.

  He heard a new voice.

  “No!” It was a woman’s voice. Screaming a warning.

  He felt something fly across the room and throw the thing off him with a hard chunking noise, like a sharp axe biting into seasoned oak.

  As soon as the thing’s mouth was rippe
d from his, he opened his eyes and tried to breathe.

  He couldn’t.

  Nor could he make sense of what he was seeing above him.

  The thing was struggling with a stick that seemed to have pinned it to the wall beside the mattress, a stick that had gone through its neck with enough force to nail it to the untreated wood planking. It was a crossbow bolt, the feathers now slick and glistening with the blood that had turned the old-man’s beard red and dripping.

  The boy turned his head to look across the room.

  A hunter stood inside the door. A woman–the thing’s wife–lay on the ground, half in and out of the hut, unconscious, and another hunter–or at least a girl in hunter’s leather, a girl with two dark pigtails and a very large knife–crouched over the prone body.

  He gagged at her, soundless, unable to get a breath.

  “Lungs collapsed!” said the hunter. “Ida!”

  The girl moved fast, so fast she seemed to shift between time and space, not through it. One moment she was checking the woman was unconscious; next moment she was at the boy’s side. Her eyes sparkled in the dying glow of the fire on the stone hearth beside the dead thing pinned to the wall.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  And she leant down, pinched his nose gently and kissed his mouth. Her lips were soft and the air that she breathed into him was sweet. She breathed out, long and hard, until her lungs were empty and his were suddenly full and there was a pain and a kind of crackling feeling in his chest, and then she lifted her mouth from his and he coughed and spluttered and gasped in again and again, amazed that he could breathe.

  “Easy,” she said. “Breathe easy. It’s over. And you do not need to be so greedy of the air now, young Peter.”

  The hunter crossed the room and pulled the old man from the wall. There was a sucking noise as he slid him off the crossbow bolt and dropped him unceremoniously to the floor. The hunter then set about working the bolt out of the wall.

  The boy looked from one to the other, listening to his breaths becoming normal again.

  “Take your time, Peter,” said the hunter. “You have a lifetime of breaths ahead of you again. You don’t have to use them all up right now.”