The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  CHAPTER 15

  THE BONE PET

  The Sluagh did not move for a very long time, his ears straining to catch the tiniest creak or murmur of breath from the darkness in the corridor beyond the cell. He was good at staying still because for him time was a very different thing than it was for normal beings. He had also been so weakened by the iron Mr Sharp had put round his neck that he’d felt his vigour drain away like blood from a butchered pig at the slaughterhouse. He had never felt this bad, this bled-out, this mortal.

  Not even when he had been alive.

  When he was sure there was no trick, and that Mr Sharp or the bulbous-nosed innkeeper were not standing in the dark waiting to spy on him, he began to move. First he knelt, and his fingers started to pick at his clothes, the hand on his uninjured arm removing the bones used instead of buttons, then working at his beard and hair, untwining the plaits and freeing the other small bones and vertebrae which had been braided into them. He put them all on the floor in front of him as he worked, and once they were all laid out on the wood, he bent over carefully and began to read them with his fingertips, searching through touch alone until he found the ones he was looking for.

  He sorted as he went, grouping the thicker neck bones next to the long column of thoracic and then sacral vertebrae, a chain that then diminished further in size as he recreated the tail all the way down to the tip of the last tiny caudal vertebra. Next he made separate piles of ribs and radii, the tiny phalanges and the almost impossibly miniscule metatarsal bones of the paw, matching long tibias to fibulas and tarsals. Once he had laid everything out, he counted the bones twice, his face wrinkling in frustration when the count came back wrong both times, until he remembered his ears and removed the two miniature shoulder-blades of a stoat that hung from his earring like sycamore keys carved from yellowing ivory and added them to the piles.

  Next he painstakingly took the bones from the piles and placed them in a different sort of order on the floor. If there had been a light in the room he would have been seen to be spreading out the seemingly random collection of bones to reveal an exploded diagram of a strange rodent’s skeleton. It was no rodent that had ever walked the earth, however, mainly because he was mixing a stoat’s skeleton with that of a red squirrel, which gave it a lopsided appearance. And the thing that topped it off was not a stoat or a squirrel’s skull but a woodcock’s, with a long beak like a needle.

  Once he was satisfied that all the parts were there, he neatly scooped every bone into his cupped right hand. Then he took the woodcock’s beak and jagged it into the fleshy part of his left hand, just below the thumb. Once this was done he spat three times on the bones, and then squeezed his left hand over the spittle-flecked pile, splashing blood on them.

  He rose carefully and went to the door, taking care not to spill the bone pile. He flattened his palm and slid it through the judas slit so that his hand stuck out of the room and into the brick-lined hall. He pushed his arm as far as it could go so that it was clear of the damping influence of the triple-wood cell and flexed his palm open, bending it back like a child preparing to feed a horse.

  Then he whistled into the dark.

  At first nothing happened. Then the bones on his open palm began to slither around, slowly at first, seemingly randomly, then faster and with more purpose. There were snicks and crunchy noises as the skeleton began to join itself together, starting with the ischium and the pubis. The ripple of something close to life spread out and fizzed and outwards along the hind legs, then back in to the backbone, and in a very short time–had there been any light–he would have seen the fully self-assembled skeleton of a rodent with a stiletto beak standing on his hand, now unmistakably alive. The ribs opened and closed as if there were invisible lungs penned within their yellowing bone cage.

  The eyeless skull swivelled and a blank socket stared back at him as the beak gaped, like a fledgling waiting for food to be dropped into it.

  The Sluagh hissed through the slit.

  “It is done. They have taken the girl in. The bone pet will lead you back to me. Free me soon.”

  The bone pet snapped its beak shut as if trapping the words.

  The Sluagh squeezed his other hand through the slit and awkwardly jammed it forward far enough to be able to stroke the strange creature’s skull with something like affection. It arched its back with pleasure as his hand ran down the tiny vertebrae, like a cat.

  “They wait for you. Go.”

  The bone pet flexed and jumped, landing on the floor with a scrabble that diminished into a skitter of claws as it ran for the gap beneath the ale cellar door and the stairs beyond.

  The Sluagh slumped against the cell wall and smiled.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE SUMMONS

  Far north, beneath the rain-soaked Rutlandshire soil, the letter Amos had brought up from London was proceeding at speed down the tunnel towards Gallstaine Hall. Whitlowe the Running Boy’s feet made muffled slaps on the coconut matting as he carried his sphere of light towards the house at the end of this strange subterranean driveway.

  The tunnel began to slope gently uphill again after half a mile, and he ran back above ground and into a covered turning circle which swept around beneath a glass roof held in place by cast-iron pillars. He cut across the circle and up the steps to the main doors of a great sprawling manor house built from dark ironstone.

  He paused to get his breath and then knocked on the door. Almost immediately it opened and a footman regarded him with a raised eyebrow.

  “Letter… for… his… Lordship,” panted the child.

  The footman just nodded and stepped back.

  Whitlowe trotted past him, through another set of double doors and into the entrance hall of the house.

  It was a cavernous space, two storeys high, and the child shivered and sniffed as he passed through it. He was an impressionable creature and though he had only once been in a cathedral, on a market day holiday in Lincoln, he felt there was something cathedral-like in the vaulting space around him. It was, however, a cathedral peopled by ghosts, or at least it appeared to be, since every piece of furniture was covered with dust cloths. Even the large mirrors and the pictures on the walls were draped, and the chandeliers were bagged in protective muslin, so that they hung overhead like spectral hot-air balloons, half deflated and frozen in mid-fall. All the windows were shuttered, and the doors to the rooms which ranged along the hall’s outer perimeter were closed.

  The child jogged up the grand sweep of the stairs two at a time, the sound of his feet on the cold marble his only companion in the emptiness of the silent house.

  He slowed when he came to the landing and walked very deliberately down the long corridor ahead of him as if this final leg of his journey required a sudden brake and injection of weighty formality. In truth, the important fact that his Lordship detested the sound of Running Boys had been beaten into him from the earliest time he could remember. So he edged stiffly down the long dark corridor, sniffling his way past draped chairs and paintings, carrying his lantern ahead of him and clutching the white letter to his chest as if scared it might hop out of his grip and lose itself in the shadows closing in behind him.

  This was the very part of the journey that the boy always wanted to get over quickest, and the urge to run was strong. The reason lay in the glass-fronted specimen cabinets which lined the walls from the polished floor to the high ceiling above. They were not draped in dust cloths but he never got more than a few paces into the endless corridor without wishing that they were. The first few yards of wall were innocent enough, and on the few occasions when he’d been here in daylight (his Lordship being a man of studiedly nocturnal habits) he had paused to enjoy the ranks of brightly coloured butterflies which were pinned neatly in matching cabinets. A yard or so of sombre moths with wings like mottled patches of fusty velvet followed. Then the horror began to itch beneath Whitlowe’s skin as the homely moths gave way to spiky battalions of segmented centipedes, and millipedes
frozen in regimented order next to shiny-dark phalanxes of scorpions and armoured beetles, some of which were nearly as large as the primordial-looking horseshoe crabs hung like half-helmets on the wall beyond them. In his mind the boy called this section the “Black Bone Yard” to distinguish it from the truly unnerving final section of bleached skeletons which followed it.

  The last length of the hall seemed narrower because the specimen cases got increasingly thicker so as to accommodate the larger fish and then the mammals whose flayed and cured skins were pinned to the backboard behind their white and yellow bones, as if the animals had flung them off as carelessly as a coat.

  Whitlowe sniffed and tried hard not to focus on any of this as he passed. This was where his nightmares came from. The ordered squadrons of spiny-boned fish were separated by banks of eel skeletons ranging in size from small cutthroat eels, through garden congers to the giant morays that were just simple spinal columns with hideously fanged jaws attached to them.

  The eels were bad enough, but the bare bones of the primates were what really haunted him. They went from tiny prosimians, starting out with neatly ordered eviscerations of lorises, lemurs, night monkeys and tarsiers, some no bigger than a baby rabbit, all the way through to the larger species, and then the simians proper. Monkeys were splayed in cabinets with their tails precisely curled between spatchcocked legs, and then in the narrowest section of the corridor the tailless primates began with the lesser apes, a graded platoon of skeletonised gibbons giving way in turn to the great apes. The chimpanzees and orang-utans and gorillas rose up to loom over the boy, the sightless sockets of their eyes staring down at him out of increasingly human skulls in which yellowing teeth were bared in forever-smiles of rage and pain.

  There were other things beyond the last of the gorillas. Their bones were not pinned and stapled to the back of the cabinets. They were splayed out and held by rusting iron shackles to wrist and ankle. Some of the skins stretched behind them had unnatural markings which he had thought–on the only occasion he had mistakenly noticed them–looked distinctly like tattoos but were, he decided, probably just regular monkey markings made to appear like that by the curing process. Possibly all apes had marks like that under their fur because these later primate pelts were smooth and hairless, and so must have–surely–been shaved prior to being stretched out and preserved by the taxidermist.

  A footman sat on a stool at the end of the corridor, and did not move until Whitlowe had walked the whole length of it and stopped in front of him, sweating more from the effort of controlling himself while walking down the ghoulish hall than the two-mile underground run which had preceded it.

  “Letter,” snivelled the child, holding it out.

  “Wait,” grunted the footman, and took the envelope into the doorway beside him.

  Whitlowe saw the tall double doors open and close and then stood there trying to re-snort the persistent dewdrop hanging off the end of his thin nose.

  Inside the double doors the footman crossed a small anteroom to another door. This door was ironbound with a lattice of metalwork, and in its centre were a wide ledge and two letterboxes, marked in and out. A tray was positioned under the out slit, standing ready to catch whatever paper was pushed through it. The footman knocked three times on the door and then slipped the letter into the second slit.

  The room on the other side of the door was cavernous and almost empty. Once it had been a great ballroom. Now the walls were stripped, the shutters closed and the whole interior was gridded–walls, floor and ceiling–with a latticework of iron bands, spaced a yard apart.

  At one end of the room, the wall was entirely taken up to its twenty-foot height with a bookcase. The other three walls were unembellished and stark white behind the regular criss-cross of metal caging the room.

  In the centre of the great chamber was a dark oak piece of furniture, a heavy-legged thing which might once have done service as a dining table before the Restoration, but was now a huge desk covered in neat stacks of paper. At the centre of it sat a powerfully built man with granite-grey hair brushed back from a cliff-like forehead, dark eyes gleaming on either side of a savagely hooked nose of heroic proportions.

  Francis, Viscount Mountfellon, was writing by candlelight, and his steel-tipped pen did not cease its rhythmic scratching as he heard the rap on the door and the sound of the envelope falling into the tray. Instead he continued to the end of the sentence before looking up. He blew on the page to dry the ink and put it beneath a leather-bound paperweight on top of a tall pile of identical pages, and only then stood, stretching the kinks out of his back and striding across to the door. He read the front of the envelope and glanced at the green wax seal, returning the skull’s smile with an equally bony grimace of his own. Then he took a knife from the tray and slit the letter open in one fast cut, as if he couldn’t wait to gut it and read the contents.

  In an angular copperplate hand which appeared to have been slashed rather than written and was so peppered with random capital letters that the writer might as well have loaded them into a blunderbuss and fired them blindly at the page, this is what he read:

  Your Lordship,

  The Trap is Sprung and the Game is Afoot…

  By the Time you receive this Letter, the Certain Girl shall have been delivered to the House on Wellclose Square by Our Northern Confederates in such a Manner and State of Mind that will make her arrival Unimpeachable and herself Instantly Trusted by those of that Free Company whose Downfall and Ruination we both so Earnestly Desire.

  If you will meet me Tomorrow at Midday at the Magistrate’s Chambers as previously discussed, I will have Constables standing by and we shall by the Operation of our Ruse gain Entrance to the House and you may take Possession of The Discriminator, that Great Key to All Bloods for which you have Sought for So Long, with the Full Appearance of Probity and Legality, as if it were indeed Merely your Lordship’s own Purloined Property that we were Repossessing.

  Please bring that Certain Fragmentary Token by which we shall Prove your “Guardianship” of the Apparently Abducted Girl, and the Sketch of the Hitherto Unattainable Key so that we can Prove Title to the Magistrate as we have Previously Planned.

  I send this to you with Best Wishes of my Brother and Myself in the Discreet and Confidential Safety of our Boy Amos’s Hands, and request that you Be So Good as to Bring him back to London, if it Be Not Too Burdensome upon You,

  Ever Loyally Your Servant,

  Issachar Templebane, Esq.

  Mountfellon passed a hand down his face, from forehead to chin, as if scrubbing the possibility of a smile from it, but as he crossed back to his table his eyes were sparkling.

  He opened a casket and took out a folded sheet of paper and a small ring box. He opened the sheet of paper to check it: it was a sketch of a key whose bow, or handle, was made to look like the flared hood of a king cobra. He refolded it and slipped it into an inner pocket of his coat. Then he opened the ring box. There was no ring inside, only another fragment of paper with a wax blob into which a lion and a unicorn seal had been pressed. He snapped the box shut and slid it into his waistcoat pocket.

  He dipped the corner of Templebane’s letter into the candle and lit it, holding it until the flames consuming it reached his fingertips. Then he dropped it onto a pewter plate on the tabletop, watching until all the fire was gone and only black ash and a gobbet of twice melted sealing wax remained.

  He snuffed the candle and strode to the door, unlocked it and walked out, leaving the caged room to itself.

  CHAPTER 17

  NIGHT ON MARE STREET

  There are two ways to get from A to B across a crowded city: as the crow flies or as the rat runs.

  The bone pet had a beak but no wings, so it was tied to the earthbound route, and its stoaty-squirrelish body parts meant that it scuttled and zigzagged north like a rat. Rats don’t run in straight lines or in plain sight, so its journey took place in shadows, as much below the ground as on it.

&n
bsp; It found its way out of the cellar through a broken airbrick, and scrabbled along the side of the wall and through a back area hung with damp washing which floated like ghosts in the fog over its head as it ran towards Cable Street.

  Though it was night, there was still horse-drawn traffic on the road. The bone pet paused behind the crook of a downspout, and then crossed in a mad dash which took it between the slow-moving wheels of a brewer’s dray and across the litter-strewn corner, where it plunged immediately into the dark maw of the bridge carrying the iron tracks of the Blackwall Railway overhead. It hopscotched from street to alley to drying green as it made its way through the densely packed grid of two-storey workmen’s houses leading up to the Commercial Road.

  A drunk lying in the gutter opened a bleary eye and saw a small and bony nightmare skitter across the pool of vomit he had just added to the pavement and shrieked in fuddled terror, but the thing was gone, into a drain system that took it on a short dog-leg into the grounds of the London Hospital. As it splashed relentlessly north, it surprised the rats who were the normal occupants of the pipes and sluices and sent them scurrying ahead of it, chittering in fright.

  A porter was standing in the open ground behind the hospital, feeding some bloodstained gauze and other waste into a roaring iron brazier which sent spirals of bright sparks into the starless sky above. He heard the rats before he saw them, turning with an armful of dirty dressings to see a sudden wave of black bodies erupt from the ground and sweep towards him. He yelled in fright and stumbled back into the brazier, bouncing off it and tripping himself so that he went down in a festoon of soiled bandages as the scared rats overran him and swept into the door he had left open to the hospital basement.

  He never saw the bone pet break off to follow the perimeter wall to the Mile End Road, which it passed beneath in another drain that came up right under the nose of a brindled terrier which was worrying a cabbage stalk that had fallen from a passing cart earlier in the day. This flash of white was much more exciting than the cabbage stalk and the terrier reacted as terriers do–instantly giving chase, firing a fusillade of excited barks ahead of it. It kept pace all the way north to the Jews’ Burial Ground where the bone pet shot through the iron bars of the gate, a space too narrow for the dog. The dog yelped in frustration as the thing raced over the jumbled gravestones, sending flying the pebbles and prayer stones which grieving friends and family had neatly stacked on the top of them. It hurled itself over the ivy-choked northern wall of the graveyard, dropping into the ordered planting of the market gardens on either side of the Eastern Counties Railway, which it passed beneath as a goods train thundered above, couplings shrieking as it began to slow down for the terminus ahead.