The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Lucy?” said Sara.

  Emmet snapped his fingers and pointed.

  The shard of light fell across the obsidian plinth, revealing the urn and the sand and the complete absence of cage.

  “The bloody key’s gone,” said Cook. “Damnation—!”

  “LUCY!” shouted Sara. “Where are you?”

  There was no reply.

  Lucy was crouched in the darkness inside the Murano Cabinet, her head smarting from an unexpected collision with something hard and angular. In one hand she held the stolen key. In the other she held her sea-glass tightly so its light would not betray her. As she adjusted her grip a sliver of light did flash out, and she covered it quickly. In the flash of vision it afforded she saw the inside of the cabinet was entirely mirrored, her reflection multiplied to infinity as the parallel sides reflected themselves back and forth in each other, and there was a bracket with a candlestick on it screwed to the back wall of the cabinet, the thing she had banged her head on as she entered the confined space. She did not have time to think how strange it was that a cabinet should be lined with mirrors, nor why it was equipped for internal illumination.

  “Right,” said Cook, hefting her axe and looking suspiciously around at the shadows beneath the tables. “I hate snakes. Emmet, if you see that blasted cobra you have my permission to stamp it into a pancake.”

  “It won’t attack her,” said Sara. “The snake’s protective. She’s one of us—”

  “If she’s one—” began Cook.

  Emmet snapped his fingers again and pointed to the far end of the room.

  There was a very thin line of light just to one side of the shutters. Emmet ran towards it, Sara half a pace behind him.

  Inside the Murano Cabinet Lucy tightened her grip on the sea-glass. Then she realised that the light was not coming from her at all. Instead to her dismay she saw that far away down the chain of infinitely reflecting Lucys there was a bright light, harsh like a naphtha flare, and it was approaching as if someone or something was able to step from one reflection to another, and each time it or they did the light bounced and the figure got closer.

  Her heart missed a beat–and then kicked back in at triple speed.

  Her mouth was dry and the glass at her back was cold and hard as she scrunched against it, instinctively trying to get as far away as possible from whatever was approaching down the tunnel of reflections.

  Her head turned and she saw to her growing distress that the figure with the lantern was only visible in the mirror ahead of her. Although the glass mirrored her on both walls, the light-bearer was not reflected in the mirror behind her, as if the laws of physics covering reflections didn’t apply to him.

  She instinctively knew that this was a very bad thing.

  Lucy could think fast.

  Whatever she was doing, whyever she had woken up to find herself in this forbidden room with a stolen key and a deadly cobra in her hands, she did not know, but she did realise that explaining this to the people outside the cabinet was going to be infinitely less unpleasant than meeting the thing calmly walking towards her through the layered reflections in the mirrors.

  So she kicked at the doors, but they opened an instant before her foot made contact, so she fell backwards onto the floor of the cabinet and stared up at Emmet.

  “Get her out of there NOW!” Sara shouted, running towards Emmet as Mr Sharp ran into the room behind her.

  Emmet hesitated a moment, his attention taken by the growing light blazing out of the left-hand wall of the cabinet.

  “Emmet!” cried Sara.

  Emmet turned and reached for Lucy and three other things happened at once:

  The cobra lunged past Cook and flew between Emmet’s legs, heading for the mirror in front of Lucy like a black javelin, striking at the approaching lantern bearer.

  Lucy, flinching away from Emmet, stumbled and fell back into the mirror behind her: it happened so fast she only had time to catch Sara’s eye in panic as she–impossibly–disappeared through the glass without breaking it, just as the cobra struck at the other mirror.

  Sara threw herself past Emmet, diving for Lucy, her outflung hand reaching deep into the mirror after her as if plunging into a vertical pond just as the snake hit the other mirror like a blunt-nosed hammer.

  The glass of that mirror shattered.

  Mr Sharp leapt through the air and caught Sara’s collar, stopping her falling further into the mirror which Lucy had tumbled back into.

  She grunted in shock.

  The stunned cobra dropped insensible to the floor of the cabinet as the approaching light in the mirror it had shattered smithereened into a thousand points of light which snapped off as the tunnel of reflections cut off in an instant.

  “Sara—?” said Cook, puffing up behind Emmet and stopping dead with a terrible gasp of shock.

  Sara lay across the floor of the cabinet, her arm flung towards the mirror through which Lucy had been dragged.

  She pushed off and scrabbled awkwardly to her feet, helped by Sharp, who gasped at the sight of her wrist.

  There was no blood.

  But there was also no hand.

  The arm was sheared off cleanly at the wrist.

  Sara stared at the stump as if the limb suddenly no longer belonged to herself.

  There was still no blood, no gore, no inner flesh, no white flash of neatly severed bone.

  “Sara,” said Mr Sharp, his voice strangely choked.

  There was just a mirrored oval.

  Glass seemed to have fused itself to the cut end of her arm.

  “Oh,” she said, staring dully at it. “Oh…”

  Sara Falk looked up at the older woman and the golem and the young man with the brown pain-filled eyes, and for a moment her face was visited by that of the uncomprehending little girl who had been scared from her bed by the Green Man so many years before.

  For a beat of time the house was again silent.

  Then her eyeballs rolled white as she fell forward into a dead faint, and Mr Sharp and Emmet caught her as bells shattered the quiet as the clocks struck midnight, marking the moment they all knew to their horror that Lucy, the key and Sara’s hand–gloves, rings and all–were abruptly, brutally and irretrievably gone.

  SECOND PART

  THE LOST HAND

  THE POWER OF FIVE

  “The material world beyond our minds is made from the Five Elements and perception of it comes in through Ears, Eyes, Tongue, Nose and Hands, known as the Five Ports of Knowledge, without which we would be locked within the purblind prison of our skulls, unable to use the Five Senses, viz. Hearing, Sight, Taste, Smell and Touch… the significance of Five is manifest in the Five Wounds of Christ, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Five Poisons of Cathay, the Quincunx, etc… In ‘apotropaic’ magic (that which practises to ‘ward off ’ evil) there is no more widespread periapt1 or sigil2 than the five-fingered hand, the Mano Pantea which the Ancient Egyptians knew as Hand of the All-Goddess. It is a symbol so powerful that it has been adopted by all subsequent societies, so that what was once the ‘Hand of Aphrodite’ to the Ancient Greeks was the ‘Hand of Tanit’ to the Phoenicians, and is to this day the ‘Hand of Miriam’ for the Jews, the ‘Kef Miryam’ or the ‘Hand of the Virgin Mary’ to Levantine Christians and the Khamsa or ‘Hand of Fatima’ to the Mussulman… As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in The Garden of Cyrus (or The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered, 1658): ‘To enlarge this contemplation unto all the mysteries accomodable unto this number, were inexcusable Pythagorisme, yet cannot omit the ancient conceit of FIVE surnamed the number of JUSTICE…’ It is thus not surprising that The Oversight with its interest in preserving equity between the natural and the supranatural has traditionally organised itself by interlocking cabals of Five, known as Hands…

  … The Rule of Five is the foundation stone on which The Oversight is built: every year, on the fifth day of the fifth month a Hand of five
members must sit round a table and contain the Wildfire. If five are not found, then The Oversight is disbanded for its own protection and the remaining few disperse and travel the wider country until they each find five new recruits to take up the challenge again.

  This is done because the weight of The Oversight’s obligations are judged too heavy for less than a single Hand, and a weakened Oversight is deemed worse than none, as it gives the illusion of safety and vigilance where none is possible. This has happened at least twice in its long history, and consequences of a suspended Oversight have scarred the city and the outlying country so badly that it took more than a century in each case to return things to equilibrium.

  One given reason for the rump of The Oversight dispersing to the four corners of the country is to make it harder for their enemies to find the weakened remnant unprotected in one place… in the past the secrets and powerful objects normally protected by them are said to have been dropped into the Thames where salt water meets fresh, so as to always be covered by running water, and thus stay safe until a resurgent Oversight returns to reclaim them. At the Great Fire of London it is said the secrets were not put in the river in time, and that indecision led to the conflagration that followed…”

  Extract from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk

  CHAPTER 28

  THE PIG-HEADED WOMAN AND THE HAND OF GLORY

  Lucy twisted and grabbed futile handfuls of air as she tried to stop herself falling into the mirror, but it did no good. She hit the glass hard, but instead of a hard crack she felt no more than a slight but distinct pop as she passed through it, tumbling right out of the Red Library as if the mirrored surface was a thin membrane like a soap bubble–and then the bright light was gone and she was falling into a dark space full of shouting and crashing and pitching lanterns which seemed to throw more shadows than light.

  And as she sprawled onto what felt like grass she saw a completely different mirror ahead of her being toppled sideways by a big woman in a calico dress and matching bonnet.

  In the instant before it crashed and smashed, she saw the reflection of Sara Falk reaching for her out of the Red Library within a second mirror behind her–the mirror in fact out of which she had clearly just tumbled. Sara was calling her name while being held back by Cook and Mr Sharp–then she saw the blur of the cobra striking the other side of the cabinet beneath Sara’s arm, and the Red Library shivered and dissolved into fragments as the falling mirror hit a barrel and splintered, destroying the vision entirely. In its place she saw the woman who had knocked it over looking at her and Lucy choked back a scream because the woman was not a real woman at all but a nightmare thing in a dress.

  The eyes that met hers were not human. They were pig’s eyes and the head within the bonnet was pink and jowly and snouty, the blunted animal nose snuffling, the ears flapping wildly on either side as the thing showed its teeth and roared at her in red-mouthed anger.

  In a snatched moment of clarity she realised she was looking at a full-grown woman with the head of a pig and the snarl of something darker and more insistently feral.

  She wanted to scream but knew escaping danger was always better than screaming at it, so she turned to flee, only to find herself facing a small crowd of people running at her out of the dancing shadows, at the front of which was an impossibly wasp-waisted woman, her mouth a perfect “O” of shock, framed between a lush moustache and a beard like a spade.

  She paused and in that moment was lost, as her foot skittered on a piece of broken mirror and she fell again. The pig-headed woman snarled and lurched forwards, straddling her.

  For an instant she thought it was all over as the woman drew back a hand to strike her, and then someone jumped between them, a wiry young man stripped to the waist, carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a mop in the other.

  “No, Nellie!” he shouted. “Back, I say!”

  Lucy’s rescuer faced down the pig-headed woman who was now roaring and slashing freakishly large gloved hands at him as he backed her away from Lucy’s prone figure. He took a quick look down at her, and she saw his face was shockingly different from his lean torso, being smeared in white paint with black crosses painted over his eyes above a large red nose like a tomato.

  He nodded at her and then dodged round to shout at the pig-headed woman in a voice that was unexpectedly cheerful and full of good humour.

  “No, Big Nellie. No! Leave her alone you great puddin’. She don’t mean no harm!”

  He turned and waved impatiently at the gathering crowd beyond Lucy.

  “Oi, someone cut along sharpish and get Big Nellie a bun; buns always calms her down, don’t it?” He turned back to the pig-headed woman and smiled. “We’ll get you a nice iced bun with a cherry on top, Nellie girl, only give the little lady space to breathe, eh? You’re frightening the life out of her!”

  He flicked a wink at Lucy, who was as disconcerted enough by his distinctly friendly tone as everything else around her.

  “Be right as spanners in a minute, my girl. Big Nellie’d rather a bun than a bust-up. It’s just her nerves, see?”

  And true to his words, the pig-headed woman grunted and backed away further, her mouth closing and her head dropping as if she were ashamed. Lucy took the young man’s outstretched hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Only then did she remember to breathe.

  “Cauchemar,” she said. “C’est un cauchemar…?”

  “What she say?” shrilled the bearded woman.

  “Nightmare,” said a cultured voice from the back of the crowd. “She said it’s a nightmare.”

  “Didn’t sound like that,” said the young man.

  “She said it in French,” said the voice.

  “French?” said her rescuer. “Blimey.”

  He reached up and pulled off his red nose, just as politely as if removing his hat, and then swept into a theatrical bow.

  “Well then–bong-joower, mamzel,” he smiled. “And what are you a-doing at the circus in your nightdress at this late hour?”

  Lucy caught the word “circus” and for a moment allowed herself to believe she was not trapped in a nightmare, that Big Nellie and the clown-faced boy and the bearded lady were explainable denizens of a travelling show. She was about to smile in relief when she saw, behind the boy, something like a crab spidering across the broken glass towards her.

  It was a disembodied black hand, and it was trying to get to her.

  For the first time in her life, and one that she would not forgive herself for, she stumbled back and fainted.

  What she missed, as her eyes rolled back into her head, was seeing someone dart out of the shadows and scoop up the hand before anyone else had had a chance to notice it.

  The person with the hand swiftly bundled it under their jacket and slipped through the crowd of circus folk, sliding through a gap in the tent wall and out into the fairground beyond, a sea of tents and wagons set up on a patch of common ground outside a village, bounded by a rough thorn hedge.

  There were smoking oil lamps and pitch torches by the tents and even, at the very centre of everything, some of the new bright naphtha lamps.

  Most of the wagons were painted in varying degrees of garishness, and so were the tents and even some of the people, for they were clearly show-people and, where they were not, they were villagers and country-folk dressed up for all the fun of the fair.

  But there was now no sign of fun to be had at this fair. The day was over and the showmen’s booths were closing up.

  The person walked fast, holding the hidden hand tightly to their chest, moving from shadow to shadow with the kind of controlled speed of someone who wants to escape, but not be seen to be escaping.

  Moving away from the centre of the fair, the figure picked up the pace as they reached the less well-lit cordon of showpeople’s wagons arranged around the perimeter as if confident that no one was now going to observe them.

  No one was.

 
But there was a dog.

  The dog chained to a stake outside a tent saw the person passing and ran forwards without warning, like a shadow suddenly solidifying into a snarl of teeth, muscle and wild eyes, barking excitedly.

  The person kicked the dog. Hard.

  There was a yelp of pain.

  The dog rolled on the grass.

  The person looked back.

  The barking did not attract attention. No one saw the dog or the kick.

  The person slipped through a gap in the rough hedge and scrambled up into the hooped canvas tent covering the back of the last wagon on the very edge of the camp.

  There was no light in this wagon but the person didn’t need it. At the far end of the cramped space there was a small iron stove bolted to the floor. Behind the stove a tin box, and in the box there was sea-coal.

  The coal was scrabbled aside, revealing another box, a padlocked iron case hidden beneath the fuel.

  The person unlocked the lid and lifted it, swiftly tipping the rag-bundled hand into the case with a light but meaty thump. The lid slammed down, the lock clicked, the key was removed, the coal scrabbled back and then there was only the creaking sound of the person sitting heavily back on the low-slung rocking chair in front of the fire and the words, spoken so low, and the glee in it so whispered that anyone overhearing it would have been hard-pushed to say if the speaker was a man, woman… or even perhaps a child:

  “Manus Gloriae, Manus Gloriae indeed. We are saved.”

  But no one overheard. Nothing moved in the wagon.

  Nothing except the hand, scrabbling blindly in the pitch-black darkness of the iron box hidden beneath the jumbled sea-coal.

  CHAPTER 29

  NIGHT RIDERS

  It was while they were changing horses at the White Hart at Hertingford-bury when Amos realised that they were being followed. He’d stepped beyond the lights in the yard in order to relieve himself behind the stables when he heard them. There was no one visible, and the jingle of harness and clatter of hooves on the paving stones behind him almost drowned it out, but he heard the word “Mountfellon…”