The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  It was the light moving among the wet roof tiles that had caught the breath-stealer’s attention and raised it from the floor on which it had been resting as it listened to the sound of the woman breathing in her sleep and the baby gurgling in the cot across the room.

  The breath-stealer should have moved further away: it knew that. It would have done so had it not been so weak on arrival in the city. It would not have been so enfeebled had it not been forced to take such a circuitous route to get there from its home in the high forests fringing the high karst plateau known to the local Austrian valley dwellers as das Steinerne Meer, the Stony Sea. Travelling from the Berchtesgaden mountains to the real sea had not been hard, but the boat it had hidden on had been held up for so long, first by contrary winds in the Kattegat and then by not one but two unseasonal storms in the North Sea, that by the time it entered the Pool of London and took its place amidst the bewildering multitude of other cargo ships, the Alp was exhausted.

  “Alp” was the name given to its kind in the folklore of its native forests, Alp not only being a word for the adjacent limestone peaks, but also being the old word for the male variety of mara: like the mara it was a night-rider, an incubus who took the strength from sleeping beings by pressing on them.

  It was not, however, the insubstantial spirit that folklore would have it: the Alp was flesh and blood and entirely human in shape if not habit. That shape was, like its face and hair, entirely unremarkable: in fact it was so unremarkable as to be instantly forgettable. It was of middling height, mild and regular featured, hair not quite dark and not especially fair. There was a faint greyness to its skin but nothing too striking, and its age was indeterminate, as was its sex. It could have been a youngish man or a slightly older woman. Though it was dressed in man’s clothing, its hair was long enough to overhang its ears; it was what would have been called a “twixter” on the streets below, had anyone on those streets noticed or remembered it for long enough.

  When weak and as debilitatingly reduced in power as it had been on arrival in London, it was its habit to recoup its vitality by preying on small animals and birds, building its strength by taking their breaths for its own before moving on to larger hosts. There was a particular intense, distilled quality in the final exhalation of a dying creature which it especially prized, which explained the coops full of dead pigeons. As the Alp watched Hodge and Jed move among the empty coops, it remembered the dry snap and pop of the pigeons’ breastbones as it had pressed the life out of them, forcing the small lungs to empty their essence into its mouth, between the lips it held clamped over their struggling beaks. It had glutted itself on last breaths, and should then have gone far away to rest and let their power restore it to its usual state of health.

  Instead it had heard the baby cry in the attic opposite and seen the woman move across the window to comfort it, and so had decided to lie up with her. Waiting until the penny candle had been extinguished, it had used a fair portion of its newly acquired vitality to leap across the courtyard and swing itself up the building and into the room. It had sung quietly as it stepped over the window, a low wordless tune which was calming and soporific and unworldly in equal measures.

  The woman had stirred a little in her sleep as it had climbed onto the horsehair mattress, but its hands had soothed her by stroking her face as it knelt carefully on her chest and concentrated on making itself heavier and heavier until her breath began to become ragged, at which point it had clamped its mouth over hers and inhaled. It freed her mouth to allow her to inhale, but bent and sucked every third exhalation. As it did so it felt strength returning, and though her eyes opened and stared sightlessly at it, like someone in a drug-fogged waking slumber, its own eyes were twisted sideways, fixed on the surprisingly plump baby in the cradle across the room.

  Youngest breaths were the purest breaths, and it watched it with the greed of a gourmand at a feast, saving the most delicious sweetmeat until the end.

  The woman had remained in a comatose state for two days, days during which the Alp had regained its strength from her exhalations, and stopped the baby from crying by taking it from the cot and allowing it to latch on to its mother’s breast at the first sign of hunger. Like any parasite, the Alp knew its own survival relied on keeping its hosts healthy–at least until it was time to move on to new ones.

  It had known it would have to move eventually, for it had not come to London unbidden or upon a whim. It had been sent for, but it would have failed in its purpose had it presented itself to its client in anything less than the full measure of its strength. But it had certainly made the mistake of sleeping too close to where it fed, and it would now have to move.

  It began to sing its low lullaby under its breath as it turned back to the room. But this time its light steps did not take it to the bed.

  It wetted its lips and walked towards the cot.

  Hodge let Jed sniff his way around the perimeter of the roof. He could see the dog was on to something.

  “Where’d it go, boy?” he said. “What you got?”

  Jed scrabbled up the wet slope of the roof and stood with his front paws on the ridge, his nose searching the breeze.

  “Stops there, does it?” said Hodge. “Can’t be, ’less it flew off, whatever it was.”

  Jed’s back suddenly stiffened and his tail went straight and quivery. Hodge lowered himself so he could follow the dog’s eyeline towards the gaunt building overhanging the roof trough they were standing in.

  He was still trying to make out what the dog was looking at in the small windows under the eaves when he heard the woman scream.

  CHAPTER 41

  OUT OF THE PAST

  “Who this Mountfellon of Chandos Place is I do not know. But he and his house are warded against the supranatural so we must assume he is more than aware of us. Templebane is a surname which The Oversight has encountered in former times,” said The Smith, and spat into the fire. “There were Templebane witchfinders in the fen country.”

  Hodge, Mr Sharp, Cook and Sara sat in a half-circle in front of the hearth at the centre of the Red Library. Hodge was grim-faced and visibly unsettled, the hand he rested on Jed’s head at his knee was shaking with some kind of pent-up emotion which the others had all noticed but were studiously not commenting on. Emmet was quietly shuffling the glass shards of mirror from the Murano Cabinet, ordering and rearranging them on a tabletop cleared of books and other manuscripts.

  Sara sat closest to the fire but looked wintry cold, her face a green only a few shades paler than her eyes, and from the shivers which sporadically racked her body it was clear that the blanket Cook had wrapped around her was not good for anything other than hiding the stump on the end of her arm.

  “Witchfinders,” she said, her voice barely more than a rasp. “Men who made a living encouraging frightened and credulous folk to kill others weaker than themselves for being something that doesn’t even exist.”

  “Not like they think it does at any rate,” said Cook. “Not devils and black magic and all that carry-on invented by fat monks and priests to frighten the people into feeding them or giving them more silver.”

  The Smith nodded.

  “Ordinary people have always known something other than themselves exists just beyond the beyond, but the witchfinders created a travesty of what actually does live on the far side of that threshold to feed off their fear.”

  “Do you think they’d be any happier knowing how the world really is?” said Mr Sharp, pointing at a large brass-bound book at the centre of the table behind them. It was as big as a church Bible, but it had a lock and was neatly parcelled with a thick red silk grosgrain ribbon, somewhat like a Christmas present. “Do you think that if they could read The Great and Hidden History of the World that they would sleep any better? There’d be witchfinders and worse on every street corner.”

  “Man’s weakness in the face of uncertainty is to harness the powers of the mob by giving it a common enemy, real or imagined,” said Sara, a
nd then coughed so long and hard that Mr Sharp got to his feet and had to be waved back by Cook who gave him a warning look. Sara eventually stopped coughing and looked up at them, her eyes red and watery from the hacking spasm. “That’s one reason we exist: to hold the line.”

  Mr Sharp watched her with something like pain in his eyes.

  “That’s just it. We ain’t holding the line,” said Hodge in a burst. Perhaps because he said less than the others when in company they tended to listen whenever he did break his silence, and it was clear from his tremoring hand that he had a head of steam built up which needed to get out before he exploded. “We can’t do our job right and that’s a fact. Too few of us running round a city that’s sprouting like ragweed, spreading everywhere. We miss stuff, or when we do spot it there’s too much going on for us to do the right thing in time.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cook.

  “I wish it was nonsense,” he snarled bitterly. “But it ain’t. It’s something else entirely. It’s a woman in a garret gone clean mad with grief because her little babby’s breath’s been stolen. It’s her feeling his little broken breastbones all jagged and wrong under the soft skin, skin that ain’t hardly even seen sunlight it’s so new to the world. It’s that poor mind-turned woman thinking it must’ve been her that done it, in her sleep or some-like, because she’s alone in the room and she’s got no memory of the thing that did it.”

  They all stared at him.

  “What happened?” said Mr Sharp.

  “What happened was I listened to you and ignored what the Raven was telling me when it showed me them pigeons all dead in their coops. Warning that there was a breath-stealer abroad,” said Hodge.

  And with that he told them of the rooftop full of lifeless squabs and how he’d not had time to fully investigate, and then how he’d gone back and looked harder just too late to stop the Alp sucking the breath from the baby and making its escape. He choked as he told them of the horror that greeted him when he and Jed broke down the door and found the distraught mother slumped on the floor with the crushed child in her arms. And then he turned his eyes to Mr Sharp, eyes that were now haunted with what he’d seen and the knowledge that he might have stopped it.

  “I’m sorry,” began Mr Sharp. “But I still—”

  Hodge shook his head with a bitter grunt.

  “No. I ain’t putting this on you, old mate, because what you told me was right. Sensible. Efficient. And I could have ignored what you said. This is a Free Company. But I didn’t. I did what was sensible. And so the babby and the woman’s on me. But the way I see it now is either I’m sworn to protect, or I’m sworn to be sensible and efficient: the two don’t always run hand in hand. And I’m damn sure which oath I took.”

  “If there’s a breath-stealer working the town we will find it,” said The Smith.

  Hodge shook his head,

  “No. I shall find it myself. Jed has the scent of it; we will pick up its trail. And I shall track it above, on or under the ground, and I shall discover it. And then I shall kill it. It’s taken life, and Lore and Law say the punishment must fit the crime.”

  It was, in its grim way, an oath, and as such they gave it the space of a moment’s silence to honour it. And then Sara spoke up.

  “That we are stretched is no new news. It does not mean this is the end; we have been stretched and yet have prevailed before…”

  “No, Sara Falk,” said Hodge, looking pointedly at The Smith. “Hear me out. Way I see it is: this is a day we’ve long known was coming. Letting that magistrate in with the Mountfellon fellow was bad, but it’s not as if we don’t have normal folk in the house often enough without them a-knowing what we do or why we’re here. That’s almost regular. What ain’t normal is the girl smuggling herself into your good offices and then getting in here. And then trying to steal something. And then escaping into the mirrors. And taking your blessed hand with her. That’s a sign. That’s a sign of the time. And the time is come. The Smith knows it. He’s been making lead boxes.”

  “That’s a last resort,” spluttered Cook. “We’re not finished yet—”

  “People who are finished never know it until it’s too late,” said The Smith. “It is a matter of safety. We seal the valuable, the powerful and the irreplaceable in the chests. And above all, we put the Wildfire in a doublesealed one. And then we put them all beyond reach.”

  “And where would that be?” said Cook.

  “At the bottom of the Thames. Hidden from all eyes, chained to the riverbed under flowing water. Hide the Discriminator and put the Wildfire under the water,” said The Smith.

  “This is hysterical,” said Cook, bridling. “Why it’s—”

  “No,” said Sara. “It’s the right thing to do. At the very least we must put them both out of harm’s way.”

  “Mr Sharp,” said Cook, turning for support, “tell them this is ridiculous—”

  “It is not,” said Mr Sharp. “It pains me to agree with the others, but it may well be necessary.”

  “But how will we do this without drawing attention?” said Cook. “It is impossible to move that much without doing so because we must now assume that the house is being watched by ill-wishers at all hours…”

  “Come,” said The Smith. “I will show you how.”

  They all followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen, Sara leaning heavily on Mr Sharp’s arm as they brought up the rear. The Smith led them into the furthest pantry where they were presented with a wall covered in shelves, all groaning under the weight of glass jars full of preserved fruits and jams.

  “No,” said Cook. “We do not open that door.”

  Sara put her hand on her arm, stilling her.

  “In extremis,” she said. “In extremis we do.”

  The Smith reached up and beneath the topmost shelf. There was a metallic click, and then he slid the entire wall out on a hinge, revealing it to be a door into a dark passage.

  “Light,” he said, reaching back.

  Mr Sharp produced a candle from inside his coat, and snapped his wrist. The candle flamed brightly as he handed it forward.

  They followed The Smith down the passage silently, or as silently as a group could be that included someone like Cook who could not keep herself from tutting in disapproval every few steps.

  The ceiling above them was smeared with soot from the generations of candles and torches that had preceded them, and the soot was smeared where others had dragged their hands through it. The reason they had done this became apparent as the band of light from The Smith’s candle reached the studded door at the end of the passage. The last fifteen yards or so of the wall were covered in sooty handprints of all shapes and sizes, and beneath each print an initial or a mark had been scratched into the plaster. The unavoidable impression created by all the handprints and initials was of a kind of informal memorial wall.

  “Wait,” said Sara, as The Smith was unlocking the door. Her eyes scanned the handprints until she came to a pair at shoulder height, bearing the initials RF and CF. Her hand reached gently towards them.

  “No!” said Sharp, pulling her away, but a beat too late.

  Her hand touched the smaller handprint and stuck to it.

  To the others watching she appeared to go rigid with shock, and her head snapped back as she glinted, the tendons on her neck arching, her eyes wide open and unblinking as the past pent up in the wall slammed into her.

  For Sara it was–as ever–as if it hit her in a series of jagged blows.

  The tunnel was full of people.

  Some walked past with weapons.

  Some stopped and smeared their hands on the sooty ceiling.

  Their clothes were those of a past generation.

  Their faces were grim and determined.

  There were women and men.

  The women carried blades and pistols too.

  They made handprints.

  A tow-haired young man, almost a boy, scratched his name with the point of a seaman’s dirk
.

  A dog barked close by.

  Then the tunnel was emptier.

  A woman stood with her hand in the same place as hers.

  Face lit by a shuttered lantern held by a tall man at her side.

  A woman with a face very like her own, but with unruly black curls escaping from beneath a sailor’s stocking cap.

  The woman seemed to look right into her eyes.

  Then she was speaking.

  “Goodbye, my strong girl. My brave little one.”

  The others who could not see what Sara was seeing saw her choke at this.

  The woman smiled and cleared her throat.

  “If all goes well, we shall be back before you wake. If mischance befalls us, you will have to be stronger still and take our place in the Hand. Cook and The Smith will guide you and young Jack Sharp has sworn to be your friend and guard you until you are grown into your power. Go easy on him, my child, for he has a wildness in him, and he struggles to master it. You will understand this, for you have a different kind of fierceness in you, and we have seen you learning to control it—”

  The past jerked again.

  The woman wiped her eyes and smiled bravely.

  Tears leaked down Sara’s cheek.

  Again the past jerked forward, and she was looking at the woman again but now with the man beside her leaning down and smiling out at her in the warm light of the shuttered lantern. He was speaking, his voice deep and strong.

  “—ever befalls us, good or ill, hold this one truth close to your heart, Sara: however much armour you have to put outside you to deal with the world that is coming, you have always been truly and most deeply loved. And whatever they tell you, child, we have always held that in both worlds, natural and supranatural, this one truth holds strongest in the end: love conquers all.”