The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “What I mean is that though I face the crowd and perform in the bright glimmer of our footlights, I have sometimes felt I was alone and performing with my back to a great void, and that the void contained things that I knew nothing of other than the clear sense that they were watching me and laughing. They were laughing because they controlled the real magic which I was merely counterfeiting.”

  He looked up at her.

  “I am the clearest-eyed man alive when it comes to spotting the mechanics of an illusion. Even the fastest and most limber-fingered card conjurer cannot elude me. But sometimes I have caught things with the tail of my eye that I cannot explain. What I found in that tent, what I found then…”

  “You cannot explain,” she said.

  “I think it comes from that darkness. And no, I cannot explain it.” He was racked by another sob. “Unless I am run mad…”

  She put her hand on his shoulder and leant forward until barely a foot separated their eyes, his wet, hers dry and unblinking.

  “Am I mad, Father?”

  “No.”

  She stood back.

  “Then show me. And I will be the judge.”

  He pointed quaveringly at the coal box.

  “It is under the coal. In the secret place. In a casket.”

  “What is it?” she said, beginning to move the coal out of the way.

  “It is a hand,” he said. “I have been trying to see how it works.”

  “A hand?” she said.

  “A Manus Gloriae. A Hand of Glory. A hand with a mind of its own, that moves as if alive.”

  She looked back at him as she moved the coal.

  “And would that not be a greater trick than a wooden automaton?” she said. “Anderson does not have a Hand of Glory!”

  She revealed the false bottom to the box and removed the casket. She held her hand out for the key without looking back, and he slipped it into her hand.

  A moment later they were both hanging over the casket as he opened the top.

  “Your hand is shaking, Father,” she said.

  “I am… scared,” he said. She reached past him and pulled the top open.

  Sara Falk’s hand lay in the bottom of the box, unmoving. They both stared at the black leather of the glove and the two rings that caught the firelight and reflected it back at them. Georgiana looked less than impressed.

  “Are the rings gold?” she said.

  “I had not wondered,” he replied.

  “Well,” she said, “the rings have value. We can sell them. I do not know for the life of me why you did not wonder…”

  “I did not wonder because the rings were quite the least remarkable thing about the hand,” he said.

  “It is just a cadaver’s hand,” she said with a shrug, clearly believing her father to have imagined anything more than that while in a “fuddle”. “It is gruesome enough, but—”

  “You have not seen it move,” he said.

  And he leant past her and jabbed the hand. It spasmed and flopped, then tried to scuttle into the corner of the box, where it scrabbled at the walls. Georgiana stared at it, eyes wide.

  “Is it some kind of ingenious clockwork?” she breathed.

  He grasped the hand and unbuttoned the glove at the wrist, displaying the pale skin beneath.

  “Feel it,” he said.

  She reached her fingertips forward and touched the skin, tentatively at first, then–when the hand didn’t try and grab at her–more boldly.

  “It’s flesh,” she whispered. “Warm flesh…”

  He stabbed a pin neatly into it, and held it tight as it convulsed in protest. He pointed at the red bead that appeared at the puncture point.

  “… and blood,” he smiled.

  Georgiana was breathing slowly, as if trying to control a rising excitement.

  “It feels pain,” she said.

  “It does.”

  Now she looked at him, a slow smile edging across her face.

  “Then we can train it,” she said.

  He shook his head at her in slow wonderment.

  “Child,” he said. “The hand moves independently of any connection to the body it came from. Does it not fill your mind with terror at the unknown world which it evidences?”

  “No, Father,” she said. “What terrifies me is penury and ugliness.”

  She took the hatpin from his hand, a hungry look coming over her as she leant over the box.

  “Let’s see what it does…”

  And she jabbed the pin into the hand and watched it flinch.

  THIRD PART

  THE BROKEN HAND

  THE COMPANY OF HANDS

  … take your hand and put the tips of your fingers and thumbs on a piece of parchment, keeping your palm a good thumb’s height from the surface. Take a quill, dip it in the ink and make a mark at the end of each one, and then join each mark to the others with a straight line. You have just drawn an irregular pentagram, or a five-pointed star, inside an outer boundary. The star is for power. The boundary is for protection. It keeps the power within, and stops it spilling out into the world unchecked.

  The ignorant, or those who would chain you to a superstition cloaked as a religion, will tell you a pentagram is a thing of darkness, a tool of black magic, the sign of any number of devils.

  It is precisely the opposite. It contains and protects the light, and it does so within a symbol based on the earthly, upon the human hand–not on something unearthly and superstitious. A pentagram says humankind has the ability to contain power and not be consumed or corrupted by it…

  … Gawain, one of the most virtuous of Arthur’s knights, carried the pentagram on his shield, not only representing duty but also generosity, fellowship, honesty and compassion. These same virtues inform the Free Company for The Oversight of London, who arrange themselves in “Hands” of five in memory of this…

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

  INTERLUDE

  The Andover Workhouse was in uproar.

  Mrs M’Gregor was outraged.

  M’Gregor himself was conducting a thorough search of all the grounds, rooms, chattels and persons within the misery-dulled precincts of that grey and thankless institution. Beds were upended, cupboards rifled and even the ominous piles of bones awaiting grinding in the work-yard were being picked over by the smallest and most nimble-fingered of the inmate children.

  All the men were lined up and stripped, their clothes checked and then returned by the male under-wardens. The women suffered the same indignity with the female under-wardens, this time assisted by their male counterparts whose presence infinitely deepened the humiliation. It was perhaps only because they were already so ground down, ground finer than the bones in the work-yard, that there was no boisterous rebellion at this, but other than mumbling and whispered curses, the search went on without obstruction or objection.

  It also continued without result.

  This made Mrs M’Gregor’s outrage burst its banks, and she, one of the least ground down and most sharp-edged of women, unleashed her invective on the assembled ranks of inmates. She enumerated the many kindnesses she and her husband had lavished on them, how nutritious the gruel was, how hard-wearing their blankets were, how sturdy the wooden clogs with which they were furnished at no extra charge! She extolled the virtues of the regimen under which they lived, praised the modernity of the system of daily work and the avoidance of that notorious free time in which the devil might otherwise find work for their idle hands. She lauded the warmth of the one sea-coal fire they provided in the winter and generally launched herself on a wide-ranging panegyric on the virtues of fresh air (in the dormitories) and the high walls with which they were surrounded, as being necessary to protect them from the shame of being viewed by those worthy and munificent parishioners whose hard labour furnished the funds with which she and her husband–a brass-bound saint of a man–were charged with paying for their board and lodging. Charity
, she said, began at home, but this home, their home, had been outrageously and burglariously predated upon. In short, someone had stolen her hand mirror, and since charity provided the most admirable and nutritious gruel (known to the inmates, but not to her, as “old sweat and bone”) the same gruel would be withdrawn from their board of fare and replaced with stale bread and water as their only sustenance until it was returned.

  Mrs M’Gregor could not abide the thought of a thief in their midst. Her hand mirror had a silver clasp on its handle.

  It had belonged to her mother.

  This was not true.

  Her mother had handed it over on her death-bed.

  This was only true in Mrs M’Gregor’s mind.

  It was her most precious possession.

  This was only true if you did not count the strong-box in which the money she and M’Gregor had not spent on the inmates of the workhouse was hidden. It was of course easy not to count this money because it had already been officially if only theoretically counted in the yearly accounts of the institution where it publicly appeared to have paid for necessary meat and medicines, things which the M’Gregors had privately considered less necessary than the need to provide for their retirement.

  And so it was that the greatest thief in the establishment harangued the innocent poor unfortunates who had been left in her and her husband’s care on the subject of their rank ingratitude and unforgiveable dishonesty. She shouted and spat at them in a most unladylike way until she was unattractively red in the face, her double chins wobbling furiously like the wattles of an especially discommoded turkey.

  The other smaller thief sat abstractedly at the back of the room, head bent to the thin light filtering in the windows high above, her fingers endlessly moving in her lap, as if sewing something invisible.

  She knew in a moment someone would rush in, having found the mirror handle in the bone piles.

  She knew there would be a moment’s celebration.

  And she knew this would turn to consternation as they saw the handle was blind, that the mirror it had contained was gone from the frame.

  She knew they would then fear someone had taken the shards to fashion a knife.

  She knew some of the least-liked under-wardens would tread carefully for the next few weeks, worried about someone rushing upon them to revenge any of a score of past unkindnesses and humiliations.

  She thought that was no bad thing.

  She also knew the mirror lay at the bottom of the water butt in the vegetable garden, and that it would not be found.

  She knew the next hand that would touch it was at present making a daisy chain in her lap.

  And though her mind was too wrapped in fog to know how precisely it was that she knew, she was also sure it would soon be time to escape.

  CHAPTER 51

  WHAT HAPPENED ON WYCH STREET

  Jed got the scent of the Alp as he passed an offal pedlar’s stall in Clare Market, and it was greatly to his credit that he did so since his attention was more than half distracted by a brimming crock full of old bone ends and butcher’s discards sending invisible tendrils of rank temptation across the alley at precisely the level of his nose.

  Hodge heard him bark and caught the urgency in the dog’s tone. He was three floors above the street, which was a crowded and unsavoury mixture of meat sellers’ shops and greengrocers’ stalls so higgled in beneath ancient overhung gables and sagging casement windows that there was scarcely barely room to breathe, let alone pass through with any degree of ease or dispatch. Hodge immediately slung his hook across a narrow side alley and tugged it secure against the lip of brick it had found, and then with no hesitation swung across the short gap and walked himself down the crumbling wall, nimble as a salty topsail man coming down the foremast on a flat calm. He reached the ground and shook a curve back up the rope, freeing the grapple with a practised tug and catching it as it fell out of the sky.

  He jogged out into the bustle of the market, still looping the cord in his hands, eyes searching for the dog.

  He caught sight of the brindled tail disappearing in the direction of Wych Street and ran after it, buffeting shoppers and traders who were unwary enough to get out of his way or deaf enough to ignore his shouted entreaties to.

  “Make a hole there!”

  There was no question that Jed had the scent. He was humming with tension, his whole body vibrating with it, tense as a bowstring. Wych Street was a lot less crowded than the market and Hodge caught up with him halfway down from St Clement Danes.

  “Where?” he said.

  Jed mounted the step and entered a dingy shop-front beneath a sign reading “M. A. Ormes–Dealer in Coal”. Hodge followed him into a dark space which was as quiet, sooty and light-starved as any mine. An elderly man was propped between two piles of sacks, tallying an account book by the glimmer of a single candle.

  “Do you have rooms?” said Hodge, gesturing at the stair at the back of the shop.

  “Who’s asking?” said the proprietor.

  “The Law,” said Hodge, and showed him a badge which he pocketed before the man had time to look closely at it. “Any new tenants?”

  “No,” said the man. “Just the missis and myself on the next floor and then a nice young couple, no trouble, on the top. Been here three years, never a peep out of ’em. What kind of law are you…?”

  “The busy kind,” said Hodge. “You stay put.”

  Hodge took the stairs three at a time, Jed bounding ahead of him. At the top of the house was a closed door. By the time Hodge got to the landing, Jed had his nose to the crack under it and was inhaling noisily, as if trying to suck the contents of the room on the other side bodily across the floor.

  Hodge did not stop. His blackthorn stick was in one hand and a knife in the other as he went through the door boot first. The cheap wood splintered as the lock tore free, and he leapt inside.

  The room was clean but meanly furnished. There was a small grate with cooking paraphernalia ranged around it, a deal table with two mismatched chairs and an oilcloth tacked to it on which were laid place settings for two; there was one moderately easy chair leaking horsehair from a split covering of threadbare velveteen, and behind a thin curtain of cheapest cotton, much laundered so that the original sprigged roses which had once splashed cheerfully across it were now more like the faded ghosts of flowers past, was a bed.

  “Come out, I say; by oak, ash and thorn I shall have you, you bastard!”

  And he ripped the curtain aside.

  There was no Alp.

  But there had been.

  The dead woman was proof of that.

  And the Alp was long gone, at least half a day from the look of her. She lay on her back in a rumpled shift which was more than half off her body, her mouth open and white-lipped as if she had died between one breath and another, her eyes open and unseeing in a face already showing the beeswax pallor of the long dead. Because her shift was rucked up, he could see the blood in her body had given way to the insistent pull of gravity so that the underside of her limbs were a mottled bluey-purple against the grey sheets, a startling imperfection when compared with the idealised pale marble quality that death had brought to her skyward features, a paleness caused by the draining of that very blood from even the smallest capillaries of her skin.

  Even though she bore all the signs of a none too recent death, Hodge still unaccountably found his hands on her shoulders shaking her, trying to wake her.

  He heard himself saying “No, no” repeatedly, all trace of exultation gone from his voice. He felt the sting in his eyes and the catch in his throat, and he knew that somehow something had broken inside him. In a long and steadfast life of adventure and service he had certainly met failure before, and he had seen death in mind-scarringly worse guises than this case. There was no reason he could have given for why something cracked deep within him, why failing to catch this particular breath-stealer was so insupportable, but maybe it had something to do with the long and p
ainstaking search, the lack of sleep, the slow and unmarked erosion of his vital energy which resulted from following his tireless dog. Maybe it is not the last straw which breaks backs, but all the ones that went before it. Whatever it was, Hodge broke.

  “Annie?” said a voice behind him. “Oh my God!”

  He turned to see a youngish man in a clerk’s tight jacket standing in the doorway with a piece of wet fish wrapped in a damp twist of newspaper in his hand.

  The hand opened in shock and the fish slapped to the floor.

  “What have you done?” yelled the man as he launched himself across the room. “Murder! MURDER!”

  The clerk wrenched Hodge off the bed and threw him into the wall. Hodge did not defend himself. Jed snarled into the attack, but Hodge waved his hand.

  “No, Jed! Stay.”

  The clerk stared in horror at his wife’s lifeless body.

  Hodge said nothing. He felt quite exhausted by the three words with which he’d stilled the dog. For the first time in his life, he could not think what to do next, nor could he bring himself to care much about it.

  The clerk was six inches shorter than Hodge, and half as wide. He was thin as a pen. He came at him in a fury, snatching up the poker as he did so.

  He caught Hodge a glancing blow on the side of the head, and then another less well-placed one on the neck.

  Hodge did not defend himself.

  The clerk kicked Hodge’s legs out from under him, and was about to hit him again when the coal seller and his son came through the door. They took in the ghastly scene with horrified indrawn breaths, and then came across the room in a flurry of oaths and boots and set about kicking the life out of the fallen Terrier Man.

  Hodge lay there, one eye disappearing behind a bloodied swelling, feeling the blows as if they were happening to someone a long way off. Someone who deserved them. Someone who welcomed the oblivion they would inevitably bring.

  Jed whined and snarled, and pawed at the floor, but Hodge held him with the remaining power of his eye. “No,” he croaked. “Go.”