The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  Then, as she heard Georgiana shout “LIGHTS!”, her hand closed on the gloved hand and she gripped it to her chest and ran for the rear flap of the tent. She tripped and stumbled as the noise of the audience rose in uproar behind her, and then she felt Georgiana’s fingers grasping blindly for her, nails raking painfully across her cheek, narrowly missing her eye, and then she was free again, bursting out of the flap into the narrow tented back alley.

  She heard Georgiana shouting after her, and saw a flare of light from within as someone unshuttered the footlights.

  Knowing it would take time for the crowd to realise what was happening, she stopped and waited as Georgiana pushed through the gap, close on her tail.

  “You?” screamed Georgiana. “You—”

  Lucy hit her. The first punch stunned her to silence. The second punch, harder and more measured, knocked her clean out.

  And then Lucy sprinted away into the night, secure in the knowledge that her one immediate pursuer was out for the count. She jinked and dodged guy-ropes and tent pegs, zigzagging across the still crowded fairground, heading for the Pyefinches’ wagon.

  She fully expected to spend a few nights in the open, which was why she had hidden the blanket and food, and now she was not just running away but expected to be chased, she thought it even more important she take to the countryside and avoid the open road for as long as possible.

  She felt the hand jerk and twist in her grip, and clutched it close to her chest.

  “Shhh,” she said. And then wondered why she’d spoken.

  Behind her, several tents away now, she heard the hubbub of the crowd emerging from Huffam’s tent, a noise punctuated by a piercing cry of “Stop, thief!”

  She skidded beneath two wagons on the edge of the fair and then found the Pyefinches’. She hurdled the carriage shaft and felt her way to the barrel lashed to the side. She reached behind it, pleased to note that the hue and cry seemed to be moving away from her. She was experienced enough at disappearing to know that now she was going to be able to slip into the darkness and put many miles between her and anyone who knew her by dawn.

  The metal shackle which dropped round her wrist, and the click as it locked, was thus more than a disappointment.

  She tied to rip her hand free, but it was caught.

  “Go easy on that, girlie,” said a familiar voice.

  She turned to see Charlie behind her, a strange look in his eye.

  Before she could say anything, two more figures appeared from behind the barrel. It was his father and mother.

  “Don’t yank your hand; you’ll just hurt yourself. You’re caught and you’re not going anywhere,” said Mr Pyefinch.

  What was even more of a shock was the fact that Rose and Charlie carried long knives, and Mr Pyefinch was hefting a short blunderbuss in his hands.

  “Wherever you thought you was a-sneaking off to with my good food and blanket, you’re not,” said Rose. “You ain’t who you say you are, and there’s interested folk doing the rounds offering good money for someone who sounds just like you.”

  They looked at her. She was aware she was panting like an animal at bay.

  “Face it, missy,” said Charlie. “You been bundled.”

  CHAPTER 63

  AN ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT

  Ravens are not usually nocturnal, but the Raven was the least conventional of birds and this, among a host of other avian norms, was a rule it pointedly ignored. It perched on the roof of a house opposite Mountfellon’s property on Chandos Place and watched. It watched by daylight, in rain and sun, and it watched in the moonlight. At present it stood in the night-shadow of a chimneystack enjoying the clear view afforded by the light of a new moon that rendered the street in an eerily precise grisaille, one in which detail was clearly visible although it was nearly midnight, but from which all semblance of colour was absent.

  The Citizen slipped from house to shuttered coach almost without disturbing the stillness of the scene. The Raven caught the flash of motion in the narrow space between door and door, and saw the springs of the coach flex minimally as they took on the desiccated, almost negligible weight of the very old man. The coachman flicked the tip of his whip over the rear of the horses, and the coach eased into the street and headed east. The Raven stretched its wings and stepped up into the air, following silently from above.

  The Alp had presented itself, as arranged, at a house in Golden Square. The doorman had not asked for a name and the Alp had not given one. No words were spoken at all. The doorman showed it up the stairs into what had once been the grand salon of a smart mansion. The damask wallpaper had begun to rot and peel off the walls in patches, and the chandelier above was bagged in muslin spotted with the droppings of birds that had evidently become trapped in the great room at various times in the past, on the rare occasions when the shutters had been opened and fresh air let in. From the musty smell, that had been a long time ago. The carpets had been removed and the parquet flooring, once elaborate and polished, had warped and sprung. What furniture there was had been pushed to the sides of the room and covered in dust cloths, similarly bespattered with droppings. A chaise-longue and a card table with two chairs stood in the centre of the room. A board about three feet by four was propped against the chaise, and on the floor next to it was a set of large stone weights with iron rings in the top, of the kind used for weighing corn sacks.

  The doorman put a lit candle on the table next to a small summoning bell and left the Alp to enjoy the rapidly fading grandeur of the room by itself.

  The Alp looked round the room once, pushed its hair behind its ears and settled down to wait, facing the door, face as blank as ever.

  It waited calmly as time passed and little else moved in the dusty house.

  It did not hear the secret door in the panelling open behind it, but it did not jump or show surprise as The Citizen creaked across the parquet and spoke.

  “You are prompt.”

  The Citizen spoke in German with an Austrian inflection. The Alp turned to look at him, something almost like interest appearing in its face before vanishing behind the mask of impenetrable blandness it habitually affected.

  “You are surprised I speak your language so well?” said The Citizen, walking around him slowly like a buyer assessing a brood mare.

  The Alp did not react.

  “I should do. I was given pointers by a very beautiful woman,” smiled The Citizen. “A regally beautiful one. She helped me master the ugly gutterals of your tongue, and more than that…”

  He traced the smooth skin of the Alp’s chin with a trailing finger.

  “More than that: she made a deal with me. For her life, she gave me my life. She gave me your secret, your family’s secret. Lie on the chaise.”

  The Alp got up obediently, went to the couch and lay flat on its back. It reached over and pulled the board on top of itself up to the chin but leaving its face free. Its face gave no indication that this was anything other than unremarkable, and its eyes lost themselves in the intricacies of the peeling plasterwork above as The Citizen climbed carefully on top of the board, his knees drawn up so that he knelt on the Alp’s chest in exactly the same way that the Alp had knelt on the breasts of its victims.

  “She thought she was buying her life and that of her family, the Otherbitch,” said The Citizen. “That’s what we called her, you know. In French it is more amusing: ‘l’Autrichienne’ means ‘Austrian woman’, which she was, but it also sounds like ‘la autre chienne’ which means ‘the other bitch’. Anyway, the Otherbitch got a life for a life, no more no less. And here I am. And there, no doubt she is, in hiding, forgotten somewhere, unless she tired of life without her luxuries and titles–in which case she no doubt let herself die, though I doubt she had the will to end her own existence. And here you are. Her family’s great secret.”

  He stared down at the Alp, the greed in his eyes a stark contrast with the breath-stealer’s studied blankness. His lip curled.

  “Everyth
ing is a trade, all is commerce. Your family survive unmolested because you do service to the great and powerful who protect you. Your coming to me in this new city is a favour redeemed, like a token. What I propose is a new deal, which is as follows: you stay in the city in these apartments at my expense. You are discreet. You are available. I in turn provide you with young women, women who no one will miss. You recruit their strength within yourself in safety and comfort, with no fear of discovery or alarm, and in turn pass the vitality you harvest on to me. Do this for two years and your family’s debts are paid. Do it for five and, if my plans and those of my confederate come to fruition, your entire family can escape the forests and mountains in which they have hidden for so long and walk London’s streets as lords of a new order, lauded and not feared. What do you say?”

  The Alp said nothing. It looked at The Citizen’s tight parchment face and–after a moment–nodded.

  “A deal then,” said The Citizen. “We need not clasp hands on it for we shall presently seal it with a kiss.”

  He reached over to the table and lifted the bell. From the speed with which the door opened when he rang it was clear that the doorman had been waiting for his summons on the landing outside.

  He faltered at the sight which greeted him, but recovered as he walked over in response to The Citizen’s beckoning hand.

  “Do you know who I am?” rasped The Citizen.

  “No, sir. Never seen you before in all my born days,” replied the doorman, evidently having decided that the best way to deal with the oddity of the tableau was by ignoring it and fixing his eye a foot above The Citizen’s head.

  “Good,” smiled The Citizen. “If you’d be so kind as to lift those weights onto the board here, I’d be most grateful. I am too enfeebled to do so myself.”

  The doorman nodded and then grunted as he lifted the heavy weights as directed.

  The Alp took a deep breath and held it as the pressure was increased, but even when the doorman fancied he heard a rib start to crack, it kept its breath behind a mouth which remained tightly closed. The doorman, now breathing hard himself, leant to pick up the last weight and The Citizen held out a hand in which there was a small doe-skin money-purse to still him.

  “You told no one you came here tonight?”

  “No, sir,” said the doorman, eyes suddenly glued to the purse.

  “You followed your instructions to the letter?”

  “Yes, sir,” gulped the doorman.

  “And you will tell no one of what you have seen here tonight?”

  “No, sir. Not a peep,” affirmed the doorman, eyes fluttering as he said it. The Citizen graced him with a wintry smile made all the more like the grin of a death’s head by the candle guttering in front of him.

  “Then here. Your pay.”

  The doorman reached for the purse.

  As he took it, The Citizen’s free hand gripped his wrist and yanked him closer, while the other twisted and flicked a straight barber’s razor out of its sleeve.

  “Wh—?” the doorman began, but the rest of the word petered out in a damp gurgle as The Citizen slashed the finely honed blade across his throat, opening it to the night, cleanly separating the windpipe from the voice box and severing the great artery in one scything arc. He thrust him away immediately so that the doorman fell over a chair scrabbling bloody fingers at the great pumping wound beneath his chin.

  The Alp’s eyes followed the action but betrayed no emotion. The Citizen watched the doorman’s heels drum and spasm on the parquet.

  “He lied. All men lie. He would have told someone. This is too strange an occurrence for him to have bottled it up for ever,” he said, flicking the blood off the razor with a practised snap of the wrist before folding it back into the handle and sliding it back into his sleeve.

  “A pessimist would say I killed him. An optimist would agree that I enabled him to keep his word. And you, my friend, you say nothing, do you?”

  The Alp looked back up at him, unblinking, its eyes beginning to bulge with the effort of not exhaling.

  “Very well,” said The Citizen. “I am quite exhausted. Bring me life.”

  And with that he lifted the final weight onto the board in front of his knees, and bent over the Alp, twisting his neck so that he could fasten his mouth over his mouth and nose at the same time, and began to inhale in as the Alp exhaled in a long and seemingly endless breath.

  The Raven was outside in the mews behind the house.

  The night was quiet.

  But it was not so far from the great salon within that it did not hear a peal of laughter, strong and vigorous laughter, and a French voice, raised in delight as it announced,

  “I am young! Again I am young!”

  CHAPTER 64

  AN EXCHANGE WITH THE SLUAGH

  Lucy pulled hard at her hand but it was securely manacled to the water barrel. She was furious and scared. She decided to show none of that to the Pyefinches who had clearly lived up to her very worst expectations and betrayed her. She cursed herself for having let her guard down so far as to like them. It just was the same kind of weakness that had led to her troubles with Georgiana. She wasn’t normally this weak, this susceptible. She thought it was to do with the gaps in her memory. After all, if she could only remember half of her life, maybe she only had half the reserves of her normal strength to rely on.

  “What are you doing?” she said, trying to sound very calm. “Why have you done this?”

  “You’re coming with us,” said Charlie.

  “I’ll call for help,” said Lucy. “Let me go.”

  “You won’t call out,” said Rose calmly, her eyes not on Lucy but scouring the blackness beyond the lights of the fair. “If you call out, the Eagles’ll be here in a trice and they’ll get their precious hand back.”

  Lucy laughed at her, a short bitter cough without a hint of good humour in it.

  “Think I wouldn’t swap the hand for my freedom?” she eyed the weapons. “For my life?” Rose stiffened, as if she had seen something in the night, and put the knife to Lucy’s throat.

  “Not another word,” she whispered.

  It took Lucy a moment to realise that they weren’t looking at her. They were staring into the dark with an air of grim preparedness.

  And then two bits of shadow shifted, and two Sluagh emerged from the blackness, almost as if the swirling tattoos on their faces were not inked but made out of the surrounding darkness, and were now bleeding them into the light from the heart of the night itself. As they advanced, she could see they were men whose clothes were patched together from animal skins and fastened with small bones. The tallest one carried an ugly bronze hook-backed blade which caught the reflections of the fair lights behind the Pyefinches. The other wore an old-fashioned bicorn hat, once black but now green with mildew and sporting a spiral fan of bird skulls where there had long ago been a silk cockade. It was hard to see if he was scowling because the tattoos on his face gave him a permanent snarl, but his voice was grim with malice.

  “The girl,” said Bicorn Hat, pointing at Lucy.

  A nasty bullet of memory hit Lucy as she looked at him, a sharp, disjointed remembrance of someone similarly skin-dressed and bone-hung, talking to the man Ketch as he handed her over to him in London. The recollection came out of one of the dark holes in her mind. The Pyefinches now appeared to have captured her with the intention of handing her over to these tattooed men who were not quite–or perhaps that was not only–men.

  “And why do you want her?” said Mr Pyefinch, his blunderbuss swinging between the two of them.

  “We will pay you for her,” said the one with the blade, and produced a jingling pouch from his pocket. He shook it noisily at him. “Gold.”

  “Why do you want her?” repeated Pyefinch.

  Bicorn Hat moved towards him and looked him hard in the eyes. Then he turned his gaze on Rose. Rose met his stare, and Lucy saw something strange come across the older woman’s face, first a flicker of concern, foll
owed by a deadening of her look and a kind of sleepy dullness in her eyes. Before Lucy could even work out if it was in her interest to say anything, the Sluagh had moved to Charlie, whose head drooped in sleepiness even faster than his mother’s. Lucy dropped her gaze and looked at her feet. She determined not to be practised on in whatever way the Sluagh had dealt with the others.

  “Trade is trade. We have said we will pay you for her,” said the one with the blade, stepping forward. “You daywalkers hunger for gold since it reminds you of the sun which lights and blights you, and we will give it to you. But if you want something from us—”

  Pyefinch stopped him with a jab of his gun.

  “Like an answer?” he suggested.

  “Like an answer,” sighed the Sluagh. “It is only fair you pay us. But in silver, mind, for silver is the moon’s metal, and we go by night.”

  “Or if you have no moon-silver, give us that strange hand perhaps,” said the other with a wheedling tone. “Give us the hand and then we’ll tell you.”

  He smiled at Pyefinch, held his gaze, and after a moment stepped back, happy at the dull look that his eyes had produced in the other.

  “That is all of them blunted and bent to our will,” he said. “We should have waited to see if they had silver for us.”

  “We’ll take the hand anyway,” said the other.

  “We do not need the hand.”

  “It is our enemy’s hand. See the rings. We can burn it. Then the owner can never be healed, and The Oversight will be dealt another blow.”

  “Burning would be good,” smiled the blade-holder. “Or flaying.”

  “Or both,” agreed his companion. He nodded at the Pyefinches and Lucy. “What shall we do with them?”

  “Take the girl who is listening to us while avoiding your eyes. We shall pass her to the Templebanes. Cut the others down. The rest of the daywalkers will think the girl did it and fled,” said the one with the blade.