The Oversight Read online

  “And inside the oyster?” ventured Coram.

  “Meat,” said Issachar, finally holding out the oyster. Coram stepped forward and let him tip it into his mouth.

  “Sweet meat,” said the Day Father, his eyes glittering with something close to warmth as he watched the young man suck the fluids from the shell. “For what could be sweeter than the destruction of an old foe who was once powerful and is now reduced almost to nothing. Once they nosed into every shadow in London and obstructed us at every turn, but now you can count them on one hand, I’m told.”

  “And as soon as there are fewer than five, as soon as they cannot muster a Last Hand, they cannot serve their sworn purpose, and then their control and their power is gone,” continued Zebulon.

  Issachar nodded.

  “And what could be lovelier, my boy, than delivering the very final blow of extinction.”

  Coram’s eyes rose to meet his in sudden understanding.

  The Day Father wiped the trickle of brine from the boy’s chin and smiled at the Night Father behind him.

  “And so, for me, to bed. You go and join your brothers and watch for the girl.”

  CHAPTER 11

  THE GREEN MAN

  The clay giant was a trick.

  Statues don’t move.

  Lucy had been picked up from the floor and led back to the table, and by the time she was seated again she had worked it out for herself: the head was just a mask worn by a real man inside the clothes. That’s why it was such a big head. She didn’t know why they relied on a guard dressed up in a clay mask, but it must have been something to do with frightening people. She’d certainly been frightened by it, and her mind and body had frozen until she had worked out the only rational explanation.

  Now she was unfrozen and angry: angry that they had foiled her escape attempt, and angry that they thought her feeble-minded enough to believe that the guard was a golem, a clay statue made to move by some kind of magic.

  Angry and something else: she was a little ashamed as she watched Sara Falk scrubbing the mess off her face, her slender body bent over the kitchen sink while Cook pumped water from the spigot in the wall above it. The Eccles cake had been hot enough to scald her, and the red splash-mark throbbed across the white skin like an accusation. She had got hot mincemeat in her eye and held a wet cloth to it as she wiped the rest of the mess away with her free hand under the spurting water. Lucy was ashamed because they had not hit her or punished her, but just put her back at her place at the table. She could see that the thin one was not only controlling her own anger but also trying not to show the pain she was in.

  Lucy didn’t like feeling ashamed. It was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and the silence of the other two was a void into which the shame seemed to grow. Her face was hot and her eyes treacherously moist. Lucy did not cry in front of other people, but if she didn’t do something, if this void of silence went on, she might betray herself. So she asked a question to fill it with something else.

  “Que veut dire ‘Glint’?” she said quietly.

  They ignored her. Cook handed Sara a dry towel and she dried her face. Her eye was swollen and red.

  Lucy repeated the question, louder this time.

  Sara Falk exchanged a glance with Cook, and then turned slowly and answered her in French.

  “When you touch something and the world around you jumps, and suddenly you see a vision that’s so real it’s not a vision but the thing itself? That’s glinting.”

  Lucy gaped at her, as if to ask how could she know this private thing.

  “Things that happen, important things, terrible things, they leave an imprint in the stones around them, as if they are leaving a record of the event. A Glint is someone with the gift to be able to read what is recorded.”

  “It does not feel like a gift. It feels like a curse. It feels like a dream but I am awake. And then I feel sick,” said Lucy, her voice beginning to accelerate with remembered panic. “Sometimes I do vomit. People say I am having a fit because I scream. I mean, they say I scream, but I never remember screaming–I remember being frightened but I do not think these are things that happened. Some of the things are too bad to be real. These things are in my head. They are things I imagine because my head is bad. Because I have done bad things. I do bad, bad things…”

  Her head bowed over and she stared down at her knotted fist that was now thumping at her knee, as if trying to hammer her heel through the black and white tile on the kitchen floor.

  “What bad things?” said Sara Falk.

  “Things I cannot remember doing, like the screaming. I know this is true. This is why they beat me. This is why they say I am bad!”

  “You are not bad,” said Sara Falk as Cook gently but firmly trapped Lucy’s fist in a hand the size of a small ham and stopped her hitting herself. “I am your friend, Lucy, so believe me—”

  Lucy was letting the gusts of panic and shame blow her where they would, making no attempt to control herself now.

  “I must be! They would not beat me just because I see the past. I cannot control the past or seeing it,” she cried excitedly, trying to wrench her hand free. “They would not beat me for something I cannot control—”

  “They beat you for something they cannot, um… understand,” said Cook, her French failing her for a moment and making her stutter as she reached for the right final word.

  “NO!” Lucy cried, smacking the table with her free hand so hard the bowl bounced and spilled oil. “They beat me because I am bad. They say so!” She was breathing hard now, her eyes hot, face flushed with a rising tide of distress.

  “If I can prove to you that you are seeing the past, and not something made up in your own head, will you stop saying you are bad?” asked Sara, her voice betraying the irritation she was trying to control.

  “You cannot,” she spat, anger swirling again, feeding on the shame. “You cannot know what is in my head! You are stupid—”

  “If I can…” said Sara Falk.

  “You cannot!” Lucy cried, her free hand sweeping the earthenware bowl across the table, toppling the candle at its centre and bouncing off it towards the hard tile floor.

  For a woman built on such generous lines, Cook moved with a speed that was in its own well-padded way as eye-bending as Mr Sharp’s, catching the bowl so deftly a bare inch from the floor that she scarcely seemed to hurry. Olive oil splashed everywhere.

  The candle rolled across the table and fell.

  Sara caught it. Curiously the flame was not extinguished but began to burn brighter and much more fiercely, so fiercely that Lucy could feel the heat coming off it from the other side of the table.

  “Sara,” said Cook, a warning growl at the back of her voice. “The Wildfire—”

  “I know,” said Sara and quickly replaced the candle in the holder, which she then placed back in the centre of the star made from the five different twigs. As soon as she had done this the unnatural flame dwindled back to that of a normal candle.

  “I…” began Sara Falk, visibly trying to control herself. “Oh, to the devil with it–come here.”

  She grasped Lucy’s arm and pulled her away from the table, towards the door at the side of the room.

  “Wait,” protested Cook in English. “Sara! She has had too much to take in already; she needs time—”

  “This won’t take long,” said Sara Falk grimly, opening the door and revealing the steep flight of carpeted steps beyond.

  “Right,” she said, taking Lucy’s hand. “We’re going to touch the wall. You’re going to glint.”

  “No, please!” cried Lucy, wriggling like a netted salmon as she tried to escape her unshakeable grip. “Please no–you said you were my friend, you whore’s bitch!”

  She had known they would punish her. They had just been waiting their time. Sara raised an eyebrow at Cook, who was standing in the doorway watching.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I know every inch of this house. I was born in it. And only on
e truly bad thing happened on these stairs.”

  “What?” yelled Lucy, kicking at her in fear. “What happened, pig’s co—?”

  “This.”

  And Sara Falk slammed Lucy’s hand against the wall.

  The girl felt the flat face of the stone, the fine grit cool against the soft skin of her fingertips. For an instant everything stopped.

  Then she did the thing she did, the thing where there was a small jolt and the world lurched with such a shock that her eyes wouldn’t close, couldn’t even blink as a horribly familiar feeling of nausea punched a hook into her gut and the past tugged itself deep into her, slamming home like an axe, and in shattered fragments and glints of time she saw

  The same wooden stairs

  No carpet now

  But a candle on a sconce on the wall where there had been a gas globe

  A low white-painted gate across the top of the steps

  Then a little black-haired girl in a nightdress running out of the dark and grabbing the gate

  Shaking it

  Too small to climb over

  Screaming down the steps at her

  “Mummy! Mummy! Cook! EMMET! Please! There’s a man in my room! A green man behind the door!”

  The child looks back into the dark hall behind it.

  Listening. Shaking with fear

  “No Mummy please! Please! It’s real! Mummy! I’m not lying! PLEEEASE! I’M NOT LYING THIS TIME! IT’S COMING! EMMET!”

  Nothing follows her out on to the landing.

  Nothing.

  Then shadows shift and rearrange themselves in the dimness behind her

  As if something is moving past candles in the unseen room

  The candle on the stair gutters.

  The little girl stops rattling the gate and stares at that something that is still out of sight in the hall.

  Something only she can see

  Something bad

  Her only movements are

  Her eyes getting wider

  Her teeth biting her lower lip in terror

  The tremor in her knees riffling her thin nightdress like a breeze

  Wetness spattering to the floor between her feet

  Her mouth shrinks to a quivering dot

  two words

  “Please no”

  squeezing out on a tiny breath

  “Please…”

  and then it’s there

  behind her

  the bad thing

  green man

  green hair

  green skin

  red mouth

  white teeth

  green fingers

  clawing for her

  touching her shoulder

  missing their grip

  tangling in her hair hair

  black as a raven’s wing

  leaching the colour from it

  the black flowing from the roots to the tips,

  twining into the greenness of his skin

  bleaching the little girl’s hair snow-white

  as

  she turns

  and

  jumps

  and

  twists

  in mid-air

  leaping at the gate

  little hands

  reaching scrabbling gripping

  pulling herself

  (impossibly)

  up and over

  and then she is diving headfirst down the steep steps

  her scream cut off brutally as the ridge of bone behind her eyebrow hits the unforgiving right angle of a step with a thunk that Lucy felt through the soles of her boots

  and as the diving girl tumbles and slumps down like a rag doll

  the thing

  the green man

  at the top of the steps boots the gate open

  comes after her

  green riding clothes swirling round him

  long green pigtail swinging behind the sharp-fanged snarl of his head

  then a blur, close to

  white, silver, pink

  a roar of red rage

  coming fast from the kitchen

  a smear of black eye patch

  Cook

  snarling like a mastiff as she bounds at the stairs, miraculously scooping and saving the tumbling girl with one hand as she hurls silver through the air her

  heavy ladle spinning like a tomahawk

  hitting the green face with enough force to cancel his forward momentum and knock him backwards

  and then a second figure overtakes her

  brown coachman’s coat

  tricorn hat

  hollow eyes

  unmistakably hollow

  not a man in a mask

  an irrefutable real live moving statue

  a clay landslide charging uphill

  falling on the green man and making his neck do a very sudden and final snap

  green boot-heels spasm and drum on the steps

  Cook cradles the little girl, looking at her face

  her hair now horror-white

  eyebrow split and swelling

  bright bloodstream beginning to delta down the death-pale curves of her face

  her eyes fluttering open

  grey-green eyes opening wide as

  The world kicked again.

  And Lucy was yanked back to a gas-lit stairwell now carpeted and monster-free.

  All different and safe.

  Except she is looking into the same grey-green eyes.

  The little girl’s eyes.

  In Sara Falk’s face.

  “But—” Lucy began.

  Sara Falk pushed aside the renegade lick of white hair and leant forward to show the silver scar that parted her eyebrow.

  “Merde,” said Lucy. “It was you?”

  “You believe me now?” said Sara Falk. “The bad things you see? They happened. They are not from your imagination. And certainly not because you are bad. You are a Glint, and someone should have told you this before now.”

  The girl’s eyes stayed on Sara’s face, and Sara could see the weather change behind them as Lucy adjusted to the new truths of her world: the clay man was not a trick, the green man was something awful and she, Lucy, had a power to conjure the past out of stones. What she had thought was madness in her head, an assault of made-up things, was not madness at all, but a different kind of reality.

  And so everything the two women had tried to tell her before she ran must be true.

  Shock turned to wonder and wonder cooled to something more guarded in her eyes, and Sara knew that she had done the right thing but done it too abruptly, out of her own impatience, maybe out of anger at the pain the girl had caused her by flinging the hot mincemeat and pastry into her face. Whatever the reason, she had brought about the very result she had begun by hoping to avoid: telling Lucy the truth like that, showing her the world as it really was meant that she would now never really be liked by this girl, this lost child who her heart had so instinctively gone out to.

  And so she steeled herself, as she had done before, to the lonely fact that it was not her lot to be liked, but only her duty to protect.

  “Lucy” she said. “I realise that until you adjust to what you now understand, the world will seem frightening and hostile, but know this for a truth: I will not let harm come to you, and all in this house shall be a friend and the house itself will always be a haven to you. I swear this, and give you my hand on it.”

  She held out her right hand, and after a hesitation Lucy swallowed, nodded slightly, reached out her own hand and shook.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE HORSE WITH NO SHOES

  Mr Sharp retrieved the Sluagh’s bronze blade from where he had left it, hidden behind the ale barrels in the alley, and then walked back out onto the pavement.

  Once more his nostrils flared and he smelled the fog. He cast this way and that trying to find a scent trail and then stalked off down the east side of the square and round the bend into Neptune Street.

  Neptune Street may have b
een named after a deity, but there was nothing godly about it. The narrow shambles of mismatched houses were a ramshackle catalogue of the various building styles that had superseded each other as the city had stumbled its way forward over the past few centuries: ancient half-timbered edifices leant drunkenly against jerry-built brick houses standing cheek-by-jowl with narrow four-storey tenements faced with age-warped clapboarding. Most of the dwellings were rooming houses, some with two or more families to a room; others accommodated those who were happy to rent by the hour to the furtive customers of the brazen ladies who loitered on the street corners outside.

  There was a swish of skirts as one of these lurched out of the fog and put a hand on Mr Sharp’s arm.

  “Looking for something, dearie?” she said in an alarmingly gravelly simper.

  “A horse,” he replied.

  The hand released him quickly.

  “Sorry, Mr Sharp. Didn’t recognise you in this blessed murk,” she said. “It’s as thick as cheese out here.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s a not a good night to be out. There are bad things abroad.”

  “I know,” she giggled, “but I’m damned if I can get any of them to come inside with me. Tuesdays is always devilish slow…”

  “Any of them on a horse?”

  “No,” she said after a beat. “I mean yes. Little Timmy Goodbehere come by saying there’s an old nag tied up next to his uncle’s shop and it kicked him when he went close—”

  “Goodbehere’s,” said Mr Sharp. “Thank you, Lily.”

  “Always a pleasure, Mr S,” she called after him as he strode away into a murk that erased his outline within six steps.

  “Or it could be if you weren’t always in such a blessed hurry,” she continued under her breath with a distinctly unprofessional hint of wistfulness.

  He found the horse in the dank cut-through between Goodbehere’s Hardware Shop and Ship Alley. It was a small mud-spattered thing, more pony than horse, hard-ridden and haggard, with an unmistakably mad look in its eye. It snorted and shied away from him as he approached, but he held out a hand and gentled it into stillness with a few soft words. He kept talking to it as he came close enough to see the shaggy mane was twisted into braids and elf-locks, and the harness was patched together from woven sea-grass and plaited leather. Hollow sections of bones and topless limpet shells were used anywhere where metal would have been used on a normal bridle, and the skulls of animals and birds hung from the end of the braided mane and clattered against each other as the horse shifted uneasily.