The Remnant by Charlie Fletcher

Author:Charlie Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Historical, Fiction / Fantasy / Paranormal, Fiction / Occult & Supernatural, Fiction / Action & Adventure
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29

THE VIGIL

And so it was, after the death of his hopes in Wellclose Square, that Amos had joined the Ghost in haunting the environs of Chandos Place. On the first night, they had slept in the lowered area of a shuttered house opposite and listened to the subterranean gurgling of the municipal drains as they attempted to deal with the unprecedented volume of water the storm had tipped into the city during the day. They watched Mountfellon’s house with its strangely regular but unsymmetrical façade. There was no sign of life within it, no lights, no noise, no toing or froing from either the front or the side. Neither he nor the Ghost could hear any human thoughts, though he at least thought he could hear some animal in pain which seemed to be beneath the house.

“A cat or a dog, swept into the sewers, like as not,” sniffed the Ghost, who professed to be unable to hear it. “One of the thousand little tragedies that beset the city every day. Is it a human mind?”

He shook his head. It was just a voiceless panic. And he couldn’t be sure if it came from the house or the one behind it anyway.

No

“Then it isn’t Mountfellon,” she said, and jammed herself into a corner of the area, looking through the railings, blanket over her head, only her eye peering out at pavement level, locked on the house opposite. “And if it isn’t him, who cares? Not, I said, the fly …”

Amos wondered if she would give him one of the two blankets she was wrapped in. She didn’t. He was too numb to mind much.

“We will watch,” said the Ghost. “Turnabout: one sleeps while the other keeps an eye on the house.”

Amos knew that a day before he would have baulked at this, but was too taken aback by the revelation of The Oversight’s demise and the extinction of his last coherent hope that he agreed. He kept just enough of his own kernel of selfhood to be sure that he would not kill for her, no matter what. But watching gave him some purpose, and without purpose he knew he would drift rudderless into even deeper shoals of despair.

On the first night and the first day, he was mechanical and dazed, but as time passed he began to think about the implications of the end of The Oversight. He had not realised how strongly he had clung to the idea that there was a group who might be able to parse the perils of the unknown, and protect him from it.

He had only really come into contact with the supranatural proper when he had been sent to deliver the letter to Mountfellon and been pursued by the Sluagh. They had not caught him but they had chased him into a dark world from which there seemed to be no escape: he could not undo what he had done, or un-see the things he had witnessed. Innocence cannot be un-lost.

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