Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  He sighs, kicks his slippers off like a schoolboy on vacation, and, content to have settled the point, slouches forward towards the fire in order to warm his stockinged feet.

  ф

  She pleads with him. “Explain it to me,” she pleads. “You owe us that much. What is Mother doing with the child?” When Sebastian does not answer Livia adds: “You lied to us! You said it would be three days before the infection took hold.”

  This last bit rouses the slouching man, wakes his inner pedant. Sebastian sits up.

  “Oh no, it wasn’t a lie. It takes between fifty and eighty hours. These things are never precise. It varies with the dose, you see, and how strong the child’s defences are. In Mowgli’s case”—Sebastian pulls out a pocket watch, sits squinting at its hands—“well, he might already be there! There is a test, in any case, a simple test.” He beams, reaches over, tugs at her sleeve. “Those fools outside, eh? Even while they are standing there, freezing, your mother is changing the world. Ha! They are so sure that it must be I who lights the fuse! They don’t expect a woman to have this much pluck.” He giggles, settles back into his chair, drink-flushed and happy. “But hush now, Miss Naylor! I mustn’t say any more. The less you know the better. In case…You see, it might be another twelve hours. And they may catch you yet and place you under duress.”

  He takes another swig, raising the laudanum bottle by accident, then checks himself just in time and guzzles brandy. By the time he has put it down, she has dug the mustard jar out her pocket. A smear of Soot remains in it. It sits at the bottom like a liquid piece of night.

  “What is this for, Sebastian?”

  He squints, takes the jar from her, flushes with excitement.

  “From your mother’s bottle, yes?” He holds it close to the fire, watches the light be swallowed by its contents.

  “Best to destroy it, I suppose,” he mumbles with a strange reluctance. Then a thought occurs to him, something clever, it scrunches up his face like a prune.

  “You want to see it?” he mutters. “After all, what is the harm? And I can’t be there, can I? Stuck here like bait in a mousetrap, while history is being made.”

  He jumps up, opens a drawer on the desk, and sorts through its contents to retrieve a small glass vial.

  “Here. Another something I did not dare to destroy! Foolish. So, let’s make amends.”

  Quietly, hardly daring to breathe lest it change his mood, Livia watches him drop to his knees and roll back a corner of carpet to expose the wooden floor underneath.

  “Come, look,” he calls to her. “An experiment. A demonstration!”

  He waits until she has kneeled down beside him, then unscrews the mustard jar and shapes a tiny island of Soot onto the floor.

  “Observe,” he whispers, handing her the vial he retrieved from the desk. “What do you see?”

  The vial is smooth-bodied and cylindrical, narrowing to a thin neck at the top. It takes her a moment to understand it has no opening, no stopper. A liquid fills it, heavy as treacle, but water-clear. At the heart of this substance sits a single red drop.

  “What is it?” she matches his whisper. “Dye?”

  “Blood! Our very last drop. Vacuum sealed. Oh, how much did we waste until I found a way of preserving it!”

  “Whose blood? Mowgli’s?”

  But Sebastian only shakes his head, jumps up and runs to his bed in the other room, from which he retrieves a pipette that appears to be one of many instruments strewn amongst its blankets. Without pausing for breath, he resumes his position on the floor, takes the vial from her hands, and breaks off the whole of its neck; plunges the pipette into the gelatinous liquid within; and pulls up the scarlet drop into the pipette’s glass shaft. Then he ceases all movement and bows his head, as though in prayer. Beneath their knees the floorboards are dark with decades of old sin, long absorbed into their grain. On top, like a canker, sits the abomination her mother scraped off the skin of dying murderers, looking as though it is seeping its evil into the surrounding wood.

  “What is Soot?” Sebastian begins to question her, like a catechist checking her lessons, his chin still resting on his chest. His left hand has, quite naturally, sought out her knee and is petting it distractedly.

  “Spent Smoke,” she answers.

  “Is it live?”

  “No. Inert.”

  “Can it be quickened?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “You showed us how. Some chemical substance, mixed into the Soot.”

  “Herbal, my dear, not chemical. Precipitating a weak reaction! Only the blackest Soot, only briefly, and at tremendous cost. A field of flowers for a dozen cigarettes. And then? Three short puffs, and half an hour of borrowed emotion!”

  “Flowers? What flowers?” she interjects, confused, but Sebastian is too absorbed in his thoughts to answer.

  “Now then. Do you want to do the honours?” He looks up, smiles expectantly, then immediately discards the idea. “No, it’ll be better if I! Shall we? Only get ready to jump! On three: one, two…”

  He places the pipette into the little mound of Soot, releases the blood. The next moment he has pulled her up with him, and leapt two paces back.

  “Wait for it!” he mutters.

  Nothing stirs. Then, his elbow prodding hers with excitement, the Soot combusts, belches a violent jet of Smoke into the air, from which they flee into the corner of the room. Chest-high, the Smoke reverts to Soot; snows down in ashen flakes onto the floor only to reignite as though by magic, leaping up in jerky puffs, like kernels of corn thrown on a sizzling pan. Each little explosion carries with it a spray of lighter Smoke, the Soot of the floorboards whispered into pale life. It is as though the very room is exhaling its sin. Two, three times the cycle repeats. Then it ceases, quietly and suddenly. Nothing is left of the inky scoop they emptied on the floor. Sebastian runs over to it, crouches, runs his fingers over the patch of floorboard that lies pale and naked as though bleached.

  Livia stands breathless, her voice brittle with fear. “What just happened, Sebastian?”

  “A dress rehearsal. For the Great Quickening! But hush, now, hush.”

  “But that Soot you used. It’s evil!”

  “Oh yes, evil, pure as pure!”

  “And the blood. It was infected, wasn’t it?”

  “Infected, yes, but still fighting the infection. Neither one nor the other. The body rejecting its new state. A narrow window!”

  “So that’s what you want from Mowgli.” She raises her hands in front of her, fingers spread wide, as though trying to take hold of something floating in the air. “The Great Quickening! Tell me, how can that bring justice?”

  Sebastian does not answer, flips from his knees over to his bottom, sits there, hugging his knees, excited and happy. For a moment he has something of Charlie, full of the joy of being alive, here and now, partaking in things. The next moment his thoughts veer to dead children. His expression remains just the same. All she does is ask another question.

  “Whose blood was that in the vial?” she asks.

  This time he answers.

  “We called her Lilith. After Adam’s first wife. A feisty little mite! Cantankerous.” He smiles with the memory, fingers his bottle. “How we scoured the world for them, in the years we learned of their existence. All the best scientists of Europe: mounting expeditions to the farthest corners of the world. A new age of exploration. And how naïvely, how clumsily did we proceed. Walking into igloos with nothing but a scarf wrapped around our mouths, infecting whole tribes in the process. They died in droves. You see, most adults could not survive the anatomical adjustments initiated by the infection. Children though! There was our hope. And little Lilith: a lovely girl, pretty as a picture. She caught a cold, in the end, an ordinary cold! Your butler buried her, out in the woods. Your mother was heartbroken.”

  The Smoke jumps out of her in a cloud of rage, is immediately smothered by some other part in her, cooler and more calcula
ting, in need of further answers. Lilith is dead. Mowgli may still be alive. It is his blood her mother wants.

  “How much do you need?” she finds herself asking.

  He does not appear to have heard, sits on the ground and plays with Soot.

  “Ah, there’s the rub,” he mutters at length, letting some flakes rain from his fingertips. “Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. It seemed little enough on the chalkboard, when I did the maths.”

  Again she finds her mind reeling, starts walking abruptly, in demented circles, as though searching for sense through the geometry of movement. Her steps displace fresh motes of Soot that swirl around the hem of her dress, half harbingers, half retinue, as unsettled as she.

  “We saw a row of rectangles,” she says into their dance, still pacing, not looking at him, no longer able to bear the sight of his hale face. “On your secret map of the sewers. Pools, we think. What’s in those pools?”

  “Oh, it’s very clever, Miss Livia, very clever, if I say so myself. At first glance, a simple problem of filtration. Water, dirt, Soot. But the devil’s in the details!”

  She pictures it; imagines an aquarium as dark as her mustard jar, and a child’s open vein fertilising its mucoid tar. “The Great Quickening—you are making Juliuses!” she whispers, as though infected by Sebastian’s incoherence. Then—that part of her mind quite separate from her anger—she notices something in the fireplace: quite literally a scrap of hope. She drops to her knees, heat flushing her face.

  “I just cannot fathom it,” she says, no longer hopeful for an answer, wishing only to distract him, her fingers sorting through hot embers. “All along I thought you would end the Smoke. Why this? Release more darkness into the world? The streets will run with blood.”

  He takes a swig from his bottle before answering and emerges in a new stage of drunkenness: sadder, sentimental, sleepy.

  “Blood?” he repeats as though suddenly unfamiliar with the word, nods off, eyes slowly closing, a baby after his feed; then jerks upright with a thought: “And did you know that in France, at the height of the Terror, they built a temple to Reason and a new type of clock designed to tame the irrationality of time?”

  Drunkenly, dreamily, he begins lecturing her on the beauty of the decimal system and the division of the earth’s daily revolution into tenths. But Livia is no longer listening. She rises, stills the madness of her pulse.

  “You won’t help me find Mother,” she speaks into his flow of slurry eloquence. “Then I must leave.”

  She says it simply, despair replaced by purpose. A shred of paper is burning in her fist.

  ф

  Sebastian helps her, unexpectedly. Gathers himself up from the floor, the plum brandy finished, fetches his hat but not his coat, and offers to lead off the watchers to ensure her escape.

  “A perambulation! Ein Spaziergang. Why shouldn’t a man go for a midnight walk? If they pounce,” he continues, “I have this,” patting the bottle of laudanum poking out of his smoking jacket.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” he announces, opening the door and pressing his coin purse on her as though in thanks for an illicit assignation. “In a newborn world!

  “Black rain,” he confides, half shivering. “I have been dreaming of black rain. The wind blows northerly tonight. In from the sea!”

  She stands by the hallway window of the second floor and watches him emerge from the hotel’s front doors. He surveys the square, slowly and theatrically, then starts walking in a mincing, unsteady gait. Five yards on a giggle shakes his frame, and he darts to the left down the shadows of an alley. For a heartbeat nobody reacts. Then the men posted in the square all fling themselves into pursuit. Four men, rather than the three Thomas counted: one of the vagrants leaps up from his dirty blanket and joins the chase. A fifth man bursts from the hotel. Their departure is so conspicuous that it raises a cheer and laughter from the drunks, beggars, and ragamuffins that still populate the square. Livia takes it as her signal to leave. The stairwell is empty, the night porters standing in a huddle on the steps outside, wondering at the noise. Within a minute she stands breathless in the shadowy corner where she left Charlie and Thomas. They don’t see her at once, are absorbed in discussion, Charlie talking intently, soothingly at his friend. Thomas’s shoulders are hunched, his good arm raised in front of him, warding Charlie off. His hand is so swollen it looks like a mitt.

  They catch sight of her in the same instant. For all their differences their faces show the same expression. Concern. Relief. Love. She smiles despite herself and they each smile back; even Thomas, past his hurt. A moment’s happiness in the chaos of their lives. Then Livia does what has to be done.

  She spoils it.

  “I know what they are up to,” she says. And: “I have an address.” She unfolds the fist she made ten minutes ago. “He burnt this. Of all the papers he was reluctant to burn, he made sure to burn this!”

  They stare at the scrap of paper like it will provide salvation. It is ripped in half and scorched black, had floated up on the chimney’s hot draft and then got stuck upon the brickwork of the fireplace’s outer lip, the paper’s edge still fire-red and smouldering when she snatched it. Together they read the few legible words. A company name and a street address. “Ryman’s Fine Tobacco Products. Manufactory and Wholesale.” The opening line promises a detailed report on the progress made on the construction work performed within the factory cellars. The next line has been eaten by the flame.

  A cigarette factory. Construction in its cellar.

  A gateway to the sewers.

  “How will we find it?” asks Charlie.

  “Sebastian gave me money,” Livia answers, displaying the purse. “So I could ride home in a cab. We must hurry,” she adds. “Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. How much blood does a human child hold?”

  BERTA

  “It’s a dead end, sir. This one’s had it and that one won’t talk. And just look at the dog. It’s his scent she followed. And now she’s grieving over him.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  They came in without knocking, or at least I did not hear them. Suddenly they were there. Gentlemen in suits. And a crippled dog dragging its hindquarters on a little two-wheeled cart. It has been strapped to it with a belt. A fat man holds the leash.

  “He’s not dead,” I say again and this time my lips move with the words. I don’t want them to leave me alone again. Not while he—it—is still in the room.

  The fat man hears me. He walks over to the water jug and pours me a glass. While he watches me drink he orders one of his men to hold a mirror to its mouth.

  “I can hear ’im breathing,” I say. “He’s broken. But I can hear ’im breathing all the same.”

  The fat man nods as though he understands, pulls up a chair and sits next to me.

  “Tell me what happened here. We already know the half of it. Lady Naylor was here, and perhaps also her daughter. And a man came to visit, I should wager, a bookish man with a foreign accent.”

  She nods.

  “Do you live here alone?”

  “My ’usband is away.”

  “What about that boy over there?”

  I do not look where he is pointing.

  “He came here. I don’t know why. He hit me. But mostly he just held me. Held me close. His Smoke—” I break off. “He isn’t human.”

  The fat man nods, pats my hand, and asks me gently worded questions. I answer a surprising number. Somehow, it is good to talk.

  I do not tell them about my husband. Not about his condition, nor that he went along with her. Nor do I put into words what it has been like, sitting there, listening to it breathe, so faintly that half the time I convinced myself it was already dead. Sitting there, alone in the dark, listening, trying to pluck up the courage to cut its throat. I could have left, I suppose. It’s like it was when I was living with Father, yearning for escape. I could have left. Even before Tobias. But you never do, do you? You sit in the dark and endure.


  They revive him. It does not take much. They stand over him, pouring water on his face, shout at him, get angry, wreath him in faint Smoke. The next moment he sits up. Like a jack-in-the-box.

  The fat man bends down to him, asks question after question. It’s like his gut is filled with them. The one on the ground has no face anymore, just a swollen mess, the tongue disturbingly bright within its blackness. But he speaks clearly enough.

  “I know where she is,” he says. “He will be heading there.” Then, with intense purpose: “Mother. She betrayed me. I can take you to her.”

  “Can you walk?” the fat man asks.

  The thing that was once a young man rises, stands slope-shouldered as though hanging from a nail.

  “I can take you to her,” he says again. “To Mother. And to him. You and I, Trout. Just us two. Only make sure to bring a gun.”

  The Smoke that spreads from him is almost liquid. It gathers in a film around his fancy boots.

  The fat man considers the offer. But it is obvious he will agree. What else is he going to do—beat the truth out of this thing?

  “I’ll need one of my men, Mr. Spencer. Just one. Any one of them will do. You can take your pick.”

  It does not hesitate, raises one twisted arm and points to a man with a slight, wiry frame.

  “That one. He broke Nótt’s legs, didn’t he? Bring him. And remember the gun.”

  The fat man nods and orders another of the men to pass over the shotgun to their colleague. He is about to say more but it is already moving, heading for the door with surprising speed. The walk is like a marionette’s. The body is broken, but some other thing moves it along. It makes no sound as it scuttles down the stairs.

  The man with the gun and the fat man follow, leaving the rest of his men behind. There are three of them, standing in my kitchen, at a loss. They have not received any orders. It takes them a full minute to even frame the problem in words; one man rifling through the cupboards, looking, he says, “for a bite to eat.” Then they begin to argue. One maintains that they must take me into custody; another declares that they are “duty-bound to return to our post.” The third man insists that they must follow the chief, “quickly, on the sly” and that they have “wasted too much time already.” They argue as though they are playing cards, each placing his argument neatly before his mates, at once friendly and competitive. In the end they have waited too long to follow anyone and are too lazy or too principled to arrest an old, beaten woman. They leave me without a word and forget to close the front door behind themselves.