by Dan Vyleta
“How will we ever stop her?” Charlie whispers, faced with this new magic.
Livia’s answer is curt. “We must try.”
Thomas is aware of a mixture of shame and relief when he sees her take the lead; of a flare of timid anger when she reaches back and takes hold of Charlie’s hand. Charlie, in turn, stretches his free palm behind himself, looking for his friend’s. Thomas ignores the gesture.
He follows warily, at two steps’ remove.
ф
It isn’t far. A hundred yards of sewer, thrice stripped of its murk by a bulb holding the same mysterious, unflickering light; then an archway opens to a room so long it too feels like a corridor, though it measures a good ten yards in width. The room is built from dark brick, ancient and porous, the mortar worn like a petrified sponge. The ceiling is low above their heads and supported by steel girders, much newer than the brick. A garland of lamps, interconnected by a black line of rubber cable, marks the central axis, from the archway through which they enter, to the far end, hundreds of feet ahead. Beneath these lamps, filling three quarters of the room and only leaving a narrow strip of walking space at either side, lies a series of interconnected pools, tiled in shiny, almost fluorescent green. Each pool is separated from the next by a permeable membrane made of some waxy cloth. Only the top foot of the tiles is visible. The water that stands heavy in the pools beneath is mirror-dark. It is as though a communal baths has been pumped full of ink. All this Thomas sees in passing, following his friends on the long march to the other end. Lady Naylor is there; and Grendel; and Mowgli, tied with belts to a heavy wooden chair.
She notices them within ten steps. There is no cover, just the open narrow passage between wall and poolside. They are walking slowly on the wet, uneven ground, sunk and cracked in places, smeared with sewage muck. Thomas sees Lady Naylor squint; sees her hand flicker for something, raise it up before her chest, then drop it to her lap upon recognition. Each step reveals a new detail. Lady Naylor has made herself cozy amongst the dirt; she is sitting in an armchair, a wineglass and a bottle on a coffee table by her side. It’s a wonder she has not brought her slippers. By her other elbow, a worktable, made presentable by means of a starched tablecloth and laden with various instruments. The dark shape of her Soot bottle rises amongst them. At the other end of the table, Grendel stoops over the boy, assiduously wiping his brow. Halfway across the length of the room, Thomas begins to make out Mowgli’s face, sweaty and feverish, and the spasmodic shivers that pit his little body against the restraints. He thinks of Renfrew’s dentist chair; of Renfrew’s niece as described by Charlie; and wonders darkly whether there exists a world in which children are not bent to purpose by a strap. Something—a needle?—grows like a mechanical tumour out of the boy’s naked flank, at the height of the liver. Grendel is fussing with it: solicitous, chin curled into chest, as though bowing to the child.
It’s another ten steps before Livia starts speaking. She has to shout: the spongy walls soak up all sound. It is Grendel she is addressing, not her mother. Thomas, behind her, walks through her anger as through morning mist.
“You lied to me, Grendel!” she shouts and they watch him flinch with a second’s delay. “But what is worse, you lied to Mowgli. He trusted you. Now look at him. Why are you hurting him?”
Grendel stares across the forty, fifty steps still separating them, flaps one hand, unchanged in the mildness of his gestures.
“He has a fever, you see. Lady Naylor says his organs are changing. But not to worry, it will be over soon.”
“She wants to bleed him, Grendel. Bleed him dry. And you are helping her.” Then bitterly, Livia’s Smoke coming thick now and settling in frothy billows on the uneven floor: “They were right about you all along. You are a monster, Grendel. You were supposed to love him.”
He looks back at her, crestfallen, baffled. Perhaps there is to his sloping neck also a hint of doubt, of regret. Across the distance, in this eerie light, it is possible to imagine all manner of things into a face, a posture. Grendel bends down to the needle growing out the child’s emaciated torso, opens some kind of valve and releases a thin flow of blood into the glass chamber at its top. If Lady Naylor has been impassive through the exchange, she rises from her chair now, something heavy and metallic dangling from one fist.
“Oh how melodramatic, Livia. But come, leave Mr. Grendel alone. It’s me you are angry with.” She moves forward a step as though to hasten their approach, opens her arms in welcome. “You will have to tell me how you found me here. But really, I am glad. The dawn of a new world. We shall welcome it together.”
Twenty more yards. Thomas sees it all clearly now. The tiny, short-snubbed, two-barrelled gun that burdens Lady Naylor’s gesture of welcome, tilts it sideways to the right; the bottle of black Soot standing on the table as though ready for decanting for their final supper; Grendel testing the drops of blood within the vial with a strip of yellow paper that, upon contact, instantly turns blue. And above all he sees Mowgli, Mowgli’s face, looking up at his tormenter with an awful expression of hope and appeal, of trust misplaced, the eyes swollen and glossy with his fever.
“The paper. It turned blue!” Grendel calls to Lady Naylor. “It is as you said. Mowgli’s blood, it’s active. May I undo his straps?”
Lady Naylor answers without turning. “Soon. First open the valve as I have shown you.”
And just like that—at the mention of a valve, as though a child were a keg, or a steam engine, ripe for the draining—something returns to Thomas, a sense of urgency misplaced amongst self-pity and doubt, and the next thing he knows he has shouldered aside his friends and is running, then stumbling, falling across the age-eaten floor, scrambling back up to his feet.
He is not aware of the words Lady Naylor is shouting at him, nor does he know whether his friends follow; is charging towards her tall figure, his head and shoulders lowered for a rugby tackle, and a fine trail of Smoke fluttering behind like the tails of a coat.
He gets to within six or seven steps. Then Thomas’s toe catches, and a shot sounds. In the dull, dead air of the chamber it is like the clap of two wet hands. Ahead: a shout, a spray of blood, or perhaps of Soot; the chandelier tinkle of broken glass; then the tidal surge of darkness, as one after the other, with a fraction’s delay, the bulbs above the pools give out, each with the dull plop of a cork plugged from its bottleneck.
The ground ploughs into Thomas and empties his lungs of all their air.
WITCHFINDER GENERAL
Julius leads us to a sewer entrance not ten minutes’ walk from the flat. It’s an unmarked stone slab covering a manhole in the corner of a dirty yard. The slab must weigh forty pounds but Julius, broken-limbed, listing, labours it aside without asking for help. Underneath, a shaft leads straight down, its circumference roughly equal to my girth. An iron ladder is screwed into the brick. I am winded from the pace Julius has set, crablike, scuttling sideways down the streets, and gesture for him to wait. He does but spurns repose; paces the alley from wall to wall. Watching him—his jerky movements, the way he twists his neck too far around the anchor of his trunk; remembering that this was once my student, a boy placed in my care—makes me sick to my fat stomach. My man, Boswell, appears immune to such queasiness. He kept both lamp and gun trained on our guide as we followed him and now descends the shaft first, so as to cover Julius from the bottom while he climbs. Myself, I carry my Colt stuck in its holster on my belt. The thought of drawing it fills me with dread.
The shaft is perhaps fifteen feet deep. At its bottom lie the sewers. For the past few days, I have been sending men down here. Spies. Ever since I learned that Ashton was Aschenstedt; that Parliament, in its infinite wisdom, had given a terrorist the mandate to clean up the former capital. I imagined the sewers to be an orderly thing: a system of tunnels, with waste running down their centre. What they reported was a web, a maze. Old tunnels and new, lying at different depths in the earth, cross-connected by vertical shafts and silo-like chambers. Neig
hbourhood cesspools five storeys deep, tapped and drained by Aschenstedt’s men. Steam-powered drills; sluices and locks; water pumps the size of grain silos sitting in purpose-built chambers; exhaust pipes leading to air vents above. It would take a team of engineers a month to make sense of it all. My lads are many things, but engineers they are not.
Now that we reach the bottom of the shaft, however, I see none of this complexity. A slimy tunnel smelling of the privy, that’s all. Within ten steps we roust a nest of rats. Julius leads the way as before, hurtling ahead, straining against the edge of Boswell’s lamplight like a hound on a leash. I am not sure whether he is following a trail or already knows our destination. At times he pauses at intersections and stands sniffing the foul air. Once, he leans against the wall and darts his tongue across its mould. Then he is off again, always with the same jerky, marionette movements and attended by the cape of his Smoke. My watch has stopped, won’t be wound. We have stepped beyond time.
I ask Julius where he is leading us.
“Ahead,” he says without modulation, the broken jaw flapping with the word.
Ahead. So be it: in the name of the state. Like me, Julius has now become its servant. The state is not choosy; enlists whatever tool is fit to its purpose; cares not for the tool’s own motivations, or rather enlists those too, weaving them into the fabric of its needs. For what does he want, this broken, nightmare boy? Why does he lead us with such haste? Revenge on Thomas, I suppose; matricide. Whenever I mention Mr. Argyle or Lady Naylor, a darkness spills out of him that I try my best not to inhale. My man, Boswell, catches it once or twice: the whites of his eyes are turning dun. Julius, I realise, is not mad. He is that thing from which madness is knit.
We arrive at last. Or rather, we get close. Then a barrier stops us, a grate of wrist-thick, vertical bars set wide enough apart to admit an arm and shoulder but little more than that. A bright light, oddly flat and lifeless, throws the grate’s shadow across our approaching forms. I gesture to Boswell to set our lamp down on the ground, then squeeze my stomach against the bars; lean my cheek on their rusty cold. Our position is such that I can see but a small part of the space before us: a cavern, a worktable, the slender neck and pinned-up hair of Lady Naylor. Her torso and legs are hidden by the backrest of her armchair and even her head is more than half obscured by a steel girder that supports the ceiling midway between her and us. The table next to her is laden with instruments and beakers, most prominently the bulbous form of a glass jug heavy with tar. At the far end of the table, in a clear line of sight, is the hunched form of a man tending to a child. The man is nondescript: a greengrocer with a sloping neck; the cheeks fleshy and florid. The child is foreign, brown-skinned, strapped to its chair. Only the head is visible, rises above the tabletop to the base of the neck. Captain van Huysmans’s demon is looking poorly; his mouth wide open, tufts of hair coming loose above the ear. It is as though he is moulting, a new boy being born out of his sweat and pain.
ф
We do not even attempt to break down the grating. Its ends are cemented straight into ceiling and floor. It would take an hour and a pickax to get us through. Thus there is only one thing to be done. Boswell knows it too. When I turn to look at him he has already cocked his rifle.
“Where do I shoot?” he asks. He is speaking softly but there is in his voice a note of expectation.
“Mother,” the marionette-boy says. “Punish Mother.”
He sounds like a child wheedling for a sweet; points with a finger broken at the knuckle, bending sideways where a finger must not bend.
“Mother. Mama. Now, now, now!”
His tongue in Boswell’s ear.
But Boswell hesitates. “Difficult shot,” he says at last. “Girder’s in the way.” And, after a pause: “How about the child?”
And God help me, I know in my gut he is right. If we want to stop this (whatever this is), put an end to this infernal plot, it is by far the safest option. The child is the key. Aschenstedt and Lady Naylor paid a fortune to have him smuggled into the country. Even now she is looking to the boy, waiting for something, some revelation or event. Once he is eliminated, we can arrest her at our leisure. She is a lady of the peerage, she has the right to a trial. Not so the child. And after all, it is our duty. For Queen and country; for the good of the state. It wills it. We must obey.
Boswell is looking to me with his Smoke-curdled eyes. An impatient look. He is awaiting the order from his commanding officer. I look straight back. Beyond the bars, in a part of the room we cannot see, a voice calls out, the words swallowed by distance. Lady Naylor rises and answers; her hand discloses a snub-nosed gun. She steps, gestures, commands. A patrician voice.
Her son’s Smoke is filling our lungs.
Boswell tastes it, licks it, decides. His finger curls around the trigger. My hand slaps the barrel when the bullet is already racing along inside: I feel the hot quiver of its passage. It is treason then and nothing less, the deliberate betrayal of my mission. Borne of what? Of decency, I suppose, a distaste for death. It appears the witchfinder in me has lost his callous love of justice. I have been a headmaster for far too long.
The shot is deafening. The bullet hits the table, an explosion of glass. Then everything happens very fast. Boswell is working the bolt for a second shot when Julius takes the gun away from him. He does not wrestle it free or even wrench it: he simply takes it into his broken hands. Takes it, turns it, swings it, and buries it inch-deep in Boswell’s face. The man is dead before he hits the ground. A black cloud leaps out of him and straight up Julius’s chest like a dog changing masters. Then Julius turns the gun on me.
He gives me time to draw my Colt. God only knows what thought is running through him now: in his face not hatred but sulky petulance at not having had his way. I fumble for the holster, tear free the revolver but cannot thread my finger through the hole. In the end I let it drop. It falls and spins between my toes.
Julius shoots me. He shoots me in my fat gut, just where my belt runs across the navel. I fall almost as an afterthought and watch him stand over me, his mouth wide open and the lips curled back across his toothless gums, savouring the Smoke that is rising from my wound like steam out of a heating pipe. Where it passes through his body, it changes colour and doubles in intensity; unfurls behind him like a flag. Julius stands and drinks me and works the lever for a second shot.
Then something steps up behind him. He wears the bluff features of a greengrocer. I know at once he is not human. He does not smoke. He stands on the far side of the metal bars, not a foot away from Julius; stands in the boy’s Smoke, the very thick of his Smoke, and adds no Smoke of his own. A kind face, seen up close: fleshy, balding, ruddy. The grocer threads his arm through the bars. Milady’s gun is in his hand: a Beretta, double-barrelled, decorations beaten into the steel of its short snout. Its tip touches Julius’s neck.
There is a pause, a moment of conspiracy, a wish asked and granted, as boy and grocer share a look. Two monsters from adjacent pits; one smokeless, one dripping with raw need. Then the shot rings out. As he falls, I notice something in Julius’s Smoke, something so essential to it, so all-pervasive, that I did not notice it before. It is the very solvent in which all his evil is suspended. Self-loathing, a hunger for his own destruction; a desperate desire to find rest. Julius drops forward, into the bars; kneels before the grocer. The man turns to me. The gun turns with him. It points calmly at my bulk.
He will shoot me too. I can see it in his face. He’ll do it calmly, benignly, without passion or ego, not for himself, not from anger, not from triumph or because he is possessed by a truth; simply because I can do harm to him and his while alive, and none dead.
Then he sees I am already dead and turns away. I look after him with dread and admiration. Perhaps his kind are the future. It might please the state.
The grocer will make it a good servant.
FUSE
And so they are made to watch Julius die a second time. It is a sort of shado
w play, something a favourite uncle would project upon a bedroom wall to amuse the children with the clever shapes of his hands; happens off-centre, backlit by the weak light of a gas lamp, turned low and placed on the ground somewhere behind the players’ bulk. Grendel’s shot that closes the play rips the half-light like a fork of lightning. As though in answer, first one, then several of the lamps above their heads flutter back to intermittent life, oscillating between a bromide darkness and flashes of dull yellow.
Within Charlie’s arms, Livia is writhing, fighting his embrace. He does not remember grabbing hold of her, pulling her head into the flimsy safety of his chest. She wants to run over to where her mother lies lifeless in the dirt. A few steps ahead of them, Thomas is picking himself off the ground. Farther ahead, Grendel places the pistol on the table—a tool discarded—and bends to free Mowgli from his straps. He removes the needle from his body and, along with it, a small beaker now filled with the boy’s lifeblood; stoppers the beaker and places it carefully upon the table, inches from the gun, before strapping the feverish child into a cloth sling that he fastens across his chest and hip.
It is only when Grendel steps away from table and gun that Charlie releases Livia, all the time conscious of the confusion in her Smoke. She darts away from him, catches up with Thomas who himself has started moving. For two steps they run abreast, touching elbows for comfort. Then their paths separate. Livia is heading to her mother, Thomas to the dead schoolmate of theirs who hangs tangled in iron bars like a fish within its netting: down on his knees, his ashen head stuck through the grating, arms thrown outward at a messianic angle. Beyond Julius lies a man with a beaten-in face and a fleshy mound that was Headmaster Trout.