by Dan Vyleta
Charlie himself starts moving. As he draws closer he comes to understand his destination. Mowgli. Grendel. The gun. Even so, his eyes are locked onto Livia and Thomas. The former has fallen to her knees by Lady Naylor’s side; is untangling her mother’s face from the mass of undone hair and soon finds her hands bloodied. As for the latter: for a moment Charlie thinks that it is fear that drives Thomas to such haste. He killed Julius earlier that night; broke him, not one breath rising out of the wreckage of his body. And yet he rose, a dark Christ. Who is to say he will not rise again; jerk up and scuttle off into the dark? But then Charlie sees Thomas tug at Julius, pull his emaciated arms halfway through the bars. Thomas is not checking for movement. He is trying to shake Julius awake. Let him rise, his action seems to be saying. Let him scuttle. It would acquit Thomas of something at least.
And on Charlie walks, steadily, mechanically, as though in a dream. He passes Livia; sees that Lady Naylor is alive, sees her daughter trying to revive her first with words then with frightened little slaps, to the good cheek, the other mangled by lacerations and welts. Livia’s eyes plead for his help but Charlie has a more urgent destination. Here, near the table, the ground is covered in glass shards. They crunch at his every step. He reaches the table, the gun; pockets it and feels some tension fall from him. Next to it a beaker of blood rests calmly on the table; two steps away, Grendel is rocking his charge, fingers spread along Mowgli’s back. From this angle, it looks as though two heads are rising from his trunk, one old and kindly, the other childish, mottled by fever but mirroring the other in its boundless calm. It is this calm that thrusts the Smoke back into Charlie’s lungs and colours his breath with the plume of disgust.
“You shot him,” he says needlessly, the words drifting over to Grendel and the boy in a sulphur haze and moving through them without a ripple. “We argued about it once. Whether it is possible to kill a man righteously, without Smoke.” Then Charlie adds, quietly, angrily: “I did not think then that it would be so horrible.”
But when Grendel turns to look at Charlie, the angel’s face is as placid as ever, untouched by doubt or self-reproach.
“Hush now,” he says. “You will frighten the child.”
Charlie looks at him and cannot bear it. He turns away, back to his friends. For a second there is a sort of lull. Everything that has urged them here is resolved. The boy is alive, Grendel disarmed, Sebastian’s plot defeated. Their triumph is mocked by a sound, a quiet mewing. It takes Charlie some moments to realise it issues from Lady Naylor; to interpret it as the sound of acute distress.
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“What’s wrong with her? Is she shot?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And the blood?”
“Cuts on her face and arms. The gun hit the bottle, I think. The big bottle of Soot standing on the table. There is a cut near her left eye, but it isn’t very deep.”
“Then why is she like this?”
In truth Lady Naylor is irrational with pain. She is lying on her belly and is crawling through the shard-spiked mud of the floor. Initially Charlie thinks she is heading towards her son; that it is his death that has deranged her so. But her gaze never strays to where Thomas continues to minister to the dead. It is riveted instead on the ground, her hands picking up glass shards and clawing at little pools of Soot. The left side of her face hangs in shreds, a flap of skin literally cut loose above the cheekbone and bleeding freely, the rest swelling fast. Charlie steps over to her, arrests the movement of her arms by taking hold of her wrists.
“Are you injured?”
“All lost,” she whispers in response. Her lips are pale, the same colour as her teeth. It makes it hard for Charlie to concentrate on her words. “Scattered. No good. We barely had enough as it was.”
Charlie ignores her words, tries to pull her up, hears her emit a yelp of intense pain. He lowers her down again, lies her on her back, her head in his lap.
“Your leg?” he asks, studying the focussed stillness of her limbs. “Were you shot in the leg?”
Lady Naylor shakes her head. “Got a fright. Slipped. Broken hip. Or maybe the femur.”
Charlie nods, points behind himself. “It was Headmaster Trout and his man. Julius was with them. Your son is dead, Lady Naylor. I am very sorry.”
She does not appear to have heard, starts shivering, then mumbling to herself.
“All lost,” she says again. “An imperial gallon! But Julius stole half. Half! Barely enough. Now scattered, useless; lost, lost, lost.”
Charlie looks down at her, trying to make sense of her gibberish. Livia kneels by his side and transfers the weight of Lady Naylor’s head to her own lap. She has fetched the bottle and glass that have survived unscathed on their perch by the armchair and has poured out a measure of port. Her mother drinks the sugary liquid in greedy little sips, while Charlie disentangles himself, stands up, and studies the table and room, alive to a new thought.
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The bullet must have hit the bottle right at the centre. Or perhaps it was buckshot rather than a bullet, a dozen lead pellets ripping into its thick glass. All that remains of it atop the table is the sphere of its base, finger-thick. Around it, the tablecloth is filthy with Soot, but much must have flown beyond it, in a spray of deepest black, and has been absorbed into the spongy, muck-slick ground. Beyond the table, the pellets have peppered a large metal box from whose innards emerges the cable that feeds the lamps above. Other than that the table is virtually undisturbed, especially at its far end, where stands the chair into which Mowgli was strapped. A tin bucket with clear water sits next to this chair, a wet flannel folded over its rim. It must have been used to manage the child’s fever. Still wrestling with his thought, Charlie picks up this bucket, offers Livia the flannel, then pours the water carelessly onto the ground before walking to the side of the filtration pool closest to them.
The pool is filled to within inches of its rim. Scooping up a bucketful proves easy. Frustrated by the flickering light, Charlie carries it to the glow of Trout’s gas lamp that shines from beyond the iron bars; has to wrestle with nausea before plunging his hand into its darkness; feels the particles of Soot, like silt suspended in a murky pond; scoops up a palmful and studies it. A shadow leans over him, Thomas bending to see what he has found. Soot quivers in the upturned cup of Charlie’s hand. It is very dark.
But it is not black.
They exchange a glance: of confusion on Charlie’s side; of mournful anger on Thomas’s.
Next Charlie knows, Thomas has turned his back on him and is marching to the prone figure of Lady Naylor.
Charlie follows hard on his heels.
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Charlie has watched Thomas take on many roles the past few days. First bloodhound, relentless in his search for clues; then martyr and demon, descending into the darkness of his being; repentant killer, suspended between self-hatred and apathy. Now Thomas turns inquisitor. He has rediscovered the sharp edge of his anger, or perhaps just turned it outward, like a knife he’s found stuck between his ribs. He walks it to the table first, this anger; collects the little beaker of blood, crouches down before Lady Naylor. Livia has thrown back her mother’s skirts, exposing the undergarments. Lady Naylor’s leg, beneath her hose, is so swollen it looks like a football has been strapped to her outer thigh. Neither Charlie nor Thomas looks away as Livia continues her examination. Thomas bends over milady, trying to see into her face, then gestures to Charlie to prop her up, no matter what pain it may cause her. She is pale and conscious; the right side of her face handsome, the left risen like dough. Thomas holds the beaker to the eye that has not swollen shut.
“Mowgli’s blood,” he begins. “Fifty to eighty hours into infection. Sebastian told Livia it took two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. Four pints or thereabouts. But this is less than half a glass.”
Lady Naylor watches him and almost smiles: ashen gums, one corner of her mouth tucked deep into the swelling.
“Fifty millimetr
es. Five thimblefuls.” A cough that stands in for a laugh. “Did you think I was a vampire, Thomas?”
“We thought you devoid of scruples, milady.”
She accepts this, closes her good eye, opens it again with a flash of pride. “It is true. I have none.”
“Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres,” Thomas continues, unmoved. “Livia misunderstood. Sebastian meant Soot not blood. And you have been crying over a bottle. Your son is dead and you are mourning dirt. Worse than dirt: bygone murders, harvested with the scrape of your razor. In the armpits. Under the tongue.” Thomas gags, spits a pearl of phlegm onto the ground, watches it steam as though the floor is a griddle. “What’s so special about that Soot, Lady Naylor? You built a whole sewer system to gather vice. You must have a hundred thousand gallons right there.”
When Lady Naylor, shaken by a spasm of pain, does not answer at once, Charlie does so for her, looking down at the murky mess he scooped out of the pool.
“The Soot in the sewers is not dark enough. Even now that it is filtered! For whatever it is you are planning, only murderers’ Soot will do.”
Lady Naylor shivers, masters herself. “Not just murderers’ Soot, Charlie. It’s much purer than that: the darkest passions of the heart, with all humanity removed. I had to pick through my harvests grain by grain. Not ten percent was usable. It’s the blackest Soot ever assembled. In bulk it becomes liquid.”
Charlie watches Thomas reel at this, form fists. “You gathered an imperial gallon. You said that just now. But the bottle was not much more than half that. Julius took the rest?”
She nods, holds Thomas’s gaze. It is his turn to shiver.
“It explains what he has become. And I.”
Thomas says it and sighs, his anger exhausted, leaving him younger and tired. It’s Charlie who presses on.
“I still don’t understand, Lady Naylor. Why? What were you planning? Why build these pools? None of it makes sense.”
She slumps, seems to drift into her pain, then jerks out of it with sudden animation.
“I can show you, Charlie. Give me Mowgli’s blood. Just a drop. You will see for yourself.”
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It’s a trick. It must be, for Lady Naylor is evil, wants to drown the world in bloody revolution.
Or is she? Looking at her—pale, beat-up, courageous—Charlie finds it hard to believe that her ambitions were so crude, and so prosaic. That, and there is the matter of her sadness. “I have already failed,” she keeps saying into their hesitation. “Nothing can change that. So please. One drop. I just want to see.”
They look to one another, Thomas, Charlie, and Livia, weighing their distrust. At long last Livia takes the beaker out of Thomas’s hand. She turns to her mother, her face savage.
“Tell me what to do,” she whispers. And: “Don’t you dare lie to me, Mother. Not this time.”
Lady Naylor nods, revived by expectation.
“The bucket first,” she instructs her daughter. “Just one drop.”
“I know what will happen. Sebastian showed me.”
All the same Livia kneels down next to the bucket, unstoppers the glass, and cautiously pours a single drop over its lip. It drops from sight, into the dark of the bucket. The next moment Livia scrambles away. They wait, one breath, two breaths, five.
Nothing happens.
“Soot is slow to quicken. The lighter it is, the harder it is. Sebastian filtered it, the city’s vice, the darkest Soot here, getting lighter pool by pool. Decades upon decades of London’s anger and plight. If we carried down the vats of solvent from the factory above we might be able to quicken some fraction of it. But with Mowgli’s blood, it takes a purer sort of Soot to initiate the reaction.”
Lady Naylor tries to sit up, winces, points at an ink-black stain three feet from her hip, still clinging to a shard of glass like honey to a spoon. It is so very dark it looks like a hole cut in the ground.
“Now try it there, Livia. Please.”
Again Livia stares at her with great ferocity; again she finds herself compelled by curiosity to walk to the smear and tilt the beaker. Charlie walks over with her, steadies her hand.
“I need to know,” Livia says as though in apology. “What she was up to. Whether she is telling the truth.”
Charlie nods, catches Thomas’s eye, watches the drop fall into the Soot as though into a void.
What happens next is hard to make sense of. Livia tried describing it to them, but it is one thing to hear of a firework and quite another to see it. For a moment all is still. Then the Soot ignites in a plume of vile black. They recoil, watch it spread like a miniature bushfire, setting alight minuscule deposits of Soot long grown into the ground: threads of Smoke scurrying like beetles across the floor, no longer just black but many hued; clambering up the legs of the table, diving into the gaps between the worn brick; jumping into the bucket to raise a rainbow-coloured flag of Smoke. Here and there other droplets of pure Soot ignite, each setting off chain reactions of their own, volatile, then dead within a yard. They stand amongst this crazed resurrection, imbibing its flavours, soon answering with their own native Smokes, joy, anger, fear, and pangs of desire tangling them up within their webs. It is like a hushed conversation conducted by their bodies: shameless, honest, intimate, bypassing both brains and tongues. It is a conversation not free of anger and want; but also rich, immediate, generous: a brazen sharing of the self. In the midst of all this, unmoved, unmovable, stands Grendel, comforting the child strapped to his chest. Never before has Charlie been struck by his isolation as much as now. For just a moment, still smoking, he pities the man with all his heart.
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It takes several minutes for the last of the Smoke to die down. Two or three times they think it dead, when a step from them a new plume—pink, yellow, brown—rises and sets off another network of threads. The Smoke runs out of energy, subsides, then jumps back to life ten inches hither; makes a half-yard’s gain only to burn itself out. In the end all Smoke is gone, and Soot rains down on them under the flickering light of the bulbs. When Charlie turns to Lady Naylor he sees that she is crying.
“There,” she says. “The end of our dreams. It took me three years to collect that Soot; many months to refine it. Mowgli’s blood will soon lose its properties. If we had been able to access my lab, we could have preserved it in its present state. But here—we don’t have the tools. We could find another child, I suppose, another innocent. But there may be none left.” She speaks to Charlie then, who is standing closest and has bent to listen; speaks confidentially and sadly, eloquent in her defeat. “So it will be your father’s world, Charlie, or else Renfrew’s. Either the smug hypocrisy of the rich or the pitiless straitjacket of self-surveillance. Which one will you choose?”
But Charlie only looks at her blankly.
“What dream exactly, Lady Naylor? What in the hell have you been cooking up down here?”
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But in truth Charlie already knows, or at any rate he has guessed it. He looks to Livia as he begins putting it in words; looks to Thomas, each of them chewing the same thought.
“Most Soot is slow to quicken. It’s like wet fire logs, impossible to light. Only dark Soot will catch. So you collected the darkest Soot that you could find. A full gallon of it, just to be safe.” He gestures to where the bottle of Soot stood on the table, waits until he has registered Lady Naylor’s nod of confirmation. “But the point is not merely to quicken black Soot. It’s to change it, make it volatile. That’s where Mowgli’s blood comes in. It does something special, something the stuff used on cigarettes does not do. It starts a chain reaction. The Quickening spreading like ripples around a dropped pebble. Self-perpetuating, on and on: the Soot in the bottle acting as kindling, setting alight the Soot in the darkest pool, which in turn will set alight the pool farther down, and on and on, until even the weakest Soot has caught and carries the spark. But where will it go, all the Smoke in this chamber? There are no chimneys after all, nothing
to connect it to the city.” He pauses, pictures again the map Thomas drew, the intricate web of lines, all connected, all leading in one final direction. “It’s not just a filtration system, is it, Lady Naylor? It’s a fuse! The pools lead back to the sewers. And the sewers lead back to the river.” Charlie swallows, thinks it through. “So the Thames would have caught; it is filthy with Soot. As are its tributaries; the groundwater and wells. Perhaps the ocean itself would have started smoking.”
“Black rain,” whispers Livia into his sudden silence. “Sebastian said he’s been dreaming of black rain. It’s monstrous, Mother.”
Lady Naylor stares back at her daughter and refuses to hang her head in shame.
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It’s Thomas who picks up the thread. A practical mind, his. He is not interested in fuses and chain reactions; the physics of Smoke. He wants to know what it would have done to the world. And to himself.
“An age of darkness, then, Lady Naylor. Britain drowning in self-perpetuating Smoke. Chaos; murder; villainy. I should have done well in this world, only I would have grown skinny like your son over there, too mad to remember eating. Perhaps there will be many of us, stumbling about, muttering gibberish, violence in our wakes. The Last Judgement, eh?” He stops, squats in front of Lady Naylor, stares into her disfigured face. “You must be very disappointed with the world to punish it thus.”
But milady simply shakes her head. “It wouldn’t have to be like that, Thomas. You misunderstand Smoke. No monsters. Just a people receiving passion, in all its many shades. A month of carnivals. The death of Discipline. The reinvention of God.”
Thomas scoffs, looks at the darkness of the pools behind him.
“No monsters? Not even one?”
Lady Naylor does something unexpected then. She cups Thomas’s face in the palm of her hand. He winces but does not recoil.