by Dan Vyleta
He looks over at her, appealing for something—help, reassurance, support—and is met by her indifference. She has no time for childhood reminiscence. A storm has eaten her friends.
“Here,” she says, not looking at Mowgli, “come and see.”
He steps over sulkily. She positions him, tilts his chin to the right angle. He struggles, does not like to be touched.
“What? Bad weather. This is a well-appointed ship. I am sure we will be just fine.”
She raises her arm, points at the heart of the storm, at that dense mass of cloud made solid upon the plane of sunlit water, cutting in half the world. There, stitched into the fabric of its density, towers a strip of unrelenting darkness, black, not grey. It is as though a strip of sky has been tarred before it was painted, and its blackness is now bleeding through the dye.
“What is it?”
She frowns, shoves the photograph into his hands. London, ten years ago. A pillar like a black spear thrown from the heavens deep into the earth; the Thames a greasy ribbon, unspooling itself behind.
Mowgli stares at the photograph; looks back out the window, where the same pillar stands shrouded amongst clouds.
“A Black Storm? But that’s impossible. Not out at sea. Not now.”
Eleanor does not argue with him. They both were there, in Britain, at the time. They heard the rumours, saw the refugees. The Storms rose up in the south and swept the land, not always moving with the wind. One took care of Cambridge, Ely, the Norfolk coast. Another swept Stafford off the map.
“Did you see the other ship?” she asks. “My friends are on it. The Storm has caught them.”
“Then they are dead.”
Mowgli says it so simply, so starkly, that anger curls out of her and straight into his skin. He bristles, then is made to gorge upon her grief; chokes on the force of her emotion. A twist at her breast, at that invisible key still jutting from the bone, and Eleanor shuts herself off, releasing him from her anguish.
“It’s closing fast now,” she says, sounding as sober and cool as the man who raised her in his image. “It’ll have us very soon. Smith must pass out his sweets. They might help protect us, if only for a moment or two.”
“He doesn’t have any. Unless he keeps them in his inner cabin. But there are none in the hold. I have seen Smoke masks”—here Mowgli gestures to the trunks and cases behind them—“but only two.” He walks over to them, digs through them, comes up empty. “They are gone.”
Eleanor thinks it through.
“The captain and the chief engineer. That’s whom he’s given them to. So they keep the ship going, no matter what.”
“And he himself?”
“He protects himself. I don’t know how.”
“And us?”
She shrugs, turns to the window, almost pressing her face against the glass. In a moment Mowgli is next to her, a little taller, his chin to her cheekbone.
Together they watch the Storm steal up onto their wake.
[ 12 ]
It starts with darkness and the sudden buckling of the world, deprived of any stable up and down. This is the outer edge of the Storm, delivering a premature dusk and heavy seas; the crazed howl of its gale. Metal pops all around them as the ship turns tin can, thin-skinned and hollow. Eleanor draws to the door, looks out into the hallway: sees the bulbs swing in their casements, the swill of water racing to each trough dug by the boiling sea; hears the ocean crash onto the deck above, then pour spumous down the hatches. Soon something else begins to register on her, a kind of scent evaluated by her skin and lungs and the organs of digestion, not yet visible upon the air. The ship is burning, it comes to her, but she at once corrects the thought. The sailors are burning. They have entered the black of the Storm.
When the first of the screaming starts up on deck, she comes to a decision. Eleanor closes then locks the door.
Mowgli tries to stop her.
“Let me leave first,” he says. “Then you can lock it.
“It’s a Black Storm,” he continues, “and I am knit from anger. When it gets me, you don’t want me around.”
She pushes him out of the way; is aware of a tattoo of steps, charging down the corridor outside.
“Show me what you were looking for, Mowgli. There, in the tuffet. I want to see.”
“I will hurt you,” he insists, his mobile face grown stark. Like a child at a funeral. Outside, something, someone, throws his weight against the door, then buckles it with heavy blows. A thread of darkness slips through the seal of its metal lips, tentacular and probing. The screaming is now very loud.
“Show me,” she repeats. “He must have put it in his bedroom. It’s too late now anyway. We can no longer get out.”
[ 13 ]
The door to Smith’s inner cabin is locked. Mowgli tests it, then bends for his crowbar. While he heaves away at the lock, the door behind them throbs with metronomic violence. Is it one man or many beating his flesh bloody on its metal? The Malay, the handsome Irishman with his sunburn and his freckles? Or the dark-skinned cook whose lower lip looks swollen as though stung? The blows are spongy, dull, are edged with screams. The mind plays tricks: amongst the roar of sea and wind there is no scope to hear the breaking of small bones. And yet Eleanor does and winces and is scared.
For now the bolt she has slid into its place is holding fast. But the door itself has begun to warp, in grim copy to the one Mowgli is wedging open with the bar. Through the gap, a frothy darkness pours itself into the room. It comes from above, too, through the latticed mouth of a ventilation pipe; lowers itself on silky threads, then hangs twitching, fish-hooked in midair. Soon a halo of filth surrounds them, lapping at their skin; tars their lips and stains their eyes. The Storm is no longer out there but has slipped into their blood. She sees it in Mowgli’s face and movements, in the way he wrenches the crowbar so hard that the metal cuts his palms.
She, too, catches it: the dark weight of anger; feels it ripple through her, scalp to sole. She opens herself, accepts it; locks it in the depth of her: there, in that same tall tower, slim and steely like a grain silo, that she has been slowly filling with such rotten wheat from the tender years of childhood so that now it stands pert and pressurised by its own fermentations. And in the same breath, as naturally as a flutter of the eyelids, she locks up Mowgli’s rage, too, and passes back a kinder Smoke, seasoned not with anger but with want.
He receives it with a shudder.
“How…?” he begins, aroused and unbelieving.
“Talent,” she answers. “A gift. Quick now, or I must burst.”
He nods, wrenches at the crowbar, and forces their way into the other room.
[ 14 ]
Smith’s inner sanctum. A bed, a stool, a mound of underwear and socks; the sheets sweat-rank with bad dreams. They have closed the door and wedged it shut, but the lock is bust now and the whole door crooked in its frame. Outside, the blows upon the outer cabin door have ceased. Perhaps its assailants have beaten themselves dead upon its bulk; perhaps their truce of rage has ruptured and they have fallen one upon the other like mating spiders woken to their hunger halfway through the act. No doubt the Storm will find Eleanor and Mowgli, too, here amongst Smith’s unwashed linens. But for now the air around them is unshrouded by anger, and their feelings remain their own. They stand and breathe; have clasped each other’s hands in fear.
But Mowgli soon has need for his, and haste. He stoops, digs around the night table and its clutter, the knotted linen on the bed. He retrieves a syringe from the hollow of the pillow, its plunger down and the needle suppurating from its tip. It has drawn a dun and wayward circle into the white cotton.
Mowgli flings the syringe away, drops to all fours, searching the floor now, and with a yelp retrieves a little box stuffed with rotting stalks of flowers. Bedded on it, a matchb
ox Snow White in black plate, lies the oozing carcass of a beetle.
But wait, it isn’t quite dead. Transferred to Mowgli’s palm, the monstrous insects stirs to life; twitches a leg and spreads the twin horned covers on its back to reveal two sticky wings. From its rump the thing leaks a clear liquid, too thick to suggest blood. The keening that fills the room is the boy’s, not the beetle’s: love and worry rising out of him like morning fog.
Even so, his fingers move. Eleanor is not sure he is conscious of their action. They dip their tips into the beetle’s juices, rise up to his lips and gums. There is something habitual to the motion, a tang of ritual, the smoothness and precision of signation.
Next she knows his hand is on her lips.
“Let me,” he says, looking confused, as though he has only just woken to the strangeness of his act and the breath-warmed moisture on his fingers. He makes to say more, then simply slips a thumb between her upper lip and teeth, anoints her gums. The beetle’s ooze tastes richly of compost. Her tongue touches his thumbnail as it dives beneath it to the wet, private cavern of her jaw. It isn’t how she pictured it: her first kiss. There is a little plop when he withdraws his digit overhastily, a thread of spittle dangling between lip and skin that almost makes her laugh.
“What is it? What will it do?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head in frustration, gestures vaguely at the air. “I remember…It’s a kind of blessing, I think. It wards off evil. We did it for the sick and dead. So it’s fitting, isn’t it?”
She looks up around herself and sees the Storm has encroached upon their sanctuary, curling past the cracks in the doorframe and dropping from the ceiling, smuggled in by hidden vents. Up above she can hear gunshots, first one, then three in quick succession, and she has a vision of Smith holding off the sailors as they attempt to take control of the bridge. Somewhere beneath them, the engine is still chugging; perhaps the machinist remains, feeding the furnace through a madness held in check only by the thin filter of his Smoke mask. Mowgli returns the beetle to its box. He closes it, then slips it gently between bed frame and mattress, where it will be cushioned from their rage.
“We are trapped here,” he says. “I must leave you and you must lock yourself in. Or else I will end up killing you.”
She pretends to consider it.
“I can’t,” she says at last. “This lock is broken. And if you open the outer door, the sailors might force their way in. So we are stuck together.”
“Then tie me. My hands and feet.”
She refuses. “You’ll be helpless. Once it gets too much for me, I might kill you.”
“You might,” he answers very simply. “But we cannot both be tied.”
Smith’s room holds his leather braces and a number of straps used to secure his trunks. She ties Mowgli’s ankles to the legs of the metal cot that is itself screwed deep into the floor; ties his wrists together, then secures them to a strap she loops around his waist.
“Too tight?”
“Fine.”
“And now?”
“Now we wait. It’s almost here.”
They watch the Smoke thicken: silken threads combining to finger-thick tendrils, mucinous streams sliding across floor and wall, an odd intelligence to their viscous probing. Without a word, Eleanor sits down behind Mowgli, leans her back against his, spine rubbing onto spine. He tilts his head back, opens his mouth, his pulse beating in her ear.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
In answer he starts talking, speaking of himself for perhaps the first time in years, rushing the words, trying to outrace the rage before it wins his tongue, telling her his nameless life and about the strange black beetle that he loves. Eleanor closes her eyes and listens.
On her skin gooseflesh soon spreads like a rash.
LADY NAYLOR, “PRIVATE NOTES FOR A PUBLIC MEMOIR,” WRITTEN IN CIPHER, DATED MAY 1909.
The news reaches me as I am sitting down to dinner. My man brings it, furtively, to this my cell that I have chosen as my home. “A Storm,” he says, “was spotted out at sea.” He says it calmly and composedly, though no Storm has been spotted for many years, and only once was a Storm ever reported to cross water, hopping fishing vessels in its leap from Northumberland to Norway, where it found Bergen ready to be put to waste. “Originating where?” I ask, and he shakes his head to say he does not know. “There were Gales along the coast this morning…” he goes on, only to trail off again. A Gale is no Storm, whatever some people may say.
“Who spotted it?” I ask.
“Fishermen.”
“Were they caught by the Storm?”
“No. But they saw a ship in trouble. Further out to sea. Some say there was more than one.”
It takes days for the news to solidify. The ships caught up in the Storm keep multiplying. First it is one, then two, then three. The first ship draws the lion’s share of interest. “It’s in one piece,” I am told. And later: “There are survivors.” And later yet: “The Lord Protector’s niece is on that ship. It was she who…” But here my otherwise calm servant and spy loses his composure and is at a loss for words. “The sailors say she saved the ship,” he tries at last.
“How?”
“Somehow.”
Updates arrive twice a day. The vessel is a Company charter; the Lord Protector has sent a tug; the ship is already in harbour; there was a hush amongst the sailors when Miss Renfrew disembarked upon the pier. Afraid that his poor powers of eloquence will not do justice to the scene, my man brings a charcoal drawing on a piece of sailcloth, made by one of the survivors during the hours when they drifted at sea, or so he has been told. It is smudged but nonetheless evocative; shows a listing, broken ship. On its deck a handful of sailors stand muffled in bandages, with broken limbs and bashed-in mugs. Their heads are all turned towards a single point; their eyes drawn overlarge, dilated by reverence or awe. It is the girl they are looking at, chubby-cheeked and unremarkable, her spine so painfully straight one would pay her to slouch. A dark-skinned youth looks shifty by her side.
“Who is he?”
“Nobody. A servant,” says my man, who has spent all his life taking orders.
There is a final figure in the drawing, standing in isolation from this beatific scene. The Company man, presumably: fire-scorched, the right cheek blistered, a munitions belt splitting his large gut. A fleshy man holding his cigar as if he were weighing his own penis; disgruntled, perhaps, at being so ignored.
“I paid for the picture,” my man says now. It is my cue to reimburse him for his grave expense. I do, then put the drawing away. The scene holds little interest for me. Nor does the news of a second ship, farther north, nor of a third—not, that is, until something else attaches itself to the latter, a port of origin. Bombay, India. Headed here, to this castle on the Bristol Channel. The rumours report it to be sunk at sea; then unsink it some days later and beach it instead upon the Welsh shore; only to fling it upon rocks and sink it once more. Nobody can explain how it is that it missed the channel and sailed past us instead into the Irish Sea.
A Storm, out to sea; an Indian merchantman, cargo unknown.
I have long hoped for a message from Hindustan; have dispatched a man there—a rather different kind of servant—and waited for word. Did he send me a signal in the shape of a Storm? It’s possible, after all. My man is marked, in more senses than one.
He has always had a sense for the dramatic.
The light dims. The room, small enough for a prison cell, sumptuous enough for a manor house study, shrinks to the size of a spotlight. In its gilded disk sits milady, now still writing, now folding up the paper and slipping it inside her bodice. The chair she sits on is high-backed and solid, suggesting the proud discomfort of a throne. Milady’s gaze is trained into the void beyond the light, where the audience cowers in long rows. A steely gaze
, unwavering. Brave is the patron who dares to move, or cough.
Then: a shiver in the floorboards, a rumble deep beneath the seats; releasing the tension; promising change. In answer to an unseen engine’s groan, the stage begins to slowly spin upon a central axis, until the patterned wall of milady’s room forms a tidy parting line between two equal halves of stage. On the left: the throne and its occupant, now in aquiline profile. The lights dim on this portion of the stage only to rise on the other side. Here then—on the right, the stage’s East—emerges a fresh scene, also in profile. It’s an oriental cityscape, marked by a dusty street and an imitation palm tree; by the flat roofline and dirty whitewash of a building overhung by the sign of a red bicycle. A man stands underneath the sign, dark-haired, European, his face paint so thick, it drains all expression from his features. He stands motionless, neck craned upwards towards the sign.
The next moment, a child runs onto the stage from the no-space that is offstage right, a boy in a knee-length orange shirt without collar or buttons, and a prayer mark on his brown-skinned forehead. Strapped to his chest he carries a calendar, outlandish in size, its topmost leaf showing nothing but the name of the month.
The child stops in his tracks; looks around; screws up his eyes to penetrate the gloom that shields the audience. Now he turns, studies the man underneath the sign; saunters over to the parting line dividing right from left and cranes his neck around to see. Satisfied, he faces the audience once more and, in an exaggerated gesture, thumbs at the dark side of the stage, then taps his chest, where MAY is written in black figures. He tears off the page and blows his nose on it, revealing APRIL; mimes wiping his arse with that, revealing MARCH. A nod and stamp of the feet confirms the month. Then the boy runs over to the frozen European and gives his sleeve a playful tug before skipping off the stage.
The tug sets things in motion. The man unfreezes; swivels his head; steps closer to the painted door. One hand finds the doorknob; the other makes to knock.