Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Singh stirs next to him, inhales the last of the oxygen, then opens a new cannister.

  “Are you dreaming of home?” he asks.

  “Dreaming? No. You?”

  “I dream of Mrs. Singh.”

  “Have you been married long?”

  “We met in the village I told you about. Where I studied Marx. She, too, was studying. We argued about everything—revolution, the nation-state, the Indian way. We were married that winter.”

  “What is her first name? Mrs. Singh’s?”

  Singh makes to speak, falls silent, passes the cannister. “We cannot be friends, Sahib,” he says, firmly if a little mournfully. “It is better not to pretend it.”

  Thomas returns to talking to Charlie.

  “Did you ever find your angel?” he asks. “Did he have wings?”

  But Charlie is tired now and will no longer answer. Outside the wind howls and makes a bellows of their tent.

  [ 8 ]

  The storm finally blows itself out midmorning. They crawl their way from the half-collapsed tent, stare up the mountainside. For now, the sky remains dull, the light subdued. Somewhere near must stand the machine they spotted from below, and the cut in rock and ice that is their destination. But try as they might, they cannot see it. Fresh snow covers everything. The guide ropes lie buried in it; and in the dull light none of the black veins they saw snaking up the glacier are visible.

  They have to break a fresh trail. It takes hours to locate the guide ropes in the hip-deep snow, and each yard gained swallows a thousand breaths. By midday, the sun has burned away all cloud. It is now Thomas notices he is no longer wearing his glasses. He has no memory of taking them off and cannot find them in his pockets. Perhaps he left them in the tent that morning. It is a sign of Singh’s tiredness that he does not notice. The stark light gives fresh contour to the landscape. It helps them perceive a bulge in the snow, not ten steps from them, that soon discloses a complex winch system somehow bolted into the ice. A chain stretches from it into the snow. They follow it, breaking through the icy crust, and are led to the lip of a crevasse, into which the chain disappears. The cut is perhaps five feet wide and as much as sixty feet long, if masked by the fresh snow: it has blown across it and partially frozen, half closing the thin, long mouth of the crevasse.

  Exhausted but also exhilarated by the discovery, Thomas and Singh lie down flat on their bellies and stare into the darkness below. The first few yards are found by the sun and shine in bright azure: pure ice, reflecting the colours of a tropical lagoon. Then the hole angles away into darkness. The chain hangs slack into the pit.

  “What do you smell?” Singh asks, inhaling, his face hanging over the lip.

  “Nothing,” Thomas replies. Then he changes his mind. “Mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do I.”

  They smile at the absurdity of the thought, but a hint of fear creeps into that smile.

  “The chain…?”

  “Yes. We might be able to get the winch going. Then we can see where it leads.”

  [ 9 ]

  It takes them an hour to beat the ice off the winch mechanism and then another twenty minutes to realise that, while there exists a mechanical crank, the main power supply comes in the form of three backpack-sized batteries marked with the name EDISON. The thought of carrying these, or any part of the winch up here, troubles Thomas; it points not just to money but to a relentless will fuelling the whole operation from afar; a will indifferent to difficulty and intolerant of failure. Watts is but an agent of this will. Thomas wonders who is the principal.

  They pull at the chunky lever and are rewarded by the slow gyration of the central drum, slowly hauling in the chain. There is a lot of it, the drum growing thicker by the yard, until a large metal hook emerges. This, in turn, holds something like a playground swing suspended at its corners by four thinner chains and anchored in the hook. Thomas understands its purpose at once.

  “It’s an elevator. Like a miner’s cage—only this is for one person at a time.” And before Singh can take in the implications, Thomas adds: “I am going down. You must operate the winch.”

  “You can barely walk.”

  “I won’t have to. All I need is to sit.”

  Their preparations don’t take a moment. Thomas walks over to the swing, tests its solidity, then places it so it is just poised over the crevasse. He gets on it, feeling more alive than he has in days, basking in the sun reflecting off the ice. In an afterthought, he ties his harness onto the swing’s chain.

  It is now Singh notices Thomas is not wearing glasses.

  “Where are they, what have you done with them?” he chides, clearly upset. “Here, you must take mine.”

  “No need, Singh. I am going underground. I would not be able to see in them below.”

  “When you return.”

  “When I return, Singh. When we are finished here. When you tell me Mrs. Singh’s Christian name.”

  “Christian, Sahib?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  [ 10 ]

  He goes below, shielding his eyes against the fantastic glare produced by the pure ice, then, sliding down on an ice shelf that tilts some thirty or forty degrees downwards, into soft shadow. Soon he is under the ice. The light follows him, flooding around his body, the ceiling glowing white and arching. He smells mushroom and rot; blood, too, his nostrils torn and clotted by the altitude. Above, Singh has arrested the chain; too early, thinks Thomas, the swing dancing, spinning in thin air.

  He stares down into the gloom. Beneath his dangling feet, the crevasse widens into a pocket of air. The light from above cuts a swathe into it. The spin of the swing makes it hard to see what it reveals. A pattern, a darkness; something mottled on the icy wall. The winch unwinds once more and he plunges farther, into open space. A renewed stop sends the swing into wild gyrations; Thomas holds on to the chain with clumsy mitts and prays that he won’t fall.

  “Slowly,” he shouts up, though he knows he won’t be heard. “Get me closer. I can’t see.”

  And he can’t—not clearly—not until the mountain itself turns on its lights and the whole of the glacier becomes a paper lantern. The sun must enter it from a dozen places; surface fissures focussing the light. The rays converge here, in this great chamber. Thomas spins and dances at the heart of this great lamp.

  He understands two things: that this is the quarter hour or so of magic light, when the sun dips low but has not yet disappeared behind the mountain range to the west; and that the light, impossibly bright, reflected over and over by the smooth ice walls, will burn his eyes as though he were staring at the sun itself. His first action then, by instinct, is to screw shut his eyes with those same tired muscles that have held them scrunched into slits for much of the day. It takes several moments to master the instinct; to smooth out that face and force open the eyelids. What choice does he have? He has come this far.

  He has to look.

  What he sees defies his sense of scale. If the glacier looked like an organ—a lung or womb—from afar, he is now inside it, swinging in a cavity of pure white light. Black veins thread the ice: buried too deep to be visible at any other time of day, opaque like frozen Smoke. They thicken and converge, grow solid down there at the bottom of the hole beneath Thomas’s feet. There, growing out of the icy floor beneath, is a black boil, bulbous and well rooted, its outline visible deep down into the ice for it alone binds the stark sunlight: a breach within the mirror surface of the chamber, an ink stain risen on a twist of blotting paper, up towards the open air. The inkwell underneath is ocean-deep.

  Thomas rests his eyes upon this darkness, trying—failing—to gauge its depth. The mountain itself seems to rest on it, its growth into the glacier but an outcrop, a reaching forth towards th
e surface, the way a spire hungers for the sky. It’s like a buried cathedral, it comes to him, like a stranger’s dark faith. Welling up to us from the centre of the earth.

  He hushes himself, up there in the air above it, as though afraid to wake it by his motion.

  The expedition members were less cautious than Thomas. Down by the black boil that pierces the ice sits a second mechanical device, powered by gas cannisters, and resting on a sort of tripod. Its disk-shaped saw blade is the only part that is at once recognisable. A cutting machine. And staring into the darkness of the boil, Thomas soon locates the machine’s bite: a notch within the light-absorbing blackness, more cubical in shape perhaps than the rock he saw down in the camp suggested. The first sample: hauled down the mountain and on its way to Britain, if Watts stuck to his plan. A white chalk line luridly denotes a second, much larger chunk.

  And still Thomas hovers in midair, the chain above unmoving. He looks up only to be struck sightless by the glare above; trains his eyes back down upon the darkness, then slowly lets them climb the walls of this cavity turned lamp. For there is something stranger yet than that vast, weird blackness underneath. A rash has grown upon the smoothness of the glowing ice around him, translucent grey in shade and far more textured than the veins that thread the glacier. From where Thomas is hanging, this rash is hard to make sense of, hard even to see.

  So he swings to it, kicking out with his legs and feet as though he were six again and dangling from a rope swing under a willow branch, building momentum, back and forth. Soon the chain is creaking and his arc brings him ever closer to the wall above his head. He reaches with one hand, both to catch himself should he have misjudged his momentum and to touch, perchance catch hold of, that strange growth. His gloved fingers are too clumsy to make any purchase. On the next pass the glove is in between his teeth, the fingers bare, looking very pale and bony in the light. He sees the growth more clearly now, a network of lichen from which rises a carpet of tiny, hooded mushrooms, glassy grey, a yellow pinprick at the centre of their mantles. His fingers touch and sink into the eerie warmth of something living, growing on the ice. He tries to pinch off a stem but fails to hold on to it, swings once more, determined to hold on this time, when—mid-arc—he is hauled up.

  The shortened line costs him his balance; he crashes into a bit of wall and spins widely, almost falling off the swing. Next thing he knows he has entered the searing light of the entrance to the cavern. He slides up its bottleneck with his eyes held shut and emerges back into the wind. His glove is still in his mouth.

  He starts shouting no sooner has he spat it out, his eyes still shut against the light.

  “Lower me back down, Singh. I wasn’t done.”

  Then he dares a look and sees the reason for his sudden extraction.

  Jagat Singh is no longer in control of the electric winch.

  [ 11 ]

  The man who holds Singh at gunpoint and has taken over control of the winch is English, or at any rate white. One can see this by his moustache, whose red-blond hair shines through the ice that covers it. He is also clearly so exhausted he can barely stand. He does not speak but merely gestures Thomas off the swing. Just as he does so, the light changes: the sun has dipped beneath the mountains in the west. A welcome dullness reasserts itself.

  Thomas climbs off the swing and approaches. Singh is sitting down, not far from the winch and in the man’s flank. The latter divides his time now, pointing his gun first at one then the other of his prisoners. His hand is shivering. Thomas does the math and realises that he must have set off after them in the middle of the storm; that he gained on them despite it all. Presumably he did not climb alone. Perhaps the others did not make it, or else they will be following soon. His pace must have been inhuman.

  “Watts sent you,” he says to the stranger now. “When the porters told him there was someone on the mountain. You are his strongest climber.”

  The stranger does not answer. Everything in his stance suggests a man spent. Everything other than the gun.

  “What do we do now? Look at you, you can barely hold the metal in this cold. Your fingers must be frozen to it. Put the gun away and we will talk. What’s your name?”

  The man’s focus is bound now, by Thomas and his words. He is too exhausted to notice Singh stirring in his flank.

  “Have you eaten? We have food. Maybe some tea, even; we can melt water.”

  Thomas cannot see his eyes, or his face: everything is covered by hat, glasses, and scarf. Only the upper lip twitches under that moustache. Copper, actually, not red-blond. Charlie’s colour.

  “What are you planning on doing with the thing below…?” Thomas continues, gently now, only to break off when Singh hits the stranger over the head with the flat of his ice axe. “You did not have to hit him that hard.”

  They kneel down together, remove the man’s glasses, his hat.

  “Look, he is bleeding. We must get him to the tent below, or else he will freeze to death.”

  Thomas does not put into words how relieved he is that the man looks nothing like Charlie. He buries his ice axe in the gears and levers of the winch, kicks its batteries into the crevasse. Then they drag the unconscious stranger down to the closest of the camps.

  [ 12 ]

  They spend the night lying stretched out, three men in a tent, a bandage around the stranger’s head and his hands tied very loosely, more to mark his imprisonment than to enforce it. If his companions show up, the situation will soon be reversed. There is nothing that can be done about this fact.

  As they lie there, while the stranger remains unconscious or is faking sleep, Thomas and Jagat talk. Their fatigue is now such that they drift off between words only to recover themselves some minutes later and resume. Neither sleep nor the waking world will have them anymore. They inhabit the half-life of the in-between.

  “A cathedral,” Singh says now, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time. “Mushrooms on its walls! How can that be?”

  Thomas’s response is a whisper that follows ten minutes later. They lie so close, they share each other’s breaths.

  “Whatever it is, it’s something new, unheard of. Something outside nature.” Then: “The snake, the apple. Lucifer falling from the heavens. Shiva dancing the destruction of the world.”

  “Fairy tales,” says the Marxist.

  “Fairy tales transcribing something. Something unspeakable. Something wrong.”

  Singh does not reply; he lies breathing in the dark. Perhaps they both drift off at last, for there is light on the tent wall when Singh speaks again.

  “What do they want it for, this unspeakable thing?”

  “I don’t know. For money, I suppose. In the end, they always want money.”

  “What now? We go back down? Evade the searchers? Tell the world?”

  “I’ve gone blind,” Thomas answers softly, though he suspects Singh already knows. “All I see is white. You must go down alone. I will wait for them and look after our patient. I think you cracked his skull.”

  “They will kill you,” Singh objects.

  “I doubt that. Not here, not on their own authority.”

  “And they will catch me.”

  “They mustn’t. I think whoever climbed up with him did not make it. Or they turned around. So you have a little time. You may be able to hide somewhere, farther down, and wait until the next lot are past you. Slip through. There is such confusion up here. Or you can use the night to find a fresh way down.”

  Singh wags his head, sceptical, thinking. Then he starts packing his things.

  “I’ll go.” Singh bends to the bandaged man, checks his breathing. “Don’t let him die.”

  “I won’t.”

  There is no need to mention Hounslow. His ghost is in the tent with them.

  They do not touch each other i
n parting. And Thomas never does learn Mrs. Singh’s name.

  FIELD DIARY OF CHARLES MONTGOMERY WATTS. 26 MAY 1909.

  Excavation delayed (sabotage). Winch broken.

  Arrested today a known terrorist and traitor to the British Crown and Company. Right to fair trial as imperial subject was asserted and accepted.

  The man is snow-blind and has three frostbitten toes.

  A taciturn man, this Watts. Punctilious. Onstage he looks small and unimposing. He pockets his diary, puts away his pen and ink, then folds up his travelling writing desk with a precision that goes beyond the merely soldierly. A frightened man, making a ritual of the few things he does control. Behind him rises a tent, dark green against the blank white wall that delimits the stage and suggests glacial isolation. Inside the tent, a shadow can be seen bending over a second shadow stretched out low upon a camp bed.

  The first of these shadows—the upright one—now emerges from the tent. He is taller than Watts, looser in his movements, and is dressed in a surgeon’s apron that is spotted with bright blood. His hand cups something, black and red; at Watts’s inquiring glance, the surgeon walks over and shoves the contents roughly into Watts’s palm. Watts inspects them and, alarmed and disgusted, at once lets them drop: black toes raining down onto the stage, where they lie, curled and stubby, like sausage ends; discarded meat. We cannot see Watts’s eyes. Both men are wearing snow goggles.

  The audience sits darkly mirrored in their lenses.

  Wherever the poor rule, that is democracy.

  —ARISTOTLE, POLITICS

   MINETOWNS

  [ 1 ]

  The Miners rescue the players as an afterthought.

  They find them strung out on the tidal current like bait upon a fishing line, sitting in their broken boats half filled with water, their clothes soaked and icy, full of horror at themselves. Etta May. Greta Silvana. Geoffrey. Ada has a raking wound across her cheek, three ragged lines; she must have put them there herself. David bit his lower lip to shreds and stands swollen-mouthed, silent. Meister Lukas won’t stop crying. The tear ducts are so sooty, it runs out of him all black.