Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Alexander the Great…Caesar…Napoleon…these are the great persons of history, whose particular purposes contain the essential purpose, that which is the will of the World Spirit. Insofar, they are to be called Heroes.

  Nothing great has been achieved without passion…

  —GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

   APPRENTICE

  [ 1 ]

  The night is clear and very still. The compartment soaks up this silence; grows strange upon its diet. Objects become unlike themselves; they appropriate sounds and arrogate motion; grow consciousness (and fangs). Two suitcases stacked one upon the other in the luggage rack, a glint of moonlight on their buckles; both breathing—snoring almost—dogs on a chain. A heavy leather coat drooping from its corner hanger, the flap of its buttoned pocket curled up into a sneer. Two pairs of boots forming chess games on the floor: a pawn lies sole-up, toppled, filthy; the bishop unlaced and drooping at the shaft.

  Time whispers life into these details. Time is the scuttle of beetle legs against the inside of one’s skull. Time is the passage of the moon in a large rectangle of window; the shift of shadow across the carpeted wedge of floor between two rows of seats. The upholstery smells of mothballs and wood polish; of mould and sweat and old cologne. On one side, two stockinged feet peek out from a blanket; twitch then curl themselves around their owner’s dream. The blanket groans in its sleep (dyspepsia, or gas?); the pillowcase gapes at the seam; like a Golem’s forehead it is stamped with a letter, its laundry’s cabbalistic mark.

  Time is a thief rising from the bench opposite; rising so slowly, he is but another shadow moved on by the moon.

  [ 2 ]

  In plain prose: two men in a train compartment, stopped for the night. An English train—a rarity, almost an antique. Small for all that: two train cars and an engine; no longer under steam. Stopping where? At the edge of the world, or very nearly so. The proverbial end of the line. Fifty yards on, the tracks simply cease. Someone’s made off with the sleepers, and also with the tracks themselves, melted them down perhaps, or used them to buttress their crumbling house. The great British railway system is flashing a gap-toothed smile these days; more of a grimace, truth be told. To the west of this particular gap lie the remains of what was once if not the heart of the nation then its guts. London. The Big Smoke, capital of factories, and of sin. Long may it rot.

  Inside the train, one man is rising. A youth really, still in those difficult years wedged between boyhood and maturity, when thought has not yet frozen into habit, and one still wears one’s skin a size too large. Rising so slowly, so silently, that the patience required must chew at his very soul. He plants his feet, leans forward, stoops; and with infinite care, half an inch at a time, withdraws a case from underneath his companion’s seat. Then, reclaiming his seat, he pulls it onto his lap. Next you know, the youth has bent double upon the hinge of his waist and lain his own head onto the box within his lap, lain it sideways, one ear down. Listening. Even the moon holds its breath; bends down to him, straining for sound.

  Then—nothing. Prayer silence: the snore of the suitcases, the blanket’s digestive gurgle; the tap-drip of your heartbeat on the inside of your ear.

  [ 3 ]

  The box was the easy part. Now Nil needs the key. It is in Smith’s trouser pocket; was kept on a chain around his neck until the Company man elected to shave this afternoon, right here in the compartment, despite the jolting of the train. Smith stuffed it in his pocket as he unfolded his razor and—red-throated and raw, bleeding from a dozen nicks—left it there when he was finished, afraid perhaps that it would chafe. Now the trousers are hooked from a peg by one of their belt loops, their legs trailing down to Smith’s head. The latter is invisible, lies buried in shadow and a lumpy pillow overstuffed with down. All Nil can see of him is a curl of whisker, erect and frizzy as though charged with an electric current, rising up out of this down-padded pit. Smith’s breathing is dislocated, everywhere at once. Sometimes he mutters in his sleep, isolated words, and these, too, seem to rise from the corners and fixtures rather than from his stretched-out, lumpen form. “Lemons”; “Caoutchouc”; “Never you mind”—the hat rack says it; the doorknob; the crates piled up in the corridor outside that are filled with half-formed beetles refusing to hatch.

  Slowly, hardly seeming to move at all, Nil reaches for Smith’s trousers. He does so in a single fluid motion, graceful and natural, so that rather than him slowing, it is the moon that picks up speed within its rectangle of the window, and Nil’s pulse becomes a telegrapher’s finger, tapping out urgent Morse into the fold of skin where throat meets jaw. His fingers find the correct pocket; find the leather string attached to the key, then the key itself, tangled up into the knot of a well-used handkerchief. And—fluidly still and utterly silent, the trousers unmoved upon their hook—he withdraws the lot and draws it over to his side of the great divide.

  Then he hesitates.

  He could try to take both box and key and leave the compartment, though he knows for a fact that the door into the hallway squeaks; and that the second door, the door to the outside, is jammed and bolted and will require a kick to open. Or else—

  Or else Nil could insert the key. Could turn it in the well-oiled lock. Swing open the lid on quiet hinges. Revel for but a moment in the touch of carapace and finger; then reach inside the lid, whose leather loops hold an array of glass syringes; withdraw one slender tube of glass and hold it up into the moonlight.

  The beetle’s spore comes slowly out of its gland. The insect scuttles in Nil’s palm with an agitation he does not remember from milking it last. He pulls back the plunger—three drops, four, then five—and knows he’s hurting the beetle now, must pinch it firmly between forefinger and thumb. Still he continues to draw the spore. He must get enough.

  Satisfied at last, Nil lifts the syringe once more into the air. He watches moonlight break in its half-inch column of murky goo, then looks for a needle amongst the box’s kit. And notices—the way we notice sudden danger: a tingle in the colon; a needle prick through both our lungs—that the curl of whisker no longer rises above the down pillow; that the head has turned; that from behind the curve of fleshy cheeks, two blue eyes stare out at him, their lashes coarse and pale like awns on winter rye.

  “Good God,” moans Smith, in genuine distress. “You move like treacle! All night long I’ve lain awake, wondering if you will kill me or simply rob me blind.”

  [ 4 ]

  “So you want to be cured, eh? And after all, why not! But will you look at the beetle! It looks pale, and shrunk. All out of bug snot, I suppose. Remember, boy, we must be careful. This beetle is all we have.”

  Smith has snatched the box from Nil’s lap; has yanked syringe and key from the boy’s weak grasp. There was haste in these actions but no anger. Now Smith has calmed and sat up, his blanket spread over his legs, and is running his fingers’ comb through his mottled crescent of hair.

  “Well, if you want it so…I suppose it makes sense, given your past. I should have thought of it before.”

  Smith falls silent abruptly, turning over the thought. Within moments he comes to a decision: a salesman’s smile at his own boldness.

  “Go on then! Here, I will even do it myself. What, you don’t want to now? Or are you afraid of dropping your pants? Let’s put it in your shoulder then, it’ll smart more but in the end it’s all the same. Stubborn, what? And yet you have toiled all night, just for this.”

  Indeed, Nil has recoiled from Smith and drawn his knees up to his chest. His eyes are riveted to the syringe. He sees something there, a becoming, a path back to boyhood; it is hard to put into words. His longing is soured by suspicion.

  He wants to know:

  “Why help me?”

  Smith purses his lips. “Let’s just say because I can. So we are equal…” He breaks off, leap
s from one thought to another. “Besides, it’s no fun, doing it by yourself. Changing the world, I mean. History needs a witness, I suppose, though that’s not quite it either. I always thought my son—but then, he’s still half a babe. They are on Madeira, he and my wife. But I told you that already. At any rate…a partnership. So what do you say?”

  Nil stares at Smith and says nothing.

  I am being bought, it flashes through him. I don’t know why and what is the price.

  And almost immediately a second thought rises in him.

  Go on then. Buy me.

  He unbuttons his shirtfront, slips his shoulder out of the wide-open collar. There is something vile about the needle puncturing his flesh; the slow slide of the plunger; the gooey thread trailing from skin to needle as it pulls away.

  “Done,” says Smith, then more grandiosely: “The truth shall set you free.”

  They sit in silence for a moment while Nil rebuttons his shirt and Smith busies himself with putting away the syringe. When he has finished, he looks over at Nil with a strange kind of fondness, almost a joy.

  “There you are. Yourself again! Uncluttered, unadulterated, private. You will miss it at times, the touch of others, right there in your skin, letting you know they are real. Solipsism—it’s the price we pay. Never mind though, welcome to the future!” He chokes up, eyes brimming; guffaws at his own emotion. “But listen to me prattle while you sit silent as a fish. Go on, boy, try it; let yourself go. I know you have been holding yourself in.”

  Nil does not respond, sits quietly, contained in his slender frame. All the same Smith’s words course through him, along with the spore. He pictures them sinking into his liver and lodging there, each syllable a little cyst, changing him back somehow, into who he was.

  “How long will it last?” he asks.

  “Ah, my friend, that is a question half the world will be asking itself once we are done. Do you know what a monopoly is? A monopoly is like having a tap. You choose when to turn it on. And when you do, money comes out, one pretty bill at a time.”

  [ 5 ]

  Dawn breaks and Smith insists on callisthenics. He even talks Nil into joining in. Here they stand, at the edge of London; stripped to the waist, legs spread wide, making windmills of their arms. There is no need to feel embarrassed. They are quite alone. The clerk who rode down with them stayed behind in what remains of Windsor, where the Company maintains a warehouse and store. The engine driver, too, has been sent back; he will return every afternoon starting the day after tomorrow, to await news and act as a liaison. There are no farmers about: the country here is so Soot-soaked that it is hard to grow anything edible. To the west lies the city; clouds squat atop it, promising rain.

  “How long did you live here?” Smith asks, as he leads them into a series of squats.

  “Six years.”

  “With your foster parents?”

  “With Grendel. Mum…my foster mother died within a year of the Second Smoke.”

  “And then? Where did you go?”

  “I set off to find the ones who robbed me.”

  “You wanted information.”

  “That and also…”

  “Revenge? Yes, of course! Though I can see from your face you didn’t go through with it.”

  Smith falls silent as he drops to the ground and starts on a long series of push-ups, holding his hands very far apart, and planting his chin all the way into the ground on the way down. Once he is done with his exercises, he sighs happily, cleans his hands on a little towel he’s tucked into his waistband, unzips and urinates happily into a nearby bush.

  “Black piss,” he mutters. “The world better get used to it. In a hundred years, they will have forgotten that we ever peed other than black.”

  Then he turns back to Nil, who sits exhausted on the ground.

  “What will we find in London? Is it abandoned like people say?”

  Nil shrugs. “Not entirely. But it’s hard to grow food there. There are fish in the river; crabs and eels in its mud. The factories are all abandoned…You’ll see.” He pauses, looks up at Smith buttoning his shirt. “It’s a good fifteen miles. How will we get there? Walk?”

  “No. We can’t leave the cases here.”

  “The grubs?”

  “Pupae, my boy, pupae,” says Smith, who has it from an expert whom he does not trust.

  [ 6 ]

  Nil has to repeat his question about their mode of transport before Smith consents to offer a reply. In the meantime, the Company man busies himself with getting dressed, putting on a double-breasted leather coat and buttoned leather gloves.

  Satisfied in his attire, still fastening on a leather cap complete with chinstrap, he walks to the second train car and unlocks it; reaches inside and pulls down a wooden ramp before climbing in. Inside stand a number of wooden packing crates; some squat metal cannisters, tied down with thick belts; a trunk with a rifle case tied to its lid. And a large, four-wheeled something, protected by a tarp; gilded spokes winking at the light. Smith raises an eyebrow at Nil: the salesman is back and tempted to theatrics. The tarp flies off with a sharp little snap.

  “Voilà!”

  “A motorcar?”

  “A motorcar, bah! A 1908 Stilson Six-Cylinder Company Special Edition. Sixty times the power of a horse! Let us roll it down the ramp and then load it. We’ll need fuel, too, and provisions. And the rifle case, of course, and that box over there, it’s full of ammunition. And here are goggles for the both of us; we will be going fast as the wind. Careful now, we don’t want to scratch the finish. There you go, boy.”

  It is fair to say that Smith is enjoying himself.

   SHIPWRECK

  [ 1 ]

  On the coast of northern Wales, in the half-world between North and South, near the southernmost slopes of the mountains of Snowdonia whose snowy tops were spared the Second Smoke, on a pebble beach still rife with Gales, Godfrey Livingstone stands bargaining with a boy of sixteen for his services in reconnaissance. There’s a gaggle of them, actually, a little gang of thieves, connected by a web of constant Smoke so light it is visible only where it brushes the walls of their shabby hut and dusts them with its colours. But it is only this one boy—the eldest, the tallest and fairest; the leader—to whom the old servant pays attention. The others are merely fingers on his hands (and sometimes knuckles to his fist). As for Livingstone, the boys find him odd but harmless. He does not smoke.

  What danger can he harbour?

  “Dive?” the boy asks. Livingstone notes his halting, lilting English. Since the Second Smoke, after many decades of being banned, Welsh has resurfaced in these parts from God only knows what hole. “Do you have any idea how cold the water is?”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “You have money then?”

  The boy’s question is not so much for the man he is bargaining with but for those who are massing at his back; a prod of the elbow by other means. Livingstone does not answer it at once.

  “I understand you,” he says at last. “We are much alike.”

  “Really?” A smile, dismissive, leering. “You sound rich to me. Fancy.”

  “I am a servant. I was a coach driver before then and a groom before that, and the assistant to a surgeon. The surgeon taught me how to read. And to speak like him. He told me I should better myself. I was his pet. For a while I even took to it.”

  Again that leering look. Livingstone has just confessed to weakness.

  “And before all that,” he says into the boy’s budding thought of violence, “I grew up an orphan. On the street. Terrified of everyone and everything. Of being used.” Here Livingstone lowers his voice so that the boy has to bend close. “It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? The day you figure out that the best way not to be scared anymore is to become a terror yourself. And how
difficult it is at first, finding that cruelty within yourself. It starts out almost as a chore. After a while, though, well…”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  The boy says it quickly. But there’s a new timbre to the voice, a new tint to his Smoke. The others pick up on it, trained as they are in spotting weakness. Their leader has stumbled somehow.

  He tries to catch himself. “About that money, man.”

  “A southern half crown.

  “If you don’t dive,” Livingstone adds, “I swear to God I will skin you like a rabbit. And your little friends over there will laugh and hold the knife.”

  [ 2 ]

  Before they enter the water, Livingstone has the boys recount once more what they have seen. It’s been several weeks now and they hardly paid any attention even then; but young minds are impressionable and little things will leave their imprint, vivid like a line of poetry. There had been a Gale the night before, not dark but potent, catching them in their sleep: shared dreams and that strange quickening of all emotion; a sharing of the soul that left them frightened and ashamed. The next day the tide brought close the drifting shell of a ship: a steamer, large and very dark, as though painted in dull black; seagulls screeching at it as it ran aground upon a rock and lodged there. A dangerous place, that, rife with tidal currents pushing the sea around: there was not one fisherman who attempted salvage. Not until the Miners showed, on horseback, led by a woman and a man with a moustache. Livia and Francis: people who lived by first names, like children and kings. Cursed by some and admired by others; rumours of Minetowns orgies woven into the old songs. They wanted to see the ship and paid for it with promises of Minetowns steel.