Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  “Fine,” says Smith.

  It is only after they have descended and retrieved the car that it occurs to Nil that Smith is sulking, disgruntled at not having been taken into confidence concerning Nil’s feelings for his past.

  [ 2 ]

  They have to climb to the tops of three more buildings until they see it. The hotel helps: the view from its rooftop aligns with one of the photographs so perfectly that Nil at once becomes convinced that it was taken from up there. But a single vantage point proves insufficient to get a fix on where the vortex of the Storm stood anchored, once upon a time. So they carry on looking, picking buildings for their height and climbing derelict staircases, hoping to catch sight of something, a sign, a clue.

  What they find is a chalk mark. Black chalk, mind, marking the ground. It’s not as obvious as it sounds. Everywhere you look the ground is dark with Soot and mud. But this mark is different: tar black, at times as much as fifty steps across, well defined at its borders. It does not respect the city’s layout, will run down a thoroughfare for five, six hundred yards, then twist across the face of a building; mark its roofline and its yard; will split, double back on itself in an angry scrawl, write swirls and loops into the city. One sees it best where it crosses land that has long turned into wilderness, where grass and shrub have overgrown the stone. Here the mark is as though drawn with ink and cuts a swath through all the greenery. The effect is misleading: the mark came first, the plant life later. But nothing will grow upon the fatal stripe.

  Nil sees it first: stretches out a finger and points, and street for street, bend for bend, traces its trajectory for as far as they can see, unspooling it in the air. They run to it, Smith huffing and puffing down the stairs despite all his gymnastics, and race into the street. Here, the Soot smudge is more subtle, its borders less clean. Nil stoops, digs his fingernail into the grit. It is mixed with dust and has been washed by a thousand rains. And yet there is a definite feel to it, fine-grained and somewhat oily. Rising, stepping back, he sees it stretch underfoot, binding the light of the sun. The mark of the Storm: a high road of hate.

  All they need to do is follow it home.

  [ 3 ]

  It takes them all evening. The car is more encumbrance than help at this point. Every time the Storm’s dark mark defies the city’s layout of streets and alleys, courtyards and squares, and charges up a wall instead, leaping across rooftops, they have to circumnavigate along the roads available to them; then speed up and down the next street over, trying to relocate the track. Their search pushes them east and pens them ever closer to the river. Periodically, Smith will stop and consult his map of London, onto which he has drawn, in fire-red pencil, the borders of his claim.

  “We remain on home soil,” he decides afresh, ruddy-faced and beaming. “ ‘Smithtown.’ There are worse names for a district.” Impulsively, he throws an arm around Nil’s shoulders. “We are like Federmann or von Speyer. Like Humboldt—or Pizarro! Explorers! Conquerors! Looking for our pot of gold!” His eyes are moist behind the driving goggles; the hand that ruffles Nil’s hair is gloved.

  Nil is unsure how to respond to such effusion. It is not simply that he cannot calculate the best response. There is a knotting in his stomach that he cannot parse. The beetle is to blame: he had thought he would experience a sense of liberation after injecting himself with its spore. Indeed there has been some of that, the certainty that he can no longer be found out. But there is another, more complex side effect. His own emotions have become invisible to him.

  Nil does not know what it is he feels.

  In the face of Smith’s expectant gaze, he opts for action.

  “Quick now,” he says. “It’ll be dark before long.”

  As they drive on, Nil finds his heart is racing. Perhaps, then, he too is caught up in the excitement of the hunt.

  [ 4 ]

  The ribbon of black leads to the docks. They may be the very docks where Nil was smuggled into the country, drugged, encoffined in a rubber mask. He has no way of telling, no memory of this place. It is like a city unto itself, dead and enormous, and covered in black. There are stagnant rectangular pools, a hundred yards across, still spotted with abandoned ships, their mooring ropes arm-thick and groaning under the loads; twisted propellers, engine parts, nets, winches, chimneys, scattered like toys upon the wharf; shipyards, warehouses, customs buildings all facing the Thames. Everything—the pools, the ships, the wharf and buildings—is covered by a viscous blanket of tar-like Soot as though encased in inch-thick lacquer. The street itself is made smooth by it, and silent; their wheels leave tracks that do not break the surface and fade the moment they have passed. The air smells dead.

  Before realising what he is doing, Nil starts scanning the ground for bones. The Storm’s first victims. There must have been workers here, and shipping crews; warehouse staff and merchants checking on their stock. But ten years is a long time, for maggots, rats, and foxes; for city dogs and rot to do their work.

  Or perhaps they are there, beneath the black. When they set down their feet, the ground is spongy, like tree sap or India rubber, like the meat of a mushroom, down at its stem. Nil turns to Smith and sees he has drawn his pistol and is stuffing whole boxes of cartridges into his coat pocket.

  “This is it, boy! The epicentrum. We will have to search for it on foot.”

  They drive into a coach house whose gate is unlocked. Nothing stirs inside, not even rats. A row of coaches stands encased in tar like everything else. They leave the motorcar next to them; place a dust sheet on top, taking along only the most necessary items. The beetle scuttles in its cage when Nil lifts it off the seat. They will have to risk leaving the grubs. But he won’t abandon the beetle, not even for a minute. In the stables next door, the stall gates have been broken open with great violence, and a leather harness swings empty from a blackened chain.

  They set to exploring, splitting up at first to cover more ground but quickly reuniting, spooked by emptiness and expanse. The place is desolate, profoundly so: a barren heath of total black. The light is wrong, the failing sun swallowed by the ground: objects have contour but no shadow. It is as though they have left the world and are walking on the dark side of the moon. The water in the pools stands so thick that it seems solid; firm enough to walk on. There is a total absence of wind.

  They drift away from the waterfront and nearer the shipyards and warehouses; are dwarfed by their scale. As they walk farther yet, past the beached carcass of a trawler, encased in perfect black, into the open yard of a large warehouse, the air grows full of swooping swallows, darting batlike about their heads. Only they aren’t swallows but a bird Nil has never before seen: more bulbous in the body, like a swollen, bent-winged tit, tar black but for a yellow mark along the wing. He walks through their flight as though through a cloud, puzzled at the sudden eruption of life in this waste. The beetle buzzes in its case within his fist.

  Then: a voice from the rubble. Nil nearly jumps out of his skin. Its source is a man, so dirty he blends into the mound of blackened ship parts piled against the warehouse wall. He is singing, talking to himself: a butterfly net in one fist, dead birds strung upon a piece of yarn slung across his neck. It does not take much insight to know that he is mad.

  Smith raises his pistol, then drops it again; looks back across the ground they have covered, to the coach house hiding his car and treasure, evidently deciding it is too far away for the man to have seen it. The stranger, for his part, takes their appearance in his stride. He continues singing and muttering, swings his net, Smoke rising out of him like the morning mist. After six or seven attempts he snatches a bird, midflight: reaches for it, then scoops it up in a well-practised manner, so as to arrest its wingbeat and the motion of its legs within a single fist. Only then does he deign to acknowledge his visitors’ presence.

  “Who are you?” he says. “Good evening!” It’s an educated
voice and somehow foreign; clipped and suspicious and a little off-key.

  Smith looks at him, points to the ground, the warehouse, the docks, and the river; uses the hand that holds his gun. “I’m the owner. All this is mine.”

  “What, you’re God then?”

  The birdman seems sceptical yet willing to admit the possibility. He draws closer, unintimidated by the gun, holds out the bird in front of him.

  “I’ve been studying the birds,” he confides. “They’re infected, you see. They’ve lost their sense of season.”

  “You are trespassing. I have a charter. A contract. Ratified by Parliament.”

  Nil studies the man’s face, stung by its familiarity and his own sense of disquiet.

  “Come,” he says to Smith, who stands flustered and passive, uncharacteristically so. “Let’s carry on. This man has lost his mind.”

  The stranger hears it, waggles his chin. He is wearing rags, extremely filthy, and is rail-thin. A top hat, brimless and almost comically tattered, is drawn low onto his brow.

  “I have started eating them of late,” he explains with great earnestness, as though the point must be established before any further conversation can take place. “I eat their little livers.

  “I, too, am changing,” he whispers with a wink and note of triumph. “Here, in my armpit, there is a growth of black and yellow, pert like a boil.”

  “Let’s go,” urges Nil, his senses crawling with the stranger’s words, and this time succeeds in pulling Smith away.

  They walk towards the warehouse entrance. Its gate is wide open, but try as they might Nil’s eyes cannot penetrate the darkness inside. He feels rather than sees the cavernous space opening up in front of them, the air behind agitated by a thousand wingbeats. Then the birdman is next to them again. He has approached far too quietly, stands far too close.

  “Then you are looking for it! Here, come. I will show you.”

  The man’s hands twist absently, breaking the neck of the bird he is holding. He stuffs it in a pocket, disappears into the dark.

  Again it is Smith who hesitates.

  “Come,” says Nil once more, and takes Smith by his unencumbered hand, the left. I am No-One, it comes to him somehow incoherently as though someone else is thinking the words. My feelings are strangers to me.

  I will know them only in my actions.

  “Come,” he says a third time, and tugs at Smith’s hand, as a nurse might guide the sick, or a son his old, befuddled father.

  Together they enter the warehouse in search of the eye of a ten-year-old Storm.

   TRAVELLERS

  [ 1 ]

  They catch up with Charlie in less than two days. Perhaps it is his sickness that is slowing him down, or else it is Mary, whose little legs will only walk so fast; perhaps Charlie simply likes to take things slow. There he is on the hilltop, red hair catching the sun; the girl skipping next to him, chewing on a roll. Balthazar stops when they come into sight, a reverent shyness coming over him at which Etta May cannot help but smile.

  “Starstruck old fool!” she chides him, then quickly squeezes his hand.

  He squeezes back before remembering to scowl.

  “What, another breather? Is your arse too big to drag up one more hill?” he vents, though it was he who stopped. “Or do you need to powder your nose again? Let’s get to it then. Look, he has seen us, he’s waving. God, see how skinny he is, how tall!”

  [ 2 ]

  Balthazar had wanted Etta May to come along. Of course he had. Not that he asked her; in fact he made a show of trying to dissuade her no sooner had he told her of his plans. But the old playwright is cracked and brittle these days, in need of support. As for Etta May, she had accepted the unspoken commission with good humour if no enthusiasm. Now—sitting around a campfire, singing songs with Charlie, the girl Mary curled into her lap—she is glad she came. It is Balthazar who sits apart, too tin-eared to join in, bursting with questions he has had no opportunity yet to ask. The night is cool but clear, the moon bright over gorse-covered moors and dry stone walls; sheep in the hills, their smell on the air.

  “Say ‘unicorn,’ ” whispers a sleepy Mary, fascinated by Etta’s southern drawl.

  “Yew-nicorn.”

  “Say ‘doghouse.’ ”

  “Dawg-howse.”

  “Say ‘Maypole.’ Say ‘potty,’ say ‘uncle.’ Say ‘Butterwick,’ ‘pea soup and sausages.’ Say ‘I do love my cheese.’ ”

  Etta May obliges and watches Mary smoke happiness into the sheep-scented night.

  [ 3 ]

  Balthazar gets a chance to ask his questions over the next few days. He and Charlie are walking ahead by some ten paces while Etta May and Mary follow behind. The girl has taken to Etta May and reaches for her with constant threads of Smoke. It teases the child out of Etta May, dares her to clamber onto boulders or pick flowers from the wayside; weave chains and crowns out of buttercups, then drop them with no sense of loss at the sight of some new wonder up ahead.

  The little girl seems less sure about Balthazar and keeps her distance to him. At first Etta May assumes this shyness is the product of Mary not having seen black skin before, or perhaps her confusion about whether Balthazar is “a girl or a boy.” But when she says as much, the girl shakes her head.

  “What then? Why don’t you like him?”

  “He tastes sour,” answers the girl rather seriously. “Like gooseberries and pickled fish.”

  “Gooseberries? Pickled fish? You mean his Smoke?” Etta May laughs at the thought. “And me? How do I taste?”

  “You taste like Charlie.”

  “What does Charlie taste like?”

  “Sugarplums.” Then, cheeks dimpled with mischief: “Say ‘sugarplum,’ Auntie, say ‘plum-plum-plum-plum.’ ”

  [ 4 ]

  When not talking to Mary, Etta May listens in on the conversation ahead. It is a one-sided affair, with Balthazar working his way through a long ream of questions about the past and Charlie answering them patiently and expansively, often with a storyteller’s gift for detail. Nevertheless, Etta May can sense the playwright’s frustration mounting as the day wears on. It takes Etta May a while to figure out the reason. Balthazar is looking for news; some crucial detail that will overturn all his thinking on the coming of the Second Smoke and provide a new direction for his play. But Charlie’s answers are familiar, not just in their outline but in their tenor and phrasing; in the perspective they inhabit. Late in the day, when they stop to make camp, she puts this impression into words.

  “It was you,” she says to Charlie. “You spread the story of the Second Smoke. You are the reason why we know so much.”

  He smiles at her, a little roguish, delighted by her surmise. “Yes, I did! I thought it was only fair. We opened Pandora’s box, after all. People had a right to know what we did and why. So I started telling everyone I met all I could remember and asked people to pass it on. I did not compose the songs, though; someone else came up with that. And then they simply spread.” He hums one of the best-known ditties. “Of course, people soon added variations. It’s part of the joy of telling a tale, I suppose. Making it your own.”

  Etta May watches Balthazar’s face shrivel up with this answer. Perhaps, she thinks, the playwright is shocked by Charlie’s lack of care about felicity. If someone took such liberties with one of Balthazar’s plays, there would be hell to pay.

  “How about Shovel?” he asks. “The historian of Minetowns. Who is he?”

  “That I don’t know. Someone told me that he was a bricklayer, someone else a lathe operator, in the steelworks. And a third person told me that this same bricklayer or lathe operator, or what will you, is actually the Prince of Wales.” Charlie laughs. “It’s a thought, isn’t it? The rightful heir to the throne, writing the chronicle of the firs
t true democracy.”

  “It can’t be. The writing is terrible. And the drawings are too good.”

  Charlie smiles at that. “You may be putting too much faith in the education of the old aristocracy, Balthazar. Believe you me, it wasn’t all that. But look, there’s a Gale on the horizon. Over there! I doubt we will catch it, it’s too far away.”

  [ 5 ]

  As they head farther west and north, the country gets hillier and hillier. Soon mountains rise from the horizon. Etta May has only a sketchy sense of the isle’s geography and can do little with Mary’s assertion that they are heading to the “Lakes.” Behind them on the crest of the unpaved road she makes out a group of other travellers. They, too, may be heading to the Angel. When she asks Charlie who he is, Charlie simply tells her, “You will see.”

  Late that afternoon, they reach a crossroads marked by a wooden pole. Two horses have been tied to it, one saddled, the other serving as a packhorse and laden with bags and a cage containing several pigeons. A man sits leaning against the pole, eating a hunk of cheese. He is slight and elderly, with stringy grey hair and a clean-shaven, somewhat haggard face. But when he rises to greet them his movement is smooth. His eyes, Etta May notices, rest on Charlie’s hair.

   TRAVELLER

  [ 1 ]

  At an unmarked crossroads deep in the Yorkshire Dales, unsure as to which road to pick, his pigeons restless in their cage upon the packing horse, Godfrey Livingstone sits, munching on a hunk of cheese, and studies the horizon. Gorse and dry stone walls; the bucolic whiff of sheep shit; the sky a latticework of cloud. Pretty, he supposes; desolate. He digs a coin out of his pocket, fixes on the fork ahead, flips it. A high arc from the tip of his thumb back into his palm; a little slap as coin hits skin. Tails means left. A dirt path still muddy with last night’s rain. He shrugs, flips the coin once more, and at the high point of its flight, when the coin seems to pause for half a heartbeat in midair, suspended between rise and fall, he spies beneath its copper circle a group of travellers crossing the hilltop to the east. One look and he is decided; the toss ignored, the coin banished back into its pocket. A stroke of luck, the nudge of fate—who is he to scorn the stars? Livingstone stills himself and waits; hate coursing through him like a drug.