Soot
Page 45
The owl’s talons are not made for steps. There is no need, however. Whatever ripped open the roof also rent the floor in a toddler’s version of a line, drawn with a pickaxe not a pencil. Light shines from underneath, lamplight, a type of illumination entirely foreign to the bird’s experience whose London knows fire but not gas. And revealed by this light (a stooping bird; yellow eyes fastened to the crack in the floor; talons spread upon its Soot-baked surface): a square cell of a room, its walls so perfectly black they offer no reflection; its floor so filled with something that it covers every inch.
This something then: too dark to be water, too solid to be tar; too much a-tremour to be anything but alive. A writhing mass, an endless scuttle: black-horned, yellow-furred, jammed in carapace to carapace; rubbing barbed legs one against the other, bumping chitin antler into antler, drumming sticky wing-case against wing-case—and thus emitting a deep jungle buzzing, bass-low and disturbing, all through the hollow shell of once-proud London, claiming it now—forever—as its own.
The owl sees it, cocks its head, contemplates this overstocked and seething larder; hops from leg to leg in lieu of furrowing its brow; then spreads its wings and rises through the hole within the roof. It is flight in all the senses of the word, unseemly in its haste (were it the bat, not the owl, one would see need to make mention of hell).
A mile westward the sound grows faint once more and the owl’s flight calmer. It cuts north and farther west and circles over Islington; makes a killing of a squirrel and flies the dangling carcass home. There, pulling at the stringy tissue of the squirrel’s diaphragm, the owl feels safe again and—having (so to speak) changed into the comforts of pyjamas, pipe, and slippers—is quick to aphorize experience in much the same way that the ancients transposed slaughter into epic song.
Some food, it turns out, is simply too noisy to eat.
[ 2 ]
“How can they have grown so fast? It’s unnatural!”
“They were hungry. Starving even. Then we finally found them food.”
“And who knew they would breed? At this speed! We must have several thousand now. More, perhaps. And every time I look, yet more grubs and more bloody cocoons; fresh bugs hatching, all sticky with goo. And the noise! It’s like living with a cicada in your ear. No, don’t laugh, Nil, it really is too much.”
Smith is unnerved. This surprises Nil. After all, there is money to be made from the beetles’ fecundity, and this, their nursery, successful beyond all hope, represents the triumph of Smith’s most daring plan. It may be that he is simply tired after their recent exertions. They have had little rest ever since finding it, the room that held the black rock, the epicentre of the Storm. The madman showed it to them, the madman with the familiar face. He bent down to the rip within the floor, genuflecting, leapt up again and ran off, jabbering about birds. Darkness was falling. They had to retrace their steps to the automobile and fetch lamps before they could study their find.
Their first reaction was one of disappointment: it seemed unspectacular, a few fist-sized lumps, piled like coals upon the naked floor. Only the hole above it gave them weight. That and the fact that it was hailed by the beetle in Nil’s hand. It started buzzing. Freed, it charged the lumps and ate; turned plump and black in what seemed like seconds; then staggered away like a drunk. They worked long hours that night: brought the motorcar to the warehouse, unloaded the cases; detached with much care each single cocoon and stuck it to the pieces of rock until they ran out of space. Soon, the lumps looked like hedgehogs, bristling with quills.
Beautiful in their way.
Then exhaustion caught up with them. Smith slept sitting upright behind the wheel of his motorcar, which they had parked at the centre of the warehouse floor; Nil curled up on the back seat, dreaming of home. They missed the miracle of birth. By the next morning, the first of the beetles had already hatched from their cocoons.
“And have you noticed the yellow fur? I swear it’s changing. Growing denser, and more yellow. On the beetle we brought it’s a narrow crescent. But some of the new ones have a full tuft now, and in some of them it’s growing from the joints of the legs. What does it mean? Ah, that smile again! The one that means ‘I remember something, from back then.’ Only when I ask it’s all very vague. Heathen worship, ancient myths; the rhythms of a cultic dance. Rider Haggard stuff. You should write it up, boy. Throw in a half-naked blonde tied to a tree and it is bound to sell. It’ll make you rich. But I forgot, you are already rich! Here, let’s shake on it. My assistant and business partner: a pagan bug-lover and thief. Old Braithwaite would have a fit! To hell with him, I say. Money knows no creed.”
They do shake hands and even linger for a moment, then laugh at their own foolishness. In truth they’ve been getting on splendidly: working contentedly side by side; sharing the tins of corned beef and potatoes that Smith had chosen for their main supplies; living an easy camp life of labour, food, and sleep. There is an animal power, Nil has discovered, to such proximity; to sticking one’s fork into the self-same tin and falling asleep to another’s sound of breathing; to forming a tribe. Without Smoke it is hard to say how deep this bond has grown.
[ 3 ]
The main work these days is the harvest. The beetles have to be milked. For this delicate process, the two business partners have fast evolved a precise method. Nil takes the lead: his hands are smaller, more dexterous; his touch gentler. The syringe has proven to be unnecessary. With the right touch, the right pressure, the gland that holds the beetle’s spore can be expressed like a tube of paint. After some experimentation, they discovered that the easiest way of doing so is to slide the beetle along a flat, smooth surface. Smith’s shaving mirror: it is his job to hold it, at just the right angle. Each beetle paints a line; five or six lines fill up the mirror; then his cutthroat scoops up the gooey liquid and transfers it to a lidded glass. The future of the world in jam jars: they have filled some three score thus far. Smith has brought a set of scales to weigh them once they are full. He labels them like a grocer.
“We need a brand name,” he says, thoughtfully, “something catchy.”
“ ‘Bug Shit.’ ”
Smith grins. “Nice but a little too blunt. It might work in Germany. For the United States we’ll need something a little more grandiose. Like ‘Liberty’ or something. A touch of the Pilgrim Fathers.”
“ ‘Deliverance.’ ”
“Perfect. You are a genius, you are.”
[ 4 ]
Later they sit side by side in the warehouse dirt and smoke cigars. Smith has brought a gramophone. He’s playing opera; some crooner called Caruso. Sitting close to it, the singing almost drowns out the beetles’ drone. Next to them stands a packed crate full of jam jars: their first delivery for Renfrew. They are leaning against its back.
Smith is tired, happy, ruminative; hums along to the melody, slightly off-key.
“We will need to hire men soon,” he says, abruptly. “Milkmaids, a foreman, guards. Turn this into a factory, with a production line and daily searches, so nobody can sneak off with our goods.” He sighs. “It’s inevitable, I suppose. But this here, this is what I like: the pioneering days. Getting your hands dirty, digging for gold.
“It’s funny,” he adds a moment later, wistful and serious. “I work for a future that takes away all the things I most enjoy. Ah well, it is what it is. History won’t be denied.”
He grinds the stump of the cigar into the ground, looks over at Nil, changes topic.
“I’m taking an awful risk. Leaving you here while I go deliver the crate to our men at the edge of the city.”
“We can’t leave the beetles. Not without guard.”
“No. And I suppose you can’t run away with them. Those pieces of rock are heavy like lead.” Smith grimaces, puffs up his cheeks. “But it’s worse than that…I trust you! God help me, but I really do.”
“There! As good as any contract.”
He wipes at his eyes, blows his nose with gusto; leans over to the gramophone, cranks the handle, and puts the needle back to the beginning. When Smith settles back against the box, his mood has shifted yet again.
“You know, I have a theory about that rock of ours. Think about it: we know about two such objects. One lies there”—he gestures left—“deep in your Amazonian jungle. The other in the East, on the other side of the world! So, you have to ask yourself: how is that possible?”
Nil spoils Smith’s dramatic pause by providing an answer.
“They fell from the sky.”
Smith starts, then carries on, not exactly annoyed but deflated. “So you think so, too! Or is it something you remembered? One of your people’s myths perhaps, yes? Well, let’s say it fell from the sky then. A meteor, a burning piece of rock, plunging to the earth, who knows how many centuries ago. Only it wasn’t made of ordinary stone…More like a coral perhaps, only harder. Or else it was stone, but locked within it, it carried something. A germ, or a bacillus, God knows—we’d have to ask some egghead expert and even then we wouldn’t get a proper answer. Something alive, in any case. Something foreign. And here it finds itself, abroad. What next? War! That’s what! That’s Darwinism, isn’t it? The rock’s germs against ours, battling it out. ‘Adaptations,’ that’s what Darwin calls it, things changing so they can survive in this new world, feed on the new food. All sped up a millionfold, I imagine: a strong stimulus calling for a strong response.”
Nil listens to Smith, pictures it, the rock in the jungle: crushing a deep hole, burning the trees and plants. Then: a growth of ferns in the scorched earth, reclaiming ground. Making contact with the thing that came from the sky. Nil ponders it, feels his heart pound at the images he conjures, and decides to share a fraction of a recent dream.
“There is something I do remember. It’s a myth, I suppose, or a song, only I dreamt it as a drawing. A stick man with a curl above his head. One of my people, smoking. In ancient times.” Excitement takes hold of Nil, bids him jump to his feet. He starts pacing to Caruso. “Do you understand, Smith, what I am saying? We, too, smoked. Perhaps we were the first ones who ever did. The rock hit near us and it changed our organs. Not at once, I suppose, but eventually. After a hundred—or a thousand—generations. And then something else happened—another adaptation—and we stopped. And the next generation did not even grow them: the organs, the gland within the liver, whatever it is. We must have discovered the beetles and lived smokeless in its spore.”
Smith’s face, too, is flushed with the joy of discovery, of explanation. All the same, he raises an objection. “You told me you did not inject yourselves. You did not even harvest it, you say—‘Deliverance.’ ”
Nil shrugs, pleading ignorance. He thinks of the sailors on the Madre de Deus who were kept free of infection merely from having a chestful of beetles in their hold. He does not say: perhaps it suffices to be around them; perhaps their spore is carried on the air. Smith might not like the implication.
Instead he says: “Those birds outside. The ones that look like swollen swallows. With a yellow mark on their wings.”
“They, too, are changed, yes. And how quickly it must have happened! Perhaps they nested right here, or a flock passed just as the first Storm was released. I wager…”
But Smith falls silent as Nil whips around, a finger to his lips. He crouches, waits, then—with a sudden movement—yanks the gramophone needle off the record. In the relative silence that follows a footfall can be heard, behind them, where the warehouse wall is broken.
“Ah, our ghost!” exclaims Smith. “Still poking around. Hunting birds, I suppose. Even a ghost needs his dinner!”
He studies Nil, who is aware of the disgust showing on his own face.
“I have had a thought about our ghost,” Smith continues. “Something about his accent. Mitteleuropa, eh? Ah, I can see you have had the same thought! And have you noticed that our photographs have gone missing? The ones that led us here. I’ve looked and looked but they are gone.”
Nil does not reply at once. When he does, he has turned away, to keep his face hidden.
“I thought you would…get rid of him.”
“Is that what you want? That I put a bullet through the man? I’d be safer, I suppose; keep him from filching anything else. But that’s not why you want it.”
“If he is who we think he is…”
“Yes, of course. He has much to answer for! Think about it, though—we would neither be here without him. We’d never even have met.”
Nil does not reply. Smith accepts his silence. It is almost as though he is developing tact.
“In any case,” he adds at last. “It’s a good thing he’s gone mad.”
[ 5 ]
Smith leaves early the next day. He won’t be gone long. Nil watches the motorcar drive off until it has disappeared from view, then waits a full hour in case Smith returns. Then, taking a single beetle with him—his beetle, the first—he leaves the warehouse himself and sets off, following the bank of the river, heading west. Within a few hours he has entered a neighbourhood he well remembers and finds the same half-burned house in which he spent his youth. He sneaks into the yard, looks up to the kitchen window. A potted geranium sits on the sill. Nil stands for a long time, considering that geranium. It’s in full bloom: a well-watered, cared-for purple-blue. His mother’s favourite colour. Foster mother’s. He’s been lost, all his life, in the gap between those two words.
Nil stands until, in the shifting light, he becomes aware of a shadow moving behind the kitchen window. Doing the dishes. It is strange how one can recognise someone by the rhythm with which they scrub. No, not just anyone. Family. Nil parses the word, curling his lips over it, and then ascends the stairs to his old flat to talk to a man who shares his name with a monster. A man who can fuss and care and like, but who does not know what it is to love.
ANGEL
[ 1 ]
Swooping birds and screaming children: the Angel’s encampment is strung out along the southwestern tip of the lake, where fields give way to a little patch of woodland. The eastern shore in particular is far too steep for habitation, a wall of rock that defers dawn each morning, dying the waters with its shadow. The lake itself is perhaps three miles long but narrow; it has been scooped out of these hills with a sharp but slender tool. It’s a desolate place far to the west of the region and retains a flavour of wilderness despite the occasional farm. Flare your nostrils and you can smell the Irish Sea.
At present, however, what blows towards the newcomers’ faces (for the breeze is westerly, and stiff) is the smell of unwashed bodies. It turns out that children stink, thinks Etta May; not as badly as adults perhaps, and less of sweat than of badly wiped backside, but still strongly enough to scent the valley with their odour. There must be several hundred of them: not quite the “army” of the rumours but a considerable number, spread out across the shore and into the little wood. They are dressed in rags and self-fashioned ponchos; live in tents and under tarps; are filthy and skinny if not quite stunted. They shout and play and squabble, trade scraps of Smoke that snag on the visitors’ skin and tug at them like fishing lines, in four directions all at once—at all but at the Smokeless One, whose infirmity earns stares wherever they pass.
They are walking in a row: Balthazar, Charlie hand in hand with little Mary, Etta May, and the lank-haired stranger. She keeps her eye on that one; turns frequently to reassure herself that he walks none too close. It is hard not to loathe him by instinct, for being something less than a man. Etta May—the Soothe
r; the placid one, professionally slow in all her passions—feels her skin pucker with his presence. She berates herself a little and makes sure to avoid his touch. Above the grey-blue pebble of the lake, a cloud of birds is flying low, playing tag; batlike, erratic in its motion. “Soot-swallows”—that’s what Charlie called them. Also: “Gale birds.” Etta May has never seen them anywhere else before.
She looks over to Charlie and sees he, too, has been watching the birds.
“There’re so many of them!” she marvels out loud. “Are they native to these lakes?”
“Not especially. As far as I know they have no fixed home. They fly with the Gales, see. It’s what we Gale Chasers used to do: look out for the birds. It is one of the easiest ways of finding a Gale.”
She shakes her head, uncomprehending. “But there is no Gale here now.”
Charlie laughs. “You’ll see. Ever wonder why there are so few Gales these days anywhere but in the North?”
Balthazar turns at these words, curious, but Charlie is far too delighted with his riddle to provide an answer.
“Not far now,” he says. “I can see the Angel over there. Come, I’ll introduce you.”
[ 2 ]
There’s a press of children that surrounds the Angel. If these are his courtiers, they appear singularly uninterested in paying court to him. Instead they are talking, playing, performing for one another. A group of girls is practicing cartwheels and headstands; another is immersed in a game of hopscotch crudely drawn into the dirt; next to them two boys compete for distance sending clumps of spit high into the wind. In fact, the only thing that differentiates these children from any of the others in the camp is that they stand more densely packed around a common centre obscured by their milling bodies.