Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  It is not a long swim, some two hundred and fifty yards at most. All the same, Livia is tired by the time she reaches the end of the pier. She can see the lighthouse rise above. The cone of its light focusses on a scene invisible to her from this angle. The hull of the Company cargo ship is close, smells of rust and sea rot. Between the darkness of the night and the shadow of pier and ship, Livia is reduced to groping about herself. She is looking for a staircase comparable to the one that led her into the water but finds none. The fear grips her that she will be thwarted by so stupid a detail. Then her left hand finds the icy rung of a metal ladder bolted into the side of the pier. Her feet feel for further rungs beneath the waterline; finding them, she heaves her body out of the water and tucks the gun behind her belt. Then she begins to climb.

  Near the top she stops, then peeks over the lip of the wall, trying to get her bearings. The pier is narrower here than it is near the shore, but even so it remains some fifteen yards across. At its very end, where the pier’s wrist grows into its fist, it widens again to accommodate the bulk of the lighthouse. Its light is misused, shining down at an acute angle. It cuts in two the pier and creates two unequal zones. A sliver of darkness gives way without transition to a glowing field of light.

  The field of light holds a wealth of things. Half the cargo ship’s hull is bathed in it. A rope threads towards it, also in the light, and is held by a row of some thirty Company soldiers who have dropped their rifles at their feet and are engaged in a silent tug-of-war. Moving towards them, no doubt blinded by the brightness that engulfs this section of the pier, is the throng of children, Miners, farmers. Eleanor is at the front, uniting them with the threads of her Smoke.

  Straddling dark and light stands a twisted, broken crane. The rope heaved by the soldiers still threads through its winch, but its arm has collapsed, its engine blown. The edge of the light runs through it like a blade, as though it were the thing that cut it down.

  A few steps from the crane, in the thin sliver of pier that rests in darkness, shielded from the approaching mob by the long row of heaving soldiers and the base of the broken crane, stands a spare old man with lanky hair holding a leash that ties to him a faceless child. How small he looks, how insignificant. A pinch-faced everyman in drab, worn clothing. She knows his name, has learned it from Balthazar, and from a letter sent to her by Eleanor.

  Livingstone.

  And right behind him, in that same thin strip of darkness; risen by another rung, so that both her elbows are now on the pier; her foot wrapped around a rung of the ladder to make sure she does not slip: Livia herself.

  Livingstone’s assassin.

  It does not bother her that he will never know who killed him. It is the child—masked, tied, leashed—that causes her distress. He carries the echo of another boy, ten years ago, whom she and her friends failed to free. Instead they consented to his use. The shame pulses through her even now. It conjoins with her anger, her grief; her body warming, smoking once again, wet, greasy smears.

  They make the gun very slippery to hold.

  The shot is not an easy one. Tools and debris litter this portion of the pier. A crate obscures the man from the waist down and reduces the masked child to little more than its head. Livia could climb up higher, attempt to sneak closer to the man. If she thought it feasible, she would walk right up to him, and hold the muzzle against the scrawny bit of bone that connects head to neck. Just to make sure.

  She does not think it feasible, though. If he notices her he will duck; use the child as a shield; order soldiers trained at shooting to rid him of this amateur. No, better to act now. Livia levels the gun, stretches her arm out as far as it will go. Soothes her breathing. Cocks the hammer (it takes surprising force to slip it back). Trembles.

  Shoots.

  The noise shocks her, the force of the gun leaping upwards in her hand. It nearly makes her drop the gun. Ahead, the reaction is delayed. One moment she thinks she has missed her target. Then he doubles over, cut down at the waist. Next to him, in the bright world of light, the soldiers’ final heave catapults something over the lip of the pier. It is large—the size of a steam engine, of a factory furnace—and surrounded by a wide-meshed net; comes up suddenly like a cork out of its bottle and slithers across twenty feet of pier, the soldiers falling hard upon their rumps. It is as though its weight has suddenly changed.

  Inside the netting, attached to that darkness that glistens like a fisherman’s catch—a ball of black fish stunned to find themselves in breathless air—something moves. It is ugly, toadlike, wriggling between catch and netting; seems grown into the darkness of the nameless thing, yet is independent of it, too; wriggles then presses its black face into the mesh of the coarse netting so that eyes and nose and mouth are cut apart and bulge from separate casements. A cry of fear flies out a blackened mouth; the gaping panic of a rope-framed eye.

  Livia knows the eye, the mouth.

  She drops the gun and runs towards the creature without thought.

  [ 7 ]

  Timothy Angel is not stupid. Not an idiot, nor even stunted, underdeveloped, half grown, dim. Different, to be sure. So different, in fact, that he does not care to speak in sound. His words are breath and colour; like magic spells they tip you into a world that scorns our grammar, a world that jumbles pronouns, i-you-he-she-mine-yours-us. He may be saviour or devil. But stupid he is not.

  There’s another thing that we must understand. The Angel is shy and full of pity. He believes in love, in play, in fate and signs. Oh, he is not naïve. He knows we are made up of wants that fast turn ugly; are made up of pain and needs first learned when we were snatched from our mothers’ wombs. That all our lives we struggle to reconnect. That’s where his pity comes in. A man was brought to him, a man cut off from all communion. A cripple. The birds picked him, just as they had picked Timmy himself (and what choice does he have but to think himself picked, he who is different from everybody else? and who can blame him for reading the world for signs of purpose, he who’s been given a gift without instruction?). This man was—to a boy for whom all hearts had always lain wide open, flayed—inscrutable. How was he not to think him lonely, lost, and sad?

  Then, too, there was relief in it: with this stranger alone, the Angel could slip his wings and hang up his halo. In the man’s condescension, Timmy saw the reflection of the relationship of other adults to other children and through it—strange, exotic—the siren song of the mundane.

  And then of course there was the sugar. It would be remiss not to mention its allure. That first lump offered revelation, there behind the closed door of his mouth: an intense and selfish sweetness spreading on his palate, in secret from everybody else. It was, to a boy for whom all love had always been communal, something like a mother’s secret bedside kiss. A boy not yet eleven. Is one to call him imbecilic for succumbing to a childhood opiate that still beguiles so many an adult?

  First came the pity then; the pity and the sugar. Then came the mask, the heavy hand seizing hold of Timmy’s shoulder. Later, the wrist ties and the leash; the cryptic whispers about the Heart of the Smoke.

  This violence has not cancelled Timmy’s pity, nor eroded his conviction that he is where he is meant to be; that the leash does nothing but tie him to his approaching purpose. But Timmy now assumes the man is bad. Being alone, incapable of Smoke, he has no way of airing his own evil: of expressing and sharing it, of seeing its fever spread to others to return to him adulterated, strange. He cannot see himself; cannot taste his anger on a stranger’s skin and find in it some cause for self-forgiveness. As such, he cannot be saved.

  As though they, too, have come to realise this, the birds have abandoned the man and made a residence of the sinking ship. There, Timmy’s purpose has acquired shape and mass and colour. When the rock first emerges, yanked from the hull by the crane’s might, it staggers Timmy by its scale. Then the crane bends i
n two and the soldiers are called to drag it from the water (soldiers masked as Timmy is; also straining at some too-tight leash).

  Following the soldiers and soon filling the whole length of the pier, but separated from Livingstone and the boy by the taut rope and the row of pulling soldiers, there comes a crowd: not a mere assemblage of people but a creature many-hued and many-limbed, bound together by its central need. Its Smoke unites it the way an orchestra is united by a score.

  It is this shared and unifying Smoke that rouses the child, wakes in him a longing. He yanks, he strains, he wants to join the crowd. There is a woman up front, with a breast of steel and leather and a wet white skirt. It is to her that Timmy strains. The leash chokes his breath and fills his eyes with tears beneath the thick glass of their goggles. He cannot get away.

  Then comes the shot.

  It happens in the same moment that the rock leaps from behind the lip of the pier; that the soldiers fall in one great row, so it is as though it is they who have been shot and the rock that is the shooter. The bullet’s noise is twofold: a bang and a hornet whistle. It passes Timmy’s ear so close, he can feel the heat of its hard flight. It hits a piece of the crane ahead, striking sparks, and dies.

  A shock then: his body is taken by surprise. It reacts. The child swings around—towards the close flight of the bullet, though of course it is long gone. Torque comes into play. The child’s feet become a pivot. His arms—tied wrist to elbow and awkwardly stretched in front of him—a pendulum. Imagine a hammer throw, all energy bundled into the double fist formed by Timmy’s lashed-together hands. He does not mean to hit Livingstone but Livingstone is in the way. A child four and a half feet high: the fists rising from beneath the level of his waist to a point near the height of his shoulders. They collide with Livingstone at the rotation’s apex; catch him tidily, slightly rising still, between the skinny prongs of his two thighs. Right in the groin.

  It cuts the man in two; bends him double as though on a hinge.

  Next he knows, Timmy’s leash hangs free. The boy turns around and starts running: towards the leather-breasted woman and her Smoke. Halfway there, his run crisscrosses with another’s, perpendicular to his, aiming for the black rock that glistens in its net. Timmy pays it no attention. He slips between the row of fallen soldiers, stumbling a little on the water-slick rope. Two more steps deliver him into the woman’s arms. Tied though his wrists are, his fingers still jump up and reach for his mask’s buckles.

  Her hands meet his there.

  [ 8 ]

  Eleanor understands.

  Walking down the pier, a crowd of hundreds at her back, she has watched Livingstone command the soldiers. Lined up, pulling at the rope, they formed a wall of bodies between her and him, but there were gaps enough to catch glimpses of her uncle’s servant. She saw his haggard face and the leash held in his hand; caught sight of the child, trussed up and gagged within his mask; heard the shot and saw—in the very moment the soldiers tumbled to the ground—Livingstone, too, double over, felled by an accidental, guileless blow; and held out her arms in welcome when the little body raced across the twenty steps of pier.

  She understands that this child must be the “trigger”; that it is he—or whatever it is he can do—that her uncle sent Livingstone to find. She surmises, too, that the mask was put there with good reason, that there are dangers to the child’s clear breath. As the little boy in front of her tears clumsily at the mask’s buckles, she understands therefore that his hands and action must be stopped. Her own hands rise for just this purpose: to wrestle free his stubby fingers and restrain them gently, to hold him close and tell him that he must not be freed.

  For the world’s sake, he must not.

  Then she looks into his eyes.

  They are goggle-drowned, distorted, pressed into clefts by the puffy skin surrounding them; are embrasures, not “windows to the soul,” unlit, half hidden, thickly draped. Need spills out of them even so. Her fingers touch his, hold them between hers, then let go and assist him with the buckles.

  The world might go to hell. But this child must be allowed to breathe.

  A moment later the buckles are loose, the mask is off. Behind him, the soldiers have picked themselves up and are raising guns. A scream sounds to the left—Livia!—but she is hidden by the hulking rock. Livingstone is on hands and knees, vomiting bile.

  So much is happening, so much that is important. But between her hands, Eleanor cradles a smile. An ugly child, fat-cheeked, puffy-skinned. Smiling ear to ear.

  You are safe, she wants to say. Before she can do so, he has hugged her and breathed a Gale into her skin.

  In a heartbeat, half the pier is in its grip.

  [ 9 ]

  Balthazar is trying not to shout at Etta May. It is not her fault that she finds the boat awkward to row; nor can she do anything about the funny currents that disturb the harbour water near the pier. All he knows is that they will come late: that Livia has long arrived at the bolted-in ladder that was her destination; that she has a gun and is aiming it; that he cannot help her in whatever it is that she has planned. When the gun goes off, Etta May has brought them close enough so he can hook an arm through the pier’s iron ladder, then pull the boat alongside. By the time he laboriously scrambles up the rungs, Livia has already disappeared from view. He pulls himself over the lip of the pier, not standing up but remaining on all fours; finds Livia’s gun by accident as one of his hands presses down on it.

  The moment he gains his bearings is the moment Eleanor slips the Smoke mask off the Angel’s head. Closer by, he sees Livingstone, retching. Much of his body is obscured by things littering the pier, but the head is clearly visible. Balthazar shudders and aims the gun. He is not thinking clearly. His fingers feel clumsy and cold. Behind Livingstone he sees the rock and, pressed into its flank, two figures. He does not know whether they are embracing or fighting.

  Then the Gale erupts. It happens downwind from them and is recognisable by an eruption of colour within the crowd’s Smoke. What was thin and stolid before now becomes nimble, many-hued, playful, thick. The wind direction holds, the soldiers remain free of it: are cocking guns, awaiting orders. Balthazar tries to concentrate on the man who might furnish one.

  How hard can it be to squeeze a trigger?

  Then he becomes aware of a movement in the Gale. The child, Timmy, dashing full-pelt towards the rock. His arms outstretched, palms open. Eleanor is following him but Balthazar can see that she won’t catch him.

  If his breath reaches the rock—

  If the wind turns now, for even a moment—

  Balthazar swears and turns around the gun, so that the muzzle is now pointed at the child.

  How hard can it be to squeeze a trigger?

  [ 10 ]

  Livia tears at the netting that holds rock and Thomas. Black teeth; barnacles upon his temple; an oozing growth there in his flank—she can see, of course, that there’s something wrong. Still she does her best to discount it. There are urgent needs driving her that have no patience with infirmity. Livia needs to tell Thomas about Charlie and that she slew his killer with a gun. She needs to hold him breast to breast; feel his weight on her; be held. This is no time for Thomas to be other than he was.

  So she focusses on the netting, slack now that the tension of the rope is gone, pulling at it with her modest weight and growing vexed at Thomas’s passivity. At last the net splits open on the sharp ridge of some piece of metal and falls down around his ankles in black loops. Her hands rush to him, then her lips. They taste seawater on him and sweat, and a rank strangeness that is not quite Soot. Thomas hangs limp in this embrace: his mouth wide open and his eyes still filled with morbid fear. It is not fear of her, or of the noise that fills the pier, but a sightless, inward sickness. He is a man sleepwalking in a private nightmare, a mountain tied onto his back. She sees it, screams des
pair at him (it sounds a little like wild laughter), then pulls him closer and lets her body tell him about Charlie’s death.

  Preoccupied as she is, she does not hear the patter of little feet nearby.

  [ 11 ]

  Three steps from the rock, Timmy slows. It is the size of a shed perhaps; taller. Mussels, seaweed cling to it. Metal pipes and jagged shards of iron hull. The rock itself is coal black, ink black, a bottomless hole: it swallows the lighthouse’s light and reflects nothing back. Timmy hears a voice on the far side of the rock—anguish? laughter?—and half rounds it, a gust whipping at his face. The woman with the harness-chest is close behind him, but absorbed in his Gale-quickened Smoke, she falters and stops. There: he sees it now, the source of the strange laughter: a man and a woman. She is blond and tired and very pretty. He is dark and grown into the rock. Not literally—not quite—but things connect him (seaweed, stringy like webbing). More than that: the rock’s grown into him. The woman is holding him; her Smoke is very dark. It decides Timmy. Frowning, a little anxious, arms held wide at shoulder height, he steps up to the rock and folds it in his Gale’s embrace.

  Somewhere close, he hears the thunderclap of a second gunshot.