Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  [ 12 ]

  Livingstone’s still on the ground and retching when the child hugs the rock and goes up in Smoke.

  No, that’s wrong. He was already Smoke-wreathed, already the nexus of a Gale of volatile emotion. Now, he goes up in hate. Yes, that’s what it is. His chubby little hands touch the rock and wake it. It’s like touching a torch to an ocean of gas. All that is solid melts into air. A vortex forms, as yet narrow, unfurls itself three leagues high into the sky. The rock has found life. Through Timmy. In Timmy.

  It is the most beautiful thing Livingstone has ever seen.

  And as Timmy steps away: as he turns his back on the rock and looks over at Livingstone—his almond eyes black and shining, filled socket-full with burning pitch—Livingstone sees the heart of the Storm move with him as though the rock has moved into his flesh. And all at once a new vision arises in Livingstone, so clear and powerful it is as though he sees it on a postcard, nicely framed by a printed black border. It shows him holding the grip of a leash, twenty feet long, the burning child straining at its end; shows him walking this child-turned-Storm the length and breadth of Britain until the very earth is black and barren at his feet. At this vision, threading through the sickness resulting from the boy’s low blow, a wash of warmth pours through Livingstone such as he has never felt before. He is transported. It is as though he is ten years old again, and gladly hates the whole wide world.

  Then something hits him (a boot? a pickaxe?) and turns this warmth to screaming pain.

  [ 13 ]

  Balthazar must shoot the child to save the day. Balthazar cannot shoot the child. He cannot do it while Timmy is still running; cannot do it when he stops and hesitates; cannot do it still when his small hands dig into blackness and something horrible unfolds, here upon the pier. As Balthazar balks and quivers, Etta May’s sturdy figure folds itself around him from behind, embracing him, guiding his arms. Together (Smoke-bound, her breath in the nape of his neck) they swivel the gun ten, fifteen degrees. Together they pull the trigger. The effect is like kicking a man who is crawling on his hands and knees. The bullet slams into Livingstone’s spare body and sends it tumbling across the pier.

  Then the Storm twists and spreads to them, and all they know is hate.

   ELSEWHERE

  (Nurse I)

  [ 1 ]

  “Eat your porridge, Lord Protector. Still sulking, are we? Or is it that you want to die? You keep an old woman guessing. Has that blow to the head finally robbed you of your wits, or are you simply holding your breath? Waiting for the end?”

  Lady Naylor holds the laden spoon a moment longer to her patient’s lips, then drops it in the bowl. It is unappetising stuff, oat porridge made with water. There has been no one to deliver milk or any other food since Eleanor left. The Silent Keep stands all but empty; a nunnery whose every nun has flown. She alone remains to raid the sad remnants of the larder. Lady Naylor does not cook. She has been eating the same damn gruel that Renfrew keeps rejecting.

  “I should just smother you with a pillow,” she says now, as she removes said item and shakes it out, trying to redistribute the sweat-clumped down. Then she slips it back under Renfrew’s head. “But I suppose you have as much right as anyone to see how it ends.”

  She turns to the window of Renfrew’s study, into which she has moved, an armchair serving her as bed. She could have ignored Eleanor’s request and headed north, of course. Towards the action. But it has proved difficult to leave this man, her enemy, to starve. More difficult yet to kill him. It has trapped her here, that and Eleanor’s words, which the young man who fetched her after delivering the unconscious Renfrew to his bed repeated like a mantra: “Tell Lady Naylor I said so.” The nerve of the girl! It was really quite admirable. And so she has been stuck here, waiting for news. When she tried the telephone, she found the line had gone dead.

  “How will we learn? I don’t suppose anyone will send us a pigeon. For all we know it might already have happened. The Storm may be on its way to us. Or Eleanor, triumphant. Riding bareback on a snow-white mare.”

  She snorts, turns back to her patient and notices that his hands lie folded on his blanket, that his lips are shaping words. Lady Naylor hastens to him, bends her ear, but can hear nothing.

  “What now? Do you need water? Or are you praying, perchance? And if so, for what? For Livingstone’s triumph or Eleanor’s survival? You know you cannot have both.”

  She receives no answer and is not sure whether the sick man can hear her; whether he is trapped in phantasms conjured by his deranged mind. The thought brings with it another; lures her back to another sickbed, another madman, more encrusted in Soot than this one. She hesitates, then slips in next to him, pushing him aside on the narrow bed. They end up in close proximity, shoulder overlapping shoulder. Up close, Renfrew’s body carries an acrid smell.

  “My husband died alone. Did you know that? They took him from our home—this was before the Second Smoke, after I had been declared an enemy of the state—and placed him in a ‘hospital.’ When I finally found him, he was long dead. I think he must have starved.”

  She reaches over to Renfrew, takes his hand; shyly almost, a debutante at a dance.

  “You were his student, Lord Protector. I remember his bringing you home. Oh, I thought you rather handsome. A little common in your manners. But burning with a special sort of flame.”

  Lady Naylor smiles at the memory. Then a noise startles her, the shrill ring of a chime. It makes her drop Renfrew’s hand, though she snatches it up again at once.

  “God, your bloody clock! It catches me out every time.”

  She laughs, genuinely laughs, her head thrown back and baring teeth.

  “And here I thought it was the end of the world.”

   ELSEWHERE

  (Nurse II)

  [ 1 ]

  Smith is making excuses. He remains pallet-bound, too dizzy to rise for any length of time, and complaining of a continual headache. It has not affected his ability to speak, though. In the absence of any bodily movement, he seems to think it important to give his tongue a good workout.

  Through these extended soliloquies, the topic of his discourse remains remarkably static. Nil. How “he had no choice, if you think about it”; “and of course, he must have been upset, I’d just told him about the destruction of his people.” “It does show pluck, though,” he will add later, for the umpteenth time, as though shouting down a dissenting opinion at a debate. “Not just pluck—proper balls. Entrepreneurial spirit! Of course, he is inexperienced. Liable to piss away a fortune. I tell you one thing, though: a man of pluck will always find another opportunity. That’s how we are made. And for all we know, it is he who is doing History’s bidding and I was merely in the way.” He seems to be under the impression that the boy has stolen his beetles to sell their spore to the Miners in the North. Grendel has not had the heart to tell him otherwise.

  Indeed, Grendel has hardly said a word. Instead he has listened to hour after hour of declamatory nonsense with great patience and equanimity. Only once in a while does he rouse himself to correct the Company man on a nominal matter.

  “It’s Mowgli,” he will say, “not Nil.”

  Smith will agree at once then babble on. He does not place much importance in names. All he wants is assurances that the boy was concerned for his well-being before running off with his car. On this subject, Grendel relates the exact truth.

  “He himself stopped the flow of blood,” he says. “And he instructed me to look after you.”

  This seems to please Smith no matter how many times he hears it. Often his eyes will brim up and he will reach over to briefly squeeze Grendel’s hand with his own sweaty palm. The headache, it appears, has made him sentimental, or soft-brained. For a man robbed of his goods, his car, his future, he seems in remarkably good form.

  [ 2
]

  Fortunately for Grendel, Smith’s compulsive talk is interrupted by lengthy periods of sleep. In these intervals of silence, Grendel sits quietly, listening to the hum of the remaining beetles and for the quiet steps of the ghost. He has been visiting regularly; staying out of sight for the most part, though Grendel has caught a few glimpses of him from afar.

  If Mowgli had not told him, Grendel would never have recognised Sebastian Aschenstaedt. The engineer and scientist was still a young man when he helped set off the Second Smoke. Grendel remembers him as excitable and self-absorbed. Now he is a wraith, inside and out, as though his very soul has worn thin. His science has decayed to alchemy, to whispered truth and totem objects: feathers, dead birds, photographs. Grendel understands he stole the latter from Smith; when Grendel last saw him, Aschenstaedt placed one of the photographs on the ground for Grendel to inspect, before disappearing back into the warehouse’s shadows. It was, to Grendel’s surprise, a picture of Mowgli taken in Grendel’s own house. Aschenstaedt himself must have taken it at the time when Mowgli was infected. It appears the wraith has recognised Grendel and wishes to communicate across the chasm of his madness. Grendel does not hurry him. He has taken to walking around armed with a shovel.

  This evening Grendel is uneasy, listening to the Company man’s quiet snore. Smith got up at lunchtime and walked around. He had to stop after just a few steps, but these are clear signs that he is mending. Soon this service that Grendel is rendering his adoptive son—his one way of proving his love—will come to an end. He himself starts pacing around the warehouse floor and is drawn to the hole in the ground through which one can observe the beetles in their pit. There are not very many now, perhaps five dozen or so, though thousands of new cocoons have since been spun and will soon hatch. Whatever it is the beetles feed on, down there in their room, has mostly disappeared. The pit’s walls and floor are curiously clean of Soot as though this, too, has been consumed. Mowgli told him that the beetles carry in them the seed of reason; a world in which our messy needs no longer spill out to pollute our neighbours. Grendel ponders this statement, curious to him given his past relationship with his son.

  Then he turns around.

  Despite the beetles’ hum, he has long heard the shuffle behind him and is not surprised to find Aschenstaedt there, at five or six steps’ distance, wearing his long, flapping coat. Grendel speaks unselfconsciously to him. It is like speaking to oneself. Speaks softly, for he does not want Smith to wake and hear.

  “It’s odd that something so”—he searches for the word—“primitive should bring the future. Creepy crawlies from the jungle. But I am sure Mowgli is right.” He looks over at Aschenstaedt, cannot tell whether the man follows his words. “Perhaps in a world that does not smoke…perhaps he will find me easier to like.” Grendel pauses, hoists the shovel to his shoulder, steps closer to Aschenstaedt. “My wife died and he blamed me. And really, he was a spiteful child. Always black with anger. I suppose it makes sense, given what you did to him. I tried to tame him through work, and when he screamed his Smoke at me, I did not react.” Grendel shrugs his shoulders in his placid way, his neck crooked, his movements those of an old man. “He hates you, Mr. Aschenstaedt. You killed his people. Not personally, of course, but your men brought in the disease…” He stops, close now to the madman, or at any rate, close enough. “I think he wants me to kill you. It’d be another act of love.”

  Aschenstaedt reacts at last, bending double, before dropping down onto his hands and knees and stretching out his neck, like a feeding cat. For a full minute he holds still, before he grows distracted by a bird carcass sticking out of his coat pocket. He snatches for it, slices the bird open with a penknife he’s been holding, then digs around within its entrails, muttering to himself in German. Grendel towers over him, the shovel raised like an axe above his shoulders.

  He does not swing it.

  “Leave,” he says, the same quiet tones. “Don’t come back. Disappear.”

  Aschenstaedt looks up, bird gizzards in his fingers; drops them, rises, shuffles away. Ten yards hence he turns, says something inaudible, then turns again and walks out the warehouse door.

  Outside, he crosses the black plain of the docks all the way to the bank of the river. Birds are all around him and they distract him for a while. Then he remembers himself and methodically, folding each divested piece of garment into a neat square, strips naked. The socks—hole-ridden, stiff with Soot—come off last. Without pause Aschenstaedt steps into the water. He takes two or three breaststrokes until he meets the main current, then flips onto his back; stretches out arms and legs and lets himself float. The birds fill the sky above him. Gently, steadily, the Soot-thick Thames begins to flush him east, towards the sea.

  Inside the warehouse, Smith wakes on his pallet and asks if there is news from the boy.

   ELSEWHERE

  (Hilltop)

  [ 1 ]

  On the crest of the hill, the horses stop and will walk no more. They are steaming, a fine, dense mist. It rises out of their mouths and nostrils, from the froth-clotted fur of their necks and flanks. In the failing light it looks just like Smoke. This is the time when I must whip them on, thinks Mowgli. All the way to their deaths. He raises the stick that has served him as a riding crop. But he can’t do it. The horses start shivering, and he slips off the coach box to rub them down. The sweaty froth soon hangs off his rag in fronds.

  Ahead, he can make out his destination: the sea, the abandoned port, the pier-bounded basin of the harbour. He sees the hillside dotted with campfires; sees people moving. A lighthouse light has been switched on, facing inward, scooping a section of pier from out the gloom. A crane swings its arm and starts to pull. Mowgli is very close. But what is happening down there is happening right now; and he is on a hilltop, and his horses are spent.

  He lost too much time. He did not know where he was going; time and again he had to ask people, many of whom were themselves heading north and west, drawn by a rumour, and just as ignorant about the way. When he entered Cumbria, the land itself wished to slow him, placing mountains in his way, forcing him to follow the irrational flow of the valleys. In his ear, sealed with wax against the racket of the beetles, he hears Smith’s voice, lecturing him on Hegel. Mowgli, too, has made the mistake of thinking himself a hero.

  He has not slept since he traded car for cart.

  As he stands, overcome by his defeat, the wagon starts shaking by his side. At first he thinks it is the horses’ shiver, working its way backwards, through harnesses and reins, into the wood and metal axle, until it rattles the boxes that rise from it in a precarious, rope-secured tower. Then he realises it is the beetles themselves that are making the boxes jump. Mowgli digs in his ears, scrapes out the wads of wax that he stuffed there in the hope for quiet. When he takes them out, he realises the beetles’ noise has swelled to whole new levels. The air is thick with its drone. He places his palms on the boxes, feels the life inside: impatient, hopping, buzzing life. Shaking the very walls of its prison.

  It has been a long drive, this journey north, and lonely. Mowgli used to hate being alone, bereft of a role, and action; afraid of his own Smoke. This time—smokeless; healed in some provisional way by his exposure to Smith, to Eleanor, to the truth about his people, however catastrophic—he used the loneliness to think. His childhood (the time before) remains inaccessible, fragmented into words and smells and patterns that are impossible to knit. Reason proved a surer tool to access his past. He has driven the length of England and asked himself what must have been.

  His people were the first. This point is not important—it might even be wrong—but nonetheless it is impossible to think it without pride. The rock came down (did they see it? or did it predate their coming to the land?) and changed the forest. Say it is a sickness. It killed many of them, then grew into their organs. One day, they started to smoke.

 
But the forest fought back. The word is wrong—Mowgli knows this—but it is the only way he can think it: the trees whispering to themselves about their enemy; the birds and river fish, the snakes and spiders, pausing their eternal game of eating-being-eaten to hatch a plan of resistance. Just as the Smoke organs had grown in humans, the trees changed their bark; the spiders their webbing. And a beetle—across generations or in one spontaneous act of rebellion—developed its spore. It soothed the Smoke.

  He imagines the people did not figure it out all at once. In fact, perhaps his chronology is wrong and the beetles were long in existence when the first humans started to smoke; living quite near to them (though not near enough). At any rate, they figured it out. Perhaps there was a year when the beetle grew overabundant and spread towards the village of his people; a year in which their density was such that the air was thick with their spore. It stopped the village’s Smoke. Soon they started keeping the beetles as pets and fashioning them into necklaces; dipped their finger in their liquid discharge. Now the villagers stopped smoking altogether.

  Unbeknownst to them, the change went deeper yet: the next generation was born once again without the organs necessary to produce the Smoke. Within a generation or two, Smoke became a story, something sung about in songs or scratched into the face of rocks hauled to the village from afar for the express purpose of turning them into memory. The beetle remained important; not sacred (the word is wrong, Mowgli feels, comes from this other world and rings of church bells) but cherished. Gestures remained: the wearing of the beetles and the touching of their rumps, the rubbing of the gums. A cultural memory as vague and as fragmented as Mowgli’s own. As for the rock, lying there in the depths of the jungle: some part of it must still be there, providing a breeding ground for the beetles, pouring its otherness into the soil.