Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Beneath Mowgli’s hands, a tower of crates chatters as though come to life.

  Mowgli pulls a nail and lifts a corner, peeks inside the crate. But it is too dark to see anything. Then beetles start peppering the walls like pellets shot from a child’s catapult. What was a buzzing turns into hail. A word rises in him, unpronounceable like so many of the others, a fragment of story, a drawing an elder scraped into the mud.

  Mowgli comes to a decision.

  He thinks the word means “swarm.”

  [ 2 ]

  He opens the crates. It does not take long. All it requires is a single wrench of the crowbar at each of the lids. Then follows a drenching. Beetles: black-horned, fur-adorned, in this, their swarm state, pour out like liquid, rubbing limbs, clapping wing-cases, stretching pale translucent wings. Eight-legged Reason, many-pincered, freed at last. Soon the hilltop is covered in them, gorse and heather turning yellow-black. There may be half a million of them now: they must have bred further in their crates. Cocoon silk is stuck to half of them like tufts of cotton candy. The horses whinny at the sight. Only exhaustion keeps them from raw panic. The noise is exquisite. A smell in the air like rotting leaves.

  They fly. There are pioneers: individual beetles who raise their heavy bodies on too-thin wings and hover awkwardly two feet up from the ground, swaying, falling, arresting themselves. Then the whole swarm rises as one. The eye capitulates before their multiplicity; they cease to be beetles and become a dark horizontal smear within the air. Below, in the hard light of the lighthouse, a fuse has been lit, an open flame touched to tar. A Storm unfurls, rooted in the rock; stands in the sky like a line drawn to split in two the far horizon.

  Its tilted mirror image—soon as wide as the Storm is high—gathers, hovers, stretches out. Then it flies to meet it with the clumsy speed of airborne chickens, hastening to feed.

   RAPTURE

  [ 1 ]

  All is hate.

  The Storm is a vortex standing in the sky. At its base, anchoring it in a double funnel, are a rock and a child. Even here, at the anchor points, it is rapidly gaining width and has spread to engulf the pier; has disregarded the direction of the wind and jumped from body to body, along connections pre-forged by the child’s Gale.

  The air is wet with blackest Smoke.

  It fills the soldiers’ gas masks and overwhelms their crude filters; blinds their goggles, so they rip them off. Most don’t bother with their rifles. The rage that grips them has little use for bolts and triggers; calls for tearing limb from limb. Near the rock, one soldier is less picky about his tools. He turns, clutching his rifle barrel like a spear, and jams its bayonet from underneath into the arch of skin formed by his neighbour’s jawbone; jams it so deep, it breaks off against the inside of his skull.

  [ 2 ]

  All is hate. The crowd catches it, Eleanor’s followers, the children and pilgrims and Miners; the women prisoners turned pirates; the fishermen and farmers who were drawn here by their curiosity. A crone of eighty charges at a soldier, buries weak teeth in the flesh of his cheek; blood spreading on her sunken cheeks like rouge. He rips her off him and—his face gaping—crushes her skull with the heel of one boot. Beside him, a Miner turns a fallen gun into a club, then shoots a hole in his own intestines when his wild swing sets it off. The child next to him is tearing out clumps of her own hair. Her name is Julie.

  She is eleven years old.

  [ 3 ]

  All is hate. It chokes Etta May, the placid one, fills her deep-bosomed chest with rage. There she stands, arms wrapped around Balthazar, a smoking gun in their shared fist. When the Storm finds her blood, she bursts into action. A yank and a push send Balthazar sailing across the lip of the pier and down into the black sea.

  (Does she do it to preserve him before the Storm swallows the last of her kindness? Or has she remembered that he cannot swim?)

  The gun is a hammer-weight in her now solitary fist. In front of her there lies a crippled man whom she will delight to kill.

  [ 4 ]

  Six steps from Etta May (twelve from the soldiers, and twenty from Julie, tearing open her own scalp) stands Eleanor, in the eye of the Storm. She has been here before. Almost. The last time, her gums were rubbed in beetle spore—not quite enough to withdraw her from the world of Smoke but enough to shield her, buy her time. Also, that first Storm had already been waning; it had found too little sustenance at sea. Back then she rose to meet it; drank it from the air. In her mind she pictured that internal silo, familiar to her from a thousand childhood self-negations; the place in which she locked up pain. An iron tower, thirty feet high: modelled on the technical drawing of a grain elevator bin that her uncle had amongst his scientific papers. Her child-self seized upon this picture; planted the bin upon a barren field. That’s where she led the sea-Storm; shut it in as best she could. The remaining shreds of hate she converted into something else. Mowgli had been there with her, had been raging at her, wanted her (was ashamed of it afterwards: of the wanting more so than the rage). She let the Storm unlock some of her own wants. They bit each other in what followed, never hard enough to draw much blood.

  Now, too, the Storm is here. There is no Mowgli and no beetle’s spore. This time she does not watch it approach from afar, staining the horizon, chasing them across the ocean, the ship engine shivering under her feet. Instead, she stands in the Storm’s thickness, in between its twin hearts.

  This time, the Storm has a face, a sweet, podgy, big-cheeked face, ten years old and smiling.

  Him then. She cannot drink this Storm, cannot picture a cup that would be deep enough. But the boy she can see and beckon; she can show him the silo in its winter field. Leather belts have grown, ivy-like, upon the silo’s outside; iron buckles; ribs of steel. Its door stands open, though, and in the zero time between two heartbeats (while the gas masks are still filling up with darkness; while a bullet flies between the muzzle of a gun and a smiling Livingstone, warmed as he is by his visions of a future hell), Eleanor tugs him through, the boy, then slams the door shut behind the two of them. It leaves them in the silo’s darkness amongst the smell of chaff and fermentation. Rage in here, she says or thinks; fill me up and drown me if you must. For a moment the child is still, sniffing the moist air.

  Then he laughs.

  It tears the silo open the way a shell bursts a mud-obstructed barrel, splitting the walls and blowing off its roof. Letting free all that which lay caged.

  Now Eleanor, too, is feeding the Storm.

  [ 5 ]

  All is hate. Not far from Eleanor, Anne-Louise, the French engineer turned pirate captain, is fighting with a woman with whom she had shared bread and berth for two whole years. Resentment marked the time, concerning morsels pinched and rations ill divided, and national prejudice so deeply anchored that it now pours out along with ill-remembered childhood hate. They have gone to ground, weaponless; have punched and scratched and bitten. Now Anne-Louise’s hands are on the other’s throat. She squeezes with her thumbs, trying to press the Adam’s apple back against the hard ridge of her spine. Beneath her, her enemy writhes and kicks her knees into Anne-Louise’s back, breaking a rib and bruising the flesh above her kidneys.

  The kicking will stop only when the woman is dead.

  [ 6 ]

  Farther out in the harbour basin, the waiting warships catch the Storm. On the bridge of the closer of the two, the captain watches its approach. He’s an Oxford man, forced into colonial service by family debt. More recent debts, acquired at the racecourse, have turned him into a Company employee. The Storm flicks across the harbour basin. He breathes it in, shudders, then whips around to dash his head against a sharp-edged steel protrusion jutting from the wall. A moment later he detaches himself, backs off, then smashes the burst-open pumpkin of his face once more into the self-same spot now marked for him in gore. Belowdecks, a crazed sailor cuts open a barr
el of petroleum, then stills his agitated hands enough to strike a match and drop it in the puddle.

  [ 7 ]

  In the water, at the base of the pier, and ignorant of the impending explosion, floats Balthazar, caught between two kinds of drowning. Whenever the sea closes over his head and his body sinks into the promise of a chilly grave, the bulk of the water insulates him briefly from the hatred of the Storm. As fear replaces hate, he starts a mad thrashing and claws his way back to the surface. Now he breaches, swallows air and rage, and pours it into a mad swing of his fist at the corpse of a soldier freshly rained down from the pier, then sinks entangled in this corpse’s deadweight back down beneath the surface of the sea, where the rage is once again leeched from his body and his old legs grow more tired with each struggle up, for air.

  [ 8 ]

  Eleanor is being eaten. The Storm has burst her silo of old pain and emptied it; threaded her into the fabric of its rage. Now it digs deeper, splits open the silo’s foundation, there to find a well. And down it dives: consumes her, dredging her, that sea-deep reservoir of all her submerged passions; sucks her up as though with a straw, until all of her is emptied out, absorbed into itself.

  All of her?

  No, not quite. Ten leagues deep the Storm reaches, down and down. But at eleven leagues there floats a little bottle with a scroll in its corked neck, a scroll that spells out “I.” The Storm reaches for it (pudgy child’s hands) but it keeps slipping from its grasp. It frustrates the Storm. It rages in her, tears her open sole to soul.

  [ 9 ]

  Hidden from Eleanor by the bulk of their enemy and shelter, Livia and Thomas remain leaned into the rock. Their embrace is intimate. She has stuck her hand into his seeping side: like a murderer with a knife; like Thomas’s doubting namesake testing his saviour’s flesh; like Adam’s Eve trying to claw her way back into that bloody rib. It is as private a touch as any invasion of another’s body; connects the pangs of birth to sex to surgery. He stands it coolly, his hands clamped to her skull. He is not crushing bone but holding firm, fingers spread like starfish.

  The part of him that’s rock is gentler than the man.

  [ 10 ]

  A little boy is the centre of it all. It was his breath that woke the rock. Livingstone saw it as possession: saw the child as a two-legged Storm, an angel turned demon, a thing to march around the world on his avenging leash. Scourging it.

  Livingstone was wrong however. The child is not possessed. When Timmy touched the rock, he opened himself up to it the way he has opened himself to everything and everyone since the day he was born in the thick of a Gale. He has spent his entire life without barriers, has never learned to lock the door. The Storm is not occupant but guest.

  It is a new situation for both parties. A chance to talk?

  [ 11 ]

  Livia’s fist is black with gore. What is it she is rummaging for, down in that open flank rimmed with hard rock-growth? Is she trying to kill the man she loves?

  Of course she is. The Storm demands it.

  There is something else there, too, however, that she pours into the cut where rock meets Thomas: a raging grief the Storm’s made nameless but that retains the image of a waterlogged corpse with copper hair.

  The man who once was Thomas receives it, heeds it, feels it spread within his blood.

  [ 12 ]

  Talk?

  Surely the word must be a mistake. Rocks do not speak. They have no brains with which to shape concepts; no breath to articulate themselves in sound; no limbs to wave around in order to form signs.

  A simile then: old Homer’s trick.

  The way a fungus grows into stone, fusing with it, dissolving minerals and turning them into itself…

  The way a tattooist’s ink is poured into the skin, staining the pores, one by one, so that ink and skin can no longer be thought apart…

  The way we eat food, taking it into ourselves, dissolving it into constituent parts through the acid of our stomachs and the filtration system of our bowels, turning it into bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, while we ourselves serve as food for other (smaller, meaner) mouths…

  That’s how the rock speaks.

  [ 13 ]

  Timmy listens.

  While screams and murder spread along the pier; while Balthazar takes his first full gulp of salty water; while a ship goes up in oily flames and Eleanor screams as she is picked apart down in her depths; while Livia holds what is left of the last of her two husbands, in arms that cannot distinguish between love, grief, rage, Timmy listens.

  It costs him something, changes him. All talk is contagion. We take into ourselves what is not ours. It reshapes our thoughts and forces reaction; cannot be unheard. Once a message is received, there is no way of going back, to innocence, before. All talk is contagion.

  Understanding’s worse.

  The rock is far from home and all alone.

  [ 14 ]

  On the eastern horizon, in the hills, invisible in the night-dark, a cloud is forming. If it weren’t for the shouts and screams, one would hear its buzzing. From afar it looks as angry as the Storm.

  [ 15 ]

  A lonely rock. A rock in a strop, abandoned in this pram we call our home, given to tantrums of blind panic.

  Is it conscious then? Does it have intelligence? Words fail. If there is an analogy it is not to man or mammal. To a clever fish perhaps, an octopus; a brood of geckos. A bacillus that has gone to school. Not one, that’s wrong, nor yet quite many. Most certainly not a hive. God might be like that, come to think of it, one and three, flesh-not-flesh. A medieval mystic might have an easier time approaching it than someone from the age of electricity.

  The rock is something that we cannot know.

  But then of course, the problem is mutual. The rock does not know us either. Its only language is the language of biology. It has no concept of sickness; infection is its mode of speech. It has been sleeping in its bed of Himalayan ice, insinuating itself into the nearly lifeless world around it, converting microorganisms, trapping dust. Imagine its dreamer’s joy at the first mushroom springing from its flank; at ice crystals adapting to a chemistry that cannot, must not be; at its own slow transformation.

  Adulteration holds no fear for it.

  Isolation does.

  And then it woke. Timmy roused it. It found itself surrounded by a mob attuned to its speech if unprepared for its volume. For we were already changed: the rock’s sister saw to this, that thing in the jungle, along with the laws of conquest and trade that make a (somewhat nasty) village of this world. It had seeded us already; had crept into the part of us most like it, the seat of our wants. We were made ready for its speech.

  It woke, raised its voice—in shock, dismay—released the pure cry of its germ speech; then waited (with bated breath, though it does not breathe; with the blush of a bride, though it knows no gender) for response. For someone to touch it. To corrupt it in return.

  Instead we started to kill each other.

  How was it to know its cry was a blow, its touch a violation; that the words it slipped so eagerly into our blood called forth in us nothing but hate?

  [ 16 ]

  Now, though: the boy. A walking Gale; a conduit for speech.

  There’s something else, too, just as significant. An irritation, analogous to an itch. Not near the centre (one never itches there) but at the tip of the nose, on the side of a toe: there, at the rock’s periphery, at the edge of its being, lies that bit of the world most recently absorbed. It whispered to it in its sea-rocked dreams. The thing that was once a young man—a revolutionary; a hero!—is clinging on to someone he can only half remember. Both are a part of the Storm now; part of its scream.

  Still: in their embrace, in their violent, ugly Smoke, there is a flavour running counter to the hatred. The rock feels it, feels it in
itself (its only realm of knowledge), and paws at it with wonder.

  A hesitation, a flicker, runs through the Storm.

  [ 17 ]

  A flicker runs through the Storm.

  It is too subtle yet to interrupt the orgy of violence. One would have to retain something, some sense of self, to detect it. Only Eleanor does. From the bottom of the well of her being—eleven leagues deep, a grimy message in a bottle bobbing around her head—she stares up towards the distant disk of sky above and sees it.

  Then Timmy is there. He’s a good foot shorter than her, and yet the way she sees it he looks down at her, pushing his face and upper body down into her well. He reaches for her, first with Smoke, then with pudgy arms and pudgy fingers. She tries to avoid him, wants to smash his face and rip his hair, wants to punish him for what he’s done. He slips down to her, into her well, then reaches clumsily for that bottle with its secret scroll. She wants to throttle him, stomp on his fingers, break his legs. She scoops up the bottle, cradles it against her bosom, finds the harness there, hard as a shell. Then (the lull makes it possible, that hesitation in the Storm) she takes hold of something in the child—a look, a puppy-pleading in his Smoke—and suddenly understands what it is he wants. With haste and trembling fingers—before she can think better of it; before the hate returns with all its might—she slips out the cork and lifts up the bottle.