Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  She offers herself: climbs out of the well back onto the pier, away from those childhood pictures in her head, the burst-open silos and sealed messages from Treasure Island; opens herself up to the Storm.

  And finds she cannot breathe.

  [ 18 ]

  It’s the harness that is choking her. Unbeknownst to her, unnoticed in her struggle to hold out against the Storm, blindly marshalling old defences, her fingers have turned over and over the screw that grows from her breast, crushing her ribcage, emptying her lungs. Now she tugs at the screw, fumbling for the little catch that she knows Renfrew’s design makes impossible to reach for the harness’s wearer, until Timmy draws her hand away and by cleverness or chance presses down on the awkward little lever that offers release.

  The next moment—while her lungs gulp air and the Storm reaches for her, a tentativeness now to all its movements—she feels the child tug at her wrist.

  She resists him (two tugs, three), then looks past him and comprehends his destination; walks hand in hand with him to where Livia stands cradled in an embrace she shares with Thomas and the rock.

  All at once the rock falls silent. The Storm stands pale and frozen in the sky.

  In the sudden silence one can move, can think.

  [ 19 ]

  They form a circle. The rock is too large to be surrounded by them but there is no need. Thomas still sticks to it, like a moulting crab dragging its half-discarded shell. He is their centre. Livia won’t let go of him, not with the hand stuck in his flank (stemming the bleeding now, not rummaging within the wound). Eleanor wrests free the other hand, threads it through her fingers; takes Timmy’s hand and feels his Smoke connect them; and sees his childish hand in turn reach up to Thomas’s arm where rock-mould stains his skin. The Storm stands around them water-pale. They grow transparent to one another, each feeling-thought passed around like a bowl of cherries from which everyone must partake.

  How stupid, thinks Livia, irate and spent. Like a bloody game of ring-a-ring-o’roses.

  Thinks Eleanor.

  Thinks Thomas.

  Ring-a-ring-o’roses! thinks Timmy.

  (The rock does not think.)

  [ 20 ]

  Out over the pier, the Storm hangs suspended. It does not put an end to all violence, not at once. Every man, woman, and child remains connected, as by a Gale. Wounded and hurting, shocked by what they’ve seen and done, their Smoke is base and dark. But it is their own anger now, their own shame, not the Storm’s unbearable screaming; and threaded through it there are other, subtler passions. Colour erupts, as yet in tender shoots, but undeniably so.

  The transformation is faster near the centre of the Storm, where tendrils of calm link the group gathered in a ring to all the others who surround them. It is not insignificant perhaps that this section of the pier remains bathed in a clean circle of light. Even blinkered by rage, the eye recognises a stage when it sees one. Curiosity has a deep hold on our passions. Row by row, attention begins to fasten on that drama played out without gesture or word.

  Only at the outer edges of the pier—around the barricades and up the hill—is this focus disrupted by the chitin buzz of an approaching cloud. But even there the crowd turns their backs on the noise and stares inward.

  Four actors and a rock.

  Shadow-sketched onto the pier.

  [ 21 ]

  An inner drama; it is shared by hundreds, but only in their breasts. Mute and free of gesture. How is one to represent it? Balthazar would enjoy this problem—were he not drowning, salt water in his throat.

  So then. A blank stage painted white.

  Or: A tiled box of a room, the ceiling too low to stand up straight, the tiles glowing Prussian blue.

  Or: A stage so cluttered with debris—with furniture and garden waste, industrial tools and marble busts—that one can hardly see the actors for all the junk.

  Or: A janitor’s basement: a worktop and a chair, a mop and bucket, a dirty oilcan; the flicker of an incinerator in one corner. Against the wall, as though left over from an earlier set, a piece of Eleanor’s silo, warped and rusting. Rivets one inch wide.

  Yes, that will do.

  There, in this cellar, positioned just a little off-centre in deliberate provocation to the audience’s need for symmetry, stands a ring of actors, two women and a child, arms spread wide and holding hands. There are ashes in their hair.

  (In some productions—those with a taste for the maudlin—there is a third adult, a male, covered in a bedsheet, a piece of pig’s lung crumpled in the palm he shares with Livia.)

  At the centre of the ring, barely spanned by the outstretched arms, there stands a round ceramic bathtub filled to bathing depth with tar.

  And then, coming from somewhere hard to pinpoint, from beneath the stage perhaps or high above it: a voice. Not a general’s voice, booming and certain; not the stage whisper of conspiracy. Thomas’s voice, calm and normal. Somewhere hiding in it (at the end of words; in the tongue tap of his Ts) some other voice, also his but hoarse from weeks of screaming. Singing ring-a-ring-o’roses; singing it badly, it must be said. The figure of Thomas soon follows the voice, the body clam-studded, a bloom of black-and-sulphur barnacles outlining the swirls of his facial mark. He ducks under the ring of arms and hands, and climbs into the tub. Something strange happens then. The tub must be deeper than it seems, stage magic straining the rules of physics, for despite remaining standing in the tub rather than lying back, Thomas’s body disappears up to the neck. The tar is a black collar tucked tight under his chin.

  He stops singing, looks around himself, frowns.

  Come, he beckons. His hand pats the surface of the tar, raising little ripples of welcome.

  It is Livia who reacts first. She gathers up her skirts, steps over the thigh-high rim, almost losing her balance, then sinks in deep on the other side, the tar almost level with her mouth. Now Eleanor climbs in beside her. The addition of another body spills tar across the rim of the tub and forces Livia, shorter than the others, to hold on for support.

  Timmy is last. He clambers over the rim as though it were a railing; hops in, arse-first, creating new spillage, then clings to Eleanor lest he sink.

  (The ghost, if he’s there, climbs in along with them, white sheets growing dark and heavy, pulling him down.)

  “Talk to me, please.” Again, Thomas’s voice, hoarse, uncertain. “Take me in.”

  This time it is Eleanor who reacts first. She nods, passes Timmy on to Livia, and in a single fluid movement, submerges in the tar. Livia soon follows, then Timmy, then Thomas himself.

  Then nothing: the matte oval of a tar-black surface, mocking the audience with its opaque blankness. A bubble rises in it, another, a stream of breath exhaled. The minutes tick past, quite literally so, the sound of a clock projected onto the stage, daring us to hold our breath.

  There is no telling what is going on, beneath.

  At last a face breaks the surface. It is soon followed by the others. Dipped in oily black they are indistinguishable, their hair solid cowls of tar, their features blank and smooth.

  Then one face leans back into the liquid, until the small, solid body attached to it rises to the surface and floats, deadman-style, between the others, and from its mouth and chest erupts a sound so powerful that it soon forces its own echo.

  All talk is contagion.

  There is nothing quite so infectious as a child’s untrammelled laugh.

  [ 22 ]

  Out on the pier, the change is both felt and seen. The Storm stands still and colourless, water in a glass. It has turned into pure connective tissue, without content of its own. The intensity of the connection is overwhelming, almost a violence in its own right. Man, woman, and child—attacker and victim; violator and violated; the wounded, the dying—each finds the other embodied in themse
lves. The sense of loss is just as devastating as what is found.

  For a moment longer, the connection carries no trace of the rock. It has withdrawn, negated itself; cancelled any self-expression.

  Now it inches slowly from its hole.

  Into the colourless Smoke that cloaks the pier like a viscous dome, there threads a colour. It is a new colour, this; unearthly, a colour never seen before by human eyes; is passed on glibly by the optic nerve to tease the brain with its impossibility. Yellow, perhaps.

  But also somehow very blue.

  One moment the colour is on the outside: a whisper of rock speech, spreading through the air. The next moment it is on the inside, a trace of something strange slipped into one’s blood, one’s glands, one’s flesh. There is disgust and fear within the crowd, as at the discovery of a tumour; the instincts scream to cut it out. Dismayed, they—for they are a collective still, entangled in their every need and want—reach for it and, in the very act of plucking at it, open themselves further to its touch. Once touched, a memory flickers, collective and universal, from earliest infancy, to that moment of first abandonment when the newborn reaches for the warmth that should be there beside its skin and finds it gone; to the boundless relief when the child reaches again and finds a body there, a touch, a heartbeat, and a voice.

  The whole pier starts to cry.

  [ 23 ]

  (Afterwards, some of the people who were there will swear they saw the rock, too, shed a tear. A weeping god. Postcards will be sold with bad trick-effects, superimposing a misty face onto the sky, tears rolling down its cheek, rich sooty black. Money will be collected for a basalt statue to commemorate the event, and will promptly be embezzled. The statue itself will never be made.)

  The whole pier starts to cry.

  [ 24 ]

  And then the beetles are there.

  The rock does not flinch from them. If anything, a note of welcome threads through Smoke and crowd. These beetles, after all, are the rock’s nieces, a piece of this world altered by the germ-speech of its twin. The note of welcome does not shift even when this cloud of children settles on the rock and starts to feed. And soon—with every bite of every little mandible, and with the spread of airborne spore—the hyper-quickened Smoke connecting those standing on the pier begins to clear. And with it clears the touch of that strangeness that they felt within their skins, until the world is reasonable again and all that remains is the disgusting sight of a mound of beetles eating, copulating, birthing even as they feed.

  Within minutes, the weight of all the beetles overbalances the rock. It reels then falls, rolls, suddenly made light, across the pier, and tumbles into the harbour, where it floats under an ever-shifting blanket of ten thousand chitin backs. Some, overgorged, drop away dead or dazed and float upon the harbour waters surrounded by little slicks of black. The birds dive into the water and feast on their plump carcasses.

  Just then, a final gunshot rends the silence of the pier.

  [ 25 ]

  The shot is Etta May’s. It is not the first that she has fired. In the rage of the Storm she pulled the trigger several times, trying to annihilate that man positioned closest to her, retaining perhaps some understanding that he is her enemy. Livingstone. Her aim was bad, her fist too firm around the gun, her whole arm shaking with hate. Only her first bullet—the one she fired when still sane and Balthazar shared with her the heavy burden of the gun—hit and shattered the man’s pelvis.

  In the brief moments after the Storm went quiet and she became as one with all the pier, the gun hung forgotten. Livingstone—the only one untouched by the Storm, deaf to the whisper of this visiting god—might have escaped then, or intervened, but the wound was too serious for him to attend to anything other than his pain. Now reason has returned to Etta May and told her there remains a bullet in the pistol’s chamber. Her heart is beating in her breast. She, the placid one, wants justice and revenge. She has no eyes just now for the swarm of beetles, feeding, copulating on the rock; treads heedlessly upon gorged and fallen specimens; does not wonder at her lack of Smoke as she places the barrel near Livingstone’s head.

  He looks up briefly, daring her, but she remembers only the loud bang and then the blood.

  Behind her, a wet, bedraggled Balthazar pulls himself up the iron ladder that saved him in the end from drowning. Coughing and spluttering, he clears the lip of the pier where beetles crawl so thickly they cover its stone.

  Two hours later, Mowgli walks onto the scene and pushes through the crowd.

  He comes as its saviour.

  Nobody cheers.

   ROMANCE

  [ 1 ]

  They are caring for the wounded. Eleanor has taken charge. Who else? Livia is busy with Thomas, who has lost some piece of himself in the past few hours and sits slumped on the ground. Etta May stands arguing with Balthazar, converting the weight of her relief and guilt into bickering. Timmy sits in a circle with some other children, playing with beetles. Everywhere people are standing, staring at one another, digesting the memory of horror and connectedness; of the unearthly sadness of the rock. It all seems distant already. Yesterday’s dream. There is no Smoke. All emotion is locked away in individual bodies, separate and unknown. The shock of it has silenced people. It has not registered yet that, from a certain perspective, they might be said to have won.

  Anne-Louise is helping Eleanor. Together, they have organised the Company soldiers, some of whom carry rudimentary medical supplies. There is no thought now of skin shades, of hierarchy or sides. They have stood together on this pier. The surviving white officers have ripped off their signs of rank. Together they are stilling bleedings, setting bones. So immersed is Eleanor in her work that she does not at once notice Mowgli standing next to her. He’s just another brown face; looking confused. Gaunt with exhaustion. Handsome for all that.

  Beetles are perching on his hair.

  Then the stare of the soldiers around her urges her to look again. It appears they don’t recognise this stranger; he is not one of them. Her heart leaps then, even before she has quite turned her head; the knowledge flooding her that Mowgli is here. Anne-Louise senses what is happening and takes the bandages from Eleanor’s hands.

  “Go.”

  A moment later Eleanor has risen and drawn him apart, from one crowded section of the pier to another. There is no privacy here. She reaches for his face, then grows conscious of the blood upon her palms and drops them again. He looks older, thinner, sterner. Some of the old shiftiness is gone from his face.

  “I am sorry I came too late,” he says to her, looking around at all the wounded. And, “Why are you still wearing that damn thing?”

  It makes her a little angry, that, and at once makes her wish he could see her anger; could feel it in his blood. “All these beetles—” she says, incoherently.

  “They swarmed. I think they will continue swarming, now that they have eaten. Their spore is in the air. It’s everywhere. And it’ll spread.”

  He hesitates now, aware perhaps that she won’t like the words that come next. “We’re free, Eleanor. Smith was right. The Age of Reason.”

  He does not wait for a reply but steps close instead, the protrusions of her harness digging into his chest.

  Eleanor cries as they kiss. Without Smoke she cannot parse whether it’s from happiness or grief.

  [ 2 ]

  They return to the Keep. Minetowns is closer, but Eleanor must know whether her uncle remains alive. Balthazar and Etta May accompany them, as does Timmy. It means a parting of ways: Livia and Thomas (turned inward, his face still marked by barnacles, in his side a wound scabbed over with Soot) go west with the Miners. Anne-Louise and many of the women who made up the pirate crew also head to Minetowns, to taste a version of freedom that already belongs to the past. The air is filled with buzzing; everybody is wearing scarfs or caps to keep the b
eetles out of their hair. It is only fifty miles south that a few of the people who travel with them break into stuttering Smoke. But when they arrive at the Keep, some beetles have beaten them there and are crawling on its walls. Every tree and bush around them is blooming with black silk cocoons.

  The Keep is near-abandoned. They find Renfrew alive but in an irresponsive stupor. His body cannot retain enough food. Lady Naylor seems content to nurse him. She accepts the story of the rock as though it were a lie made up by naughty children. Within days, however, she has captured a few beetles and hung them in a birdcage above Renfrew’s bed.

  “It disquiets him when he soils himself,” she explains. “This way he won’t.”

  Eleanor is grateful for Lady Naylor’s help but finds it hard to spend time with her; there is an undercurrent of resentment in the aristocrat, at her own insignificance. On Mowgli’s urging, Eleanor has finally taken off her harness. Without its armour, she feels smaller somehow, vulnerable. As more and more beetles drift south, eating any dark Soot they can find and in the process cleaning the prison ships in the harbour to an odd shine, their spore once again begins to suppress all Smoke. The water in the bay, meanwhile, is turning darker. Nobody knows why that is.

  Within a week Mowgli leaves her again in order to “see what happened to Smith.” He returns only a few days later, filled with a sense of mission: he and the Company man will travel east, to India, and deliver them the beetle; his foster father will accompany them. Eleanor has told Mowgli that Miss Cooper, too, has headed east with her store of inoculant. Smith’s goal is to “pull the rug from right under her feet,” by delivering the product more cheaply. Mowgli’s motives for the journey are harder to pinpoint. He has mingled with some of the sepoy soldiers and now wishes to “free the Indian people” from “Empire and Smoke”; and he seems drawn to a place where his skin will no longer mark him out as different. Perhaps he thinks that India can furnish him with a surrogate home, against all the odds. Above all, however, it is Eleanor herself who is driving him away. Both of them are acutely aware of her struggle to accept the smokeless world he has unleashed. Their good-byes are passionate but brief. Smith squeezes her hand in farewell. He vows he will return “her sweetheart” safe and sound, and advises her to plan for a lavish wedding. Then they board the Company warship Smith has somehow contrived to charter and Eleanor is alone once again. One month passes, two. Renfrew is in a coma but continues to live. Finding enough food is a problem, but Eleanor is reluctant to leave the Keep as long as he is alive. One by one, the few dozen people who travelled south with her also leave. They have homes to go to.