Dan Vyleta - Smoke

They revive him. It does not take much. They stand over him, pouring water on his face, shout at him, get angry, wreath him in faint Smoke. The next moment he sits up. Like a jack-in-the-box.

The fat man bends down to him, asks question after question. It’s like his gut is filled with them. The one on the ground has no face anymore, just a swollen mess, the tongue disturbingly bright within its blackness. But he speaks clearly enough.

“I know where she is,” he says. “ He will be heading there.” Then, with intense purpose: “Mother. She betrayed me. I can take you to her.”

“Can you walk?” the fat man asks.

The thing that was once a young man rises, stands slope-shouldered as though hanging from a nail.

“I can take you to her,” he says again. “To Mother. And to him. You and I, Trout. Just us two. Only make sure to bring a gun.”

The Smoke that spreads from him is almost liquid. It gathers in a film around his fancy boots.

The fat man considers the offer. But it is obvious he will agree. What else is he going to do — beat the truth out of this thing?

“I’ll need one of my men, Mr. Spencer. Just one. Any one of them will do. You can take your pick.”

It does not hesitate, raises one twisted arm and points to a man with a slight, wiry frame.

“That one. He broke Nótt’s legs, didn’t he? Bring him. And remember the gun.”

The fat man nods and orders another of the men to pass over the shotgun to their colleague. He is about to say more but it is already moving, heading for the door with surprising speed. The walk is like a marionette’s. The body is broken, but some other thing moves it along. It makes no sound as it scuttles down the stairs.

The man with the gun and the fat man follow, leaving the rest of his men behind. There are three of them, standing in my kitchen, at a loss. They have not received any orders. It takes them a full minute to even frame the problem in words; one man rifling through the cupboards, looking, he says, “for a bite to eat.” Then they begin to argue. One maintains that they must take me into custody; another declares that they are “duty-bound to return to our post.” The third man insists that they must follow the chief, “quickly, on the sly” and that they have “wasted too much time already.” They argue as though they are playing cards, each placing his argument neatly before his mates, at once friendly and competitive. In the end they have waited too long to follow anyone and are too lazy or too principled to arrest an old, beaten woman. They leave me without a word and forget to close the front door behind themselves.

They leave the dog, too, half lying, half sitting on its cart, its maw tied shut with a strap.

When I am sure they are gone, I slide off my chair and crouch down beside it. It growls, then whimpers, dangles drool from its jowls. We sit there, side by side, the broken-legged dog and me with my swollen eye. When the fear rises up in me again, hot like a fever, I drench us both in Smoke.

Livia cannot stop speaking. It’s an open cab, and she has to yell over the noise of wheels and hooves on cobbles, lean forward and halfway across Charlie’s lap to make herself heard. Up on his box, the coachman is making haste; sends his nag flying into corners and keeps craning his neck, too, listening in, or perhaps just staring at her, this gentlewoman with the stringy hair and her two filthy companions. His bowler is rain-dark; it has played feast to many tribes of moth.

“It was as though he had poured petroleum over the floor!” Livia shouts again. “An explosion: contagious . As though it would never stop.”

She raises her chin into the wind, stabs her hands into the air, cutting off some question Charlie has been trying to voice.

“‘A problem of filtration,’ Sebastian said. Separating sin from muck and water. That’s what he has been doing down in the sewers. Creating a giant sieve and collecting London’s Soot! Dredging every cesspool for it, the bottom of the river, two and a half centuries’ worth of crimes. They want to quicken it!”

Throughout her monologue, Thomas sits quietly, only half listening, lost in himself. The urgency of his horror has abated and left behind something duller, slow in its wits. He has been watching his hand, the right one. It has swollen to the size of a club, the fingers so thick they feel fused, all but the pinkie which rides up, crooked, above the others. The blood on the knuckles might be his own or it might be Julius’s. Most likely it is both of theirs, mingled. Blood brothers. As a child he read a book about that, two boys whittling open their palms with a blunt penknife. The coach veers, pushes him into Charlie. His thoughts veer with it. He is conscious that he needs to pee.

Killer. It is a funny word. Not an act: a mode of being. A profession. Some trades, you pass them on from father to son. They say his father killed his man in a rage. One of his tenants. There was slander involved, drink, a tavern. A pewter mug scooped up where it had fallen on the ground. A pewter mug. Smart. His father knew how to protect his hand.

Back home, Thomas used to call those who spoke of it liars. Liars! — turning his eyes on them, Smoke on his lips. They stopped speaking of it in his presence. He wonders now: did he sit there, his father, afterwards , on a stool at the bar, nursing his wrist, his bladder nagging at him like a bad joke? Thomas does not know. The only letter his father sent from prison was a will, stipulating that his son was to inherit his leather hunting breeches and his good lamb’s wool coat. Thomas has never grown sufficiently to fit into either.

So , Thomas now says to himself, I have come into my patrimony. All I needed was a bit of priming. Then I took to it like a boar to his rut.

But the ease of his corruption, it isn’t really the worst of it. He has known he is susceptible all his life. A boy with a temper; rage, like a pet, always faithful by his side.

The worst of it is that it was fun . Being consumed by the Smoke. Letting go of all restraint. Stripping naked as the day you were born and becoming a creature of pure want. For Thomas discovered something. At the heart of the Smoke he found waiting for him the unselfconsciousness of childhood, of those years before speech. How perfect, how natural it felt to live there, in a place that knew no consequence. His fists swollen, the heat of Livia’s body pinned under his weight.

Just as he is thinking this, squirming in his seat with the power of the thought, Livia turns to him, her head thrown forward so she can see him across Charlie. Thomas looks away. The coach veers, his bladder strains. He wants to talk to her, explain himself. He wonders where to pee so she won’t notice.

He is, in short, confused.

Then they arrive: a dank street without lighting.

The coach races off as soon as Livia has paid the driver.

ф

It might be Ratcliff or Southwark: Thomas did not pay attention to the way. All he knows of London are a dozen or so streets and a score of names he has overheard. Lambeth, Hammersmith, Wapping. Limehouse. Shoreditch (always mentioned in a hush). They remain close to the river in any case; he can smell its stink. A great grey slab of a building rises before them, looking more like a fortress than a factory. Initially Thomas thinks that it is here they are headed. But it is the smaller, red-brick building growing out of its flank that wears the name of Ryman’s Fine Tobacco. There is no fence at the front, just a sturdy green door at the top of a short flight of steps. For the third time that night they try a door handle and find it does not move. The knocker rings through the building beyond but fails to summon either a doorman or a guard. They are alone.