Dan Vyleta - Smoke

It’s another ten steps before Livia starts speaking. She has to shout: the spongy walls soak up all sound. It is Grendel she is addressing, not her mother. Thomas, behind her, walks through her anger as through morning mist.

“You lied to me, Grendel!” she shouts and they watch him flinch with a second’s delay. “But what is worse, you lied to Mowgli. He trusted you. Now look at him. Why are you hurting him?”

Grendel stares across the forty, fifty steps still separating them, flaps one hand, unchanged in the mildness of his gestures.

“He has a fever, you see. Lady Naylor says his organs are changing. But not to worry, it will be over soon.”

“She wants to bleed him, Grendel. Bleed him dry. And you are helping her.” Then bitterly, Livia’s Smoke coming thick now and settling in frothy billows on the uneven floor: “They were right about you all along. You are a monster, Grendel. You were supposed to love him.”

He looks back at her, crestfallen, baffled. Perhaps there is to his sloping neck also a hint of doubt, of regret. Across the distance, in this eerie light, it is possible to imagine all manner of things into a face, a posture. Grendel bends down to the needle growing out the child’s emaciated torso, opens some kind of valve and releases a thin flow of blood into the glass chamber at its top. If Lady Naylor has been impassive through the exchange, she rises from her chair now, something heavy and metallic dangling from one fist.

“Oh how melodramatic, Livia. But come, leave Mr. Grendel alone. It’s me you are angry with.” She moves forward a step as though to hasten their approach, opens her arms in welcome. “You will have to tell me how you found me here. But really, I am glad. The dawn of a new world. We shall welcome it together.”

Twenty more yards. Thomas sees it all clearly now. The tiny, short-snubbed, two-barrelled gun that burdens Lady Naylor’s gesture of welcome, tilts it sideways to the right; the bottle of black Soot standing on the table as though ready for decanting for their final supper; Grendel testing the drops of blood within the vial with a strip of yellow paper that, upon contact, instantly turns blue. And above all he sees Mowgli, Mowgli’s face, looking up at his tormenter with an awful expression of hope and appeal, of trust misplaced, the eyes swollen and glossy with his fever.

“The paper. It turned blue!” Grendel calls to Lady Naylor. “It is as you said. Mowgli’s blood, it’s active . May I undo his straps?”

Lady Naylor answers without turning. “Soon. First open the valve as I have shown you.”

And just like that — at the mention of a valve, as though a child were a keg, or a steam engine, ripe for the draining — something returns to Thomas, a sense of urgency misplaced amongst self-pity and doubt, and the next thing he knows he has shouldered aside his friends and is running, then stumbling, falling across the age-eaten floor, scrambling back up to his feet.

He is not aware of the words Lady Naylor is shouting at him, nor does he know whether his friends follow; is charging towards her tall figure, his head and shoulders lowered for a rugby tackle, and a fine trail of Smoke fluttering behind like the tails of a coat.

He gets to within six or seven steps. Then Thomas’s toe catches, and a shot sounds. In the dull, dead air of the chamber it is like the clap of two wet hands. Ahead: a shout, a spray of blood, or perhaps of Soot; the chandelier tinkle of broken glass; then the tidal surge of darkness, as one after the other, with a fraction’s delay, the bulbs above the pools give out, each with the dull plop of a cork plugged from its bottleneck.

The ground ploughs into Thomas and empties his lungs of all their air.

Julius leads us to a sewer entrance not ten minutes’ walk from the flat. It’s an unmarked stone slab covering a manhole in the corner of a dirty yard. The slab must weigh forty pounds but Julius, broken-limbed, listing, labours it aside without asking for help. Underneath, a shaft leads straight down, its circumference roughly equal to my girth. An iron ladder is screwed into the brick. I am winded from the pace Julius has set, crablike, scuttling sideways down the streets, and gesture for him to wait. He does but spurns repose; paces the alley from wall to wall. Watching him — his jerky movements, the way he twists his neck too far around the anchor of his trunk; remembering that this was once my student, a boy placed in my care — makes me sick to my fat stomach. My man, Boswell, appears immune to such queasiness. He kept both lamp and gun trained on our guide as we followed him and now descends the shaft first, so as to cover Julius from the bottom while he climbs. Myself, I carry my Colt stuck in its holster on my belt. The thought of drawing it fills me with dread.

The shaft is perhaps fifteen feet deep. At its bottom lie the sewers. For the past few days, I have been sending men down here. Spies. Ever since I learned that Ashton was Aschenstedt; that Parliament, in its infinite wisdom, had given a terrorist the mandate to clean up the former capital. I imagined the sewers to be an orderly thing: a system of tunnels, with waste running down their centre. What they reported was a web, a maze. Old tunnels and new, lying at different depths in the earth, cross-connected by vertical shafts and silo-like chambers. Neighbourhood cesspools five storeys deep, tapped and drained by Aschenstedt’s men. Steam-powered drills; sluices and locks; water pumps the size of grain silos sitting in purpose-built chambers; exhaust pipes leading to air vents above. It would take a team of engineers a month to make sense of it all. My lads are many things, but engineers they are not.

Now that we reach the bottom of the shaft, however, I see none of this complexity. A slimy tunnel smelling of the privy, that’s all. Within ten steps we roust a nest of rats. Julius leads the way as before, hurtling ahead, straining against the edge of Boswell’s lamplight like a hound on a leash. I am not sure whether he is following a trail or already knows our destination. At times he pauses at intersections and stands sniffing the foul air. Once, he leans against the wall and darts his tongue across its mould. Then he is off again, always with the same jerky, marionette movements and attended by the cape of his Smoke. My watch has stopped, won’t be wound. We have stepped beyond time.

I ask Julius where he is leading us.

“Ahead,” he says without modulation, the broken jaw flapping with the word.

Ahead. So be it: in the name of the state. Like me, Julius has now become its servant. The state is not choosy; enlists whatever tool is fit to its purpose; cares not for the tool’s own motivations, or rather enlists those too, weaving them into the fabric of its needs. For what does he want, this broken, nightmare boy? Why does he lead us with such haste? Revenge on Thomas, I suppose; matricide. Whenever I mention Mr. Argyle or Lady Naylor, a darkness spills out of him that I try my best not to inhale. My man, Boswell, catches it once or twice: the whites of his eyes are turning dun. Julius, I realise, is not mad. He is that thing from which madness is knit.

We arrive at last. Or rather, we get close. Then a barrier stops us, a grate of wrist-thick, vertical bars set wide enough apart to admit an arm and shoulder but little more than that. A bright light, oddly flat and lifeless, throws the grate’s shadow across our approaching forms. I gesture to Boswell to set our lamp down on the ground, then squeeze my stomach against the bars; lean my cheek on their rusty cold. Our position is such that I can see but a small part of the space before us: a cavern, a worktable, the slender neck and pinned-up hair of Lady Naylor. Her torso and legs are hidden by the backrest of her armchair and even her head is more than half obscured by a steel girder that supports the ceiling midway between her and us. The table next to her is laden with instruments and beakers, most prominently the bulbous form of a glass jug heavy with tar. At the far end of the table, in a clear line of sight, is the hunched form of a man tending to a child. The man is nondescript: a greengrocer with a sloping neck; the cheeks fleshy and florid. The child is foreign, brown-skinned, strapped to its chair. Only the head is visible, rises above the tabletop to the base of the neck. Captain van Huysmans’s demon is looking poorly; his mouth wide open, tufts of hair coming loose above the ear. It is as though he is moulting, a new boy being born out of his sweat and pain.