Dan Vyleta - Smoke

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We do not even attempt to break down the grating. Its ends are cemented straight into ceiling and floor. It would take an hour and a pickax to get us through. Thus there is only one thing to be done. Boswell knows it too. When I turn to look at him he has already cocked his rifle.

“Where do I shoot?” he asks. He is speaking softly but there is in his voice a note of expectation.

“Mother,” the marionette-boy says. “Punish Mother.”

He sounds like a child wheedling for a sweet; points with a finger broken at the knuckle, bending sideways where a finger must not bend.

“Mother. Mama. Now, now, now!”

His tongue in Boswell’s ear.

But Boswell hesitates. “Difficult shot,” he says at last. “Girder’s in the way.” And, after a pause: “How about the child?”

And God help me, I know in my gut he is right. If we want to stop this (whatever this is), put an end to this infernal plot, it is by far the safest option. The child is the key. Aschenstedt and Lady Naylor paid a fortune to have him smuggled into the country. Even now she is looking to the boy, waiting for something, some revelation or event. Once he is eliminated, we can arrest her at our leisure. She is a lady of the peerage, she has the right to a trial. Not so the child. And after all, it is our duty. For Queen and country; for the good of the state. It wills it. We must obey.

Boswell is looking to me with his Smoke-curdled eyes. An impatient look. He is awaiting the order from his commanding officer. I look straight back. Beyond the bars, in a part of the room we cannot see, a voice calls out, the words swallowed by distance. Lady Naylor rises and answers; her hand discloses a snub-nosed gun. She steps, gestures, commands. A patrician voice.

Her son’s Smoke is filling our lungs.

Boswell tastes it, licks it, decides. His finger curls around the trigger. My hand slaps the barrel when the bullet is already racing along inside: I feel the hot quiver of its passage. It is treason then and nothing less, the deliberate betrayal of my mission. Borne of what? Of decency, I suppose, a distaste for death. It appears the witchfinder in me has lost his callous love of justice. I have been a headmaster for far too long.

The shot is deafening. The bullet hits the table, an explosion of glass. Then everything happens very fast. Boswell is working the bolt for a second shot when Julius takes the gun away from him. He does not wrestle it free or even wrench it: he simply takes it into his broken hands. Takes it, turns it, swings it, and buries it inch-deep in Boswell’s face. The man is dead before he hits the ground. A black cloud leaps out of him and straight up Julius’s chest like a dog changing masters. Then Julius turns the gun on me.

He gives me time to draw my Colt. God only knows what thought is running through him now: in his face not hatred but sulky petulance at not having had his way. I fumble for the holster, tear free the revolver but cannot thread my finger through the hole. In the end I let it drop. It falls and spins between my toes.

Julius shoots me. He shoots me in my fat gut, just where my belt runs across the navel. I fall almost as an afterthought and watch him stand over me, his mouth wide open and the lips curled back across his toothless gums, savouring the Smoke that is rising from my wound like steam out of a heating pipe. Where it passes through his body, it changes colour and doubles in intensity; unfurls behind him like a flag. Julius stands and drinks me and works the lever for a second shot.

Then something steps up behind him. He wears the bluff features of a greengrocer. I know at once he is not human. He does not smoke. He stands on the far side of the metal bars, not a foot away from Julius; stands in the boy’s Smoke, the very thick of his Smoke, and adds no Smoke of his own. A kind face, seen up close: fleshy, balding, ruddy. The grocer threads his arm through the bars. Milady’s gun is in his hand: a Beretta, double-barrelled, decorations beaten into the steel of its short snout. Its tip touches Julius’s neck.

There is a pause, a moment of conspiracy, a wish asked and granted, as boy and grocer share a look. Two monsters from adjacent pits; one smokeless, one dripping with raw need. Then the shot rings out. As he falls, I notice something in Julius’s Smoke, something so essential to it, so all-pervasive, that I did not notice it before. It is the very solvent in which all his evil is suspended. Self-loathing, a hunger for his own destruction; a desperate desire to find rest. Julius drops forward, into the bars; kneels before the grocer. The man turns to me. The gun turns with him. It points calmly at my bulk.

He will shoot me too. I can see it in his face. He’ll do it calmly, benignly, without passion or ego, not for himself, not from anger, not from triumph or because he is possessed by a truth; simply because I can do harm to him and his while alive, and none dead.

Then he sees I am already dead and turns away. I look after him with dread and admiration. Perhaps his kind are the future. It might please the state.

The grocer will make it a good servant.

And so they are made to watch Julius die a second time. It is a sort of shadow play, something a favourite uncle would project upon a bedroom wall to amuse the children with the clever shapes of his hands; happens off-centre, backlit by the weak light of a gas lamp, turned low and placed on the ground somewhere behind the players’ bulk. Grendel’s shot that closes the play rips the half-light like a fork of lightning. As though in answer, first one, then several of the lamps above their heads flutter back to intermittent life, oscillating between a bromide darkness and flashes of dull yellow.

Within Charlie’s arms, Livia is writhing, fighting his embrace. He does not remember grabbing hold of her, pulling her head into the flimsy safety of his chest. She wants to run over to where her mother lies lifeless in the dirt. A few steps ahead of them, Thomas is picking himself off the ground. Farther ahead, Grendel places the pistol on the table — a tool discarded — and bends to free Mowgli from his straps. He removes the needle from his body and, along with it, a small beaker now filled with the boy’s lifeblood; stoppers the beaker and places it carefully upon the table, inches from the gun, before strapping the feverish child into a cloth sling that he fastens across his chest and hip.

It is only when Grendel steps away from table and gun that Charlie releases Livia, all the time conscious of the confusion in her Smoke. She darts away from him, catches up with Thomas who himself has started moving. For two steps they run abreast, touching elbows for comfort. Then their paths separate. Livia is heading to her mother, Thomas to the dead schoolmate of theirs who hangs tangled in iron bars like a fish within its netting: down on his knees, his ashen head stuck through the grating, arms thrown outward at a messianic angle. Beyond Julius lies a man with a beaten-in face and a fleshy mound that was Headmaster Trout.

Charlie himself starts moving. As he draws closer he comes to understand his destination. Mowgli. Grendel. The gun. Even so, his eyes are locked onto Livia and Thomas. The former has fallen to her knees by Lady Naylor’s side; is untangling her mother’s face from the mass of undone hair and soon finds her hands bloodied. As for the latter: for a moment Charlie thinks that it is fear that drives Thomas to such haste. He killed Julius earlier that night; broke him, not one breath rising out of the wreckage of his body. And yet he rose, a dark Christ. Who is to say he will not rise again; jerk up and scuttle off into the dark? But then Charlie sees Thomas tug at Julius, pull his emaciated arms halfway through the bars. Thomas is not checking for movement. He is trying to shake Julius awake. Let him rise , his action seems to be saying. Let him scuttle. It would acquit Thomas of something at least.