Dan Vyleta - Smoke

And on Charlie walks, steadily, mechanically, as though in a dream. He passes Livia; sees that Lady Naylor is alive, sees her daughter trying to revive her first with words then with frightened little slaps, to the good cheek, the other mangled by lacerations and welts. Livia’s eyes plead for his help but Charlie has a more urgent destination. Here, near the table, the ground is covered in glass shards. They crunch at his every step. He reaches the table, the gun; pockets it and feels some tension fall from him. Next to it a beaker of blood rests calmly on the table; two steps away, Grendel is rocking his charge, fingers spread along Mowgli’s back. From this angle, it looks as though two heads are rising from his trunk, one old and kindly, the other childish, mottled by fever but mirroring the other in its boundless calm. It is this calm that thrusts the Smoke back into Charlie’s lungs and colours his breath with the plume of disgust.

“You shot him,” he says needlessly, the words drifting over to Grendel and the boy in a sulphur haze and moving through them without a ripple. “We argued about it once. Whether it is possible to kill a man righteously, without Smoke.” Then Charlie adds, quietly, angrily: “I did not think then that it would be so horrible.”

But when Grendel turns to look at Charlie, the angel’s face is as placid as ever, untouched by doubt or self-reproach.

“Hush now,” he says. “You will frighten the child.”

Charlie looks at him and cannot bear it. He turns away, back to his friends. For a second there is a sort of lull. Everything that has urged them here is resolved. The boy is alive, Grendel disarmed, Sebastian’s plot defeated. Their triumph is mocked by a sound, a quiet mewing. It takes Charlie some moments to realise it issues from Lady Naylor; to interpret it as the sound of acute distress.

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“What’s wrong with her? Is she shot?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And the blood?”

“Cuts on her face and arms. The gun hit the bottle, I think. The big bottle of Soot standing on the table. There is a cut near her left eye, but it isn’t very deep.”

“Then why is she like this?”

In truth Lady Naylor is irrational with pain. She is lying on her belly and is crawling through the shard-spiked mud of the floor. Initially Charlie thinks she is heading towards her son; that it is his death that has deranged her so. But her gaze never strays to where Thomas continues to minister to the dead. It is riveted instead on the ground, her hands picking up glass shards and clawing at little pools of Soot. The left side of her face hangs in shreds, a flap of skin literally cut loose above the cheekbone and bleeding freely, the rest swelling fast. Charlie steps over to her, arrests the movement of her arms by taking hold of her wrists.

“Are you injured?”

“All lost,” she whispers in response. Her lips are pale, the same colour as her teeth. It makes it hard for Charlie to concentrate on her words. “Scattered. No good. We barely had enough as it was.”

Charlie ignores her words, tries to pull her up, hears her emit a yelp of intense pain. He lowers her down again, lies her on her back, her head in his lap.

“Your leg?” he asks, studying the focussed stillness of her limbs. “Were you shot in the leg?”

Lady Naylor shakes her head. “Got a fright. Slipped. Broken hip. Or maybe the femur.”

Charlie nods, points behind himself. “It was Headmaster Trout and his man. Julius was with them. Your son is dead, Lady Naylor. I am very sorry.”

She does not appear to have heard, starts shivering, then mumbling to herself.

“All lost,” she says again. “An imperial gallon! But Julius stole half. Half! Barely enough. Now scattered, useless; lost, lost, lost.”

Charlie looks down at her, trying to make sense of her gibberish. Livia kneels by his side and transfers the weight of Lady Naylor’s head to her own lap. She has fetched the bottle and glass that have survived unscathed on their perch by the armchair and has poured out a measure of port. Her mother drinks the sugary liquid in greedy little sips, while Charlie disentangles himself, stands up, and studies the table and room, alive to a new thought.

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The bullet must have hit the bottle right at the centre. Or perhaps it was buckshot rather than a bullet, a dozen lead pellets ripping into its thick glass. All that remains of it atop the table is the sphere of its base, finger-thick. Around it, the tablecloth is filthy with Soot, but much must have flown beyond it, in a spray of deepest black, and has been absorbed into the spongy, muck-slick ground. Beyond the table, the pellets have peppered a large metal box from whose innards emerges the cable that feeds the lamps above. Other than that the table is virtually undisturbed, especially at its far end, where stands the chair into which Mowgli was strapped. A tin bucket with clear water sits next to this chair, a wet flannel folded over its rim. It must have been used to manage the child’s fever. Still wrestling with his thought, Charlie picks up this bucket, offers Livia the flannel, then pours the water carelessly onto the ground before walking to the side of the filtration pool closest to them.

The pool is filled to within inches of its rim. Scooping up a bucketful proves easy. Frustrated by the flickering light, Charlie carries it to the glow of Trout’s gas lamp that shines from beyond the iron bars; has to wrestle with nausea before plunging his hand into its darkness; feels the particles of Soot, like silt suspended in a murky pond; scoops up a palmful and studies it. A shadow leans over him, Thomas bending to see what he has found. Soot quivers in the upturned cup of Charlie’s hand. It is very dark.

But it is not black.

They exchange a glance: of confusion on Charlie’s side; of mournful anger on Thomas’s.

Next Charlie knows, Thomas has turned his back on him and is marching to the prone figure of Lady Naylor.

Charlie follows hard on his heels.

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Charlie has watched Thomas take on many roles the past few days. First bloodhound, relentless in his search for clues; then martyr and demon, descending into the darkness of his being; repentant killer, suspended between self-hatred and apathy. Now Thomas turns inquisitor. He has rediscovered the sharp edge of his anger, or perhaps just turned it outward, like a knife he’s found stuck between his ribs. He walks it to the table first, this anger; collects the little beaker of blood, crouches down before Lady Naylor. Livia has thrown back her mother’s skirts, exposing the undergarments. Lady Naylor’s leg, beneath her hose, is so swollen it looks like a football has been strapped to her outer thigh. Neither Charlie nor Thomas looks away as Livia continues her examination. Thomas bends over milady, trying to see into her face, then gestures to Charlie to prop her up, no matter what pain it may cause her. She is pale and conscious; the right side of her face handsome, the left risen like dough. Thomas holds the beaker to the eye that has not swollen shut.

“Mowgli’s blood,” he begins. “Fifty to eighty hours into infection. Sebastian told Livia it took two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. Four pints or thereabouts. But this is less than half a glass.”

Lady Naylor watches him and almost smiles: ashen gums, one corner of her mouth tucked deep into the swelling.

“Fifty millimetres. Five thimblefuls.” A cough that stands in for a laugh. “Did you think I was a vampire, Thomas?”

“We thought you devoid of scruples, milady.”

She accepts this, closes her good eye, opens it again with a flash of pride. “It is true. I have none.”

“Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres,” Thomas continues, unmoved. “Livia misunderstood. Sebastian meant Soot not blood. And you have been crying over a bottle. Your son is dead and you are mourning dirt. Worse than dirt: bygone murders, harvested with the scrape of your razor. In the armpits. Under the tongue.” Thomas gags, spits a pearl of phlegm onto the ground, watches it steam as though the floor is a griddle. “What’s so special about that Soot, Lady Naylor? You built a whole sewer system to gather vice. You must have a hundred thousand gallons right there.”