Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Before Renfrew can answer the coach hits a pothole and throws them out of their seats. In a second everyone’s awake, jumbled, pushing themselves up, away from awkward contact with their teacher. Charlie waits for the conversation to resume, but it doesn’t. When he looks outside, he sees an owl sitting on a moon-washed hedge, its eyes fixed on his and ringed by fine light feathers that give its stare a look of callous wonder.

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They arrive. As they clear the last hillock, the school lies beneath them, dormitories, schoolhouse, and shed forming a black cross in the wet snow, the dark brick evading the eye’s attempt to impose details. The boys need no prompting to file inside. They head for the dormitory; some fling themselves down without undressing, an eerie silence in the room where whispers, laughter, little squeals mark bedtime on any other day. Charlie waits for half an hour after the last candle has been blown out, then gets up and sneaks into the bathroom. Thomas is already there, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, his back slumped against the wall. Charlie slides down next to him, the tiles very cold under his bottom.

“Me first or you first?” he asks.

“You,” Thomas says. Charlie is unprepared for how weary he sounds. More than just weary. Resentful. Sick of life.

“Unless you’d rather not. It can wait till tomorrow.”

Thomas shifts enough to find his eye. “You want to talk, Charlie, and I am your friend. So let’s talk.”

He does not say: That’s the price we pay. For friendship. But it’s there in his voice.

It sickens Charlie that friendship should have a price.

Charlie tells me. About the miracle he has seen. And I tell him what I was up to, back there on the market square. An accounting, you might call it; honest as two Dutchmen settling up. Then we go to bed. Neither of us reacts in the way the other needs him to. Charlie wants me to be excited; to spin theories with him; devise a plan to return to London, sniff out his man.

But it is difficult to believe what he is saying. A man immune to Smoke, hook-necked and all. It’s impossible: like seeing a ghost. I don’t think he’s lying, of course. Charlie wouldn’t lie. It may be he can’t. But this was the city: a thousand people pushing, pressing, trampling one another’s feet; no air to breathe; and so much Smoke in your blood your senses are screaming. To fight, mostly, smash someone’s face in. That, and the other thing. Find a girl, I mean. Rip her clothes off. It’s like your pulse has slipped into your pants. Chaos, in other words, not just in the square but in you, rage and lust and laughter, too, a mad sort of laughter, weightless and simple, and your stomach tells you it wants food. To see a man in all that, one that doesn’t smoke, because his collar is clean on the inside , you notice it when he walks past, well—

There’re things you have to see for yourself, I suppose. It’s not a matter of choice, or even friendship. You cannot help but doubt. We are lonely creatures , Mother used to say. We live in our heads.

And when I tell him what I saw — and I do, as honestly as I can, though my stomach heaves with it and I keep spitting up black — all Charlie wants to know is, am I all right. I’m not, but that isn’t the point. Charlie saw an angel walk past. I think I saw the devil. There’s none of us going to be all right ever again.

Here’s what I tell Charlie. When the Smoke spread— her Smoke, the woman’s, the murderess’s — I pushed closer to the scaffold. What drove me there was this: if Renfrew is right, if there is a cancer of sin growing in my guts, my heart, my brain, then she is what I will become. My fate, my patrimony. So I wanted to look her in the eye. For a sign of kinship, or something. That, and there was this flavour to her Smoke, something I have noticed before but never this clearly. It tasted good . Bitter of course, sheer murder on the lungs, but good, too, like spirits I suppose, if you ask a drunk. Seductive. So I pushed ahead. Dealt out a lot of thrusts with my elbows. Earned just as many, my arms black and blue, but kept on pushing.

Right up front there was a yard-wide gap ringing the gallows: only a few people there, and those that were, were pushing back, into the crowd. It makes sense: everyone wanted to be close — see her hang by the neck, her tongue sticking out — but if you got too close, you got pushed up against the scaffold, a big wooden box, really, man-high, square, and covered with a large sheet of nailed-down canvas, somewhere between brown and black. And there, flush against its wall, you couldn’t see a thing. Even the Smoke was thinner here, travelled over your head.

So I tried to fight my way back into the crowd, charged it really, headfirst, half mad. And got kicked in the gut for my trouble, Soot and stomach juice mixing in my mouth. Next thing I knew I was on my knees in the dirt, back in the no-man’s-land near the scaffold, leaning on it as I struggled up. That’s when I noticed that there were gaps beneath the canvas, that the box that held the gallows was more lattice fence than crate. And the evil thought flashed in me that it was there, inside, where the hole would open, the trapdoor, I mean, through which the woman would fall. And — it pains me to say it, it was the Smoke, the Smoke, only perhaps it wasn’t — I wanted to see it, see her , even if it were only her feet kicking as the breath was being choked out of her, and her stiff bloated face when she was dropped through the hole once she was dead.

So while the crowd was chanting, and the Smoke got so black you could hardly see the sky above, I ran my fingers up and down the side of the scaffold, looking for a gap large enough to slip through. I found it right at the bottom, got flat on my stomach (like a worm, I remember thinking, like a nasty little worm), jimmied two nails out of the canvas cover, and scooted through.

Inside the only light came from the open trapdoor above. I was too late, I realised it at once. The body was already on the ground, cut down, the knot of the noose jutting up from her neck like a knife handle. Already her Smoke had ceased; she lay on her stomach, legs splayed, the shift so caked with Smoke it cracked like icing.

It didn’t crack by itself, mind. There was someone there, crouching by her side, his back to me. Holding a razor. He cut the shift away in two quick jerks. The naked body underneath remained as though dressed in Soot. The figure — wearing a suit, a lumpy overcoat, dirty, patched tweed — produced a jar from out one pocket, squat and wide-mouthed, its glass tinted like an apothecary’s bottle. Then he bent over the body again, razor in hand, and with its three-inch blade began to scrape away Soot.

Not everywhere, mind. The figure knew exactly what it wanted. He started at the face, unclenching the woman’s jaws, wedging open her mouth; then, with gloved fingers pulled out the tongue as though to cut it off at its roots, only to run the blade along its underside, taking shavings of the Soot trapped there, more liquid than powder, then transferring it into the jar by sliding the blade along the inside of its rim, the way you’d clean a butter knife of jam. The sound of steel on glass. It seemed louder than the crowd outside.

I watched all this silently, lying on my stomach, afraid not of the knife but of this man with a dead woman’s tongue between his fingers. He harvested Soot from two more places, the depth of both armpits, then (I turned away here: London’s Smoke in my brain and lungs, and still I turned away, could not bear it, was ashamed) from the scissor of her thighs: scraped the knife again and again against the rim of his glass, then screwed it tightly shut. All told it took him no more than a few minutes. He never turned around, worked with precision, never more quickly than the task merited, but with an efficiency that hinted at practice.