Dan Vyleta - Smoke

Charlie hears her footsteps in the stairwell. He has been waiting for their sound and slips out onto the tiny landing to catch her there. It has been raining and she is wet, her hair clinging to her head and face. It makes the ears look large, their rims delicate and pale, like fine bone china. The miner’s jacket is big around her shoulders, weighted down by water and dirt. Charlie looks and looks. He wants to tell her that all is forgiven; that he does not want to stand in her and Thomas’s way; that things are not her fault and, anyway, there are bigger things afoot. He wants to touch her, hold her hand — like a friend, a brother — rest his forehead on her shoulder.

“You followed Sebastian,” he says.

“Yes. I found out where he lives. A hotel, not far from here. I thought it might be useful to know.”

“Good idea.”

She steps up to the landing, makes to round him. But then she stops, inches away. The cock of her head is that strangest of mixtures. Modesty and strength. City grime dusting the fine down of her cheeks.

A pencil line of Smoke rises from Charlie, light and grey. He is glad for it. It will tell her what he feels.

She looks at it without flinching; opens her mouth, tasting it, tasting him; reaches out and laces her fingers into his.

“Whom do you love?”

He says it and sees Livia smile over the phrase. What would Thomas have said? But that’s just it: Thomas wouldn’t have asked.

“You,” she says. “Him. Both.”

“Yes. But you love him like a bride. And me like a sis—”

She interrupts, cheeks flushing, displeased at being told what she feels.

“It isn’t as simple as that.” She snorts, steps up, kisses him. “There! I’ve been learning to smoke.”

It’s a peck or rather a bite: his lips between hers, tugged and held for the length of a breath; a passing of Smoke, of emotion — hunger, confusion, triumph, fear — from skin to skin and lung to lung. Then Livia rounds him and opens the door.

Behind it, Grendel stands, looking flustered, Mowgli’s porridge on a tray.

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Charlie watches the feeding. The boy won’t handle the spoon himself but he will sit there, mouth open, and allow Grendel to deposit a spoonful; will chew it slowly and sigh, world-weary, his eyes screwed up and cold. When the bowl is nearly finished the boy holds a dollop on his tongue then suddenly bends forward and spits it at Grendel’s feet. It is deliberate, a test: the small brown face insolent, the body tense, ready to bolt. Grendel kneels, cleans it up, offers another spoonful from the bowl. But the child has moved away and wrapped himself in blankets. All this Charlie sees from the keyhole. When Grendel turns to leave, the boy looks after him. A curious look. Suspicion mingled with the dawning of trust. Charlie rises just before Grendel pushes open the door.

“Can I go to him?” he asks, but Grendel shakes his head. “Mr. Sebastian does not wish it.”

“Why do you follow his orders?”

“The boy is scared,” Grendel says. “You are kind, but you will scare him. With me, he knows I won’t smoke. Even when he bites. He can sense that I’m harmless. Down to my bones.”

Charlie understands what he means. Grendel radiates something. Holiness; an absence. A man estranged from sin.

“Then Livia is right. You are an angel.”

Grendel hesitates. “I fear I am one of those who stood at the edge of heaven, looking down. Dreaming about their Fall.”

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Thomas returns late. Finding the sewer entrance proved harder than he thought, his hand-drawn map of the underground and the city’s streets impossible to match. In the end he chanced upon an Ashton engineer in a company cab and ran behind it until it led him to a work site. Thomas snuck into the sewer for several hundred yards before being thrown out by a foreman. What he saw was a maze of tunnels and a mechanical pump the size of a house, pumping water down a giant bore. He got nowhere near those giant pools marked in pale rectangles upon his map.

“We are running out of time,” he keeps saying. “It’s been forty-eight hours since they infected Mowgli. Another day and he’ll start changing. We must find out what she is planning before then.”

“Then we will go tonight,” Charlie suggests. “We must take him along. In case we don’t want to return.”

Thomas and Livia are quick to agree. They are all fed up with waiting. One might start a revolution, it comes to Charlie, or thwart it, just from this, a hunger for movement, for action.

“Mowgli is locked in,” Livia reminds them. “But Grendel has the key. I will talk to him.”

They see her speaking to Grendel later. It is easy that evening to catch him alone: Lady Naylor has been much preoccupied and has kept to her room. It is a whispered conversation, private, at the end of the corridor; Livia holding her holy man’s hand. His face is so kindly, so prone to blushes and nervous smiles that it is only by the tilt of Livia’s chin they can guess at the urgency of their talk.

“Will he help us?” Thomas asks her bluntly when she returns.

“Of course he will!”

“And he won’t—”

“He gave his word,” she barks, storming off, leaving both Thomas and Charlie in the wake of her Smoke. They sniff it like the lovelorn pups they are.

“Pissy,” Thomas decides.

“But she’s pretty when she is.”

And for a moment they forget, almost, that they are to fight a duel for the favours of her heart.

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They decide on leaving early that night, but deep in the flat they can hear Lady Naylor stir and move about, so they wait until the moon is gone and the night made blacker by rain. The plan is a compromise of sorts, between Livia’s trust and the boys’ suspicion. Thomas will sneak into the room in which the Grendels sleep and see whether he can find the key to the child’s cell. If not, Livia will wake their host and remind him of his promise.

“He will help us without fail.”

But in the end there is no need to wake Grendel. When they step into the hallway, they see his wife’s shadow, sitting alone in the kitchen, the faint glow of embers in the stove behind her back. Not for the first time Charlie notes their ignorance of her Christian name. She remains, to them, a stranger. They start, crowd around her, assault her with whispers.

“Quiet,” they hiss. “Don’t be alarmed.”

And: “We need to speak to Grendel. He must unlock the child’s door.”

The angel’s wife is stony-faced. She seeks out Livia’s form amongst them, shorter than the boys’ and framed by pale hair.

“I know. He told me you had asked him. He told me everything.” The woman rises, pushes through them, pulls something out the pocket of her skirt. “There is no need to wake him. I have the key.”

The door squeaks when she swings it open for them. Charlie winces, but nothing stirs in Lady Naylor’s room across.

“Quick now,” says Thomas. “The child must not call out.”

They rush forward, into darkness, find the blankets, the bunk. Behind them, the door falls back into its frame, the lock snaps.

“I’m sorry,” says Mrs. Grendel. Her voice is dull, muffled by wood, by distance. “He said you mustn’t follow. They’ll be back before long.”

Around them the room is empty, the child long gone.

They capture Nótt. This happens before Mother but after Sebastian. I’m having trouble with words, with time. I’m different now, transformed. A buzzard climbing the updrafts of Smoke. My bones hollow, my body a husk: reinhabited. I, the dark twin of my former self, flesh of my own liver. I am my own father and mother; Renfrew my midwife; the mask my baptism and my last rites. Children cower when I pass them in the streets.