Dan Vyleta - Smoke

But so is Mother.

Her Smoke has a scent all its own, sweet and treacly like a sick man’s piss. The baron’s doing. He cut her deep, Mother showed me the scar. My fingers down her bodice. Seduction: a way of reminding me that I came from her womb. She has betrayed me, used me, given me life. I hate her, I love her. Commonplaces: every mother’s son. I am reborn, remade, a thing of her dark dreams. I am my own becoming. I am the alpha and the omega. I am. . I am not ready for her yet.

I wait. The house draws me, repels me in turn. I squat in the gateway down below. They are all inside. He. Charlie. Livia. Half sister, empress for a day. He wants her. She wants—

Mother.

I’m afraid of her.

But I shot Mr. Price. Father figure; hole for a heart. I could kill her at a hundred yards. A twitch of the finger, no need to look her in the eye. One hundred yards. But the Irish kept the gun.

I squat in the gateway, watch a tart serve clients in the mouth of the alley across. The men smoke. She does not. Only with the last one does she finally catch, converting his lust to her anger, pale silvery green. Alchemy. Like a goose eating grass and shitting gold. She pulls down her skirts and bolts. The moon rises then is lost in cloud. It rains. I stick my tongue out, each drop seeded with Soot. Sand corns in oysters. Pearls for a swine.

Time.

I am no good with time. Half the night gone in the blink of an eye. Then the door opens above and I hide. Mother crosses the yard. Behind her a man, an abomination, carrying a boy, a cripple, a blank. Two rents in the fabric of Smoke. My blood puckers. Puckers, I say: not the skin, the blood, a scrotum dunked in ice. They are in a hurry, Mother and man, walk quickly into the rain. I know where they are heading. Mother. I shot Mr. Price. If only I had kept the gun.

But first: inside. To him . Smoke wells up, consumes me. Rage. Yearning. Time. I am no good with time. A minute, an hour, just to take the first step. Put a leash on my Smoke. A game, let’s make a game of it. Savour it. Sommelier. Wine is bitter under the tongue.

At the top of the stairs: a seam of his Smoke. Old, caked in, stuck to the brick. I put my lips to it. Feeding or kissing? A bloom of mould growing up the wall underneath. Mould and Soot. London’s flowers. They should put them on its crest. Ahead, the door is locked. I stand there sniffing. Time? I am no good with time.

Order!

Who am I? Lord Spencer? Julius? Caesar. Et tu. Before (before Nótt, after London; before ) I entered a church. He had been there: a trace of him on the steps by the gate. The man inside crossed himself. High Anglican: a confession box like a coffin, the priest slumping on its stool. The haste of drunk fingers. Forehead, belly, both sides of the chest. It made me chuckle. The devil, then? The devil is a schoolboy. I stare at my hands. My skin has turned grey, like ash.

A fist of ash.

It knocks gently on the door.

Please, Mrs. Grendel! You must let us out at once. You have no right. And it is very important that we catch up with them. The little boy is in danger. Please. We insist.”

Livia listens to her own words and frowns.

We are speaking to Mrs. Grendel as though she is stupid.

Mrs. Grendel is not stupid. In fact her account of the situation is remarkably lucid. She tells them that the previous evening, as he returned to his hotel, Sebastian noticed a man in the foyer who, while pretending to read, studied Sebastian’s ascent up the stairs with uncommon interest. When Sebastian returned to the front desk some hours later, under the pretext of asking for his mail, the man was still there, reading the same paper. Sebastian concluded that he had been discovered and placed under surveillance. Indeed he was followed when he left his lodgings early that morning, but, using the sewer as a shortcut, he managed to lose his pursuers. He came, informed Lady Naylor, considered “going into hiding,” but resolved to return to his rooms instead. As long as he was under surveillance, he argued, the authorities’ energies were tied up and they would not dare to make too obvious a search of the sewer system. Lady Naylor was left in charge of what he (playfully, in Mrs. Grendel’s opinion childishly) called “the operation.” The lady, in turn, decided not to delay any further and had left an hour previously, taking Grendel along. All this her husband told Mrs. Grendel that very evening just as she is now relaying it to them. Mr. Grendel did not, it appears, invite Mrs. Grendel’s own thoughts on the matter.

“But where did she take Mowgli?” Charlie mutters. “It’s too early. Lady Naylor said seventy-two hours. It hasn’t been much more than fifty.”

The voice beyond the door is unmoved by his reasoning.

“I don’t know about that. Perhaps she lied. People do.”

Throughout the exchange, Livia is conscious that Thomas is only half listening. Unlike Charlie and her, he has no faith in words. Instead he is busy searching the room. He finds a candle first of all, high up on a shelf; a box of matches. Next, working by candlelight now, he examines the window, finds it expertly barred. An engineer, Sebastian Aschenstedt: thorough. On the floor, not far from the bed, lies his doctor’s bag. Livia remembers his handing it over to her mother when he visited last. The bag has been ransacked, its few remaining contents spilled across the floor. Syringes and little glass vials sealed with tinfoil. The small round tin Sebastian used to infect the child, looking for all the world like a tin of shoe polish, a needle hole at its centre. Thomas unscrews it and finds it encrusted with oily crumbs of brownish Soot. Not far from him, head-high, Mowgli’s mask hangs off a nail like a forgotten face. That’s all, Thomas’s inventory complete. There is nothing in the room that would help them escape.

Livia returns her attention to the door.

“You are doing it for money,” she shouts, spite tinting her breath. “You are a greedy dried-up woman who cares only about herself.”

A silence follows the words. But Mrs. Grendel is still there. Livia can see the shadow of her feet through the crack at the foot of the door.

“You’ve never been poor, duck,” she says, reasonably. “And Tobias asked me. He never asked a thing of me, not once, in all these years. Until tonight. ‘Keep ’em here,’ he said. ‘The lady wishes it. Lock them in if you must. They are still only children,’ he said. ‘Keep them safe.’”

“It was Grendel’s idea?” There is no masking the hurt in Livia’s voice. “I don’t believe you! Grendel acted under duress. Mother forced him to come.”

Again the answer is devastatingly reasonable.

“Lady Naylor needs him to keep the child quiet. The boy trusts him, you see. No Smoke, the little mite, but a cheeky bugger all the same.”

A note of hope swings in this last phrase. What did Grendel say to Livia? We were not blessed ourselves.