Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“He struck a bargain.” Livia realises at last. “For Mowgli. But it’s impossible. Grendel promised he would help me. And Grendel can’t lie.”

“Can’t he?” Mrs. Grendel snorts. “Lies are but words, and he can speak just fine. It’s hate he can’t. That, and there are limits to his love.”

A moment after she says it, Thomas tries to run down the door. He tries it with a kick first, near the lock. Then an angry charge, a fine mist of Smoke growing darker when it fails. Next Thomas and Charlie try it together. The door does not budge. On the far side, they hear Mrs. Grendel walk away with fast, disgusted steps.

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They sit defeated, both boys rubbing their shoulders. Livia looks from one to the other, Charlie’s lean, honest runner’s face; Thomas bolder, more intense, ugly in his anger. She pictures herself walking over to them, wedging herself there, in the half-foot gap between their hips. A step from them the respirator leers from its nail on the wall, its saucer eyes reflecting a twinned her.

Then: a knock on the front door. Five little raps, so soft Livia barely hears them. A friend calling. Steps answer, coming from the kitchen.

“See! Here they are back already.”

Mrs. Grendel’s voice sounds pleased with the development. It is their first hint that she is not comfortable with the situation.

They hear her open the door. The next instant there is the opening syllable of surprise, or perhaps it is a question, cut short before it shapes itself into words. It is followed by the sound of two pairs of footsteps, very close together, as of two people dancing, eerie in their tidiness. The steps stop outside the door and a new sound finds them, an animal sniffing, head-high. Through the gap underneath the door a haze invades the room, dark and tentacular, leaving tracks on the floorboards. It’s Charlie who reacts first, scrambling to his feet, drawing Thomas and Livia away from the door.

“It’s Julius.”

The steps resume, still locked in dance. As they retreat into the kitchen, there sounds a scream, the pure notes of panic, a voice so divorced from its normal usage that it takes Livia a heartbeat to ascribe it to Mrs. Grendel. The next moment, Thomas has once again thrown himself against the door. He hammers on it. It does not drown out the second scream. Neither does his shouting.

“Julius!” he shouts. “Julius Spencer. What are you doing to her?”

Beside him Charlie stands, face drained of colour.

“Julius is not what he used to be,” he says.

He has used these words before, precisely these words, talking about the events at Renfrew’s. It is only now that Livia begins to understand what he means.

Then the presence returns to the door. A voice: Julius’s, not Julius’s. Speaking not to them as a group but only to Thomas. As though Julius knows he is there, inches away, right behind the door.

“Are you listening, cousin? How weak you smell. Naked, are you? Come now, don your rage. Here, I’ll help: bait the badger. First the old lady. Livia next. It’ll bring out your plumage. Then we wed.”

“Don’t,” Thomas pleads.

Julius does not appear to hear.

“Locked you in. Thick door! Good of her. A helping hand. Or is it luck? Fortuna is a woman. I am her husband, I am her child. I am the darkness behind her eyelids. I am. .”

He trails off. Then his steps move away again, back to the kitchen. The silence that follows is worse than the earlier screaming. Thomas kicks at the door. The door will not break.

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Livia is not sure what gives him the idea. He acts as though he has rehearsed it, quickly, efficiently, without hesitation. Dips a hand into her jacket pocket; pulls out their mustard jar of purest black; unscrews the tin of Soot from Sebastian’s bag and replenishes its contents. Then Thomas takes the mask off the nail and stretches its rubber over his head and face until his dark eyes are ringed by its glass goggles. The limp tube dangles from his mouth like a length of fireman’s hose. The tin screws smoothly on its copper spout. Sebastian again. Precision work. Only when Thomas tries to insert the needle of one of the spare syringes into one of the glass vials does he slow down. Wearing the goggles, his sense of depth appears to be compromised. He misses twice, breaking off the needle on the floor; labours to attach another. Then Charlie is there, trying to stop him.

“What are you doing, Thomas?”

“You heard! He is coming for us. He is killing Mrs. Grendel and then he is coming for us. For Livia. I am too weak. I can’t even break down the door.” Thomas wraps a hand around the tin dangling at the bottom of his rubber snout. “I need strength. The strength of madness. This is murderer’s Soot. Black as black. From your mother’s secret stash. And this here”—he stabs down with the needle, misses the little ampulla—“will quicken it.”

“You will get lost,” Charlie says. “Lost in the Smoke.”

All the same he kneels down and attempts to help Thomas draw the liquid into the syringe. But his hands, too, are shaking. It’s up to Livia then. She threads the needle through the thick wrapping of foil that seals the little bottle, draws its inch of liquid into the cylindrical glass chamber.

“Good! Now release it into the tin.”

She hesitates, her eyes on Charlie, then Thomas.

“What will happen to you?” she asks.

“Do it!”

“What if—”

“Do it!”

Thomas cups her hands in his. She leans forward. His face is rubber. The goggles are easiest to kiss. A smudge on their glass, his eyelid fluttering underneath. Already he is smoking, green and yellow, an aggressive kind of fear.

“I love you.”

He says it to Charlie as much as to her. Livia injects the liquid into the tin, hears him inhale. The eyeglasses ink over, darkness in the mask. A spasm, followed by the wheeze of respiration. Then Thomas pushes her aside and charges, all his weight thrown against the door. Again and again he batters the wood, heedless of injury, until his left arm hangs like a flipper broken at his side. The noise brings Julius running; when the lock finally breaks, he has to jump aside not to be showered in splinters. Livia only sees him indistinctly: there is too much Smoke. In the room, but also in her blood, infected as it is by Thomas’s rage. An emaciated figure, ash-grey, the whites of his eyes dyed and curdled, purple-black. His hands are up, boxing style. The voice surprisingly light. Taunting.

“There,” Julius says. “The gloves are off. And you found a mask. Second face. It grows into you. After a while, you can’t tell if it’s on or off.”

Then he and Thomas disappear in an explosion of Smoke.

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It is ugly, and also happens at a distance, inscrutable, hidden from view. It’s like a hole has opened up in the centre of the hallway, a window to another place, far away. The darkness of a well, in winter. You can throw the bucket down into the dark. You will hear it hit, but what it finds down there is beyond the realm of the senses. The water you draw is black.

Livia would like to go and help Thomas. But even at a distance the Smoke that reaches out to them in thin dense tendrils frightens her blood. Infects it, yes, but also chases her away, to the front door where she cowers, consumed by baseness, hate, and fear. Not far from her, she can see Charlie in his own battle against the Smoke, leaning into it as though into a storm. Beyond, there is the wild flailing of limbs, accompanied by sounds, dull, spongy thuds, meat beaten soft by a butcher. Shouts in between, yelps, something like laughter. After what seems like an age, a hand reaches for her, Charlie’s. They lace fingers, so hard she can feel his bones pressing on hers. His hair and face is black with muck.