Dan Vyleta - Smoke

This last bit rouses the slouching man, wakes his inner pedant. Sebastian sits up.

“Oh no, it wasn’t a lie. It takes between fifty and eighty hours. These things are never precise. It varies with the dose, you see, and how strong the child’s defences are. In Mowgli’s case”—Sebastian pulls out a pocket watch, sits squinting at its hands—“well, he might already be there! There is a test, in any case, a simple test.” He beams, reaches over, tugs at her sleeve. “Those fools outside, eh? Even while they are standing there, freezing, your mother is changing the world. Ha! They are so sure that it must be I who lights the fuse! They don’t expect a woman to have this much pluck.” He giggles, settles back into his chair, drink-flushed and happy. “But hush now, Miss Naylor! I mustn’t say any more. The less you know the better. In case. . You see, it might be another twelve hours. And they may catch you yet and place you under duress.”

He takes another swig, raising the laudanum bottle by accident, then checks himself just in time and guzzles brandy. By the time he has put it down, she has dug the mustard jar out her pocket. A smear of Soot remains in it. It sits at the bottom like a liquid piece of night.

“What is this for, Sebastian?”

He squints, takes the jar from her, flushes with excitement.

“From your mother’s bottle, yes?” He holds it close to the fire, watches the light be swallowed by its contents.

“Best to destroy it, I suppose,” he mumbles with a strange reluctance. Then a thought occurs to him, something clever, it scrunches up his face like a prune.

“You want to see it?” he mutters. “After all, what is the harm? And I can’t be there, can I? Stuck here like bait in a mousetrap, while history is being made.”

He jumps up, opens a drawer on the desk, and sorts through its contents to retrieve a small glass vial.

“Here. Another something I did not dare to destroy! Foolish. So, let’s make amends.”

Quietly, hardly daring to breathe lest it change his mood, Livia watches him drop to his knees and roll back a corner of carpet to expose the wooden floor underneath.

“Come, look,” he calls to her. “An experiment. A demonstration!”

He waits until she has kneeled down beside him, then unscrews the mustard jar and shapes a tiny island of Soot onto the floor.

“Observe,” he whispers, handing her the vial he retrieved from the desk. “What do you see?”

The vial is smooth-bodied and cylindrical, narrowing to a thin neck at the top. It takes her a moment to understand it has no opening, no stopper. A liquid fills it, heavy as treacle, but water-clear. At the heart of this substance sits a single red drop.

“What is it?” she matches his whisper. “Dye?”

“Blood! Our very last drop. Vacuum sealed. Oh, how much did we waste until I found a way of preserving it!”

“Whose blood? Mowgli’s?”

But Sebastian only shakes his head, jumps up and runs to his bed in the other room, from which he retrieves a pipette that appears to be one of many instruments strewn amongst its blankets. Without pausing for breath, he resumes his position on the floor, takes the vial from her hands, and breaks off the whole of its neck; plunges the pipette into the gelatinous liquid within; and pulls up the scarlet drop into the pipette’s glass shaft. Then he ceases all movement and bows his head, as though in prayer. Beneath their knees the floorboards are dark with decades of old sin, long absorbed into their grain. On top, like a canker, sits the abomination her mother scraped off the skin of dying murderers, looking as though it is seeping its evil into the surrounding wood.

“What is Soot?” Sebastian begins to question her, like a catechist checking her lessons, his chin still resting on his chest. His left hand has, quite naturally, sought out her knee and is petting it distractedly.

“Spent Smoke,” she answers.

“Is it live?”

“No. Inert.”

“Can it be quickened?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“You showed us how. Some chemical substance, mixed into the Soot.”

“Herbal, my dear, not chemical. Precipitating a weak reaction! Only the blackest Soot, only briefly, and at tremendous cost. A field of flowers for a dozen cigarettes. And then? Three short puffs, and half an hour of borrowed emotion!”

“Flowers? What flowers?” she interjects, confused, but Sebastian is too absorbed in his thoughts to answer.

“Now then. Do you want to do the honours?” He looks up, smiles expectantly, then immediately discards the idea. “No, it’ll be better if I! Shall we? Only get ready to jump! On three: one, two. .”

He places the pipette into the little mound of Soot, releases the blood. The next moment he has pulled her up with him, and leapt two paces back.

“Wait for it!” he mutters.

Nothing stirs. Then, his elbow prodding hers with excitement, the Soot combusts, belches a violent jet of Smoke into the air, from which they flee into the corner of the room. Chest-high, the Smoke reverts to Soot; snows down in ashen flakes onto the floor only to reignite as though by magic, leaping up in jerky puffs, like kernels of corn thrown on a sizzling pan. Each little explosion carries with it a spray of lighter Smoke, the Soot of the floorboards whispered into pale life. It is as though the very room is exhaling its sin. Two, three times the cycle repeats. Then it ceases, quietly and suddenly. Nothing is left of the inky scoop they emptied on the floor. Sebastian runs over to it, crouches, runs his fingers over the patch of floorboard that lies pale and naked as though bleached.

Livia stands breathless, her voice brittle with fear. “What just happened, Sebastian?”

“A dress rehearsal. For the Great Quickening! But hush, now, hush.”

“But that Soot you used. It’s evil!”

“Oh yes, evil, pure as pure!”

“And the blood. It was infected, wasn’t it?”

“Infected, yes, but still fighting the infection. Neither one nor the other. The body rejecting its new state. A narrow window!”

“So that’s what you want from Mowgli.” She raises her hands in front of her, fingers spread wide, as though trying to take hold of something floating in the air. “The Great Quickening! Tell me, how can that bring justice?”

Sebastian does not answer, flips from his knees over to his bottom, sits there, hugging his knees, excited and happy. For a moment he has something of Charlie, full of the joy of being alive, here and now, partaking in things. The next moment his thoughts veer to dead children. His expression remains just the same. All she does is ask another question.

“Whose blood was that in the vial?” she asks.

This time he answers.

“We called her Lilith. After Adam’s first wife. A feisty little mite! Cantankerous.” He smiles with the memory, fingers his bottle. “How we scoured the world for them, in the years after we learned of their existence. All the best scientists of Europe: mounting expeditions to the farthest corners of the world. A new age of exploration. And how naïvely, how clumsily did we proceed. Walking into igloos with nothing but a scarf wrapped around our mouths, infecting whole tribes in the process. They died in droves. You see, most adults could not survive the anatomical adjustments initiated by the infection. Children though! There was our hope. And little Lilith: a lovely girl, pretty as a picture. She caught a cold, in the end, an ordinary cold! Your butler buried her, out in the woods. Your mother was heartbroken.”

The Smoke jumps out of her in a cloud of rage, is immediately smothered by some other part in her, cooler and more calculating, in need of further answers. Lilith is dead. Mowgli may still be alive. It is his blood her mother wants.