Smoke

DEMONS

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.

“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.

Together, she and Charlie finally work their way closer, aware that the fighting has slowed, that it is just one figure beating the other now; that the Smoke is dying down. The Soot that coats the floor is slick like axle grease and they find themselves skidding, then falling gracelessly alongside the prone figures. Thomas is on top. What is on the bottom is motionless and running red with blood.

And still Thomas is beating him, one fist rising into the space above his head and coming down on chest, head, neck, like a toddler in a strop, hammering the floor. She bends down to him, tries to reach him, the mask on his face. He feels her tug at him, turns, goggles black and bulbous. Then he pins her, puts a hand around her throat, throws his weight on her. His fingers are slick with blood, move from her throat, to her face, her hair, tear at her clothing; his body heavy and hot. It’s Thomas, she reminds herself, struggling; Thomas. She manages to hook a hand around the rubber tube that juts from his jaws and yank it up, dislodge the mask; something dark rising in her worse than fear. Then Charlie is there, riding his friend’s back, pushing him down beside her. They hold him wedged between their bodies.

She watches the change: his mouth snarling, threatening her skin, the very teeth turned black with Soot. Then, like a child emerging from a tunnel, something else starts surfacing in Thomas’s eyes. Intelligence. Recognition. It is followed by such an intense burst of shame that she wants to turn away from him, not to burden him with her witnessing. And still his weight lies heavy on her, on her chest, her thighs. She scrambles away, bumps into the lump of flesh that is Julius, the mouth a cavity of tooth stumps, hair ripped out in clumps.

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“He was starved, weak. Skin and bones. Nothing but rage. He did not stand a chance.”

That’s the first thing Thomas says. His left shoulder is dislocated, his hands swollen to twice their size, his shirt ripped to shreds. “Renfrew was right all along. I’m a killer.”

“You were not yourself.”

“Wasn’t I, Charlie?”

He is crouching in a corner, chin curled into his chest. Thomas has yet to look at Livia. She wants to make it easier for him, but it’s hard, past the memory of his body forcing its weight on hers. Her face and shirt are covered with both cousins’ blood.

“It’s over now” is all she manages.

At this, his eyes rise. No tears. That same unblinking stare. Never flinching from the facts.

Not even now.

“Yes, over. My nature is out.” He rises, takes a step towards Mrs. Grendel, then stops. “You do it. See whether she is all right.”

Mrs. Grendel has yet to move. She is sitting on a stool in a corner of the kitchen, huddled into herself. One of her eyes is swelling shut. Other than that she is not visibly hurt. Livia crouches in front of her, tries to talk to her. But the woman stares right through her. It is not that she is unconscious and does not see. Her eyes look beyond, at Julius. On her large, ruddy, working-woman’s hands, the veins crisscross like parcel string.

“We must go,” Charlie whispers behind her. “Find Mowgli.”

“Yes.” Livia stands up, looks down herself. The miner’s shirt is ripped and stained, the blood already half dried. She thinks she can smell it. “I must get changed.”

“There is no time. And you have no other clothes.”

“I must get changed,” she repeats, brusquely, then rushes into her mother’s room.

When she emerges Livia is wearing one of the dresses Sebastian brought for her mother. It is too large for her and feels alien after days spent in men’s clothing. It is as though she has stepped back into another life. She raises the hem as she steps over Julius.

The boys stare at her when she enters the kitchen, even Thomas, beaten, miserable Thomas. She has scrubbed her face and hands with lye soap and a boar-bristle brush. Her body underneath the dress remains as filthy as ever. There just wasn’t the time.

“Hurry,” she says, needlessly. The two boys rush past her at once, each eager not to touch her, now that she is once again a lady. There is a bulk to the petticoat that gives new width to her hips.

Before leaving, Livia returns to Mrs. Grendel one more time.

“Are you all right?” she asks and then, when the woman does not respond: “What is your name, Mrs. Grendel? Your Christian name?”

The delay in the answer is such that Livia has already turned and walked three steps before she hears it.

“Berta,” the beaten woman says. “Berta Grendel.”

They do not say “Good-bye, Berta.” They simply leave.

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Thomas leads. He is spent, broken, hollow-eyed with fear. And yet he leads them, towards the sewer entrance he discovered. Livia and Charlie follow, hand in hand. Her fine dress elicits comments, catcalls, caps doffed in mock homage. London, a city of louts; sleepless, even in the middle of the night, a steady stream of figures peopling its streets. She trades pallid Smoke with her hecklers, stains grey the ruffles of her sleeves. There is, in her Smoke, a tiny whiff of her own thrill at being noticed.

It isn’t long before they reach their destination. An unmarked building, its gateway leading to a courtyard; and there, set into the courtyard’s wall, the brick-rimmed entrance to a stairwell, leading underground. A squalid place, anonymous, the site of an old cesspool now pumped empty. The courtyard is littered with construction materials. A chalkboard screwed into a wall marks the rota of work shifts. Thomas told them that when he found it earlier that day, the entrance had been guarded by a foreman with a ledger, ticking off names against a list. There is no foreman now, nor any workers, no one to tell them that they must not enter at their leisure. There is only one hitch, a problem so simple it has eluded their plans. The entire gateway is blocked by an iron gate.

When he sees it, Thomas covers his face with his hands.

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They try the handle, rattle the doors, study the hinges. The lock is complex and made of steel; the bars sturdy and firm. There are no more than a few inches between the top of the gate and the top of the gateway; less space at the bottom. A cat could squeeze through; a rat. No doubt a thousand have.

Charlie articulates it first. “There we are. After all we have been through. Defeated by a lock.”

His bitterness is fed by Thomas, who continues to stand passively, smokelessly by his side. Livia watches him in his impotence and despair; lets drop again the hand she has raised to touch him. At another time, another hour, they would sit and talk to Thomas, help him mourn. But this is no time for funerals, not even to bury your best friend’s soul.

For five, ten minutes they simply stand there, wallowing in their defeat. Then Livia gathers her skirts in front of her and marches off. The boys follow.

“Where are we going?”

She only answers Charlie when the hotel comes into sight. Two porters stand outside its front steps, each flanked by a lamppost. The rest of the Regency lies in darkness, save for a window on the upper floor. Aschenstedt’s window. She remembers following him to this square; remembers his opening the shutters and looking out.

“We need to find Mother. And there is only one person in the whole world who can tell us where she is.”

“It won’t work. Sebastian has no interest in showing us the way. Besides, you heard what Mrs. Grendel said. He’s being watched.”

Charlie is merely being reasonable. Nonetheless she grows angry at once.

“What else do you want to do? Wait and do nothing?”

They watch the square. Despite the late hour there are quite a few people there, some drinking, some talking, some merely passing through. The longer they watch, the more they are aware of a number of men who do none of these things but simply stand there, in thick overcoats, their eyes on the hotel.

“Three, I think,” Thomas says. And then (weary, resentful, mustering the last of his will): “I’ll go.”

Charlie stops him before he can take a step. “You can’t. You are covered in blood. You’ll never make it past the doormen.” He hesitates, continues. “I will go. I can talk them into letting me through.”

Thomas sinks his fingers into Charlie’s sleeve. One sticks up funny. Hurt and fear constrict his voice.

“The last time you went off by yourself, Charlie, a man tied you to his bed and whispered about virtue. If anyone goes, I—”

“Neither of you can go,” Livia interrupts him. “It is a good hotel. A place for gentlefolk. And you both look like vagrants.”

They do not listen, caught up in their struggle over who can be trusted to risk his freedom. By the time they understand what she is saying she is halfway across the square. She turns once, to shake her head and forbid pursuit. It is Charlie who holds back Thomas. Rational, principled, disciplined Charlie. Trusting her. Treating her as his equal.

She is grateful and disgruntled all at once.

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The doormen never try to stop her. She raises the hem of her skirts and pushes past them, ignoring the tipping of their hats. From the corner of her eye she sees one of the watchers stir. She wonders whether there will be another one, lurking in the semidarkness of the reception hall. A concierge mans the high wooden desk. She waves him close, so she can avoid being overheard. Coquettish. And wonders did she learn it from Mother or from one of the girls in school; or is it simply in her blood?

“I am here to see Mr. Ashton,” she confides. “A surprise visit.”

The young man takes in her filthy hair and splendid dress.

“I am a family friend,” she adds.

The concierge appears reassured by this. Not the words, she realises, but the accent. The tones of the nobly born. The smell of sweet is on his breath.

“It is very late, miss.”

“Indeed. But his light is burning. I saw it from my trap.” She pauses, moves her face closer to his. “He will be most grateful that you let me through.”

The concierge shifts his sweet from one cheek to the other; locates a timbre at once flirtatious and shy.

“In that case, miss, go right on up.”

The man does not provide her with a room number, assuming perhaps that she has been there before and knows the way. But the hotel’s layout is easy enough to understand. She ascends to the second floor and then matches the door to the light they saw from down below. Room 14. Her knock is soft. Part of Mother’s outfit was a new pair of deerskin gloves.

Sebastian does not open the door at once. She can hear him shift inside, approach. A long hesitation, his breath curiously laboured. When he finally opens up and sees her, his tense face floods with relief.

“Miss Naylor!”

He pokes his head around the doorframe, squints down the corridor to see if she is hiding other callers, then yanks her in by the wrist. No sooner has he locked the door than he releases her, staggers, drops his weight into an armchair. Sebastian is wearing a paisley-patterned smoking jacket. Each of its pockets is bulging with a bottle.

“And here I thought they had finally grown sick of waiting and had come to take me away! Die Stunde der Wahrheit, ha! The pliers and the rack. But instead it’s you, wearing a dress!” He laughs, slips a hand onto one bottle, uncorks it, and takes a long swig.

“Dr. Aschenstedt. You are drunk!”

“Yes,” he beams. “Plum brandy, from Poland. And this here is laudanum. For later, you see. One cannot question a sleeping man.” He jumps up from his chair once more, strides over to her, confides. “You see, I am a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A Robespierre! (Only better than Robespierre, because what a blockhead he turned out to be!) But alas, my dear — I am also a coward. Positively a coward. Lily-livered! It is almost shameful.” He giggles, stamps his feet. “But sit, my dear, sit. Here, why don’t you drink a little glass?”

It’s a two-room suite, fashionably furnished. The door to his bedroom stands open, the bedding is unmade. Its presence only feeds Livia’s feeling of disorientation. Not long ago this would have been unthinkable: standing in a hotel room with a man, a drunk, alone in the night. Even the week in the mine seems licit by comparison. That was an adventure. This is the stuff of dormitory whispers and banned French novels. It is, for girls of her station, the very centre of the Smoke. She picks her way through the books and papers that litter the floor and cautiously takes a seat. The fireplace is burning. Black husks of charts, letters, and notes are floating in the hot air above the flames.

Sebastian follows her gaze, jumps over to his desk, takes up a sheaf of papers and is about to feed them into the fire when something distracts him and he starts reading them instead. He catches himself, flushes, drops the papers on the floor.

“You see I have been busy. Hiding evidence! In case. . but of course, what does it matter now? Still, you never know. .” He stoops, picks up the papers once more but again fails to place them on the fire. “The trouble is, these records are precious. Letters, articles, drafts of learned essays. The next frontier of science! Besides, they’ve already searched the room. The hotel porter let them in, the swine. No man’s a hero to his valet, eh?”

He mutters to himself, totters, then looks over at her with sudden interest. “What about you though, Miss Naylor? What in the devil’s name are you doing here?”

Livia has her lie prepared; practised it on the way up the stairs and readied it for the moment he opened the door. Then Sebastian scattered it with his drunken antics. Now the words come haltingly and are belied by a blush.

“I’m afraid things have gone wrong, Dr. Aschenstedt. Mother has been arrested and you are being watched. We have Mowgli. You must tell me where to take him. It is our only chance.”

He blinks, suppresses a burp, dismisses her words with a flap of his hand.

“You are lying, of course. Your mother left with Mowgli and you are trying to follow her.” He drops back into the armchair, happy as a clam, leans over to her, grows avuncular, then sentimental, all in the space of three breaths. “But there is something else, is there? You look aggrieved. Wie ein Häufchen Elend. ‘Like a little pile of gloom.’ Come now, you must tell me.”

“Julius,” Livia finds herself saying. “He found us. There was a fight.”

Before she knows it, she has given Sebastian an account, her voice raw with the horror over the thing Julius had become. Sebastian listens intently, his hands wrapped around one of his bottles, pale and fretting now. When she is done, he shakes himself like a man wishing to shake off his doubt.

“A dark angel, you say,” he mutters even though Livia used no such phrase. “Indeed! He’s been imbibing our Soot! And did you know he stole it from us, the rogue? But then, we were all of us rogues. Your mother and I tricked him out of his money. And he ran off with half our precious harvest. Poetic justice, yes?” Without waiting for a response, Sebastian carries on, cryptically, incoherently. “What do you think, though — would you and I have taken to darkness as readily as that? You see, despite it all, I hold with Monsieur Rousseau, not dour Master Hobbes. We are born for the herd, not the jungle, eh?”

He sighs, kicks his slippers off like a schoolboy on vacation, and, content to have settled the point, slouches forward towards the fire in order to warm his stockinged feet.

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She pleads with him. “Explain it to me,” she pleads. “You owe us that much. What is Mother doing with the child?” When Sebastian does not answer Livia adds: “You lied to us! You said it would be three days before the infection took hold.”

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.

“How much do you need?” she finds herself asking.

He does not appear to have heard, sits on the ground and plays with Soot.

“Ah, there’s the rub,” he mutters at length, letting some flakes rain from his fingertips. “Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. It seemed little enough on the chalkboard, when I did the maths.”

Again she finds her mind reeling, starts walking abruptly, in demented circles, as though searching for sense through the geometry of movement. Her steps displace fresh motes of Soot that swirl around the hem of her dress, half harbingers, half retinue, as unsettled as she.

“We saw a row of rectangles,” she says into their dance, still pacing, not looking at him, no longer able to bear the sight of his hale face. “On your secret map of the sewers. Pools, we think. What’s in those pools?”

“Oh, it’s very clever, Miss Livia, very clever, if I say so myself. At first glance, a simple problem of filtration. Water, dirt, Soot. But the devil’s in the details!”

She pictures it; imagines an aquarium as dark as her mustard jar, and a child’s open vein fertilising its mucoid tar. “The Great Quickening — you are making Juliuses!” she whispers, as though infected by Sebastian’s incoherence. Then — that part of her mind quite separate from her anger — she notices something in the fireplace: quite literally a scrap of hope. She drops to her knees, heat flushing her face.

“I just cannot fathom it,” she says, no longer hopeful for an answer, wishing only to distract him, her fingers sorting through hot embers. “All along I thought you would end the Smoke. Why this? Release more darkness into the world? The streets will run with blood.”

He takes a swig from his bottle before answering and emerges in a new stage of drunkenness: sadder, sentimental, sleepy.

“Blood?” he repeats as though suddenly unfamiliar with the word, nods off, eyes slowly closing, a baby after his feed; then jerks upright with a thought: “And did you know that in France, at the height of the Terror, they built a temple to Reason and a new type of clock designed to tame the irrationality of time?”

Drunkenly, dreamily, he begins lecturing her on the beauty of the decimal system and the division of the earth’s daily revolution into tenths. But Livia is no longer listening. She rises, stills the madness of her pulse.

“You won’t help me find Mother,” she speaks into his flow of slurry eloquence. “Then I must leave.”

She says it simply, despair replaced by purpose. A shred of paper is burning in her fist.

ф

Sebastian helps her, unexpectedly. Gathers himself up from the floor, the plum brandy finished, fetches his hat but not his coat, and offers to lead off the watchers to ensure her escape.

“A perambulation! Ein Spaziergang. Why shouldn’t a man go for a midnight walk? If they pounce,” he continues, “I have this,” patting the bottle of laudanum poking out of his smoking jacket.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” he announces, opening the door and pressing his coin purse on her as though in thanks for an illicit assignation. “In a newborn world!

“Black rain,” he confides, half shivering. “I have been dreaming of black rain. The wind blows northerly tonight. In from the sea!”

She stands by the hallway window of the second floor and watches him emerge from the hotel’s front doors. He surveys the square, slowly and theatrically, then starts walking in a mincing, unsteady gait. Five yards on a giggle shakes his frame, and he darts to the left down the shadows of an alley. For a heartbeat nobody reacts. Then the men posted in the square all fling themselves into pursuit. Four men, rather than the three Thomas counted: one of the vagrants leaps up from his dirty blanket and joins the chase. A fifth man bursts from the hotel. Their departure is so conspicuous that it raises a cheer and laughter from the drunks, beggars, and ragamuffins that still populate the square. Livia takes it as her signal to leave. The stairwell is empty, the night porters standing in a huddle on the steps outside, wondering at the noise. Within a minute she stands breathless in the shadowy corner where she left Charlie and Thomas. They don’t see her at once, are absorbed in discussion, Charlie talking intently, soothingly at his friend. Thomas’s shoulders are hunched, his good arm raised in front of him, warding Charlie off. His hand is so swollen it looks like a mitt.

They catch sight of her in the same instant. For all their differences their faces show the same expression. Concern. Relief. Love. She smiles despite herself and they each smile back; even Thomas, past his hurt. A moment’s happiness in the chaos of their lives. Then Livia does what has to be done.

She spoils it.

“I know what they are up to,” she says. And: “I have an address.” She unfolds the fist she made ten minutes ago. “He burnt this. Of all the papers he was reluctant to burn, he made sure to burn this!”

They stare at the scrap of paper like it will provide salvation. It is ripped in half and scorched black, had floated up on the chimney’s hot draft and then got stuck upon the brickwork of the fireplace’s outer lip, the paper’s edge still fire-red and smouldering when she snatched it. Together they read the few legible words. A company name and a street address. “Ryman’s Fine Tobacco Products. Manufactory and Wholesale.” The opening line promises a detailed report on the progress made on the construction work performed within the factory cellars. The next line has been eaten by the flame.

A cigarette factory. Construction in its cellar.

A gateway to the sewers.

“How will we find it?” asks Charlie.

“Sebastian gave me money,” Livia answers, displaying the purse. “So I could ride home in a cab. We must hurry,” she adds. “Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. How much blood does a human child hold?”

BERTA

It’s a dead end, sir. This one’s had it and that one won’t talk. And just look at the dog. It’s his scent she followed. And now she’s grieving over him.”

“He’s not dead.”

They came in without knocking, or at least I did not hear them. Suddenly they were there. Gentlemen in suits. And a crippled dog dragging its hindquarters on a little two-wheeled cart. It has been strapped to it with a belt. A fat man holds the leash.

“He’s not dead,” I say again and this time my lips move with the words. I don’t want them to leave me alone again. Not while he—it—is still in the room.

The fat man hears me. He walks over to the water jug and pours me a glass. While he watches me drink he orders one of his men to hold a mirror to its mouth.

“I can hear ’im breathing,” I say. “He’s broken. But I can hear ’im breathing all the same.”

The fat man nods as though he understands, pulls up a chair and sits next to me.

“Tell me what happened here. We already know the half of it. Lady Naylor was here, and perhaps also her daughter. And a man came to visit, I should wager, a bookish man with a foreign accent.”

She nods.

“Do you live here alone?”

“My ’usband is away.”

“What about that boy over there?”

I do not look where he is pointing.

“He came here. I don’t know why. He hit me. But mostly he just held me. Held me close. His Smoke—” I break off. “He isn’t human.”

The fat man nods, pats my hand, and asks me gently worded questions. I answer a surprising number. Somehow, it is good to talk.

I do not tell them about my husband. Not about his condition, nor that he went along with her. Nor do I put into words what it has been like, sitting there, listening to it breathe, so faintly that half the time I convinced myself it was already dead. Sitting there, alone in the dark, listening, trying to pluck up the courage to cut its throat. I could have left, I suppose. It’s like it was when I was living with Father, yearning for escape. I could have left. Even before Tobias. But you never do, do you? You sit in the dark and endure.

They revive him. It does not take much. They stand over him, pouring water on his face, shout at him, get angry, wreath him in faint Smoke. The next moment he sits up. Like a jack-in-the-box.

The fat man bends down to him, asks question after question. It’s like his gut is filled with them. The one on the ground has no face anymore, just a swollen mess, the tongue disturbingly bright within its blackness. But he speaks clearly enough.

“I know where she is,” he says. “He will be heading there.” Then, with intense purpose: “Mother. She betrayed me. I can take you to her.”

“Can you walk?” the fat man asks.

The thing that was once a young man rises, stands slope-shouldered as though hanging from a nail.

“I can take you to her,” he says again. “To Mother. And to him. You and I, Trout. Just us two. Only make sure to bring a gun.”

The Smoke that spreads from him is almost liquid. It gathers in a film around his fancy boots.

The fat man considers the offer. But it is obvious he will agree. What else is he going to do — beat the truth out of this thing?

“I’ll need one of my men, Mr. Spencer. Just one. Any one of them will do. You can take your pick.”

It does not hesitate, raises one twisted arm and points to a man with a slight, wiry frame.

“That one. He broke Nótt’s legs, didn’t he? Bring him. And remember the gun.”

The fat man nods and orders another of the men to pass over the shotgun to their colleague. He is about to say more but it is already moving, heading for the door with surprising speed. The walk is like a marionette’s. The body is broken, but some other thing moves it along. It makes no sound as it scuttles down the stairs.

The man with the gun and the fat man follow, leaving the rest of his men behind. There are three of them, standing in my kitchen, at a loss. They have not received any orders. It takes them a full minute to even frame the problem in words; one man rifling through the cupboards, looking, he says, “for a bite to eat.” Then they begin to argue. One maintains that they must take me into custody; another declares that they are “duty-bound to return to our post.” The third man insists that they must follow the chief, “quickly, on the sly” and that they have “wasted too much time already.” They argue as though they are playing cards, each placing his argument neatly before his mates, at once friendly and competitive. In the end they have waited too long to follow anyone and are too lazy or too principled to arrest an old, beaten woman. They leave me without a word and forget to close the front door behind themselves.

They leave the dog, too, half lying, half sitting on its cart, its maw tied shut with a strap.

When I am sure they are gone, I slide off my chair and crouch down beside it. It growls, then whimpers, dangles drool from its jowls. We sit there, side by side, the broken-legged dog and me with my swollen eye. When the fear rises up in me again, hot like a fever, I drench us both in Smoke.

FACTORY

Livia cannot stop speaking. It’s an open cab, and she has to yell over the noise of wheels and hooves on cobbles, lean forward and halfway across Charlie’s lap to make herself heard. Up on his box, the coachman is making haste; sends his nag flying into corners and keeps craning his neck, too, listening in, or perhaps just staring at her, this gentlewoman with the stringy hair and her two filthy companions. His bowler is rain-dark; it has played feast to many tribes of moth.

“It was as though he had poured petroleum over the floor!” Livia shouts again. “An explosion: contagious. As though it would never stop.”

She raises her chin into the wind, stabs her hands into the air, cutting off some question Charlie has been trying to voice.

“‘A problem of filtration,’ Sebastian said. Separating sin from muck and water. That’s what he has been doing down in the sewers. Creating a giant sieve and collecting London’s Soot! Dredging every cesspool for it, the bottom of the river, two and a half centuries’ worth of crimes. They want to quicken it!”

Throughout her monologue, Thomas sits quietly, only half listening, lost in himself. The urgency of his horror has abated and left behind something duller, slow in its wits. He has been watching his hand, the right one. It has swollen to the size of a club, the fingers so thick they feel fused, all but the pinkie which rides up, crooked, above the others. The blood on the knuckles might be his own or it might be Julius’s. Most likely it is both of theirs, mingled. Blood brothers. As a child he read a book about that, two boys whittling open their palms with a blunt penknife. The coach veers, pushes him into Charlie. His thoughts veer with it. He is conscious that he needs to pee.

Killer. It is a funny word. Not an act: a mode of being. A profession. Some trades, you pass them on from father to son. They say his father killed his man in a rage. One of his tenants. There was slander involved, drink, a tavern. A pewter mug scooped up where it had fallen on the ground. A pewter mug. Smart. His father knew how to protect his hand.

Back home, Thomas used to call those who spoke of it liars. Liars! — turning his eyes on them, Smoke on his lips. They stopped speaking of it in his presence. He wonders now: did he sit there, his father, afterwards, on a stool at the bar, nursing his wrist, his bladder nagging at him like a bad joke? Thomas does not know. The only letter his father sent from prison was a will, stipulating that his son was to inherit his leather hunting breeches and his good lamb’s wool coat. Thomas has never grown sufficiently to fit into either.

So, Thomas now says to himself, I have come into my patrimony. All I needed was a bit of priming. Then I took to it like a boar to his rut.

But the ease of his corruption, it isn’t really the worst of it. He has known he is susceptible all his life. A boy with a temper; rage, like a pet, always faithful by his side.

The worst of it is that it was fun. Being consumed by the Smoke. Letting go of all restraint. Stripping naked as the day you were born and becoming a creature of pure want. For Thomas discovered something. At the heart of the Smoke he found waiting for him the unselfconsciousness of childhood, of those years before speech. How perfect, how natural it felt to live there, in a place that knew no consequence. His fists swollen, the heat of Livia’s body pinned under his weight.

Just as he is thinking this, squirming in his seat with the power of the thought, Livia turns to him, her head thrown forward so she can see him across Charlie. Thomas looks away. The coach veers, his bladder strains. He wants to talk to her, explain himself. He wonders where to pee so she won’t notice.

He is, in short, confused.

Then they arrive: a dank street without lighting.

The coach races off as soon as Livia has paid the driver.

ф

It might be Ratcliff or Southwark: Thomas did not pay attention to the way. All he knows of London are a dozen or so streets and a score of names he has overheard. Lambeth, Hammersmith, Wapping. Limehouse. Shoreditch (always mentioned in a hush). They remain close to the river in any case; he can smell its stink. A great grey slab of a building rises before them, looking more like a fortress than a factory. Initially Thomas thinks that it is here they are headed. But it is the smaller, red-brick building growing out of its flank that wears the name of Ryman’s Fine Tobacco. There is no fence at the front, just a sturdy green door at the top of a short flight of steps. For the third time that night they try a door handle and find it does not move. The knocker rings through the building beyond but fails to summon either a doorman or a guard. They are alone.

This time, though, there is an alley running down the flank of the building, and a side door. In the mud outside, footprints are visible, amongst them, unmistakable, the heel of a woman’s boot. The door is closed but not locked. It is a carelessness that speaks of haste, of having one’s hands full. Beyond, a gaslight has been left burning. A corridor connects a string of offices, shabby-looking despite their once-decent carpets. It is a place of business, not of reception. Before they venture farther, Thomas turns on his heel and returns to the alley to relieve himself against the factory wall. It is a moment’s bliss in the middle of a nightmare.

Inside again, he finds Charlie and Livia have run ahead. The main floor holds the facilities associated with the sale and manufacture of ordinary tobacco. A front desk, an orders department; a workshop floor for packaging; and across the cobbled inner courtyard, a warehouse smelling like a giant pipe.

It is in the basement that the other factory is located. To enter one has to negotiate another, sturdier door, also left unlocked, and descend two revolutions of a carpeted spiral staircase. At its bottom a cavernous storehouse opens, suffused in a smell at once floral and rotting, emanating from a row of giant copper vats that loom like pillars in an old cathedral. Slender copper pipes emerge from these vats and move in coils towards a separate tank, minute by comparison, and holding the results of some long process of distillation. A cloying, wet heat stands in the room. Charlie has climbed the brass rungs riveted into one of the vats to get to its open top, has stuck a hand beyond the rim and is scooping up a palmful of its contents. Not far from him, Livia is examining a glass cabinet that holds a series of pharmaceutical bottles, each carefully labelled with dates.

“Flowers,” Charlie calls surprised, holding aloft a delicate stem crowned by a papery bloom, not unlike a poppy but of veined purple-grey. “The vat is filled to the rim with some kind of flower, submerged in warm liquid. There must be a million flowers here. And the smell. .” He sniffs his hand. “Like cigarettes, but faint.”

Livia, five steps from him, has uncorked one of the bottles and sniffed its contents.

“Sebastian mentioned flowers. He said: ‘A field of flowers for a dozen cigarettes.’ It must be how they produce the solvent: that which quickens Soot.” She lets her gaze wander between the giant vats and the small glass bottles with their labels, clearly struck by the misproportion. Almost reverently she accepts the flower Charlie holds out to her.

“Can you picture the size of the plantations, Charlie? Half of the Empire must be kept busy growing these.”

“In the full knowledge of the authorities, no doubt. And all part of the Cooper business empire. Your mother said we hold special import licences. One day I shall be very rich.”

Charlie’s eyes offer Thomas a share of his dark-cheeked indignation, but Thomas will have none of it. He is not interested in the Coopers’ stake in horticulture; stands unmoved, or removed rather, still separated by the fog of his own thoughts.

Killer, he thinks. Blood brother.

The proverb’s right: the apple does not fall far.

Apples, falling. Isaac Newton: built a bridge without nails. Now they bring Germans over to build our sewers, Sebastian said. Ash-Town. Taylor, Ashton and some made-up Sons.

Father.

That piss was good, Thomas thinks. And you are a coward, a coward, wallowing in pity. He moves back into the staircase doorway, hooks his left arm into its frame, and wrenches his shoulder back into its socket.

ф

There is a room that leads off one end of the distillation chamber. A smaller room, boxlike and mould-walled, where a row of workbenches stand bolted to the floor. It is here that Thomas walks his sense of isolation; stands and studies it with self-absorbed patience.

Three workbenches, each with two work places. Each place marked by an oak stool and a little machine, screwed into the table’s wood, combining the features of a sewing machine and a pencil sharpener. Six stools in total, plus a chair for the supervisor, at three yards’ remove and upholstered in bottle-green leather. On the wall, like so many hats or umbrellas, hang six respirators from numbered metal hooks. Tan, well-worn rubber, each snout ending in a chunky, perforated filter, smeared with Soot. Thomas stares at these then sits down at a work place; turns the little wheel of one machine and works out its purpose. Around him, at the wall, stand small kegs of Soot each labelled with a quality sign, ranging from Alpha++ to Gamma —. At the centre of the workbench stands a box full of little squares of cigarette papers; next to it a similar box, somewhat larger, holds a supply of ordinary tobacco. A pipette completes the sets of tools and materials provided for each worker.

Mechanically, holding at bay both thought and emotion, Thomas threads a piece of paper into the machine, fetches a pinch of Soot from one of the barrels, mixes it with tobacco and begins to roll a cigarette. Halfway through the process he takes up the pipette; looks back through the doorway to the rack of solvents Livia has discovered; pictures spreading the sticky liquid into the mix of tobacco and Soot to make it ready for consumption.

“They are wearing the respirators,” he says out loud though he is speaking to himself, not his friends, “so they don’t imbibe any of the quickened Soot. It protects them, and also keeps them docile; and it ensures that not a precious gram is lost.” He gets up, fetches a respirator, spreads it out before him, goggles at the top. “And so they sit. Six slaves, masked, and strangers to one another. And the foreman, he will have a club.”

He hears Livia walking up behind him, listening to his words; continues with his numb recital of the facts.

“And that door over there with the heavy lock will lead next door. Did you notice it when we drove up? A big house like a fortress. Barred windows: a gaol. Of course, whoever works down here must never be released — otherwise they would go into the world and spread the news about cigarettes far and wide. No, they are stuck here for life. I wonder what crime warrants that? Something temperate, I should think. Forgery, counterfeiting, or some clever kind of theft. You wouldn’t want murderers near such Soot. They might get ideas.” He looks over at the kegs by the side of the wall. “What a paltry harvest! Dark Soot is a rare commodity. Until now. Pools, you say, a filtration system. Sebastian has been dredging the sewers to distil three hundred years of crime. No wonder Julius put up the money! Your mother must have told him it was to expand operations. The profits would have been astronomical. I doubt she told him it was all to go up in Smoke.”

He falls silent as Livia takes the stool next to him; watches her study his face.

“Does all this not make you angry, Thomas?”

He could say: I can’t afford my anger. It is too much fun.

Or: We have seen what my anger leads to.

Or: Back there, pressed hip to hip, my trousers wet with Julius’s blood, I could feel your pulse beat in your upper thigh.

But he merely shrugs his shoulders and watches her nostrils dilate around a stringy slug of Smoke.

ф

Charlie joins them. He has raced from room to room and wall to wall, inspected each shelf, each alcove, and each tool. Now he drops his weight onto a third stool.

“There is no sign of Lady Naylor. And no exit. Just that one”—he points over to the bolted door near them—“and you say it leads to the gaol. Which means we have lost her. We have lost Mowgli.”

When neither Thomas nor Livia responds, he jumps up, races around the rooms once more, frantically searching the walls for a clue. On his return he is too restless to sit; walks up and down in front of them, his face open, flushed, and worried.

“We know that she’s been here. The door was open and her footprint was outside. And Sebastian’s letter spoke of construction works. Down here, in the basement. There must be a doorway, then, a passage; something to connect one of these rooms to the sewers. But I looked at all the walls and can’t see evidence of any construction.” He mutters to himself, walks another thirty yards in four-step paces. “Let’s think it out. Only quick now, quick. What do we know? She has been collecting Soot. Black Soot, the darkest she can find, has scraped it off murderers, spent millions to build this sewer to get more. Well then, for what purpose? To quicken it, you say. No, not just quicken it but make it explosive. Self-perpetuating. Contagious. And not by the usual method, using the solvent produced in this factory, which is weak and does not last, but with Mowgli’s blood, two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres — four pints! — of his blood. Do I have this right? Yes? All right! The sewers will steam with rage. A black cloud like nothing anyone has seen, rising out of the ground and infecting the city. But then what? I don’t understand.”

“He kept talking about the French Revolution,” Livia answers. “Robespierre. Decimal time. The Terror.”

Charlie stops mid-step. It nearly costs him his balance.

“Is that what she’s planning? An uprising! An age of anger. Nobody working, the factories idle, the docks closed. An army of Juliuses, infecting one another, looking for food beyond the city. Marching on the manor houses.” He stands, head cocked, appalled and baffled. “But why would your mother want such a thing?”

“She’s evil.”

Charlie won’t have it. “Even evil needs reasons,” he says. “You don’t destroy the world just so.”

“Mad, then. Mother’s gone mad. Just like Father. She hates Discipline. It broke him. She thinks she’s avenging him.”

“Mad?” says Charlie. “I don’t know. When is the last time you saw your mother smoke?”

ф

They sit perplexed and passive, minutes trickling away. Thomas is aware that both Livia and Charlie are looking at him, waiting for him.

Lead us, these looks appear to say. You always have.

But Thomas is afraid to lead.

It is a weak sort of fear, cowering and smokeless, at a remove from life. His shoulders rounded, his chin tucked in Grendel’s abject stoop. The respirator remains spread out on the table in front of him, built to filter Smoke from the infectious air and wall in its wearer within the safety of his private self. Thomas is conscious of Livia watching him as he turns the mask within his hands; once, twice; disappointment cleaving her face. Then she bends to him, leans into him, lip to lip, and shouts her anger into his face—“Help us, God damn you!”—each word a sulphurous taunt summoning his manhood, in that strange language of Smoke in which love and derision can be as one.

It is enough and not enough; sends him to his feet and away from the table, half in obedience to her call to arms, half in flight from her challenge. Like Charlie before him, he storms around the room housing the fermentation vats. It is not the walls he inspects but the floors; and seeing nothing, no fresh seams nor any irregularities in the dark tiling, his courage already abating, he grabs a wrench from a toolbox in one corner, and systematically, hurting his wrist and damaged hand, hammers away at a copper pipe emerging from one of the hulking vats like a spout, until it gives way and a sickly floral liquid pours in a thousand gallons across the floor. Then he stands, watching the room fill inch-deep with flowers and liquid, eyes peeled, head cocked, like a man on the hunt.

“Why did you—” Charlie begins but Thomas hushes him, hears then sees the pop of bubbles in one corner, where the liquid is drawn to some flaw within the flooring and is rushing to a pocket of air trapped underneath. As the liquid’s level slowly begins to fall, the flowers floating within it arrange themselves into a rough and soggy square, marking the outline of a well-masked trapdoor underneath their feet.

ф

They have to wait until the weight of the liquid has shifted from the door, then kick aside the pulpy mass of drenched and half-fermented flowers. The trapdoor itself has a tiny keyhole and is locked. This time it is Charlie who acts: he fetches a giant steel ladle from the same box of tools that supplied the wrench, manages to wedge it into the minute gap between trapdoor and floor, and throws his weight against it. Soon Thomas too is pushing at this lever. Together, they break the lock and bend the ladle, open the trapdoor to a rough-hewn wooden staircase leading down.

They descend. The staircase is new, wet and strewn with dead flowers; the air rising out of the stairwell thick with the smells of excrement and offal. At the bottom, a light burns. They walk towards it and come to a landing and an arched gateway, much older than the stairs. Beyond lie the sewers: a dark canal of stagnant water, flanked by slime-spattered walkways on each side. But their eyes are riveted elsewhere. Dangling from the ceiling, suspended by a rubber string, hangs a bulb of murky, unwavering light. No flame flickers within. It is like an ailing, miniature sun, fetched down from the sky and nailed here by a hangman. When Thomas touches it, it burns his fingertip, then quivers and dances like a hooked fish.

“How will we ever stop her?” Charlie whispers, faced with this new magic.

Livia’s answer is curt. “We must try.”

Thomas is aware of a mixture of shame and relief when he sees her take the lead; of a flare of timid anger when she reaches back and takes hold of Charlie’s hand. Charlie, in turn, stretches his free palm behind himself, looking for his friend’s. Thomas ignores the gesture.

He follows warily, at two steps’ remove.

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It isn’t far. A hundred yards of sewer, thrice stripped of its murk by a bulb holding the same mysterious, unflickering light; then an archway opens to a room so long it too feels like a corridor, though it measures a good ten yards in width. The room is built from dark brick, ancient and porous, the mortar worn like a petrified sponge. The ceiling is low above their heads and supported by steel girders, much newer than the brick. A garland of lamps, interconnected by a black line of rubber cable, marks the central axis, from the archway through which they enter, to the far end, hundreds of feet ahead. Beneath these lamps, filling three quarters of the room and only leaving a narrow strip of walking space at either side, lies a series of interconnected pools, tiled in shiny, almost fluorescent green. Each pool is separated from the next by a permeable membrane made of some waxy cloth. Only the top foot of the tiles is visible. The water that stands heavy in the pools beneath is mirror-dark. It is as though a communal baths has been pumped full of ink. All this Thomas sees in passing, following his friends on the long march to the other end. Lady Naylor is there; and Grendel; and Mowgli, tied with belts to a heavy wooden chair.

She notices them within ten steps. There is no cover, just the open narrow passage between wall and poolside. They are walking slowly on the wet, uneven ground, sunk and cracked in places, smeared with sewage muck. Thomas sees Lady Naylor squint; sees her hand flicker for something, raise it up before her chest, then drop it to her lap upon recognition. Each step reveals a new detail. Lady Naylor has made herself cozy amongst the dirt; she is sitting in an armchair, a wineglass and a bottle on a coffee table by her side. It’s a wonder she has not brought her slippers. By her other elbow, a worktable, made presentable by means of a starched tablecloth and laden with various instruments. The dark shape of her Soot bottle rises amongst them. At the other end of the table, Grendel stoops over the boy, assiduously wiping his brow. Halfway across the length of the room, Thomas begins to make out Mowgli’s face, sweaty and feverish, and the spasmodic shivers that pit his little body against the restraints. He thinks of Renfrew’s dentist chair; of Renfrew’s niece as described by Charlie; and wonders darkly whether there exists a world in which children are not bent to purpose by a strap. Something — a needle? — grows like a mechanical tumour out of the boy’s naked flank, at the height of the liver. Grendel is fussing with it: solicitous, chin curled into chest, as though bowing to the child.

It’s another ten steps before Livia starts speaking. She has to shout: the spongy walls soak up all sound. It is Grendel she is addressing, not her mother. Thomas, behind her, walks through her anger as through morning mist.

“You lied to me, Grendel!” she shouts and they watch him flinch with a second’s delay. “But what is worse, you lied to Mowgli. He trusted you. Now look at him. Why are you hurting him?”

Grendel stares across the forty, fifty steps still separating them, flaps one hand, unchanged in the mildness of his gestures.

“He has a fever, you see. Lady Naylor says his organs are changing. But not to worry, it will be over soon.”

“She wants to bleed him, Grendel. Bleed him dry. And you are helping her.” Then bitterly, Livia’s Smoke coming thick now and settling in frothy billows on the uneven floor: “They were right about you all along. You are a monster, Grendel. You were supposed to love him.”

He looks back at her, crestfallen, baffled. Perhaps there is to his sloping neck also a hint of doubt, of regret. Across the distance, in this eerie light, it is possible to imagine all manner of things into a face, a posture. Grendel bends down to the needle growing out the child’s emaciated torso, opens some kind of valve and releases a thin flow of blood into the glass chamber at its top. If Lady Naylor has been impassive through the exchange, she rises from her chair now, something heavy and metallic dangling from one fist.

“Oh how melodramatic, Livia. But come, leave Mr. Grendel alone. It’s me you are angry with.” She moves forward a step as though to hasten their approach, opens her arms in welcome. “You will have to tell me how you found me here. But really, I am glad. The dawn of a new world. We shall welcome it together.”

Twenty more yards. Thomas sees it all clearly now. The tiny, short-snubbed, two-barrelled gun that burdens Lady Naylor’s gesture of welcome, tilts it sideways to the right; the bottle of black Soot standing on the table as though ready for decanting for their final supper; Grendel testing the drops of blood within the vial with a strip of yellow paper that, upon contact, instantly turns blue. And above all he sees Mowgli, Mowgli’s face, looking up at his tormenter with an awful expression of hope and appeal, of trust misplaced, the eyes swollen and glossy with his fever.

“The paper. It turned blue!” Grendel calls to Lady Naylor. “It is as you said. Mowgli’s blood, it’s active. May I undo his straps?”

Lady Naylor answers without turning. “Soon. First open the valve as I have shown you.”

And just like that — at the mention of a valve, as though a child were a keg, or a steam engine, ripe for the draining — something returns to Thomas, a sense of urgency misplaced amongst self-pity and doubt, and the next thing he knows he has shouldered aside his friends and is running, then stumbling, falling across the age-eaten floor, scrambling back up to his feet.

He is not aware of the words Lady Naylor is shouting at him, nor does he know whether his friends follow; is charging towards her tall figure, his head and shoulders lowered for a rugby tackle, and a fine trail of Smoke fluttering behind like the tails of a coat.

He gets to within six or seven steps. Then Thomas’s toe catches, and a shot sounds. In the dull, dead air of the chamber it is like the clap of two wet hands. Ahead: a shout, a spray of blood, or perhaps of Soot; the chandelier tinkle of broken glass; then the tidal surge of darkness, as one after the other, with a fraction’s delay, the bulbs above the pools give out, each with the dull plop of a cork plugged from its bottleneck.

The ground ploughs into Thomas and empties his lungs of all their air.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL

Julius leads us to a sewer entrance not ten minutes’ walk from the flat. It’s an unmarked stone slab covering a manhole in the corner of a dirty yard. The slab must weigh forty pounds but Julius, broken-limbed, listing, labours it aside without asking for help. Underneath, a shaft leads straight down, its circumference roughly equal to my girth. An iron ladder is screwed into the brick. I am winded from the pace Julius has set, crablike, scuttling sideways down the streets, and gesture for him to wait. He does but spurns repose; paces the alley from wall to wall. Watching him — his jerky movements, the way he twists his neck too far around the anchor of his trunk; remembering that this was once my student, a boy placed in my care — makes me sick to my fat stomach. My man, Boswell, appears immune to such queasiness. He kept both lamp and gun trained on our guide as we followed him and now descends the shaft first, so as to cover Julius from the bottom while he climbs. Myself, I carry my Colt stuck in its holster on my belt. The thought of drawing it fills me with dread.

The shaft is perhaps fifteen feet deep. At its bottom lie the sewers. For the past few days, I have been sending men down here. Spies. Ever since I learned that Ashton was Aschenstedt; that Parliament, in its infinite wisdom, had given a terrorist the mandate to clean up the former capital. I imagined the sewers to be an orderly thing: a system of tunnels, with waste running down their centre. What they reported was a web, a maze. Old tunnels and new, lying at different depths in the earth, cross-connected by vertical shafts and silo-like chambers. Neighbourhood cesspools five storeys deep, tapped and drained by Aschenstedt’s men. Steam-powered drills; sluices and locks; water pumps the size of grain silos sitting in purpose-built chambers; exhaust pipes leading to air vents above. It would take a team of engineers a month to make sense of it all. My lads are many things, but engineers they are not.

Now that we reach the bottom of the shaft, however, I see none of this complexity. A slimy tunnel smelling of the privy, that’s all. Within ten steps we roust a nest of rats. Julius leads the way as before, hurtling ahead, straining against the edge of Boswell’s lamplight like a hound on a leash. I am not sure whether he is following a trail or already knows our destination. At times he pauses at intersections and stands sniffing the foul air. Once, he leans against the wall and darts his tongue across its mould. Then he is off again, always with the same jerky, marionette movements and attended by the cape of his Smoke. My watch has stopped, won’t be wound. We have stepped beyond time.

I ask Julius where he is leading us.

“Ahead,” he says without modulation, the broken jaw flapping with the word.

Ahead. So be it: in the name of the state. Like me, Julius has now become its servant. The state is not choosy; enlists whatever tool is fit to its purpose; cares not for the tool’s own motivations, or rather enlists those too, weaving them into the fabric of its needs. For what does he want, this broken, nightmare boy? Why does he lead us with such haste? Revenge on Thomas, I suppose; matricide. Whenever I mention Mr. Argyle or Lady Naylor, a darkness spills out of him that I try my best not to inhale. My man, Boswell, catches it once or twice: the whites of his eyes are turning dun. Julius, I realise, is not mad. He is that thing from which madness is knit.

We arrive at last. Or rather, we get close. Then a barrier stops us, a grate of wrist-thick, vertical bars set wide enough apart to admit an arm and shoulder but little more than that. A bright light, oddly flat and lifeless, throws the grate’s shadow across our approaching forms. I gesture to Boswell to set our lamp down on the ground, then squeeze my stomach against the bars; lean my cheek on their rusty cold. Our position is such that I can see but a small part of the space before us: a cavern, a worktable, the slender neck and pinned-up hair of Lady Naylor. Her torso and legs are hidden by the backrest of her armchair and even her head is more than half obscured by a steel girder that supports the ceiling midway between her and us. The table next to her is laden with instruments and beakers, most prominently the bulbous form of a glass jug heavy with tar. At the far end of the table, in a clear line of sight, is the hunched form of a man tending to a child. The man is nondescript: a greengrocer with a sloping neck; the cheeks fleshy and florid. The child is foreign, brown-skinned, strapped to its chair. Only the head is visible, rises above the tabletop to the base of the neck. Captain van Huysmans’s demon is looking poorly; his mouth wide open, tufts of hair coming loose above the ear. It is as though he is moulting, a new boy being born out of his sweat and pain.

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We do not even attempt to break down the grating. Its ends are cemented straight into ceiling and floor. It would take an hour and a pickax to get us through. Thus there is only one thing to be done. Boswell knows it too. When I turn to look at him he has already cocked his rifle.

“Where do I shoot?” he asks. He is speaking softly but there is in his voice a note of expectation.

“Mother,” the marionette-boy says. “Punish Mother.”

He sounds like a child wheedling for a sweet; points with a finger broken at the knuckle, bending sideways where a finger must not bend.

“Mother. Mama. Now, now, now!”

His tongue in Boswell’s ear.

But Boswell hesitates. “Difficult shot,” he says at last. “Girder’s in the way.” And, after a pause: “How about the child?”

And God help me, I know in my gut he is right. If we want to stop this (whatever this is), put an end to this infernal plot, it is by far the safest option. The child is the key. Aschenstedt and Lady Naylor paid a fortune to have him smuggled into the country. Even now she is looking to the boy, waiting for something, some revelation or event. Once he is eliminated, we can arrest her at our leisure. She is a lady of the peerage, she has the right to a trial. Not so the child. And after all, it is our duty. For Queen and country; for the good of the state. It wills it. We must obey.

Boswell is looking to me with his Smoke-curdled eyes. An impatient look. He is awaiting the order from his commanding officer. I look straight back. Beyond the bars, in a part of the room we cannot see, a voice calls out, the words swallowed by distance. Lady Naylor rises and answers; her hand discloses a snub-nosed gun. She steps, gestures, commands. A patrician voice.

Her son’s Smoke is filling our lungs.

Boswell tastes it, licks it, decides. His finger curls around the trigger. My hand slaps the barrel when the bullet is already racing along inside: I feel the hot quiver of its passage. It is treason then and nothing less, the deliberate betrayal of my mission. Borne of what? Of decency, I suppose, a distaste for death. It appears the witchfinder in me has lost his callous love of justice. I have been a headmaster for far too long.

The shot is deafening. The bullet hits the table, an explosion of glass. Then everything happens very fast. Boswell is working the bolt for a second shot when Julius takes the gun away from him. He does not wrestle it free or even wrench it: he simply takes it into his broken hands. Takes it, turns it, swings it, and buries it inch-deep in Boswell’s face. The man is dead before he hits the ground. A black cloud leaps out of him and straight up Julius’s chest like a dog changing masters. Then Julius turns the gun on me.

He gives me time to draw my Colt. God only knows what thought is running through him now: in his face not hatred but sulky petulance at not having had his way. I fumble for the holster, tear free the revolver but cannot thread my finger through the hole. In the end I let it drop. It falls and spins between my toes.

Julius shoots me. He shoots me in my fat gut, just where my belt runs across the navel. I fall almost as an afterthought and watch him stand over me, his mouth wide open and the lips curled back across his toothless gums, savouring the Smoke that is rising from my wound like steam out of a heating pipe. Where it passes through his body, it changes colour and doubles in intensity; unfurls behind him like a flag. Julius stands and drinks me and works the lever for a second shot.

Then something steps up behind him. He wears the bluff features of a greengrocer. I know at once he is not human. He does not smoke. He stands on the far side of the metal bars, not a foot away from Julius; stands in the boy’s Smoke, the very thick of his Smoke, and adds no Smoke of his own. A kind face, seen up close: fleshy, balding, ruddy. The grocer threads his arm through the bars. Milady’s gun is in his hand: a Beretta, double-barrelled, decorations beaten into the steel of its short snout. Its tip touches Julius’s neck.

There is a pause, a moment of conspiracy, a wish asked and granted, as boy and grocer share a look. Two monsters from adjacent pits; one smokeless, one dripping with raw need. Then the shot rings out. As he falls, I notice something in Julius’s Smoke, something so essential to it, so all-pervasive, that I did not notice it before. It is the very solvent in which all his evil is suspended. Self-loathing, a hunger for his own destruction; a desperate desire to find rest. Julius drops forward, into the bars; kneels before the grocer. The man turns to me. The gun turns with him. It points calmly at my bulk.

He will shoot me too. I can see it in his face. He’ll do it calmly, benignly, without passion or ego, not for himself, not from anger, not from triumph or because he is possessed by a truth; simply because I can do harm to him and his while alive, and none dead.

Then he sees I am already dead and turns away. I look after him with dread and admiration. Perhaps his kind are the future. It might please the state.

The grocer will make it a good servant.

FUSE

And so they are made to watch Julius die a second time. It is a sort of shadow play, something a favourite uncle would project upon a bedroom wall to amuse the children with the clever shapes of his hands; happens off-centre, backlit by the weak light of a gas lamp, turned low and placed on the ground somewhere behind the players’ bulk. Grendel’s shot that closes the play rips the half-light like a fork of lightning. As though in answer, first one, then several of the lamps above their heads flutter back to intermittent life, oscillating between a bromide darkness and flashes of dull yellow.

Within Charlie’s arms, Livia is writhing, fighting his embrace. He does not remember grabbing hold of her, pulling her head into the flimsy safety of his chest. She wants to run over to where her mother lies lifeless in the dirt. A few steps ahead of them, Thomas is picking himself off the ground. Farther ahead, Grendel places the pistol on the table — a tool discarded — and bends to free Mowgli from his straps. He removes the needle from his body and, along with it, a small beaker now filled with the boy’s lifeblood; stoppers the beaker and places it carefully upon the table, inches from the gun, before strapping the feverish child into a cloth sling that he fastens across his chest and hip.

It is only when Grendel steps away from table and gun that Charlie releases Livia, all the time conscious of the confusion in her Smoke. She darts away from him, catches up with Thomas who himself has started moving. For two steps they run abreast, touching elbows for comfort. Then their paths separate. Livia is heading to her mother, Thomas to the dead schoolmate of theirs who hangs tangled in iron bars like a fish within its netting: down on his knees, his ashen head stuck through the grating, arms thrown outward at a messianic angle. Beyond Julius lies a man with a beaten-in face and a fleshy mound that was Headmaster Trout.

Charlie himself starts moving. As he draws closer he comes to understand his destination. Mowgli. Grendel. The gun. Even so, his eyes are locked onto Livia and Thomas. The former has fallen to her knees by Lady Naylor’s side; is untangling her mother’s face from the mass of undone hair and soon finds her hands bloodied. As for the latter: for a moment Charlie thinks that it is fear that drives Thomas to such haste. He killed Julius earlier that night; broke him, not one breath rising out of the wreckage of his body. And yet he rose, a dark Christ. Who is to say he will not rise again; jerk up and scuttle off into the dark? But then Charlie sees Thomas tug at Julius, pull his emaciated arms halfway through the bars. Thomas is not checking for movement. He is trying to shake Julius awake. Let him rise, his action seems to be saying. Let him scuttle. It would acquit Thomas of something at least.

And on Charlie walks, steadily, mechanically, as though in a dream. He passes Livia; sees that Lady Naylor is alive, sees her daughter trying to revive her first with words then with frightened little slaps, to the good cheek, the other mangled by lacerations and welts. Livia’s eyes plead for his help but Charlie has a more urgent destination. Here, near the table, the ground is covered in glass shards. They crunch at his every step. He reaches the table, the gun; pockets it and feels some tension fall from him. Next to it a beaker of blood rests calmly on the table; two steps away, Grendel is rocking his charge, fingers spread along Mowgli’s back. From this angle, it looks as though two heads are rising from his trunk, one old and kindly, the other childish, mottled by fever but mirroring the other in its boundless calm. It is this calm that thrusts the Smoke back into Charlie’s lungs and colours his breath with the plume of disgust.

“You shot him,” he says needlessly, the words drifting over to Grendel and the boy in a sulphur haze and moving through them without a ripple. “We argued about it once. Whether it is possible to kill a man righteously, without Smoke.” Then Charlie adds, quietly, angrily: “I did not think then that it would be so horrible.”

But when Grendel turns to look at Charlie, the angel’s face is as placid as ever, untouched by doubt or self-reproach.

“Hush now,” he says. “You will frighten the child.”

Charlie looks at him and cannot bear it. He turns away, back to his friends. For a second there is a sort of lull. Everything that has urged them here is resolved. The boy is alive, Grendel disarmed, Sebastian’s plot defeated. Their triumph is mocked by a sound, a quiet mewing. It takes Charlie some moments to realise it issues from Lady Naylor; to interpret it as the sound of acute distress.

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“What’s wrong with her? Is she shot?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And the blood?”

“Cuts on her face and arms. The gun hit the bottle, I think. The big bottle of Soot standing on the table. There is a cut near her left eye, but it isn’t very deep.”

“Then why is she like this?”

In truth Lady Naylor is irrational with pain. She is lying on her belly and is crawling through the shard-spiked mud of the floor. Initially Charlie thinks she is heading towards her son; that it is his death that has deranged her so. But her gaze never strays to where Thomas continues to minister to the dead. It is riveted instead on the ground, her hands picking up glass shards and clawing at little pools of Soot. The left side of her face hangs in shreds, a flap of skin literally cut loose above the cheekbone and bleeding freely, the rest swelling fast. Charlie steps over to her, arrests the movement of her arms by taking hold of her wrists.

“Are you injured?”

“All lost,” she whispers in response. Her lips are pale, the same colour as her teeth. It makes it hard for Charlie to concentrate on her words. “Scattered. No good. We barely had enough as it was.”

Charlie ignores her words, tries to pull her up, hears her emit a yelp of intense pain. He lowers her down again, lies her on her back, her head in his lap.

“Your leg?” he asks, studying the focussed stillness of her limbs. “Were you shot in the leg?”

Lady Naylor shakes her head. “Got a fright. Slipped. Broken hip. Or maybe the femur.”

Charlie nods, points behind himself. “It was Headmaster Trout and his man. Julius was with them. Your son is dead, Lady Naylor. I am very sorry.”

She does not appear to have heard, starts shivering, then mumbling to herself.

“All lost,” she says again. “An imperial gallon! But Julius stole half. Half! Barely enough. Now scattered, useless; lost, lost, lost.”

Charlie looks down at her, trying to make sense of her gibberish. Livia kneels by his side and transfers the weight of Lady Naylor’s head to her own lap. She has fetched the bottle and glass that have survived unscathed on their perch by the armchair and has poured out a measure of port. Her mother drinks the sugary liquid in greedy little sips, while Charlie disentangles himself, stands up, and studies the table and room, alive to a new thought.

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The bullet must have hit the bottle right at the centre. Or perhaps it was buckshot rather than a bullet, a dozen lead pellets ripping into its thick glass. All that remains of it atop the table is the sphere of its base, finger-thick. Around it, the tablecloth is filthy with Soot, but much must have flown beyond it, in a spray of deepest black, and has been absorbed into the spongy, muck-slick ground. Beyond the table, the pellets have peppered a large metal box from whose innards emerges the cable that feeds the lamps above. Other than that the table is virtually undisturbed, especially at its far end, where stands the chair into which Mowgli was strapped. A tin bucket with clear water sits next to this chair, a wet flannel folded over its rim. It must have been used to manage the child’s fever. Still wrestling with his thought, Charlie picks up this bucket, offers Livia the flannel, then pours the water carelessly onto the ground before walking to the side of the filtration pool closest to them.

The pool is filled to within inches of its rim. Scooping up a bucketful proves easy. Frustrated by the flickering light, Charlie carries it to the glow of Trout’s gas lamp that shines from beyond the iron bars; has to wrestle with nausea before plunging his hand into its darkness; feels the particles of Soot, like silt suspended in a murky pond; scoops up a palmful and studies it. A shadow leans over him, Thomas bending to see what he has found. Soot quivers in the upturned cup of Charlie’s hand. It is very dark.

But it is not black.

They exchange a glance: of confusion on Charlie’s side; of mournful anger on Thomas’s.

Next Charlie knows, Thomas has turned his back on him and is marching to the prone figure of Lady Naylor.

Charlie follows hard on his heels.

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Charlie has watched Thomas take on many roles the past few days. First bloodhound, relentless in his search for clues; then martyr and demon, descending into the darkness of his being; repentant killer, suspended between self-hatred and apathy. Now Thomas turns inquisitor. He has rediscovered the sharp edge of his anger, or perhaps just turned it outward, like a knife he’s found stuck between his ribs. He walks it to the table first, this anger; collects the little beaker of blood, crouches down before Lady Naylor. Livia has thrown back her mother’s skirts, exposing the undergarments. Lady Naylor’s leg, beneath her hose, is so swollen it looks like a football has been strapped to her outer thigh. Neither Charlie nor Thomas looks away as Livia continues her examination. Thomas bends over milady, trying to see into her face, then gestures to Charlie to prop her up, no matter what pain it may cause her. She is pale and conscious; the right side of her face handsome, the left risen like dough. Thomas holds the beaker to the eye that has not swollen shut.

“Mowgli’s blood,” he begins. “Fifty to eighty hours into infection. Sebastian told Livia it took two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres. Four pints or thereabouts. But this is less than half a glass.”

Lady Naylor watches him and almost smiles: ashen gums, one corner of her mouth tucked deep into the swelling.

“Fifty millimetres. Five thimblefuls.” A cough that stands in for a laugh. “Did you think I was a vampire, Thomas?”

“We thought you devoid of scruples, milady.”

She accepts this, closes her good eye, opens it again with a flash of pride. “It is true. I have none.”

“Two thousand two hundred cubic centimetres,” Thomas continues, unmoved. “Livia misunderstood. Sebastian meant Soot not blood. And you have been crying over a bottle. Your son is dead and you are mourning dirt. Worse than dirt: bygone murders, harvested with the scrape of your razor. In the armpits. Under the tongue.” Thomas gags, spits a pearl of phlegm onto the ground, watches it steam as though the floor is a griddle. “What’s so special about that Soot, Lady Naylor? You built a whole sewer system to gather vice. You must have a hundred thousand gallons right there.”

When Lady Naylor, shaken by a spasm of pain, does not answer at once, Charlie does so for her, looking down at the murky mess he scooped out of the pool.

“The Soot in the sewers is not dark enough. Even now that it is filtered! For whatever it is you are planning, only murderers’ Soot will do.”

Lady Naylor shivers, masters herself. “Not just murderers’ Soot, Charlie. It’s much purer than that: the darkest passions of the heart, with all humanity removed. I had to pick through my harvests grain by grain. Not ten percent was usable. It’s the blackest Soot ever assembled. In bulk it becomes liquid.”

Charlie watches Thomas reel at this, form fists. “You gathered an imperial gallon. You said that just now. But the bottle was not much more than half that. Julius took the rest?”

She nods, holds Thomas’s gaze. It is his turn to shiver.

“It explains what he has become. And I.”

Thomas says it and sighs, his anger exhausted, leaving him younger and tired. It’s Charlie who presses on.

“I still don’t understand, Lady Naylor. Why? What were you planning? Why build these pools? None of it makes sense.”

She slumps, seems to drift into her pain, then jerks out of it with sudden animation.

“I can show you, Charlie. Give me Mowgli’s blood. Just a drop. You will see for yourself.”

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It’s a trick. It must be, for Lady Naylor is evil, wants to drown the world in bloody revolution.

Or is she? Looking at her — pale, beat-up, courageous — Charlie finds it hard to believe that her ambitions were so crude, and so prosaic. That, and there is the matter of her sadness. “I have already failed,” she keeps saying into their hesitation. “Nothing can change that. So please. One drop. I just want to see.”

They look to one another, Thomas, Charlie, and Livia, weighing their distrust. At long last Livia takes the beaker out of Thomas’s hand. She turns to her mother, her face savage.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispers. And: “Don’t you dare lie to me, Mother. Not this time.”

Lady Naylor nods, revived by expectation.

“The bucket first,” she instructs her daughter. “Just one drop.”

“I know what will happen. Sebastian showed me.”

All the same Livia kneels down next to the bucket, unstoppers the glass, and cautiously pours a single drop over its lip. It drops from sight, into the dark of the bucket. The next moment Livia scrambles away. They wait, one breath, two breaths, five.

Nothing happens.

“Soot is slow to quicken. The lighter it is, the harder it is. Sebastian filtered it, the city’s vice, the darkest Soot here, getting lighter pool by pool. Decades upon decades of London’s anger and plight. If we carried down the vats of solvent from the factory above we might be able to quicken some fraction of it. But with Mowgli’s blood, it takes a purer sort of Soot to initiate the reaction.”

Lady Naylor tries to sit up, winces, points at an ink-black stain three feet from her hip, still clinging to a shard of glass like honey to a spoon. It is so very dark it looks like a hole cut in the ground.

“Now try it there, Livia. Please.”

Again Livia stares at her with great ferocity; again she finds herself compelled by curiosity to walk to the smear and tilt the beaker. Charlie walks over with her, steadies her hand.

“I need to know,” Livia says as though in apology. “What she was up to. Whether she is telling the truth.”

Charlie nods, catches Thomas’s eye, watches the drop fall into the Soot as though into a void.

What happens next is hard to make sense of. Livia tried describing it to them, but it is one thing to hear of a firework and quite another to see it. For a moment all is still. Then the Soot ignites in a plume of vile black. They recoil, watch it spread like a miniature bushfire, setting alight miniscule deposits of Soot long grown into the ground: threads of Smoke scurrying like beetles across the floor, no longer just black but many hued; clambering up the legs of the table, diving into the gaps between the worn brick; jumping into the bucket to raise a rainbow-coloured flag of Smoke. Here and there other droplets of pure Soot ignite, each setting off chain reactions of their own, volatile, then dead within a yard. They stand amongst this crazed resurrection, imbibing its flavours, soon answering with their own native Smokes, joy, anger, fear, and pangs of desire tangling them up within their webs. It is like a hushed conversation conducted by their bodies: shameless, honest, intimate, bypassing both brains and tongues. It is a conversation not free of anger and want; but also rich, immediate, generous: a brazen sharing of the self. In the midst of all this, unmoved, unmovable, stands Grendel, comforting the child strapped to his chest. Never before has Charlie been struck by his isolation as much as now. For just a moment, still smoking, he pities the man with all his heart.

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It takes several minutes for the last of the Smoke to die down. Two or three times they think it dead, when a step from them a new plume — pink, yellow, brown — rises and sets off another network of threads. The Smoke runs out of energy, subsides, then jumps back to life ten inches hither; makes a half-yard’s gain only to burn itself out. In the end all Smoke is gone, and Soot rains down on them under the flickering light of the bulbs. When Charlie turns to Lady Naylor he sees that she is crying.

“There,” she says. “The end of our dreams. It took me three years to collect that Soot; many months to refine it. Mowgli’s blood will soon lose its properties. If we had been able to access my lab, we could have preserved it in its present state. But here — we don’t have the tools. We could find another child, I suppose, another innocent. But there may be none left.” She speaks to Charlie then, who is standing closest and has bent to listen; speaks confidentially and sadly, eloquent in her defeat. “So it will be your father’s world, Charlie, or else Renfrew’s. Either the smug hypocrisy of the rich or the pitiless straitjacket of self-surveillance. Which one will you choose?”

But Charlie only looks at her blankly.

“What dream exactly, Lady Naylor? What in the hell have you been cooking up down here?”

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But in truth Charlie already knows, or at any rate he has guessed it. He looks to Livia as he begins putting it in words; looks to Thomas, each of them chewing the same thought.

“Most Soot is slow to quicken. It’s like wet fire logs, impossible to light. Only dark Soot will catch. So you collected the darkest Soot that you could find. A full gallon of it, just to be safe.” He gestures to where the bottle of Soot stood on the table, waits until he has registered Lady Naylor’s nod of confirmation. “But the point is not merely to quicken black Soot. It’s to change it, make it volatile. That’s where Mowgli’s blood comes in. It does something special, something the stuff used on cigarettes does not do. It starts a chain reaction. The Quickening spreading like ripples around a dropped pebble. Self-perpetuating, on and on: the Soot in the bottle acting as kindling, setting alight the Soot in the darkest pool, which in turn will set alight the pool farther down, and on and on, until even the weakest Soot has caught and carries the spark. But where will it go, all the Smoke in this chamber? There are no chimneys after all, nothing to connect it to the city.” He pauses, pictures again the map Thomas drew, the intricate web of lines, all connected, all leading in one final direction. “It’s not just a filtration system, is it, Lady Naylor? It’s a fuse! The pools lead back to the sewers. And the sewers lead back to the river.” Charlie swallows, thinks it through. “So the Thames would have caught; it is filthy with Soot. As are its tributaries; the groundwater and wells. Perhaps the ocean itself would have started smoking.”

“Black rain,” whispers Livia into his sudden silence. “Sebastian said he’s been dreaming of black rain. It’s monstrous, Mother.”

Lady Naylor stares back at her daughter and refuses to hang her head in shame.

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It’s Thomas who picks up the thread. A practical mind, his. He is not interested in fuses and chain reactions; the physics of Smoke. He wants to know what it would have done to the world. And to himself.

“An age of darkness, then, Lady Naylor. Britain drowning in self-perpetuating Smoke. Chaos; murder; villainy. I should have done well in this world, only I would have grown skinny like your son over there, too mad to remember eating. Perhaps there will be many of us, stumbling about, muttering gibberish, violence in our wakes. The Last Judgement, eh?” He stops, squats in front of Lady Naylor, stares into her disfigured face. “You must be very disappointed with the world to punish it thus.”

But milady simply shakes her head. “It wouldn’t have to be like that, Thomas. You misunderstand Smoke. No monsters. Just a people receiving passion, in all its many shades. A month of carnivals. The death of Discipline. The reinvention of God.”

Thomas scoffs, looks at the darkness of the pools behind him.

“No monsters? Not even one?”

Lady Naylor does something unexpected then. She cups Thomas’s face in the palm of her hand. He winces but does not recoil.

“Don’t live your life afraid of yourself, Thomas. You are a fine boy.”

“A fine boy? I killed your son, Lady Naylor. With my bare hands! Oh, he rose again, but I killed him all the same.” He swallows, shakes off her hand, straightens. “You don’t understand evil, milady. It runs in certain families. My father—”

Now it is her time to scoff. “Oh, enough! Sons and their fathers. How silly it all is! Forget your father. What was he? An irritable drunk. It’s your mother you take after. How little you think of her. She was one of us. A nonconformist. If not for her cancer she would have been standing here, giving me a hand.”

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They make preparations to leave. There is nothing else to be done. Lady Naylor is bleeding on the inside, her leg swelling to grotesque proportions, and a temperature now colouring her cheeks. It gives her an odd liveliness, both prophetic and diseased. Charlie casts around for something they can use as a stretcher, but the tabletop proves too heavy to lift and the chair too awkward. In the end he turns to Grendel, crooked-necked Grendel, Mowgli’s chin half buried in that crook. From the side, watching his little arms slung around Grendel’s shoulders, it looks like the boy is comforting him. But Grendel, Charlie reminds himself, requires no comfort: all this while he has been watching, impassive, untouched by events, like a butler awaiting orders. Now that Charlie waves to him, he rushes over without hesitation. Charlie has trouble looking at him, has noticed that Livia shares his revulsion, whilst Thomas stares at him with open disgust. Charlie keeps his eyes on the boy instead, but finds him illegible, beyond his understanding: a scrunched-up face, ugly and sallow, softening only for the stunted man who wishes to be his father. When Charlie finally speaks, he finds himself addressing the floor.

“We need your help, Grendel. Lady Naylor needs a doctor. We must carry her. Thomas has hurt his shoulder and we cannot lift her without help.” But before Grendel can respond or even nod, Charlie carries on, incoherently and haltingly, moved by his horror of this man. “I don’t understand it, Grendel. Why did you help her? Was it to win custody over a child you don’t know how to love? Or did she sell you her dream of a future that you cannot hope to share?”

Grendel considers this, his crooked neck tilting farther, his hand stroking the child’s back, gently and mechanically.

“I have a strange fate, Mr. Cooper. I stand apart. All my life I have wondered why. She told me there was a purpose in it, a way of giving it meaning.” He dares a shy smile. “It was naughty, wasn’t it, Mr. Cooper? Almost a sin.”

“Naughty?” Charlie echoes, no longer speaking to him but only to himself, picking through thoughts that, in tangled ways, connect Grendel to his father. “So that’s what it was. An angel playing at vice. But really you are on Renfrew’s side. The side of reason. He too would have shot Julius. And the other side? The other side would have bought off the witnesses and hushed up his crime.”

Grendel nods, uncomprehending, walks past him, adjusts the boy to ride on his back, and crouches down to gather Lady Naylor in his arms.

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Livia intervenes, won’t let him, is in no rush to release her mother from her pain. Instead she kneels, interposing her body between Grendel’s and Lady Naylor’s, daring him to interfere. Her hands take hold of her mother, not from solicitude, Charlie thinks, but to make sure of her attention.

“Before we go,” she begins, “while we are still in this cave of your dreams: explain it to me, Mother. ‘A month of carnivals.’ ‘The reinvention of God.’ Pardon me, Mother, but it’s gibberish. Explain it to me, your vision. You won’t have another chance.” A twist of Smoke darts from her breath as she speaks. Charlie stands close enough to take it into his blood. All at once it is clear what she is asking. Livia wants to know whether it is possible to forgive her mother; whether there are grounds for appeal. Charlie imagines a similar situation: his asking his father for an accounting. But he would merely frown and send Charlie to his room.

Not so Lady Naylor. She answers willingly, eagerly even, buoyed by her rising fever. It is as though she is speaking at her own tribunal, or on the executioner’s platform; as though the words are long prepared, different versions of the same speech, pouring out now all at once.

“The Smoke was never a problem,” she begins, haltingly yet, waiting for Charlie to fill her glass with wine. “It is simply who we are. What connects us, a thousand subtle threads of want and need. But for centuries now, we have been living a lie. The whole world has been living it, but we most especially, here on our little island, where we have made a devil of our Smoke. It shapes us, this lie: our relations, woman to woman, man to man; orders our polity; divorces us from any possibility of change.

“Power,” whispers Lady Naylor, “is underwritten by morality. Those who rule, rule because they are better people than their subjects. It’s written on our linen. It cannot be denied. Oh, you will say that it’s because we have sweets. That we are faking our virtue. But the lie goes deeper than that. We spend a lifetime training ourselves against Smoke. We go to school, are punished, learn to watch our words, our actions, our very thoughts. It turns us into nuns. Miserable, cold-blooded nuns. Trapped in our Discipline; capable of meanness, of judgement, of greed. But not of love.

“As for the ‘people,’ those we presume to rule because of the commonness of their sins, they are in awe of us. Oh, of course they make jokes about our manners, our fussiness, our mincing ways. There may even be small pockets of resistance. But who can watch the Smoke and deny it; see one person clean and the other mired in their messy desires; one regal and enjoying God’s good favour, rewarded for his goodness by his power and his wealth, and the other toiling and miserable, underfed, poor, his very skin scorched by diseases of bad hygiene — who can see all this and not feel the superiority of one and the inferiority of the other? It is as though two races walk our land, one blessed, the other cursed.

“And so it has served us to perjure Smoke, misrepresent it. Cigarettes and sweets, vice and virtue, black and white: what a crude vision of our lives! And yet, how powerful it has proven, how deeply it has grown into our souls so that we routinely reject what we apprehend with our senses, and defend our crude fiction even against our own interests if need be.

“No, our problem is not Smoke, it’s what we have grown to believe it means. We need to remake our sense of good and evil; learn to apprehend Smoke anew. But how? We need a sign. From the land itself. From the very heavens! A storm; a cauterising fire. Sweeping away the high and mighty; curing us of our self-told lies. We dreamt of a world where people would argue and make love without fearing they are making God mad.

“Oh, it would have burnt out soon enough. A few weeks, a month or two at most. Enough for a new beginning. Tabula rasa. A second childhood for mankind. We grew up stunted the first time around.

“So again, Thomas: no monsters. We did not plan to release the black of cigarettes, that manufactured vice scraped off prison cells and the bodies of the mad. It’s a Puritan’s version of sin. My bottle, the pools here, they were to be mere ‘kindling,’ as Charlie put it so well: a spark that flares out the moment it has ignited the real flame. Out in the world, Soot lies weak, human, dormant. It lies in the water and the soil, in every brick that’s ever been baked. We wished to free it, quicken it; allow it to fill the air, communicate. Let men know one another. We wanted to fight the lie that we are filthy creatures; that all loss of control leads to murder, all passion to rape. Passion: flexible, complex, ever-changing passion, not dividing but uniting the land.

“For what after all is Smoke? Yearning. Courage. Anger. The type of fear that coils itself into a fist. Defiance. Triumph. Hope. It’s the animal part of us that will not serve. That won’t do the homework. That won’t take orders. I dreamt of a world where people will not serve.

“Tell me, Livia, tell me honestly. Was it not a beautiful dream?”

It takes Livia some moments to answer. Her face is very dark. It is as though she has caught her mother’s fever.

“You wanted to make a world where nobody turns the other cheek,” she says at last.

“Perhaps, my child. But who does it serve, all this cheek-turning of yours, who counts its profits? And after all, perhaps some would turn the cheek all the same. There is love in Smoke. And none in Discipline. I had hoped you would have discovered this by now.”

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Thomas listens, grim in his scepticism; Charlie thoughtfully, stirred despite himself. As for Livia, she is not content with the answer, seems suspicious of its very eloquence, the facility with which it leaves her mother’s lips. Again Grendel stoops to gather Lady Naylor in his arms, again Livia intervenes, stops him, watches him cringe before her angry gaze.

“I don’t believe you, Mother. I want to, you see, but it just doesn’t fit. You talk of change and a new Eden. But I know you too well. Deep down, you don’t give a fig about revolution, or power, and about the common people least of all. Then why, Mother, why? Just because Father went mad? You will remake the world because he took Discipline too far?”

Her mother winces, looks up, cold fury in her one good eye.

“You were too young to see it, Livia. How he changed. A happy, healthy man. Fond of his food.” She coughs, swallows. “He forbade the cook to put any salt in his food, lest it warmed his thoughts. He wouldn’t sleep, because the Smoke might come in his dreams. He even grew afraid to laugh. And he stopped coming to my bed.” She pauses, her tongue chasing for spit. “He cut me, Livia! Cut me open. Me, the woman he loved. And he did not smoke. Do you want to live in a world such as that?”

Livia looks at her mother with an expression that fuses disparate emotions.

Incredulity.

Terror.

Pride.

Her mother studies it calmly.

“I can see that you don’t understand,” she whispers. “You have never really been in love.”

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For a third time Grendel stoops to gather her; for a third time Livia interposes her body and pushes him out the way.

“Say it was noble,” she mutters. “Your revolution. Your dream. It does not justify it, Mother. The things you did to Mowgli. And to others. Sebastian told me about Lilith. It was wrong, Mother. Reprehensible.”

Her mother shivers, holds Livia’s gaze.

“I know, my dear. But I did it anyway.”

Livia nods, bends forward suddenly, as though afraid her courage will leave her, kisses her mother full on her mouth. Smoke comes pouring out of her, Smoke of grief, of love. And slowly, painfully, something in her mother answers, a Smoke strangely damaged and shy, like a widow long shut out from the ways of the living, daring a peek past her front door. It lasts a minute, maybe two. When it ends, Lady Naylor is in tears.

“Thank you, my dear.”

“I cannot forgive you, Mother.”

“I know. I read it in your Smoke.”

Livia lets go of her mother.

A moment later Grendel has carried her away.

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They watch him take the lead, Mowgli on his back, Lady Naylor cradled to his front, a three-headed beast, lumbering across the uneven floor. They should help him, perhaps, but for once Charlie fails to summon his good nature, is sunk in thought. All the same he starts to follow, Thomas by his side. It’s Livia who holds them back; places a hand on each of their shoulders and arrests them in their steps. They watch Grendel go, never once stumbling under the weight. At the hall’s far end, by the entrance to the sewers, Grendel turns and sees they are not coming. He does not call to them and they offer no explanation; and within a heartbeat he has turned again and continued on his way.

When Grendel is out of sight, Livia takes both boys’ hands and walks over to where Julius’s body hangs entangled within iron bars.

GRENDEL

I get her home, first carrying her by myself as far as I can manage, then hiring a man to help. I pay him with the money she thrust at me that very night, for services rendered. We are in luck: he is a kindly man, if drunk, and once he sees that she’s injured he carries her gently. Me the head, him the feet, trying not to dunk her bottom in the dirt. Throughout milady is faint, mutters to herself, not always in English. Mowgli watches her from over my shoulder; from the corner of my eye I can see his frown.

I dismiss my helper on a street corner not far from the house. The staircase is hard work, the door bolted. Berta opens only when I call her by name. I ask her where her bruises come from, and the blood that stains her sleeves, but when she sees my load, the surgeon’s daughter takes over and she becomes deaf to all questions.

“Put her in bed,” she commands. “Mowgli too, he has a fever.” Then: “Bring water.”

In the kitchen a dog lies dead, dragged into one corner. Its hind legs are strapped to a cart. Its skull appears crushed. I call out, but again Berta ignores me; she rushes between her patients, barks at me to boil more water, to find a clean cloth and cut it into strips.

It keeps my hands busy and my mind free. I watch as Berta applies a cold flannel to Mowgli’s head and sings to calm him; then crouches over Lady Naylor and cleans up her face. She sends me out when it comes to undressing her and examining her hip. Lady Naylor is conscious, watching me retreat across the length of the room.

I stand outside and weigh that look.

Why exactly did I do it? Agree to help her when she asked? When I knocked on her door late that night I came only to plead for Mowgli. Berta had sent me. We thought he might be as I am, blighted, incapable of Smoke. I explained my condition and watched milady start in shock and recognition. She gave me more that night than the promise of a child. “I have use for you,” she said. “You cannot smoke. But you can be Smoke’s shepherd.” She did not pressure or cajole; did not see fit to explain her thoughts or confide the details of her plans. A noblewoman talking to a commoner: she never pretended we were equals. But she shook my hand when I left, long-fingered and firm. It was then I knew I would assist her.

Can a man such as I be seduced by a courtesy?

And so I lied to Livia. It made sense, ensured that she and the boys were safe from reproach. The lie came easily. What frightened me was how small was my capacity for shame.

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Berta emerges. She is shaking her head.

“It’s the top of her thighbone. I cannot set it. She needs a surgeon. If it infects—”

“There is a dog in the kitchen.”

“It went mad,” she answers, obscurely, as though that explains its presence. “I smoked and it went mad. Angry, snapping at me. But it was sad too. A mad dog with a broken heart.” She grimaces, shudders. “It seemed a mercy, Tobias.”

“I will get rid of it.”

“Leave it by the street corner. Someone will take it for its meat. It’s January. A hungry month.”

When I return, I look in on Lady Naylor. She remains awake, tucked under sheet and blanket, her dress draped over the backboard flaring its skirts.

Her eyes are wet with tears.

“My son is dead,” she whispers when I draw closer. “But my daughter loves me.”

I watch a shiver ripple through her frame, bend down to her mangled, bandaged face.

“Your Smoke,” I tell her. “When you said good-bye to your daughter. It looked different.” I search for the right word, cannot find it. “Weak. Thin. Reluctant.”

She nods, pulls away the blanket and displays her naked flank without shame. The scar is an ugly thing, rises mottled from her skin.

“He damaged me. When he cut me. I am almost as broken as you.

“It would be best if we both were dead,” she carries on. “We will give people ideas. Renfrew’s ilk.”

Then Berta is there, walks over to the bed and pulls the blanket back to cover her.

“You go on, die,” she tells Lady Naylor. “My son needs a father.”

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We spend the rest of the night at Mowgli’s bedside. The boy drifts in and out of sleep. His face is serious. At times he cries with some internal pain, quietly, not wiping the tears. I do it for him. He does not flinch at my touch.

In the periods when he sleeps, Berta and I talk. I try to describe to her what happened. Berta is not interested.

“I shot a man today,” I tell her. “I shot milady’s son.”

“What does it matter now? It’s over and done with. Mowgli’s here.”

“Miss Livia called me a monster. And then she would not look at me, not once.”

“She is young,” Berta says. “She has a narrow view of life.”

I nod, unconvinced.

“It’ll be dawn soon. We should get some sleep.”

But we stay. Mowgli wakes when light starts filling the room. His temperature is down, he is alert. Berta bends to him slowly, afraid she will startle him. His arm comes up, cautiously, his little hand grabbing at her face, her nose. It withdraws and displays between his index and middle fingers the little wedge of his thumb. Berta raises her hand to her face as though looking for her nose; mimes finding nothing there, only a blank; stares in mock terror at the boy’s raised-up thumb. He does something miraculous then. He giggles. And grabs for her nose once again.

Emotion pours out of Berta. It pours out as a sob, as pale, hazy Smoke. The child sees the Smoke, waves at it, finds he can dance shapes into it with the movement of his fingers.

And I?

I sit there abject, smiling, yearning to feel as they do; contented and removed.

BAPTISM

He looks like a statue.”

“Like a saint. At prayer. Only, you know. Crucified.”

“And evil.”

But even as Charlie says it he realises it is not true. Julius is kneeling, arms out, his mangled face drooping halfway through the bars. It isn’t just that Thomas’s fists have cut loose his features. The Soot has come off where his temples and ears have slipped through the bars, along with something more substantial than skin. Livia is right then. Julius looks like a saint: whittled from a block of charcoal, or black burnt wood. Brittle to the touch.

Not that they have touched him yet. They are in awe of his death. He looks impossibly thin; the hands ready to snap off at the wrists, the shoulders sharp and angular. Only his stomach is oddly distended, half spherical, as though ready to burst with undigested Soot. Charlie watches Livia study him. She lifts her hand once, as though to rearrange him, then lets it drop again.

“He could have stepped through,” she says at last. “If his head fits, the rest would have, too. I wonder whether he realised.”

She frowns, steps forward suddenly, and takes hold of one arm and shoulder. A shifting of the weight, a twist, and Julius’s right shoulder and chest slide through the bars; the arm splayed out ahead of him, hand spread, the skin oddly white underneath the fingernails. His movement leaves a trail of tar along the iron of the bar.

They crouch down to him, Charlie and Livia. Thomas is behind them, a shadow watching from afar. Charlie wonders whether Livia wants to transport and bury her half brother; wonders, too, at the two other men lying beyond the barrier, out of reach. What she does, however, is unbutton Julius’s shirt. Charcoal skin, flaking off him; Soot and flesh fused. Charlie watches her touch Julius’s chest, recoil; pokes his own finger at the ribs, and feels it sink in to the knuckle.

“It’s like he is made of sin,” she mutters. Then: “You would have thought Mother would have noticed it. But she wouldn’t look at him. And she was in pain, in shock. It’s funny, I suppose. Crying over her failure. The means to reverse it a dozen steps behind her back.”

All at once, Charlie knows what she is thinking. It sends a shiver through him, gut-deep, of fear, of excitement; the burden of choice.

Revolution.

What young man has never dreamed of being its cause?

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Charlie stands, breathes. What is happening within him cannot be called thought. It has no words, for one thing, and knows no maths; does not calculate, but is simply the slow ascent of a decision already made, up from his centre to that sluggish organ that is his brain. He does not know how long it takes. His mouth, he notices, is full of Smoke.

Then he acts. Bends down to Julius, takes hold of his armpits, feels the brittle flesh move under his grip. Twists and pulls, trying to line up the shoulders, then the stomach and hips; that potbelly sticking, like a wine bladder pert with mud. Livia does not help him with his labour. Neither does Thomas; stands watching behind. Only when Julius’s thighs (emaciated; sticks of bone and black, the trousers torn beneath both knees) come sliding through, does Thomas step close. He pulls Charlie out of his crouch, looks him hard in the eye.

“What are you doing with him, Charlie?”

“You know what.”

Thomas stares at him, sniffs his breath.

“It’s catching then,” he decides. “You said it to Grendel. ‘An angel playing at vice.’ Charlie Cooper is going to change the world.” Thomas puckers his lips as though to spit, swallows it instead. “Are you going to scrape it off him, or just sink him in the pool?”

And Charlie stands there, listening to him, already connected to Thomas by fine tendrils of Smoke, chest to chest and hip to hip, his blood alive to a single truth. This is it, our duel. Who would have thought it would be like this? Me, kind, goodly Mr. Cooper, standing here, lighting the fuse. And he, the dark one, standing in my way. In another moment we will go at each other with our fists.

A duel.

Or else Livia will decide.

“You are afraid,” Charlie taunts Thomas. “We can make a difference, and you are shaking in your boots. I can smell it in your every breath.”

They are standing close now, have stepped into each other’s exhalations, too close even to throw a punch.

“Tell him, Livia,” Thomas says without turning, “Tell him it is dangerous; madness. He loves you. He will listen to you.”

They both start when she closes the gap and puts a hand on each of their arms.

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Oh, how well she understands them both. Everything is written in their Smoke.

Their friendship is in there. Charlie’s doubt and Thomas’s secret longing for the Smoke. She is there, too, flesh and blood, the things each wants to do with her; their focussed wonder at that body beneath her dress. It is as though they have all shed their clothes.

“Tell him,” Thomas says again, exhaling the words into Charlie’s face.

Then he appears to remember that it was she, Livia, who led them back to Julius’s corpse. The thought diminishes him, slumps his shoulders, pulls down his chin.

“You too, then?”

He does not wait for her nod.

“How eager you both are,” he goes on, spiteful now, all alone, “to dance to milady’s tune. She blew you a kiss, Livia, and taunted Charlie about his father. And here you are ready to do her bidding. In the name of the people! Do you think the people want it, the chaos you’ll be starting for them here?”

Before Livia can answer, Charlie does.

“I want it,” he says, half in anger, half in wonder at himself. “I need it. Otherwise, Father will. .” He trails off, catches himself, a hint of amusement lightening his Smoke. “That’s awfully selfish, isn’t it?”

Thomas frowns and smokes and walks away.

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He does not go far. Two steps. The no-man’s-land between Julius’s haggard body and the rim of the closest pool. Livia follows as he must have known she would, until she stands as close as she did before. It’s a choreography of sorts: some birds, her mother once told her, dance before they mate. Thomas is calmer away from Charlie, sadder.

“We don’t know a thing about it, Livia. How long will it last? A few weeks, a month, your mother said, but how can she know? Not rape, she promised, not murder. Everyday sins. A fever of passion. All urges laid bare, all secrets shared.” He grimaces, winces when she takes his hand. “Even if your mother is right — if her dark fuse burns itself out in the lighting of a gentler fire; if the world does not choke on its store of anger; if we all bare our souls to one another and are not appalled by what we find. . imagine it, Livia. A whole world letting go of reason. Chaos; confusion. Nobody working the fields.”

“It’s winter, Thomas. The fields don’t need working.”

“Still. A volatile world. Don’t underestimate its darkness. Every argument that draws a knife, every man beaten, every woman forced: it’ll all be our fault.”

“Yes. And if we don’t: every child sewn into some apparatus; every prisoner made to roll cigarettes; every lie told from dawn till dusk; every year that passes without change or hope. That too will be our fault.

“But it’s more than that,” Livia continues. “She loves me, you see. Mother. She watched me trying to become holy, all the while afraid I would go mad like Father.” She smiles, crooked, tender; a hint of flirtation in her words. “I’m angry with her. But it’s hard to resist love. Don’t you think?”

Thomas winces, makes fists.

“Charlie is right,” he says at last. “I am afraid.” He studies her, fiercely, like an enemy. “What if I get lost in all the Smoke? What if I go mad and turn into a beast?”

She returns his gaze, at a loss how to answer.

Then Charlie is there. He is smoking; repeats her mother’s gesture, cups Thomas’s face.

“Then we will drink you and go mad together.”

“Will you?” Thomas asks, more out of despair than doubt. “What ever happened to compromise, Charlie?”

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Julius’s body floats gently on the water. Thomas expected it to sink. He was surprisingly heavy to carry, each withered limb a deadweight swinging on its joint. Once they lower him, however, the Soot is as though magnetised by him, dresses and shrouds him, like a sodden sheet, so that the whole pool becomes one with his lean figure. They leave Thomas to fetch the blood. Charlie is sitting on the pool’s edge, his hands and feet in the water, holding on to Julius and supporting his head as though it is important that he does not drown. Livia, in turn, has her hands on Charlie’s shoulders, to reassure him and help him up, when the time comes. And so Thomas goes to retrieve the blood in its little beaker, swishes it around like wine in a glass. How easy it would be even now to hurl it across the room, let it shatter in a dirty corner; or stumble, fall, as though by accident, and crush it under his weight.

They assemble at the pool’s edge. Charlie sitting, Livia hunched, Thomas upright. It would make a good picture, Thomas thinks; the black of the pool, the dull, pulsing light of the lamps overhead. Charlie’s expression has changed in the past few minutes. The fierceness is gone; there has been time to think. He has opened some door inside himself, it flashes through Thomas, and doubt has crept in. Perhaps, then, he will recant. Thomas is surprised to find he is disappointed as well as relieved.

Charlie looks up at him, too honest to mask his doubt.

“We can’t have it, can we? Just a little Smoke. Enough to make us human?” He pauses, frowns, corrects himself. “But that’s just it, isn’t it? How much is enough?”

He moves his hand through the dun liquid, scoops some up, holds it next to Julius’s charcoal cheek. Thomas thinks he understands what troubles Charlie. It is wrong, somehow, that evil should be a question of proportion; that this much Smoke should be the weave of life, and that much produce murder; and that no Smoke at all should produce a cruelty of a different sort. Charlie has a tidy mind: he must feel there should be more system to life. All at once Thomas wants to comfort the friend he was ready to fight before.

“Two, three weeks during which Smoke takes over the world,” he muses. “Maybe longer. A carnival of passions. Black rain and all that. Do you think, Charlie, this means we won’t have to go back to school?”

ф

The smoking starts halfway through their giggles. It rises easily, naturally, articulates their tension, their fears, the feeling of standing on a precipice, toes in the void.

We don’t know what we are starting.

No. But we do know how things are at present.

And after? When the Quickening has burnt itself out. What will the world be like then?

But it is not like that, the Smoke, it has no use for words. It speaks in images instead, in feelings referencing memories that, recounted later, across a pillow in the dark, will appear both familiar and strange. In this wordless realm these whispers are not something yet, are but the possibility of thought; like a joy neither voiced nor performed, shapeless and real. And all the while the Smoke surrounds them, humming their melodies, sneaking its tendrils across the borders of their individual selves.

Thomas’s Smoke is the darkest, raw and confused. It sings his fear — of Julius; of becoming like him; of being abandoned for his crimes — and the bliss of self-forgetting. His father is in his Smoke, cradling a pewter mug. Livia, too, her shirt wet and clinging to her chest. Charlie: befriending him on that first day of school. His mother dying; a bullet slamming into his head. A nurse’s kiss; a boxing bout; bones breaking under knuckles. Gypsy vagrants fighting, rutting in the dirt. A church floor, littered and noble; a drunken priest. Hope.

Charlie’s Smoke is different, more marshalled and orderly, a procession of people sketched in white, tan, and grey. There is the woman in the woods, dressed in her shift and smoking as naturally as she is breathing. There are Renfrew and Eleanor, sewn into her harness of leather and steel. Thomas, Livia, flushed and beckoning; bare shoulders entangled under a linen sheet. His parents, stiff-backed, sitting in their ill-begotten house and wondering whatever happened to their son. A room of coachmen, huddled together on the floor against the cold. The tattoo of a mermaid, her bosom blinking with each movement of the coachman’s thumb.

And threaded into their Smokes, unpredictable, at turns more controlled and more volatile than either’s, is Livia’s, in violet and green. Her mother, crying, in front of the cell she had built to make prisoners of little boys and girls. Her father strapped to his attic bed, staring up at her with fearful eyes. Francis the miner walks in, tugging a pony on bandy legs. Grendel, her killer angel, brandishing a snub-nosed gun; Mowgli hiccupping his first billow of Smoke. Thomas, half naked, holding out to her the black of the mask. Charlie, in darkness, tongue to her tongue.

“Yes?” she asks into the Smoke, her eyes closed, a hand on each of the boys.

“Yes,” says Charlie.

“Yes,” says Thomas. He removes the stopper, tilts the beaker, and washes Julius’s head in blood. The next moment Charlie pushes Julius’s body to the centre of the pool; the Soot shifting with him, his bridal train, his burial shroud.

Then they step back, Livia, Thomas, and Charlie.

And run like hell.