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.