Right up front there was a yard-wide gap ringing the gallows: only a few people there, and those that were, were pushing back, into the crowd. It makes sense: everyone wanted to be close — see her hang by the neck, her tongue sticking out — but if you got too close, you got pushed up against the scaffold, a big wooden box, really, man-high, square, and covered with a large sheet of nailed-down canvas, somewhere between brown and black. And there, flush against its wall, you couldn’t see a thing. Even the Smoke was thinner here, travelled over your head.

So I tried to fight my way back into the crowd, charged it really, headfirst, half mad. And got kicked in the gut for my trouble, Soot and stomach juice mixing in my mouth. Next thing I knew I was on my knees in the dirt, back in the no-man’s-land near the scaffold, leaning on it as I struggled up. That’s when I noticed that there were gaps beneath the canvas, that the box that held the gallows was more lattice fence than crate. And the evil thought flashed in me that it was there, inside, where the hole would open, the trapdoor, I mean, through which the woman would fall. And — it pains me to say it, it was the Smoke, the Smoke, only perhaps it wasn’t — I wanted to see it, see her, even if it were only her feet kicking as the breath was being choked out of her, and her stiff bloated face when she was dropped through the hole once she was dead.

So while the crowd was chanting, and the Smoke got so black you could hardly see the sky above, I ran my fingers up and down the side of the scaffold, looking for a gap large enough to slip through. I found it right at the bottom, got flat on my stomach (like a worm, I remember thinking, like a nasty little worm), jimmied two nails out of the canvas cover, and scooted through.

Inside the only light came from the open trapdoor above. I was too late, I realised it at once. The body was already on the ground, cut down, the knot of the noose jutting up from her neck like a knife handle. Already her Smoke had ceased; she lay on her stomach, legs splayed, the shift so caked with Smoke it cracked like icing.

It didn’t crack by itself, mind. There was someone there, crouching by her side, his back to me. Holding a razor. He cut the shift away in two quick jerks. The naked body underneath remained as though dressed in Soot. The figure — wearing a suit, a lumpy overcoat, dirty, patched tweed — produced a jar from out one pocket, squat and wide-mouthed, its glass tinted like an apothecary’s bottle. Then he bent over the body again, razor in hand, and with its three-inch blade began to scrape away Soot.