by B Catling
The stranger drew him closer still. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said.
He let her suck his mouth again, and it was sweet and arousing. He kissed back, and his manhood surpassed previous dimensions and expectations.
Even in the over-populated room of revellers, the sounds of the owl and her new companion arose above all others. Their bedding thrashed wildly, and something else wallowed out from their conjunctures; other couples and trios found their attention hooked and pulled across the pulsing darkness, away from their own compacted intimacies, peering towards an unnameable eminence that was outside and beyond their own little shudders and sighs.
It was almost dawn when he crept from her bed to search the rooms for his black velvet cloak.
When the owl awoke, she began to cry. She pulled her mask away and started to shout. She stumbled to the window, her hands on her face, and began to scream.
The owl was called Cyrena Lohr. She was thirty-three years old, and had been blind since birth. In the early light of post-carnival, with anxious friends and strangers standing by her side, she shivered, naked and overpowered at the window, watching the brilliant sunrise, yellow and crisp on her first visual day.
How had he done this? Who was this miracle worker who had entered her bed and given her sight? She had to find him. The moment she could be sure she was not dreaming, she would find him and thank him on her knees.
The remaining revellers in her mansion were dressing quickly. One brought a dressing gown and wrapped Cyrena in its warm folds, while attempting to steer the emotional woman away from the window and back to the bed. But she would not be moved, so they brought her a high-backed armchair and seated her safely within it. Most of the crowd that had occupied her many rooms had disappeared; the combination of unmasking and being a witness was too much for their frail identities to bear, and they had fled as the whisper slithered through the house. Miracles are never comfortable; for the hungover, the debauched and the anonymous, they are intolerable.
Four weeks later, she had settled with her sight. All available tests had been completed, and it was unanimously agreed: she had excellent and enduring vision.
With the help of various companions, she spent two of those weeks visiting the city she knew so intimately, adding colour, shape and tone to its sound and texture. She stared for hours at the faces of her friends and the few of her family who were left. The new details were catching up and beginning to make sense. Only her dreams remained slow and auditory; the pictures came, but would not attach properly, flopping and draping over the hard skeletons of sound and becoming transparent. It would take a year for them to solidify into trust.
She redecorated her splendid house. She gave all her old clothes to the poor, and went on a lavish spending spree to dress her body in the rich colour and sumptuous design of her wildest imaginings. She burnt her white sticks, unceremoniously, in the gardener’s fire, the sweet scent of leaf smoke disguising their brittle stink of anguish. And then she focused her zeal on finding him – to become his devoted acolyte, or to make him her own.
* * *
His jaw was sewn back on. Tufts of greasy twine stuck out of it in all directions. It no longer moved, and he could not chew or talk. But that could all be fixed later; now, he just had to stay sharp, and kill the Bowman before he ever touched another arrow.
Tsungali waited before the bridge and the mill, high in the rocks, where he had been before. He knew his prey had to come this way to find passage through the damned forest. He held the Enfield in an awkward grip. The first arrow had severed three of the tendons in his right arm, so that two of his fingers no longer worked with any predictability. But this time, he would make no mistake: a closer shot, backed up by the stump-barrelled shotgun, would finish the job.
He had not dared show his wrecked face at the inn; he wondered if those other assassins still lurked there. He knew they would come running at his shots, and in his present weakness those jackals might even take his quarry away, claiming the kill as their own. He did not have the agility for a silent kill, or the strength to fight off three or four strong and armed assailants; all he had was time and cunning, so he laid traps around his planned killing zone, and waited.
It wasn’t long before his attention was rewarded, but he had not expected to see two men walking together. They came along the river road arm in arm, a little tipsy and unsure of foot, one black man and one white. The white man was talking loudly, his associate appearing to nod in approval. Neither carried weapons.
Tsungali had never seen his target clearly, could not know the details of his face or dress. But he knew him to be a loner, and unlikely to be in cahoots with this drunken Negro, so he did not make the shot or stop them on their way to the inn.
They passed below him, and he carefully, quietly stood to catch a glimpse of their faces. He instantly recognised Tugu Ossenti, and the expression on his face revealed that he was not drunk, but grievously hurt. He looked at the loud, laughing face of the white man and saw no mirth: it was a face that could not be, a face that he knew too well. He saw the bow, concealed behind his back, and swung his shotgun down onto the ill-matched pair, sending a loose skree falling in his tilted swivel. As he fired, the white man lifted Ossenti like a puppet, raising him up by his armpit, where the dagger had pierced and guided his pretend drunken walk. The black man screamed before the first barrel removed the back of his head, the second crashing into his broad back. The white man shrugged the twitching carcass to one side, and tucked himself swiftly beneath the rocky shelf where Tsungali stood, out of his sight and out of the reach of his gun.
After the booming roar, the valley fell quiet. Birds stopped singing and the breeze held its breath. A door banged somewhere in the mill, and another figure scanned the scene for the next move, before retreating to a safer, hidden place. All stayed motionless until nightfall, then evaporated into the dark, skins crawling with potential attack. Their next meeting would be in the forest: it had been inevitable all along. Nothing could deflect the viciousness of its defined fate.
* * *
Ghertrude had returned to 4 Kühler Brunnen first. She’d expected him to be there already and climbed the stairs to listen at the doors, but he was still out, even though the carnival had ended the night before. Fleetingly, she thought that perhaps he might never return, and the idea bounced far too blissfully for a while. Then she became anxious for him, anxious for them both, and, finally, scared of being found out.
They had stayed together for the first three hours, coupling deeply in the first room of the first house that the party had surged through. He had pinned her to the silk wall, as she looked over his shoulder at another pair, who drank ferociously from each other’s cups as they lounged on the sable carpet. Their hands had gripped tightly in the excitement of wrongdoing, before sliding apart in the grounds of one of the great houses, where the throng of dancing fantasies surged and bumped, entangling and re-partnering at will. She had been whisked away by a small, bubbling party of young people dressed in shimmering foliage. The Green Man theme was rife that year. She spent the first night with a willow, whose languid courtliness extended into all of his surprising attributes. Her time with Ishmael had paid off; the last of her inhibitions had fled. She relished the contrast she had discovered; the Willow and the cyclops had little in common, and she marked and compared the difference, trying to decide where her true taste lay. She balanced passion against technique, hunger against restraint, and dominance against submission. By the morning, she knew she needed even more comparison. The carnival would accommodate her experimentation. She would rise to the challenge of expanding her knowledge of the hidden intimacies of manipulation and the breadth of her own sensual appetite.
She thought that she had seen him the next evening at a tableau vivant in the hall of the De Selby’s. He, or someone dressed like him, stood as motionless as the naked figures that formed the classic scene of Mars disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. The room was packed and concentrated
. New arrivals were hushed as they spluttered into the hall, and she saw him whisper to the woman standing next to him, saw her squeeze his arm and quietly laugh, her hand covering the serrated teeth of her beak. Ghertrude assumed the woman to be one of the countless numbers of whores and courtesans who gatecrashed the homes of the wealthy. She had an urge to confront them and reveal the truth behind the mask, but decided that she preferred the lasting prospect of her secret to a quick demonstration of her power. Besides, some of the company there may well have relished his deformity; many of those women may have found it perverse enough to arouse their jaded and cankered passions.
He had arrived back at 4 Kühler Brunnen in the mid-afternoon. He had been lost in the empty streets, exposed in his costume. He was not the only one to be walking dazed, or sleeping in the parks or back alleys: many denizens of the revels still staggered in their grotesque outfits, now stained and wet from nights of rain or morning dew. But, unlike him, they were all unmasked, to share in their embarrassment and have it forgiven. Anyone who wore his disguise past the magic hour of unveiling was prey for abuse, or even attack. The same crowd who crossed so many boundaries, who permitted so many exchanges of lies, fluids and dreams, instantly returned to the stiff rigour of the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year. Everything of those three nights was forgotten forever; it was mutually agreed by all, and strictly enforced. Masked strangers, continuing into the fourth day, were renegades, and a threat to the contract. Worse, they blatantly challenged the anonymity of the group with their audacious arrogance, and became a target for all, from lords to dogs. He would be unveiled, and disclosed by any who crossed his path; he would be beaten and driven through the humiliated streets.
The cyclops had not been aware of the rules as he’d left the owl’s bed earlier that day. Walking across one of the circular arteries of streets, his efforts had gone into trying to retain his bearings against the combined effects of alcohol and lack of sleep, not to mention the stalwart attentions he had paid his companions. Bunting and strings of paper flowers were hanging wet and wild in the air, the wind giving them a disturbing sense of animation; they flapped against what should have been normal gravity with an insolent abandonment. Just as he walked past them, he heard voices calling out to him:
‘You’re late friend, there’s nothing to hide now; the hour has sounded!’
He ignored the two men and the woman, who had turned into the road from a narrow alley, just ahead of him.
‘Did you hear me?’ barked the taller man, stepping away from the other two, who seemed to be propping one another up, interlocking against inevitability. ‘I said take it off, show yourself!’
He stood in Ishmael’s way, but the cyclops was quick and deftly stepped around the big man, who was dressed as a penguin. His movement incensed the man, who shouted a warning to his friends. Ishmael was caught between them when the first man turned, growling. ‘What gives you the right?’ he spat. ‘Better than us, eh?’
Ishmael leapt, but the second man stuck a foot out into his stride and he tripped badly, falling into the leaves and hard cobblestones and banging his knee and the side of his head with great force. Some of the paste jewellery he was wearing broke in the fall and lay strewn across the gutter. The big man was laughing as he dragged him up onto his good knee and tore away his mask; a string of fake emeralds, with which he had been garlanded, snapped and spluttered down, skidding into hiding in the cracks of the murky road.
‘That’s better.’ he leered. ‘Now you’re one of us.’ Then his eyes focused on what he was so firmly gripping. He let go instantly, his fingers splaying out, as if he had been scolded or electrocuted. Ishmael remembered a sound the Kin had sometimes made, and he screamed it out across his rolling tongue. Both men ran, leaving the woman to slide down the wall. She had not seen his face when she hit the pavement. On impact, her yelp turned into giggles.
‘Now you havta carry me!’ she squealed.
He bent down close to her face and grinned with the exaggerated gusto of a demon prince. She looked up at point-blank range and screamed. He punched her over into the gutter and kicked her in the head until his shoe broke and she had stopped crying out. She lay, quietly sobbing, as he limped away, calculating a safer route home. He picked up his crushed muzzle and skull cap from where the coward had dropped it, and refitted it back onto his face. Most of its whiskers had fallen out, and its damaged length now gave him a new comic appearance, not unlike toys that become misshapen by too much love; squeezed and hugged into character, remodelled by the damp affections of their owners until they are abandoned.
He had found his way eventually and hobbled back, bruised, wet and tired, with a rising feeling of nausea. The day was distilling his triumphs of the nights and converting his prowess and conquests into a hollow gruel of cold disgust. He desperately wanted a hot bath and a long, dreamless sleep, so that he might unwind himself from all those sticky, desperate bodies that had embalmed his light with the thickness of their embraces. He wanted to remove every last atom of the tastes and scents, which he had so recently cherished; to comb out all their rotted sighs and smiles, and never touch a human being again.
It was three days before he would speak, locking himself away in his rooms and refusing to acknowledge Ghertrude’s pleas. On the fourth day, when she let herself into the house, she heard the music. She followed its source, climbing the stairs as she listened, spellbound by its eerie resonance. By the time she reached the attic, its volume and complexity had increased. The Goedhart Device had been tuned and set in motion. The lead balls with their attached quills had been tied to the ends of the cords that hung down vertically from the ceiling. They swung in long, pendulum arcs, each of the feathers strumming one of the horizontal piano wires with every passing, sending the shivering strands of metal into melodic voice. Thirty or so such strings played in the dusk, each of a different length and pitch. Plucked harmonies echoed back and forth; the light from the open window shimmered on the pendulums’ movements. Everything sang.
Ishmael sat in the far corner, his back against the wall, hands folded in his lap. Ghertrude found her place and also sat; she knew better than to attempt to open a conversation now. Over the next hour, the pendulums lost their momentum, the pulses changing and the volume dropping, each feather only lightly scraping against the strings, eventually coming to a rest against them. Towards the end, their hearing strained into the attic to fetch each little tremor of the heart-stopping sensitivity. When the concert was over, they sat in silence for a long, intuited amount of time.
‘It’s getting cold,’ the cyclops said at last.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘hot days and cold nights.’
‘I am going to leave, Ghertrude,’ he said, finally. ‘For good.’
She got colder and hugged herself. Her eyes flickered to the floor; she knew it was useless to argue.
‘Where will you go?’ she murmured in half of her voice.
‘To the wilderness,’ he replied. ‘Away from all people. To the Vorrh.’
* * *
His plump life and pink young wife made him happy, for a time. He learned to grin without thinking, to look forward to meeting new people and enjoy coming home. Neighbours once caught him performing a brief skip in the street, coming home from a very successful meeting with some of the influential San Francisco elite (who, to his delight, already knew his name, even though he had changed it once again) to the handsome dinner prepared by his wife. When she became pregnant and he became accepted, they both started to fill out.
The gnawing hollow was replaced with growing, rotating weight, swelling with pride, ambition and a strengthened belief in the unique placement of his potential. His skills were picked up on by the Stanford family, who purchased some of his photographs (including the negatives), Leland Stanford taking him under his wing and changing his life to prove a bet. The first ‘horse in motion’ photographs were made, and both his sponsor and the public applauded their brilliance. He went to so
irees and and lavish dinners, gave lectures and readings; he would often leave his wife at home: her gathering size and homely ways might trip or blunder, and he did not wish her any embarrassment.
Yet, even amid this gaiety and triumph, a shadow nagged. Something of the past was travelling backwards, from a journey made in the future, and the rattle of it harried him continually. ‘Doubt’ was too small a word, too uncertain. What troubled him, and curdled his first ever joy, was that the shadow was known. Something was understood, without having a face or a name; it was like the after-blur of his treatment, the moon smear that the surgeon had warned him of, but it was moving in advance of the fact.
The thing it resonated with the most was the Ghost Dance, or rather his ignorance of the Ghost Dance’s meaning. He had photographed it many times and talked at length with its instigators, but he still did not understand; its workings remained a mystery to him. There was a mechanism, on the inside of its action, like an iris or a newly developed shutter on the other side of a lens; he saw the desire and the subsequent result, like the plate, which received the inverted image and displayed it; similarly, he understood the achievement of the circular dance, bringing the dead back to join the living braves in one last war. But he could not feel the process, nor the delineation of its occurrence.
He met several people with interests in psychic photography, but thought them fools. Even though a small cog turned against his will and brought to mind the effects of Gull’s perithoscope, he mainly shrugged them aside. But it was rumoured that higher and higher society was engaging in the new fashion of spiritualism, that the Queen herself had some interest. Sensing there might be a market for an honest man among the charlatans and quacks, he perched the opportunity on a shelf against the collapse of his present, just in case the disquiet which gnawed at his glowing success proved to be the sound of tables turning.