The Vorrh tv-1

by B Catling

  * * *

  The sun was fierce that day, and the bald cliff stood clear of the great mass of the forest; like a hermitage in a mythical painting, it shone pale gold against the greens and blacks of the trees. The sky was heroically blue, with vast, rolling, white clouds which seemed to move in all directions in the light breeze.

  The Bowman had scrabbled over the broken terrain for two days before finding the cave, though the notion of having ‘found’ it seemed inaccurate, somehow; he had felt drawn to it by an ungovernable magnetism which seemed to turn his every step; that weak force, which holds every star and cell in check, had tilted him towards the crack in the rock.

  He pulled himself over the last ledge and surveyed the landscape in all directions; the Vorrh seemed to go on forever. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and moved into the mouth of the cave, its coolness overwhelming. Light, shafting in through fissures in the high ceiling above, gave it a church-like atmosphere that suggested sanctum and calm. The sense of having been here before overcame him; he knew this place. Then the bow moved in his hand. At first he thought a gust of wind had caught it, but it moved again, twitching like a divining rod sniffing at water.

  He dropped all of his other possessions and held the bow firmly between his two hands. The inexplicable movement steered him with tiny twitches along its length, twitches that united to make a pull. He went with it further into the cave. It guided his growing excitement to a point at the back of the third chamber. There, a rock seemed to mark the spot that the bow was pointing to. He brushed dust and wind-flung twigs off the stone and gasped at the pictograph inscribed crudely onto its surface, a semi-circle, struck through its middle by a slender, pointed dart: a bow and arrow.

  He rolled the stone aside and started to dig, scraping at the compacted earth with his hands and the large knife he carried at his side. After twenty minutes, and a forearm’s depth of excavation, he struck something solid. He swept the earth around it to reveal a heavy, wooden box. With some difficulty, he freed it from the tight, stony earth, stopping to take several deep breaths before forcing the lid off. It prised free to reveal a heavy parcel and a scrawled note. The words were written in a familiar hand. It read:

  You and I are Peter Williams. I already have little memory, so I am writing these words from Este’s dictation. You will find this after she has died and become the bow of your arm. You are returning to whence you came, from the other side of the Vorrh. You are now midway. Many will try to stop you; some will attempt to take your life. You must be vigilant and sly. Este is the only one to travel with us, the only one you can trust. She led me out of the lands of struggle when blood poured. We lived here in this cave for a year, and then moved on to start a new life. It was heaven, but it was waiting for hell. She saw it all and our place in it. Your returning is to balance the dead that will follow. Este sends all her love from our time, to you, and her present. I leave you a little something from before, a dragon that will stop some of the monsters, and a memory from the village that will let you hear us and the others from afar.

  God speed.

  You.

  He stared at the paper for a long while, and then started to shake. The air in the cave seemed to adopt his agitation, so that all things except the letter trembled into a blur. Something like fury and torpur were wrestling inside his shock, and his eyes closed to watch his opposites tear and scratch at each other. His body was in spasm, the muscles clenching hard, as if to defy the turbulence around and inside him. It was reaching the point of fracture when the sound came: a terse, dry report, like the tolling of a cracked bell. It echoed once in the cave and grounded his unrest. Perfect calm swallowed all the ruptured time. He turned in the milky stillness to look at the split box that was now nothing but a nest of splinters.

  He let the letter fall and walked over to the origin of the sound, stooping to retrieve the contents of the box. He lifted a heavy package of brown oiled paper from the wreckage, and something caught on the parcel and fell to his feet, like a dead bird. He set the package aside and picked up the two halves of coconut shell, joined together by a fractured, curved twig and a string of twisted vine. One of the shells had split; he lifted the other to his ear, the vine dangling around his wrist. A hollow wash of the ultimate, distant sea filled the cave; in its shell-like whiteness, voices whispered.

  He carefully laid the contraption aside and lifted the heavy parcel. Unfolding the paper, he felt the reassuring weight of the Mars Fairfax in his hand; without memory or reason, he felt the heavy presence of the pistol ground him to another time and place.

  He slept the night in the cave, unnerved but warm. He hoped some part of them might seep out of the stone, to embrace their current incarnation. He slept with Este in one hand and the letter in the other, the gun and the shell either side of his head. He slept knowing that everything in his life was a mystery, and that his only purpose seemed to be to travel through the Vorrh. There was a reservoir of memory that twitched towards the letter, but its cup was smaller than a synapse, and it held a single word: Oneofthewilliams.

  * * *

  His time in the wilderness was coming to an end. His work and his roaming had turned from gossip into legend. After all these years, his fame was spreading. Rocks and buildings became his subjects and stepping stones. He used lenses that moved long exposures and denied human presence, paradoxical stairs to the sight traps of movement. New and unusual commissions called to him, and he needed a single address to be reached by them all.

  The technical processes had evolved in his absence, and they greatly excited his inventive mind. Once more, he moved back into the cities, cleaning his shutters for people. He clipped and curled his name again, giving it a unique quality; he opened his temple of lenses and a trickle of curiosity turned into a flood of interest.

  His experiments in capturing animal movement caught the public imagination. His great success was founded on a gambler’s bet: Leland Stanford, the Prince of Wisconsin, wanted proof that horses flew, that they were suspended in mid-air as they galloped, jumping through space, all hooves losing contact with the ground. Muybridge’s job was to capture that momentous truth, and his wealthy patron was generous with both money and time.

  Academic institutions wanted him. Europe called. Triumphantly, he returned to London. He was no longer Muggeridge, the coal-seller’s son – or Mirebridge, a name to span a bog, the split-headed, hollow man hiding in the colonies – but Muybridge, the scientist and artist. London praised him and he lectured to it. He had, of course, sent invitations to the surgeon, Gull, but never received a reply. He looked for him in the audience, and at the countless receptions, but was never rewarded with a sighting. He wanted to show the great man that he was healed, successful. The surgeon had seen deep into him; he had predicted the trouble when people became close; he may even have glimpsed the murder in that little whirling instrument of his, and the imbalance of their relationship made the photographer uncomfortable. He wanted to show Gull the man he had become.

  One day, when picking up a new batch of specially made lenses from a workshop in Clerkenwell, his impulses led him across the Thames to the expanding hospital at London Bridge. The cab dropped him by the great iron gates and he quickly found a porter.

  ‘Do you know if Dr. Gull still works here?’ he asked.

  ‘Sir William?’ said the porter, and Muybridge was impressed, though not surprised: all men of excellence are eventually so rewarded. ‘He’s here today, sir. He’s lecturing up in the north theatre.’

  He pointed the way and Muybridge rushed ahead, not wanting to miss the moment. He was out of breath by the time he reached the top of the long flights of stone stairs, jammed with students who had flocked here from all over the world. The stairs narrowed and changed noisily to wood on the last flight, leading to a high door. He listened for a moment, then opened it quietly and slid in, his tall felt hat already in his hand.

  He was at the back of a steep-sided anatomical theatre, its six-tiered auditoriu
m tapering down towards the focused space at its centre. Each of the semi-circular tiers was crowded with an attentive audience that stood and leaned forward, looking down towards the voice that he recognised as Gull’s. He squeezed into the back row of students, who moved along to make a space for his dignified presence. Only an iron handrail stopped them all from tumbling forward like a collapsed wedding cake.

  Gull had aged. He was heavier and squarer than Muybridge remembered, with a solid authority that was grounded in his sonorous and empathic voice. But perhaps all those qualities were merely accentuated by the creature that stood next to him. Muybridge had seen many human forms, but never one like this – certainly not alive. It was difficult to guess her age – he thought perhaps early to mid-twenties. She was the same height as the sturdy surgeon, but a mere quarter of his girth. She was naked; every bone showed under the surface of her pale, porcelain skin. She was a living skeleton. Not an ounce of fat existed anywhere on her fragile frame; her muscles must have been as thin as paper.

  ‘Alice started her condition sixteen months ago, and she will continue until it reaches its obvious conclusion. Isn’t that right, Alice?’ said Gull, turning to the waif at his side.

  Alice nodded and her huge eyes blinked in their dark sockets.

  ‘Her condition, which I have recently identified, has never been properly recognised before now. Others like Alice have died without diagnosis. For the most part, they would not have been seen by a physician, and their families have assumed that they had been suffering from a wasting disease.

  ‘Alice is typical of those thus inflicted, coming from the upper and middle classes. Whilst the poor have the problem of finding enough food to survive, this is a sickness that stems from affluence. Starvation is, as we all know, a daily companion to the underclass that throng this vast city, but, gentlemen, this is not a disease of the body; it is an affliction of the mind. Alice chooses not to eat. Her mind holds a picture of herself that is the opposite of the truth; not simply a negative, but a physical, three-dimensional distortion of reality.’

  He then filled in the case history and more detailed medical observations. Muybridge watched with growing fascination, finding the woman’s shrivelled starvation hypnotic at the end of the collapsed perspective of the room. He thought about building a camera like this, of photographing an entire flock, or herd, or harem of these withered beauties.

  On the stairs outside, he waited for the last of the hungry students to leave the good doctor alone. Two would not let go, and attached themselves to Gull’s every movement. He could wait no longer and stepped into the narrow space of focus that had previously displayed Alice. He hoped to be recognised, but Gull looked at him in a blank, friendly way. The student stopped talking and gave in to the strangeness of his agitated intrusion.

  ‘Doctor Gull, eh, I mean Sir William, if I might have a moment?’

  Gull, startled at his voice, looked closer. ‘Mister Mireburn?’ he questioned.

  ‘Yes! Muybridge!’ the other answered energetically.

  The doctor excused himself from the students and led him to an impressive suite of rooms, one much larger than the turret chamber Gull had previously occupied. ‘How are you, sir?’ Gull asked, indicating a seat.

  ‘Oh, I’m well, thank you, I have done very well.’

  ‘And your health?’

  ‘Since I last saw you, I am greatly improved. I have had a few bouts of nerves, but I grow stronger each day. Your advice has held me in great stead.’

  ‘Good, good,’ Gull answered, not really knowing why this man, who now looked like a wild prophet, was here. Muybridge saw this and responded.

  ‘I have brought you some of my pictures by way of thanks.’ He lifted up the small portfolio by the side of his chair, untied the strings, and opened it out onto the massive desk.

  ‘This is really very kind of you,’ Gull said, genuinely taken aback.

  Muybridge had brought a collection of ten prints, five of which were of the wild places Gull had advised him to seek out all those years ago. He laid them out on the grand mahogany desk and stood back, allowing the doctor a clearer view.

  Gull ignored the magnificent views of Yosemite valley, the panoramas of San Francisco, the ice mountains of Alaska. He even ignored the running horse, Muybridge’s most famous work. Instead, he homed in on the four other, more diverse images, pushing the landscape master works aside to see them.

  ‘What are these?’ he murmured with obvious excitement. On the table lay a picture of an ancient sacrificial stone from his visit to Guatemala, a print of the Ghost Dance, and another, from the same time, of two medicine men of the Shoshone. The final image was his composite of Phases of the Eclipse of the Sun. Gull pored and clucked over them, wanting to know their exact history and meaning. It became obvious by his questions that he had not the faintest interest in his artistic talent or technical skill; he was interested only in the subject of the photographs. He drew the four images closer to him.

  ‘May I keep these?’ he asked.

  ‘They are all for you,’ answered the dispirited artist.

  ‘Remarkable!’ he said to himself. The doctor seemed to have forgotten Muybridge completely. ‘Look at the intensity of those faces; such men could do anything!’ he said, as if speaking to the photographs themselves. ‘Truly remarkable!’

  ‘I wondered if my photographs might help your patients?’ Muybridge said.

  ‘What? Sorry, what did you say?’

  ‘I only wondered, Sir William, if my photographs might be of help to your patients?’

  ‘How?’ Gull asked cautiously.

  ‘If patients, like the one we saw today, had an actual image of themselves, then could they, perhaps, compare it to their misconceptions and find a treatment in the photograph’s truth?’

  Gull thought for a moment. ‘It would not work, I tried giving them all mirrors, they don’t use them the way we do. A picture would be the same,’ he said dismissively.

  Muybridge was deflated by such an obvious comparison; surely his offer was worthy of a little more consideration?

  ‘Have you heard what Charcot is doing in Paris?’ Gull asked.

  The name was familiar. He ran it through his memory, but Gull was oblivious to his ponderings and proceeded to tell him anyway.

  ‘He is a clinical doctor, like me, good old solid anatomy, body mechanics. But, like me, he is moving into the machinery of the soul, the invisible stuff that doesn’t bleed and won’t be sewn, perhaps the true centre of malady and health. This year, he will open a new department to investigate that which cannot be seen: the hidden pulses of the body. I envy him that. We both have our private wards, but this is something altogether different. If I were twenty years younger, I too would throw away the bone saws and totally engage in the surgery of the mind.’

  Muybridge was a little confused and said nothing.

  ‘Anyway, the reason I tell you of this is that he is using photography, not just to make pictures of a patient, but as a therapy in itself. I have no idea how it works, but one of our junior doctors was there last year and he saw what they were doing. You should go and see it.’

  It was all beginning to sound like the kind of spurious fiction Muybridge so thoroughly distrusted, and it being a French innovation only made it worse; his distrust of French claims was long-standing and inherent – he often found them to be greatly exaggerated, and the natural boundary between fact and fiction to be a lot less substantial in France. Even Marey, with whom he had exchanged many ideas, had a fanciful turn of mind that was more interested in the aesthetics of his machines than the result they were supposed to produce.

  He suddenly realised where he had heard Charcot’s name before. ‘Yes, Salpêtrière!’ he exclaimed with relief, happy to be able to prove his knowledge. ‘The Parisian teaching hospital.’ His host looked at him oddly.

  ‘Yes, precisely. You should go,’ said Gull, closing the subject.

  Muybridge realised he was not going to talk his way
into Gull’s private wards. He understood for the first time that Gull had no real interest in him. It had been the malady that had sparked his interest, not the man who bore it. The surgeon wanted a new set of tools to reach in and adjust, to be able to remake the man. The individual was incidental and expendable to his quest. He glanced at his host as the understanding dawned, but the man in question was looking again at the Ghost Dance photograph.

  ‘Remarkable; the strength of willpower.’

  ‘Like that poor woman,’ Muybridge said.

  ‘Yes! Exactly!’ said Gull, the energy of a small, wiry man jumping up and down inside his solid, unmoving frame. ‘The determination of that pathetic creature to believe in her view, even until death itself. And I have others who show even more voracity.’ He pointed at the shaman. ‘If that willpower was focused like these, and sharpened with knowledge, well… then we would have an instrument to investigate and repair the soul of any man or woman. I could put my hands into their heads and hearts and change everything.’

  Muybridge nodded silently.

  Outside, the London particular[2] had arrived, a dense and all-consuming fog that swallowed light and dimension, misplacing the blurred sounds of the city. As he stood in the dim, damp chill, Muybridge realised that Gull had said nothing about the print of the eclipse, although he had touched it repeatedly throughout their conversation.

  He tried to find a cab in the confusion of muffled shadows and sounds, but failed, and realised that he was lost. His only way home was to ask each person he bumped into which way he should go. Stepping stones, again; stepping stones in a fog. His life was full of them.

  * * *

  They were still talking about Adam when he thought he recognised the broader track as the one that would lead towards the station and, hopefully, the waiting train. He had endured quite enough of this. Even with Seil Kor’s fanciful stories and his warming presence, he wanted to be back in the hotel with hot water and cold wine. His ankles and toes hurt from the exertions needed to keep his ruined shoes intact. The bruises, cuts and insect bites rubbed incessantly against his stained robes, the texture of which now expressed itself as irritant and rough. Dried saliva still covered him and had turned rank and sticky under the humid heat of the forest, its persistent odour seeming to have gained access to every pore of his exhausted body.