by B Catling
The rightness guided her; such doubts and forgettings were discarded, unimportant. It led her home; the child and the time were growing. But when she reached the great forest, the time was heavy and could wait no longer. To be born here was unknown – the meaning and force of the Vorrh was beyond the understanding of all people. But this birthing was ordained; the trees were waiting, and something was waiting in them.
In the depth of the forest, on her way to the True People, her daughter was born. Wondrous omens heralded the event: snow fell through the tropical night; violet seas were seen to shimmer in the twilight of the far western shores; luminous insects clustered into balls and floated above the villages. Some said the Erstwhile awoke and brought the pair out of the Vorrh, into the human lands of the True People. Others said that the infant belonged to the Erstwhile and had been sired by one of them, as in the olden days.
The only known truth was that the dying Abungu and the sacred Irrinipeste were found on the edge of the village, by an old warrior on the night after the day of the feast, when the sun was eaten by the moon and reborn in crescent fragments under the black sea. The mother was recognised as one of the tribe by the scarification her parents had inscribed by dismal candlelight, in the slums that clung to the mud banks of the River Thames, far beyond London’s city walls. Before she died, she gave a crown of gold and mirrors, encrusted in mud, for the safekeeping of her daughter, along with a picture of a shield, which bore the same sun fragment as those beneath the waves. The dawn of the next day took her, and the child received the light that lingered in her dead eyes for hours.
* * *
His pink, scrubbed hands were in her bed. She felt them parting her legs. She turned slightly. One of his fingers was moving on her, caressing and opening her bliss. No: this could not be. His hand was inside her, groping upwards. She pushed out, the other hand holding her leg down. Her cry woke her into a panic, though the old house was empty. She was alone, but his hand was in her womb, grabbing at the foetus, trying to squeeze the life out of it and pull it from its safety. She felt his other hand enter her and almost fainted, ready to burst with fear. Her shouts echoed through the house, from the hollow well in the cellar to the attic, where it strummed against the long, taut wires and bounced in the white hollow of the obscura’s table. She felt the doctor’s ring dig into her bone as his fat, pink finger rotated. Her final scream pulled her from the layers of nightmare and into the dim, pre-dawn haze of her room.
She was wringing wet and brutally cold. The bedroom had not quite settled into reality and she feared that Hoffman still lingered nearby: maybe under the bed, or behind the weighty curtains. She breathed heavily, not daring to detach herself from the safety of the damp sheets, and waited for the morning to release her again from another night of blind, vengeful terror.
* * *
Cyrena and Ishmael had not stepped outside the house for almost a week. The world beyond the mansion’s walls had dissolved in its own continuum of noise and bustle. They never left each other, talking and touching and succumbing to their courtship through all the hours of the day and night. Even the division of light and dark held no meaning for them: the richness of their realm was more than all else.
The servants ferried food and drink and kept out of their way. So powerful was their love in the house that it evaporated all gossip and below-stairs speculation. The staff just grinned knowingly, shrugged their shoulders and grinned again.
The bow lay neglected in the hall; Ishmael no longer moved it with him from room to room. Occasionally it would fall in the night, clattering noisily against obscure items and leaving unpleasant odours and resistant stains. Eventually, he placed it as far from the heart of the house as the walls allowed, resting it in the small porch that joined the garden to the cellar. The servants were warned not to disturb it under any circumstances. It was a somewhat unnecessary order: the long, black bundle was loathsome to all.
Under a nearby bush, Tsungali’s ghost dozed peacefully. His grandfather had caught up with him a few days after he arrived. He had decided to wait with him for their business to be concluded, so they might travel together into the awaiting worlds. Tsungali slept to conserve the strength of what was left of him. His grandfather kept a wary eye on the bow while he dozed.
The arrival of the letter dislodged the peace of the house. Its sharp, white envelope was like a porcelain blade. It was from Ghertrude.
My dear friend,
Have you forsaken me? Please tell me what I have done to cause your silence? I felt such relief at your support in this strange, incomprehensible time; I cannot begin to express my despair at your absence.
I am so alone. Nobody comes. I only ever see Mutter, and I cannot speak to him – his smile unnerves me, it is more than I can tolerate at this moment.
The house has never been so empty. I am racked by nightmares, which I think might be omens; the evil spirit of the doctor comes to steal the life from within me and I wake in terror every night. Please, if I have not offended you in some unknown way, come to me soon. I need your strength and friendship to see me through these desperate times.
Yours always,
Ghertrude
Cyrena was mortified. She had not considered Ghertrude’s needs for days, even though she and Ishmael had talked about her frequently with warmth and care; she had to go to her friend at once. She called Ishmael and showed him the letter.
‘What is the significance of this doctor?’ he asked.
She shut her eyes to the answer that tangled in her throat. There was so much to explain, and so much more to forget.
‘He was one of the men we paid to find you. He was a vile man, corrupt and dangerous.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He disappeared,’ she lied, ‘ran off somewhere with the other vermin who tricked us.’
Ishmael was content and asked no more questions, letting her rush about as she dressed for the first time in days.
‘I don’t know how long I will be,’ she said at the door.
‘I am coming with you.’ He had his shoes on and was buttoning his shirt. ‘I am coming to see Ghertrude.’
The car sped through the city and she gripped his hand tightly, moving back and forth in her seat as if it might help the lilac Phaeton gain speed. Ishmael tried to talk, but it was impossible to engage her, so he sat back, enjoying the speed and the vista of the city, without the disguise of a mask or a scarf. He was beginning to feel grand in his new face and the plush elegance of the car’s interior.
Minutes later, they arrived at 4 Kühler Brunnen and she rattled at the gate and the bell. Ishmael stepped into the street and was suddenly overwhelmed; he was transported to a very different place, with a tide of memories flooding back.
When a dishevelled Ghertrude eventually came to the gate, the sight of her friend unhooked her and she immediately began to weep. She yanked the barrier open, throwing herself, sobbing, into Cyrena’s arms. Cyrena held her tightly, patting her back in soft, soothing strokes, heavily aware of their unseen companion but overcome with a maternal sense of responsibility. ‘I am so, so sorry for deserting you. Please forgive me, it will never happen again.’
Ghertrude pulled back slightly from her friend’s damp shoulder. ‘I am sorry for crumbling so again, I have just been so lonely and scared.’
‘No, my dear, it is I who must apologise; we have been so locked up in conversation that all else faded.’
‘We?’ sniffed Ghertrude, only then realising that they were not, in fact, alone. Her eyes transcended Cyrena’s shoulder and found the face of the stranger; it took far too long for her to be certain. She frowned calculations at the mangled face, which returned her gaze apprehensively. Pushing herself back from Cyrena, she examined her friend’s expression before looking again at the man with long, black hair and two, independent eyes.
‘Ishmael?’
He relaxed his doubt and smiled. ‘Yes, Ghertrude. I have come back much changed.’
She moved p
ast Cyrena, who allowed their reunion a respectful space. With one hand still grasped by her friend, her other reached out and rested on his chest; he gently covered it with his own. The three of them stood, wordless, welded into a silent tableau which slowly softened and flowed, through the yard and into the house.
Mutter was just arriving as they got to the front door. They turned to acknowledge him and the young man waved. He frowned back and nodded, attempting to smile while groaning inside. More strangers in the house. More odd-doings and unpredictable relationships. A stunted root of defensive jealousy started sucking at the earth of his foundations. Who was this new boy, and what did he want with his ladies? Why had they picked another one up, after all they had been through? Could they not be contented with what they had and let him take care of them, make sure that they were safe from intruders and parasites? He had never quite seen them in the same way since his wife had confessed her anxiety about his desirability to them. In the months since, he had come to see her point of view, that she could have been right all along; it was only a matter of circumstance that the growing carnival mite was a stranger’s and not his.
Their conversation was long. Though they sat close to one another, the spaces between them were growing and flexing in all directions. Cyrena and Ishmael did their utmost to conceal their intimacy; Ghertrude and Cyrena did not speak of the baby, and Ishmael did not seem to notice its obvious presence. He had mated with both women, and, in each other’s company, both felt possessive and maternal about him in very different ways, and to varying degrees. Surface tensions crackled and buzzed, building a static charge between their words and shaping the conversation into irregular troughs and peaks. Doldrums of reflection mingled clumsily with elated memories; lows of tongue-biting were interspersed with highs of overly jovial camaraderie.
Cyrena ached to be closer to him, to touch and be touched again. She wanted to be at home with him, but her duty was here: she had pledged her presence.
Meanwhile, Ghertrude tried desperately not to stare at his new face and to fight back her overreaction at seeing their blatant love. She did not want him – indeed, she never had – but his distance was proving to be too much, too soon.
Ishmael sensed the women’s hunger and felt suffocated by it. He felt deeply for Cyrena, but he longed to breathe freely, and he made a bid to escape.
‘Ladies, would you excuse me for a short while? It’s been a long time since I have been in this house and there are so many memories. Ghertrude, would you mind if I roamed around for a while and reconnected with my past?’
Ghertrude and Cyrena exchanged glances. Ghertrude nodded her assent, and he took his leave, closing the elegant, tall doors behind him on a conversation that he had no desire to hear.
He immediately bounded up the wide stairs to where his room had been. The proportions had changed again, another reflection of recollection, rather than scale. So much had happened so early, shunts of life that suddenly revealed themselves to be ill-matched and opposite.
His room was unlocked and unchanged. He touched the bed and opened the wardrobe to see his history hanging there: so many textures and smells, so many memories of isolation. He went to the window and thoughtfully traced his finger along the spot where he had picked the paint off the shutter.
‘What will you tell him?’ said Cyrena.
‘I don’t know. Nothing will be known until the birth. I don’t want to raise a false alarm for him; he has already been through so much.’
Cyrena nodded her agreement. ‘You are right, I’m sure. Until we are certain, it’s probably best to say nothing.’
‘We are becoming very good at saying nothing.’
Cyrena agreed again in silence.
In the attic, he opened the shutter into the breeze and the courtyard below, leaning out to get a better view. He saw Mutter moving back and forth, changing the straw in the stables. He looked towards the cathedral and watched the jackdaws circle over the spires.
He needed to see more. He climbed into the tower and opened the swivelling eye of the camera obscura, observing the activity below, changing lenses to see inside it. The curved, white table flooded with his memory of Ghertrude, the exposed parts of her body made whiter by the table and the squeezed light. He remembered watching her confusion turn into annoyance, then transform into abandonment and, eventually, satisfaction. He recalled the same transformation in himself, only in reverse.
‘You mean you intend to live together as man and wife?’ Ghertrude sounded disapproving and a little horrified.
Cyrena said nothing.
‘Do you really feel so much for him? You hardly know each other. What about his past? I have told you something of his dubious origin, doesn’t that concern you?’
Cyrena’s eyes were changing colour and shape, bracing themselves to protect what sheltered behind them.
‘There are many things that I have not yet told you,’ Ghertrude continued, ‘things you would not believe.’
‘I don’t want the details about how he made love to you,’ Cyrena blurted.
‘Not that; things before any of that happened, when he was kept downstairs.’
‘Ah yes! The mysterious teachers who lived in the basement, those who you saved him from.’ Cyrena was turning on her friend, disbelief becoming her advancing weapon. ‘And then they disappeared, vanished into thin air. Am I right, is that not what you said?’
‘I boarded and locked all the cellar rooms after I got him out…’
‘You mean they might still be living down there?’ said Cyrena with a dismissive, unpleasant laugh. ‘Or did they vanish like Hoffman?’
Ghertrude glared at the question, feeling the restraints of their friendship being pulled taut.
‘Well? Did they? Did Mutter spirit them away?’ pushed Cyrena, the bit between her teeth, her tastes changing from defence into attack. ‘How many others have you removed to have him for yourself? Am I next?!’
The truth instantly quenched the rage flaring between them.
‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ said Ghertrude. ‘They weren’t human, they were machines; puppet-like machines.’
He was tightening the strings, softly strumming them to adjust their pitch. The task gave him a place to think and recollect. The matter-of-factness of balance and modification separated his mind and let him wander back into the Vorrh. Nothing had happened to his memory. He had suffered no adverse effect. Was he immune to its legendary influence? Certainly, Tsungali had been confused and Oneofthewilliams had seemed positively deranged by it.
Cyrena’s jaw was hanging in astonishment. Ghertrude had told her everything, in great detail, with a delivery that was sparse and without emotion. There had never been the opportunity before, and she was finally released from the burden of her own disbelief. The naked facts of the impossible sounded firm and clear in the air, rather than forever tumbling around in the depths of her uncertainty, where they nagged and clotted, shifting focus into possible delusion.
When she had finished, both women sat in silence, a quietness unexpectedly gilded by sounds that seeped in from above. Wafts of celestial chords rolled and hovered down through the house, their beautiful eeriness making Ghertrude’s tale all the more strange. The tang of disquiet was smoothed out by the poignant resonance and they sat in bemused silence, while Ishmael set more and more of the Goedhart device into action. The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.
On the way home, Ishmael tried to gently quiz Cyrena about their friend; he wanted the core of Ghertrude’s reaction, to know which way her thick waters flowed. The car slipped smoothly through the dark city; Cyrena’s thoughts were burrowing too deeply to answer. An odd tiredness was guiding her towards hibernation, to a place other than the previous glow she and Ishmael had generated, somewhere far from the cooling distance
of Ghertrude and her latest stories of hidden monsters. In this brittle, shifting world, ruled by sight, Cyrena did not know what to believe or who to trust; she wanted sleep and darkness and the hope she had always had before. She begged exhaustion, promising to speak about it later. She huddled deeper in her travel blanket and looked out at the bleary city, its house lights and fireflies wavering sympathetically to long-stringed music that still sung in her heart.
* * *
The ivy and some of the smaller, more tenacious plants had begun to entwine themselves through his nothingness. It brought them pleasure, an irresistible tingle that ran through them, almost to the tips of their roots.
The ancient ghost tapped his dozing grandson.
‘You will sleep yourself to nothing.’
There was no reaction, so he tapped again.
‘It is time to wake and thicken. She is troubled and moving, shrugging the rags off. You must gather yourself.’
Tsungali opened one eye, catching the old man’s meaning in his other. He had felt the friction from her unrest; he knew the bow longed to be naked, her every fibre straining towards meaning. He stretched unnecessarily, his muscles untaxed and absent. If he could, he would take her back, carry her into the Vorrh; she needed to be given there before rage and insanity consumed her. His fingers flexed involuntarily and he looked at his arm, something stirring in his psyche as the one that should not be there, the ghost arm of a ghost, lay expectantly at his side. It was normal now, as normal as dead arms could be, but surely that was not possible – it had died before him. Did he dare try and grip the bow?
He knew his grandfather would disapprove; the old man was of the generation where the dead knew their place and trod the haunting track with unerring vigour. Tsungali quietly arose and slipped away towards the house. The breeze of his intentions swung the porch door on its whispering hinges and he knelt before the bow, speaking to her in gentle, respectful tones.