The Vorrh

by Brian Catling

  “And nobody is ever unmasked?”

  “Never!” she said, with more certitude than she felt. It was true that one felt a certain freedom under the protection of disguise, and she had committed petty crimes and minor malices before under the mask. But she had never possessed the nerve to engage in open debauchery. Until now.

  They peeped through the gap and plucked at the springboard of their nerves, readying to be jettisoned into the whirling throng of dreams that bustled and shoved in the streets outside. The noise was colossal. Hurdy-gurdies and pipers roamed the streets, confusing the vast steam organ that played from the heart of the market square. There were fireworks and pistol shots, trumpets and singing, screaming and laughter.

  Suddenly, the gate was open and they were gone. Mutter locked it hard behind them and spat on the wet cobblestones.

  Ishmael was intoxicated with the number of people he had touched and seen in the first two hours of his freedom. His entire body was becoming luminous beneath the costume. Was it the same for everybody that thronged the streets, opened their doors, and gave themselves up for molestation? He had lost Ghertrude somewhere after the third house and had no idea where he was, which made him even more excited. He entered a grand house full of music and laughter. Women and men held him and felt beneath his robe, making joyous sounds of pleasure at what they found there. He wanted to explore the rooms more, so he pulled away and slunk close to the lushly carpeted floor.

  In a magnificent room lit by flickering torchlight, he felt a different perfume and crawled across the floor towards it—an animal of his own making, his long, white proboscis sniffing, his whiskers quivering, as he nodded from side to side. His rangy, pale legs seemed to both tiptoe and slide on the polished wooden floor. The top part of his body was clothed in a silken green skin, which caught the garish light from the blazing flambeaux on the balcony outside the windows. The lower half of his body was naked, its huge, swollen phallus swaying like an independent entity as he approached his next engagement like a creature possessed.

  The last bed was in great disarray, the covers pulled messily around the softly snoring body of its spent occupant. The room was full of whispers and laughter; small, animal noises of hunger and fulfilment rippled the landscape of opulence. Sighs gilded the tangled scent of incense, musk, and intoxication.

  He reached the next bed and slid his gloved hands beneath the sheet. They were instantly gripped by the smooth, trembling grasp of the woman who waited there. She pulled the beast inside and drew the covers over them both. Her form was older, large, and voluptuous, and she was dressed like an owl, black feathers accentuating the ivory wideness of her eyes. He slipped a catch on his beak and pulled it backwards, leaving the lower half of his face exposed, so that his mouth was visible and active in their lovemaking. Pulling him close, she kissed him passionately. He jumped back, startled, almost falling from the bed. Neither Luluwa nor Ghertrude had ever done such a thing; it had never been explained to him, and Ghertrude had always looked away when they mated.

  “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 overpopulated room of revellers, the sounds of the Owl and her new companion rose 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 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.

  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 repartnering 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 Selbys’. 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 hush
ed 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 gate-crashed 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.

  Ishmael had arrived back at 4 Kühler Brunnen in the midafternoon. 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.

  Ishmael had not been aware of the rules as he’d left the Owl’s bed earlier that day. As he walked 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 each other 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 skullcap from where the coward had dropped it, and refitted it 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 that 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,” he 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.”

  Cyrena Lohr combed the city and caught three names, which now wriggled in her teeth. Two had been regular partygoers, inconsequential gentry of deplorable reputation, the kind of creatures whose very existence is antagonistic to miracle. The third had no name. He was said to be the companion of a young woman whose family Cyrena knew. She made more enquiries, buying information and paying street eyes to unwrap small morsels of sight or whisper.

  She found out that the man she so desperately sought had arrived at the carnival with the affluent heiress Ghertrude Tulp and that, whatever their relationship was, it allowed them to slip separately into many different beds over those three spectacular days, which had been such travesties of life. She discovered that, some time after he left her bedchamber, he had been involved in a street altercation, in which an aging doxy had received permanent damage to her saturated brain. She knew that Ghertrude and the man lived at 4 Kühler Brunnen and that he had never been outside in public. She could not be sure but suspected that the
Tulp girl held some power over him; that she imprisoned him there, her prize, her possession, which she bitterly hoarded.

  She stood before the double gate, magnificent in her knowledge and the certain triumph of her discovery. Taking a quick, deep breath through her feline nostrils, she stepped forward and hammered on the shaking wood.

  In her heart, she felt sure that he would open the door to her love; that she would see him, beautiful and beaming, moved by her persistence in finding him. As the scene played in her mind, she saw Ghertrude unlock the great secret and give in to her overpowering enquiry and rightful passion. What she did not expect was the hump and shuffle of Mutter, whose sour response did not even seem to recognise her grandeur.

  “Is your master at home?” she asked, unprepared for the sound and need of her stilted formality.

  Mutter gawped at her through bleary eyes. He removed the dead cigar stub from his wet mouth and said, “I have none here!”

  She jittered slightly. “Your mistress, then?”

  “Out!” he said, as he started to shut the gate.

  “Where is he?” she demanded, her hand against the gate, equalising Mutter’s pressure from the other side.

  “Who?” he said, genuinely unaware of whom she meant.

  “The man,” she said softly, through a nervous smile. “The mysterious young man who lives here.”

  There was a long pause while Mutter came to, looking into her working, expectant eyes. “Gone,” he said. “He’s gone. The monster has left.” And with that, he shoved the gate shut.

  Part Two

  Listen to me. The worlds swarm with an infinity of creatures. Those we see, those we never see: Naga snakes, who live in the depths of the earth. Rakshasas, monsters of the forest’s night, who live off human flesh. Gandavas, frail creatures who glide between us and the sky. Apsovahs, Danavas, Yakshas and the long glittering chain of gods, who live like all beings in the shadow of death.