—
“We must ask him,” he pleaded of the Scotsman.
“Ask him what?”
“What they did with the bag.”
Maclish no longer found the Limboia’s appropriation of the bag so amusing. The herald was brought down into the central hall, where he stood vacantly, like one hanging on the thickness of the air. His speech had deteriorated since the last time they met; he was not reluctant to answer their questions, but his replies were slow and suspended.
“You give Orm scent from looking, looking inside. After Orm wear it, went out, hollowed for you, all gone.”
Maclish and Hoffman looked at each other, desperately hoping they had misunderstood. They whispered to each other and Hoffman asked, “Was the scent that of a female?”
“Scent is spoor, is animal trail for looking out.”
“Where did it go to?” cried Maclish.
“Vorrh.”
“That’s impossible,” the doctor said incredulously. “Mrs. Klausen would never go there—I don’t think she’s ever left Essenwald!”
“Orm hollowed out for you and looking one. Hollow to nothing, nothing left inside, only the rind walked into Vorrh to nothing,” the herald said, smiling. He bowed to the startled men as the understanding of what they had done began to seep into them, their eyes meeting in the fearful perception of what they had released and how its hunger could end up devouring them all.
As they left the building, the herald remained in his stooped pose, head bent obsequiously and the smile fixed to his unwavering face.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Muybridge was ecstatic. Gull had changed his mind. Three months after he declined him at his offices a letter arrived.
DEAR MR. MUYBRIDGE,
I pen this hasty note as a disclaimer to my previously false assumption about photography and my special patients. I now think you were right in your belief about their response to images of them.
Please, the next time you are back in London, let us put your suggestion to a clinical test.
W. W. GULL
Muybridge stood in the leafy suburbs of London, having been redirected from Sir Thomas Guy’s hospital by another note, this time held by a surly porter. He was in Forest Hill. The southern railway from London Bridge had deposited him there, where Gull had said his private clinic was situated. He stepped out of the station and into the overly green trees; a coachman waited for him at the roadside. Ten minutes and dozens of green turns later, they pulled in through high metal gates and stopped. He was taken inside by a custodian, or a warder, he thought, a rhino of a man dressed in a long apron over a dark uniform, with a peaked cap that accentuated the man’s hornlike nose and low, sloping forehead.
“Thank you, Crane,” Gull said to the departing shadow.
“Mr. Muybridge, welcome.” He put out his square hand for his visitor to shake, looking about as if to greet another guest. “But where is your equipment?” He looked towards the door; the coachman shook his head.
“I did not bring any,” said Muybridge. “I presumed our first preliminary meeting would be more theoretical than practical?”
Gull was mystified and twitched his mouth in a small movement that looked like a rehearsal for a larger one—irritation in advance of anger—before it was quickly gathered back. “Quite right!” he blurted, in a boisterous and obvious lie. “Let me show you the business at hand, and then you can make your professional assessment.”
The good doctor took him by the arm and amiably propelled him along the corridors in Crane’s wake. Muybridge was instantly ill at ease; being touched was repugnant to him, and not something he tolerated well. He had never understood why so many people, common people, derived such pleasure from pawing one another, even in public. His treacherous wife had demanded these suffocating duties from him. She used to grab at his arm while walking, hanging from the speed of his sprightly gait, complaining about his pace, telling him to slow down, and hanging on even harder if he failed to comply. It had been embarrassing. But when they were alone, she had demanded much worse. He had never refused his husbandly duties. In fact, he quietly enjoyed them in moderation, and practice had improved him in the rigours of their physical exertions. He fulfilled all that might have been expected of him, but she always wanted more: to cling, to kiss, for him to linger inside her, long after his business was done. Some of her requests had been downright offensive, and against all modern notions of hygiene. The worst of it was that she even pawed him in front of the neighbours or the servants, and at social functions to which she had forced him to take her. It had been uncomfortable, unnatural, and thoroughly time-consuming.
Shaking off the horrid recollections, he returned to the present and found that Gull had removed his hand to denote waiting. They stood outside a long, ward-like corridor. The walls were painted in a thick, heavy yellow, more marrow than flower. The same apron-clad guard stood in contrast by the doors. Gull gestured, and the guard pulled an elaborate bolt that slid levers and greased phalanges to open to the ward beyond. It all seemed highly theatrical, more like one of the new zoological gardens than a sanctum of health.
Gull caught the scent of his thoughts and began to explain. “Some of the women here are very unstable, a danger to themselves and others. Their tides of mania and excessive will are beyond discipline or control. Therefore we contain them, and for good reason.”
Muybridge felt his excitement grow at the proximity of these demented creatures. The pair walked the corridor and stopped at another door, where Crane stood waiting. Gull nodded and the assistant unlocked it.
“First,” said Gull, “I will show you Abigail. She is the one I gave the picture to. She was picked up off the streets, where she was working the Penny Finger trade; she has been here now for nearly eight months.”
“But you said this was an affliction of the affluent, not of the poor, not of street women?”
“Quite right!” said Gull. “But to understand a disease you have to find its root. To instigate it from the beginning. So we collect test subjects and create the malady in them. This is the same protocol that grew from vaccine research, but here we apply it to the mind. Those already suffering are only useful to study symptoms—not the cause, effect, and cure: You can’t grow a plant from a leaf.”
“So the subject of your lecture at Guy’s was different from this one?”
Gull looked at him in the way strangers do when they are trying to politely judge the age of a friend’s child. “On the surface they are different, yes, but fundamentally they are the same. The one you saw at the lecture hall came into my care with her malady already fully formed. Her family were glad to see the back of her. They would have willingly packed her off to the bedlam, to die in the filth with all those other patients who have caused grievous embarrassment to their parents and siblings. This one came here undernourished but in good spirits—I saved her from a life of rotting on the streets. She will take part in the experiments and then eventually be released, if she is well enough.” Muybridge watched the doctor as he spoke, glancing at the guard every so often to gauge a reaction, but both their expressions remained impassive.
“When she first arrived, we treated her like royalty, spoiling her with food, compliments, and fine clothing. She grew fat and weak, and she was soon ready for her first encounter with the Lark Mirror.”
“The Lark Mirror?”
“Yes. It’s a tool we use in our hypnotic process, not unlike the peripherscope I used for your treatment.”
Muybridge did not care for the comparison.
“Anyway, as I was saying, the problem started when we gave Abigail here the picture.”
“What was the picture of?” asked Muybridge.
“It was a picture of her, taken three weeks ago. I took your advice and photographed all my special cases.”
The news took Muybridge aback. He had offered his services and been flatly turned down, and now, a few years later, Gull had taken the idea and instigated his own photographi
c enquiries? He tried to hide his disdain as Gull continued.
“When I gave her the print, she just stared at it. I had to tell her it was her likeness. And then she ate it. Before I could stop her, she stuffed it into her mouth and refused to take it out. By the time Crane arrived to part her jaws, it was gone.”
Before the words had time to settle and sting, he opened the door. She was on the far side of the room, standing in the corner. She was skeletal and absent. Only the top part of her body was clothed. A thick blouse that looked many sizes too large was wrapped about her torso. The lower part of her body, from her sternum down, was swathed in bandages, ending in a small, dangling flap for decency.
Her sticklike legs were naked and shivering. Her feet turned inwards and were blue with cold.
“She’s undressed again,” said Crane, exposing the reality of his below-average intelligence.
“Yes,” said Gull calmly. “Cover her up.”
A blanket was wrenched from her thin mattress and wrapped around her waist. The guard seated her on the equally skeletal bed.
“Her wounds are healing slowly; it takes a long time when the body has so little to draw from.”
“What happened to her?” asked Muybridge.
Gull turned and directed his gaze with withering force into the photographer’s unsuspecting eyes.
“She tried to get the picture back. She clawed herself open to find it.”
Muybridge yanked his gaze away from the surgeon to look at the frail creature again: her distant, vacant stare; the bandages; her birdlike hands with some of the fingernails broken off. He felt queasy and somehow aroused, one sensation cancelling the other out, making him impassive, becoming for a moment like her.
“If we had not found her in time, she would have bled to death. She ripped her abdominal wall, lost part of her lower intestine, and nicked her fallopian tubes without screaming or making any other sound.” Gull was obviously impressed. “Imagine the willpower that would take!”
“Did she use a weapon?” asked Muybridge, already fearing he knew the answer.
“No, sir, that’s what I am telling you: She used her bare hands.”
“Is that possible?”
“Not to you or I. We would hesitate. The hand would lose its power and only scratch and bruise at our weakness. The human hand is a potent and massively strong mechanism. It is a series of fulcrums and levers worked by tough and dominant muscles. Its sinews and bones are tensile and capable of bearing colossal strain. We barely use a fraction of its potential strength, developing its agile pliancy and delicate touch instead. The hand, without doubt, is an awesome tool. Did you know it is one of the most difficult parts of the human body to destroy? You have to crush and mangle it just to get it to break into smaller parts.”
Muybridge was not sure he wanted to know all this, but clearly he had no choice, and Gull galloped on.
“There is an ancient funeral practice in Tibet called ‘sky burial.’ Deceased monks are carried to a high platform, where their bodies are dissected—butchered, really—into small, devourable pieces. The surgeon-priest then leaves the platform so that a flock of vultures may descend onto the meat table. They then eat every scrap and depart, taking the body of the holy man into the clouds. In this procedure, the hands require the most work. All else is child’s play in comparison. To get them shredded enough for the birds to eat takes great effort, heavy, sharp tools, and time.” He paused for a breath. “Yes, sir, the hand is a ferocious weapon when sent forth, without doubt.”
All four of them fell silent, with not an ounce of communication floating between them. They all looked in different directions, into different worlds, and waited for theirs to begin again.
—
Muybridge stood with his hands behind his back watching Gull speak.
“I am now working on making direct contact with that ferocious willpower, trying to set aside the starvation obsession, to cleave it from the unique determination it engenders. I am gaining remarkable results: It has been possible to map its mechanism in the brain and produce its exact responses under experimental rigour.”
They were walking the corridor again, Gull finally keeping his hands to himself. He had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his breeches as he strolled past the locked metal doors. There was something unstoppable about his confident posture.
“There is one side effect, however, that does not make clinical sense,” the doctor was saying. “There appears to develop a taint of violence in all I have treated or experimented with, as if there is some fundamental correlation between the activation of peripheral sight and the loosening of the moral codes that keep us all in check.”
Muybridge was about to ask a question, when the implication of the words hit home.
“There is also some distortion of the libido,” Gull continued. “The peripherscope and the Lark Mirror seem to call something wild out of otherwise docile patients; the continual application of the devices seems to heighten these effects in a cumulative manner. In fact, I have some more hypno-optical instruments that I would very much like you to see while you’re here.”
As he looked at Muybridge’s troubled and knotted face, which was again taking on the countenance of a vengeful God crossed with a scolded child, he was interrupted by a long, mournful wailing, a sound so unusual that it arrested all other sounds around it. Muybridge, his own thoughts disturbed, recognised it as a savage animal, exotic and lethal; he had heard such things before and instantly knew it was not native to these shores. On his extensive travels, he had heard the calls of many such feral beasts—perhaps these bolted corridors really did contain a zoo?
Again it sang out, and this time he caught the tincture of its humanity. He had taught himself to listen carefully to many peculiar tongues, to hear and trust his instinct to decode their meaning. This one had the same extreme edges he had heard in the mountain tribes of Guatemala or the Eskimo shudders of the high Alaskan plains; the songs of the nomads of the fallen land bridges to Greenland and the North Pole. It was totally out of place.
“Ah, this will interest you!” Gull pointed to the source of the eerie noise and Crane knocked on the metal door. A few moments later, it was opened by a small bald man wearing a white apron and stiff, red, gutta-percha gloves.
“Good day, Sir William. She is restless again.”
“Good morning, Rice. Let’s have a look at her, shall we?”
The howling stopped when she saw Gull. Her huge eyes widened and she covered them with her ornate, scarred hands. She had luminous black skin that had been polished into blues and purples by the smooth, uninterrupted breeding of thousands of years. She was slight, but not emaciated like the others, and had a head of statuesque beauty, more horizontal than vertical, like a long lozenge of graceful stone balanced midway on the poised, slender plinth of her neck. Muybridge had seen and met Negroes in America, had seen their plight and their strength. But she was quite a different species.
“Allow me to introduce you to Abungu. We call her Josephine here. Josephine, this is Mr. Muybridge. He is the man who made the picture you so love.”
She put her hands down and looked into the photographer’s mystified face.
“Show him what you have done with it!”
Crane grabbed at her clothing, trying to pull her into action. “Leave her, Crane; she will do it herself.”
Josephine crossed the room, leaving a trail of water, which seemed to be coming from her underskirts. The men pretended not to notice. She went to a small trunk that had been painted the same colour as the cream cell. She opened it and stood aside; it was full of neatly stacked pieces of paper, all the same size, and all with one rough edge, as if they had been torn from notebooks. The men crossed the room to the trunk and its owner.
“Show him, Josephine,” encouraged Gull. She dipped down to retrieve the top sheet and lifted it in front of Muybridge.
“Take it!” said the doctor, using much the same tone as he had with the black woman. Muy
bridge felt he should say something about being patronised in such a way, but curiosity reigned and he followed the command. He glanced at what he was holding, then looked again in surprise: It was a perfect copy of his print Phases of the Eclipse of the Sun. Staring at it more closely, he saw that it was not a photographic print at all, but a drawing made on paper with black ink, identical to the one he had left with Gull years before. Only the five lines of text, which explained its provenance and gave the times of the exposures, had been left out. Each drawing had a hastily scratched “A” in its corner: her signature. Every “A” missed its middle, joining stroke, so that it appeared closer to an inverted “V.”
Muybridge looked from Gull, who was stroking his jaw and partially concealing a smile, to the sleek radiance of the woman, whose huge eyes looked right through him, then back at the box full of paper.
“Go ahead, help yourself. She won’t mind,” said Gull.
He picked up a small wad of paper and examined it. Each image was exactly the same. She had made hundreds of copies of his picture, all signed the same way. Gull saw the question and answered it before it became sound.
“Josephine is remarkable. She constantly surprises us. I once showed her your picture. She could not have looked at it for more than a minute. Some weeks later, after a session with one of my new instruments, she was given some paper, pens, pencils, and ink. She is allowed those; she is one of our passive patients, the only one not showing the disturbing side effects I told you of before. Anyway, she sat down and started making these copies. From the first to the last, they have all been precisely the same. If I gave her paper and ink now she would make another.”
The Vorrh Page 22