The Vorrh

by Brian Catling

  Seil Kor and the Frenchman also stopped in their tracks to look towards the shudder in the trees.

  The string drifted, kneading the atmosphere, eager to find its host. It possessed an astonishing longevity and was capable of lying dormant, but sprung, for years, until the heat or scent of a passerby triggered its urgent jump and vampire attachment. On this day, it would have only a few minutes to wait.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ghertrude was feeling lonely and out of step with her life. Since the end of the carnival and Ishmael’s departure, everything had seemed dimmer and without flavour. She felt flat and unexcited by the city and her diminishing secret in it.

  She turned the corner into Kühler Brunnen and was nearing the house, head down and mind elsewhere, when she almost collided with a figure standing at the gate. The woman was taller and older than Ghertrude, with eyes she would never forget. They looked down at her, absorbing every particle of sight, every ounce of meaning. She had obviously been waiting for her.

  “Mistress Tulp!” She beamed in a triumph that seemed without reason. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Cyrena Lohr,” she said, holding out her hand. “I believe our families are already acquainted? May I call you Ghertrude?”

  She had heard of this woman: Everybody had; if not before the miracle of the carnival, then certainly after. She suddenly knew that they had met once before, when she was a child and the beautiful blind stranger was put in her care at one of the grand parties of the city’s gentry. Or perhaps it had been the other way around? But there was certainly a memory of vast rooms and music, of being separate and in the company of an elegant blind woman. She remembered being able to stare at her, to examine her without politeness, and to think about what blindness meant for the first time. Her sight then had probed the blackness of the beautiful, dead eyes, which were now more than alive and staring down at her.

  “Of course, Mistress Lohr,” she answered to the barely remembered question.

  “Then you must call me Cyrena, if we are to be friends.”

  Ghertrude was taken aback by the speed of this assumption and was about to answer when she realised that Cyrena was staring at the locked door.

  “Oh, I am sorry. Please do come in,” she said, fumbling for the keys in her pockets.

  Inside, they sat at the kitchen table and talked about their mutual acquaintances, their memories and experiences of being the city’s chosen daughters. Ghertrude’s uncertainty at their introduction was beginning to pass when, without warning, Cyrena smiled and broke all the rules.

  “Forgive me, my dear, for asking such a taboo question, but I simply must know: Who did escort you to the beginning of the carnival frivolities?” Ghertrude fluttered and flushed while trying to remain calm and indifferent. The hungry eyes saw all and pressed harder.

  “I am not asking you to be indiscreet or break a confidence, but I owe something to the gentleman concerned and I am anxious to pay.”

  “Are you sure we are talking about the same person?” questioned Ghertrude, clutching at straws and finding it impossible to conceive of any situation where the unlikely pair may have met.

  “I do hope so,” said Cyrena. She described the costume without ever having seen it. She described it well, and Ghertrude’s blush turned to an anxious pale. Cyrena saw the truth behind her blanching and knew her game had been cornered.

  “His name is Ishmael,” Ghertrude said reluctantly. “He was my friend; he lived in this house.”

  “Lived?” repeated Cyrena. “Where is he now?”

  “He left weeks ago; I don’t know where for,” she lied.

  The older woman stood abruptly, obviously agitated. Ghertrude approached her and touched her shivering arm.

  “Why do you need to find him?” she asked.

  The unwavering eyes locked on hers with an indescribable eeriness. “It was he who gave me my sight,” she said.

  —

  The sharp, rank electricity stung her nose and slapped her brain. She instinctively tried to push the glass bottle away from her airway, but Cyrena held it there firmly until the smelling salts had proved to work. Ghertrude gasped for breath as the older woman held her firmly in the upright chair, one hand on Ghertrude’s forehead and her other arm hugging the woozy younger lady across her back.

  “It’s all right, my dear. You have only fainted,” she said.

  The nauseous zebra vision ceased and Ghertrude bounced back to the dazed reality of Cyrena’s revelation. “Ishmael did that?” she whispered. “But how?”

  Reseating herself at the table, Cyrena began to explain the situation of that amazing night. She explained it frankly and perhaps with too much detail. This time, they both blushed, but she continued with the extraordinary story, and Ghertrude’s mind slowly accustomed itself to the depth of Ishmael’s festive experiences. As Cyrena related the exquisite interactions of their encounter, Ghertrude began to realise the terrible truth of the event, the one feature that couldn’t have been exchanged by their actions alone. She wished she could undo her involvement, but it was too late; nothing should be held back now. There was no place for deception or half-truths between them.

  “Did…” Ghertrude hesitated, throwing a sidelong glance at her new friend. “I only wondered…did you never see his face?”

  —

  The younger woman took charge of the smelling salts. Cyrena had not fainted, but the news had sent her reeling back, like a short, sharp punch to the chest.

  “You mean he was born with only one eye?” She gaped.

  “Yes. It is here, in the centre of his face.” Ghertrude pointed to the area just above her nose. “It takes time,” she said gently, “but you get used to it. After a while, you only see him.”

  “But, there was no sign that he was so deformed; I had no idea! The mask, the mask…it…He felt normal!” Cyrena ran out of words as she remembered the events of that night and struggled to hold back tears.

  “He is not like us,” Ghertrude said, shaking her head. “Not like us at all.”

  The day passed. Ghertrude fetched a bottle of Madeira and two glasses. They sat by a window as they drank, watching the sun set over the Vorrh. She told the stranger, fast becoming a friend, much about their life together in 4 Kühler Brunnen, but not about the beginning. Though she ached to tell somebody of the abnormalities in the basement, to share that impossible truth, she knew that, without any evidence, she would sound deranged, incredible. Who would ever believe such a story? She looked at Cyrena: Might it be her? Might this strong, clever woman, who made her feel childlike again and curiously protected, be understanding of such a tale?

  “I must still find him,” Cyrena was saying. “Whatever he is, wherever he has gone, he has changed my life completely.”

  Ghertrude sighed and let the last crumbs of denial fall to the kitchen floor. “He said he was going to the Vorrh,” she declared. It sounded like a pact.

  Later, Cyrena sat in her favourite room, the one with the wrought-iron balcony outside. She used to spend hours there, over-sensing the city, its aromas and sounds shaping a landscape of poignant, knitted contentment and longing. One of her favourite times was the evening, when the city’s sounds folded down to allow the distant forest its full voice. She loved to feel the exchange, the tides of human and animal sounds passing each other in the growing dominance of night.

  Her sighted friends (and all were) had always said that she had marvellous perception of the world they shared. Over the years, they had learned not to lead their conversations with descriptions of sight. Cyrena had never minded, but she could always sense their embarrassment when they inadvertently referred to appearance or invited her to look at something; little words that created errors in their shared reality, small slips in perceptual reciprocation.

  High above, the swallows turned into bats, foraging the sky for its shoals of insects. The birds’ tiny, sharp cries were like single stars, calling for a fraction of a second out of a constellation of glittering darknes
s; they became the stars she had never seen. Her first sightings of the swifts in the bright air had delighted her. Their spinning and darting were faster than anything she could have ever imagined, their spatial acrobatics instantly displacing her previous image of pinprick chirps echoing from a vast distance. At first, it had been a more-than-adequate barter, but over the weeks their sky weaving had become predictable; dismally, unimaginatively attached to the food chain. Other things in her eyes were also beginning to flatten and become commonplace. The colours of her furnishings had started to pall. They had invigorated her in the beginning, their richness accentuated by their textures, which had once been their greatest appeal. Now they seemed to jump unpredictably, or daze the depth of the room; with sight, things seemed smaller and somehow pinching.

  Perhaps it was the recent meeting that had so depressed her. The Tulp girl had given a little friendship, but it had been a very slight compensation for the greater loss. Her expectations had been single-minded: Their reunion that day had been the only option she had considered; she had pictured every detail of the moment. If “pictured” is the right word; in truth, her anticipation had not been shaped by her visual imagination at all. It had been carefully sculpted out of touch and sound, his presence bolder in the contours of those memories than anything she had seen since the miracle. Ghertrude’s descriptions had made it worse. How could she accommodate this ugly portrait with the sweeping clarity of the beauty of that night? Her new eyes were bringing more disappointment to her than she could have ever anticipated. They shunted in a continuous torrent of irrelevant detail for her to respond to and process; she feared that the profundity and articulation of her previous world was being frittered away, erased by an endless low tide of brightness and an infinite shingle of pictures.

  And yet, it must be sacrilege to think such things. Everybody gave such enraptured sermons about “the prime sense” and how wonderful it was that she had gained it—how could she be so ungrateful? How could she secretly long for the uninterrupted, dark containment of the world she had always known as reality? But sight made her lonely, and she had never been that before. The indifference of the world was jarringly apparent, and its knotted, adamant distance had begun to shrink everything she had ever achieved. It dwindled all she understood, and the intimacy where she once dreamt was engulfed by loud and vulgar light that always spoke of the space between things.

  The doubts suddenly ignited an obvious omission in her celebrations. She had shared the miracle with all around her, but she had forgotten one, the only one who really understood her sightless world. The one who had asked her to imagine sight and had changed her childhood in a way she had never understood. Uncle Eugene. How could she have been so thoughtless? She did not strain at the question, because the answer was a shadow, a sourness; it was her doubt, her anxiety, that made her remember him, because those were the tones of his being. He would understand. She would write and try to explain, to describe the bouts of sadness that came from nowhere, and he would advise her, tell her why light felt like treachery.

  The evening light drifted towards her, licking at her little resolve; it tugged at her need but she shook it off and sat down to compose the earnest letter in its sulking wake.

  —

  Many minutes had passed since her moment of insight. As she wrote, a glass vase of fresh flowers billowed between her and the evening outside. The swifts were darting and spinning in the cooling air, their squeaks and dizzying speed calling her. She wanted to go out onto the balcony and listen to them, but the vase and its contents blocked her way. The colours held her at bay, their breath growing violent and unfurled. Plants had held little meaning in her life until now; she had never before understood the insistence of their horrid pressure and omnipresent existence.

  This bunch had been a gift. A well-meant but unnecessary mob of growth and vibrancy, just one of the many visual feasts bestowed on her with an overgenerous zeal by friends and strangers eager to celebrate her new sense, her new affinity with their ranks.

  The vase was crowned by a bloated roar of colour. She decided to really look at the uncompromising entities within; she thought her maid had called them peonies, but she could not be sure. They had straight, confident stems that bristled with hairs and spikes, presumably to keep the subtle mouths of beasts and the nimble beaks of birds at bay. The leaves were long and pointed, catching every shudder of breeze from the balcony and giving the obstacle a faint animation, a lure just large enough to trap the casual eye into looking. At the end of the stalk gloated the flower. There were two varieties here, scarlet and pink, and they both shared the same salacious contours. Each head was like a bowl of crushed silk, opening out to reveal its dense, heavy layers and display the complex folds of its interior with a powerful relish. The petals curled and ruffled to catch any saccade and pull it in, so that a maximum density of viewing was folded in on itself. All human sight was sucked towards a central concentration, a habitual, swollen funnel, like the mouth at the centre of an octopus’s beak, demanding to be fed by all its arms. The blooms seemed designed for the eye, matching their own craving to humanity’s visual gluttony; they even mimicked its anatomy, once the external ball was peeled away. A dozen or so of the bright, rumpled orbs moved at a speed concealed from her hectic eyes. Others stirred more positively, picking up the passing breeze, nodding in what seemed like a smug, taciturn agreement among themselves. Their vanity appalled; she could see the strain of opening as they demanded to be seen, the hinge at the base of each petal bending under the pressure, stressing until they fatigued and fell loose, leaving a swollen, pregnant ovary. That was the extent of their purpose: to gush colour and expose the wrinkles of their complexities; to attract admiration and excited insects and perpetuate the fertilisation of their kind.

  The more she looked, the more she saw the extravagant blooms as an insolent, mimicking raid on her eyes and a mocking sham of her womanhood. Their heads nodded in agreement, grinning in a pretence that lay between frailty and obese saturation, and her indignance overflowed. She could have rung the bell and called the maid to take the odious creations away, but that would have been too easy. She clenched her teeth at the thought of being defeated by these wretched weeds that shouted denial at her sensibilities. Then, without plan or agreement, she snapped shut the lids of her perfect eyes, walked forward, and picked up the vase; it slopped water onto her dress and all over the floor. She clasped it to her bosom like a troublesome child and walked purposefully across the room to the open door of the balcony, stepping out into the evening air as the peonies slid sideways in their vase, clinging together in an unordered, clammy sheath. At the far end of the balcony, she opened her eyes briefly and looked down into the corner of the enclosed garden. It was deserted. Closing off her vision once again, she lifted the swilling weight up and over the iron balustrade. The immense weight pulled at her joints, almost levering apart the clamped lids of her eyes. Then she let go, and a great gulp rose from the earth beneath, to meet the vase as it plunged through a long and delicious time before smashing, in glorious auditory technicolour, on the patio below. She remained there for a long, luxurious moment, arms stretched out, her eyes still shut, looking like an enchanted sleepwalker, smiling triumphantly on the edge of a precipice.

  —

  Rumours tend to spread like ripples, circular waves moving out from a point of incident. In cities, they stop for a moment when they reach the outer walls, especially when the city in question is circular. Against those arcs of fact and protection, they are questioned, the hard litmus of stone, straw, and lime interrogating their origin and validity, in the same way as those who camp outside, dreaming of entrance and stability, are made to prove their origins. If the story stands, it is filtered to the outside world in muted or fragmented form.

  When the miracle of the carnival reached the dispossessed and the injured who sulked in the shadow of the walls, a great stench of hope rose, its heat cooking the story and causing a bubbling at the gates. That was
when they started to arrive at Cyrena’s home. Not having the nerve to knock at the lofty door, they loitered outside her garden walls, hoping for a sight, if sight was in them, of the blessed lady, believing that proximity might affect their damaged condition, that radiance might mend.

  Chalky and his sister had found their way there hand in hand, begging their path to the ivy-covered wall. They carried white sticks, but, unlike those that Cyrena had so recently burnt, theirs had been cut each year from the forest and painted white by their father. Chalky’s eyes had been taken by flies when he was a child. They had crawled over him from the moment he’d left the womb, suckering and sweeping his sweaty skin, before leaving their eggs buried in his pupils at the age of three. It was not a rare occurrence in the village where he was born, but outside, on the road to the city, it prompted pity from passing travellers, and a slight income appeared in his father’s life.

  Exactly how his sister had gone blind was unknown. It had been sudden, having taken place in the middle of the night; all she remembered was the pain and the feeling that she was being held down, tangled in her gripping, sleeping sheet. Since then they had travelled the viable road together, bringing in an even larger revenue for the insatiable old man. The picture of them hand in hand, foraging by the busy track, would melt the hearts of travellers and prise open their usually reluctant purses. Their father did not know they were here; he assumed they were stopping the traffic outside the city with their tragic appearance, not in it, standing at the door of miracle.

  The story they had heard told of a grand lady who invited blind people to her home during carnival. The house had been bursting with them; the rattle and tap of their sticks could be heard outside, like the beaks of storks sounding from the rooftops. Perhaps she might make an exception outside of carnival time for two so young and needy?