The Erstwhile watched on, dismayed by the hunter’s barbarous arrogance. He was an imposter. His disconnection of self, for such a short time, was a small price to pay for entrance to these sacred lands, and they stayed afar, wanting no contact with the trespassing stranger. If they could have hoped, then it would have been for beasts to devour him, or for lesser men to emerge and gnaw on his godless, selfish bones. But morning found him safe and intact, and when the first warmth touched his face, he peeled his protections away, pushed the canoe back into the water, and headed upstream.
Dusk and the benediction of shadow were coming back, but not for the Erstwhile, who had become too old. When the sun went away, they creaked and cracked, crawling on the forest floor and hanging sloth-like from the trees. There was no cave or simple dwelling for them. They did not have the pleasures of men or the ability to make and change what was around them. They had each forgotten their purpose and the details of their design, how they had come to roam the ancient wood. But they all had longing, and it was attached to the actions of humans.
Their lightweight skeletons of spun coral and honey had absorbed the densities of water and time; now, heavier than bone, they filled their sluggish bodies with despair. Where feathers and light might once have been, there now grew vines and rough, scarred bark. Some had assumed coverings of fur or scales to keep their endless life forces protected.
Their unions with women had occurred thousands of years earlier, the resonant orgasm bleaching their voices and their sense of direction. Those that had mated were the ones that had been left behind with Adam, and with those that had been called the Watchers. Now derelict, their purpose and their application had washed away to rumour and ache. They roamed, pilfered, and scratched a life in utter, total materiality. Their ambition was to become invisible, to waste away into mist and breeze. But that, too, had been lost. Their given task was to protect the tree of knowledge, and so they remained in the forest, slowly becoming a forgotten part of it.
In previous times, a few had crept out, making short, scavenging journeys to the city. Fewer still had stayed away, to sleep with the Rumour, the name that they had given all those humans and semihumans after Adam, to twin with them in attempts to understand. They were chosen for the task, to go to places full of the Rumours, where land and time had been cultivated in scratched, straight lines and chopped, mean patches.
Aside from the chosen few, it was forbidden for any others to trespass the places of Rumour and false gods; the species carried such a virulent contagion and misunderstanding of knowledge that even God’s name was slutted by it. No one knew of the Erstwhile’s journeys to Essenwald until they pillaged the Chapel of the Desert Fathers. They should have been pitied, or sympathised with, but that was not the nature of men turned Rumour, who could not be blamed for following their own righteous teachings.
The Erstwhile had broken into the little church to look at the paintings. Without strength or tools, they had rubbed repeatedly at a patch in the wall, gradually wearing it away a little more each night, until eventually they were able to squeeze through and crawl about in the clean, closed darkness. Such an enclosure was beyond their understanding; its straight lines and solid walls confused them with wonder and fear. They were like insects at a glass window; everything there contradicted the laws and form of their existence.
They crept and flapped through the mystifying unity of out and in. When they came to the paintings, they froze. They stood, whimpering, before the framed print and the thick, black icon, shuddering and shaking in great swathes of moment, until they were stumbled upon the next morning by the young priest. They paid no attention to his presence, and he was oblivious to theirs, until he walked directly into them at the far side of the church. He dropped his box of waxy candle ends in shock, and yelped as he fell to the floor under the draft of their exit.
“It was a kind of wind, Father,” he jittered. “A kind of bumpy wind, like being pushed about in the market, but there was nobody there.”
He was standing outside in the sun an hour later, his breathing almost returned to normal, talking animatedly to the old priest and one of the city’s watchmen. The old man was watching him intently, while the other puffed knowingly on a curved briar pipe. As he described his extraordinary experience of that morning, it suddenly became much, much stranger.
As the images appeared before his eyes, the young priest fell off his chair, screaming and scrambling a pointless retreat.
“Oh God, oh Jesus!” He flailed in fright. “It’s them! They’ve come back!”
It took them a long time to calm him down. All the while, he looked about him fearfully, gripping the elder priest’s arm with a strength that had almost become painful.
“It was them, Father. I saw them; they were here! Running at me. Terrible things. Oh Jesus, protect me!”
“Be calm, my son, be calm; God is with you.”
“But, Father, it was them; I know it was. It was everything I felt them to be this morning; it was as if their visual form appeared to me from an hour before. How could that be?!”
Father Lutchen was very concerned but tried hard not to show it. “They have gone now; they won’t come back,” he said, and the words sounded like they had been said before. “Tell me one thing, my son.”
“Yes, Father?”
“Were they frightened?”
The young man pulled himself up the older man’s arm in small grabs, until their faces were almost touching. “They were terrified,” he said.
The priest sent the boy home with the watchman and made his way back into the chapel. He was in little doubt as to what he would find. He went to where the visitation had occurred, taking in the knocked print hanging askew on the wall. He looked at the floor and, slipping his shoes off, he walked carefully in tight, quiet little circles, a small, solemn dance in threadbare stocking feet. Occasionally, he flinched or abruptly lifted his foot, as if from the piercing of an invisible sharpness; his expressions flickered, wavering between a grimace and a smile, the bare environment seeming to send a message that he alone could interpret. Eventually, his circles locked into a shuffle, and he moved intuitively across the room, where he discovered the rubbed-away slot in the chapel’s sidewall. He had found their entry place.
He walked slowly back to the print, brushing his socks with his hand before slipping his shoes back on. The crooked picture caught his eye and he felt compelled to level it before he left. He reached out to straighten it, and his touch jolted it from the wall and he felt its weight drop into his hands. With a start, he pushed his hands up to return it to its nail, but it resisted, and as he drew slowly away, it remained in place, an inch away from the wall, unattached.
Though his instinct was to recoil, he had seen much stranger than this, and he refused to be shaken by it. He lifted the dusty string from the back of the frame and rehung the picture, its weight shifting again to the accepted limitations of gravity. He considered the image for a moment, a rendering of the angelic host from Gustave Doré’s most revered work. And then he turned and left, deep in thought, the illustration hanging limply in his wake.
Sidrus regarded Father Lutchen contemplatively.
“Twigs,” said the old priest to the forest guardian. “Twigs and leaves. A path of them, from the lesion in the wall to the point where they stood. All invisible, which means they came out of the Vorrh again.”
Sidrus and his tribe—all named Sidrus after the centurion who had saved the Sefer haYashar from extinction in the ruins of Jerusalem—had started as a scholastic branch growing out of the split tree of the Tubal-Cain. Somewhere in its tangled history, it had bred with the testaments of Enoch and Lilithian blasphemies to produce the hieratic order that Sidrus now fervently represented. The warrant he carried was of the Boundary Holders of the Forest, a position of responsible fanaticism that suited him well.
Their relationship was not a comfortable one: Many of the things the guardian and the priest believed and stood for were in opposition.
Then there was the problem with Sidrus’s face: The old priest had tried to avoid direct confrontation with it for years. However, in the working business of policing the sanctity of the forest, they were united.
“Surely ‘invisible’ is a contradiction?” said Sidrus, in response to the old man’s comment. “I prefer to refer to them as ‘visually elsewhere.’ ”
“The elsewhere of the Erstwhile,” the priest mused, without the faintest sign of humour.
“It’s the same old problem of resemblance,” Sidrus said in a weary tone. “Not holding their form away from the forest’s time, which is the very substance that bonds them; the delays of similitude slicing them into separation outside of its boundaries.”
“Well, their dislocation must not be witnessed here,” said Lutchen, “and they cannot be allowed to take our cause and effect back into the Vorrh.” He looked resignedly at the forest guardian. There was nothing more to be done: life had to be preserved in its current state, and for that to happen, action had to be taken.
—
They set about constructing the deceptively simple trap. A square section was cut out of the panelled wall where the Doré print hung. It was then set on a long, vertical spindle, so that it could rotate freely, and a small wooden wheel was attached to the top of the spindle, just above one of the U-shaped brackets that kept it in place. Strong, thin string was wound around the wheel, then looped out into the yard at the back. Sidrus had small, crude paper copies made of the print. He trailed them back to the forest, to the point where the Erstwhile had first escaped. The damp and sun would exhaust the pictures in three days, but hopefully not before one of them caught hold of the scent and was reminded of the larger, more vivid version. Now it was just a question of waiting.
They sat in the stillness for four nights, the young priest trying to keep his eyes open and away from the white, distorted countenance of the heretic at his side. The old priest had warned him of the night’s requirements—he had assured his young apprentice that it would be a test of his strength and of his faith. As he shivered in the moonlight, trying not to stare at the abnormality standing next to him, the young man could not be sure if the priest had referred to the trapping of the Erstwhile or the malign warden himself.
On the fifth night of waiting, the young priest spotted movement between the trees and hurried to tell Sidrus and the priest, who quickly made their way into the yard to take hold of the string.
In moments, there was a scraping sound around the worn-away slit in the wall, a rustling of entrance. They waited ten minutes, and then, very gently, the guardian pulled on the string. After a pause and a little tug, the wooden panel with the picture hanging on it spun around to face the outside of the church. There was an immediate shuffling inside the wooden building, like animals running through a stormy forest. After a while, it quietened. The three men held their breath: A faint movement could be heard outside, and they correctly assumed that the Erstwhile were very close. The picture frame swayed a little, touched by an unseeable force. Lutchen nodded to Sidrus, who again pulled the string. The panel turned back on itself, the picture again facing the inside of the chapel. The rustling grew frantic, but without the hollow resonance of size or weight. It distanced itself from the three men, as its creators returned to the chapel’s interior. The process was repeated for the next hour. At one point, when the ethereal beings were once more inside, the young priest began to giggle. Lutchen hushed him severely.
“This is not a game,” he said. The youngster returned to his imperceptible orchestrations, solemn faced in his superior’s rebuke.
On the final turn, with the image facing out, Sidrus leapt forward and retrieved it from its nail. He ran silently to the far end of the yard and placed the framed print at the top of a pyre of old wood. When he returned to his companions, his clothes reeked of kerosene.
The Erstwhile emerged more quickly than they had previously; perhaps they were learning. It was unlikely, their minds being that same, impenetrable substance as saturated sponge, but they did seem to find the panel in less time. Its emptiness sent them into convulsions. They rattled in circles as they looked for it; the men heard one go back inside. Lutchen knew that he and Sidrus would see all this in an hour or two, see this and worse. He would have to remember to warn the boy and not let him witness the burning, the detachment of visual existence; its delay in time was an unsettling phenomenon, especially when attached to such an act as today’s cleansing.
There was a commotion in the woodpile.
“They have found it,” whispered Lutchen.
The noise became louder as more and more wood slipped down, falling aside under their clandestine weight.
“They are climbing—do it now!”
Sidrus took a bottle out from the shadows and lit the rag that was stuffed into its neck. He rushed towards the pyre and threw it with all his might into the heaped wood. A great, explosive blaze bellowed up the dry wood. The whole yard was lit by its roar.
“Look away! Do not turn back!” demanded Lutchen of the young priest.
Inside the fast flames, there were slower movements, lumbering, slow-motion flailing. The wood was collapsing onto the thick smoke; the framed picture had fallen, shrunken into a crisp ball.
They watched in awe as a greater brightness grew inside the heart of the fire; oxygen being sucked into its vortex was turning the screaming core white. Many minutes later, it all collapsed into a tall heap of vivid coal and gleaming ashes. The smoke smelt strange: choking ammonia mixed with sweet cinnamon, sandalwood with briar and oranges, with bitter edges like the smell of roasting seashells.
“Is it done?” asked Lutchen.
Sidrus moved carefully forward. The pyre was now half his height. It twitched and cracked with loud retorts, a slow turning emanating from its core. He looked back at Lutchen and shook his head. He made a shooing gesture with his right hand, and Lutchen leant over to the young man still turned away from the flames, and whispered in his ear. He got up and the old priest pointed him away from the hot, moving embers. A steamy, bluish haze seemed to be condensing above the heat.
“Look, the animation, the halos,” said Sidrus with an excitement that made his face even more malformed. “The gas of their life escaping.”
An hour later, both men picked up the long-handled tools that they had concealed nearby. They probed the coals and the white, charred wood for anything that might be larger or living. They found only one part, its ash covering giving it the appearance of presence. It appeared to be a section of hip and upper thigh; the ball and socket joint was exposed and working, swivelling in the gritty charcoal, its stump pointing aimlessly towards the sky. There were other, smaller suggestions of form, but it was difficult to be sure exactly what they saw, because the heat from the fire was still so intense; their eyes smarted with it, causing them to shield their faces and continually turn away from the ripples of temperature.
As the flames slowly began to lose their power, they started to rake through the cooling embers, breaking up anything larger than a fist and reducing the wood and the Erstwhile to a low, smouldering carpet of ashes.
The job done, they quickly parted, not wanting to be together when the visual record of the incineration played in their heads. It would be an inescapable nightmare to watch this, to see the writhing and the screaming projected onto the inside of their eyelids; inflicting it on strangers or fellow brothers would only amplify the terror and demand a nauseous response that no other should witness: They chose to contain that horror in solitude.
The young priest, returned from his boundary of exclusion, was quiet and cold by the old man, who was white-lipped and tense.
“Father,” he said, with great care. “Father, is it not a sin, what we have done?”
The question helped Lutchen, giving him a substance to resist, a grit to stand firm on: “Those wrong creatures brought madness and fear into our world. They were never meant to share the time of men. Our work here is God’s work, and
the pain of the experience of it will be written in scars that I shall wear with fulfilment and modest pride until the Day of Judgment.”
The young priest remained silent and still, moving only to comply with Lutchen’s orders. He tied the older man to a chair in the vestry of the church, laying cassocks and a few old prayer cushions on the wooden floor, to soften the blows in case the old man became convulsive. When all was set up, he left, under strict instructions not to return before midnight, and not to enter the room, no matter what noises he heard coming from it.
—
Sidrus drank six glasses of absinthe and descended to the basement of his dwellings. In the pitch-black cellar, he would face the seeing on its own terms and wrench some power from its horror to use to his advantage. No act or crime could ever debase him. It was the way and the duty of his clan to milk cruelty and terror of their own benefaction, and some part of him relished the disgust that was about to erupt in his head. He gripped an iron ring in the wall and braced himself for the visions. He would not have long to wait.
The sun was fierce, 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 that 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 that 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, 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.
The Vorrh Page 26