The Vorrh

by Brian Catling

  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 to try to 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.

  “Great sister, I am of your own people, a common warrior who wants only to obey. I have heard your needs and ask for your blessing in bringing you aid. It is my wish to lift you and carry you in your journey.”

  There was no response; the bow remained still. As he stretched out his twice-spectred arm, the wrapping fell away, letting his fingers close around the supple maroon sheath; it did not struggle or shrink from his touch. He felt his hand enter into its apparent substance, the bow gripping him even as he gripped it. They fused together without hesitation and he was flooded with warmth.

  A single arrow was left in the vacant quiver, white and old and imbued with history; the wood of the shaft was stiff and twisted; the fletchings had lost their perk and gained a dingy yellowness about their edges. He retrieved it from its lonely perch and walked back to his vaporous ancestor.

  His slow grandfather turned towards him and immediately sprang back. For a second or two, Tsungali thought the old man had been petrified, but then his mouth opened and a thunderous, ethereal roar emanated soundlessly from him, rattling the leaves like seeds in a husk. The ancient ghost sprang from one foot to another, clapping his hands and bouncing in place. It was not the reaction his grandson had expected, yet in some indefinable way, his arm was not taken aback. As he stood in the awareness of the new sensation, it spread along his shoulder girdle, flowing into his other arm and curving in to embrace his neck and spine.

  “It is you,” the old man yelped. “It is you! You are the final one!” His nostrils flared and he whistled his short breaths, completely overcome with joy.

  Tsungali’s arms were one with the bow. He walked to the far corner of Cyrena’s garden, where the wall blocked the view of anything, and placed the warped arrow against the bowstring, bracing it against all his strength. Gravity was dissipated in the straining, swallowing the rest of his body in the act. The arrow pointed up, over the wall, in the direction of the Vorrh.

  In that second, everything stood still. The plants turned to face him, the lazy sunflowers most obviously, their heavy yellow crowns lolling around. The roses, drooping with scent, lifted their drowsy heads as tiny anemones strained up on delicate necks. The blind heads of worms, muscled out from their clinging arteries of mud metres below his feet, kept a breathless stillness, and the stalk eyes of snails swivelled into the scene. The kaleidoscopic lenses of a thousand bees and flies focused on him, their wings floating to a stop as the moment drew itself out to full length; the birds above came to a standstill, mid-flight, their attention locked on the unfolding below. Everything twisted towards the bracing, from the servants in the house to the citizens of the city.

  Then the arrow was loosened and breath was restored, before most could register its absence.

  With his grandfather matching his every step, the final Bowman left the house, relinquishing his care of the young man. Together, they walked the path of the arrow, following the rippling turbulence that it left, a humming song that vibrated in the air.

  A solid line of twisting swallows swam above them, forming a frantic, parallel shadow to guide the way and lead them through Essenwald’s glowing streets; past the towering cathedral and the balconied hotel; past the church of the Desert Fathers and the slave house; past memory and meaning and beyond the city’s walls, out onto the train track and into the heart of the Vorrh.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The first stabs of illness and return of the horses in his waking dreams made Muybridge relinquish his demands of his homeland. He would retire. He demanded to live with his cousin back in Kingston upon Thames. He would spend his last years there in quiet and splendid old age. England would have his bones and his triumph to immortalise.

  The last thing he expected was a commission from Her Majesty’s government—a commission to kill a horse.

  He stood proud and erect at the centre of a great barn. He looked like God. A mane of unkempt white hair, a long, fearsome white beard, and wild smoke eyebrows cocked ragged over piercing, unforgiving eyes. A stern, knowing face that saw the world in a hard light with gauged contrasts. He wanted to look like this—biblical, austere, and imposing. He was seventy-three years old and justified. He had remained justified all his life, and now, as a celebrated patriarch, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had the certainty of Abraham.

  Five men and a horse waited on his commands as the cold air and light streamed in from the tall open doors at one end of the hollow building. He spoke to them quietly and they nodded to his instructions. One man led the horse outside; the others took up their positions in the delineated interior. The walls and the floor had been painted black, immaculately clean and precise. White lines were drawn into the controlled darkness in chalky paint, grid patterns that framed the space into a stiffened concept and held the smells of the farm at bay. When the generated light came, it scrubbed the rural out, a fizzing brightness that tightened the interior into a fiction.

  Her Majesty’s men had made him a replica of his previous studio, where he could photograph what he wanted without anybody knowing. They had dragged him out of his docile years for these images, built his equipment into the old barn, followed every instruction and requirement he had given. He even insisted on the colour of the horse.

  “It must be white, pure white,” he had told them. “Preferably with a flowing mane.”

  Some of the government men had speculated, behind their hands, that this was a narcissistic whim, that he wanted an animal that looked like him. But they had been wrong: The photographer had another horse in mind, one from a stable of madness and violent dreams. But that was his business, not theirs; he was ready to make a picture that the world had never seen.

  Muybridge picked up a handful of cables and nodded to the two men at the far end of the barn. One put his fingers in his mouth, while the other lifted a gleaming Gabbett-Fairfax Mars pistol from a wooden box. It looked like a forging hammer.

  Muybridge called to the other, lesser man, who shuffled nervously at the far end, by the doors. The signal was given. The man outside whipped the horse hard into a stampede. The man with the fingers in his mouth whistled, a series of tearing notes. The horse bolted between them into the glaring, disembodied light of the fathomless hall. The other man lifted the gun. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched in insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the Gabbett-Fairfax, and the sound that followed swallowed everything else. The horse collapsed onto its running legs, sending up a cloud of black, swirling dust, its thrashing body digging into the white grid and splattering the walls from the exit wound in its spine. It snapped its neck in the violen
ce of its death throes, which, like everything else, seemed to be instantaneous. With its last snort of breath, the cameras ceased and a tidal wave of silence wallowed into the barn.

  All stood still in the settling air. After a moment, the nervous new electricity was turned off. The scene became operatic in the sliding light of the opening doors. The whistler and the horseman put on overalls and began to clean up around the corpse; the shooter put the monstrous gun back in its icon-like box and unpacked a maroon rubber apron and gloves and a box of equine surgical instruments. Some of the black dust still eddied, high in the shafts of daylight that flooded the barn, giving celestial animation to the actions of the industrious men. Muybridge seemed totally uninterested in the current activities and busied himself with the cameras, collecting their precious thoughts and taking them away, to be unlocked next door in his night-black chapel of chemicals.

  Muybridge entered the lightless room, out of focus and red. The darkroom’s proportions were shunted into afterimage by a scarlet lamp that did not illuminate, but swallowed any traces of normal white light or perspective.

  Water flowed ceaselessly, and the occupant moved with determination in the thick, urine-scented air. He soaked his hands and the glass plates in blind tanks of warm fluids. Sealing them, he counted aloud as he rocked them into waking under the hollow red of the mournful light. When they were complete, he released them and set them aside, the glass dripping dry while he prepared the next batch of chemicals. Once they were cured, he gently inserted them into the projector and opened them out as light and shadow on the flat screen below. Peering sideways into the focused surface, his eyes almost touched the image, seeking errors and imperfections: None were there. It was another immaculate work. Every grain of dust and spit of flying blood could be seen—sharp white sparks against the inverted black of the horse’s skin. He quickly blocked the flow of light and, with something close to glee, slid the sensitive paper beneath it, unsheathing the glow from the lamp once more. He set a loud clock ticking and adjusted the preciously kept temperature of the bloods. When the alarm bell sounded, he gathered up the paper and drowned it in the floating tray of liquid chemicals, lulling it back and forth until gradually, under his moving hands, a shadow appeared, a shadow darker than anything else in this bolted chapel, a shadow grown to become a space around the screaming void of a horse.

  Muybridge lifted the image of the spilling animal from one tank to another, where it floated with more of its kind in a circulation of fixatives. He dried his hands and pulled his long white beard out from his shirt collar—it had been tucked in so as not to stir the chemicals and spoil the process. He stepped back, straightening into a position of satisfaction and unbolting the door to the intensity of the world.

  An hour later, he laid out the sequence of photographic prints on a long, narrow table in his temporary study, which adjoined the barn. Four men moved together towards the images as Muybridge stepped aside to give them space around his pride.

  The running horse had been delineated, flattened to silhouette on a scaled grid. The cameras had erased the noise and the sickening third dimension. Now it could be studied, uncluttered by the stink of actuality. Great beauty strode across the dense chemical papers. The horse had become classical and otherworldly as it charged, buckled, and collapsed in a dignity of aestheticism.

  The men were delighted as they pored over the prints. Theirs was a world of mechanical precision, and this gridded slaughter had proved the value of its latest device. They packed away the evidence that would lead to manufacture and thanked Muybridge on the doorstep of his domain, shaking his hand enthusiastically.

  He closed the door on their departure. For a moment, in the narrow corridor between rooms, he mused on the effect that monstrous gun would have had on the anatomy of the despicable Major Larkyns, and how his last expression of stunned surprise and pain would have been so much greater. Even after all these years, he would have liked that. He would have liked his treacherous young wife to witness her lover being cut in two.

  It was a moment of delightful speculation before he returned to the serious business of the negatives. His military clients had their prints, but he had the negatives, and he had his own plans for the images. He had been at the pinnacle of a life’s achievement when he decided to chase another quality in his work: an elusive ghost that permeated everything he photographed. It had led him into deep speculation and personal violation, but still he could not put it aside. He was an artist, photographer, and inventor of prodigious importance—that was all secured, acquired against all the odds. The last few experiments were his, and they would answer the questions. He pictured a horse that never touched the ground, or one that charged under it, or another that stalked his sleep like a bedsheet phantom. This was to be his ghost dance. Process thrown over anxiety to flap in the corridors of then and his few remaining tomorrows and what beckoned beyond.

  Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. The glass negative was the removal of that splinter in his soul. The last machine he would create would look through the world. The glass negatives of the dying horse in a box of earth, using water to shutter its time and process a glimmer of far-off light that he thought might just be in Africa.

  Muybridge died a year later, but only after digging up half of his cousin’s garden. When somebody finally summoned the courage to ask him the purpose of the huge holes he had made, he replied, “I am making a scale model of the Great Lakes of North America.”

  No further questions were proffered or answered. His last two names were misspellings. Eudweard Muybridge written in the crematorium register. Eadweard Maybridge carved on the stone that marked his ashes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  On the night of their return from Ishmael’s reunion with Ghertrude, they made a strange mating. Ishmael made love to assert himself, while Cyrena’s endeavours sought a reassuring balm: Neither was achieved. The hybrid resonance that followed them into their sleep disturbed the house for days. They were only fortunate that the bow was already gone; she would not have fed well on the atmosphere they had created.

  Ishmael did not notice that Tsungali and the bow had gone. So absorbed was he in finding his place in his new life that he temporarily forgot his old one; he could hold no reflection on anything other than Cyrena. He longed for her to see his truth, not because he was deformed and rare, but, conversely, because of his growing normality and commonness. He hungered for her to mirror him in the depth of the love she so strongly professed. He watched her continually, when he thought she was unaware, to see if there were cracks or blemishes in the perfection of her surface. He wanted her to prove his existence in hers; all else had been empty, and the attempts of those who marked his passage had always failed: Even Nebsuel’s ministrations now seemed lost. His place in the world had been slippery, unfounded, and without a single trace of purpose, as hollow as a bottomless well.

  Cyrena visited Ghertrude once a week. She took care to do it alone; it was easier that way, and she could concentrate on her friend without distractions. She found relief in being clear of the house, to have a break from Ishmael’s constant attention. It was not his fault, she realised; he simply wanted to be close, but she had lived alone for years, and most of that time had been spent in a space that no other human could truly enter. The difference between the now and then was like the difference between the sound and the sight of the swallows. In her crossings of the city to visit Ghertrude, she would try to revert to those times, and her imagination and sensitivity would glide gleefully in advance. Sometimes they would warn of obstacles, but mostly they would tug her impatiently and joyfully forward.

  At the house, Ishmael always sat close to her; her feelers never seemed able to extend beyond him. He smothered her perception with his love and need, and she sought ways of stretching around it, for both of their sakes. She was aware that he sometimes watched her, as if listening to her heart for irregular beats and uncertainties. She assumed it was care, but at times it
felt like custody.

  —

  Ghertrude was regaining her strength, that confident energy that had so defined her from her first day in the world. But now it was turning inwards, no longer seeking to pry and investigate into the lives of others. Hoffman no longer stalked her dreams—he had been banished by the first visit of Cyrena and Ishmael. Her instincts told her that it was Ishmael who had done it, that it had something to do with the sounds from the attic. The eerie music, without structure or form, slid into the subconscious and opened pathways and doors previously closed. It had filled the entire house and had been the only thing to enter the basement in the years since her foray down there.

  Since she had told Cyrena about the incident with the Kin, she realised her memory of it had changed, as if sharing her story had given her space to reflect and see it from different angles. The facts remained the same, and the events occurred in the same sequence, but their meaning had somehow shifted. The puppet guardians no longer seemed uncanny and full of dread; instead, their actions appeared to have a calmness, care, and purpose, rather than the cruel, mechanical coldness she had so automatically and fearfully interpreted.

  How could this be? What had changed to allow her to give them such a great benefit of the doubt? In their absence, she realised that the only variable factor was herself. She considered the child growing inside her and wondered at the effects it might be having on her attitude, but surely that should be making her more protective, more hostile to anything that could be unnatural or threatening? Perhaps it was the harshness of recent events—the reality of violence, and the blind selfishness that so often instigated it. She had, after all, witnessed it firsthand. Hoffman, Maclish, even Mutter, had behaved in ways abhorrent to all that she treasured and believed; blood and anger had washed the innocence from her eyes. Ugly conceptions and spiteful deceits had hacked at her heart until it had shrunk and burrowed deeper into its meaty cage. In such a fearful setting, those brown things were turned into the dreams of another place, as opposed to the nightmares of this one.