The Vorrh

by Brian Catling

  The first cut felt like only pressure, until he skinned the nerve and everything in Williams’s mind turned white.

  —

  He did not know how many times he had passed out or how many times he had come to. New agonies awaited him with every breath. The night arrived and the wind dropped; he was about to scream again when he felt it change, its velocity fluttering and calming into a whisper.

  “Now,” he heard himself say. But now what?

  He felt something, far outside the chapel, searching him out, rushing to his side. Was this what Sidrus searched for? A secret approaching, to be given to him and then passed on? A secret whose journey was triggered by blood? Sidrus moved closer.

  “Speak up, Oneofthewilliams: Your time has come, as I told you it would.”

  The whistle outside was shrill and fast, only moments away. Sidrus was oblivious; he pushed his disgusting face closer to his prey’s mouth, but the sounds he heard had no meaning.

  Williams saw the voice from the corner of his eye. It flashed white in the window for a fraction of a second, and he recognised it as the first arrow, the one that Este had made for him; he almost smiled before it sliced through his throat, pinning his words to the altar.

  Sidrus sprang back in a shower of blood, his white face drenched pink.

  “No!” he bellowed at the dying man, tugging desperately at the white arrow impaled in his neck. But it was no use: Williams was gone, and the arrow would not move. Sidrus slumped backwards, defeated and dejected. He wiped a shaking grey hand over his bloodied face. He sat there until the dawn’s grey sheen made the chapel hover. The thin light moved across the room, momentarily highlighting a tiny painting of a heavily bearded prophet, standing in a flat black landscape of featureless insistence. The colourless prism illuminated the dead man’s face to reveal an expression of pleased contentment. No man who died in such pain should look like that. Sidrus scrabbled to his feet and grabbed at the ropes around the corpse. There was a smile somewhere in that face, under the bone, working like a battery and powering an expression of total peace. Sidrus shook the dead body in rage. The arrow fell loose, as though it had merely been resting there.

  He could bear no more. Grabbing his things together, he speedily shovelled the blunted probes and knives into a sack. The brazier had not fully cooled and he left it behind, pushing impatiently out into the damp, brightening air.

  He ran towards the forest. It took him an hour to reach its sanctified enclosure; it already felt different, less troubling: He felt at ease there. Had he got it? Were those words, those few, strange words, the secret? Could he at last go deeper and contact the Erstwhile directly, communicate with them in some tangible way? The forest warmed and flamed with beauty as the full power of the sun rose over it: He was welcome here. He had it. It had begun.

  —

  He dropped the sack of tools and made straight for the core. His patience had run out: He needed to find the older being and be cleansed of the wounds he had already carried for too much of his life. It was midday; huge shafts of light flooded down from the canopy, shuddering with life and birdsong. He could see the swallows darting in the sky between the spaces of trees; something rustled in the undergrowth, followed by a trill in the air; the swallows spun into a line and parted the leaves above. A great arc formed and glided down from the clouds to the forest floor. It approached at speed, almost upon him before he understood what shrilled inside the arc. It was another arrow, old, white, and twisted. It spun to the ground with huge purpose. It struck its target: a grey-skinned creature that had been hiding in the undergrowth. It fell to the ground in front of Sidrus with a force that echoed through his bones. It cried out, thrashing momentarily before falling silent.

  Birds spiralled upwards, fluttering through the chattering leaves and out to quietness. He bent to examine the creature’s grey skin, unable to decide if it was man or animal; it seemed much too shrivelled, as if it had been dead for years rather than seconds. His interest faded with the recollection of his purpose; he walked away from it, not noticing the two black ghosts who approached in his departure.

  Tsungali disregarded the mangled presence in the chapel: There was nothing to be gained from such a lost and empty being; he was like a white sack, limp and vacant, standing only because he did not have the wisdom to fall. Tsungali and his grandfather approached the other dead thing. The old man pulled the arrow they had shot from Cyrena’s garden out of its parched grey skin. He gave the arrow to Tsungali without his eyes ever leaving the carcass. His other hand circled above his trembling head. He knew what they had killed but could not believe that it had strayed so far from perfection. He lifted the creature’s hand and parted the fingers, removing moss and lichen that clung there. The fingernails had turned into horny claws. He pulled away tendrils of ivy that grew under the skin and what might have once been veins and arteries. The distorted covering fell away like parchment and revealed what had once been a human hand. The first human hand. The grandfather turned away and told Tsungali to shoot the same arrow out of the forest, pointing his attention into the shafts of swirling light.

  From the moment the arrow left the bow, followed on its journey by the duo of earnest spirits, Sidrus’s vision started to fail. The sound of the bow echoed behind his eyes; they quivered in his head and lost focus. His skin crawled with a shiver that had previously been the avatar of Mithrassia, but this was something else, something altogether different. It must be the blood, he thought, or else the thrill at the beginning of his repair. It was as though his entire body was alive with thousands of ants, running over and inside his changing skin, rewriting his structure and purpose. He came to a murky pool and plunged his white head into its brackish waters to wash off any last traces of Williams’s death. The water felt cool and cleansing against the heat of his purpose, his exposed body embraced by the closeness of the trees. He emerged and dried his wrecked face carefully on his shirt, breathing heavily into its comfort. When he opened his tight, button eyes, all that lay before him was mile upon mile of desolate black peat.

  EPILOGUE

  The book was a present

  Best to throw it away, to the bottom

  Of the sea where ingenious fish may read it

  Or not.

  JOHN ASHBERY, A Snowball in Hell

  BELGIUM, 1961

  The streets are livid with bright cars; they seem to run at the same speed as their horns. The sunburnt boulevard is engorged with primary colours. The American poet looks at his map once again. Brussels seems to be based on an irrational grid. Eventually, he locates the cul-de-sac, snatches up his briefcase, and strides on, past clipped gardens that are manicured to retentive perfection. As he walks on, the buildings become older and more dishevelled. He arrives at the entrance of the public nursing home, enters, and is met by the universal smell of old age, an indelicate ambience of urine and sour cooking; here in central Europe, it is tinged with perfume and garlic. He talks to the staff in a remote French from his high school. Most of them are peasants, or foreigners with accents weirder than his. He claims good, proper French, taught to him and his classmates by a tutor from Montréal.

  A Moroccan woman in a stained, threadbare uniform of blue and white takes him through the old house, which has been embalmed in magnolia and disinfectant. They climb two tasteless flights of stairs. The American is nervous and keeps pushing his spectacles back onto the bridge of his nose. She takes him into a large room full of seated women.

  “Madame Dufrene, your visitor is here.”

  All the old women look around. He panics: He has no idea what she looks like. Then a hand waves from a seat by the window.

  The once grand room has crumbled into institutional decay. He carefully crosses it, avoiding the damp patches and dropped objects that redesign an exhausted carpet. She is frailer than he expected, double wrapped in a heavy shawl as the sun floods the streets outside.

  “Madame Dufrene, good morning! Please allow me to introduce myself,” he begins.


  Charlotte listens and smiles kindly at the incorrect precision of his French. He pretends to make an effort to engage in polite conversation but soon tires of the charade and pounces on his only interest. For the next hour, he asks endless questions about the Frenchman. Most of what he says is incomprehensible to her. She grows weary of the strain it takes to understand him, becoming more and more uncertain about what it is that he actually wants.

  “May we talk a little about the last days in Palermo?”

  She is aware that he does not see her, does not look in her eyes. He is so appalled by her fall from grace that he cannot bear to acknowledge her tired gaze. He buries himself in the questions and pushes on relentlessly.

  “Is it true that he could not sleep in his bed, that he had a fear of falling from it? Is that why he was on the floor next to your door when they found him?”

  She thinks of the genius of the man and knows it is not what this large, lumpy American wants. For her, his brilliance was not in his books or his words, but in the moments when he became a unique, infused, individual human being, doing what he loved most. She thought of him sitting at the piano, playing, improvising voices. He could mimic everything from the trams squealing outside to exotic animals, from opera divas to common street singers. It made them both laugh, in that time when he still could.

  “Do you have any pictures of your time together?”

  She expected this and pulls a large, crumpled manila envelope out from under her shawl. She digs into it and, after a few moments, produces a dog-eared photograph. They are posed like a married couple: she seated, him standing behind her chair; her kindness radiates, even lending beauty to her startling hat, which resembles the neck of a dead, inverted swan. The American is mesmerised: this is the best image of his literary hero he has ever seen. It shows a taut, immaculate man of precise, if diminutive, proportions.

  “This is wonderful, truly wonderful!”

  She warms towards him and relaxes. He listens as she begins to unwrap an explanation of what their relationship truly was. It has become quiet in the room; even the incessant coughing has stopped. The ladies subtly strain to catch the details.

  As he is about to leave, he remembers the gift he has brought her and rummages about in his briefcase. He presents her with the chocolates and asks if they can meet again. She is delighted and says nothing would please her more.

  They meet four times more; on the last occasion, he visits her in her own room in the elegant, private nursing home that houses her final days in peaceful dignity.

  —

  He had worked hard ever since he had first left her in the crumbling decay. He had instigated the move, and surrealism had paid for it. Now she shone in her reflective surroundings. She beamed at him when he arrived and showed him around the room, pointing out her prized possessions, which had been locked away in storage for the last nine years. She wanted to tell him everything, but there was so little detail that he really wanted to know, and she had already forgotten so much. Only the joy and spite remained, embedded over the years; the rest had fallen away. Nevertheless, they talked for hours. She enjoyed the company of the soft, shapeless man and did not welcome his final departure; he started to rummage in the briefcase and she knew he had already left.

  Like a disappointing conjuring trick, the chocolates had transformed into a book. She stared at it as he adjusted his spectacles.

  “I thought you would like this: It’s just been published, the latest edition.”

  She took it from him; it seemed unfinished, without a spine or hard covers.

  “It’s the first publication in paperback,” he said gleefully.

  She thanked him and held it close. They said their goodbyes and he slipped away, waving back to her along the diminishing corridor: She knew she would never see him again. She crossed the plush carpet and lay down on the bed, bolstered slightly by the crisp white pillows, her thoughts soft edged and reminiscent.

  The dove had won over the raven, at least up to the very last days. She had fought hard and dogmatically for its victory. His cruelty had been painful to her, but nothing like the carrion bird that had stabbed at his own heart continually. Now she would banish that and see him only as she wanted to: mimicking music hall stars, or playing Max Kinder’s hopeless decadent fop, seated at the piano again, his fingers skipping across the keys, his warbling voice dimming into a plaintive hum.

  The book was in English; its title sounded more emphatic that way. Impressions of Africa—he would have liked that. She imagined him reading it out in the mock British accent he so enjoyed. She smiled, closed her eyes, and put the book aside. She would never read it, not in English. She had never read it in French.

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