The Vorrh (16 page)

When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.

‘Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muybridge.’

The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.

‘It’s the angels,’ Gull said. ‘The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the Cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head, it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.’

He smiled broadly at Muybridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like the same vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.

‘Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable, but caused no long-term structural damage.’ Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. ‘There may be side effects,’ he said, ‘but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours, do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.’

He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muybridge towards the door, he said, ‘Are you planning to return to America?’

The photographer nodded. ‘Eventually.’

‘I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Make pictures of that wilderness,
force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.’

They stood either side of the door, their handshake passing through.

‘Will you send your fee?’ Muybridge remembered to say.

‘No, I think not,’ said the surgeon. ‘We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.’ He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. ‘Read this in the future,’ he said, and closed the door.

The great German cathedral had two towers that should have been twins, but irrational time had delayed one, causing a fluctuation of ideas to warp its mirrored principle. Some shards of fashion and theology had dented its skeletal helix, making the thin needle twist out of symmetry with its sister. A slim, silver bridge joined the towers near their apex and highlighted the subtle difference between them: one tower had the clock, the other the bell. Each month, a trumpeter would celebrate the moon from the dizzying heights of the slender walkway. The pang luna ceremony, one of many that were the responsibility of Dean Casius Tulp, had been imported along with the stones, the design and the meaning of the great church.

(Many of the natives of the area also believed that the freak changes in the weather had been smuggled in with the invaders. It was certainly true that a new cold infested the nights in the winter season. Frost had been seen for the first time after the spires had been made, and different kinds of clouds now lurked above their spikes and tried to swallow the moon. But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh; it seethed in heat and ignored any rumour of ice.)

The dean stood in the whistling, circular room with the pallid musician and one of the younger wardens. They were all panting. After climbing the forever spiralling stairs, pointed clouds of silvered air wheezed from them into the cold chamber, two hundred feet above ground. They were like so many arctic fire-eaters: none had the energy to talk, which made their steamy speech plumes all the more vacant. They were giddy, faintly
nauseous and desperately trying not to think about the space below. The inexperienced warden had already opened the arched door onto the frost-covered walkway, which trembled and sang with the wind. The musician was becoming the same colour as the platform from which he would perform tomorrow.

Tulp spoke first. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘This weather is very unusual, never seen the like of it before, just like the Old Country. Your music will be heard all the better under these conditions, it will sound out across the whole city.’

Nobody moved or wanted to think about tomorrow, and everybody had forgotten the Old Country. Their thoughts were about the grip of their shoes, the strength of the floor and the little bit of their own personal gravity that enabled them to resist the wind. They clutched the railings, the walls, or anything of a solid nature, with a fervent vigour.

Ghertrude’s bright head appeared through the floor and startled them with its ease. ‘Here are the keys and the moon ring, father.’ She climbed into the room with a wave of excitement that made the men grip their supports even more firmly. Giving the ancient velvet bag to the older man, she turned into the blast from the open door and, in purposeful joy, walked towards it and out onto the bridge. The men’s insides shrank, their spines and stomachs slivering over the threshold and plummeting, with the imagined falling girl, towards the hard, cobbled ground. She was laughing as the wind plucked at the fur of her collar and her hair to make another jealous imitation of fire. ‘I can almost see to the other side of the Vorrh!’ she yelled. ‘Look at the people, like ants!’ Her shoes rattled on the slender metal as she tapped her feet in excitement. She only had one hand on the silver rail; the other waved towards the abyss. Nobody went out, and nobody would have ever dared to look down. It took some effort to get her back into the tower.

She had been fourteen at the time, and had begged to be given the job of organising the moon call every year. After ten days of incessant
pleading, interspersed with silent, certain haughtiness, the dean had given in and she had been awarded the position: the first woman and the youngest in history.

Now, all these years later, she stood again on the bridge and gazed out over the city. Flocks of birds were wheeling below, their shrill cries caught in the rising chimney smoke. Further down, a warren of business squirmed in the mud. She looked down onto 4 Kühler Brunnen, lit by the slanted rays of the afternoon sun; into its courtyards and odd-shaped garden; at its shuttered windows and what she knew to be inside. She pictured him, like a flea or a speck of grit, hard and senseless, encrusted into the upper rooms. She thought how tiny his eye would be from here. Looking at the streets that he would never see, she shivered at his growing need to walk in them. A raven crossed her view, circling the roof under which he paced or slept. It landed and looked down into the garden. She grinned at their telescoped comparison, then thought of God peering down at her petty elevation. This was a fancy that she did not care for, and she switched to more practical matters, deciding to go to her parents for dinner that night. There were a few more questions to be asked about the old house.

At this moment, the rods under the bridge, which connected the clock to the bell, started to move. She felt their expectancy shift, seconds before the mechanism fell into gear. The weights lurched and the cogs started to gnaw into the allotted time. It was time to go.

She turned towards the door and moved a fraction, when something hooked her back to the distant rooftops: there was something below, almost unseen. It pecked at her mind’s eye, and slid a new dimension into what she thought she knew so well. She moved back, targeting the raven and opening her sight. There it was: a tower. A shrunken, octagonal chimney, rising from the corner of the roof of 4 Kühler Brunnen. The tiled turret was hidden in the patterned complexity of the rooftops, and the raven stood on its brim, his shadow sliding over
its edge. This was another secret of the house that she was beginning to think of as her own.

She flew down the spiral stairs into the echoing nave, its booming organ trying to rival the setting sun, which was already stoking up the great windows of the west side. She knew that, if she sped, she would catch Mutter before he returned home that night.

He already had the quiet, hasty key in the lock when she pounced.

‘Sigmund! Come with me.’

She entered the garden gate and hurriedly walked around the side of the house, looking up at the roof. Mutter trailed behind her, his head too tired to stare at the sky.

‘There! There!’ She pointed upwards. She was crouched, almost sitting in the shrubs, beneath the tall wall at the garden’s far end. Only from such an extreme angle could the tower be seen, sheltering in the fractured perspectives of the interlocking roofs. She pointed again. ‘There! What is that? Look, man, look!’

He lumbered over to her, bent sullenly, and stared upwards.

‘There, there! What is it?’

After a few moments of squinting and shifting, while she jabbed rabidly at the air, he said, ‘It’s a raven, ma’am.’

Back in the house, they climbed the main stairway. She was very quiet and intent; Mutter was stiff, formal and distant. He had become used to her commands, to her shifts of mode and her haughty righteousness. He had come to expect it. But nobody had ever spoken to him in the way that she just had. If it had been a man, he would have cuffed him into submission and apology. No woman had ever dared to call him a fool and worse; it stung his pride and abraded his manhood. And all because of a crow, or a raven, or some invisible chimney! He was saturated in sulk, and wore it with a sullen distance.

Ghertrude knew she had been wrong to lose her temper with him; she needed this man, especially now. She stopped on the stairway and turned to face him. ‘Sigmund, I am very sorry for behaving so badly. You are a good and trusted servant and I have talked to you like an angry child. I must ask your forgiveness, it will not happen again.’

He was amazed. Before her outburst, he had been secretly growing to respect her; now it seemed she had proven him right in doing so. He was lost for words, and strong emotions erupted in small spots inside him, like pennies in a cap.

‘Do I have your forgiveness?’ she asked.

He grunted a nod.

‘Good. Now, let’s find this tower,’ she said, turning to resume her climb and lead the way up through the house.

On the third floor, she put her finger to her lips as they crept past Ishmael’s suites. They walked the length of the corridor, but no other door could be found there, or in any of the adjacent rooms. Mutter pointed up at the ceiling and whispered, ‘the attic’, the entrance to which was at the other end of the building.

It was the most unused part of the house, not counting the cellars or the well, which were best ignored. Inside a tiny box-room, which at one time must have been used for servants, they found the stairway. Its carpentry was different from the rest of the house. It was tree-cut wood, still showing forms of branches and organic twists in its length. It suggested that the ladder had been grown, rather than constructed, conjured from the forest for a measured purpose. It was neat and strong, and led to a roughly painted hatch in the ceiling.

Mutter lit the bullseye oil lamp and started up the stairs. His bulk made the wood creak as he pushed upwards, flipping the door inwards and lifting the light into the dark volume.

‘Please wait a moment, mistress,’ he said, and continued to climb until just his feet were visible, huge on the delicate ladder.

Ghertrude was instantly reminded of the fearful giant following Jack down the beanstalk to terrorise his world. She suppressed a titter and looked up. ‘What can you see?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ he answered.

She climbed onto the ladder too, intending to ascend, but it objected noisily. She got a whiff of Mutter’s rear end, an aroma that was, essentially, peasant: root vegetables and meat, laced with hard work, tobacco and strong drink, all amplified by a distaste for bathing.

She stepped back onto the solid floor and into more fragrant air, just as he disappeared into the groaning hole.

‘My God!’ he said, in a voice that rang with sympathetic resonance, like a child calling into a lute.

‘What?! What is it?’ she cried, hands once more holding the ladder, but this time with firmer intent.

‘You better come and see,’ he called.

The immense attic ran the entire length of the house, with a dramatic, right-angled turn at the far end, suggesting its continuation over an adjoining property. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dry gloom and the resonance, which seemed to be tuning itself to her breathing.

Mutter spoke with an unearthly, musical clarity. ‘Take care, the floor is covered in wires!’ The words transmuted into a fluttering choir of angels. If his harsh, guttural voice had been so cleansed and extended, what would she sound like?

Then she saw the taut and gently glinting strings, in the light of their lamp. Spider yarns delineating the distance, causing it to resemble the open fields as seen from above. Nitre, she thought, lines of fungi glistening, but it hummed. Yet again, that impossible word leapt into her mouth. It had been ordained that she would forever question strangeness with strangeness in this unpredictable house. She breathed out the call.

‘WHAT!’

It sang with a liquid vibrancy that coloured the space and made the
blood dance in every quivering capillary. A tangible thrill rattled their bones and forced them both to grin like cats. When they drifted back to reality, the attic was ready to show them more.

They saw limp lines of cord hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the strings. Boxes of iron balls and boxes of feathers were interspaced, placed close to the wall. The prone wires were listening to them, accosting and commenting on their movements and distorting Mutter’s whispers. The wires resonated with their every sound. Her word still sang in the air.

There was a narrow path across the attic between the strings. Not a straight path, which would have made more sense to the fixed delineations, but a winding track that forced the tense wires to make a more random pattern, or perhaps it was the other way around. Like the rest of the house, there was no dust covering these mysteries. Ghertrude stopped to touch and admire the objects as she walked, in a dreamlike glaze, through the hollow room. Mutter was more cautious and thrust his hands deep into his tarry pockets. Then they saw the door, and knew, without words, that it would lead them to the tower.