The Vorrh (34 page)

‘I have brought you some of my pictures by way of thanks.’ He lifted up the small portfolio by the side of his chair, untied the strings, and opened it out onto the massive desk.

‘This is really very kind of you,’ Gull said, genuinely taken aback.

Muybridge had brought a collection of ten prints, five of which were of the wild places Gull had advised him to seek out all those years ago. He laid them out on the grand mahogany desk and stood back, allowing the doctor a clearer view.

Gull ignored the magnificent views of Yosemite valley, the panoramas of San Francisco, the ice mountains of Alaska. He even ignored the running horse, Muybridge’s most famous work. Instead, he homed in on the four other, more diverse images, pushing the landscape master works aside to see them.

‘What are these?’ he murmured with obvious excitement. On the table lay a picture of an ancient sacrificial stone from his visit to Guatemala, a print of the Ghost Dance, and another, from the same time, of two medicine men of the Shoshone. The final image was his composite of Phases of the Eclipse of the Sun. Gull pored and clucked over them, wanting to know their exact history and meaning. It became obvious by his questions that he had not the faintest interest in his artistic talent or technical skill; he was interested only in the subject of the photographs. He drew the four images closer to him.

‘May I keep these?’ he asked.

‘They are all for you,’ answered the dispirited artist.

‘Remarkable!’ he said to himself. The doctor seemed to have forgotten Muybridge completely. ‘Look at the intensity of those faces; such men could do anything!’ he said, as if speaking to the photographs themselves. ‘Truly remarkable!’

‘I wondered if my photographs might help your patients?’ Muybridge said.

‘What? Sorry, what did you say?’

‘I only wondered, Sir William, if my photographs might be of help to your patients?’

‘How?’ Gull asked cautiously.

‘If patients, like the one we saw today, had an actual image of themselves, then could they, perhaps, compare it to their misconceptions and find a treatment in the photograph’s truth?’

Gull thought for a moment. ‘It would not work, I tried giving them all mirrors, they don’t use them the way we do. A picture would be the same,’ he said dismissively.

Muybridge was deflated by such an obvious comparison; surely his offer was worthy of a little more consideration?

‘Have you heard what Charcot is doing in Paris?’ Gull asked.

The name was familiar. He ran it through his memory, but Gull was oblivious to his ponderings and proceeded to tell him anyway.

‘He is a clinical doctor, like me, good old solid anatomy, body mechanics. But, like me, he is moving into the machinery of the soul, the invisible stuff that doesn’t bleed and won’t be sewn, perhaps the true centre of malady and health. This year, he will open a new department to investigate that which cannot be seen: the hidden pulses of the body. I envy him that. We both have our private wards, but this is something altogether different. If I were twenty years younger, I too would throw away the bone saws and totally engage in the surgery of the mind.’

Muybridge was a little confused and said nothing.

‘Anyway, the reason I tell you of this is that he is using photography, not just to make pictures of a patient, but as a therapy in itself. I have no idea how it works, but one of our junior doctors was there last year and he saw what they were doing. You should go and see it.’

It was all beginning to sound like the kind of spurious fiction Muybridge so thoroughly distrusted, and it being a French innovation only made it worse; his distrust of French claims was long-standing and inherent – he often found them to be greatly exaggerated, and the natural boundary between fact and fiction to be a lot less substantial in France. Even Marey, with whom he had exchanged many ideas, had a fanciful turn of mind that was more interested in the aesthetics of his machines
than the result they were supposed to produce.

He suddenly realised where he had heard Charcot’s name before. ‘Yes, Salpêtrière!’ he exclaimed with relief, happy to be able to prove his knowledge. ‘The Parisian teaching hospital.’ His host looked at him oddly.

‘Yes, precisely. You should go,’ said Gull, closing the subject.

Muybridge realised he was not going to talk his way into Gull’s private wards. He understood for the first time that Gull had no real interest in him. It had been the malady that had sparked his interest, not the man who bore it. The surgeon wanted a new set of tools to reach in and adjust, to be able to remake the man. The individual was incidental and expendable to his quest. He glanced at his host as the understanding dawned, but the man in question was looking again at the Ghost Dance photograph.

‘Remarkable; the strength of willpower.’

‘Like that poor woman,’ Muybridge said.

‘Yes! Exactly!’ said Gull, the energy of a small, wiry man jumping up and down inside his solid, unmoving frame. ‘The determination of that pathetic creature to believe in her view, even until death itself. And I have others who show even more voracity.’ He pointed at the shaman. ‘If that willpower was focused like these, and sharpened with knowledge, well… then we would have an instrument to investigate and repair the soul of any man or woman. I could put my hands into their heads and hearts and change everything.’

Muybridge nodded silently.

Outside, the London particular
²
had arrived, a dense and all-consuming fog that swallowed light and dimension, misplacing the blurred sounds of the city. As he stood in the dim, damp chill, Muybridge realised that Gull had said nothing about the print of the eclipse, although he had touched
it repeatedly throughout their conversation.

He tried to find a cab in the confusion of muffled shadows and sounds, but failed, and realised that he was lost. His only way home was to ask each person he bumped into which way he should go. Stepping stones, again; stepping stones in a fog. His life was full of them.

* * *

They were still talking about Adam when he thought he recognised the broader track as the one that would lead towards the station and, hopefully, the waiting train. He had endured quite enough of this. Even with Seil Kor’s fanciful stories and his warming presence, he wanted to be back in the hotel with hot water and cold wine. His ankles and toes hurt from the exertions needed to keep his ruined shoes intact. The bruises, cuts and insect bites rubbed incessantly against his stained robes, the texture of which now expressed itself as irritant and rough. Dried saliva still covered him and had turned rank and sticky under the humid heat of the forest, its persistent odour seeming to have gained access to every pore of his exhausted body.

‘Adam will never leave now,’ Seil Kor was musing. ‘The angels have grown old and weary in the forest; perhaps they have forgotten their purpose. Perhaps God has forgotten them all.’

Uculipsa moved out in a long, slow motion, the gleaming bolt pulled back and forth to load one of the charmed, .303 rounds into the breach. The nose of the rifle poked through the bushes, sniffing at the voices that were approaching.

‘How much further do we have to walk?’ asked the Frenchman, realising that he had recognised the wrong track and that there was no sign of the rail line.

‘Two more hours,’ answered Seil Kor.

Tsungali pulled the eager rifle back; it was not his prey. He slid the bolt open and removed the cartridge, placing it in one of the charm pouches he wore on a bandolier. He did not see the thin trace of string escape from the flap of the pouch, the low, damp air catching it in a gust of heated breath. Every bird in the immediate vicinity took off in a startlingly discordant flapping of wings. Tsungali’s gaze twisted up sharply and he observed them in keen suspicion, as they filled all the spaces in the sky between the leaves of the canopy. 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 passer-by triggered its urgent jump and vampire attachment. On this day, it would only have a few minutes to wait.

* * *

The years had been kind to Muybridge – his endless labours and determination had paid off, and he now lectured all over the world; he was in demand, a man of consequence.

His vast portfolio of animals in movement had been a great success. He thought about making another great study, this time of human beings in motion; there was no shortage of subjects.

He had left the rest of his competitors standing. Marey, as predicted, had been easily sidetracked by pretty machines and worthless fancies, leaving Muybridge as the only contender of worth in the field of science and the application of photography for serious purposes; he had been right to trust his instincts. He had given up his correspondence with Marey after receiving his last letter, in which the whimsical Parisian had
rambled on about cameras that might record ‘other’ time. It had been a mistake to ask him about Charcot and his experiments in photography. Marey had incorrectly assumed that a fascination with the potential for capturing mental manifestations (or worse) plagued his ambitions, even though he had explained to him the nature of being an objective artist, involved only with the bare bones of fact. That last letter had talked about theoretical cameras, engaged in the recording of impossibly slow movements, such as trees or the depths of the night sky. It had even suggested that holes might be dug in the ground and different levels of water be used as reflective lenses. What the deluded man could ever hope to achieve by standing over such a pit and seeing the stars and foliage reflected in its dismal mud was altogether beyond him.

Any further conversations about such nonsensical speculations could have been damaging to Muybridge’s carefully constructed reputation and standing; Marey was duly ignored.

On his way to developing the twelfth generation of his zoopraxiscope, he set about making a copy of Gull’s instrument from memory, estimating where and how it fitted together. Using an assortment of mirrors, he began to identify the exact flickering phenomena that the surgeon had produced. In the second week of his attempts, he came very close, producing a lapping shadow that made him dizzy; he thought about the frequency, the pulsing light and dark, whether it opened the eye to a different sight somehow, affecting the brain directly; he identified a lens that concentrated his creation’s glare to a pinpoint of burning, incandescent energy. Throughout it all, he wondered whether Gull used this instrument in his private experimental wards of skeletal women, if he had found a way of focusing their distorted but empathic willpower.

Gull’s paper on their malign mental condition had caused a stir in small medical circles. He had given the tragic illness the name
Anorexia nervosa
, and it cut him another step in history. But Muybridge knew that
the good surgeon’s fascination with their brains was on a much deeper level than their eating habits. After all, when half of London was locked in famine, what use could this privileged knowledge about a privileged sickness be to anyone? Gull and he had a lot in common, he thought. The doctor obviously believed this too, because three months later, the letter arrived.

Dear Mr. Muybridge
,

I pen this hasty note as a disclaimer to my previously false assumption about photography and my special patients. I now think you were right in your belief about their response to images of them
.

Please, the next time you are back in London, let us put your suggestion to a clinical test
.

W. W. Gull

Muybridge was ecstatic. He desperately wanted to see the physician’s private wards; to be given the tour of the rank and raving females, and see the extent of the mania that Gull had merely hinted at before. He replied at once, and the necessary arrangements were swiftly underway.

He stood in the leafy suburbs of London, having been redirected from Sir Thomas Guy’s hospital by another note, this time held by a surly porter. He was in Forest Hill. The southern railway from London Bridge had deposited him there, where Gull had said his private clinic was situated. He stepped out of the station and into the overly green trees; a coachman waited for him at the roadside. Ten minutes and dozens of green turns later, they pulled in through high metal gates and stopped. He was taken inside by a custodian, or a warder, he thought, a rhino of a man dressed
in a long apron over a dark uniform, with a peaked cap that accentuated the man’s hornlike nose and low, sloping forehead.

‘Thank you, Crane,’ Gull said to the departing shadow. ‘Mr Muybridge, welcome.’ He put out his square hand for his visitor to shake, looking about as if to greet another guest. ‘But where is your equipment?’ He looked towards the door; the coachman shook his head.

‘I did not bring any,’ said Muybridge, ‘I presumed our first preliminary meeting would be more theoretical than practical?’

Gull was mystified and twitched his mouth in a small movement that looked like a rehearsal for a larger one – irritation in advance of anger – before it was quickly gathered back. ‘Quite right!’ he blurted, in a boisterous and obvious lie. ‘Let me show you the business at hand, and then you can make your professional assessment.’

The good doctor took him by the arm and amiably propelled him along the corridors in Crane’s wake. Muybridge was instantly ill at ease; being touched was repugnant to him, and not something he tolerated well. He had never understood why so many people, common people, derived such pleasure from pawing each other, even in public. His treacherous wife had demanded these suffocating duties from him. She used to grab at his arm while walking, hanging from the speed of his sprightly gait, complaining about his pace, telling him to slow down, and hanging on even harder if he failed to comply. It had been embarrassing. But when they were alone, she had demanded much worse. He had never refused his husbandly duties. In fact, he quietly enjoyed them in moderation, and practice had improved him in the rigours of their physical exertions. He fulfilled all that might have been expected of him, but she always wanted more: to cling, to kiss, for him to linger inside her, long after his business was done. Some of her requests had been downright offensive, and against all modern notions of hygiene. The worst of it was that she even pawed him in front of the neighbours or the servants, and at social functions to which she had forced him to take her. It had been uncomfortable,
unnatural and thoroughly time-consuming.