The Vorrh (4 page)
When the colonial forces had first appeared, they were mysterious and powerful. Their ignorance of the world was forgiven. The quantity of wonderful goods they brought and the manner of their arrival startled the True People. Cautiousness made their hands hesitate and quiver over the treasures they were offered. There were gifts for everybody. Tsungali and his brothers watched their kindness with distrust and bewilderment, watched the endless flow of impossible things: animal meat in hard, shiny shells without bones, killing irons of great power and accuracy, rainbows of cloth, talking cages and a swarm of other things and powers with no name.
When the strangers were given permission to cut the trees and shave the ground, nobody could have expected the consequences. Tsungali had seen the first ones in the sky when he was small. They floated belly-side-up like a dead lizard in a pool, streaking the sky with straight white lines. Tsungali asked his grandfather what they were, those dagger birds with long voices. His grandfather saw nothing, heard nothing, the sky was empty, they did not exist. There was no template in his perceptions for such a thing. And, if some did see something, then it must be
from another world, and therefore dangerous and best left alone. The magicians said they were the dreams of young fathers still to be born, and that their growing frequency told of a vast future fertility. No one had an explanation when one came down to nest on the shaved strip in the jungle; the strangers simply had great power to be able to catch one so easily. Tsungali walked to the clearing with his grandfather, hand in hand. They stood and stared at the gleaming hard bird. Its shell was the same as the shell around the meat without bones. The old man shivered slightly and saw only the clearing with the strangers hurrying back and forth. He saw them because they were men, or creatures in the shape of men.
The excited child stepped forward but was yanked into a standstill by the old man’s rigidity. He was rooted to the spot and his tugging grandson would not unbind him. The boy knew better than to argue, and tears of frustration filled his eyes. The old man wept, too. One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.
The airplane was full of possessions, more than had ever been seen before; astonishing things which made the young feel rich and honoured, making them far greater than neighbouring tribes, who had nothing. The plane also carried a priest. Over the next few years, the strangers settled in and brought families and new belief to the village. They said they had changed, coming from different lands now with different ways of speaking, but this seemed untrue, like so many other things that were discovered later. They instructed the True People in the way of the one world, with its god that was ashamed of nakedness. They taught them how work might bring them those precious things that were previously given. They brought books and singing and exchanged the splendour of an invisible god for all their carved deities of wood and stone. And
somewhere in that sickly trade, suspicion became woven into the fabric of trust. The insistence of guilt was converted into the notion that the True People must have already paid the price for something, something they had never received, something that just might be possessions.
The airstrip was carefully maintained and the goods continued to arrive. The empty planes were filled with the disgrace of their vanquished homes. Old weapons, clothing, gods and kitchen tools were stacked inside to be sent away, shabby totems of a discarnate history, expelled. Clean pictures, metal furniture and uniforms filled their spaces, or at least appeared to.
It was, of course, the English who brought the cricket. Six of them cut and shaved the strip and called it pitch, which was also their name for the darkness of night and the darkness of the True People. Six men at first, then more, who dressed in white and conducted a solemn magic lasting a whole day, and that had nothing to do with the nailed-up god. Six who showed a great lie was being hinged onto the True People, who would always be dressed in darkness. The flint to the great conflagration was called Peter Williams.
He had been washed ashore decades ago, clinging to a fragment of Séance Table 6, the part with the close mesh cage underneath, containing a metal horn with a rubber bulb at one end, a small tambourine and a brass bell. The table had been split apart by psychic force some two years earlier, in a dingy sitting room in Halifax, Yorkshire. The case made history, the unsubtle, invisible violence having had many witnesses. The fragment, bought by the millionairess Sarah Winchester, was being shipped to her mansion in America when the disaster occurred.
When Williams came to, his dislocated arm was still gripping the cheap varnished wood, two fingers broken into a hook through the metal mesh, bobbing up and down with the surf of the foreshore, outside of his pain threshold. The tribe found him trapped on the beach some hours later, terrified of the incoming tide, whispering and close to death. They
carried him back to their village and life. The salt had erased his memory, but he thought he was called Williams. They asked him what such a name meant. He said he did not know, but he was one of many.
Legend tells that in the next five years the tribe flourished and bloomed. Illness disappeared, game became abundant and the women gave birth to a new tribe of men, some of them speckled with Williams’ fair blessing. And then he vanished, absorbed into the land of forgetfulness. They said the land was envious and wanted a new pale biped of its own. They said he had been eaten or dissolved. He had told them he was one of many, and now they waited and prayed to the wreck of Table 6 for their saviour to return. Thus the Oneofthewilliams cult grew, and redemption and longing had a family and a name.
Sarah never received the haunted instruments and shattered wood to add to the rest of her endless, knotted house. The great, ever-growing wooden octopus of a mansion was to house all the restless dead which the Winchester rifle had erased; the medium had told her she would be safe as long as the house was never finished.
She took it literally and began the house that grew until the day of her death. Two dozen carpenters sawed and hammered day and night, building and re-building an equally restless architecture to keep her from the hungry ghosts that hunted the inheritor of the wealth of the man who invented the fast, long gun which emptied the plains and filled the skies and the earth with the guilty and the innocent. The ghosts would scratch at every door, even the false ones Sarah built to deviate their closure. She held séances every day. The labyrinthine structure shuddered with spirit rapping, the rich inlaid parquet floors sticky with ectoplasm and the blind stairs aching aloud. The ghosts and the carpenters only stopped when Sarah sat down to play the piano, alone, late at night. The echo notes found their way through all the twisted empty rooms, the wooden, serpentine corridors, the listening attics and towers.
The altar that grew out of Table 6 also expanded. Prayer nails were beaten into it for expectation. Beads and bells, milk and bloods sang out, to call the ghosts home and weld them back into one solid man called Williams.
* * *
The man 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 which saw the world in a hard light with gauged contrasts. A Lear countenance that let nothing in or out without radical severity. He wanted to look like this – biblical, austere and imposing.
He had explored the savage wilderness, going beyond his guide’s wisdom, cutting trees away from the untouched landscape to construct the view he desired, squeezing it into his compositional inverted frame, compiling the world in fierce light. He had been with dead and dying men, seen their eyes in his camera; he had slain one himself once, in cold civilian times, calling his emissary out from a party in the silver mine and into the fragrant landscape, cooling under the setting new moon.
‘Good evening, Major Larkyns,’ he had said to the man squinting in the doorway, trying to see who was speaking against the bright light. ‘My name is Muybridge, and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife.’
He had levelled the pistol at the philanderer’s chest and fired. Quick blood coughed into the bright, moving leaves of that October dusk; the victim staggered through the house and died in the back garden, hugging a tree. Muybridge walked behind him, apologising to the players, whose hands were frozen in disbelief.
But that was back in Calistoga, the old Wild East country of San Francisco. A year later, the murder charge was dropped: he was justified. He
remained justified all his life, and even now, in his seventy-first year, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had broken the brain of his deceitful wife and spitefully rejected his son with the certainty of Abraham. He had posed as Abraham once, for the set of photographs that made him known throughout the civilised world – naked, wielding a pickaxe, with taut muscles and hard sinew, stern and unflinching in his sixtieth year.
Now he stood erect at the centre of the great barn in his native Thames Valley. Five men and a horse waited, cold air streaming in at one end from the tall, open doors. They talked quietly, nodding 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. This was a reversal of California: the cameras inside, the bright sunlit action outside. In rainy England, all studio life was interior – he had come to prefer it that way.
Her Majesty’s government had called him out of retirement for this day. They made him a physical negative 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 what looked like a forging hammer from a polished wooden box. 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 his iron. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the huge gun in the man’s hand, 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 violence 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-coloured 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 with 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.
The Gabbet-Fairfax ‘Mars’ pistol was one of the first of its kind. A self-loading semi-automatic with an astonishing ballistic power, it looked like
an axe or a hammer, and possessed a rudimentary ‘L’ of a body, an ugly, unique elegance of top-heavy dense steel, smooth and uncluttered. The rear end of the pistol was infested with a knurled mechanical contrivance of the breech, hammer and sights. The Mars was intended for military mass-production, but it entered the world backwards, and at the wrong time. It came with the same consideration that sent the mounted cavalry into the gas and machine guns of the First World War, with the pedigree of a medieval killing field: it could stop a horse. It sounded like the end of the world. Its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist and spit hot, spent cartridge cases back into their face. The imagined accuracy was never achieved because its marksman, having taken the first shot, shivered and flinched so greatly before squeezing the trigger that it was impossible to aim. It was the most powerful pistol ever conceived or constructed at the turn of that century, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Less than a hundred were manufactured. So how one found its way, sheltering with the Enfields, into the heartland of the True People was unknown. What was known was that it vanished at the same time as Peter Williams.