The Vorrh (8 page)

* * *

It had been the angels that had caused the damage. The priest had spoken to the girl about them for a long time, on one occasion for more than an hour. He explained how they were not gods themselves, like the myriad clans of deities who had previously infested their beliefs, but winged servants who could interact between God and man. The mistake had come when he’d opened the pages of
Paradise Lost
, a large edition with Gustave Doré’s magnificent illustrations.

He had shown her the angels; sometimes she saw the demons too. There was no problem: she’d liked them all, especially when their wings
were open and ready to fly. Then they had come upon one of the pages of Adam and Eve in the garden, before the fall; Book V. 309 – 311.

Adam called: Haste hither, Eve and, worth thy sight, behold,
Eastwards among the trees, what glorious shape
Comes this way moving; seems another morn
Risen on mid-noon. Some great behest from heaven
To us perhaps he brings, and will vouchsafe
This day to be our guest
.

The accompanying image showed the couple beneath a tree. She, seated on the rocks with her back to the reader, he before her, pointing further into the picture, where the angelic presence had appeared and was walking towards them. Nearby, and balancing the scene, were two deer, one lying down with a docile, but watchful, lion. The landscape was lushly grown over; the grass and plants in the foreground giving it a vivid, scratchy reality.

Its effect on the native woman had been violent and overpowering. She immediately lost her air of casual involvement, becoming rigid and sitting bolt upright. Her whole body had begun to shake, wide eyes staring from her head, as though racked by tortures of extreme terror. She started to pull at her clothing, moaning and tearing at the fabric until she was naked and alarming, giving off a pungent odour of sweat; her voice had become deeper, sending out a wave of shared fear. Then she started to bleed. The priest had become afraid and embarrassed at the same time. She caught his eye intermittently, lashing her turned-in focus out, like a whip, until he was finally overcome with fear and embarrassment. Repelled by every element of the scene, he had fled the church.

Returning from the jungle, the atmosphere in the camp had been appalling. Williams’ arrival caused an almost visible ripple of energy; the locals had stopped instantly, then averted their faces, staring at the ground or at whatever happened to be in their hands. One of the more
obsequious recruits had run for the officers’ mess; others followed behind to see what might happen.

De Trafford, the commanding officer, standing squarely on the veranda with a white-faced subordinate, had indicated to the door. They filed into the officers’ mess without a word. The short spell of quiet soon gave way to thunderous shouting and even louder silences.

Williams’ anger was fastened tight by the rigours of command. He had locked his expression in stone as De Trafford spat out his accusations of the breakdown of obedience among the natives, blaming him directly for ‘that Savage bitch’s unprovoked attack’. He’d demanded to know what he had been doing to her to cause this outrage, and said he was seriously thinking about ‘having the bitch put down’. Williams had nothing to say, and gated his rage behind clenched muscles and gritted teeth. He did feel responsible for the girl, but not in a way De Trafford would ever understand. A deep, aching attachment had blistered at the edges of the sweetness he felt in her presence. All of this had taken place while he was away, but he knew he was implicit in it all, in a way he could not explain, especially to himself. The chain of impossible events had occurred, and he had been left outside of all.

He left them and returned, via the wary looks of the lingering villagers, to the sanctum of the hut that had been designated the armoury. He found solace in unpacking the guns, while the priest crept back into the church to cleanse it of any abnormalities that might have been shed there. But when Williams opened the heavy, book-shaped wooden box, his day changed for the better. Lifting the Mars Fairfax from the velvet of its snug containment and feeling the commanding density in his fist, he looked to heaven and, cocking the massive breech with a resounding, bell-like clang, gave a grinning nod of comprehension.

* * *

Ghertrude Eloise Tulp was an only child. She was ‘only’ in a great manner of ways: in the way that a single child is given all; in the way that it is received and understood as a sign of natural superiority, growing into unquestionable rightness; in her luscious delight in solitude and satisfaction without a trace of loneliness.

She was the pride, construct and admiration of her father, the third generation owner of the city’s second-largest timber merchant, who had long since left the basic details of his inherited empire to his servants, and turned his razor-keen appetites to politics and the church. She was modest in her skin, charming in her manner, with a tall, willowy vagueness, which mostly concealed the centre of her hunger. Her twenty-two years had been filled with kindness and education, but none of it had thawed her hurt at being born unknowing. She wanted to find out and possess all. Quickly.

She had always hated being excluded. Not many dared to attempt it socially – her power was too far-reaching and influential to be toyed with. But most had tried to lock her out in more literal ways, with brass and iron puzzles that fooled their owners into trusting their blind servitude. From the age of seven, she had begun to understand their mechanics and principles and, with that realisation, what delicious power and satisfaction lay on the other side of their manipulation. She had gained access to all hours of the day and night. She had tiptoed in forbidden places. She had seen a royalty of secrets: her parents becoming the beast with two backs; treasures being hidden; the dead, rotting in conversation in the catacombs beneath her home. She had seen intrigue, incest, deceit, lies and pleasures, all closed to the assumption of sight.

Now she stood in the elbow of the next building while the buffoon Mutter disappeared home. She waited a tantalising time, watching the street set into stillness, enjoying the restraint before she touched the door to see if her curiosity really had a menu. She walked quickly across the empty space and pushed the cold gate. It moved, heavy under her calfskin glove.

Her joy spun and silently shrieked: this was forbidden and ecstatic. The house had been a great secret for all of her life, the only thing denied to a child who was given everything. No one in her family would talk about it.

‘Ah ja, the Kühler Brunnen House,’ they would say, and then change the subject. She had stared at it, glared at it and watched it in passing all the days of her life, from her pram to her womanhood. Something in it had tapped at her shell, stirring the wakening within. And now she had breached its outer wall, closing the gate behind her in protection from all vulgar intrusion.

She lingered over the stables and the basic construction of the courtyard, drawing out her anticipation before approaching the entrance to the building. To her delight and surprise, the lock was simple, an old and well-known type, the kind she had been surreptitiously picking for years in her family’s homes. The door of this house would be no match for her skills, and she thrilled at the thought of devouring the secrets it had concealed for so long.

She returned through the courtyard. Once back at the gate, she looked again at the lock and laughed, almost too loudly. This was the ridiculous contraption that had held her at bay for so long? She could have opened it years before. It had only taken Mutter’s pantomime of stupidity to give her permission and scrawl the ticket to her fulfilment.

She shut and padlocked the gate and walked along the darkening street, humming her way home and savouring her strength and the sweet weakness of everything around her. There was no rush now; she already had the conclusion to the enigma firmly in her grasp. She would relish all the possibilities rather than leaping into the outcome; it would pay back all those years of frustrating exclusion. She now owned every imagined room.

Six days later, when Mutter had again left, she entered the house.

* * *

For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.

The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans, but could also devour a thousand of their little lives in a microsecond of their uninterrupted, unfathomable time. So vast was its acreage, it also made its demands of time, splitting the toiling sun into zones outside of normal calibration; a theoretical traveller, passing through its entire breadth on foot, would have to stop at its centre and wait at least a week for his soul to catch up. So dense was its breathing, it dented the surrounding climate. Swirling clouds interacted with its shadow. Its massive transpiration sucked at the nearby city that fed from it, sipping from the lungs of its inhabitants and filling the skies with oxygen. It brought in storms and unparalleled shifts of weather. Sometimes it mimicked Europe, smuggling a fake winter for a week or two, dropping temperatures and making the city look and feel like its progenitor. Then it spun winds and heat to make the masonry crack after the tightness of the impossible frost.

No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human – some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.

The logging roads skirted its perimeter, allowing commerce to gingerly nibble at its unprotected edges. There were no commercial means of ingress or egress from its solid shadow, except for the train. The mindlessly straight track that ran towards its heart was laid, line by line,
with the hunger for wood. As it grew forwards, it forgot its immediate past. The iron rail carried sleep in its miles of repetition.

Most of the train that ran on it was composed of open platform and iron chain, built to receive the freshly cut trunks. But there were two passenger carriages, made for short and necessary visits, or for those whose curiosity outstripped their wisdom. There were also the slave carriers, basic boxes on wheels designed to carry the workforce into the forest’s interior. The slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.

* * *

The zoopraxiscope was defunct. It had been superseded, overtaken by other machines that defined movement and projected the gait of reality. But he had already given up that task in America. He and his brass hydra of lenses, cogs and light had already achieved that which was now being trivialised. No one had ever seen the new machine – it remained locked away in its haunted East London room.

Returning to Kingston-upon-Thames after so many years and so many travels had been the natural thing to do. He had contacted what remained of his family and told them he needed help to grow old. ‘Uncle Eddie’ was a celebratory figure and a man of considerable affluence: they had, of course, said yes.

He knew he would not develop the last machine. Its effect had been
catastrophic – everything else that had brought him fame seemed like child’s play by comparison, and he had determined to take its secret to the grave.

He had recognised, many years ago, what had been screaming at him from his archives of movement: his misdirection, up to that point, had been complete. The measured delineation that filled his life was a lie. Observation was
not
the primary function of photography, but a side effect of its true purpose. The constant gathering of pictures of life was only a harvesting of basic material. Deeper meaning lay within the next part of the process, a kernel waiting to give up its flavour after being savagely reworked: the camera was not a collector of light, but time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death.

It could look between the seams of existence and sniff out an essence that was missed in the daily continuum. It fed on a spillage between worlds which was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modruc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala, and in some of the invalids who graced his movement porfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently to other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.

There was an aura of non-visible vibration in his glass slides, an effect that shimmered in the emotional eye but not in reality. It somehow transferred to his prints, so that while they depicted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance which slivered alongside the viewer’s subjective intelligence. Astoundingly, the effect was increased when the image was projected, rather than stained, onto paper.

The twelfth generation zoopraxiscope was not like the rest. It was certainly not like the first four. He needed another name for it, the one that still scared him, yet he had never found it. No one would ever believe what it did, looking at its complex entanglement of lenses and shutters. They would expect more pretty pictures to dance on the wall, yet would
meet instead a rippled light which sliced the optic nerve into a whip of driving visions…

Muybridge was keen in his arrogance, sharp enough to know that such a statement, made publicly, would unbind his esteem and threaten his well-forged place in history. Those little minds that scratched at his achievements would make light work of his undoing, were they privy to such a discovery – but they would never be allowed to snatch away his triumph or his secret. He would let it seep out, after they were all rotted bones. Let others announce his genius, as Huxley had for Darwin, or as Ruskin had for Turner, men not yet born, men of the growing age who would recognise his enlightenment. He would save his strength and maybe live long enough to witness it. He had made the device, found the conclusion. But he had seen others of his age brought to the pillory in the last years of their lives, shredded and broken by their generosity, choked on the crumbs of wisdom they gave, too freely, to the mob. He had better things to roll into the future than explanation. He was too old to debate and be questioned. He was justified and right.