The Cloven Read online

  This was the moment that the Vorrh spoke to her. The first touch of its forever vastness. High on the cliffs above the sea at the peak of oppositeness. The trees came to her with the taste of the baptism water that filled her mouth. Its memory coming like an embrace, she raised her arms above her head to let the wind feel her contours. Goose bumps nibbled her mottled skin and she shifted again into a body of familiarity.

  What seemed like many days later she finally lost the seraph and entered the new world of vertical sounds and dappled majesty where she knew that she was home, amid the shaven tides of wind and the rampant voices of the birds and the monkeys that cascaded between the echoing trees. This was not a subject of dreams but a gigantic reality that gave her sleep a physical dimension. Her Vorrh that was growing her in its proportions. She was thinner now but had grown older, and her spotted skin was taut over her lengthening bones. She had dreams every night, and their enigmas were making her grow upwards to match the trees, a different realm of turgor contained within the walls and pressures of her consciousness. Her footfall was light and its quietness surprised animals in her path. She stopped to drink in a startled clearing, enjoying the bright taste of the cold water and defining a change in flavour. She ate little, being unaware of food. All the proposed sustenance for their journey had gone over the cliff with Carmella. Modesta was now eating berries and clawed-up roots, chewing leaves and occasionally the grubs that clung to the shade of their undersides. She was unaware that the gradual starvation was affecting her mind as well as her body, and that the increasingly vivid dreams were feeding on her hunger. A great tiredness came about her on the fourth day in the forest and she lay down by the fast waters, incapable of anything but sleep.

  The dream that came in dappled light was softer than the others. A Man Without Substance came to her and told her he was of her blood, that he was her grandfather. He had visited her before but never in a dream and never in sight. His name was Eadweard and he told her that he had always known she would arrive on the other side of the world and that he had dug into the ground on his side of the world to send gifts to her. She said they had not arrived yet, because the time was thick between them. So was the land, he said, and it was making him thin in this the last year of his life. He tried to smile at her when he said this, but his face was not made for it and got stuck halfway. They were standing in a strange place that he called a garden, and he was pointing at many rough-dug holes that were filled with water and looked like eyes. At the edge of the garden, houses had been piled one on top of the other, so that a wall of windows looked down. A rag behind one twitched and she knew they were being watched. Then she woke up.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Meta was sleeping on the stairs and hiding from everyone. After they took the remains of Mutter away, she shifted among the rooms of Kühler Brunnen, never in the same one for more than a few hours. She hid when Thaddeus came to speak to her. She hid from the one visit of her mother and she hid from the police. She did not have to hide from Ghertrude because Ghertrude could not see her. Not even when she lay on the stairs or sobbed in the same room, absorbing a bit of her mistress’s unique inability to see her. But mostly she was alone. Ghertrude had told the family and the police that Ishmael had shot Mutter and then run away. At first the police did not believe her, being convinced that the criminal had been executed some hours before. It was only after her continual insistence that they dug up the wooden masked head and peeled its cover off before the lime had done any real damage. It was not the head of Ishmael Williams. Indeed, one of the diggers recognised the bloody thing as a man called Cranz, a prison guard who had volunteered for execution duties that week. After the shocking and humiliating discovery, they came back to ask Ghertrude more questions and then began their manhunt in every quarter and rat hole of the city.

  After they had gone, Ghertrude ran through the empty house, her bare feet pattering on the wooden floors, calling out to Meta and telling her of her safety and how she would never be blamed and that nobody would ever think she had been guilty of this terrible mistake. Meta didn’t care about the authorities and the law. They meant nothing compared to the cost to her family and the look in her father’s eye that she never saw but dreamt of every time she closed her eyes. The truth was that the old man never knew what hit him. The hail of bullets and the splintering door had spun and fogged him so that he died with his fist clenched and furious that he never got his throttling hands on the villains, whoever they were. There was a tiny balm as he was extinguished: the voice of his beloved daughter calling to him, from very far away.

  At night Meta would go into the kitchen to drink cold water from the old iron pump that connected directly to the well. She had not eaten in days, and hunger and the tortured lack of sleep were beginning to take their toll. The glow and roundness had gone; the apple complexion and the wide happy eyes had paled. She was changing in her solitude and starvation. She used the pain of her shrinking stomach and aching limbs to drive the nail of vengeance in deeper. It had never been there before, but now its bitter iron tasted of blood and its cold resistance gave her hope. She was not going to die in this house, not going to perish of heartbreak and let her enemies escape. She was going to change, to split and knot into something else. The water and the stairs kept despair at bay. Their indifferent hardness and chill would chisel her softness into angles that the hunger would sharpen. This process had begun without her knowing, outside of her will. But now all of her was involved. What had once been her beaming optimism had been snatched up and cuffed into a dirty shape that cherished the lean hollowness of her passion. The bleak stair was a vindictive mould and Meta was reshaped in its stiff pressure.

  Thaddeus had visited every other day, but not even he could find Meta. He inspected the scrubbed floor where his father died, where he had been murdered by the man whom he’d once had a little sympathy for. Ghertrude left Thaddeus to reflect in the room with the shattered door, and his remorse was always overshadowed by guilt. He knew this was going to happen. His father had died within one of the red-ringed circles that he had scrawled on the calendar after the prediction he had been given in that gloomy warehouse. He hadn’t really understood it but made the calculations anyway. But he never saw it coming like this. He watched for signs of illness or fatigue. He visited his father in the stables, and when the old man wasn’t looking, he would test the endurance of things: overhead racks and misplaced tools and the strength and good repair of all the wheels of the carts. He even looked deep into the swivelling eyes of the horses, seeking indications of frothing madness lurking beneath their tranquil indifference. How was he ever to expect murder, by his own sister no less? The shock was that it happened here in the safety of Mistress Ghertrude’s home, a house that had always meant kindness and stability to his family. After his short vigil he would return to the hall, where Ghertrude would meet him and offer tea or coffee. Their conversations were stilted at first, but with practice they became more fluent. They said the same things each time, almost the same words. He would ask about Meta and she would say that nothing had changed. He would delicately enquire about her daughter, Rowena, and she would appreciate his care, which jolted her in its sincerity. And she would explain there was no news, which was an act of repetition, a device to keep the daily horror and agony separate from who she must be to others. She said these things by rote. The words were able to hold her formality if others were listening. In the sanctum of seclusion she would fret every hour, gnawing at the gap between her child and her until she bled white tears and amber blood against her bed and clothing. It was easier for her to recount her notions of the world outside. In relief of her anguish she again went through the detail of Mutter’s murder and the escape of the evil perpetrator. Mutter had had no comprehension that the floating gun that had split him apart had been wielded by his daughter, her trusted but invisible servant. Thaddeus was bewildered and without words as he shuffled his nervous, bashful hands under his hat, which sat
on his lap. These rituals were becoming important to them and neither questioned why. Thaddeus was becoming Ghertrude’s only contact with the outside world. He had immediately adopted some of his father’s duties. Especially with the horses, which gravely missed the old man’s touch and smell. Concealed behind the lace curtain, Ghertrude would watch him working in the stables. The sight and knowledge of his being there gave her a settling reassurance.

  Ghertrude was in despair. Rowena was still missing. Yet Ishmael was alive. She had to tell Cyrena, but how would she react?

  Of course Cyrena had visited the moment she heard about Rowena’s abduction and insisted that Ghertrude return to her house and stay there. Ghertrude would not go. She explained that she needed to be in her own home in case of Rowena’s return. But it was more than that; she also pined for Meta and needed to play the vile scene over and over in her memory, standing where it happened in her house. Nothing was going to take that away from her.

  Cyrena was also in shock. She had witnessed the execution of Ishmael at the hands of Adam Longfellar, saw him die, allowed herself a portion of grief. And then to find that it had been another trick, a guileful substitution, and that he was alive and laughing at her and the rest of the world again. Her disbelief was matched only by her fury, and Ghertrude did not want to share in either. There was also something else, a growing shadow between them, as if some part of Ishmael or something was cleaving them. She came to recognise that perhaps it had always been there and was generated from Cyrena’s strange and magnificent heart. For is it not so that the greater feelings always require a counterbalance, a parallel other if not an exact opposite? Ghertrude had always sensed some resentment in her closest friend. Some difficulty about her knowing Ishmael first. It was also there at the birth of Rowena and now she sensed it forming again. Ghertrude had been the only witness to Ishmael’s survival and in some way it made her implicit to his deceit. She feared that Cyrena was brooding on her hurt and saw her as the frame in which it was held. The ornate frame that had always contained some part of Ishmael, which she had never seen. Maybe even his sincere side, if anybody could ever believe in that. Thaddeus’s calls had become important to her. The kindly young man offered a gentle stability against the random violence that seemed to be erupting and filling her life. He also shared her sadness without ever weighing it against his own.

  During Thaddeus’s most recent visit she unexpectedly told him more than ever before and no longer feared the consequences.

  “Meta is still here, sometimes I think I see her out of the corner of my eye. I still talk to her. Did you know that?”

  “No, Mistress Ghertrude,” said Thaddeus as they both stood in the hall looking up and down the empty staircase.

  “Well, I do.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t know where she could be, we have both searched the house. Twice now.”

  “Do you think me unstable, Thaddeus?”

  He looked at the floor and his large shoes, scuffed and often repaired.

  “It would not be surprising if I were.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So many terrible things, one after another. It’s enough to make anyone go mad.” She looked at him, her lip trembling, her throat tight, her insides turning to grit and dribble. Then suddenly he seemed different. Standing in a different space. He was most unusual, different from anybody else she had ever known. He was quite simply the most normal person she had ever met, despite his weird self-conscious hands. The alarming speed of this revelation had thrown her off guard. She had never understood normality and now it flowed over her. Not as the tiresome, boorish shallowness that she as always suspected it to be. But as a reassuring tide of warmth. How could this be? In this one moment it was revealed. She looked again at the tall, stooped young man who fidgeted his bruised felt hat in his embarrassed hands. He was his father’s son, but without the width and solidity. In its place was a willowy carefulness, like a slender tree growing inside a hollow oak. His long jaw, nose, and ears were set in a listening cast. His brown eyes were the same shape as Meta’s and had the same smoulder of kindness in them that once so illuminated her expression. Ghertrude had never really examined him before, and she found that she was enjoying the act. Then the clarity of it made her blush and totter. He was the exact opposite of Ishmael in every conceivable way. He seemed to want nothing and offered benevolence shyly as a path or a prayer mat.

  “I don’t think you are mad,” he said, still examining his shoes and not seeing her flushed interest. “It has been you that has kept us all sane.” There was a tiny crack in his voice and he cleared his throat to glue it together and wedge back the emotion that was solidifying under it.

  She saw his plight and acted without thought or word. She crossed the space between them and took the hat from him, put it on the hall stand, and then held both his hands in hers. Nobody had ever done that, nobody had ever held them. Not even his mother, who had helped him wash and dress when he returned from his alteration. Ghertrude had grasped them, and while he did not know what to do, she had brought them to rest chastely across the warmth of her bosom. He was instantly and overpoweringly in love with her. He dared not move. Tears were hurrying to form a great geyser inside his awkward size and he feared offence by the unmanliness of such emotion, lest his touch might insult her, even the accidental brush of the back of his trapped paws. But mostly he feared that his reaction would wake the dream that he was now in and send it skidding away into the reality of nothing at all. For surely this must be a dream, what else could it be? He lifted his gaze and she ducked her smiling face to meet it halfway. It was everything, far too much, and it doubled again and he was lost in her forever.

  Meta could hear their stillness from the stairs. Hear that they were silent and unmoving in the passage below. She dared not creep down to see why. She wanted to thrust her head between the banisters and look down upon them, but instead she put her head on the polished wood and pressed her ear hard against it, trying to sense the house and be sure that they were not in danger. She had no more fear left for herself; it was not used up but converting: compressing itself to temper her resolve.

  Ghertrude moved closer; she parted his arms and folded them about her as she pressed into his stiff embrace, tilting her head to rest it on his beating chest. He enfolded her and felt her weight give in to his arms, a strength filling them with a confidence he had never possessed before. Levels of transformation were moving inside the whole house, different vibrations fingering its old walls and blushing its whispers. They shuddered between them and in the small compacting body of Meta lying above.

  They slept together without making love—or better and more accurately to say, love made them without any sexual congress. They held each other fully clothed in a most unusual bed, where tears and grip bound them in a wordless union. Exhaustion and relief wove them together, so that as dream and surprise, wakefulness and slumber exchanged, they became one unique body. By dawn a new being arose.

  Meta had seen it all. At first watching from the stairs when the tension dropped, and then, without a trace of voyeurism, she tiptoed to the bedroom door to sense the alchemy that sweetly churned within. A great burden fell from her aching shoulders at the same time that she also became invisible to Thaddeus. For in their union one of the last parts of her worldly responsibility faded. Benevolence had slipped its leash. In the radiance that flooded from the quiet room, she had become untied from that great compound that had so ruled her heart. Now her brother could take care. He was obviously much better at it than she. All the care that was needed for those she had so cherished was now his. He was suddenly so strong in this, and her pride in him had bit through the umbilical that kept her kind. It was on the carpet by the door that she transformed. Curled there, she shifted from opaque to translucent, then to transparent, her gentleness evolved into a clarity that had nothing to do with the emotions and visions that had governed h
er previous life. Those painful qualities had solidified into something greater: a nameless strength that had been gifted equally by all those who had loved and abused her. The demons and angels had clashed together and she was at the matrix of the collision, where sublime knowledge is silently forged.

  * * *

  —

  By dawn she was already washing on the lower floor. Singing quietly to herself under the warmed water. Knowing that her task in the world was delineated. Now that her brother was protecting Ghertrude, she was free to find Rowena in her own way. And she knew where and how to look. She stood steaming, wrapped in a large towel, and all the fear and trepidation that filled that horrible warehouse dispersed. Her teeth were quiet and her purpose sang.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cyrena trusted Marais with her life, or, more important, with the meaning of it. She had trusted him when she was a child and blind, and she hoped that he would be there for her all of his days, even with the fierce cruelty of physical distance between them. And with the diminishing of his fragile health.

  She would never forget their meeting at the time of her father’s funeral. She saw him with her vivid eyes, which saw the world anew, without the long filter of time to numb the harshness. She also knew something else had grown between them at that time, now that she was a woman.