The Vorrh Page 11

  The bodies of the twins had stopped twitching. Stepping clear of the lake of their blood, he picked up the wooden tablet he had displayed and made for the door. A dim, gawping youth stood in his way by mistake, frozen to the spot as the incident replayed through his slow brain. “Kippa! Kippa, get out of the way!” barked the innkeeper.

  Sidrus stopped moving and brought his sheathed cane into view. He knew there was no danger from this faint one, but he had no intention of showing mercy as the other drinkers watched; even the dog had awakened to the danger and watched him with bared teeth from beneath the table.

  Kippa was still rendered immobile, unable to take his eyes away from the approaching demon. The blade made a great, circular arc, an elaborate matador flourish that had none of the surgical precision of its previous use. On its upward swing, it cut between the youth’s legs, severing his budding manhood and sending him, toppling and screeching, out of the deliberate path of a living, grinning nightmare.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He was now Edward Muybridge and his focus was sharp. He had caught landscapes and tribes in the darkness of his exposure. He had a reputation and his new name stuck to it like shit to a blanket.

  He spent more and more time back in the cities, especially after he captured the great wastes of Alaska. Their cold loneliness prompted unwise warmth in his humanity and he decided to “settle down.”

  Flora walked into his life like another dimension; it was the only time he lowered his defences and overpowering love had trampled all his apertures, calculations, and timings. It had shaken his terse tree of knowledge to its roots. His young wife, like new blood, warming and radiating every part of his ordered existence, bringing a joy that he could not own and for the first time had not wished to. The birth of his son had overwhelmed him with more feelings than he had been able to understand; a ball of life burnt and writhed inside him whenever he held the child in his bony hands. Then he found the letter proclaiming her love for another man and the whisper that the child might be his. Then Muybridge knew that they had only ever been deceitful diversions—things that were never meant to last, moments of deception to rob him of purpose. He should have stayed with the wilderness, instead of being tempted by the vain hopes of family and wealth: He knew that was what the London doctor would have advised. His love and his money had been squandered; he would never make that mistake again. He justified his weakness with the ill health and puerile wishes that all men have injected into them by their mothers; the belief that finding a good woman and making a home is a solid and resolute accomplishment of maturity. He had never truly felt the draw of that ambition, only its slender side effect of respectability. He had always been aware of his difference, and so had his mother, who doted on his younger brother.

  But at least he had tried giving his thin, forlorn heart in trust to a wife, albeit a fat woman who had trampled it in the smeared bedsheets of her adultery. He had survived far worse than heartbreak in the wilderness, going beyond his guide’s wisdom, cutting trees away from untouched landscapes to construct the composition he desired. Compiling fierce light in the inverted world that was totally his. In the same cold passion he climbed the hill to the silver mine, calling his adversary out from a card game 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 Edward 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.

  He knew now what the good London surgeon already understood; he had warned that his injury would become inflamed by people, and it had. This would even be mentioned in court: how the lesions in his brain had opened, becoming red raw with her deception; her lies and faithlessness running like lava, hot salt, ammonia, tears; her fecund fluids pissing in his wound. He must close it forever and never let another finger his interior or violate the pristine bone closure of his vision. He was finished with proximity and all the cankers that grew in it.

  He had resolved to never again be the person described in that courtroom: a “lost animal, vacant and mad.” People he knew—friends, neighbours, even servants—had told of his seizures; of incoherent jabbering, his eyes starting from his head, jaw hanging open; his dreadful appearance, haggard and shivering all over, a terrible paleness swallowing his humanity, while his breathing shrank to gasps and smelt rank and toothy. At one point in the trial, he was said to have sunk into such a fit, his countenance becoming so horrifying, that the clerk of the court had been obliged to restrain his furiously working hands and hide his hideous, contorting features beneath a handkerchief, while the jury left the room, some in tears, and the judge retired for thirty minutes, needing the consolation of a sturdy bourbon. Why they had told these lies he never knew, but it had somehow helped all to see his righteousness.

  When he stepped free from the courthouse and into the cheering crowd, it had been a sanctified rebirth. Friends and strangers held him up, helped him walk limply home; after only a few steps, he had heard the white, death-faced voices of the singing circle and begun to understand the significance of the Ghost Dance. He slowed and twisted around, weak in the arms of his helpers, to look back at the crowd at the foot of the courthouse steps—they milled and revelled, picking their hats up from the dusty street where they had landed only moments before, a jubilant and temporary resting place after being cast into the air of his triumph.

  Now that his wife was dead, the bastard child given to a home, he was free once more. Free to continue, and to never again allow such treacherous emotions to poison his will. When friends tried to update him on the growing child or on the striking resemblance to him that it had apparently begun to bear, he had cut them dead, severed them from his righteous mind. He moved again and again, photographing all he could, wandering into the deserts and high mountains without a whiff of Christ or Satan as companions.

  Muybridge was becoming famous for his encyclopedic studies of animal movement, but also for his most popular invention, the zoopraxiscope—a mechanical tabletop precursor of cinematic motion. But it and its family of more and more sophisticated devices were mere toys in comparison to the new machine, a brass hydra of lenses, cogs, and light that no one had ever seen. This was not a passive projector of illusion or entertainment, but something far more disturbing and revolutionary, with an engaged conversation with light itself.

  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 a collector not of light, but of 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 that was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modoc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala and in some of the invalids who graced his movement portfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently from other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.

  There was an aura of nonvisible 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 depi
cted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance that 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. Gull’s peripherscope kept floating to the surface, but he always banished it, not wanting a minor medical instrument to be seen as any kind of influence on his totally original concept.

  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 that 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, so he concealed his knowledge of the brass creature that engineered the invisible.

  A long time ago, what now seemed like hundreds of years, he had visited the Isle of Man, a derelict rock in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland, ignored by both antagonistic islands. His parents had taken him there to see the peasants working the thick, dense earth and the violent, ragged sea and to avoid the questions of a smouldering family horror at home. On a rare, blistering afternoon, without shadows or any other form of shade, he had been trusted to explore alone as they wandered the beach and not to move from the place in which he winched and roamed without finding interest.

  In a shelter of cupped rock, nailed with white painted cottages to the cliff, he had met a fisherman. His boredom had been like bait to the old seaman, who was hiding his own endless tedium in the morbid actions of work. They had talked intermittently, dribbling sentences into the sand for each to watch without comment. The tide had receded and given a bellowing space to their breath, letting speech occur in salty bubbles. The highlight of the interaction had been in the contents of a battered pail of slopping brine, fetched by the fisherman and dramatically screwed into the sand for his young mind’s attention. A clunking, pissing sound had come scratching from the bucket. He was instantly hooked. Walking over to look inside, he saw five crabs of various sizes, struggling against the limited water and the steep tin sides of their containment.

  “Are they trying to escape?” he stuttered. “Trying to get out?”

  “Aye.” The fisherman nodded after a tobacco pause.

  “But why can’t they do it?” he asked. “There are more of them than the water.”

  “They be Manx crabs,” said the man. “See—every time one crawls up an’ nearly escapes, the others drag it back down.”

  Even as a boy, he had recognised this, known it to be as true as the ocean, and he had been instantly grateful for an adult fact. He had known, even then, that he would use it all his life.

  He had never looked back.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ghertrude told Mutter to bring the next case up to the third floor. He obeyed with little relish, panting, huffing, and stumbling on each turn of the staircase. At their destination, she instructed him to open the crate and leave. He did so without a word, even as quick, infuriated splinters pierced his hands.

  She removed the wooden shavings and other packing and looked into the box. Stenciled on the inside was “Lesson 315: The Songs of Insects.” Forty screw-capped jars nestled tightly in the crate; there were no instructions. Ghertrude gingerly lifted one of the containers and held it up to the lamp. Small air holes had been punctured in the lid, and a letter J printed across its top. An elegant plant cutting shuddered within, a thick brown cricket gripping its stem. She began to remove all of the jars, placing them in alphabetical order on the dining room table. After Z, the letters were doubled: AA, BB, CC.

  All manner of creatures ticked inside their glassy prisons. Suddenly, as if by some unknown command, they began to chirp and strum as one, their growing voices squeezing through the tin holes and vibrating the glass, until the room shimmered with aural beauty. Ghertrude stood entranced, her hands clasped together in a gesture of spontaneous pleasure. Ishmael watched her, waiting for his lesson to begin. From below, Mutter heard the third floor come alive, shook his head, and lit a cigar.

  Ghertrude tried to explain the contents of the jars but soon found she had no idea what to say. She stumbled through the first nine before running out of words. She asked her pupil what he thought. He stared blankly at her.

  “How would I think anything?” he asked, incredulous. “What are these things? What is their place?” She blushed in her ignorance and shrank in her failure.

  Many of the cases that followed were even more obscure, rendering her speechless before the packing material had left her hands. Salvation came with Ishmael’s change of heart. He decided to give up his petulant student status and listen graciously, without the rancour that had previously spilled over with his hunger for knowledge. It was true that she possessed more experience of the world outside, but he had a sharper mind to examine the facts before him, without the hindrance of their known function blinding their potential. He would try to do it her way, to speculate on the contents of the boxes and come to a conclusion based on each of their contributions.

  So it was that they began to open the boxes together, with a newfound zeal and what she believed to be a rising tide of intimate respect. It became a pleasure: the anticipation, the piecing together of meaning, the guesswork. He was easier in his movement and speech, the angles and corners of previous mannerisms smoothing into softer, more natural alignments. Weeks passed in this way until, one afternoon, as they excitedly examined the textures and toughness of different kinds of leather, he asked, “When will we practise mating?”

  She hoped she had misheard. “What do you mean?” she asked, with caution.

  “When can I put my man tube inside your cleft? For pleasure and practice?”

  She blushed and became tongue-tied, her hands overgripping the chamois in her clutch. She averted her eyes, looking down and noticing, with surprise, that his trousers were unbuttoned and gaping.

  “It’s been a long time now, and I miss it.”

  “We can never do such a thing,” she hissed. “It’s unnatural and shameful.” She was about to explain the moral codes and the potential genetic disasters, when his words finally arrived at her understanding. “When did you do that before?” she asked slowly. “And who with?” Even as the question formed, she knew the answer, a picture of it assembling in the furthest recess of her mind.

  “With Luluwa,” he said. “Many times before.”

  The shock hit her in the strangest of ways. An unknown taste entered her mouth; her spine shivered, and she had the overpowering sense of being very far away, of being tiny while her body bloated, expanding to become the size of a continent. A flapping edge of swoon treacled her eyes, making everything peripheral to her speeding distance. And worst of all, in this ocean of disgust, fright, and repulsion, delight quivered, on a far-off island, on the other side of the world: in her womb.

  —

  It was two days before she could bring herself to return. She did not know how she had escaped that last a
fternoon; her memory had been rinsed to make space for her imagination. The image of their unholy coupling had crowded into her skull, the elbows, knees, and heels knocking against the bone. When she opened the door, he was standing by the shutters, picking at paint. He turned and anxiously began to speak. She put her finger to her lips and hushed him.

  “Say nothing,” she said. “Say nothing.”

  She crossed the room, taking his raised hand away from the shutters and holding it tightly in hers. Quietly, she led him through the room into the adjoining bedroom, guiding him onto the edge of the bed and unbuttoning her long raincoat. She stood before him, naked and trembling. He undressed quickly, fumbling with the buttons while she sat next to him. His last garment discarded, he placed his hands on her shoulders and felt her shudder. He was startled by her softness and warmth, and she shivered in the excitement of wrongness, the fear of the unknown and her commitment to the untold levels of power she knew she would wield from that point on. He ran his hands along her body, feeling the curves swell against his touch. She had the same contours as Luluwa, but his first teacher’s cool hardness had never moved under the pressure of his body, and her rigidity had been the height of his eroticism. Now the heat and pliancy were transferred; she was like him, and they exchanged pressures by exquisite degrees. His fingers touched the inside of her legs, leaving tiny flakes of paint from under his nails. There was a jolt when he brushed against her pubic hair. He lowered his head and looked deep into her nakedness. An unmapped cog turned in the pale engine of his near humanity.

  They coupled for two hours, shifting positions and angles until every aspect had been achieved. He fell into sleep while still inside her, his weight balanced across her. She looked down across his back at his breathing. He was drawing out of her, leaving a glistening trail across her thigh, in the shadow of his body. His penis had a counterclockwise spiral and turned as it retracted. In future couplings, she would find herself watching it in fascination, but for now the motion was hidden and proclaimed itself in a tickling sensation that made her squirm, waking him from his total slumber.