The Vorrh Read online

  It had been Ghertrude’s first time with another. She felt tired and exhilarated. There was no blood—she had taken her own virginity many years before. She had learned the conclave joys of auto-satisfaction through hours of practice and used the secret acts to inform her clandestine ways. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, the way it elevated her above common appetite. The day was a fissure in her containment, one that she would monitor with precise care.

  Ishmael lay sprawled across the bed, ecstatic and soothed by his own pleasure, feeling his male dominance rise for the first time on the third floor. He reached out for her as she moved away from him, his fingers just touching her hips as she grabbed her coat and prepared to leave. He wanted to say something warm and appreciative but did not have the language. Beneath his heart, there was a subtle and churning bonding, and he wanted to be able to stroke and soothe her with its gentle fire. She left him unrelieved of his thoughts, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, where she had prepared a douche of alkaline salts.

  In the centre of Essenwald, the great cathedral was German in origin—a facsimile of Europe nailed to the core of Africa. It had two towers that should have been twins, but irrational time had delayed one, causing a fluctuation of ideas to warp it. Some shards of fashion and theology had dented its skeletal helix, making the thin needle twist out of symmetry with its sister. A slim silver bridge joined the towers near their apex and highlighted the subtle difference between them: One tower had the clock, the other the bell. Each month, a trumpeter would celebrate the moon from the dizzying heights of the slender walkway. The pagan lunar ceremony, one of many that were the responsibility of Deacon Casius Tulp, had been imported along with the stones, the design, and the meaning of the great church.

  (Many of the natives of the area also believed that the freak changes in the weather had been smuggled in with the invaders. It was certainly true that a new cold infested the nights in the winter season. Frost had been seen for the first time after the spires had been made, and different kinds of clouds now lurked above their spikes and tried to swallow the moon. But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh; it seethed in heat and ignored any rumour of ice.)

  Deacon Tulp stood in the whistling, circular room with the pallid musician and one of the younger wardens. They were all panting after climbing the forever spiralling stairs, and pointed clouds of silvered air wheezed from them into the cold chamber, two hundred feet above ground. They were like so many arctic fire-eaters: None had the energy to talk, which made their steamy speech plumes all the more vacant. They were giddy, faintly nauseous, and desperately trying not to think about the space below. The inexperienced warden had already opened the arched door onto the frost-covered walkway, which trembled and sang with the wind. The musician was becoming the same colour as the platform from which he would perform tomorrow.

  Casius Tulp spoke first. “It’s perfectly safe,” he said. “This weather is very unusual; never seen the like of it before, just like the old country. Your music will be heard all the better under these conditions; it will sound out across the whole city.”

  Nobody moved or wanted to think about tomorrow, and everybody had forgotten the old country. Their thoughts were about the grip of their shoes, the strength of the floor, and the little bit of their own personal gravity that enabled them to resist the wind. They clutched the railings, the walls, or anything of a solid nature with a fervent vigour.

  Ghertrude’s bright head appeared through the floor and startled them with its ease. “Here are the keys and the moon ring, Father.” She climbed into the room with a wave of excitement that made the men grip their supports even more firmly. Giving the ancient velvet bag to the older man, she turned into the blast from the open door and, in purposeful joy, walked towards it and out onto the bridge. The men’s insides shrank, their spines and stomachs slivering over the threshold and plummeting, with the imagined falling girl, towards the hard, cobbled ground. She was laughing as the wind plucked at the fur of her collar and her hair to make another jealous imitation of fire. “I can almost see to the other side of the Vorrh!” she yelled. “Look at the people, like ants!” Her shoes rattled on the slender metal as she tapped her feet in excitement. She had only one hand on the silver rail; the other waved towards the abyss. Nobody went out, and nobody would have ever dared to look down. It took some effort to get her back into the tower.

  She had been fourteen at the time and had begged to be given the job of organising the moon call every year. After ten days of incessant pleading, interspersed with silent, certain haughtiness, the dean had given in and she had been awarded the position: the first woman and the youngest in history.

  Now, all these years later, she stood again on the bridge and gazed out over the city. Flocks of birds were wheeling below, their shrill cries caught in the rising chimney smoke. Farther down, a warren of business squirmed in the mud. She looked down onto 4 Kühler Brunnen, lit by the slanted rays of the afternoon sun; into its courtyards and odd-shaped garden; at its shuttered windows and what she knew to be inside. She pictured him, like a flea or a speck of grit, hard and senseless, encrusted into the upper rooms. She thought how tiny his eye would be from here. Looking at the streets that he would never see, she shivered at his growing need to walk in them. A raven crossed her view, circling the roof under which he paced or slept. It landed and looked down into the garden. She grinned at their telescoped comparison, then thought of God peering down at her petty elevation. This was a fancy that she did not care for, and she switched to more practical matters, deciding to go to her parents’ house for dinner that night. There were a few more questions to be asked about the old house.

  At this moment, the rods under the bridge, which connected the clock to the bell, started to move. She felt their expectancy shift, seconds before the mechanism fell into gear. The weights lurched and the cogs started to gnaw into the allotted time. It was time to go.

  Ghertrude turned towards the door and moved a fraction, when something hooked her back to the distant rooftops: There was something below, almost unseen. It pecked at her mind’s eye and slid a new dimension into what she thought she knew so well. She moved back, targeting the raven and opening her sight. There it was: a tower. A shrunken, octagonal chimney, rising from the corner of the roof of 4 Kühler Brunnen. The tiled turret was hidden in the patterned complexity of the rooftops, and the raven stood on its brim, his shadow sliding over its edge. This was another secret of the house that she was beginning to think of as her own.

  She flew down the spiral stairs into the echoing nave, its booming organ trying to rival the setting sun, which was already stoking up the great windows of the west side. She knew that, if she sped, she would catch Mutter before he returned home that night.

  He already had the quiet, hasty key in the lock when she pounced. “Sigmund! Come with me.”

  She entered the garden gate and hurriedly walked around the side of the house, looking up at the roof. Mutter trailed behind her, his head too tired to stare at the sky.

  “There! There!” She pointed upwards. She was crouched, almost sitting in the shrubs, beneath the tall wall at the garden’s far end. Only from such an extreme angle could the tower be seen, sheltering in the fractured perspectives of the interlocking roofs. She pointed again. “There! What is that? Look, man, look!”

  He lumbered over to her, bent sullenly, and stared upwards.

  “There, there! What is it?”

  After a few moments of squinting and shifting, while she jabbed rabidly at the air, he said, “It’s a raven, ma’am.”

  Back in the house, they climbed the main stairway. Ghertrude was quiet and intent; Mutter was stiff, formal, and distant. He had become used to her commands, to her shifts of mood and her haughty righteousness. He had come to expect it. But nobody had ever spoken to him in the way that she just had. If it had been a man, he would have cuffed him into submission and apology. No woman had ever dared to call him a fool and worse; it stung his pr
ide and abraded his manhood. And all because of a crow, or a raven, or some invisible chimney! He was saturated in sulk and wore it with a sullen distance.

  Ghertrude knew she had been wrong to lose her temper with him; she needed this man, especially now. She stopped on the stairway and turned to face him. “Sigmund, I am very sorry for behaving so badly. You are a good and trusted servant and I have talked to you like an angry child. I must ask your forgiveness; it will not happen again.”

  He was amazed. Before her outburst, he had been secretly growing to respect her; now it seemed she had proven him right in doing so. He was lost for words, and strong emotions erupted in small spots inside him, like pennies in a cap.

  “Do I have your forgiveness?” she asked.

  He grunted a nod.

  “Good. Now, let’s find this tower,” she said, turning to resume her climb and lead the way up through the house.

  On the third floor, she put her finger to her lips as they crept past Ishmael’s suites. They walked the length of the corridor, but no other door could be found there, or in any of the adjacent rooms. Mutter pointed up at the ceiling and whispered, “The attic,” the entrance to which was at the other end of the building.

  It was the most unused part of the house, not counting the cellars or the well, which were best ignored. Inside a tiny box room, which at one time must have been used for servants, they found the stairway. Its carpentry was different from that in the rest of the house. It was tree-cut wood, still showing forms of branches and organic twists in its length. It suggested that the ladder had been grown, rather than constructed, conjured from the forest for a measured purpose. It was neat and strong and led to a roughly painted hatch in the ceiling.

  Mutter lit the bull’s-eye oil lamp and started up the stairs. His bulk made the wood creak as he pushed upwards, flipping the door inwards and lifting the light into the dark volume.

  “Please wait a moment, mistress,” he said, and continued to climb until just his feet were visible, huge on the delicate ladder.

  Ghertrude was instantly reminded of the fearful giant following Jack down the beanstalk to terrorise his world. She suppressed a titter and looked up. “What can you see?” she asked.

  “Not much,” he answered.

  She climbed onto the ladder too, intending to ascend, but it objected noisily. She got a whiff of Mutter’s rear end, an aroma that was, essentially, peasant: root vegetables and meat, laced with hard work, tobacco, and strong drink, all amplified by a distaste for bathing.

  She stepped back onto the solid floor and into more fragrant air, just as he disappeared into the groaning hole.

  “My God!” he said, in a voice that rang with sympathetic resonance, like a child calling into a lute.

  “What?! What is it?” she cried, hands once more holding the ladder, but this time with firmer intent.

  “You better come and see,” he called.

  The immense attic ran the entire length of the house, with a dramatic, right-angled turn at the far end, suggesting its continuation over an adjoining property. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dry gloom and the resonance, which seemed to be tuning itself to her breathing.

  Mutter spoke with an unearthly, musical clarity. “Take care; the floor is covered in wires!” The words transmuted into a fluttering choir of angels. If his harsh, guttural voice had been so cleansed and extended, what would she sound like?

  Then she saw the taut and gently glinting strings in the light of their lamp. Spider yarns delineating the distance, causing it to resemble the open fields as seen from above. Nitre, she thought, lines of fungi glistening, but it hummed. Yet again, that impossible word leapt into her mouth. It had been ordained that she would forever question strangeness with strangeness in this unpredictable house. She breathed out the call.

  “What!”

  It sang with a liquid vibrancy that coloured the space and made the blood dance in every quivering capillary. A tangible thrill rattled their bones and forced them both to grin like cats. When they drifted back to reality, the attic was ready to show them more.

  They saw limp lines of cord hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the strings. Boxes of iron balls and boxes of feathers were interspaced, placed close to the wall. The prone wires were listening to them, accosting and commenting on their movements and distorting Mutter’s whispers.

  The wires resonated with their every sound. Her word still sang in the air. There was a narrow path across the attic between the strings. Not a straight path, which would have made more sense to the fixed delineations, but a winding track that forced the tense wires to make a more random pattern, or perhaps it was the other way around. Unlike the rest of the house, there was no dust covering these mysteries. Ghertrude stopped to touch and admire the objects as she walked, in a dreamlike glaze, through the hollow room. Mutter was more cautious and thrust his hands deep into his tarry pockets. Then they saw the door, and knew, without words, that it would lead them to the tower.

  Ishmael was restless. He had explored every crevice and recess in his suite of rooms, and he wished for more. He wanted variety and difference, contrast and resistance. He knew Ghertrude and Mutter were outside; he could smell them through the shutters. He also knew that all the others out there had at least two eyes. He should have known this before. He had once asked Luluwa why all the animals she brought him had many eyes. She had said it was because they were of a lower denomination. The answer had seemed true at the time. Perhaps it was still true now. He saw nothing superior in Ghertrude or Mutter, certainly not in relation to himself or the Kin. But being locked in these rooms, he would never find out. There were many secrets and mysteries. No one knew who sent the boxes or who arranged for Mutter to be paid. He had discovered this by mistake; he was learning guile by watching them, by observing the unsayings and the quick looks. He wanted to train his powerful and undivided sight further into the world, but she would not let him. For his own good, she said. She claimed to be protecting him from the cruelties that would befall him outside the walls of the house. But she could not know that he had already been taught the lessons of cruelty, from the contents of the two crates that had been delivered together, so long ago.

  He knew that he was watched. He had heard movement above, heard muffled voices up there when the house was supposed to be empty. He was not meant to have noticed the small hole that had appeared in the plaster scrollwork of the ceiling, the gap that let them peer down into his seclusion. He, in turn, picked at the paintwork around the lock on the shutters, splintering away a shard of wood, which could be set back in place with spit and cunning. He had seen the courtyard and the live animals and sometimes the street beyond, when the gate had been opened.

  Some nights, he dreamt of the Kin: the hard brown of their kindness; Luluwa’s unflinching touch; the watery hiss in her body. Some nights he pieced together the bits of learning they had given him and strung them on a thread of meaning that was entirely his own. If she would not let him see the world outside, then he would not let her see the one he was constructing within.

  There was no key for the door to the tower, just a slit, its edges rounded by use and the gnawing of rats. She put her flat hand inside and her fingertips touched the string. She scissor-gripped it between the polished almonds of her nails and pulled it out.

  “Let’s come back in daylight, mistress,” Mutter said.

  She heard real concern, not fear, in his voice. The oil lamp was smoking and the night was inking in the volumes around them. What had been magical was beginning to give way to the eerie.

  “Yes,” she said, letting the string fall back to the other side of the door. “We will return in the morning. With new light, we will see so much more.”

  They climbed back to the civilised part of the house. Lost in her thoughts, she exited the stairwell brushing cobwebs and dust from the folds in her dress. It took her some moments to realise that her action was purely mechanical, designed to announce her arrival—there was nothi
ng on her clothing to be removed.

  —

  The light declared that it would be a glorious day, limply draped in water at first, but with a glowing intensity that would burn off any trace of shadow by noon. They climbed the stairs to the third floor in a saturated brightness that followed their ascent, pencil-thin rays of sun spinning through the singing attic, creating a magnificent landscape of shifting perspective. At the door, she retrieved the string once more and tugged on it eagerly. With a meaty click, the door opened and they stepped into another stairwell.

  “I sometimes wonder if this house will ever end,” she said, as she began to climb up the wooden, panelled tube. At the apex was a large, circular table, sheltering under the beautiful curves of a domed roof. A brass rod and lever pointed down to the faded silk cloth that covered the disc. She knew instantly what it was, and her heart pounded with glee.

  She pulled the cloth from the disc to expose its subtle curve. Reaching up, she drew the lever down, while holding the thick brass knob at the end of the rod. A panel in the ceiling slid open, sending dappled light onto the table. She turned the knob and the juddering blurs cohered into an image of the city below. Mutter was leaning on the white surface when a horse and carriage crossed the back of his hand. He pulled away as if stung.

  “It’s all right, Sigmund,” she said. “It’s just a picture.”

  She twisted the knob and the city spun and turned under her control. Continually adjusting the lever and the rod, she selected and focused on the distant life at her will. She trawled the contours of the horizon and the black shadow of the Vorrh, before focusing tightly on the cathedral door. Marvelling at her perfect detachment, she caught all the faces of those who passed through the great door, their purpose and activity reduced and smeared across the white dish for her inspection and delight.