The Vorrh Read online

  “I will call you Seil Kor,” the Frenchman announced.

  “But that is not my name, master.”

  “That does not matter. Seil Kor was a great hero and I know his name well. For this adventure, you shall be he.”

  The young man had frowned at this strange way but accepted his play name to make the little man more comfortable. The conversation became more serious, and when the Frenchman declared he would traverse the entire forest, the space between their knowledge and understanding broadened and split.

  Seil Kor turned his gaze away from his new companion and looked out towards the horizon. “Thou canst walk to the derelicts of the saints,” he said with firmness and distance, “but no farther. More is forbidden. From there is barred; you must turn away. No son of Adam is allowed, for God walks there.”

  The Frenchman’s sense of intrigue and challenge was ignited by such bold and ultimate statements. “The gods and monsters that live there must be more savage at the centre.” He smirked.

  At this, Seil Kor’s countenance gained an expressive patience, and he turned to stare back into the conversation, while making a gesture over his heart. “Not gods of old people,” he said gently. “The one God. Your God; my God; Yahweh. The great Father who made all things and gave Adam a corner of his clearing, so that he may dwell in it and grow. He walks there. It is his garden on earth. Paradise.”

  A sudden silence opened around them.

  “Seil Kor, my friend, are you telling me that the Garden of Eden is located in the Vorrh?”

  “Yes, it is so. But Eden is only a corner of God’s garden; the rest of the clearing is where God walks, to think in worldly ways. It is impossible in heaven, where all things are the same, without form or colour, temperature or change. In his worldly garden, he wears a gown of senses, woven in our time. He lets rocks and stones, wind and water, clothe his invisible ideas. He pictures our life in the matter that makes us.”

  The Frenchman was shocked and moved by such faith and by the clarity that bound it. Delaying his cynicism, he tried desperately to shape his next question outside of his normal patronising indifference. “How do you know this?” he asked.

  Seil Kor was confused by the question. Could his companion really be so obtuse? “Because he has told us,” he replied.

  Any further questioning the Frenchman may have been tempted towards had been silenced. They parted ways, agreeing to meet the next morning and begin their journey to the lip of the Vorrh.

  He returned to his servants and found their hotel, solidly located at the centre of the city, on sturdy roads where all dust was banished. That night, the Frenchman had hardly spoken to Charlotte. Lying on his bed, listening to the moonlit sounds outside, he had prayed for sleep. He wanted to dream in biblical weight and in the brightness of a lush garden, untenanted by man for thousands of years. But the dreams that awaited him were without pity and had the predatory grace of a jackal.

  —

  He awoke the next day drenched in sweat, his pillow turned pink—dazed, he searched his head and body for a wound that might explain the stained fabric, but nothing could be found.

  The dream had hollowed him; no trace of rest remained as he crawled into the morning, defeated and abused. Hot water did nothing; the stain of the night was indelible. He dressed grudgingly, tightly buttoning himself into a costume of scratchy, irritant lies. With one gulp of bitter black coffee, he walked out of his room and into the day, speaking to nobody. Outside the hotel, the heat had waited, ready to pounce.

  Seil Kor stood in the shadow of a palm tree across the street. “Bonjour, effendi!” he called, one hand waving in the intense blue sky, as the blindingly white suit stepped into the sun. The Frenchman, barely able to get into his stride, had found himself exuberantly propelled along the street.

  “We go directly to the Vorrh,” said his acquaintance. “But on our way, I want to show you something.”

  He mumbled agreement but was inwardly horrified by the idea of walking. He had had no intention of making the journey on foot, yet discovered himself being dragged down the main road of the filthy town by a stranger. His irritation began to rise with the heat of the day; the claws of his previous night were prickling, envious, and alive.

  Walking on the raised wooden pavement, under arcades of curved sandstone, he was reminded of the precise architectural splendours of Bern, where he had spent some time with his mother, shopping in the days before Christmas, the snow falling without intention, light and constant. Not a single flake had touched them as they moved from shop to precious shop, the vaulted Altstadt offering a snug tunnel of civilised proportions, the pleasure of warm cinnamon wine and pine trees scenting the frosted air.

  As suddenly as he’d fallen into the fantasy, the perversity of the comparison had spat back, giving him no time to relish or ponder; his own mechanism of creative invention had turned on him once again. It had begun to happen more and more by then; the brilliance of his literary deceit had a vindictive twin, who could not see why his little word game, if it was so clever, should function only in his languid fiction. Each day it had started to apply the same rules of composition and invention to his life, twisting pleasure and experience into worthless jokes. It grabbed at his memories and perverted them with elaborate motivations, succulent in their weirdness, making stupidity and pride fuck on the hallowed ground of his genius. Here, everything was made of rotting wood and was held together by the stink of collapse. It was nothing like the elegance of Switzerland; even the grand stone houses paled into insignificance.

  His irritation had mounted, turning inwards with a voracious glee. It chased him with accusations: The base of the comparisons had been exhaled from some dim childish sentiment—surely it should have been beaten out of him years earlier? And what was he doing there, anyway? He never left his rooms or his car. Why had he agreed to meet this stupid savage?

  So it had continued. A swarm of flies buzzed around his head, a halo of carrion, just to emphasise the point. He spluttered one out of his mouth, waving his hands about wildly to fend the others off and dropping his cane, which clattered off the boardwalk and into the soiled road. Seil Kor only laughed at his new friend’s pantomime. Indignant at the best of times, the Frenchman was entangled by an instant rage and spat abuse into the face of the ignorant black peasant. Nothing happened. Seil Kor did not register shock or anger. He hadn’t even flinched, but converted his open laugh into a serious, frowning smile and waited.

  The hiss of the final expletives drained away; the Frenchman was ready to turn and stomp back to the hotel, when, with a smooth and simple action, Seil Kor took a fine, silken scarf from his head and loosely knotted it about the red and raging throat of the small man before him. The world dropped away. The blue of the silk and the sky melted together, a fresh breeze cooling his heart and soothing his mind.

  With all the venom and distress gone, Seil Kor took his hand and led him on, bringing them to the doors of a nearby church. He directed his dazed companion inside, and they sat in the cool of the interior, on one of the dark, carved pews. The Frenchman tried to find words of apology, but it had been so long since he’d used them that he remained dumb.

  “I have brought you here to understand the Vorrh,” said his guide. “This house of God is for those travellers who pass near its sacred heart. The Desert Fathers founded this church before one stone was laid on another, before even a single tree was cut. They came out of Egypt like the prophets of old, came to guard and wait, to protect us and those travelling through us.”

  The Frenchman looked around the chapel. Images of trees dominated the iconography; trees and caves. Black, kohl-rimmed eyes stared out of a face that looked like it had been carved with an axe. Dark, shoulder-length hair and a tangled beard framed the whiteness of the Father’s staring expression. In one hand he held a Bible, in the other a staff. He sat in a cave, surrounded by the deep green of an impenetrable forest. The scene had been set on a square piece of thick and gnarled wood. The Frenchma
n stared at the icon while the tall black man spoke over his head.

  “The Vorrh was here before man,” he said. “The hand of God swept over this land without hesitation. Trees grew in its great shadow of knowing, of abundance. The old silence of stones was replaced by the silence of wood, which is not quiet. A place for man was made, to breathe and be thankful. A garden was opened at the centre of the shadow and the Vorrh was given an occupant. He is still there.”

  The Frenchman’s eyes unlatched from the gaze of the saint. He turned to look up at Seil Kor. “The Bible says the children of Adam left the sacred lands and moved into the world.”

  Seil Kor made a gesture over his own head, a cross between wafting a scent and stroking a halo. “Yes, so it is written—but Adam returned.”

  They continued to talk while the heat of the day prowled around the chapel. The Frenchman had given up the last remnant of sexual desire for his companion. It had been present from the start, a rich, thick musk of fantasy that had excited their meetings. He had seen no reason, initially, why he should not possess the black prince and add him to the list of urchins, sailors, and criminals who had spiced the gutter of his sexual greed. He was handsome and presumably well-endowed; his obvious poverty would have made him easy to purchase for a short time.

  But the words in Seil Kor’s mouth—the certainty of his vision and the kindness in his eyes—had washed away those stewed perfumes, replacing them with an ethereal distance that shocked back the very pride and circulation of his vital cynicism. The tired ghost of his ennui had been offered colour and hope. He had begun to sense, with some fear, that Seil Kor tasted of redemption. He even found himself giving weight to the ludicrous myths of the Vorrh and the salvation that might shudder in them. They talked of the serpent sin, of deliverance, of the starry crown and the origin of purpose; Adam’s house in paradise, his generations, Eve’s punishment, and all the crimes of knowledge. During those moments, his eyes had wandered back to the saint and to his brothers lining the walls. He took in the black-and-white prints of angels; some he’d recognised as being pages from a book, torn and framed excerpts of Gustave Doré’s visions of heaven and hell. The images were solid, almost marble in appearance, so different from the glowering Desert Father patriarchs of the icons, who all had the same eyes, an impossible combination of tempera infinity and point-blank, chiselled authority. It had occurred to him that Seil Kor had younger versions of the same eyes and that they would mature into that same gaze of stern wisdom.

  As the conversation came to an end, the Frenchman noticed another painting. Smaller than the rest and set in a far corner of the chapel, away from any source of light, it was made on the same dense, gessoed wood, but something had obviously gone wrong with its process, for the pigmentation of varnish had turned black. He drew closer to examine it; it was as if the picture was empty, or contained only painted night. He put his fingertips on its crusted surface, discerning a raised outline, the contours of a head, the painting’s swallowed occupant invisible in the tarry depth.

  “What is this one?” he asked of his guide.

  The young man looked bashful and evasive and refused to look directly at the block of darkness.

  “What is this one? Please tell me.”

  “Some of the stories from the Vorrh are older than man and they become confused with the Bible,” replied Seil Kor. “I think this is one of those. It is said that a being will come to protect the tree, after all the sons of Adam are dead. He is called the Black-Faced Man. This might be him.”

  The Frenchman looked closer at the picture. As he did, Seil Kor turned away, saying that he thought they would need a complete day to discuss the Vorrh’s entrance, and that this day had been sidestepped to catch a different knowledge. It was the way of life, to scent the direction of the breeze or a man’s falling. That day had been about the chapel and their place in the wheel of time. He noisily picked up the Frenchman’s cane from one of the pews and gave it to him—it was warm and light. A whisk of dust swirled from its tip, looking like smoke in the shafting rays of the afternoon that waited outside. They never spoke about the tablet of darkness again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Edward Muggeridge was a hollow man. Born that way. A camera without an aperture. Closed and hoping that nobody would ever see the volume of his dark interior. He worked hard on the panelled walls that framed him, changing his when he felt it could add gravitas and solemnity. He left England to start a new life and roamed the Americas starting modest businesses, scratching a respectable living selling other people’s images of the world. Until a fateful day in 1860, when he missed the boat and instead left San Francisco by stagecoach. In mid-Texas velocity, concussion and blood changed the signature of Edward Muggeridge forever.

  Before the accident he was a thirty-year-old man filled with vapor, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed among the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat from a dead woman’s luggage staunching his head blood, swooning clear of the hooves, which were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds. He now saw horses all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse wire to the fire in his brain. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling, savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step.

  The aperture that had been gouged into his brain had no lens. It was permanently sick in double vision and raging in pain. After fifteen months he took the compensation from the Stage Company and set sail back to England, to find a cure or a focus.

  First he changed his name to Edward Muygridge. Second he sought a doctor. Upon his return, the capital was swarming with horses; their stink and their volume made him shiver as he crossed London Bridge. His first consultation waited on the other side of the teeming river. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated one another in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers, and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with workingmen; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.

  At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river that so gently flowed through his hometown. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty; it was for fishing, idle boating, and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage, and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.

  He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family while on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk br
iskly towards the Surrey side.

  Dr. William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.

  Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muygridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting, and ill.

  They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muygridge sat and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muygridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them farther forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk and began to make notes of his observations.

  “Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?”

  The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. “Here,” he said.