The Vorrh Page 7

  “Tell me,” the surgeon said, “when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?”

  “I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.” His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. “Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside down.”

  “What is a double exposure?” asked Gull.

  “Oh, it’s a term used by photographers; it’s when two images are fused together, one picture on top of another.”

  Gull stared at him. “It’s an optical fixture of two different times, then?”

  “Um, yes, that could be said.”

  “How do you sleep?”

  “Badly. Sometimes not at all.”

  Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.

  “Is that a bad sign?” asked Muygridge.

  “No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter; the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.” But before Muygridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.

  The questions lasted for twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muygridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muygridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.

  “It’s a peripherscope,” the surgeon explained. “It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.”

  “I am no such scholar; I have only read a little and recently bought my first camera.”

  Gull ignored his comments and moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin.

  “This will be just like a photographic portrait,” he said mildly. “Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.”

  The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected his or her deathlike image. He had already thought of a way to dispense with such artificial contrivance.

  “The dome, please!” the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different from the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. “Now, please, do not move; just stare at the dome.”

  These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night that shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.

  When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Dr. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.

  “Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muygridge.”

  The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone, and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.

  “It’s the angels,” Gull said. “The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head; it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.”

  He smiled broadly at Muygridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like a vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.

  “Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable but caused no long-term structural damage.” Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. “There may be side effects,” he said, “but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours; do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.”

  He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muygridge towards the door, he said, “Are you planning to return to America?”

  Muygridge nodded. “Eventually.”

  “I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Use your camera to take pictures of that wilderness; force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.”

  They stood on either side of the door, their handshake passing through. “Will you send your fee?” Muygridge remembered to say.

  “No, I think not,” said the surgeon. “We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.” He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. “Read this in the future,” he said, and closed the door.

  —

  On a ship back to America, Muygridge had opened Gull’s letter and was trying to taste the time that had vanished in the high room at London Bridge. The time that had been leached had been used to cleanse the wound in his head; he had no doubt of that. Gull and his peripherscope had cured a chasm in him. He would return to America a different man. It would be another three decades before he could thank the physician and offer his services in return; in the meantime, some part of him relished the prospect of that day, and he became dedicated to catching invisible time with his own device, so that they might share their notes as equals. Little did he know that their weighty conversation might be stolen by the machine itself.

  For now, the wilderness called to him, and he would become lost in its magnitude. He would head north into the Yukon, then west to roam the open plains; he would suck their essence into hand-ground lenses and encapsulate their magnificent bleakness into paper that had been eclipsed under his strengthening hands.

  He knew this because he had already seen it all, in the space where the pain used to live, projected brighter than life itself. Held in a place between sleep and waking, and contained by the sides of his vision. The only disadvantage was that he sometimes shared this space with something else, something akin to an ominous, rising moon. That was why he now stood on the deck, gazing at the real moon, high above the black waves. Away from the public lighting of the ship, he opened Gull’s crumpled envelope again, in the white incandescence. The surgeon had known of this afterimage and how its blur might haunt his future clarity.

  What you will see is the afterburn of my investigation and suggestive treatment. It will manifest as an absence in your mind, a glowing hollow that will sometimes disturb you, but mostly can be ignored. It is the negative of the dome that you looked on for so long in my rooms, and my joke about angels was only partially a jest.

  I w
ill not prescribe drugs to clothe its manifestations, nor to banish it. I suggest hard work at your given science, fresh air, and large quantities of solar and lunar light. After a while, the form of this genie will change, and you and it will live in unity. I wish you good health and success with all your endeavours.

  W. W. GULL

  The motion of the sea settled Muygridge. The moon bathed its interior other, as the written words began their transformation from diagnosis to prophecy. The ship ploughed through the darkness, a pinpoint of light skimming the great curve of water. A million beasts rolled, fled, and laughed in the vast distance beneath it, while the stars multiplied and roared in the perpetual silence above.

  Upon arrival in America, he followed the doctor’s advice to the letter. He was so far removed from human society that he had almost died of starvation three times. A legend of this thin man’s endurance had begun to spread across the Great Plains, reaching as far as the Indian nations. Many such foolhardy explorers were scavenging this land, tipping themselves from famine-haunted homelands, from frozen pogroms and relentless oppression, to step into the burning sun and huge, endless spaces. They sought gold and silver, pelts and land. They had arrived to be reborn and to take everything they could with their pale, bare hands.

  But he was very different. It was said that he was hunting stillness and that instead of picks or shovels, guns or maps, he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye, which ate time. Some said he carried plates of glass to serve the stillness on. He would eat with a black cloth over his head, licking his plate clean in the dark.

  The Europeans and the Chinese gave him a wide berth. Such behaviour was unchristian and suspicious in these new lands, where anything might propagate and swell to dangerous consequences. The other whites said his box stole the souls of all he placed before it, but how could those who had no soul to begin with ever know? The natives were intrigued by the stories and wanted to see the hunter of quiet. He had found their sacred places and stayed close to them. He had not interfered with or desecrated their energy and power. He had sat with his box in their presence for many hours, sometimes days, and then silently moved on.

  He had found a race of humans that he could tolerate, and they welcomed him into many clans, even though he was a Lost One, a most-feared being in all small, tight societies. He was a man who survived outside the tribe and the family, a man turned loose and wild. But this one had understanding and silence and was dedicated to motionlessness; all qualities the Plains tribes cherished. He was allowed to photograph the great chiefs and their medicine men. Eventually, they would let him see and photograph the Ghost Dance. He sent back to England prints of lonely desolation, stunning landscapes of untouched, gigantic purity and pictures of powerful, noble men, who looked into the camera without seeing themselves. Many he sent back to the wise surgeon, to demonstrate his improvement and to reiterate his gratitude; his instinct told him that the man high in the oriel window at London Bridge would understand.

  Muygridge began to feel himself healed; his growing confidence stood upright in the hollow lava beds of the flat plains of the Tule Lake. He turned his box on the Modoc War, shovelling up images of the vanquished lands and their shivering occupants. The enemy paid him well, so he became the official photographer for the U.S. Army; the stillness could wait while his plates were filled with the pumice of defeat and exile. At the end of it all, he gathered his new fame and his obsessively accumulated wages and travelled back to the city lights and the crisp linen of San Francisco, to embark on the joys of marriage, parenthood, and murder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For Ghertrude Eloise Tulp, the quietness of the house was a thrill, heightening her expectations and making tiptoeing from room to room all the more delicious. She opened doors slowly against her discovery, moving with a certitude that caressed the moment. Searching in the complete freedom of night served only to increase her pleasure.

  Some years before, she had read “The Tell-Tale Heart” in its third impression, taking in Poe’s description of cunning, and standing alongside as his protagonist crept in to watch the victim sleeping. She had marvelled at his ability to describe such a contained act of evil against the common, dull speed of life; how he had known the precision of stealth and could put into words the silent, skilful malice. The modern American author’s little story had moved her and given her hope. Even though it had almost been spoilt by a suggestion of mania, she knew that he truly understood the control and vision of a superior intellect, one that was ultimately engaged in the divinity of its own development.

  Now, in this old, empty house, she could practise her own talent. Armed with a bull’s-eye lamp, she listened for the sound of humans, that whisper of movement and breath that always betrayed their presence. Her ears strained for any sign of them but heard none of the faintness of life. Convinced she was alone in the mansion, she let her feet settle out of stealth. As she moved quickly through the lower passage, she almost missed the locked door to the basement.

  Raising her lamp to inspect her collection of steel pins, she found two that were twisted in the right deception and applied them to the brass eye. She made the usual turns of leverage, yet nothing shifted. She changed the picks for a sturdier set; this lock was different, its inner workings more resistant, possibly newer. She mumbled under her breath as she strained. It should not be this difficult; what was she doing wrong? She stopped and listened to the empty house again. Nothing had changed, so she inserted the picks and suddenly realised what was different: It was a sinister latching, a set of left-handed tumblers cunningly set in a right-handed lock. She turned the probes upside down and twisted them against all logic. It yielded.

  She opened the door and found herself in a distinctly separate space at the top of a flight of stairs, peering into the murky depths of the basement. Its entrance was in keeping with everything she’d already seen, but the difference in its atmosphere was plain—something in it lived. The palms of her hands became damp and her mouth was suddenly parched. She felt thrilled and nauseated at the same time. She had not seen, heard, or smelt the change, but every fibre of her sentient being told her she was no longer alone. Another indicator tinged her already heightened senses, poised, as they were, on the brink of discovery: warmth. A minute rise in temperature had perfumed the static, neutral musk of absence. Someone was down there, hiding under the house.

  Ishmael’s demands to practise mating had increasingly punctuated their daily lessons; his diet had been adapted accordingly, to compensate for his change in habits and his loss of fluids and minerals. The eternality of Luluwa’s patience had been clarified by her limitation of function, a trait that had, evidently, endowed her with a continuous enthusiasm for all things.

  Some days they mated for hours. The others walked around and about their action, carrying food and lessons, ignoring them or sitting and watching, mildly bewildered by the energy and repetition of the acts. On one occasion, Seth adjusted their angle, to prevent them from sliding off the table on which they shuffled so.

  Ishmael still learned from the crates, but his preference was for the damp, wordless classes, his enthusiasm limitless, until fatigue slowed him to sleep. Luluwa would then put him to bed, darkening the room and lowering the heat. She swaddled him in a deep, aching sleep before leaving the sanctity of their chamber to go into the house itself, silently entering the basement kitchen, where humans had once lived. She removed the casements of her internal mechanisms and cleansed them in the ancient porcelain sink. She did this in the dark, because machines do not need light to function, even when they have been given only one good eye.

  The sound of the water made Ghertrude start. Now she really knew there was someone else there, that she was the trespasser. She also knew that, whoever they were, they did not wish to be found out; their clandestine tenancy was evidence enough. Yet her excitement outweighed any trepidation over her crime, and anyway, nobody would ever lay a hand on a Tulp.

  The water stopped.
Her attuned hearing caught the sound of a door’s latch and she followed it down the staircase, elevating her long body and trying to become weightless, her toes delicately testing each step for betrayal before trusting it with her load.

  It took her more than an hour to make the descent, by which time dawn had begun to murmur through the night. The old basement kitchen was vast and empty. Dim spider light filtered in from the high windows on the east side. The garden above was overgrown at its edges; matted vines, dusty leaves, and a gauze of webs flavoured the light on its journey downwards into the still room. She stood in the doorway and listened. Nothing. For the first time, she felt a chill of unease—not fear, but a slight soaring of the thrill that she was so enjoying. She looked around the room to gauge its current purpose and count the doors. Between the marble table and the hatchway of the dumbwaiter were the remains of a crate. Splinters of wood and a short crowbar had been discarded, probably by that fool Mutter. Then she saw the light in the cupboard; the door was too small to be anything else. She crouched down to examine its closeness. There was no keyhole or handle; it sat flush against the wall. It would once have been undetectable, so snug that it would have been impossible to see. But age had loosened its boundaries, so that now a sliver of light proclaimed its other side.

  Putting the lamp down, she picked up the crowbar and, without hesitation, levered the stoic door open. Not a cupboard, but a curving, downwardly spiralling corridor appeared before her. She bent her height into its tunnel and started to walk-crawl, making her way down its length.

  Unaware of her imminence, Abel and Luluwa were in the dim sleeping room with the quietly snoring Ishmael, tending to various details for the next day’s class—“Lesson 314: The Signatures of Trees.” Aklia was in an adjacent room, her concentration engaged with an open crate, her head cocked and staring into it, as if reading something contained within. Seth was charging in the rack, receiving energy for the next day.