The Vorrh Read online

  Neither Abel nor Luluwa noticed the door in the wall begin to open; they did not register its occupant, as she attempted to make out their form. As her eyes became accustomed to the room beyond the light of the corridor, her brain tried to make sense of her discovery. It allowed for tricks of perspective; it suggested illusions brought on by tiredness; it even prompted dream as an explanation for what she now saw. But reality slid its frozen tentacle along her spine and she winced with a reaction of revulsion, fear, and hunger.

  Her involuntary spasm unhinged the door, sending it flapping into the startled room. The brother and sister jumped to attention, blocking her view of the waking boy, adopting a predatory stance of defence, half-crouching, braced like cats. Ghertrude eased herself into the room, propelled by the wonder of this unique moment and too fearful to turn her back on the small, lithe creatures. She slowly unfolded herself into the space, holding the crowbar poised at breast height like a hesitant truncheon. Her head touched the ceiling; the creatures came up as high as her shoulder. As the morning light continued to rise, she saw that they were not creatures but machines, and the twisted reflex of her superiority felt secure. Her rind of confidence was gaining a voice, and she was just about to speak when Abel opened his jaws and let loose a high, sibilant shrill. Aklia and Seth appeared at once in the far doorway, both in the same stance as their kin. Ishmael, awakened by the commotion, rubbed at his face and turned sleepily into the conflict. His somnolence evaporated the moment he saw Ghertrude blocking the exit. Her face provoked horror, and he drily retched at her deformity: She had two eyes.

  For a moment, everything in the room was locked rigid in an icy tension. Only Ishmael’s gagging divided its glacier of time.

  Then he feebly warbled, “Oh, oh, help!”

  Abel became unleashed by the pathetic command and took three fast paces towards Ghertrude, his eye glaring at her pale, looming face. The other Kin converged behind him. He was within a metre of her, and closing, when the crowbar splintered his neck and shoulder. His head clattered across the floor, still attached to a sliver of his upper torso, the mouth chattering wildly, the single eye spinning in his cracked face. His body fell to its knees and stiffened, causing a judder to slop his interior cream out of the jagged rim of his fractured body. Even in the midst of the action, Ghertrude was instantly reminded of her dissections of beetles, years before. The same brittle carapace splitting under her blade, the same white pus escaping from the hollow of the shell. It had slipped over the chocolate-brown edge and splashed on the tiled floor.

  The others were now making the same sound as the splintered head, chattering their hard gums together, working uncontrollably. Ghertrude’s teeth rattled in unison, infected by the noise coming from these devices and the horribly deformed child crouching in its metal cot. But the staccato of her teeth was imbued with the adrenaline of exhilaration, so that its insistence dominated the choir.

  The boy moaned and covered his eye against the ugliness of the giantess’s symmetry. Suddenly, the Kin retreated, walking backwards, without turning, towards the far door; stepping with delicate poise, never taking their eyes from the invader, still half-crouched as if for attack, but reversing, rewound. They reached the door and disappeared beyond it. Luluwa was the last to leave, and just before she disappeared forever, she glanced at the boy, who felt her eye but turned too late to see her. All that was left of his protectors was the door, closing behind them.

  The woman’s voice boomed in a sluggish yowl. It was hideous but human, and Ishmael recognised something of himself in it. She was the first of her kind he had ever seen or heard, and she was a monster—oversize, with a face that made him retch repeatedly. The shock of being alone with this creature chilled his bones.

  Misinterpreting his disgust as fear, Ghertrude tried to say something kind to the imprisoned child, something that would tell him she meant him no harm. She was practising kindness and the novelty made her feel righteous, in the purest sense she had ever known.

  She spent a long time almost motionless, speaking softly to demonstrate her distance and restraint. Ishmael began to look at her less warily, moving his hand away from his protected eye and gradually standing up in his bed. She saw that he was not a child, but a stunted adolescent, diminished and grossly deformed, but very human.

  High above, the sun had risen in the tangled garden, shooing off the clinging mist and unveiling a bright-blue sky. Its radiance dazzled the kitchen, sending thick, curling rays that shafted through the basement windows. Without breeze or any other movement, dust was lifted into its magnitude to be exalted in the stillness. The room sang to itself and rejoiced in its unoccupied beauty, as all rooms do when left for such long periods of time: When they are untainted by even the slightest trace of rearrangement or the hectic purpose of humans, their invention and design become their own once more.

  Ghertrude had cautiously begun to cross the room to make contact with the youth; hands and arms wide, the crowbar left behind, she felt possession flood her future and justify her present. She moved slowly past the leaning remains of Abel, but her caution was not enough to stop him toppling over, spilling the remnants of his fluid in a noisy pool. It triggered an unexpected rage in Ishmael that leaked into every part of his fear. They had left him. Luluwa had abandoned him without a word. The Kin had failed to defend him—all the care of their work and time together had, in the end, meant nothing to them. He looked at the broken Bakelite body, slumped stiff and clumsy in its milky puddle. Abel’s lifeless head lay on the other side of the room, but the memories of their conversations had already begun to elude him. His confusion and anger were meeting at a crossroads, and the shadow of this giant woman was waiting there to greet him.

  She had quickly become accustomed to the pained squint of the shrunken adolescent, feeling a surge of protection towards him, which was an innovation and added sanctity to her confusion. She had never experienced such emotions as when she touched Ishmael, but he shrank back from her contact—its softness was without meaning, and queasy. He pulled the light-blue bedsheet around his nakedness and bit into his hand.

  From a vocabulary of fiction, Ghertrude said, “Shush now; you’re safe.” In her hot mouth, the words bunched like his improvised loincloth. “Those creatures are gone, and I will protect you.”

  He knew what the double eye meant but could not understand what had caused her to say it. In the voice of the Kin, a brittle flutter, he said, “They were my family, my friends.”

  Ghertrude was incensed. Not for another second would she let those abominable puppets stay in his deluded head. Sweeping aside the last traces of unfamiliarity, she helped him out of the cot with both hands, pulling his face close to hers as she knelt, saying, “They are monsters, keeping you here, away from your own kind. They are abominations.” He blinked and dribbled. “They will be found and destroyed for what they have done to you and your poor face.”

  She sat him on the floor and wrapped the sheet tightly around him, tucking its ends beneath his shivering weight. “Don’t move,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She quickly crossed to the point where the Kin had vanished and looked into the next room, where another door was left ajar. Cautiously, she squeezed past the charging bays and the open crates, reaching the tiny kitchen on the far side of the room. The open doors there led to a spiral staircase with darkness at its base. There was hollowness below, far greater than its architectural structure. A resonance sounded towards her, a solid emptiness that tolled in silence: This was the infamous well.

  Nothing moved there except volume itself, stretching downwards in a shaft of waiting echo. She could not tolerate its dominance and shouted into its length.

  “What!”

  The word found itself in her mouth without passing through her brain. It spat itself out, not as a question, more like a challenge or a curse, a gob of noise to state her territory and show that she would not retreat. It should have been defiant, but it quivered. Too late, she understood t
hat it was the last word, in any tongue, to choose to screech into such a rifled abyss. Such questions must be answered at some point, and she prayed that it would not be now, for fear was finally invading her sense of control. What came back to her was a shattering rumble that described how far out of her depth she really was. The reverberation of “What!” crashed up the stairs, hissing and booming between the magma and the stars. For a micro-eternity, everything inside her gave up its colour and mobility. White blood blocked her heart, filled her ears, and coagulated in her eyes, cracked stiff in the capillaries of her brain; white breath’s film stopped in the gate of her lungs; white muscle glued to white bone; white urine waited to burn white legs; and her white nerves clicked with opacity and hid in the transparency of water.

  As the echo still shuddered, she jerked back into life and bolted. Crashing the door behind her, she sprinted through the careful congestion of the next room, colliding with packing cases, straw, and specimen jars, upsetting tables and gashing her leg. She barged the next door, scooped Ishmael up in her arms, and ran towards the cramped, upward corridor, slithering on the congealing fluid that had once been Abel, sending his head clattering once more across the wet floor. She pushed up hard into the bright tunnel, her dress squealing in friction against the smooth walls. Panting against the boy’s sobs, she slipped on wet hands and feet into the quiet kitchen, through the splintering panel of the secret door. The slanting sunlight glazed her, offering benevolence, but she barely registered it as she fled with her charge, through the room to the upper stair, bursting at last into the still dignity of the old house. She slammed the door and, taking a deep breath, used one hand to turn the skeleton key, while her other arm propped the limp boy between her hip and the wall. The bolt turned into place. Tears flooded her eyes. Her relief was poised for release when she heard something move behind her. She spun around, summoning fury in a spray of voice, sweat, tears, and the nameless gruel from the broken Kin. Teeth bared, hands like claws, she came face-to-face with Sigmund Mutter.

  It was difficult to know who was the most shocked. They had shuddered into the dining room of the old house without a word, Mutter swallowing loudly, trying not to look too obviously at either of them, but continually dragging his eyes up off the floor to make sure of the vision before him. Ghertrude was ruthlessly busy, daubing and scrubbing the mess from her clothing with a rag she had snatched from Mutter’s pocket.

  And Ishmael? It was impossible to guess what the half-naked little cyclops was thinking behind his hands, which had locked over his face the moment Ghertrude had released him from her protective grip. It was she who broke the silence with a command.

  “Mutter, you will tell no one of this.”

  He looked up into her dominance, which was rapidly drying off her humiliation, the steam it produced smelling of anger. Mutter nodded automatically.

  “You must help me hide this poor, hurt child.” She put her arm around Ishmael to emphasise the point. She had ignored him while repairing herself, and the sudden embrace made him jump. “Does anybody ever come here?” she demanded.

  Mutter assured her that he was the only one with keys and that he had never seen the owner or anyone else here; neither had his father.

  “Good,” she said to herself. She was thinking fast now, and the clarity pleased her. “Do you have the keys to the rooms upstairs?”

  “Yes, mistress, but all the doors are unlocked,” Mutter said, a tone of unease creaking in his voice. The room was beginning to feel cold, and she became aware of the boy’s shivering.

  “Go and fetch some clothing for him,” she said. “Anything will do. And light a fire in there.” She pointed to the reception room next door. “Go, man, and say nothing.”

  He nodded and made for the door.

  “Oh, and…,” she called out, as he made to leave. He turned to question her and she met him halfway, pushing four heavy coins into his hand. “Bring food and drink, something hot.”

  With that, he was gone instantly. She returned to Ishmael and pulled the sheet more closely about his white body.

  Two hours later, the boy was dressed in hand-me-downs from Mutter’s children. They had eaten and the room was warm. The exhaustion had put the cyclops to sleep and left Ghertrude free to make her plans. She questioned the anxious servant about his unseen masters, the house, the crates, and how his family had been paid over all these years. When she realised that he knew nothing, she started to build her palace of lies.

  The foundations of this baroque edifice were dug in need and fear: Mutter’s fear of becoming unemployed, or being held responsible for the damage and strangeness that so deeply perplexed him, gave her a foothold with which to begin her journey of deceit. She had explained in some detail that kidnapping was a crime punishable with the gravest of verdicts; that he was the only person with keys; that many would have seen him take food to the house each week. Moreover, there was nobody else there and any statement from Ishmael would be inadmissible, if he was allowed to speak at all.

  The need, however, was hers. She wanted to keep the little monster to herself, to find out more and not share him, yet, with the many and the mindless. But she lived in her father’s house. She needed another place to hide him, and 4 Kühler Brunnen was perfect. She would seal off the lower floor and any abomination that lived there and keep him in the attic or the rooms on the third floor. She would visit him every other day; nobody would know. Mutter was the key to making her plan work. He would be the engine to drive the day-to-day mechanism of concealment, and she would stoke the fires of that engine with dread and money. The only unknown in all of this was the response of his invisible masters, when they learned of her trespass and the destruction of one of their puppets.

  She waited for their appearance, but it never came. Meanwhile, Mutter carried on as usual, collecting the crates, taking them to the house, opening them, shuffling their contents, nailing them shut, and taking them back. He brought regular food; he cleaned the stables and looked after the horses. Now he had two wages for doing the same job and keeping his mouth and his eyes shut.

  The upper floor had been full of furniture, so it would be easy to make a usable suite of rooms. She could set about making a home that was comfortable and discreet. But before that, there was work to do in the basement. She told Mutter to bring tools, locks, and a gun.

  Drawing a chair up to the door of the basement, she instructed him on what had to be done below. With his keys in her hand and his shotgun across her knees, she told him only what was essential to make him do the work, calling instructions down the stairs that she had so recently escaped. He was to go down, beyond the old kitchen, and into that shrunken place. He was to take the remains of that repulsive thing and drop them down the well shaft. He was to change all the locks and board up the doors. She would guard the house and listen to his progress from the stairs.

  Mutter was not an intelligent man, but he knew that he was her litmus, her canary in a cage, to go down there and test for horrors. His skin crawled as he descended. She stood listening, her body in the hall, her head in the dark stairwell, the barrel of the gun pointing into expectation. After three hours, and a lot of banging and sawing, he returned, relieved to be out and buoyant in his fulfilment. She was beaming, as happy as he to have this work done, until he told her that there had been nothing left to clean, just a stain on the floor. The remnants that she had so horribly described were gone. She questioned him again and again to be sure that he was in the right room, and then gave up. Someone or something had moved the evidence and rewritten all of their parts in this strange event.

  During the first weeks, her plan seemed to work. She made many excuses to her family for her growing bouts of absence. She enjoyed the cunning complexity, the drifting sideways past the walls of the house and slipping in without being seen. Her family believed everything she said. They had no reason to doubt it, and it kept her out of their hair and from under their feet. She had stopped her daily forays to the kitchen to give a
dvice to the cook and no longer demanded to go through the housekeeping expenditures with the butler. She had less energy to expend directing her mother’s attention to the new fashions and modes of entertaining, and no time at all, it seemed, to offer the converse point of view in her father’s affairs. The family home was at rest and off guard. It was even rumoured, belowstairs, that a man had entered her life, that she had finally found a suitor who could keep up with her copious expectations. Much smirking and giggling occurred at such a prospect, as the servants huddled around the kitchen’s circular table.

  Mutter did as he was told. Occasionally, she would send him downstairs to check on the lock and listen for movement behind the boarded-up room, but nothing was ever heard. Once, she crept down with him to double-check his reports. She smiled at the growing layers of dust and the firmness of the barriers. She detected nothing and was content. Her plan was working, and a regularity forming that created a pleasing rhythm of mundanity in the strange old house.

  The greatest surprise was how easily the cyclops had adapted to his new environment. He was calm and self-reflective, using the time alone to read books she had bought for him. He seemed to have forgotten, or at least disregarded, his time spent in that squalid hutch of a space under the house. He never mentioned the abominations that had imprisoned him. He had stopped calling them the Kin, after she explained how distasteful it was. He seemed content in his new home and to be growing into his new role as an adult.

  It was in the fifth week that she noticed Ishmael was beginning to grow in more literal ways, stretching the cast-off clothing into a parody. By the seventh week, he had outgrown a second set of new clothes, which she had carefully picked out only days earlier. He was taller; his frame had gained bulk; he was eating the same food, albeit larger helpings, but that alone would not produce such a startling effect. She wondered if it was the room.