by B Catling
The Gabbet-Fairfax ‘Mars’ pistol was one of the first of its kind. A self-loading semi-automatic with an astonishing ballistic power, it looked like an axe or a hammer, and possessed a rudimentary ‘L’ of a body, an ugly, unique elegance of top-heavy dense steel, smooth and uncluttered. The rear end of the pistol was infested with a knurled mechanical contrivance of the breech, hammer and sights. The Mars was intended for military mass-production, but it entered the world backwards, and at the wrong time. It came with the same consideration that sent the mounted cavalry into the gas and machine guns of the First World War, with the pedigree of a medieval killing field: it could stop a horse. It sounded like the end of the world. Its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist and spit hot, spent cartridge cases back into their face. The imagined accuracy was never achieved because its marksman, having taken the first shot, shivered and flinched so greatly before squeezing the trigger that it was impossible to aim. It was the most powerful pistol ever conceived or constructed at the turn of that century, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Less than a hundred were manufactured. So how one found its way, sheltering with the Enfields, into the heartland of the True People was unknown. What was known was that it vanished at the same time as Peter Williams.
* * *
Twine, splinters of wood and weightless teeth-shards lie with the wingless bodies of twenty swallows at my feet, their strange, streamlined eyes looking in all directions. The shape of their eyes is echoed in their wings, the same wings that now grace my arrows. A sea fret rises at my back, and the horizon is gated, hinged on shadow. I am ready to leave these bleak, soft lands.
* * *
Tsungali unwound his sitting body and dropped soundlessly to stand, waiting a few seconds before he was called inside. Slow-motion dust clouded around his long, shoeless feet. He walked behind the soldier, who escorted him to the barracks door. As he entered, the soldier grabbed at the Enfield, gripping it midway. Tsungali barked a word or a sound that was a cross-breeding of multiple ferocities, one taken from cats and snakes, birds and winds. The hand sprang back to hang limp and tingling, as if electrocuted, at the terrified soldier’s shivering side. Tsungali’s eyes drummed the officer’s attention. He swallowed his contempt and waved him away. The shivering soldier left the room.
Tsungali walked in and smelt himself there years before, the rush of memories filling the hollows of his previous nervous system. For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: they keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current useable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.
That old part of him swelled with an essence of himself before, nudging the now in a physical déjà vu, becoming two in the stiff interior of his body, ignoring the even stiffer officer who glared in his direction. The overhead fan waded in the congealed air, stirring heartbeats of a larger beast and giving rhythm to the mosquitoes queuing to taste the sweating white skin of the officer, who choked out, ‘You have been asked to come here’ – the claws of the word ‘asked’ scratched the inside of his throat – ‘for a very special purpose.’
Night and insects.
‘We are looking for someone to hunt a man, someone we can trust.’
‘Trust’ nipped at his balls and diaphragm.
‘Someone with all the skills, a bushman warrior.’
Even the officer heard the condescension and it halted him, giving him time to look more appraisingly at the man before him. He was tall but slightly bent. His formidable skeleton had been broken and repaired many times. The flesh and muscle was hard, dark meat, pliant and over-used, solid. The skin was losing its once blue-black sheen, a faint grey opalescence dusting its vitality. The uniform was worn-out and rearranged, mended into another version of itself, turned into how he had wanted it to be: the opposite of its function of uniformity and rank. Its blueness was waning, building a visual alliance with the man’s skin. He looked like a shadow in the room and perhaps he was: a static shadow being cast by what was now happening in his swirling being, a gap of light spun out of a space in time.
In this departure, the officer was given a moment to look at Tsungali’s face, which was now still – not in calmness, but more like a single frame taken from a fast-moving film, held in blur at an unnatural rest. It had been some years since the officer had been this close to him. He had been in chains then, manacled to the courtroom floor. The ferocity of that man’s face had been in the wild passion of its movement and malice. Now it was formalised. The lines of twisted hate had been wrought into signs and contrivances, the spitting screams written in careful glyphs. His motionless face writhed in a balanced book of deep scars, an illuminated tapestry of skin, not unlike his grandfather’s. Neither was it unlike the body of the Enfield, which had itself become a carved narrative.
The officer stared at the polished bolt of the rifle; polished not by pomp or fetish, but by use.
‘Where is he from?’ said Tsungali. His voice stopped the mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.
For a moment, the officer was jarred back into the abhorrence of their business, and didn’t understand the question. Then he said, ‘He’s a white man.’
* * *
Ishmael did not know that he was not a normal human, because he had never seen one. The gentle, dark brown machines that nurtured him from infant to child, child to adolescent, looked like him in shape but were made from a different material. He had grown in their quiet, attentive care, knowing he was not the same, but never dreaming that he was a monster. There were no monsters in his world, deep under the stables in the old city of Essenwald.
It was a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made in the perimeter of the forest. It was built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine, while the extremes of weather had set about another form of fakery, forcing the actions of seasons through the high velocity of tropical tantrum. Many of the old stone houses had been shipped in, each brick numbered for resurrection. Some of the newer mansions and warehouses had taken local materials and copied the ornate, crumbling splendour of their predecessors, adding original artistic brilliance in their skeuomorphic vision of decay. It was prosperous, busy and full of movement, with solid roads and train lines scrolling out from its frantic, lustrous heart. Only one track crawled into the dark interior of the forest. Into the eternal mass of the Vorrh.
The city fed on trees, devouring the myriad of different species that ferociously grew there. Sawmills and lumber yards buzzed and sang in the daylight hours, rubber works cooked sap into objects, and paper mills boiled and bleached the bodies naked, ready for words. All this appetite was allowed by the forest. It encouraged the nibbling at one of its edges and used it as another form of protection – a minor one in comparison to the arsenal of defence that kept the Vorrh eternal.
Essenwald’s declaration of power and continuance was written throughout the labyrinthine manuscript of its twisting streets.
One crooked causeway was called Kühler Brunnen, its handwritten name nailed high on its sunless side. A house of significant age stood at its middle; its core was among the first to arrive and be sunken into the heated ground, on the site of a more sacred enclosure that some said was older than humanity itself. Parts of its later exterior had been copied in anthracite-rich stone, mined from a long-extinct quarry. Its proportion and whereabouts were stolen from one of the bitter-clad cities of northern Saxony. Its windows were shuttered. It quietly brooded, while deflecting any attention. Its small, neat stables contained three horses, a polished carriage and a working cart. Cobbles and straw gave movement and scent to its courtyard’s stillness, while far below, beneath the blue and yellow, the brown ones hummed and fussed over the white thing they grew. The air was filled with their scent of o
zone and phenol and the slight singeing of their overly warm bodies, an odour of life which led to cracking and brittleness, emitting its own distinctive hum, in the same way we age with wrinkles and softening.
The house was empty and wanted to be. It thought it had completed its business with full-time occupancy many years before. A trained, tight-lipped servant would visit it mechanically to attend to its upkeep. He, like his father before him, would use and maintain the stables and horses and lock its existence behind him each time he left. The bright, heavy keys were polished from daily use.
4 Kühler Brunnen contained no people in the balanced and poised hollowness of its rooms above ground. In its basement was a well of astonishing depth – if it were ever given sky, it would reflect the most distant galaxies in its sightless water. But it remained hugged, contained and blinkered by the solid house. In other rooms below, there were crated machines and stagnant presses, boxed carboys and empty, stained vessels. The quietness here had an agreement with dust; neither settled. The old, dark house was always alert and guarding what occurred beneath it.
* * *
The cave was lightless, out of focus and red. Its proportions were shunted into afterimage by a scarlet lamp which did not illuminate, but swallowed any traces of normal white light or perspective.
Water flowed ceaselessly, and the occupant moved with determination in the thick, urine-scented air. He soaked his hands and the glass plates in blind tanks of warm fluids. Sealing them, he counted aloud as he rocked them into waking under the hollow red of the mournful light. When complete, he released them and set them aside, the glass dripping dry while he prepared the next batch of chemicals. Once cured, he gently inserted them into the projector, and opened them out as light and shadow on the flat screen below. Peering sideways into the focused surface, his eyes almost touched the image, seeking errors and imperfections: none were there. It was another immaculate work. Every grain of dust and spit of flying blood could be seen – sharp, white sparks against the inverted black of the horse’s skin. He quickly blocked the flow of light and, with something close to glee, slid the sensitive paper beneath it, unsheathing the glow from the lamp once more. He set a loud clock ticking and adjusted the preciously kept temperature of the bloods. When the alarm bell sounded, he gathered up the paper and drowned it in the floating tray of liquid chemicals, lulling it back and forth until gradually, under his moving hands, a shadow appeared, a shadow darker than anything else in this bolted chapel, a shadow grown to become a space around the screaming void of a horse.
Muybridge lifted the image of the spilling animal from one tank to another, where it floated with more of its kind in a circulation of fixatives. He dried his hands and pulled his long white beard out from his shirt collar – it had been tucked in so as not to stir the chemicals and spoil the process. He stepped back, straightening into a position of satisfaction and unbolting the door to the intensity of the world.
An hour later, he laid out the sequence of photographic prints on a long, narrow table in his temporary study which adjoined the barn. Four men moved together towards the images as Muybridge stepped aside to give them space around his pride.
The running horse had been delineated, flattened to silhouette on a scaled grid. The cameras had erased the noise and the sickening third dimension. Now it could be studied, uncluttered by the stink of actuality. Great beauty strode across the dense chemical papers. The horse had become classical and otherworldly as it charged, buckled and collapsed in a dignity of aestheticism.
The men were delighted as they pored over the prints. Theirs was a world of mechanical precision, and this gridded slaughter had proved the value of its latest device. They packed away the evidence that would lead to manufacture and thanked Muybridge on the doorstep of his domain, shaking his hand enthusiastically.
He closed the door on their departure. For a moment, in the narrow corridor between rooms, he mused on the effect that monstrous gun would have had on the anatomy of the despicable Major Larkyns, and how his last expression of stunned surprise and pain would have been so much greater. Even after all these years, he would have liked that. He would have liked his treacherous young wife to witness her lover being cut in two. She had died from his silence months after he dispatched the Major. A stroke they said, some said grief, but Muybridge knew it was the granite hush he had sealed in her: even after she left their home, he had known it would harden and split her head.
It was a moment of delightful speculation before returning to the serious business of the negatives. His military clients had their prints, but he had the negatives, and he had his own plans for the images. He had been at the pinnacle of a life’s achievement when he decided to chase another quality in his work: an allusive ghost that permeated everything he photographed. It had led him into deep speculation and personal violation, but still he could not put it aside. He was an artist, photographer and inventor of prodigious importance – that was all secured, acquired against all the odds. The last few experiments were his, and they would answer the questions. He pictured a horse that never touched the ground, or one that charged under it, or another that stalked his sleep like a bed sheet ghost. Process thrown over anxiety to flap in the corridors of then and his few remaining tomorrows. A movement he had only caught from the corner of the camera’s eye.
* * *
Ishmael was becoming a man. His docile white body was beginning to toughen and shape itself for a different purpose, though it would never be as hard as the brown ones who so carefully nurtured him. Their bodies were all very different, perfect in their gleam and the depth of their polished surfaces. Each was a unique, beautiful variation of form and appointment – he forever marvelled at their splendour, while examining the flabby imprecision of his own shell.
Over time, he had become more and more intrigued by Luluwa; she was unlike the others. Not because she was female. That had been explained to him before. There were four kinds of things like him in this world: men, women, animals and ghosts. He was a man, like Abel and Seth. Luluwa was a woman, like Aklia. He was just a different kind. Men had tubes and strength, women had pouches and gentleness. He had a little of all.
He had first felt heat for Luluwa when she killed an animal for him. Snapping it in her long, shiny fingers, she had opened it for him to taste and smell, and explained that its insides were a copy of his, made in the same materials, unlike her own, which were modelled from a different substance. She had described how the thick, soft covering kept the animal warm and that, in time, he too would have such, and that if he looked carefully near the lamp he might see tiny traces of growth already there on his pliant skin. She had extended her smooth, graceful arm and shown him the absence of ‘hair’. He had flushed, felt ashamed and badly made. He’d wanted to hold his breath and suck all the traces of animal back into his shell, wanted every hair to shrivel and glaze over, towards her perfection.
She had explained before that he was too soft to grow, to expand from the inside out, to puff up. She was fully formed and inflexible. This made no sense to him – why would he have to grow into something while she was already there, immaculate? She tapped her brown shell and said that her skin was stiff and brittle while his was pliant and cuttable, that they were both vulnerable in different ways. He was made of flesh, like the animals, and she was made of Bakelite, like the furniture.
She touched the back of his neck, stroking him with two perfect fingers, reassuring him of his place, his distinction, and her affectionate acceptance. The solidity and coolness of her touch excited him and tightened his lukewarm softness into tumescent mimicry. She pretended not to notice and drifted away from his shock on a wave of ductile clicks and internal hisses, sounds he would remember throughout his tangled life.
He lifted his gaze from his awkward lap to watch her move across the long room. Her walk was purposeful, smooth and exact, as if each of the hundreds of minor adjustments needed for propulsion and balance was consciously thought about, carefully considered
in fractions of time which were impossible to contemplate. He knew if he thought about walking like that, he would fall after a few steps. Such perfect control was unattainable to his jarring and ridiculous motion. Luluwa was graceful and constant, while he was becoming more and more clumsy and random. Surges of emotion and eruptions of ideas tossed his motley, leaking being in unpredictable tides, causing him to invent doubt as a companion, to construct anxiety as a mirror in opposition to flawlessness, knowing that only he would be seen in it, and that the others would quietly continue without reflection.
Sometimes, when he watched them sleeping, becoming charged, he became fascinated by their stillness. He would sit very close to Luluwa and one of the others and watch for movement. Once, Seth, who was standing behind him, asked why he was looking so closely.
‘Because I think they are dead,’ he said, without a moment’s thought. Seth put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and made a rotational sound in his throat. ‘It’s like the animals when they are broken,’ the boy said over his shoulder, without taking his eye off the sleeping woman. ‘Before they break they are entirely made of movement, and then it stops. Where does the movement go?’
Seth moved to the boy’s side and kneeled, looking with him. ‘It is true that all living things move and the movement is unceasing. It is also true that the dead do not move. But sometimes the movement is concealed in smallness and hides from sight. I will show you.’
Ishmael broke his stare to watch Seth speaking, looking at the words unfold from his toothless mouth, focusing on the shudder flap dancing in his jaws.
He slid away to a cabinet across the room and opened a drawer. He returned with quick purpose, carrying a glass tube as long as his arm and a small glass funnel. Kneeling again, this time between Luluwa and the boy, he rested one end of the tube on the sleeper’s brow, and attached the funnel to the other end. He put his finger to his lips, hissed and winked. The boy understood the agreement and they moved stealthily, so as not to awaken her. Seth put the cupped end of the funnel to the boy’s ear, delicately placing the other end in the corner of the sleeper’s closed eye. He froze there, half-turning to watch the listener’s face.
