The Vorrh tv-1

by B Catling

  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 only contained 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.

  * * *

  The woman’s voice boomed in a sluggish yowl. It was hideous, but human, and he recognised something of himself in it. She was the first of her kind he had ever seen or heard, and she was a monster – oversized, 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 up 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: 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 which 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 bed sheet 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 that 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 flood
ed 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.

  * * *

  Both men had grown tired of each other’s presence. The work had been done, the arrangement made. Tsungali had agreed to the hunt. He would take the unknown man’s life and empty it somewhere, out in the wilderness.

  Walking into the night, he was in control of his world. He would shape it with the gods and demons into an understanding of forces, each with their own price, marked in blood. He walked to the back of the compound, where his purloined motorbike skulked in the shadows, a puma skeleton of upright metal. He knowingly placed the Enfield in a brass scabbard on the bike. The rifle was named Uculipsa – ‘lullaby’ in his mother tongue. It sat snugly in the dull, scratched metal, itself scratched and dented by abrasion and impact, but with a dense slumber of non-ferrous richness which kept all moisture at bay. Uculipsa was safe here, the flesh of the wooden stock and the muscle and bones of the mechanism protected in the tight, resounding darkness that smelt faintly of metallic blood. He drove past the sentries and the thick wooden gate, out of a past home and into the darkness of his unflinching confidence. The tyres rumbled and bucked a regular pulse against the red earth as he drove towards his encampment and a task he would enjoy.

  He had no hatred of the white men – that would have taken energy away from his purpose. He just knew them all to be thieves and liars. When they made him a police officer in his early twenties, he was already an important visionary for his tribe, a neophyte priest waiting for greater manhood to achieve full status. The prized Irrinipeste herself had seen his value and praised his courage. To be noted by a shaman of such power was a great blessing. When she had asked for the headphones of his cousin, he had willingly given them to her.

  His cousin had died the week before Tsungali’s promotion, after the incident with the invaders. Many of the True People had worked hard to understand and adopt the new ways, converting the foreign senselessness into some usable part of the real world. His cousin had been one of those. He had watched their ways and seen the fetish that they held dear. He had made copies of the things they guarded and held in reverence, assuming that likeness would clarify everything, even make their words become clear, so that all could share the great wisdom. He made compressions of leaves and earth, bound together with spit and sap. He moulded them into the black steps that the white holy men called bibles. He even carried his own, pressed against his heart like the padre of the invaders.

  Yet they had responded badly to his dedication, and confiscated all of the imitations that he had given out. When he’d retreated into the forest and had started building the hut, they seemed relieved and glad of his departure.

  The hut was just big enough for him to enter. Above it, he had erected a very long stick, tying together a collection of the straightest reeds and branches he could find. From this rickety mast dangled a long vine that he had tied to its very top. The vine passed through the roof of the hut, where it was connected to two halves of coconut shell, joined together by a bent twig. This sat on the head of his cousin, one half held over each ear. He, like the whites, was listening to the voices of ghosts floating in the air. Like them, his mast caught them on its line and drained them, down to the cups and into his head. He sat there for days, his eyes tightly shut, concentration absolute. When the invaders found him, they laughed until tears ran pink out of their eyes. He had laughed too, and had given them the headphones, as they called them, to hear the voices.

  The officer had taken the shells, still wiping the laughter away from his eyes, and cupped them over his ears. His smile had dropped immediately and he’d thrown the things away, casting them from him as if they were a serpent. He shouted at the cousin, and told his men to burn the hut down. But the cousin refused to leave, saying that the spirits wanted it this way, and that the fire would pass through the wand, over his hut and into the air, where it would wait to enter the wand on the Whiteman’s hut at another time. He had burnt there. Tsungali had picked up the discarded headphones and watched with the others as the hut, and the spirit-mast above it, collapsed about the squatting figure in the smoke.

  Nobody had understood the incident then, even the invaders who said prayers for the fire and for his cousin’s soul. That understanding would take several years to fully ripen.

  It was after that debacle that they had made Tsungali a policeman. To balance things, he thought, and because he’d never accepted one of the solid bibles. He was an excellent policeman from the first day, obeying all orders and achieving all of his tasks. It was simpler than it looked – he explained to his people what they must be seen to do, they agreed and so it was done, and the new masters believed their wishes had been carried out. So good was he, in the eyes of his masters, that three years later they rewarded him by flying him from his land, into theirs; a long and meaningless journey, to show him the magnificence of their origins. By the time he had arrived in the grand European metropolis, he was without compass, gravity or direction; his shadow had remained behind, bewildered and gazing at the empty sky.

  They dressed him in smooth cloth and polished his hair. They put gloves on his feet and pointed boots; they called him John. They took him into great halls to meet many people; he had conducted his duties perfectly, they said. He was trustworthy, they said, a new generation of his clan, a prize in their empire.

  He just watched and closed his ears to the drone of their voices. He touched everything, felt its texture and colour to remember the difference, the size, and the fact that all things there were worn down, smoothed out and shiny, as if a sea of a million people had rubbed against the wood and the stone, curving its splinters and hushing its skin. The food they gave him made his mouth jump and sting, burnt him inside and skewered him so that he had to shit continually; even this they kept contained. He was not allowed outside into the clipped gardens, but locked in a tiny room, where all his waste had to be deposited, washed away in a cold stone cup. He could endure all of it, because he knew he would return soon.

  It was the museum that changed everything and explained the volume of their lies. Like the churches he had been to, it was lofty and dark; everyone whispered and moved quietly, respectful of the gods who lived there. One of the army men had guided him through, showing him box after box of impossible things, all caged in glass. They told lies – the scenes, the guide – about men, living in ice and sleeping with dogs; pointing to tiny totems that glowed in the dark; murmuring their magic; nodding together. Steadily growing more sickened, he had walked ahead and turned a corner, coming to a standstill before the next great case. In it shone all the gods of his fathers. The prison of glass and wood held them, cleaned and standing proud, so that all around could see their power and worship them. But on the floor of the prison were the prized tools and cherished possessions of his clan, all mixed and confused: men and women’s tokens, implements and secrets, entangled and fornicating, lewdly exposed and crushed under writing. Manila tags were tied to each, scrawled Whitemen lies gripping each cherished thing, animals in traps; the poached, the stolen and the maimed. All those things which had been taken away, discarded as shoddy and replaced with steel. And there, at the centre, was his grandfather’s sacrificial spear. The one that had been handed down towards him for centuries, its wood impregnated with the sweat and prayers of his family. The one that he had never touched. He had walked into a trove house of all that was significant, all that was cherished – all that was stolen.

  The visitors were humbled before these objects and deities, quietened into reverence by their influence. One of the uniformed elders got down onto his knees, nose almost touching the glass, to come closer to a carved manifestation of Linqqu, goddess of fertility and the fields.

  On the far wall were pictures. Almost in a state of trance, he walked closer to these, into
a memory of his village, pinned to the wall and drained of colour. This was the final sacrilege; the exposure of the sacred, the dead, and the souls of the living.

  His sponsors were enjoying his visit, pleased with his attentive behaviour. They watched as he stared at a photograph of an elder of his tribe, sitting before an elaborately carved dwelling. It was a significant image of anthropological value, a first contact document that showed an uninterrupted culture in domestic vigour. Tsungali stared at his grandfather. The old man had never been photographed before, and he’d had no idea why the stranger was covering his face and shaking the box at him. Sitting on the steps of their Long House, legs holding an animal-tailed fly swat, the other hand quietly trying to cover his balls; his expression was confused, cocking his head slightly to see around the box, trying to look at the photographer’s face. His grandfather’s eyes and mouth had just been wounded by strangeness, he was too dazed and absent to ward off the event. The outside of the Long House was encrusted with climbing, crawling, and gesturing spirits. All of their carved and painted faces were alive, talking to the stranger, laughing at his manner.

  The old man looked through the box, through the stranger, through to his reflection, and appeared to shudder. The doorway to the house was dark, but another figure could just be seen inside. A boy, happy and grinning, all teeth and eyes in the darkness, open, smiling amazement. It was Tsungali, caught young, and in opposition to his beloved grandfather’s nakedness, bewilderment and pain.

  Tears filled his eyes as he secretly begged the print to move, to turn away or turn back, to do anything but confront his memory with such resistant loss. He could look no more. To find his grandfather trapped behind glass and nailed to a wall, so far from home and his earthly remains, was beyond sacrilege and blasphemy. It gnawed into him, along his genetic ladder, an emotional, hidden thing, chewing back into extinction. He slid backwards into the crowds and quickly became dissolved among their throng. He ran from that place and became lost in the streets of liars outside.