The Vorrh tv-1

by B Catling

  At this moment, the rods under the bridge, which connected the clock to the bell, started to move. She felt their expectancy shift, seconds before the mechanism fell into gear. The weights lurched and the cogs started to gnaw into the allotted time. It was time to go.

  She turned towards the door and moved a fraction, when something hooked her back to the distant rooftops: there was something below, almost unseen. It pecked at her mind’s eye, and slid a new dimension into what she thought she knew so well. She moved back, targeting the raven and opening her sight. There it was: a tower. A shrunken, octagonal chimney, rising from the corner of the roof of 4 Kühler Brunnen. The tiled turret was hidden in the patterned complexity of the rooftops, and the raven stood on its brim, his shadow sliding over its edge. This was another secret of the house that she was beginning to think of as her own.

  She flew down the spiral stairs into the echoing nave, its booming organ trying to rival the setting sun, which was already stoking up the great windows of the west side. She knew that, if she sped, she would catch Mutter before he returned home that night.

  He already had the quiet, hasty key in the lock when she pounced.

  ‘Sigmund! Come with me.’

  She entered the garden gate and hurriedly walked around the side of the house, looking up at the roof. Mutter trailed behind her, his head too tired to stare at the sky.

  ‘There! There!’ She pointed upwards. She was crouched, almost sitting in the shrubs, beneath the tall wall at the garden’s far end. Only from such an extreme angle could the tower be seen, sheltering in the fractured perspectives of the interlocking roofs. She pointed again. ‘There! What is that? Look, man, look!’

  He lumbered over to her, bent sullenly, and stared upwards.

  ‘There, there! What is it?’

  After a few moments of squinting and shifting, while she jabbed rabidly at the air, he said, ‘It’s a raven, ma’am.’

  Back in the house, they climbed the main stairway. She was very quiet and intent; Mutter was stiff, formal and distant. He had become used to her commands, to her shifts of mode and her haughty righteousness. He had come to expect it. But nobody had ever spoken to him in the way that she just had. If it had been a man, he would have cuffed him into submission and apology. No woman had ever dared to call him a fool and worse; it stung his pride and abraded his manhood. And all because of a crow, or a raven, or some invisible chimney! He was saturated in sulk, and wore it with a sullen distance.

  Ghertrude knew she had been wrong to lose her temper with him; she needed this man, especially now. She stopped on the stairway and turned to face him. ‘Sigmund, I am very sorry for behaving so badly. You are a good and trusted servant and I have talked to you like an angry child. I must ask your forgiveness, it will not happen again.’

  He was amazed. Before her outburst, he had been secretly growing to respect her; now it seemed she had proven him right in doing so. He was lost for words, and strong emotions erupted in small spots inside him, like pennies in a cap.

  ‘Do I have your forgiveness?’ she asked.

  He grunted a nod.

  ‘Good. Now, let’s find this tower,’ she said, turning to resume her climb and lead the way up through the house.

  On the third floor, she put her finger to her lips as they crept past Ishmael’s suites. They walked the length of the corridor, but no other door could be found there, or in any of the adjacent rooms. Mutter pointed up at the ceiling and whispered, ‘the attic’, the entrance to which was at the other end of the building.

  It was the most unused part of the house, not counting the cellars or the well, which were best ignored. Inside a tiny box-room, which at one time must have been used for servants, they found the stairway. Its carpentry was different from the rest of the house. It was tree-cut wood, still showing forms of branches and organic twists in its length. It suggested that the ladder had been grown, rather than constructed, conjured from the forest for a measured purpose. It was neat and strong, and led to a roughly painted hatch in the ceiling.

  Mutter lit the bullseye oil lamp and started up the stairs. His bulk made the wood creak as he pushed upwards, flipping the door inwards and lifting the light into the dark volume.

  ‘Please wait a moment, mistress,’ he said, and continued to climb until just his feet were visible, huge on the delicate ladder.

  Ghertrude was instantly reminded of the fearful giant following Jack down the beanstalk to terrorise his world. She suppressed a titter and looked up. ‘What can you see?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much,’ he answered.

  She climbed onto the ladder too, intending to ascend, but it objected noisily. She got a whiff of Mutter’s rear end, an aroma that was, essentially, peasant: root vegetables and meat, laced with hard work, tobacco and strong drink, all amplified by a distaste for bathing.

  She stepped back onto the solid floor and into more fragrant air, just as he disappeared into the groaning hole.

  ‘My God!’ he said, in a voice that rang with sympathetic resonance, like a child calling into a lute.

  ‘What?! What is it?’ she cried, hands once more holding the ladder, but this time with firmer intent.

  ‘You better come and see,’ he called.

  The immense attic ran the entire length of the house, with a dramatic, right-angled turn at the far end, suggesting its continuation over an adjoining property. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dry gloom and the resonance, which seemed to be tuning itself to her breathing.

  Mutter spoke with an unearthly, musical clarity. ‘Take care, the floor is covered in wires!’ The words transmuted into a fluttering choir of angels. If his harsh, guttural voice had been so cleansed and extended, what would she sound like?

  Then she saw the taut and gently glinting strings, in the light of their lamp. Spider yarns delineating the distance, causing it to resemble the open fields as seen from above. Nitre, she thought, lines of fungi glistening, but it hummed. Yet again, that impossible word leapt into her mouth. It had been ordained that she would forever question strangeness with strangeness in this unpredictable house. She breathed out the call.

  ‘WHAT!’

  It sang with a liquid vibrancy that coloured the space and made the blood dance in every quivering capillary. A tangible thrill rattled their bones and forced them both to grin like cats. When they drifted back to reality, the attic was ready to show them more.

  They saw limp lines of cord hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the strings. Boxes of iron balls and boxes of feathers were interspaced, placed close to the wall. The prone wires were listening to them, accosting and commenting on their movements and distorting Mutter’s whispers. The wires resonated with their every sound. Her word still sang in the air.

  There was a narrow path across the attic between the strings. Not a straight path, which would have made more sense to the fixed delineations, but a winding track that forced the tense wires to make a more random pattern, or perhaps it was the other way around. Like the rest of the house, there was no dust covering these mysteries. Ghertrude stopped to touch and admire the objects as she walked, in a dreamlike glaze, through the hollow room. Mutter was more cautious and thrust his hands deep into his tarry pockets. Then they saw the door, and knew, without words, that it would lead them to the tower.

  * * *

  The time that had vanished in the high room at London Bridge 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, and he had returned 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 hea
d 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 will 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 the man. 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.

  * * *

  Tsungali watched the afternoon arrive. He had moved his camp again. He was becoming familiar with the patch of land that would be his killing ground. The spirit of his victim would be offered to his ancestors, and the ritual of its transmutation would occur here in this valley, the name of which he did not know.

  He sat by the fast water, enjoying its speed, its splendid indifference and its rippling sound, silently observing the wading birds with their shrill curl of beak and voice. He drank deeply of life so that he knew the taste of it here, knew the vibrant wealth of its dominion, knew exactly what he was taking from the man who would die on this ground.

  Looking upriver, he tried to remember the great forest that brooded there. It had been a long time since he once saw it. His visual memory was dimmer than its legends and his grandfather’s stories of it, which burned brightly.

  But mostly he saw a painted picture of it, one which hovered at the end of the water. A bearded man stood in a cave. Around the cave was the endless forest, its power darkening the sky. In front of the cave ran the river, depicted as a blue twisting stream. A fish swam under its paint and against the flow, so that it could watch the man, who would soon leave the safety of the cave and enter the wilderness, where he would meet his God or his demons. Tsungali was just about to let the image go when, unexpectedly, it became familiar. Something about it shifted into the actuality of his dreams, or a memory of a different world. He closed his eyes and let the sparkling water flicker on his lids; he stared through them, searching. It was the photograph in the museum, the picture of his grandfather sitting at the entrance of the carved trove house. Both images merged, and he looked into the painted shadow behind the old man, expecting to see himself again. But now it was not the lean, grinning boy who hid there. It was the huge, unfolded wings of the man he had remembered as a saint or a prophet. They filled the space inside the cave and were far too large to ever squeeze through the jagged entrance. Tsungali opened his eyes wide, recognising, at last, the expression on the bearded face.

  * * *

  The cyclops was restless. He had explored every crevice and recess, in her body and in every part of his suite of rooms, and he wished for more. He wanted variety and difference, contrast and resistance. He knew they were outside, he could smell their rub through the shutters. He also knew that all the others out there had at least two eyes. He should have known this before. He had once asked Luluwa why all the animals she brought him had many eyes. She had said it was because they were of a lower denomination. The answer had seemed true at the time. Perhaps it was still true now. He saw nothing superior in Ghertrude or Mutter, certainly not in relation to himself or the Kin. But being locked in these rooms, he would never find out. There were many secrets and mysteries. No one knew who sent the boxes, or who arranged for Mutter to be paid. He had discovered this by mistake; he was learning guile by watching them, by observing the unsayings and the quick looks. He wanted to train his powerful and undivided sight further into the world, but she would not let him. For his own good, she said. She claimed to be protecting him from the cruelties that would befall him, outside the walls of the house. But she could not know that he had already been taught the lessons of cruelty, from the contents of the two crates that had been delivered together, so long ago.

  He knew that he was watched. He had heard movement above, heard muffled voices up there when the house was supposed to be empty. He was not meant to have noticed the small hole that had appeared in the plaster scrollwork of the ceiling, the gap that let them peer down into his seclusion. He, in turn, picked at the paintwork around the lock on the shutters, splintering away a shard of wood, which could be set back in place with spit and cunning. He had seen the courtyard and the live animals and sometimes the street beyond, when the gate had been opened.

  Some nights, he dreamed of the Kin: the hard brown of their kindness; Luluwa’s unflinching touch; the watery hiss in her body. Some nights he pieced together the bits of learning they had given him and strung them on a thread of meaning that was entirely his own. If she would not let him see the world outside, then he would not let her see the one he was constructing within.

  * * *

  Charlotte spent many leaden hours in the hotel room, especially after the turmoil of their arrival. She could still feel the Derringer, grasped hard in the palm of her hand, and the suffocating crowd of grinning faces, squashed against the car. She had travelled to many places with the Frenchman, but never to such a primitive location. Before, he had always stayed with her, in their interconnecting suites of rooms. He had never walked out into such a street, had never made appointments and plans without her. She was anxious about him, knowing how easily he could become embroiled in trouble. His predilection for the poor and the criminal led him to the most sordid and dangerous parts of town. He had a hunter’s nose for those quarters, and would find them instantly in the newest, most unfamiliar locations. But he would never wander out alone. They always cruised the streets and alleys in the massive vehicle, often blocking the road and scraping the crumbling walls, causing a sensation. Sometimes, when he was too dissolute to venture out to catch his quarry, he would unfold a map of the place, pour a glass of his favourite Alsace and ponder over it for hours. He would imagine the streets, sniff the alleys and finally select a site. She and the chauffeur would be dispatched to that place, to collect or trap a partner for his night of pleasure. It was the least favourite of her duties, and the only one that genuinely made her feel unclean. No innocent was ever kidnapped, and no one was taken against his will: any doubts in the mind of the chosen one were quickly muted by an offering of money. But the journey back in the car embarrassed her, especially when they questioned her about what they had to do, and what her part was in those delights. She had never been prudish, but the last five years had stretched her experience into realms of disbelief.

  The difficulty was her kindness. She could explain the sexual details and the intricate peccadilloes that sharpened them so for the Frenchman. She could elucidate the manner of their conduct and the level of brutality that was expected of them. But she could not give voice to the instant abandonment of their humanity after the deeds were done. The suddenness
of their expulsion, propelled by the total disgust of their existence. This part of the ritual she hid from, closing the doors to all her rooms, leaving the chauffeur to ringmaster the debasing event, which she suspected he enjoyed. Charlotte had no delusions that the abused vermin she had solicited would have been offended by these actions; indeed, most would have been overjoyed to escape the limpet passions of the aesthete’s bed, especially after drinking as much as they could, and with the bundle of notes grinning in their pockets. She felt pity for them, but it was the debasement of the Frenchman that so unnerved her.

  He was not just a ruined brat, spending his family’s wealth on indulgence; she had known many of those. He possessed, or was possessed by, something else: a crippled soul, which might just pucker into genius, if only he allowed his wretched shred of joy to grow. She had seen it, and knew it was closer to his vision than the exhaustion of his heart and the poisoning of his body. She knew that, for those that have everything in abundance, there is always a gap, a hollow that will never be filled. Long before she had met the Frenchman, before his mother had even conceived of proposing that Charlotte become the companion of her beloved son, she had known of the hunger, and some of the ways of its manifestation. The fruitless mangle of emotions, spurred and strangled by the auto-cannibalism of guilt. The humiliation of being animal, the whipping into cruelty of lost affections. She had accepted the offer out of kindness, and the need to provide the possibility of change. They had thought she needed the money and the elevated social position – perhaps she had. Nevertheless, it was a good bargain. The son had a companion who he would learn to trust, who would give a glint of beauty to all his endeavours. He could wear her proudly in all Parisian society, and she would neither expect nor demand anything from him. The mother could entrust her son to a bright and elegant creature, who would keep him on at least one fixed rail considered respectable and normal in decent society; moreover, she would own the young woman and never have to suffer the machinations and spite of a daughter-in-law.