The Vorrh (41 page)

‘The whole thing must remain entirely private, you understand,’ said Cyrena.

‘I am sure we are all more than capable of keeping a secret,’ the doctor replied, his eyebrows raised.

The agreement was made that he would talk to Maclish about setting the Orm loose in the forest to find their wandering friend. A certain sum of money would be paid upfront, and the rest exchanged when Ishmael was brought to them. They stood to leave, on fairly good terms, shaking hands in the doorway and agreeing to speak again in a few days. Then, while Ghertrude’s hand was still in his, and Cyrena had turned towards the street, Hoffman looked down at Ghertrude’s waist and quietly said, ‘I am here to help you with the other problem, if you so want.’

He slowly patted the back of her hand, then uncoiled his fingers and let go of her frozen form, grinning inside his mouth as he gently closed the door.

* * *

It would have been foolish to think that the life of the arrows was inert, or incidental. The truth was that each of the Bowman’s handmade shafts of wood, feather, bone and steel were extensions of nerve, breath and skill. The arrows’ continuance was like the nerve fibres outside the brain, which hold memory in a twined conflict of disbelief and certainty; fibres found in the spine and muscles, sometimes even the hands, that remembered past places, past movements. As it was with trees, whose delicately
calligraphic postures waved and shredded the communicating winds with their stencilling semaphores. The arrows were made of all their elements, bound together with intent.

Peter Williams lifted the gleaming bow into the sun of the early morning. He had cleaned and polished it in the dawn, and now he stood outside the cave, on the summit of the outcrop. The bow felt like Este in his hand: eager, lithe and determined. He knocked one of the whistling arrows and pulled back the bowstring, the sensuous power locking into his entire body. He closed his eyes and rotated, pointing the arrow in a full circle. He stopped when he did not know which direction he faced. He loosened the arrow and opened his eyes. It sang through the clear distance above the forest, before curving to fall into the trees. He looked carefully at the landscape, picked up his pack and climbed down towards the place where the arrow would wait for him.

Two hours later, he had reached the forest floor, again relishing its scent and shade. He faced north-west, and his intention was clear: to forge a straight line until the Vorrh was left behind him. It was a journey that would take him directly through the centre of the forbidden territory.

* * *

The three or four sessions that followed had been very formal and brief. He spent much of his time shut in the studio, working on the new device, which he had not yet named. Somehow, ‘zoopraxiscope’ did not do his little miracle of reflection justice.

Josephine behaved with her usual decorum, as if the incident had never occurred; their formal and professional friendship seemed unaffected by the nameless incident. However, he had noticed with some disquiet that
his version of the peripherscope had been moved from its exact place in his studio. Each time he had gone away she must have taken it, presumably to her room. It had always been returned before he came back, but he noticed the slight differences in its meticulous setting down. Nobody else would have spotted the variation: it takes a trained and scientific eye to observe the unmentioned. At first, he thought of scolding her, but that would mean admittance and knowledge of all, and he had no desire to tread that path again. He could have locked it away, or taken it apart. In the end, he did nothing. It was easier to ignore her animal appetites and pretend that he did not know about the daily pilfering. At times, he even congratulated himself in letting her use it; another of his acts of uncalled-for kindness. Anyway, the instrument was no longer of much value to him. He had surpassed Gull’s little plaything; she could have it.

Yet he could not so easily ignore the image of her that afternoon; it tugged at his consciousness each time they met, and it always had the same physical effect on him. After a while, he stopped trying to restrain the memory and its attendant arousal, choosing instead to reclassify it as the normal reaction of a particularly healthy and virile fifty-two year-old man.

He had begun the process of packing away his things. Josephine knew that he was leaving, but that he would visit again upon his return. She had seemed genuinely downhearted at the news of his departure; but perhaps that was just her reaction to the prospect of being separated from the peripherscope.

He had contacted Gull, telling the doctor of his progress and sending the previous batches of pictures to him; the last batch would be picked up the next day, by one of his men. But he was hesitant – he could not find it in himself to pack his new invention away, to stop testing it; he certainly did not want to leave it behind. He had had another fit while operating it, and was getting butterflies about using it again; he was so close, it was madness to stop now, but he couldn’t continue alone – he needed a guinea pig. Then he heard movement next door and the idea
came full circle. Gull would be delighted.

He cleared all appointments for two days and brought provisions to the rooms so that he would not have to go out. In the corner of the studio he set up the camp bed which the maid had previously used. All he had to do now was convince Josephine to help.

He arrived very early the first day; she was still sleeping while he made tea and toast in the kitchen. She heard the early kettle boil and came to see what was happening at this time of day. Her hair was tousled, and she wore a heavy hospital dressing gown over her nightdress.

‘Good morning, Josephine!’ he said to the blinking ex-slave yawning before him. ‘I have made you some toast and brought us some excellent marmalade.’

Such hospitality was alien to her, and the gaiety of his breakfast-making was beyond expectation; she regarded him, and his culinary efforts, with a wary delight.

‘These are my last few days before I go away. I have only one important piece of work to finish and I wanted to show it to you later, because I think you might like it. Now, come and sit down.’

He drew a chair out for her to sit, then went to his side of the table and started buttering the toast. ‘You will like this marmalade, it’s come all the way from Oxford. Some people, myself included, believe it to be the only thing of any value that has been produced by that city!’

The joke was beyond her, and she sipped her tea. He pushed the toast towards her as she looked blankly at him, his scruffy beard full of sharp crumbs that caught her eye.

‘I have a gift for you!’ he said suddenly, bounding across to the wide-open studio as she looked from him to the food and back again. She was not fully awake, and the marmalade and gifts were causing her the exact amount of confusion he had been aiming for. He returned, grinning, with one arm behind his back.

‘I want to give you this; I know you like it.’

He thrust the brown paper parcel in her face and she frowned as she accepted it. Two days before, he had taken the peripherscope from its normal place, wrapped it up in thick, brown paper and placed it in a drawer. Now she held it in both hands, turning it, feeling its obvious form. She immediately knew what it was and started to pick at the string.

‘Oh no, not here – it’s yours now. Take it to your room, you can open it there.’

She was suspicious, delighted and confused. Unable to convey all three emotions at once, she beamed at him and crunched into her toast.

‘After breakfast, I will show you my new machine; it’s a bit like that one, only better,’ he said, jabbing a prurient finger at the parcel.

She finished her breakfast and went to dress, while he prepared his nameless device. He had moved its component parts around so that she might lie down on the table with her head between the reflecting mechanisms. He had brought the sunlight to the machine with the aid of three parabolic mirrors. It was less smelly and irksome than using the oil lamps, and the day was very much brighter than recent weeks.

She was at the door, observing his joyful demonstration. ‘See? It works just like the other device; these little mirrors spin around, cupping the light from over there. There are lenses all over, look!’ He was pointing and fluttering his hands over the polished wood and brass; the sunlight glinted in the lenses. ‘There are two disc shutters and a rotating drum shutter back here. It’s all controlled by this crank, which I shall turn for a few moments. So, what do you think? Are you ready?’

She hesitated a moment, then nodded and sat on the table, swinging her legs up to lie flat. He positioned her head, and put a simple, thin restraining band across her forehead.

‘Excellent! Let’s begin. Ready?’ Her eyes blinked ‘yes’.

He pushed against the crank and the machine spun into motion. By
the third turn, he had found his rhythm. The lenses turned into glowing, spinning spheres, stretching, chewing, sphinctering and splitting the now-invented light, which drilled into the sides of the black, responsive eyes, as the shutters chopped and shaved pulses of shadow, brilliance and darkness. For the first time, the machine hummed. He looked back and forth from it to her face and body, which remained motionless, and to his half-hunter pocket watch, propped up on the shelf nearby. After three minutes, he began to slow down, eventually bringing the machine to a stop. He removed the head strap and helped her to sit up. She was breathing normally, her eyes looked normal and there wasn’t the faintest trace of any effect. He gave her some water and asked her to walk around the room, which she did while drinking. He was mildly perplexed; there should have been some effect. He consulted his logbook, made a few minor adjustments and said, ‘Could we try again, please?’

She nodded with a shrug and climbed back into the device. He cranked it into action again, this time for five minutes. He was perspiring under his tight, itching collar and cuffs. He sat her up again. Nothing. He asked her to lie down and close her eyes, expecting at least dizziness to manifest. She fell asleep. He gently but irritably shook her awake. ‘One last try, please. Just one.’

They went back to the table. He fastened the strap and cranked again. Eight minutes later, he stopped: the machine was a failure. It only worked for him, she was totally impervious to its influence. It did nothing. He dismissed her with great irritation and sat, gloomily staring at the ridiculous hand-built tangle of disappointment.

He sat until it started to get dark, then he dragged himself together, snatched up his topcoat and hat and left, slamming the door and waking her again in his exit. He stomped the gritty and dissolute streets for hours, walking in circles, trying to exhaust his rage and fathom what had gone wrong. He stopped at a public house and quietened it for a long moment with his wrong, brooding entrance. He made his way to the bar and
ordered Nelson’s Blood from the surprised barman; men of Muybridge’s class were never seen in such neighbourhoods, and certainly not drinking concoctions as potent as the Admiral’s blood. Of course, unbeknownst to his unwilling bar-fellows, he had been in much rougher establishments than theirs: from the shabby beer halls of the Arctic to the decrepit rat holes of Guatemala, to the gambling house of the Yukon, decorated with icicles of human blood. But he had never drunk alone in a public house in England. Here it was improper; the chronic barriers of position and wealth forbade the fluidity he found everywhere else.

The second drink hit, stirring some mirth out of the sediment of his gloom. Everybody in the cramped, over-varnished rooms of the pub was intensely aware of the gaunt, scraggly-bearded man with crazed, prophet’s eyes, who had started talking to himself and grinning into his drink. He was oblivious to them all.

His mind wandered to an earlier time and place, where he had consumed a weighty amount of the potent black rum and port mixture, with a man who had since become an infamous figure, even to those on this miserable rock. They had been in Cheyenne, in the wild Dakota territories, distinguishing themselves by making loud toasts to the Bard and to Scholarly Conduct, to The Fine Arts and Chivalry. The saloon had been full of armed riff-raff; many there with a price on their heads had ignored them and refused to be stirred by their conduct. Muybridge’s drinking companion that day had been John Henry Holliday, the notorious gambler and gunfighter who had made the London newspapers a year earlier, when he and the Earp brothers had staged a magnificently theatrical gunfight in the little-known and appropriately named town of Tombstone. Muybridge was sure that ‘Doc’ Holliday had done most of the killing and maiming on that day, and he wished he had been there to see it, maybe photograph the heroes afterwards.

He shoved his hand into his topcoat’s inside pocket, looking for more money, but finding instead the loaded Colt pistol. It was getting like
the old days, he slurred to himself. He now had the appetite for a bit of gunplay. Then, with all the rhyme and reason of an amateur drinker, his thought switched to Josephine, to her passive and inert reaction today, to her electric performance with his copy of Gull’s device. Her pliant and sensual magnetism seemed a much better option than shooting the worthless clientele of The Roebuck.

He pulled himself up and made for the door. No one caught his eye, and the pub breathed out when he was gone. He sobered on his way back, getting lost twice and deciding never to drink publicly again, especially with a charged revolver. He stopped over a gurgling drain and emptied the bullets out of the gun; they fell like brass comets into the speeding firmament below.

He turned the key very slowly and entered the apartment without a whisper. He crept back towards his camp bed, trying not to make a sound. He did not want to wake her, to let her see him tipsy after she had seen him in defeat.

As he dragged off his coat and unlaced his boots, he heard a noise that made the hair stand up all over his body. Something was scratching in the rooms. This was no faint animal, no rat or mouse scrabbling for figments of foods; something else was clawing nearby. He patted the walls, finding his way to the shelves. He found the simple tin candelabra and matches, lit its three stubs of candles and peered through the rooms. The scratching stopped. He was totally sober, with an icy wire inside his spine. He waited, and the clawing began again. He heard wood splinter and rip, and pushed the hushed light towards it. It stopped again, but he saw a mass on the kitchen floor. It was Josephine’s dark body against the black floor. She was naked and lay very still, staring with unblinking eyes at the flaking ceiling. He brought his light close to her to ward off the unseen creature that scraped in the room. He knelt and touched her arm; it felt very cool, as if she had been out of bed for hours. He held the light
high above his head to scan the room and keep the thing at bay; hot wax spilt and splashed across her face. There was no reaction.