The Vorrh (6 page)

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.

At first Ishmael could hear nothing but his own agitation. Then, in the tube, he heard a diminutive sound. Yes, and again, a fluid hiss, like the sound of spit in one’s mouth, so faint that it could have been from the other side of the universe. Yes! There again – irregular but fast and flickering, a whisper of pulse. He stopped and took his ear away from the tube.

‘What is it, that noise?’ he asked.

Seth became intent and modestly smiled. ‘It’s her eye moving,’ he said. ‘Beneath the hard lid.’ He stared deep into the boy. ‘She is dreaming.’

* * *

Peter Williams joined the far-flung outpost just after the rainy season. His journey there had begun in conception. Khaki bed sheets, stained dark by khaki spunk, his father having carried the rifle and the flag for three generations. There had never been any doubt; he was to be a soldier. From the day of his birth to the day of his disappearance, there was only ever one road.

A great yellow sun had spun in the bluest of Wiltshire skies. His birth had been abrupt and easy, his brilliant red head bouncing in the warm light. The sun was always to be his principle, and he sought to embrace it.

He had been given a choice of posts and the remote backwater was his most favoured. He desperately wanted to escape Europe. The scars left by the gutting rope of the Great War were still fresh, if those words could ever be used in the same sentence. The rotting trenches had carved gangrene into the heart of the old countries, which clung together like so many old maids in a storm, friends and foes alike. He had been in a slithering ditch at Passchendaele for two years, where no sun ever warmed the forsaken earth. When there was daylight, it was contaminated and heavy, so that it hung densely on the black thorn hooks of splintered trees, the few verticals in a sea of mud, smoke, flesh and metal. The only clear light he remembered was the light that had not existed. He had been one of those who witnessed spectral visions floating over the smeared remains of men and mules. Angels of the Somme, they had been called. An illumination of purity, squeezed out of corruption to flicker in the
wastelands. He never really knew what he had seen, but it had helped him survive and erase the impossible reality of that carnage.

At the age of twenty-three, he had been ready for a far-off land of heat and life. From the moment he’d stepped from the plane and onto the rough-shaved clearing, he had felt satisfaction, as if the place had greeted him with a smile. There was something about the aroma of the jungle and the humidity, something about the teeming life that pulsed in every inch of the land that had reassured him. Perhaps it was the ecstasy of opposites, or the certainty that what he had witnessed could never happen there. Whatever it was he inhaled into his soul that day, it had grown stronger as he had walked through the singing rainforest to the barracks, with the step of a prodigal son.

The outpost was to the south-east of the Vorrh, two hundred miles from the city and two thousand years away. The tribe who owned the enclosure had been there since the Stone Age; their land was an isthmus at the mouth of the great river, which ran from the sea to be swallowed in the Vorrh. They said it was the other way around, that the forest bled from its heart to invent and maintain the sea. They called themselves The True People, and they had been that forever.

The sublimation of the True People had led to the survival of their race and the obliteration of their meaning. As the twentieth century had made its entrance, it was deemed necessary and desirable to focus on the tribe’s development, especially if the trade route via the river was to thrive after a long period of poverty. Three European countries had forcibly assisted their evolution. The British were the last to join the noble crusade, and they did it with their characteristic munitions of charm, cynicism and armed paternal control.

The outpost was an elaborate undertaking. When he had arrived they were just finishing the roof of the church, complete with a joyless bell to summon the newly converted. There were six professional soldiers, two with families; a priest and a dozen bush policemen, aged between forty-two
and fifteen, had been wrangled from the more significant members of the tribe. They took their positions very seriously. What they actually policed was a matter of speculation, since no set of formal laws had been introduced, and the previous mechanisms of agreed existence were fast being rubbed out. At least, that’s what the invaders had believed.

Williams had been an armourer in the Great War, and he was there to equip and train the new police force with weapons beyond their expectations. He had arrived with a cargo of arms and ammunition, which he lovingly unpacked from their solid crates.

All the hopeless carnage he’d experienced only proved to him that greed, pride and blindness, once rolled together, created a mechanism of appalling velocity, and that humans outside of imagination are best kept caged and regulated by severe controls. Never, in all the conflict and the infinity of wounds, had his love and enthusiasm for the firearms changed. Yes, these beautifully designed and crafted machines had only one purpose, but they did not breed it. He knew that their sole purpose, the taking of life, would have been operated anyway, even if the tools at hand had been sharpened sticks and heavy stones. Indeed, he had seen trench warfare move into hand-to-hand combat, where the bayonet was too distant a weapon, where handmade clubs and honed steel had hacked flesh apart in slippery, sightless fury. If men were to be butchered, then better it be done professionally, with a precise tool in skilled hands. With this dislocation as a balm, he could continue.

He had been unpacking a crate of Lee-Enfield rifles when he realised, to his surprise, that they were not reconditioned stock as expected, but a batch of gleaming new models in mint condition. In fact, none of the order had matched his paperwork at all. There were odd and unusual boxes in the shipment which were not mentioned elsewhere, and he had begun to feel a glowing excitement, the thrill of being gifted with all sorts of treasures in a place at the end of all caring.

He understood little of the local people. Their language was
impenetrable, their ways oblique, and though their humanity was blatant from the beginning, all of their methods were questionable. But he had begun to be fascinated by the way they watched without looking, bemused by their laughter, which seemed disconnected to events, and intrigued by their shock at new objects and gestures. In fact, his curiosity was fusing him to them in direct proportion to the extent that he was becoming separated from all the other colonists of the outpost. He had not known this. His day-to-day work of demonstrating the weapons and organising target practice had consumed introspection and nullified his nagging doubts. It was only the incident with the girl and the angels that forced his dislocation and pinned him up against isolation and the threat of court martial.

* * *

The Dutch priest was a man of one gear: forward. A dauntless missionary, he had finished his church in a record two months. It was filled with the faithful every day, or at least what looked like the faithful. But on this day it sounded woefully empty as he stood outside, sheepishly peering into the moaning interior. A group of onlookers had started to form around the newly painted entrance steps and the abnormality could be heard by nearly the whole village.

‘Padre, what’s wrong?’ asked the first of the senior officers to arrive at the priest’s side.

‘It’s one of the women,’ he replied. ‘She has gone mad.’

The lieutenant pushed past the priest and opened the double doors to take control. The church still smelt of paint, its whiteness disorientating and off-key. In the aisle, halfway to the altar, a young woman knelt on the floor, surrounded by books, with one heavy foolscap tome open before
her. She was naked and menstruating heavily. A low, inhuman groan rumbled constantly from deep inside her, the kind of sound that is heard at a distance, from the centre of a glacier, or lethally close, when it growls from the sleek, unseen darkness of a big cat.

The lieutenant looked back to the priest and understood his reticence. ‘It’s only a girl,’ he said, the greatest lie he could manage, because he too had begun to shrink back in fear. His testicles were sucked up into his pelvis and his hair was standing on end. Whatever was in the church was a girl only in the curves of its black surface: its essence and action were not from the known world. What was in the girl was altogether alien to a trained modern mind, and it was rewriting the rules of phenomena in a language that had an irremediable taste of pure terror.

A second officer and a group of onlookers had begun to bustle at the entrance of the church. The officer had a revolver in his hand already, and had pushed it through the door like a crucifix, ready to dominate anything into submission. He saw a blur that shivered. Its sound unbound him, made him want to flee. He smelt the fear of all those around him and his bladder started to weaken and leak. Pointing his shaking defence down the length of the aisle at the hideous black confusion, he shut his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened. The hammer had dropped, but only onto the flesh of the left-hand ring finger of Peter Williams. He had grabbed the pistol and restricted the action, twisting it around and down, forcing his colleague to his knees in yelps of pain. He took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. After looking down the aisle for a moment, he walked to the young woman, knelt beside her and closed the book. The silence was instant, the fears and shuddering vanishing immediately.

‘Coat,’ he called back to the door.

Moments later one had arrived, and was brought almost to him, it being thrown for the last few feet. He covered the girl and helped her to stand, then slowly escorted her from the church, a trail of blood left
on the new floor. Once outside, he had expected her to walk off or to be collected by one of her own. But this did not happen. Instead, every time he stopped, so did she; when he moved, she began to walk. So they walked out of the camp together, and thirty minutes later they were deep in the bush.

It was then that he stopped to look at her, wiping the sweat from his face with the backs of his hands. She was now calm and without the faintest sign of perspiration. Lifting her head, she stared through him, her eyes the colour of opals, bright and unnervingly clear as they gazed into a distance that he preferred to ignore. Then she spoke a word that seemed out of sequence with her mouth: ‘Irrinipeste’.

He did not understand until she said it again. He heard it deep in the back of his head, in a place where the old brain skulked. Only part of it clung, and he repeated it: ‘Este’.

She nodded a kind of agreement and waited. To hear his name, perhaps? He said it slowly. Halfway through its second pronouncement, she started to twitch, then shake. He thought that perhaps she was going to spasm again; the blood was flowing down her legs at an alarming rate. But she gathered herself and walked forward, pulling him behind her.