The Vorrh

1

The hotel was ponderous, grand and encrusted with gloom. Its tall baroque rooms and corridors were grudgingly fortified by the vicious light that desperately tried to penetrate the heavy curtains and starched formalities. The Frenchman’s suites of rooms were the hotel’s finest, but drab and without the illusive flair which sometimes makes audacious architecture appear natural.

He stood naked and shrivelled in the marble and glass bathroom, the last feeble surface scars on his neck and wrists throbbing red, the deep plucking of his other wrist stitched back together. The dose of barbiturates had done nothing and he was being mocked by flights of gilded putti and ignored by the wafting indifferent female figurines that shared the room. He stood with his cock in his hand, trying not to see his reflection in the gigantic mirror before him. He was small and prematurely old. The services of his hand were without effect and the purple veined stump was more fatigued than he was. He could summon no image to his service to enthrall and instigate the action, even though he had witnessed many and imagined more. He knew that Charlotte, his maîtresse de convenance, and his servant were waiting for him in the next room. He knew that the chauffeur might have brought him some fruit of the gutter or the docks to arouse him. He knew that they were as bored as he. He knew that he had invented everything in his and their lives and maybe elsewhere in the world. Sometimes he thought he had dreamt reality itself. Dreamt it outside of sleep, which now eluded him continually.

The drugs sometimes coddled him into that place without his mind nagging on, but it was rare. The right combinations of doses refused to remain stable. The growing quantities of the shifting cocktails wrung him without the softness, the blur that he so craved. He made Charlotte write it all down. The quantities, the mixtures, the times. It must be there, concealed in the now concrete broth of unbeing. He liked the idea of being Dr Jekyll, experimenting with secret potions, when he remembered what it was like. He sometimes doubted Charlotte’s ability to keep accurate records. She could be making careless mistakes or lying about the doses. They were not working in the way he wanted. He had crossed words with her over the last few days. She claimed to be doing exactly as instructed, trying to calm him with her infuriating patience. But he knew she was tricking him with her cunning servant’s slyness. Some nights and most mornings found him on the floor, crawling on hands and knees, away or towards the thing that was strangling his heart. He had begun to sleep on the floor. The terror of falling off his shaking bed made him drag the mattress down there. He had found the medicine and the bathroom and stood again before the smirking mirror.

Last night, there had been a carnival and fireworks outside. Music and gaiety had clawed at his upper windows. This morning it was wet outside. He could hear the grit and spent festivities being swept away in the quiet rain. A tinge of sulphur and nitrate in the clinging air.

He raised his eyes to the mirror and smirked. Max Kinder was standing 4 in the gilded frame where the glass should be, naked and looking exactly like him again. He lifted his tired arm and Max mirrored it perfectly. This had been the comedian’s great invention: the live reflection. An act that would be copied throughout the century and beyond. He had often copied Kinder’s acts. The hopeless fop incapable of understanding how the world worked. His comic gestures of abrupt shock and dazed examination carved out the first continual comic character identity to grace the new flickering screen. He tugged his moustache and Max did the same. Then Max pointed at the open wound in his arm, deeply vented and bloodless. He had died nine years before, at the height of his fame, in another grand hotel, his wife cutting first, his hand gripping hers on the razor. This was a very different mirror dance. The Frenchman nodded and averted his eyes as Max stiffened back into him and glass. He knew he had exhausted his imagination, his wealth and his libido. He knew he had lost a precious gift, but did not know what it had been. He knew he had once been Raymond Roussel. He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger, and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.

2

The bow I carry with me into the wilderness, I made of Este.

She died just before dawn, ten days ago. She had seen her death while working in her garden, saw the places between plants where she no longer stood, an uncapping of momentum in the afternoon sun. She prepared me for what had to be done, walking back into our simple house and removing her straw hat, returning it to its shadow and nail on the north wall.

She was born a seer and some part of her seeing lived in the expectancy of her departure, a breeze before a wave, before a storm. Seers die in a threefold lapse, from the outside in. The details and confinement of each infolding had to be carefully marked and heard without panic or emotion on my part, for I then took on a different role.

We said goodbye during the days leading to her night. Then all of my feelings were put away; there were more important rituals to perform. All this I knew. From our first agreement to be together it had been described, it had been unfolded. Our love and companionship grew in the confines and the constantly open door of its demand, and secretly I rehearsed my distance and practised the deceit of loneliness.

As I stood before our solid wooden table with her blood drying stiff on my skin, her body lay divided and stripped into materials and language. My back and hands ached from the labour of splitting her apart, and I could still hear her words. The calm instruction of my task repeated over and over again, embedded with a singsong insistence to erase my forgetfulness and its fence of doubt. The entire room was covered in blood, yet no insect would trespass this space, no fly would drink her, no ant would forage her marrow. We were sealed against the world during those days, my task determined, basic and kind.

She had explained all this to me while I served her breakfast on a rare rainy morning. The black bread and yellow butter had seemed to stare from its plate with mocking intensity, the fruit pulsing and warping into obscene ducts and ventricles, vivid in innocence at every direct glance. I perched on the edge of the bed, listening to her simple words glide and agree with the rain, while my fear ignited them into petrol wires of ferocious anger, stuffed into my oxygenless, hidden core.

I shaved long, flat strips from the bones of her legs. Plaiting sinew and tendon, I stretched muscle into interwoven pages and bound them with flax she had cut from the garden. I made the bow of these, setting the fibres and grains of her tissue in opposition, the raw arc congealing, twisting and shrinking into its proportion of purpose. I removed her unused womb and placed her dismembered hands inside it, sealing the misshapen ball which sometimes moved a little in its settling. I shaved her head and removed her tongue and eyes, and folded them inside her heart. My tasks finished, I placed the nameless objects on the wooden draining board of the sink. They sat in mute splendour, glowing in their strangeness, untouched by any criminal light. What remained on the table and floor was simply waste. I left it for the wild dogs when I departed that place with all its doors and windows open. For three days I lived with the inventions of her and the unused scraps, the air scented by her presence, the musk-deep smell of her oil and movement. The pile of her thick, unwashed hair seemed to breathe and swell against the bars of sunlight that turned the room towards evening. These known parts of her stroked away the anxious perfumes, the harsh iron of her blood and the deeper saturated smoulders of her unlocked interior. On the third day I buried her heart, womb and head in the garden in a small, circular pit she had dug with her very hands a week before.

I buried the compass of her and covered it with a heavy stone. I obeyed with perfection, tearless and quiet, picking up the arrow that she had made and walking back into the house for the last time.

The bow quickened astonishingly, twisting and righting itself as the days and the nights pulled and manipulated its contours. There was a likeness to Este’s changing during her dying, although that transition had nothing in common with all the deaths I had witnessed and participated in before. With Este, an outward longing marked all, like sugar absorbing moisture and salt releasing it. Every hour of the three days rearranged her with fearsome and compelling difference. Every physical memory of her body, from childhood onwards, floated to the surface of her beautiful frame. Every gesture that had evolved into her grace found its origin and almost joyfully puppeted its awkwardness through her. Every thought found its way through her bones and exhaled waves of shadow from a deep ocean floor, rising into sunlight and dispersing, meeting the decay that was closing in. I could not leave her. I sat or laid next to her, fascinated and horrified, aroused and entranced as the procession gently disgorged. Her eyes waxed and waned memory, pale transparency to flinted fire. She was dimly aware of me, but able to instruct and explain the exactitude of the process. She did this to dispel my anxiety and pain; also to confront the ecstasy of her control. In the evening of the third day, the memory in my dreams began to show itself. It refined our time together, the constancy of her presence. Since leaving her village, we had never been apart, except for those strange weeks when she had asked me to stay inside while she dwelt in the garden day and night. When she returned, she was thin and strained.

The bow is turning black now, becoming the darkest shadow in the room. Everything is very still. I sit holding the two wrapped arrows in my hands. Out of their turnings comes hunger and sleep, forgotten reflections of my own irredeemable humanity.

From the cupboards and the garden I juggle anticipant food, flooding my senses with taste and smell. Citrus and bacon rise in the room, sage and tomatoes, green onions and dried fish unfold. Separation has been hewn by the essential, and a long, dreamless sleep waits to sanction it.

My hands tremble holding the bow and the morning door, the arrows between my teeth. The exact moment has come, and I wrench into dazzling light, the ancient wood sucked inwards and falling from its twisted hinges. Overwhelmed, the house gives up, showing its previously unseen squalor as an act of submission. Heat, buffeted by a bright wind, wakes me to this world and seals the shrivelling house to a hollow.

I untie the dark, dry leaves from the arrows while holding the bow cradled to my chest. They are white; an infinite, unfocused white without any trace of hue or shadow. They absorb the day into their chalky depth and I grow sick looking at them. I lift the bow, which I must have strung in my sleep, and knock one arrow into its contrast. The other is wrapped away and saved to be the last. I would make many in between. This is the moment of departure, her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my strength, and feel this single gesture brace every muscle of my body, feel the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. Pulling the great curve silences the world and even the wind stops to hold its breath against my energy and the release. For the first and last time, the bow is silent, except for small, creaking sighs that echo my taut bones. I raise it skywards, perpendicular to the track that runs over the low foothills in an almost vertical scar from our home.

It lets itself go, vanishing into the sky with a sound that sensually pulses through me and every other particle of substance and ghost, in or out of sight. I know I will never see that arrow again. It is not to be my guide; I will have to make that one differently.

That first white arrow is still travelling the spirals of air, sensing a defined blood on its ice-cold tip. For a moment I am with it, high above these porous lands, edging the sea, its waves crashing endlessly below. Above the shabby villages and brutal tribes, leaning towards the wilderness and the dark forest which cloaks its meaning.

The pain calls me back as I stand before the track, dazed in the garden. The inside of my arm is raw from where the bow string lashed it, removing a layer of skin with the ease of a razor, indifferent and intentional. Stepping forward, I pick up my sack and quiver, steady my looping stance against the bow and walk forward into the wilderness.

The land has become depopulated. Too much effort is needed to keep the parched fields active enough to grow clinging tomatoes and dusty, dwarfish melons; it is a country of the old, tending their patches of earth out of habitual purpose, the last days of the clock ticking through daily ritual, the weights almost unwound from their creaking spool. There are no young people to reset it, no one to wind the well each day and sprinkle the ravenous earth into function. The young have left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They are underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They are in venomous sheds, weaving chemical cancer. They are automata in chains of industry which do not need identity, language or families. All their saved money is endlessly counted as escape. Some come back to the fields to help the old and infirm raise the dented bucket and spade; others attempt to return as princes, buying expensive and bland new homes in the crumbling villages of their origin. This will fail, and their children and the land will turn on them and intensify the shuddering fatigue. The scuffed tracks of their efforts are erased under my feet, walking through the few occupied remnants of community.

It will take me three days to clear these places, another three or four to cross the low mountains and be further out at the rim of the wilderness. We had lived in this place for eleven years, healing the gashes and fractures of our past, using the sun and dust to staunch the jagged memories. This peninsula of abandonment had given much, and a part of me ached to plan a return, even though I know it will never be possible.

The heat of the day has become saturated with weight, the brightness sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds have thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water is being born, heavy and unstable.

This is the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land; a wind which sucked rather than blew, its hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toys with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, whilst beneath the reservoirs, caves and cisterns strained their emptiness towards its skies.

This was the reason we had lived here. Este said the isolation was part of the treatment, but the mending and evolution of the body and spirit could only take place above a honeycomb of hollows. The skies and the sea would be heard in those places. Their vastness and motions would be echoed down beneath the taut earth, swilling and booming the darkness into quiet against their unseen mineral walls. She spoke of their unity of voice, from the humblest well to the vastest cathedral cave, how they are like pipes of different sizes in a mighty organ. An organ constructed to shudder in fugues and fanfares of listening, not playing; where a cacophony of silence was only counterpoised by insistent drips of water.

She knew it was their action that influenced the minute physical and the immense mental and spiritual spaces inside human beings. I think of this as I walk across the lid of their meaning, of her unfolding these wonders to my baffled ears. I think of her voice, very close, very clear, and I stare in shock at the truth of holding her bones and flesh in my sweating hand.

During the night, lightning can be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flicker, marbling the curve of the earth on their way towards here and the waiting dawn. I take shelter in a dug-out shepherds’ cave at the edge of one of the poorest villages. The terraced fields here are worn down, losing their boundaries in limping disrepair, survival and oblivion quarrelling among the falling stones and parched plants. In this domain of lizards, flies and cacti, the human signatures were being erased.

My shelter feels like it has not been used for years, the stitched-together sacking that made its rudimentary door falling apart in my hand as I try to unhook it. This crouching space had been scratched out from the soft yellow stone, just big enough for a small man or boy and a few goats. There are still remnants of occupation: a low bed or table blocking the far end; a few tools bearing the labour scars of generations; a car wheel, its tyre worn smooth; dry, sand-encrusted empty bottles and a few exhausted shotgun cartridges. Hanging on a nail is a fragment of rusted armour, an articulated breastplate of diminutive size. Whether this is a genuine artefact dug up from some unknown battle, or part of a carnival costume from one of the gaudy pageants that once marked the saint’s passage through the year, it is impossible to say. The hot land and the salt wind have etched and cooked it into another time, a time that never stained memory, because it was too ancient to have yet been conceived.

The cave’s bare interior seemed at once empty and brimming with occupation. I curl into the sanctity of this most human shelf, and taste the joy of its simplicity with the edge of my sudden tiredness.

The thunder enters my sleep. It slides between the laminations of dreams with the grace of a panther, its first sound being no more than a whisper or a vibration. Each mile it runs it gains volume and power, each mile it flies it trains my unconscious to not respond, each growing resonance being only fractionally louder than the last. The hours are eaten in its stealthy approach, my nightmares absorbing the shocks until it is directly overhead and its massive percussion shakes the ground with light; a huge whiteness, battering the pale morning with a fury that refuses all kinship.

The village is awake and active, people darting from one house to another as the sky opens and torrents of rain fall to meet the rising earth’s unbridled appetite. Within minutes, the fields have drunk deep and are forming lakes. The streets and tracks of the village are alive with rivulets and yellow tributaries of fast water. The villagers fall upon these eddies with a great frenzy of action. Rolled-up sacks and hessian are used to divert the flood into wells and gulleys which lead to other cisterns. Logs and stones, even items of clothing, are improvised to divert this precious storm. The feuds and squabbles that fossilised the village are forgotten, water and its capture going beyond blood and its boundaries. The rain is constant and spiteful, the villagers are determined and drenched with mud. People slither and run, shout instructions to the very young, scream for more sacks, laugh and fall with the very old, who curse. Those who are normally locked away join the rush, limping and screaming with exhilaration and confusion. The entire village turns into mud beings, a chaotic, purposeful mania rattling under the rains. Some animals watch from their stables and doorways, surprised and indignant at so much energy, water and noise.

I can not stay outside of this circus vortex, so I carefully stash the bow and other goods high in the cave, away from the flood and beasts, and run to work alongside a toothless elder who is trying to build a dam of rocks and rags.

His efforts are useless against the power of the flow. His slowness gives a pathetic humour to the event, and his wall tumbles away every few minutes while he methodically continues to pile, seemingly unaware of the gleeful water and his mechanical futility. Together, we manage to turn the stream, sending it into the corner of the courtyard. It pours into the mouth of an open well, and falls into its resounding depth with echoing splashes. As I watch our minor triumph, in a flash it occurs to me that I have no memory of Este bleeding, no picture of the blood leaving her body, just a vague blur of its presence drying everywhere in the room. Have these sounds caught a reflection, cupped the act in a palm of memory?

The old man tugs at my sleeve and clears my vision. He has started work on another stream and needs my help. We continue directing the water for two hours, soaked to the bone but satisfied. The storm passes, the rain stops and the steaming earth has begun to dry. Birds noisily make use of the orange puddles before they return to dust. A saturated heat begins to rise, forcing all labour to cease.

The family of the old man insist I join them in their dripping home. Our celebratory feast is simple but powerful: we drink a coarse red wine made from the family’s parched, hard grapes and eat a dish of fat rice and dark meat cooked in pomegranate juice, punctuated by delicious bread with black onions baked into its crust. There is much merriment and we share that language of need and alcohol, where the native and the foreign are overrun by excitement, and delicacies of grammar are jolted loose by emotion.

The old man concentrates on his food as if it were his last. I make some slight comment of jest about this, and am carefully told that the rains and the old have a special relationship in this land. I had heard rumour of this before, but our isolation had kept most things at a distance; our contact with the neighbouring communities had been remote. But the spring rain ritual is true, and my host explains its necessity and the intricacies of its operation between mouthfuls of food and wine.

The old are a burden on their poor economy, becoming increasingly incapable of work. So, once past their useful stage, they are given to the mercy of the spring gods and placed outside their homes with food and drink for three days. At that time of year, the rains are soft and constant, very unlike the autumn deluge we had just suffered. They would sit in silence, knowing that conversation or pleading would not help their condition; better to save strength. After their allotted time, they are welcomed back inside and returned to their anxious beds. They understand that this was a more civilised and kinder test than those conducted by their forefathers. In those distant days of famine, the old had been taken to steep cliffs and forced to find their own way home, the Gods growing fat on their torn and fractured remains.

A quarter of the old will die during the coming weeks; night chills, influenza or phenomena being the divine intervention. The rest will be celebrated, fed and honoured for another year. The old father cleaning his plate with his last scrap of bread has survived six spring rains, and has the intention of surviving many more.

In the afternoon, I say my farewells and return to my cave, where I sleep a peaceful and dreamless journey.

Far to the south, twilight was tasting the air. Swallows darted and looped in the invisible fields of rising insects, restless arrowheads spinning in the amber sunlight. One moment, black silhouette, iron age. The next, tilting to catch the sun, flashing deep orange, bronze age. Dipping and rotating in giddying time: iron age, bronze age, iron age.

Watching them were the yellow eyes of a lone black man who sat on the mud parapet wall of a colonial stockade. He watched and attempted to gauge their distance and speed, making abstract calculations across the infinite depth of sky, a solemn assessment of range and trajectory for a shot that could never be made. Across his knees lay his Lee-Enfield rifle, a bolt-action firearm of legendary durability, in perfect working condition and untouched by any other hand since he was given it in his early manhood. He still remembered first grasping its solid weight and the smell of the brown, oiled paper it was wrapped in. The excitement of possession, matched by his pride at becoming a member of the bush police. That was forty-two years ago, and now Tsungali was beginning to feel the old rifle grow heavy again.

He and the gun bore cuneiform scars and indentations. They had been written into. Prophecies and charms marked his face, talismans against attack from animals, demons and men. The butt of the Enfield was inscribed against touch or loss, and for accuracy and courage; it also carried the tally of the twenty-three men and three demons it had officially dispatched. Tsungali had not worked for the police or the British army for many years. The Possession Wars had made him an outcast from the authorities, and far too much blood had been shed to divide the beliefs of both sides. So he was confused and disturbed at being called for, summoned to the enclosure he had known so well and loved as home, the same compound he had seen turned into the bitter kraal of his enemies.

They had come looking for him, not with troops, shackles and threats like before, but quietly, sending soft, curved words ahead that he was needed again. They wanted to talk and forget the crimes of before. He had smelt this as a trick and set about carving new protections, constructing cruel and vicious physical and psychic traps about his house and land. He spoke to his bullets and fed them until they were fat, ripe and impatient. He waited in docile cunning for their arrival, which had proved to be calm, dignified, and almost respectful. Now he sat and waited to be ushered into the fort’s headquarters, not knowing why he was there and surprised at his own obedience. He was shocked at the scent of homecoming which befuddled his warrior’s instinct. He gripped the Enfield to fence it off, and used the swallows to gain focus before, during and after the event. He bled their speed into his anticipation, as the fierceness of the stars took command of the darkening sky.

I set my path by the night and walk out of the village while the track remains luminous. Later, starlight will make it shine in a different way, polishing the miles ahead with a bright, invisible velocity.

I walk between banked walls of white stone as if in a riverbed, the road hollowed out by time, weather and the continual passage of humans, migratory as birds. Tribes crossing and re-crossing the same gulley, desperately trying to draw a line against extinction. It is with this herd of ghosts that I travel, alone.

After some hours, I am stopped by an anxiety of sight. I have been aware for some time of tiny movements in the edges of my vision, fish-like punctuations breaking the solid wave of stone on either side, catching the light in dim flashes for less than a blink. Every time I stop, the phenomenon ceases. When I continue, the glinting peripheral shoal follows me. There is wonder at first, but it had now turned to unease, and I fear sentience or hallucination. Neither is wanted at this time: I seek only loneliness and distance, not wanting association or introspection, it being necessary to seek one dimension to understand with clarity. I have been crippled by complexity before, and the healing from it had taken too many years. I will not go there again and share my being with all those others who would claim and squabble over my loyalty. I need only to breathe and walk, but at this time of night, in that albino artery, I hear fear tracking me.

The bow comes to my hand, wand-like and unstrung. She gives off musk into my grip, and her chemical blade reaches my pounding heart, which has also turned white, but away from stone. It touches my mind like her tongue, and I become calm and weightless, ready for the attack. Nothing happens. I stand, still as a post. After a time, I tilt my head slightly to see if anything moves. At first nothing, then a flicker, a single, tiny glimmer. I focus on this sprite, and move towards it in the manner of a cat stalking a sound. It is not in the air, but in the white stone. I can see it embedded in its cretaceous library. Starlight has ignited it, and a resonance of dim brilliance quivers about its edge. It is a fossilised shark’s tooth, a small, smooth dagger encrusted into the stone, its edges bitterly serrated and gnawing against the distant celestial light. There are hundreds of them stippling the rock.

It was my movement between them which had rattled their light to give the impression of motion. These teeth were once greatly prized and, as I recall, had offered a small industry to the local inhabitants, who dug them out and exported them to political cities where they were mounted in silver and hung in a cluster on a miniature baroque tree. It was called a credenza, a name that became synonymous with the side table that once held it. The Borgazis and the Medici owned rich and sumptuous versions. When a guest was given wine, he or she was shown to the tree, where they freely picked a tooth and placed it in their chalice, its delicate chain hooked over the rim. If the tooth turned black, the wine was poisoned; if it stayed unstained, the credence of the wine and the host was proven and business and friendship could commence.

I stand in the black night, musing on distant tables and forgotten aggressions, in a stone river of teeth, some of which I can use; their compact hardness and perfect jagged edges would make excellent arrowheads. In the approaching morning, I will dig them out and clean them, find straight wood for the shafts and hunt swallows; their wings will be my fletching. The wings are only perfect when cut from the bird alive, so I will have to make nets to trap their speed.

The officer hated this place, hated the forces that made it work so brilliantly in opposition to all that was sensible and ordered. He was driven into the fort twice a week to set its business straight before returning to the centre of one of the more civilised townships. He knew that every plan or order he made would be reversed or inverted, and that this act was not mischievous or malicious, but simply the process of translation, the negotiation of opposites; not to find compromise, but to ritualise the act of meaningless exchange. It infuriatingly proved that the world was made in at least two different ways. If he were to ever truly know how many different ways, he may have run screaming from his post and returned to the sanctity of the linear cities, even to the common values of the linear trench. He had survived that relentless war, and had been rewarded for it. But this commission on another continent had proved to be a biblical reward: tricky, blind and ultimate.

The task he was now undertaking was a perfect example of managing the inexplicable, a distasteful confrontation with a set of primitive values. He had been told to use persuasion and guile to achieve the outcome. He preferred force, but it was proven not to work here, and could produce the opposite effect.

The Possession Wars were evidence of that, and the man outside had been a leader in that bloody uprising. He tried not to think about that, about the dead, the stupidity and the waste and the fact that everything now was just the same. He would have hanged the man outside for treachery and murder, for betraying the position of responsibility given to him, violently selling it out over a mistake, and for arrogantly mixing ignorance with shabby, meaningless superstition and boiling these to outrage. Over three days, a peaceful and obedient community had turned into an inflamed, rampant mob. The church and school burnt down. The resident officers butchered in their astonishment, radio equipment torn to pieces. The airstrip and the cricket pitch had been erased, scrubbed out. Not a single straight line was allowed to exist anywhere.

By the time he and a heavily armed division had arrived, they found a squalid churn of destruction. Everything that had been achieved with, or given to, the natives had been intentionally eradicated, mangled back into their own stinking, senseless history. Tsungali stood at the centre of the carnage, triumphant and exhilarated, wearing only his tunic jacket and his peak cap, ridiculously turned inside out. Feathers, bones and cartridges were entangled in his hair and his teeth had been re-sharpened.

When the colonial forces had first appeared, they were mysterious and powerful. Their ignorance of the world was forgiven. The quantity of wonderful goods they brought and the manner of their arrival startled the True People. Cautiousness made their hands hesitate and quiver over the treasures they were offered. There were gifts for everybody. Tsungali and his brothers watched their kindness with distrust and bewilderment, watched the endless flow of impossible things: animal meat in hard, shiny shells without bones, killing irons of great power and accuracy, rainbows of cloth, talking cages and a swarm of other things and powers with no name.

When the strangers were given permission to cut the trees and shave the ground, nobody could have expected the consequences. Tsungali had seen the first ones in the sky when he was small. They floated belly-side-up like a dead lizard in a pool, streaking the sky with straight white lines. Tsungali asked his grandfather what they were, those dagger birds with long voices. His grandfather saw nothing, heard nothing, the sky was empty, they did not exist. There was no template in his perceptions for such a thing. And, if some did see something, then it must be from another world, and therefore dangerous and best left alone. The magicians said they were the dreams of young fathers still to be born, and that their growing frequency told of a vast future fertility. No one had an explanation when one came down to nest on the shaved strip in the jungle; the strangers simply had great power to be able to catch one so easily. Tsungali walked to the clearing with his grandfather, hand in hand. They stood and stared at the gleaming hard bird. Its shell was the same as the shell around the meat without bones. The old man shivered slightly and saw only the clearing with the strangers hurrying back and forth. He saw them because they were men, or creatures in the shape of men.

The excited child stepped forward but was yanked into a standstill by the old man’s rigidity. He was rooted to the spot and his tugging grandson would not unbind him. The boy knew better than to argue, and tears of frustration filled his eyes. The old man wept, too. One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.

The airplane was full of possessions, more than had ever been seen before; astonishing things which made the young feel rich and honoured, making them far greater than neighbouring tribes, who had nothing. The plane also carried a priest. Over the next few years, the strangers settled in and brought families and new belief to the village. They said they had changed, coming from different lands now with different ways of speaking, but this seemed untrue, like so many other things that were discovered later. They instructed the True People in the way of the one world, with its god that was ashamed of nakedness. They taught them how work might bring them those precious things that were previously given. They brought books and singing and exchanged the splendour of an invisible god for all their carved deities of wood and stone. And somewhere in that sickly trade, suspicion became woven into the fabric of trust. The insistence of guilt was converted into the notion that the True People must have already paid the price for something, something they had never received, something that just might be possessions.

The airstrip was carefully maintained and the goods continued to arrive. The empty planes were filled with the disgrace of their vanquished homes. Old weapons, clothing, gods and kitchen tools were stacked inside to be sent away, shabby totems of a discarnate history, expelled. Clean pictures, metal furniture and uniforms filled their spaces, or at least appeared to.

It was, of course, the English who brought the cricket. Six of them cut and shaved the strip and called it pitch, which was also their name for the darkness of night and the darkness of the True People. Six men at first, then more, who dressed in white and conducted a solemn magic lasting a whole day, and that had nothing to do with the nailed-up god. Six who showed a great lie was being hinged onto the True People, who would always be dressed in darkness. The flint to the great conflagration was called Peter Williams.

He had been washed ashore decades ago, clinging to a fragment of Séance Table 6, the part with the close mesh cage underneath, containing a metal horn with a rubber bulb at one end, a small tambourine and a brass bell. The table had been split apart by psychic force some two years earlier, in a dingy sitting room in Halifax, Yorkshire. The case made history, the unsubtle, invisible violence having had many witnesses. The fragment, bought by the millionairess Sarah Winchester, was being shipped to her mansion in America when the disaster occurred.

When Williams came to, his dislocated arm was still gripping the cheap varnished wood, two fingers broken into a hook through the metal mesh, bobbing up and down with the surf of the foreshore, outside of his pain threshold. The tribe found him trapped on the beach some hours later, terrified of the incoming tide, whispering and close to death. They carried him back to their village and life. The salt had erased his memory, but he thought he was called Williams. They asked him what such a name meant. He said he did not know, but he was one of many.

Legend tells that in the next five years the tribe flourished and bloomed. Illness disappeared, game became abundant and the women gave birth to a new tribe of men, some of them speckled with Williams’ fair blessing. And then he vanished, absorbed into the land of forgetfulness. They said the land was envious and wanted a new pale biped of its own. They said he had been eaten or dissolved. He had told them he was one of many, and now they waited and prayed to the wreck of Table 6 for their saviour to return. Thus the Oneofthewilliams cult grew, and redemption and longing had a family and a name.

Sarah never received the haunted instruments and shattered wood to add to the rest of her endless, knotted house. The great, ever-growing wooden octopus of a mansion was to house all the restless dead which the Winchester rifle had erased; the medium had told her she would be safe as long as the house was never finished.

She took it literally and began the house that grew until the day of her death. Two dozen carpenters sawed and hammered day and night, building and re-building an equally restless architecture to keep her from the hungry ghosts that hunted the inheritor of the wealth of the man who invented the fast, long gun which emptied the plains and filled the skies and the earth with the guilty and the innocent. The ghosts would scratch at every door, even the false ones Sarah built to deviate their closure. She held séances every day. The labyrinthine structure shuddered with spirit rapping, the rich inlaid parquet floors sticky with ectoplasm and the blind stairs aching aloud. The ghosts and the carpenters only stopped when Sarah sat down to play the piano, alone, late at night. The echo notes found their way through all the twisted empty rooms, the wooden, serpentine corridors, the listening attics and towers.

The altar that grew out of Table 6 also expanded. Prayer nails were beaten into it for expectation. Beads and bells, milk and bloods sang out, to call the ghosts home and weld them back into one solid man called Williams.

The man looked like God. A mane of unkempt white hair, a long, fearsome white beard, and wild smoke eyebrows cocked ragged over piercing, unforgiving eyes. A stern, knowing face which saw the world in a hard light with gauged contrasts. A Lear countenance that let nothing in or out without radical severity. He wanted to look like this – biblical, austere and imposing.

He had explored the savage wilderness, going beyond his guide’s wisdom, cutting trees away from the untouched landscape to construct the view he desired, squeezing it into his compositional inverted frame, compiling the world in fierce light. He had been with dead and dying men, seen their eyes in his camera; he had slain one himself once, in cold civilian times, calling his emissary out from a party in the silver mine and into the fragrant landscape, cooling under the setting new moon.

‘Good evening, Major Larkyns,’ he had said to the man squinting in the doorway, trying to see who was speaking against the bright light. ‘My name is Muybridge, and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife.’

He had levelled the pistol at the philanderer’s chest and fired. Quick blood coughed into the bright, moving leaves of that October dusk; the victim staggered through the house and died in the back garden, hugging a tree. Muybridge walked behind him, apologising to the players, whose hands were frozen in disbelief.

But that was back in Calistoga, the old Wild East country of San Francisco. A year later, the murder charge was dropped: he was justified. He remained justified all his life, and even now, in his seventy-first year, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had broken the brain of his deceitful wife and spitefully rejected his son with the certainty of Abraham. He had posed as Abraham once, for the set of photographs that made him known throughout the civilised world – naked, wielding a pickaxe, with taut muscles and hard sinew, stern and unflinching in his sixtieth year.

Now he stood erect at the centre of the great barn in his native Thames Valley. Five men and a horse waited, cold air streaming in at one end from the tall, open doors. They talked quietly, nodding to his instructions. One man led the horse outside, the others took up their positions in the delineated interior. The walls and the floor had been painted black, immaculately clean and precise. White lines were drawn into the controlled darkness in chalky paint, grid patterns that framed the space into a stiffened concept and held the smells of the farm at bay. When the generated light came, it scrubbed the rural out, a fizzing brightness that tightened the interior into a fiction. This was a reversal of California: the cameras inside, the bright sunlit action outside. In rainy England, all studio life was interior – he had come to prefer it that way.

Her Majesty’s government had called him out of retirement for this day. They made him a physical negative of his previous studio, where he could photograph what he wanted without anybody knowing. They had dragged him out of his docile years for these images, built his equipment into the old barn, followed every instruction and requirement he had given. He even insisted on the colour of the horse.

‘It must be white, pure white,’ he had told them. ‘Preferably with a flowing mane.’

Some of the government men had speculated, behind their hands, that this was a narcissistic whim, that he wanted an animal that looked like him. But they had been wrong: the photographer had another horse in mind, one from a stable of madness and violent dreams. But that was his business, not theirs; he was ready to make a picture that the world had never seen.

Muybridge picked up a handful of cables and nodded to the two men at the far end of the barn. One put his fingers in his mouth, while the other lifted what looked like a forging hammer from a polished wooden box. Muybridge called to the other, lesser man, who shuffled nervously at the far end, by the doors. The signal was given. The man outside whipped the horse hard into a stampede. The man with the fingers in his mouth whistled, a series of tearing notes. The horse bolted between them into the glaring, disembodied light of the fathomless hall. The other man lifted his iron. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the huge gun in the man’s hand, and the sound that followed swallowed everything else. The horse collapsed onto its running legs, sending up a cloud of black, swirling dust, its thrashing body digging into the white grid and splattering the walls from the exit wound in its spine. It snapped its neck in the violence of its death throes which, like everything else, seemed to be instantaneous. With its last snort of breath, the cameras ceased and a tidal wave of silence wallowed into the barn.

All stood still in the settling air. After a moment, the nervous new electricity was turned off. The scene became operatic in the sliding light of the opening doors. The whistler and the horseman put on overalls and began to clean up around the corpse; the shooter put the monstrous gun back in its icon-like box and unpacked a maroon-coloured rubber apron and gloves and a box of equine surgical instruments. Some of the black dust still eddied, high in the shafts of daylight that flooded the barn, giving celestial animation to the actions of the industrious men. Muybridge seemed totally uninterested with the current activities and busied himself with the cameras, collecting their precious thoughts and taking them away, to be unlocked next door in his night-black chapel of chemicals.

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 ozone 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.

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.

They walked on, into a clearing with six or seven large and ornately decorated dwellings. A few chickens scurried about in their passing, and a peacock watched them and shrilled. He looked about them and was ready to call out, when the old man was suddenly there. His tattooed and bangled arms held out for the girl. She folded into them and let Williams leave the clearing. As he looked back, he saw her beauty standing between them. It was detached, older and breathtaking.

On a brilliant sunlit morning, I shoot the next arrow. The curve of its fletching sings in the vibrant air as it flies out over my path of hard stone, which rises into the distant hills.

With each step I seem to climb out of the past, lift away from the flat gravity of waiting. From now on, memories will only flow forwards and await my arrival, the way it happens in dreams, where they give continuity and momentum. In the same way, the arrows went before to sense the void, taste its colour and name its happenstance. She had written my understanding of this high in the continual pathway. What waited in my dreams to resume the path will be explained to me between the flights of the arrows. My walking between them will unravel the knowledge, while my feet erase the path of all arrivals.

Stout yeoman Mutter pulled the gate closed on his Sunday morning duties in 4 Kühler Brunnen. He turned the key in the heavy lock which jarred against its closure, causing him to totter in the street. A tarry, wet cigar, chewed into the corner of his badly shaven mouth, accentuated his shallow breath in the cold air. He was returning home to the rich, swollen musk of his wife’s lunch, and his attention was slurred between last night’s schnapps and the saturated sleep that wallowed on the other side of the thick food of the afternoon; perhaps that is why the lock wasn’t quite properly engaged and he fumbled the keys, dropping them into the icy mire.

‘Good morning, Sigmund,’ fluttered a voice above his mittened stooping. He groaned himself into an upright attention to respond to the shining woman smiling over his moleskin hump. Her height was accentuated by the full-length beige winter coat that glowed around her, her radiance framed by a brightly patterned scarf which held a wide-brimmed hat over stacked curls of auburn hair. Her green eyes shone with a strength that was uncomfortable.

‘Good morning Mistress Tulp, a fine, cold day.’

For a moment they were suspended between gestures. The street became narrow as it rose, funnelling from a broad hip for carriages into a stilted neck of roofs, the chimneys crooked and attempting to mimic the calligraphy of trees, burnt black against the madder sky. High in the nape of the street was a clock, unworking and roughly painted out, an act of erasure which had no story. Like its blind face, the meeting below seemed equally gagged.

‘How is Deacon Tulp?’ Mutter blurted out, with a barked volume that disclosed his need for departure.

‘My father is well,’ she said kindly, knowing that she could play with this stupid man’s inferiority. A fierce gust of wind wrestled in from the cathedral square and paused her calculated sport, agitating the heavy door just enough for her to see that it was unlocked.

‘Do give my regards and affection to your wife and the little ones,’ she piped. He blinked clumsily at her, not quite believing the ease of his escape. ‘And do tell her not to worry about the lateness of the rent; my father understands that things are hard at this time of year.’

This sent him scurrying away, stuttering his beaten hat against his flaky head with felicitation for all of her kin. She was left in the empty, windblown street with her excitement distinctly rattling in the mouth of the half-open lock.

Mutter’s main task was looking after the house and the horses, beasts that he and his family had the use of when not ferrying crates from locations across the city to the cellars below and vice versa.

Each week he collected a numbered crate from a warehouse an hour’s drive away, brought it to the house and exchanged it for the previous week’s used one. He had no idea what was inside the beautifully made, simple wooden boxes, and he did not care. Such was his temperament; it was fiercely consistent, as it had been with his father and hopefully with his sons. It wasn’t his or their concern to pry into the business that had kept them secure and employed for the last eighty years. Anyway, such enquiries were not the property of his class. Imagination was always inevitably a disastrous activity when operated or purloined by those in service.

The boxes were of varying weights and he occasionally took one of his sons along to help with the heavier loads. It was good training for the boys, to see and understand the house, to repeat their duties and guard the quiet. They had known the building from the moment they could walk. It had been the same with him when he was a lad, standing behind his father’s legs as the gate was opened, terrified by the size of the horses and the richness of their smell, mesmerised by the stillness inside the lofty, empty rooms, and always waiting to see the masters appear. But they never did. He never saw anybody there, because the house was empty. Only his father had keys.

One day, when he was twelve and waiting in the kitchen, swinging his feet from his perched seat, he thought he saw something in the far wall, a brown, polished shadow of something that moved out of his sight. He sensed, even then, that he must not see it, so he unbound it from his memory and never spoke about it, especially not to his father.

He was in the same basement kitchen now, gingerly dragging the box across the room to the middle wall, where the dumbwaiter was concealed behind a panel of polished wood. The kitchen was dominated by a rectangular marble table which occupied its volume with a dignity of purpose. This would have been the focus of the entire kitchen staff when preparing food for the household, or when resting at the end of the day and feeding themselves.

Mutter panted as he put the box down and steadied himself, gripping the cold stone and wiping his red, wet face with a towel that he always kept folded near the sliding wall. Over the years, he had perfected a technique of lifting and sliding the boxes in and out of the lift interior of the dumbwaiter, but now it was getting difficult. Not because of weakness, but from a slowness that seemed to be dissolving his energy, like a flame passing over the wax of a candle. The image of a cold, sallow puddle, flooded on its white saucer, its bristling wick tilted and sinking, made a chill run through the bulk of his body. He gathered himself and heaved the crate into the lift with an echoing thunder that was swallowed into the depth of the shaft below the floor. The dumbwaiter worked in reverse. Instead of servicing the rooms above, as would usually have been the case, it travelled downwards into a self-contained and undisclosed part of the house. He had always assumed the queerly shaped elevator had something to do with the well that must be down there, giving the house and the street its name.

He closed the lift door and slid the panelling back into its position of concealment. Dragging the lighter, used crate out of the room, he slowly closed the door behind him, pausing momentarily until he heard the lift begin to be winched down on its long, thick ropes.

He listened, not out of curiosity, which would have been impermissible, but out of a sense of impending satisfaction. His duty and his task were again complete.

The crates were a teaching library. Each box contained poignantly selected examples of the world outside: its structures, materials, animals, tools, plants, minerals and ideas were represented for explanation. Some were preserved samples, sealed in jars; some fresh, some alive. There were also photographs, prints and reproductions.

The Kin, which is the name they called themselves, would open the crates away from their pupil. They would become silent and stiff, their heads in the boxes. He thought they were listening for instruction, or having their memories prompted. But he never heard a voice, just a long, piping whistle.

They would take turns to explain the wonders to Ishmael. Sometimes they specialised in certain subjects. Abel would delineate materials and processes; Aklia would explain plants, minerals and the earth in which they grew, also their attendant insects; Seth would demonstrate tools, act out history and show inventions; Luluwa would illustrate the animals, how they worked and how they might be used.

There was always a small box inside the large one. This was taken out and examined in the kitchen, and would then be turned into food for him. He loved the word ‘kitchen’; it was one of the first he’d learned. It was nourishment, perfume and warmth, and he smelt its sound long before he tasted it. It also made the others’ mouths go very strange. He watched when one of them said it, all of his attention turning to the speaker. It was the first thing he remembered making him laugh – not knowing why, just in response to their reactions. It somehow got better when they did nothing but stare blankly back.

They only ever laughed once, some days after he had shown them how he did it. They had watched his demonstration with such solemn attention that it had turned his perfunctory titters into full-blown guffaws. But when they came back and laughed for him, it was horrible. He could not explain why. It was simply wrong, the grating opposite of what he’d felt and heard during his spontaneous outburst. They had been practising it for him, for his sake, to join in, but they had no depth of reference. It was not in any of the crates. They promised never to do it again. In return, he promised never to scream again, never to sob uncontrollably.

Their care and tenderness was much better expressed through action and movement and touch, through the gentle unfolding of knowledge, companionship and food.

The day that Luluwa showed him how his body could extend into her and produce nectar was overwhelming. She had cleared away the lesson of flies and he had posed a question about the thing she had called ‘pleasure’. He knew it was like the white dry ‘sugar’ or the thick yellow ‘honey’, not outside or on the tongue, but all over. She said that his kind had many ways to find it, and that they were all connected to knowledge. She said pleasure was made of cream, like her motor.

Some weeks before, Abel had shown him a small part from one of their bodies – the curved hollow of a Bakelite shell. Its interior was notched and ingrained with tiny lines, small dents and channels. Bumps covered its surface, very different from the smooth perfection of its gleaming other side.

‘We are hollow, only fluid inside,’ Abel had said, ‘not like you and the other animals, packed full of matter and organs. We work in another way. All of our forces are held in a thick cream contained within us; all that we are is alive in that cream and it feeds and talks to the inside of our shell through these complex ducts and circuits.’ He pointed to the inside of the fragment in his hands. ‘We know nothing of its workings, it is forbidden that we question and examine its process. We have a greater knowledge of you than we do of ourselves.’

Ishmael wanted to know more about pleasure and pressed Luluwa for a description. She said there were no words to explain it. ‘Your kindred have a connection between their breeding and their sweetness, a swelling of both that works like the magnets in Lesson 28. Their conception also follows the same construct.’

He wanted more.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is time to show you. You are like the animals that we have seen – you must place your tube inside the pouch of the female to breed. The seeds then pass to fertilise the egg. This you know. But what you will learn is that its action is layered with pleasure.’

Ishmael understood her words, but not their consequence.

‘When you release your seed,’ she said, ‘there is a great song of warmth.’

He stared and spun inwardly. She coiled down closer to him. Her hard, gleaming hand stroked his thigh. The firmness of her shell drew an erection.

‘I will show you that I have been fashioned like your kind to explain these marvels to you. These lessons of humans have been clearly taught to me alone, for you.’

She showed him a latch in the crease between her legs, normally hidden by its underside position. She asked him to move it and, with chattering fingers, he felt the mechanism of this secret thing. After a while she joined in, her nimble fingers sliding its notch down the entire length of her division, leaving the long cleft open.

‘Touch inside,’ she said.

It was warm and soft. He looked closer, some of his hand now within her, fingers moving the folded layers.

‘Kelp,’ he said. ‘It’s made of kelp.’ Kelp had been in Lesson 17. Jars from the sea.

If she could have smiled, she would have. Instead, she stroked his head and said, ‘No, but very like it. It’s a material you have not yet seen.’ She pushed the notched bulb in a little further and moisture flooded his touch.

‘You leak like me,’ he said. ‘Like me and the animals. You never did before.’

‘This is not the same. This is not the passing of waste fluid, but a special oil to let you move inside me without friction or hurt.’

She guided him towards her, positioning her prone body, and with the same attentive concentration that she showed when peeling the animals apart, she drew him into her. An inner clasping made Ishmael flinch, but she rectified it with the pressure of her left hand in the small of his back and a series of whistling clicks that he knew were declarations of satisfaction, the same sounds she made when he understood her other lessons. A growing wave of succulent achievement overcame him, and he began to push deeper inside her. His hands gripped the hard perfection of her curved hips, making the contrast of her hot interior a wonderful benefaction.

This was different from all the other things she had shown him. The understanding was in his whole body, churning with sugars that gave him a direct power he had never dreamt of before. He tasted might and dominance and the impossible joy of retreat as she fed his anxious childhood into the past. They rocked together while he cried, sobbing pleasure, locked in her arms, sensation boomeranging sensation with continual vigour. Suddenly she began to shake, every joint shuddering, her voice impaling itself on an imprecision of sound. This had never happened before, and she had no understanding of its purpose or meaning. Only Ishmael knew that one of her inner ventricles had been flushed directly to the shunt mechanism of her sleep and recharging mode, had switched into total response as he reverberated against her, causing her to flick in and out of sleep in a fast stutter of consciousness and oblivion, producing something like pleasure constructed of surprise in her old, servile body of juice and stringency. As long as the rule regarding her Kin was in place, she would never be able to comprehend her reaction. The mystery would be for Ishmael alone to understand.

It had been the angels that had caused the damage. The priest had spoken to the girl about them for a long time, on one occasion for more than an hour. He explained how they were not gods themselves, like the myriad clans of deities who had previously infested their beliefs, but winged servants who could interact between God and man. The mistake had come when he’d opened the pages of Paradise Lost, a large edition with Gustave Doré’s magnificent illustrations.

He had shown her the angels; sometimes she saw the demons too. There was no problem: she’d liked them all, especially when their wings were open and ready to fly. Then they had come upon one of the pages of Adam and Eve in the garden, before the fall; Book V. 309 – 311.

Adam called: Haste hither, Eve and, worth thy sight, behold,

Eastwards among the trees, what glorious shape

Comes this way moving; seems another morn

Risen on mid-noon. Some great behest from heaven

To us perhaps he brings, and will vouchsafe

This day to be our guest.

The accompanying image showed the couple beneath a tree. She, seated on the rocks with her back to the reader, he before her, pointing further into the picture, where the angelic presence had appeared and was walking towards them. Nearby, and balancing the scene, were two deer, one lying down with a docile, but watchful, lion. The landscape was lushly grown over; the grass and plants in the foreground giving it a vivid, scratchy reality.

Its effect on the native woman had been violent and overpowering. She immediately lost her air of casual involvement, becoming rigid and sitting bolt upright. Her whole body had begun to shake, wide eyes staring from her head, as though racked by tortures of extreme terror. She started to pull at her clothing, moaning and tearing at the fabric until she was naked and alarming, giving off a pungent odour of sweat; her voice had become deeper, sending out a wave of shared fear. Then she started to bleed. The priest had become afraid and embarrassed at the same time. She caught his eye intermittently, lashing her turned-in focus out, like a whip, until he was finally overcome with fear and embarrassment. Repelled by every element of the scene, he had fled the church.

Returning from the jungle, the atmosphere in the camp had been appalling. Williams’ arrival caused an almost visible ripple of energy; the locals had stopped instantly, then averted their faces, staring at the ground or at whatever happened to be in their hands. One of the more obsequious recruits had run for the officers’ mess; others followed behind to see what might happen.

De Trafford, the commanding officer, standing squarely on the veranda with a white-faced subordinate, had indicated to the door. They filed into the officers’ mess without a word. The short spell of quiet soon gave way to thunderous shouting and even louder silences.

Williams’ anger was fastened tight by the rigours of command. He had locked his expression in stone as De Trafford spat out his accusations of the breakdown of obedience among the natives, blaming him directly for ‘that Savage bitch’s unprovoked attack’. He’d demanded to know what he had been doing to her to cause this outrage, and said he was seriously thinking about ‘having the bitch put down’. Williams had nothing to say, and gated his rage behind clenched muscles and gritted teeth. He did feel responsible for the girl, but not in a way De Trafford would ever understand. A deep, aching attachment had blistered at the edges of the sweetness he felt in her presence. All of this had taken place while he was away, but he knew he was implicit in it all, in a way he could not explain, especially to himself. The chain of impossible events had occurred, and he had been left outside of all.

He left them and returned, via the wary looks of the lingering villagers, to the sanctum of the hut that had been designated the armoury. He found solace in unpacking the guns, while the priest crept back into the church to cleanse it of any abnormalities that might have been shed there. But when Williams opened the heavy, book-shaped wooden box, his day changed for the better. Lifting the Mars Fairfax from the velvet of its snug containment and feeling the commanding density in his fist, he looked to heaven and, cocking the massive breech with a resounding, bell-like clang, gave a grinning nod of comprehension.

Ghertrude Eloise Tulp was an only child. She was ‘only’ in a great manner of ways: in the way that a single child is given all; in the way that it is received and understood as a sign of natural superiority, growing into unquestionable rightness; in her luscious delight in solitude and satisfaction without a trace of loneliness.

She was the pride, construct and admiration of her father, the third generation owner of the city’s second-largest timber merchant, who had long since left the basic details of his inherited empire to his servants, and turned his razor-keen appetites to politics and the church. She was modest in her skin, charming in her manner, with a tall, willowy vagueness, which mostly concealed the centre of her hunger. Her twenty-two years had been filled with kindness and education, but none of it had thawed her hurt at being born unknowing. She wanted to find out and possess all. Quickly.

She had always hated being excluded. Not many dared to attempt it socially – her power was too far-reaching and influential to be toyed with. But most had tried to lock her out in more literal ways, with brass and iron puzzles that fooled their owners into trusting their blind servitude. From the age of seven, she had begun to understand their mechanics and principles and, with that realisation, what delicious power and satisfaction lay on the other side of their manipulation. She had gained access to all hours of the day and night. She had tiptoed in forbidden places. She had seen a royalty of secrets: her parents becoming the beast with two backs; treasures being hidden; the dead, rotting in conversation in the catacombs beneath her home. She had seen intrigue, incest, deceit, lies and pleasures, all closed to the assumption of sight.

Now she stood in the elbow of the next building while the buffoon Mutter disappeared home. She waited a tantalising time, watching the street set into stillness, enjoying the restraint before she touched the door to see if her curiosity really had a menu. She walked quickly across the empty space and pushed the cold gate. It moved, heavy under her calfskin glove.

Her joy spun and silently shrieked: this was forbidden and ecstatic. The house had been a great secret for all of her life, the only thing denied to a child who was given everything. No one in her family would talk about it.

‘Ah ja, the Kühler Brunnen House,’ they would say, and then change the subject. She had stared at it, glared at it and watched it in passing all the days of her life, from her pram to her womanhood. Something in it had tapped at her shell, stirring the wakening within. And now she had breached its outer wall, closing the gate behind her in protection from all vulgar intrusion.

She lingered over the stables and the basic construction of the courtyard, drawing out her anticipation before approaching the entrance to the building. To her delight and surprise, the lock was simple, an old and well-known type, the kind she had been surreptitiously picking for years in her family’s homes. The door of this house would be no match for her skills, and she thrilled at the thought of devouring the secrets it had concealed for so long.

She returned through the courtyard. Once back at the gate, she looked again at the lock and laughed, almost too loudly. This was the ridiculous contraption that had held her at bay for so long? She could have opened it years before. It had only taken Mutter’s pantomime of stupidity to give her permission and scrawl the ticket to her fulfilment.

She shut and padlocked the gate and walked along the darkening street, humming her way home and savouring her strength and the sweet weakness of everything around her. There was no rush now; she already had the conclusion to the enigma firmly in her grasp. She would relish all the possibilities rather than leaping into the outcome; it would pay back all those years of frustrating exclusion. She now owned every imagined room.

Six days later, when Mutter had again left, she entered the house.

For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.

The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans, but could also devour a thousand of their little lives in a microsecond of their uninterrupted, unfathomable time. So vast was its acreage, it also made its demands of time, splitting the toiling sun into zones outside of normal calibration; a theoretical traveller, passing through its entire breadth on foot, would have to stop at its centre and wait at least a week for his soul to catch up. So dense was its breathing, it dented the surrounding climate. Swirling clouds interacted with its shadow. Its massive transpiration sucked at the nearby city that fed from it, sipping from the lungs of its inhabitants and filling the skies with oxygen. It brought in storms and unparalleled shifts of weather. Sometimes it mimicked Europe, smuggling a fake winter for a week or two, dropping temperatures and making the city look and feel like its progenitor. Then it spun winds and heat to make the masonry crack after the tightness of the impossible frost.

No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human – some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.

The logging roads skirted its perimeter, allowing commerce to gingerly nibble at its unprotected edges. There were no commercial means of ingress or egress from its solid shadow, except for the train. The mindlessly straight track that ran towards its heart was laid, line by line, with the hunger for wood. As it grew forwards, it forgot its immediate past. The iron rail carried sleep in its miles of repetition.

Most of the train that ran on it was composed of open platform and iron chain, built to receive the freshly cut trunks. But there were two passenger carriages, made for short and necessary visits, or for those whose curiosity outstripped their wisdom. There were also the slave carriers, basic boxes on wheels designed to carry the workforce into the forest’s interior. The slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.

The zoopraxiscope was defunct. It had been superseded, overtaken by other machines that defined movement and projected the gait of reality. But he had already given up that task in America. He and his brass hydra of lenses, cogs and light had already achieved that which was now being trivialised. No one had ever seen the new machine – it remained locked away in its haunted East London room.

Returning to Kingston-upon-Thames after so many years and so many travels had been the natural thing to do. He had contacted what remained of his family and told them he needed help to grow old. ‘Uncle Eddie’ was a celebratory figure and a man of considerable affluence: they had, of course, said yes.

He knew he would not develop the last machine. Its effect had been catastrophic – everything else that had brought him fame seemed like child’s play by comparison, and he had determined to take its secret to the grave.

He had recognised, many years ago, what had been screaming at him from his archives of movement: his misdirection, up to that point, had been complete. The measured delineation that filled his life was a lie. Observation was not the primary function of photography, but a side effect of its true purpose. The constant gathering of pictures of life was only a harvesting of basic material. Deeper meaning lay within the next part of the process, a kernel waiting to give up its flavour after being savagely reworked: the camera was not a collector of light, but time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death.

It could look between the seams of existence and sniff out an essence that was missed in the daily continuum. It fed on a spillage between worlds which was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modruc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala, and in some of the invalids who graced his movement porfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently to other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.

There was an aura of non-visible vibration in his glass slides, an effect that shimmered in the emotional eye but not in reality. It somehow transferred to his prints, so that while they depicted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance which slivered alongside the viewer’s subjective intelligence. Astoundingly, the effect was increased when the image was projected, rather than stained, onto paper.

The twelfth generation zoopraxiscope was not like the rest. It was certainly not like the first four. He needed another name for it, the one that still scared him, yet he had never found it. No one would ever believe what it did, looking at its complex entanglement of lenses and shutters. They would expect more pretty pictures to dance on the wall, yet would meet instead a rippled light which sliced the optic nerve into a whip of driving visions…

Muybridge was keen in his arrogance, sharp enough to know that such a statement, made publicly, would unbind his esteem and threaten his well-forged place in history. Those little minds that scratched at his achievements would make light work of his undoing, were they privy to such a discovery – but they would never be allowed to snatch away his triumph or his secret. He would let it seep out, after they were all rotted bones. Let others announce his genius, as Huxley had for Darwin, or as Ruskin had for Turner, men not yet born, men of the growing age who would recognise his enlightenment. He would save his strength and maybe live long enough to witness it. He had made the device, found the conclusion. But he had seen others of his age brought to the pillory in the last years of their lives, shredded and broken by their generosity, choked on the crumbs of wisdom they gave, too freely, to the mob. He had better things to roll into the future than explanation. He was too old to debate and be questioned. He was justified and right.

So he had returned to England, to conceal his knowledge of the brass creature that engineered the invisible and to avoid the native curiosity and gawping interest of the Americans, which he had previously exploited so brilliantly. He wanted the surly indifference of England to hide in, to be unseen, even while apparent.

A long time ago, what now seemed like hundreds of years, he had visited the Isle of Man, a derelict rock in the Irish sea between England and Ireland, ignored by both antagonistic islands. His parents had taken him there to see the peasants working the thick, dense earth and the violent, ragged sea, and to avoid the questions of a smouldering family horror at home. On a rare, blistering afternoon, without shadows or any other form of shade, he had been trusted to explore alone as they wandered the beach, and not to move from the place in which he winched and roamed without finding interest.

In a shelter of cupped rock, nailed with white painted cottages to the cliff, he had met a fisherman. His boredom had been like bait to the old seaman, who was hiding his own endless tedium in the morbid actions of work. They had talked intermittently, dribbling sentences into the sand for each to watch without comment. The tide had receded and given a bellowing space to their breath, letting speech occur in salty bubbles. The highlight of the interaction had been in the contents of a battered pail of slopping brine, fetched by the fisherman and dramatically screwed into the sand for the boy’s attention. A clunking, pissing sound had come scratching from the bucket. The boy’s attention was instantly hooked. Walking over to look inside, he saw five crabs of various sizes, struggling against the limited water and the steep tin sides of their containment.

‘Are they trying to escape?’ stuttered the boy. ‘Trying to get out?’

‘Aye,’ nodded the fisherman, after a tobacco pause.

‘But why can’t they do it?’ asked the boy. ‘There are more of them than the water.’

‘They be Manx crabs,’ said the man. ‘See – every time one crawls up an’ nearly escapes, the others drag it back down.’

The boy had recognised this, known it to be as true as the ocean, and he had been instantly grateful for an adult fact. He had known, even then, that he would use it all his life.

The only time he had let it go was in his marriage, where overpowering love had happened twice and shaken his terse tree of knowledge to its roots.

His young wife had strolled into the hard sinew of his single life like new blood, warming and radiating every part of his ordered existence, bringing a joy that he could not own, and for the first time had not wished to. The birth of his son had overwhelmed him with more feelings than he had been able to understand; a ball of life burned and writhed inside him whenever he held the child in his bony hands. But they had been diversions – things that were never meant to last, moments of deception to rob him of purpose. Now his bitch wife was dead, the bastard child given to a home, and he was free once more. Free to continue, and to never again allow such treacherous emotions to poison his will. When friends tried to update him on the growing child, or on the striking resemblance to him which it had apparently begun to bear, he had cut them dead, severed them from his righteous mind. He moved home again and again, wandered into the deserts and high mountains without a whiff of Christ or Satan as companions. He had never looked back.

The Frenchman was the only modern being to have explored the Vorrh, to enter its interior and scribble down some of its detail. The only one – and all his perilous journey had been fiction. What better way was there to trespass on the sacred and the forbidden?

He had, of course, read or held the weight of every volume related to its existence. He had absorbed all the obscure and fantastic accounts of travellers who had returned by the skin of their teeth, having been hunted by the anthropophagi, the Artabatitai, the dog-headed Hemikunes, and all manner of fabulous denizens, representative of every forest in the world, which had been sucked into the mythical whirlpool of the Vorrh. He knew of the saviour of the forest, the fabled Black Man of Many Faces, and saw in it another reworking of the Green Man of Europe; he owned copies and private translations of Euthymenes the Massilian, and late medieval renditions of Scylax of Caryanda; he had marvelled at the tall tales of Sir John Mandeville, stories of the horrors and wonders to be found in the uncharted depth of unknown lands. He had ploughed through the works of Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, even tried to find the famous mummies that had been bought by René Caillié and shipped, on a torturous route through Timbuktu, back to France, where over the latter years of forgetfulness they had become ‘misplaced’. He had read all the fact and all the fiction and, in later days of need and intrigue, he had created his own version, cut out of the jungles of all the other words, their slippery shadows of meaning translated into a rich weft of description. He had re-seen each moment and the backdrop of the eternal, savage forest. His writing had given it life, with all the detail of its population.

Years before, he, Charlotte and the reluctant chauffeur had driven into Essenwald, through the outskirts of mud and rushes to its fired foundations of imported German dogma. Their huge car heaved and jolted on the deeply rutted road. It was the first ever motor caravan, a grandiose collision of baroque parlour and expensive, petrol-driven truck, which he had invented specifically for long distance travel. During the day, the three travellers would be separated, each sweating in a different compartment of the vehicle, the varnished dark brown interiors sweltering in the buckling heat. The chauffeur was forced to wear his uniform at all times, even in the blistering temperatures. Only at night would his nakedness be tolerated and his name allowed.

The Frenchman had ordered the car to stop when he first smelt the blood. They’d been passing through the outskirts of the city, swerving and bumping towards its stony European heart. A shrine tower, one of the many tall, red buildings with wound-like windows, had given off a pungent aroma, its dried-mud surface still showing the prints of the hands that had made it. Goats had been slaughtered there each day for centuries, and one side of the tower was saturated black with blood and milk. He stepped out of the car into the blinding sunlight, the dust still spinning in circles around the stationary wheels.

In this part of the fabled city, the streets were immaculate in their filth. Taking a pair of bone spectacles from their sealskin case, he arranged them over his eyes; the slits narrowed his vision and gated the sun. They had come from Greenland, purchased from a recent explorer of that frozen, barren place.

He was the most ridiculous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened. His handmade shoes were instantly discoloured by the red earth, as was his cream suit. He stood and glared at the tower, waiting to be noticed by the throng of local passers-by. They had seen him, the little man stamping in the ground of arrival, but they were much more interested in his vast, grunting cart, enclosed on all sides. They slowed their pace and drifted towards its metal body, some daring to touch it on its blind side. Soon, the Frenchman would meet the young man who was to become the most significant person in his overcast life, but for that moment the crowd was pressed against the car’s windows, trying to glimpse the interior. The woman inside gripped her small clutch bag. Hiding in the perfumed darkness was her silver Derringer, a palm-sized pistol of American origin; it sat like a bright comma in the umbered pouch. It was made to fit snugly in the hand when discharged. It was blunt and inaccurate, but delivered a lethal slap at short range. The Frenchman had never had any feelings of masculine protection for the fairer sex, even the few he had tolerated and liked. He and his paid companion had been locked in a crude democracy forged from selfishness, desire and humiliation.

Turning his back on the angry chauffeur and the twitching woman, he walked towards the tower in the open street.

‘Which is your way father, are you lost?’ A young man had stepped out of the sun, the halo of his head blasted by brightness. ‘Where is your way?’ he asked again, in a French that reflected the rippling mirage of sand that surrounded them.

He stared at the young man, speechless as his face came into focus. There was a resonance in his tone that had stirred a place yet unravelled, but nonetheless known, in his scarred heart. In a voice that was eerily subdued, he told the young black man that he was here to see the Vorrh, to gaze on the fabled forest.

The man’s eager smile broadened, and he looked out over the dust and the Frenchman’s shoulder. He pointed a tattooed finger towards the horizon. The Frenchman turned quickly to follow his direction, to look through the crumbling gap between the rows of buildings, where a dark curtain closed off the most northern aspect of the city with shadow and solid contrast. The redness of earth, animals, plants and buildings ended at its massive edge.

Its suddenness instantly reminded him of a stage set and returned him to the opera he had seen as a child. Vivid and overwhelming, its story had been indistinct, its music brash and bellowing. But its set had transfixed him, a forest of painted darkness stretched across the stage, blindingly artificial, its leaves, roots and hanging tendrils filling his hungry imagination with a longing that had gnawed at all other realities with an unrelenting insistence – the same scene would pass through the last millisecond of his life, as he lay, seeded in oxygen, choking for absorption in the tiled indifference of a hotel bathroom.

That was only the second time he had been to the theatre, though his mother had often told him of it. She would come to say goodnight while he was in the bath, his nanny stopping, mid-sponge, to stand back in admiration while the apparition wafted in. She was always dazzling, in her society gowns and gleaming jewellery. She would tell him of the theatres and balls she was going to; of ballet and the opera; their stories of princesses and kings, demons, maidens, magic and spells. Sometimes she would touch his back or arm with her silken gloves, sending a shiver through his damp, excited body. But she never stayed, and the nanny was always left to dry his cooling hope and dress it for sleep. His mother’s perfume stayed in his heart for hours afterwards.

At last, within sight of the Vorrh, he understood why he had travelled so far. Yet as he took an automatic step towards it and everything else that had unbalanced his life, his chauffeur had begun to pound on the horn of the car – his forgotten companions had become completely engulfed by a solid wall of in-lookers. The discordant screech, his memories and his stumbling curiosity knotted against movement in time, cutting his next step away from beneath him, causing him to fall forward in stupid surprise towards the red earth. The young man swooped and caught his awkwardness in long black arms, before righting them both.

The Frenchman struggled against the embrace. He only liked to be touched when and where he commanded. He was about to shriek at the outrage, when something of its firm gentleness crept through his disgust. He looked into the face of the tall shadow who held him. His rescuer was now totally silhouetted against the blinding sun, his features and eyes hidden. Yet his expression could be perceived; his eyes radiated grace. Grace was holding him up, tottering on the sanguine earth. The young man said nothing, but extended a long, thin arm, shivering with bangles, towards the shade of a low building. The Frenchman leant into the grip of the other and allowed himself to be guided forward. Without speaking, they walked into the shade of a pungent bar, where they sat and drank mint tea and tried to talk. The young man started by introducing himself, explaining that, despite his rags, he was of noble blood.

‘I will call you Seil Kor,’ the Frenchman announced.

‘But that is not my name, Master.’

‘That does not matter. Seil Kor was a great hero and I know his name well. For this adventure, you shall be he.’

The young man had frowned at this strange way, but accepted his play name to make the little man more comfortable. The conversation became more serious, and when the Frenchman declared he would traverse the entire forest, the space between their knowledge and understanding broadened and split.

Seil Kor turned his gaze away from his new companion and looked out towards the horizon. ‘Thou canst walk to the derelicts of the saints,’ he said with firmness and distance, ‘but no further. More is forbidden. From there is barred, you must turn away. No son of Adam is allowed, for God walks there.’

The Frenchman’s sense of intrigue and challenge was ignited by such bold and ultimate statements. ‘The gods and monsters that live there must be more savage at the centre,’ he smirked.

At this, Seil Kor’s countenance gained an expressive patience, and he turned to stare back into the conversation, while making a gesture over his heart. ‘Not gods of old people,’ he said gently. ‘The one God. Your God; my God; Yahweh. The great Father who made all things and gave Adam a corner of his clearing, so that he may dwell in it and grow. He walks there. It is His garden on earth. Paradise.’

A sudden silence opened around them.

‘Seil Kor, my friend, are you telling me that the Garden of Eden is located in the Vorrh?’

‘Yes, it is so. But Eden is only a corner of God’s garden; the rest of the clearing is where God walks, to think in worldly ways. It is impossible in heaven, where all things are the same, without form or colour, temperature or change. In His worldly garden, He wears a gown of senses, woven in our time. He lets rocks and stones, wind and water, clothe His invisible ideas. He pictures our life in the matter that makes us.’

The Frenchman was shocked and moved by such faith, and by the clarity which bound it. Delaying his cynicism, he tried desperately to shape his next question outside of his normal patronising indifference. ‘How do you know this?’ he asked.

Seil Kor was confused by the question. Could his companion really be so obtuse? ‘Because he has told us,’ he replied.

Any further questioning the Frenchman may have been tempted towards had been silenced. They parted ways, agreeing to meet the next morning and begin their journey to the lip of the Vorrh.

He returned to his servants and found their hotel, solidly located at the centre of the city, on sturdy roads where all dust was banished. That night, the Frenchman had hardly spoken to Charlotte. Lying on his bed, listening to the moonlit sounds outside, he had prayed for sleep. He wanted to dream in biblical weight and in the brightness of a lush garden, untenanted by man for thousands of years. But the dreams that awaited him were without pity, and had the predatory grace of a jackal.

The quietness of the house thrilled her, heightening her expectations and making tiptoeing from room to room all the more delicious. She opened doors slowly against her discovery, moving with a certitude that caressed the moment. Searching in the complete freedom of night only served to increase her pleasure.

Some years before, she had read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ in its third impression, taking in Poe’s description of cunning, and standing alongside as his protagonist crept in to watch the victim sleeping. She had marvelled at his ability to describe such a contained act of evil against the common, dull speed of life; how he had known the precision of stealth, and could put into words the silent, skilful malice. The modern American author’s little story had moved her and given her hope. Even though it had almost been spoilt by a suggestion of mania, she knew that he truly understood the control and vision of a superior intellect, one which was ultimately engaged in the divinity of its own development.

Now, in this old, empty house, she could practise her own talent. Armed with a bullseye lamp, she listened for the sound of humans, that whisper of movement and breath that always betrayed their presence. Her ears strained for any sign of them, but heard none of the faintness of life. Convinced she was alone in the mansion, she let her feet settle out of stealth. As she moved quickly through the lower passage, she almost missed the locked door to the basement.

Raising her lamp to inspect her collection of steel pins, she found two that were twisted in the right deception, and applied them to the brass eye. She made the usual turns of leverage, yet nothing shifted. She changed the picks for a sturdier set; this lock was different, its inner workings more resistant, possibly newer. She mumbled under her breath as she strained. It should not be this difficult; what was she doing wrong? She stopped, and listened to the empty house again. Nothing had changed, so she inserted the picks and suddenly realised what was different: it was a sinister latching, a set of left-handed tumblers, cunningly set in a right-handed lock. She turned the probes upside-down and twisted them against all logic. It yielded.

She opened the door and found herself in a distinctly separate space at the top of a flight of stairs, peering into the murky depths of the basement. Its entrance was in keeping with everything she’d already seen, but the difference in its atmosphere was plain – something in it lived. The palms of her hands became damp and her mouth was suddenly parched. She felt thrilled and nauseated at the same time. She had not seen, heard or smelt the change, but every fibre of her sentient being told her she was no longer alone. Another indicator tinged her already heightened senses, poised, as they were, on the brink of discovery: warmth. A minute rise in temperature had perfumed the static, neutral musk of absence. Someone was down there, hiding under the house.

Ishmael’s demands to practise mating had increasingly punctuated their daily lessons; his diet had been adapted accordingly, to compensate for his change in habits and his loss of fluids and minerals. The eternality of Luluwa’s patience had been clarified by her limitation of function, a trait which had, evidently, endowed her with a continuous enthusiasm for all things.

Some days they mated for hours. The others walked around and about their action, carrying food and lessons, ignoring them or sitting and watching, mildly bewildered by the energy and repetition of the acts. On one occasion, Seth adjusted their angle, to prevent them from sliding off the table on which they shuffled so.

Ishmael still learned from the crates, but his preference was for the damp, wordless classes, his enthusiasm limitless, until fatigue slowed him to sleep. Luluwa would then put him to bed, darkening the room and lowering the heat. She swaddled him in a deep, aching sleep before leaving the sanctity of their chamber to go into the house itself, silently entering the basement kitchen, where humans had once lived. She removed the casements of her internal mechanisms and cleansed them in the ancient porcelain sink. She did this in the dark, because machines do not need light to function, even when they have been given only one good eye.

The sound of the water made Ghertrude start. Now she really knew there was someone else there, that she was the trespasser. She also knew that, whoever they were, they did not wish to be found out; their clandestine tenancy was evidence enough. Yet her excitement outweighed any trepidation over her crime, and anyway, nobody would ever lay a hand on a Tulp.

The water stopped. Her attuned hearing caught the sound of a door’s latch and she followed it down the staircase, elevating her long body and trying to become weightless, her toes delicately testing each step for betrayal before trusting it with her load.

It took her over an hour to make the descent, by which time dawn had begun to murmur through the night. The old basement kitchen was vast and empty. Dim spider-light filtered in from the high windows on the east side. The garden above was overgrown at its edges; matted vines, dusty leaves and a gauze of webs flavoured the light on its journey downwards into the still room. She stood in the doorway and listened. Nothing. For the first time, she felt a chill of unease – not fear, but a slight soaring of the thrill that she was so enjoying. She looked around the room to gauge its current purpose and count the doors. Between the marble table and the hatchway of the dumbwaiter were the remains of a crate. Splinters of wood and a short crowbar had been discarded, probably by that fool Mutter. Then she saw the light in the cupboard; the door was too small to be anything else. She crouched down to examine its closeness. There was no keyhole or handle; it sat flush against the wall. It would once have been undetectable, so snug that it would have been impossible to see. But age had loosened its boundaries, so that now a sliver of light proclaimed its other side.

Putting the lamp down, she picked up the crowbar and, without hesitation, levered the stoic door open. Not a cupboard, but a curving, downwardly spiralling corridor appeared before her. She bent her height into its tunnel and started to walk-crawl, making her way down its length.

Unaware of her imminence, Abel and Luluwa were in the dim sleeping room with the quietly snoring Ishmael, tending to various details for the next day’s class – ‘Lesson 314: The Signatures of Trees’. Aklia was in an adjacent room, her concentration engaged with an open crate, her head cocked and staring into it, as if reading something contained within. Seth was charging in the rack, receiving energy for the next day.

Neither Abel nor Luluwa noticed the door in the wall begin to open; they did not register its occupant, as she attempted to make out their form. As her eyes became accustomed to the room beyond the light of the corridor, her brain tried to make sense of her discovery. It allowed for tricks of perspective, it suggested illusions brought on by tiredness, it even prompted dream as an explanation for what she now saw. But reality slid its frozen tentacle along her spine and she winced with a reaction of revulsion, fear and hunger.

Her involuntary spasm unhinged the door, sending it flapping into the startled room. The brother and sister jumped to attention, blocking her view of the waking boy, adopting a predatory stance of defence, half-crouching, braced like cats. Ghertrude eased herself into the room, propelled by the wonder of this unique moment and too fearful to turn her back on the small, lithe creatures. She slowly unfolded herself into the space, holding the crowbar poised at breast height like a hesitant truncheon. Her head touched the ceiling; the creatures came up as high as her shoulder. As the morning light continued to rise, she saw that they were not creatures but machines, and the twisted reflex of her superiority felt secure. Her rind of confidence was gaining a voice, and she was just about to speak when Abel opened his jaws and let loose a high, sibilant shrill. Aklia and Seth appeared at once in the far doorway, both in the same stance as their kin. Ishmael, awakened by the commotion, rubbed at his face and turned sleepily into the conflict. His somnolence evaporated the moment he saw Ghertrude blocking the exit. Her face provoked horror, and he drily retched at her deformity: she had two eyes.

For a moment, everything in the room was locked rigid in an icy tension. Only Ishmael’s gagging divided its glacier of time.

Then he feebly warbled, ‘Oh, oh help!’

Abel became unleashed by the pathetic command and took three fast paces towards Ghertrude, his eye glaring at her pale, looming face. The other Kin converged behind him. He was within a metre of her, and closing, when the crowbar splintered his neck and shoulder. His head clattered across the floor, still attached to a sliver of his upper torso, the mouth chattering wildly, the single eye spinning in his cracked face. His body fell to its knees and stiffened, causing a judder to slop his interior cream out of the jagged rim of his fractured body. Even in the midst of action, Ghertrude was instantly reminded of her dissections of beetles, years before. The same brittle carapace splitting under her blade, the same white pus escaping from the hollow of the shell. It had slipped over the chocolate-brown edge and splashed on the tiled floor.

The others were now making the same sound as the splintered head, chattering their hard gums together, working uncontrollably. Ghertrude’s teeth rattled in unison, infected by the noise coming from these devices and the horribly deformed child, crouching in its metal cot. But the staccato of her teeth was imbued with the adrenaline of exhilaration, so that its insistence dominated the choir.

The boy moaned and covered his eye against the ugliness of the giantess’ symmetry. Suddenly, the Kin retreated, walking backwards, without turning, towards the far door; stepping with delicate poise, never taking their eyes from the invader, still half-crouched as if for attack, but reversing, rewound. They reached the door and disappeared beyond it. Luluwa was the last to leave and, just before she disappeared forever, she glanced at the boy, who felt her eye but turned too late to see her. All that was left of his protectors was the door, closing behind them.

He had awoken drenched in sweat, his pillow turned pink – dazed, he searched his head and body for a wound which might explain the stained fabric, but nothing could be found.

The dream had hollowed him; no trace of rest remained as he crawled into the morning, defeated and abused. Hot water did nothing; the stain of the night was indelible. He dressed grudgingly, tightly buttoning himself into a costume of scratchy, irritant lies. With one gulp of black, bitter coffee, he walked out of his room and into the day, speaking to nobody. Outside the hotel, the heat had waited, ready to pounce.

Seil Kor stood in the shadow of a palm tree across the street. ‘Bonjour, effendi!’ he called, one hand waving in the intense blue sky, as the blindingly white suit stepped into the sun. The Frenchman, barely able to get into his stride, had found himself exuberantly propelled along the street.

‘We go directly to the Vorrh,’ said his acquaintance. ‘But on our way, I want to show you something.’

He mumbled agreement but was inwardly horrified by the idea of walking. He had had no intention of making the journey on foot, yet discovered himself being dragged down the main road of the filthy town by a stranger. His irritation began to rise with the heat of the day; the claws of his previous night were prickling, envious and alive.

Walking on the raised wooden pavement, under arcades of curved sandstone, he was reminded of the precise architectural splendours of Bern, where he had spent some time with his mother, shopping in the days before Christmas, the snow falling without intention, light and constant. Not a single flake had touched them as they moved from shop to precious shop, the vaulted Altstadt offering a snug tunnel of civilised proportions, the pleasure of warm cinnamon wine and pine trees scenting the frosted air.

As suddenly as he’d fallen into the fantasy, the perversity of the comparison had spat back, giving him no time to relish or ponder; his own mechanism of creative invention had turned on him once again. It had begun to happen more and more by then; the brilliance of his literary deceit had a vindictive twin, who could not see why his little word game, if it was so clever, should only function in his languid fiction. Each day it had started to apply the same rules of composition and invention to his life, twisting pleasure and experience into worthless jokes. It grabbed at his memories and perverted them with elaborate motivations, succulent in their weirdness, making stupidity and pride fuck on the hallowed ground of his genius. Here, everything was made of rotting wood and was held together by the stink of collapse. It was nothing like the elegance of Switzerland; even the grand stone houses paled into insignificance.

His irritation had mounted, turning inwards with a voracious glee. It chased him with accusations: the base of the comparisons had been exhaled from some dim childish sentiment – surely it should have been beaten out of him years earlier? And what was he doing there, anyway? He never left his rooms or his car, why had he agreed to meet this stupid savage?

So it had continued. A swarm of flies buzzed around his head, a halo of carrion, just to emphasise the point. He spluttered one out of his mouth, waving his hands about wildly to fend the others off and dropping his cane, which clattered off the boardwalk and into the soiled road. Seil Kor only laughed at his new friend’s pantomime. Indignant at the best of times, the Frenchman was entangled by an instant rage, and spat abuse into the face of the ignorant black peasant. Nothing happened. Seil Kor did not register shock or anger. He hadn’t even flinched, but converted his open laugh into a serious, frowning smile and waited.

The hiss of the final expletives drained away; the Frenchman was ready to turn and stomp back to the hotel when, with a smooth and simple action, Seil Kor took a fine, silken scarf from his head, and loosely knotted it about the red and raging throat of the small man before him. The world dropped away. The blue of the linen and the sky melted together, a fresh breeze cooling his heart and soothing his mind.

With all the venom and distress gone, Seil Kor took his hand and led him on, bringing them to the doors of a nearby church. He directed his dazed companion inside, and they sat in the cool of the interior, on one of the dark, carved pews. The Frenchman tried to find words of apology, but it had been so long since he’d used them that he remained dumb.

‘I have brought you here to understand the Vorrh,’ said his guide. ‘This house of God is for those travellers who pass near its sacred heart. The Desert Fathers founded this church before one stone was laid on another, before even a single tree was cut. They came out of Egypt like the prophets of old, came to guard and wait, to protect us and those travelling through us.’

The Frenchman looked around the chapel. Images of trees dominated the iconography; trees and caves. Black, kohl-rimmed eyes stared out of a face that looked like it had been carved with an axe. Dark, shoulder-length hair and a tangled beard framed the whiteness of the Father’s staring expression. In one hand he held a bible, in the other a staff. He sat in a cave, surrounded by the deep green of an impenetrable forest. The scene had been set on a square piece of thick and gnarled wood. The Frenchman stared at the icon while the tall black man spoke over his head.

‘The Vorrh was here before man,’ he said. ‘The hand of God swept over this land without hesitation. Trees grew in its great shadow of knowing, of abundance. The old silence of stones was replaced by the silence of wood, which is not quiet. A place for man was made, to breathe and be thankful. A garden was opened at the centre of the shadow and the Vorrh was given an occupant. He is still there.’

The Frenchman’s eyes unlatched from the gaze of the saint. He turned to look up at Seil Kor. ‘The Bible says the children of Adam left the sacred lands and moved into the world.’

Seil Kor made a gesture over his own head, a cross between wafting a scent and stroking a halo. ‘Yes, so it is written – but Adam returned.’

They continued to talk while the heat of the day prowled around the chapel. The Frenchman had given up the last remnant of sexual desire for his companion. It had been present from the start, a rich, thick musk of fantasy that had excited their meetings. He had seen no reason, initially, why he should not possess the black prince, and add him to the list of urchins, sailors and criminals who had spiced the gutter of his sexual greed. He was handsome, and presumably well-endowed; his obvious poverty would have made him easy to purchase for a short time.

But the words in Seil Kor’s mouth – the certainty of his vision and the kindness in his eyes – had washed away those stewed perfumes, replacing them with an ethereal distance that shocked back the very pride and circulation of his vital cynicism. The tired ghost of his ennui had been offered colour and hope. He had begun to sense, with some fear, that Seil Kor tasted of redemption. He even found himself giving weight to the ludicrous myths of the Vorrh, and the salvation that might shudder in them. They talked of the serpent sin, of deliverance, of the starry crown, and the origin of purpose; Adam’s house in paradise, his generations, Eve’s punishment, and all the crimes of knowledge. During those moments, his eyes had wandered back to the saint, and to his brothers lining the walls. He took in the black and white prints of angels; some he’d recognised as being pages from a book, torn and framed excerpts of Gustave Doré’s visions of heaven and hell. The images were solid, almost marble in appearance, so different from the glowering Desert Father patriarchs of the icons, who all had the same eyes, an impossible combination of tempera infinity and point-blank, chiselled authority. It had occurred to him that Seil Kor had younger versions of the same eyes, and that they would mature into that same gaze of stern wisdom.

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 flooded 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.

He was, of course, found and returned to his homeland, where it was trusted that he would explain the splendours and dominion of the masters. Instead, he explained that the True People’s gods had been stolen and replaced by cross-sticks, that all they once were, all they had once worshipped, had been given to others. He explained that their masters had cheated them, had stolen their ancestors and locked them in prisons of glass. He explained that there was only one way to treat such wicked profanation: on the third of June, on a bright spring afternoon, he began the Possession Wars.

By the next day, two-thirds of the invaders were dead or dying, their houses burnt and the church torn apart; the airstrip was ripped up soon after and the cricket pitch desecrated beyond recognition.

Peter Williams vanished into myth. So had the blessed Irrinipeste, child who never grew old, daughter of the Erstwhile and heart of the True People.

It was difficult to know who was the most shocked. They had shuddered into the dining room of the old house without a word, Mutter swallowing loudly, trying not to look too obviously at either of them, but continually dragging his eyes up off the floor to make sure of the vision before him. Ghertrude was ruthlessly busy, daubing and scrubbing the mess from her clothing with a rag she had snatched from Mutter’s pocket.

And Ishmael? It was impossible to guess what the little, half-naked cyclops was thinking behind his hands, which had locked over his face the moment Ghertrude had released him from her protective grip. It was she who broke the silence with a command.

‘Mutter, you will tell no one of this.’

He looked up into her dominance, which was rapidly drying off her humiliation, the steam it produced smelling of anger. Mutter nodded automatically.

‘You must help me hide this poor, hurt child.’ She put her arm around Ishmael to emphasise the point. She had ignored him while repairing herself and the sudden embrace made him jump. ‘Does anybody ever come here?’ she demanded.

Mutter assured her that he was the only one with keys, and that he had never seen the owner or anyone else here; neither had his father.

‘Good,’ she said to herself. She was thinking fast now, and the clarity pleased her. ‘Do you have the keys to the rooms upstairs?’

‘Yes, Mistress, but all the doors are unlocked,’ Mutter said, a tone of unease creaking in his voice. The room was beginning to feel cold, and she became aware of the boy’s shivering.

‘Go and fetch some clothing for him,’ she said. ‘Anything will do. And light a fire in there.’ She pointed to the reception room next door. ‘Go man, and say nothing.’

He nodded and made for the door.

‘Oh, and…’ she called out, as he made to leave. He turned to question her and she met him halfway, pushing four heavy coins into his hand. ‘Bring food and drink, something hot.’

With that, he was gone instantly. She returned to Ishmael and pulled the sheet more closely about his white body.

Two hours later, the boy was dressed in hand-me-downs from Mutter’s children. They had eaten, and the room was warm. The exhaustion had put the cyclops to sleep, and left Ghertrude free to make her plans. She questioned the anxious servant about his unseen masters, the house, the crates and how his family had been paid over all these years. When she realised that he knew nothing, she started to build her palace of lies.

The foundations of this baroque edifice were dug in need and fear: Mutter’s fear of becoming unemployed, or being held responsible for the damage and strangeness that so deeply perplexed him, gave her a foothold with which to begin her journey of deceit. She had explained in some detail that kidnapping was a crime punishable with the gravest of verdicts; that he was the only person with keys; that many would have seen him take food to the house each week. Moreover, there was nobody else there and any statement from Ishmael would be inadmissible, if he was allowed to speak at all.

The need, however, was hers. She wanted to keep the little monster to herself, to find out more and not share him, yet, with the many and the mindless. But she lived in her father’s house. She needed another place to hide him, and 4 Kühler Brunnen was perfect. She would seal off the lower floor, and any abomination that lived there, and keep him in the attic, or the rooms on the third floor. She would visit him every other day, nobody would know. Mutter was the key to making her plan work. He would be the engine to drive the day-to-day mechanism of concealment, and she would stoke the fires of that engine with dread and money. The only unknown in all of this was the response of his invisible masters, when they learned of her trespass and the destruction of one of their puppets.

She waited for their appearance, but it never came. Meanwhile, Mutter carried on as usual, collecting the crates, taking them to the house, opening them, shuffling their contents, nailing them shut and taking them back. He brought regular food; he cleaned the stables and looked after the horses. Now he had two wages for doing the same job and keeping his mouth and his eyes shut.

The upper floor had been full of furniture, so it would be easy to make a usable suite of rooms. She could set about making a home that was comfortable and discreet. But before that, there was work to do in the basement. She told Mutter to bring tools, locks and a gun.

Drawing a chair up to the door of the basement, she instructed him on what had to be done below. With his keys in her hand and his shotgun across her knees, she told him only what was essential to make him do the work, calling instructions down the stairs that she had so recently escaped. He was to go down, beyond the old kitchen and into that shrunken place. He was to take the remains of that repulsive thing and drop them down the well shaft. He was to change all the locks and board up the doors. She would guard the house and listen to his progress from the stairs.

Mutter was not an intelligent man, but he knew that he was her litmus, her canary in a cage, to go down there and test for horrors. His skin crawled as he descended. She stood listening, her body in the hall, her head in the dark stairwell, the barrel of the gun pointing into expectation. After three hours, and a lot of banging and sawing, he returned, relieved to be out and buoyant in his fulfilment. She was beaming, as happy as he to have this work done, until he told her that there had been nothing left to clean, just a stain on the floor. The remnants that she had so horribly described were gone. She questioned him again and again to be sure that he was in the right room, and then gave up. Someone or something had moved the evidence and re-written all of their parts in this strange event.

During the first weeks, her plan seemed to work. She made many excuses to her family for her growing bouts of absence. She enjoyed the cunning complexity, the drifting sideways past the walls of the house and slipping in without being seen. Her family believed everything she said. They had no reason to doubt it, and it kept her out of their hair and from under their feet. She had stopped her daily forays to the kitchen to give advice to the cook, and no longer demanded to go through the housekeeping expenditures with the butler. She had less energy to expend directing her mother’s attention to the new fashions and modes of entertaining, and no time at all, it seemed, to offer the converse point of view in her father’s affairs. The family home was at rest and off-guard. It was even rumoured, below stairs, that a man had entered her life, that she had finally found a suitor who could keep up with her copious expectations. Much smirking and giggling occurred at such a prospect, as the servants huddled around the kitchen’s circular table.

Mutter did as he was told. Occasionally, she would send him downstairs to check on the lock and listen for movement behind the boarded-up room, but nothing was ever heard. Once, she crept down with him to double-check his reports. She smiled at the growing layers of dust and the firmness of the barriers. She detected nothing and was content. Her plan was working, and a regularity forming that created a pleasing rhythm of mundanity in the strange old house.

The greatest surprise was how easily the cyclops had adapted to his new environment. He was calm and self-reflective, using the time alone to read books she had bought for him. He seemed to have forgotten, or at least disregarded, his time spent in that squalid hutch of a space under the house. He never mentioned the abominations that had imprisoned him. He had stopped calling them the Kin, after she explained how distasteful it was. He seemed content in his new home, and to be growing into his new role as an adult.

It was in the fifth week that she noticed Ishmael was beginning to grow in more literal ways, stretching the cast-off clothing into a parody. By the seventh week, he had outgrown a second set of new clothes, which she had carefully picked out only days earlier. He was taller, his frame had gained bulk; he was eating the same food, albeit larger helpings, but that alone would not produce such a startling effect. She wondered if it was the room.

She had seen something like it, years before, when they moved her pet goldfish from its small, glass globe into a much larger aquarium. She had been six years old at the time. So remarkable was the change in the small creature, as it ballooned to a size more relative to its expanded surroundings, that she had accused everybody within earshot of exchanging it for another animal. Even at that age, she had been unflinching in her certainty; no amount of explanation had been able to persuade her that it was a natural phenomenon, and she had held a smear of malice against the unidentifiable perpetrators of the conspiracy ever since. Now, for the first time, she had doubts. It was easy enough to replace a fish with a bigger, older specimen of the same kind, but to find another human cyclops? That would surely be impossible. So it must have been true: he was growing to fit the proportions of his new space.

Unfortunately, it also coincided with a change of temperament. He started to become listless and morose, finding her visits less and less interesting. A flicker of seething was pulling the strings, manoeuvring his body in sullen, bored lurches. His eye was avoiding hers, purposefully. She knew these movements well – they had been a significant part of her vocabulary for many years, but nobody had ever dared to use them against her.

It came to a head on the evening of a storm. She arrived later than usual, running up the stairs, shedding her soaking raincoat. He was waiting, his mood thickened and dark. She made little of it at first, busying herself with arrival, removing her wet hat and gloves, manipulating speed to slice through the tension he was broadcasting throughout the room. But this night it did not work.

‘Where have you been?’ he said, in a cracked and guttural voice, three octaves deeper than the one she knew. ‘Why have you been so long away?’

The unmistakable emphasis was on ‘where’ and ‘why’, the words bitten into the air.

‘I’m sorry, the rain was very heavy and my class ran on so…’

‘YOUR class!’ he boomed. ‘YOUR class? I used to have classes! Now I just sit here, with nothing and nobody.’

She was taken aback by the vehemence of this statement, the anger and sorrow strangling the space between them.

‘You say I must not think or talk about those who kept me before, you say they were unclean and dangerous. I SAY THEY CARED!’

She noticed, through the coagulated light, that a red rash was forming around his neck, and his ears were burning scarlet.

‘I brought you books,’ she ventured, limply.

This was enough for him to close in on her.

‘BOOKS ARE NOTHING! YOUR BOOKS ARE NOTHING!’ he bellowed, snatching one up and hurling it across the room. It hit the shuttered windows and ripped its spine, falling twisted and broken, like the game birds she had seen on her father’s estate. ‘I WAS TAUGHT BEFORE.’ A gulp of memory seemed to well up through the house to prompt him. ‘I was taught with care, taught with meaning,’ he said, choking on the ashes of his rage.

An appalling silence telescoped the room into a reverse perspective, separating each of them to either end of its numbing distance. Mutter had long since crept away, preferring to keep a distance by busying himself with the crates downstairs. He wanted nothing to do with this drama, or with the emotions of the situation, keen only to get on with his work, uninterrupted. He left the house quietly, tiptoeing clumsily across the cobbled yard.

Water dripped noiselessly from the fingertips of her discarded gloves, slipping off the table and onto the muted carpet. One page of the crumpled book turned in rictus, dreading to be seen in its last moments.

Finally, she said, ‘I will teach you.’

He grunted a sound that should have been a derisive snort of doubt, but with his new and unused voice sounded closer to a cough, laden with phlegm.

The next day was still wet, but without the lashing horizontal wind which had come from the warm sea and driven the rain so relentlessly. Mutter remembered during breakfast that he should have collected another crate. The slab of bread lost its taste mid-mouthful, and he groaned through the melting butter. He decided to go back to the house immediately, when he knew she would not be there.

Harnessing the horse to the two-wheeled carriage, he led it out of the stables and across to the double gates. While unlocking them, he took a cautious glance up to the third floor. He knew he would see nothing at the windows; he had fastened the shutters tight and padlocked them closed, as instructed. Even so, he could feel the straining thing expanding against the glass, wanting to wash its eye in the city.

Forty minutes later, he had arrived at the warehouse on the other side of town. After climbing, achingly, down from the creaking carriage, he unlocked the padlock – bigger than his heart, and six times as heavy – and swung the gate inwards, pulling the horse inside. He entered the warehouse, dragging the empty crate behind him. He used to do this mechanically, enjoying the constancy of repletion. There were no questions, just an exchange of objects. Since the dramatic change at 4 Kühler Brunnen, he had dreaded meeting the master of the house. He would be seen as betraying his responsibility, that which his family had been given and conducted without doubt or deception for two generations. Had he damaged that beyond hope? Then he saw the blinding whiteness of an envelope, intersecting the path between the door and the crates, and he suspected that he had. He panicked. A letter, the rectangular diagram of his ignorance, little paper blades that had threatened him all of his life. He could not read, but it had never been a problem. His world of work and muscle, endurance and abeyance, had never required letters to direct it or describe its essential importance.

He picked up the envelope, gingerly, so that its venom could not rise to touch him. He saw the spider ink trails of writing on its surface, and had no idea what to do.

Then the voice said, ‘Sigmund Mutter, you are a good man and we trust you.’ Mutter gave a start and looked around bewilderedly, amazed and relieved at what he was hearing. It came from the entire warehouse, and yet it felt intimate, close by, somehow. ‘The Mutter family has pleased us for years. Your father, you, and your sons, will always be trusted by us. All of your work and confidence is greatly valued. Take this letter to Mistress Tulp and say nothing of our conversation. You are protected and your family will endure.’

On his way back, Mutter sat as if in a dream. The ebony carriage flexed and curved through the streets, the wheels and the hooves talking through the reins to his cold hands. He stabled the horse and crossed to the house, holding the letter before him like a dead fish or a live centipede, at arm’s length. Entering the mansion, he came upon Ghertrude, fluttering aimlessly in the hall. She feigned disinterest at his arrival, until his changed manner intruded upon her senses. Looking up, she noticed his unpredictable focus and the letter in his hand. He pointed it towards her and said nothing.

G.E. Tulp

You have committed the crime of trespass, housebreaking and false occupancy. You have corrupted my servant. Nobody knows of this. Nor do they know of the other acts that you have undertaken to perform.

I do. However, I want the same as you: silence.

You are in my house and you have my child. I was at your birth; your parents are in my knowledge and influence. Do not doubt this, or you are lost.

You will be trusted to follow your own plans. You will be protected. Do not leave or subtract your stolen responsibility. I will speak to you again in one year.

He knew his prey would have taken one of two routes. The first, the main commerce artery, led directly into the city without any diversions, straight through its main street, its industrial flank, and then to the Vorrh. The other was an older track which meandered through the long valley, before entering the city by its layered history. That road splintered at a hub of old buildings, where the river and six other roads met, and then crawled towards the city, the Vorrh and other, lesser-known extremities. These routes were slow and hardly ever used by normal travellers; they were reserved for those who wanted to taste the past, those who had something to hide, those who did not wish to mix with normal men. Often it was a combination of all three. He knew that, while his prey did not want to be seen, he would still have to rest and buy food and information on his approach. The old road would be perfect for his needs.

Approximately a day and a half’s walk from the city, there was a scarred bridge, attached to a working mill and a scatter of huts. It was notched into the bend of a steep, carboniferous limestone valley. Glaciers had edged their razoring weight through, cutting twisting canyons and gorging out riverbeds, so that overhanging walls of jutting cliff leered above. At one point, by the mill itself, the lofty, sheer sides almost touched, either side approaching the other with a heightened tone of suspense; remembrance, perhaps, of historical connectedness. It was rumoured that sunlight could sometimes penetrate at that point for an hour a day; at other times, it proved impossible and darkness loomed beneath.

The mill and its attendant buildings had an equally murky history; most travellers would go to great lengths to avoid its shadows and crimes. But a man could stay there without being asked questions, and enjoy its muffled expectations without catching the eye of its threat.

Tsungali sat amongst a group of rocks, looking down on the bridge. Its four spans of the river were mighty and compact in their solid structure. It could withstand the dry, burning heat of percussive summers, or the vicious frost of a chiselling winter. It eerily echoed a feeble stream in its arching curves. It would stand fast against floods which hurtled full trees against its stanchion, and catch light from the water beneath, casting polyphonies into its hollows.

Tsungali watched silently. This was one of many beautiful days he had sat through, awaiting his prey. He had visited the mill, to smell its interior and the purpose and strength of its occupants. He knew their number, colour and creed. He had hidden his motorbike in the tall bamboo by the side of the river and walked the water road to this place, stepping between the rippling stones. He had traversed the path to the hamlet, five buildings in a ragged line, swirls of scented log-smoke rising from two of the dingy houses. The tallness of the land and the multitude of trees had filtered and tamed the savage sunlight into a lukewarm dapple that suggested peace, but a stiff, pale indifference stained the air with trouble.

The hunchbacked cottage grafted to the side of the mill was a public house, with noise broadcasting its presence. He walked to its door and tasted its interior; cooking smells; drink; smoke and loud voices; a company of conflict. Inside was worse; a solid décor of masculine tension, sprawled between loud guffaws and sullen quiet, occasionally diluted by drifts of alcohol.

He took a seat, a black man’s seat, against the wall, in the shadows. From there, he watched and gauged the company under hooded eyes. He pretended to drink, rolling orders of deep spirit, spilling each under his hand and beneath the table. He instantly recognised three of the occupants as assassins. One he could name as Tugu Ossenti, a fellow member of the same constabulary, before the Possession Wars. Ossenti had been dismissed after allegations of torture. Since then, it was known, but not proven, that he had murdered for money and sometimes for satisfaction. He would not recognise Tsungali, who had been much younger and clearer-skinned then, his teeth unsharpened the last time they were face-to-face.

Ossenti’s consorts were twins. Thin, white and edgy, they had the suddenness of small reptiles, their eyes and hands twitching constantly. Tsungali knew from experience that twins have the ability to think as one, even when they are apart. He had seen it in the village before, observed two working in unison, without a word of discussion or direction. In a fighting situation, such adversaries could be unpredictable and overpowering. The rapid watchfulness of the men worried him much more than their companion’s strength and history.

After watching intently, he allowed his gaze to sweep the smoky, irregular room. A solitary drinker sat in the far corner, in shadows that dissolved his features. Even in the gloom, his posture could be read, and Tsungali looked past him. Four men sat loudly around a circular table in the middle of the room. They looked like drovers. Their worn clothes and thick boots propped them up against their slurred conversation. The mud had dried on their leather gaiters, and fallen in clumps around their sluggish feet. They had been at this table for hours.

At the bar sat a tall, thin man, erect and pitching indifference. His narrowness and clothing suggested clergy; his spine was the straightest thing in the room. Sipping the clear fluid from his glass with a long bamboo shoot, he drank without using his hands, which hung limply at his sides. He gazed before him into the rack of bottles behind the bar, their rears reflected in the mirror that held the slumped room in its cracked, misted eye. His bleached, distorted face floated out of focus in the glass. Apart from him, the barman, a wheezing old man in the back room and a gormless youth with a dog were the only other occupants.

There were no weapons propped in the rack by the door, which meant that everyone carried concealed ones. This was no place for nakedness, but Uculipsa was not here with him. She lay in her brass scabbard, high up in the leaves of the bamboo forest, the patina of her metal matching the colour of the whispering foliage, a charm of invisibility attached to the slender rope which held her in place. In these surroundings, he needed close-range companions; a blunt-nosed, hammerless pistol sat in the folds of his lap, and a long-bladed kris hung beneath his armpit; additional weaponry was concealed under the bridge.

He read the men, then examined the room to measure the dimensions of fight or flight, the exits and angles of possible violence. There was a back door, a window and an open fireplace. The upper stories were connected only by steps outside. As he sat, he projected killing fields into the room, and rotated scenarios of defence and attack. He had no doubt that everybody else had done or was doing the same, except the dog and the old man, who rattled and flinched in other dreams.

One of the twins caught the vibration of his hidden eyes and muttered something to the others. After a suitable but ridiculous pause, Ossenti turned in the pretence of a stretch, tilting his head to look directly into Tsungali’s shadow.

Charlotte was paid to stay close, to be the lifelong companion to her neighbour in the eighth arrondissement. She did this with understanding and gratitude, and because she was drawn to such stray dogs – even the noble ones.

His mother paid for her attentions, paid for everything. She knew of her son’s weakness, and something of his genius. She doted on him, and her love would have devoured him completely if she had not had a greater suitor. That suitor was heroin, and it determinedly won all conflicts of emotion and care. So Charlotte was employed to be her stand-in, the visible female pillar to which the Frenchman would be publicly leashed. This way, he could strain against something external, and always have a place to return to, scratch against and abuse.

Charlotte had a face which should have been loved. Her overpowering eyes said everything that was sensitive and feeling, on a level that hurt. Indeed, hurt was what coloured her gaze, not for herself, but for those around her, who pained and leeched their existence into permanent sadness. She was strong because she was quiet. Not silent, but still. Hers was a beauty of listening and a strength of giving; there was knowing, more than understanding, in the smoulder of her gaze. She saw and felt it all, she gave more love than she received, more than she was ever paid for. It kept some of her friends alive, especially those who were born with half their souls in limbo: the frozen ones who wandered helplessly, in poverty or wealth, towards destruction. She was drawn to them, to add light to their irredeemable journey. They could never admit to vampiring her calm and continuity, could never show her the ache they had for her. But they were, in their own way, forever thankful, even faithful, particularly when they died on the other side of their anger and despair. They sent their ghost tongues back, deep ocean fish, transparent and luminous, to whisper gratitudes often, in her long-deaf and then-dead ears.

Muybridge hated fiction. He saw no point in it, when fact was so powerful and strange. He especially hated fiction about science or discovery. He normally avoided such works of ‘literature’ but, for some reason, people would continually bestow copies of their ridiculous efforts in that field on his ungrateful person. They seemed to imagine that there was some similarity between these scribbled daydreams and his life’s work of precision and ingenious invention, which only fuelled his disdain. Most of the writing came from France, another good reason to distrust it. Jules Verne had been the first to annoy him, and other imitators had followed fast. He had been forced to become an expert in the trivial nonsense, to make sure that none of it ever rubbed off onto his reputation.

On his return home, H. G. Wells was littering England with stories of time travel, invisible men and genetic mutation. Such tales were only bearable because they were swift and slight, and written like children’s stories. The year before he died, he saw A Trip To The Moon. He watched George Méliès’ film corrupt and condemn the moving image to a future of lies, saw his own techniques extended beyond his perceptions.

It was the ease and the conceit of telling lies that he found so indolent in these men of letters, men who did not know one end of a screwdriver from the other. They described things which could never exist, and were applauded for their imagination. The painstaking beauty of his images, with all their care, organisation and science, could have been trampled into insignificance by their kind of reckless fiction.

His new machines would set the mockery right; projecting spinning, tinctured light directly into a spectator’s mind would cleanse them of an addiction to lies and replace the easy stain of fiction with the real burn of art, in all of its unmistakable clarity. The machine was locked in a room on the other side of London; he planned to rescue it and bring it back to Kingston-upon-Thames, but the truth was that the thought of using it again terrified him, even as his understanding of its potential and its purpose had grown. So he had delayed in taking action, again and again. His hands were too old and shaky to remake it, and he had more sense than to trust another and watch them steal it from him. That, on top of the ghosted memory of that woman and the outrage she had perpetrated on him, stilted every plan he had to move towards its waiting mechanism.

Sweet pushing inside her pushing pumping the bitch clasped hard by me pushing over and over again held to the ground smelling open pushing sweet the pump of my heart pulsing she tries to move but I hold her fast pumping bending in the middle we turn in the scented dust my teeth on her spine my spine heart-pumping sweet she skidding me going deeper locked inside pushing she flinches against me spins I turn leg slips we spill rolling pushing touching the ground its smell twisted backwards my cock facing out she the other side of me now tail to tail pumping sweet spinning locked snapping Then the cuts the stones the kids throwing stones double-ended so we can’t fight back they know it we circle still sweet pumping locked twisted the stink of kids the hurt snapping pulled both ways fuck bite fuck bite blood from stones my eye pushing spinning stones she yelps I snarl pumping now water over us others touching pulling us apart she runs away full of my spunk I can’t stand still bending uncontrollable reflex air fuck bending bending fucking nothing over and over and over again bite fuck bite fuck bending spine still fucking nothing still still the kids laughing but they run from my jaws claws in the ground teeth searching balls empty sweet she still in my nose mouth cock dripping licking sweet.

All but the cleric twitched their sight towards the dreaming dog, shuddering under the table. For a moment, their eyes were dissolved of their previous purpose and shed their watch to partake in the flinch that nipped and shook the sleeping animal, unlatching it from its tension to let it swing in forgetfulness. It awoke with a shudder. The table of assassins dismissed Tsungali’s hidden stare and returned to their previous clandestine conversation.

As he walked to the door, and the semi-fresh air of the street, a single set of eyes followed his movements. Outside, he smelt evening as it settled on the high treetops, the ravine beginning to sing with returning birds. He knew this would be a place of significance for him, though he didn’t yet know when, or how. Optimism flooded his caution and he made a prayer, one hand on the talisman around his neck, the other gripping the pistol in the deep pocket of his canvas and leather gown. He would not kill his prey here; he sensed this place had something else in store for him. He collected the stumpy shotgun from its hiding place beneath the bridge and walked the stream back to his motorbike. He would kill his man further down the track.

She told Mutter to bring the next case up to the third floor. He obeyed with little relish, panting, huffing and stumbling on each turn of the staircase. At their destination, she instructed him to open the crate and leave. He did so without a word, even as quick, infuriated splinters pierced his hands.

She removed the wooden shavings and other packing, and looked into the box. Stencilled on the inside was ‘Lesson 315: The Songs of Insects’. Forty screw-capped jars nestled tightly in the crate; there were no instructions. Ghertrude gingerly lifted one of the containers and held it up to the lamp. Small air-holes had been punctured in the lid, and a letter ‘J’ printed across its top. An elegant plant cutting shuddered within, a thick brown cricket gripping its stem. She began to remove all of the jars, placing them in alphabetical order on the dining room table. After ‘Z’, the letters were doubled: ‘AA’, ‘BB’, ‘CC’.

All manner of creatures ticked inside their glassy prisons. Suddenly, as if by some unknown command, they began to chirp and strum as one, their growing voices squeezing through the tin holes and vibrating the glass, until the room shimmered with aural beauty. Ghertrude stood entranced, her hands clapped together in a gesture of spontaneous pleasure. Ishmael watched her, waiting for his lesson to begin. From below, Mutter heard the third floor come alive, shook his head and lit a cigar.

Ghertrude tried to explain the contents of the jars, but soon found she had no idea what to say. She stumbled through the first nine, before running out of words. She asked her pupil what he thought. He stared blankly at her.

‘How would I think anything?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘What are these things, what is their place?’ She blushed in her ignorance and shrank in her failure.

Many of the cases that followed were even more obscure, rendering her speechless before the packing material had left her hands. Salvation came with Ishmael’s change of heart. He decided to give up his petulant student status and listen graciously, without the rancour that had previously spilled over with his hunger for knowledge. It was true that she possessed more experience of the world outside, but he had a sharper mind to examine the facts before him, without the hindrance of their known function blinding their potential. He would try to do it her way, to speculate on the contents of the boxes and come to a conclusion based on each of their contributions.

So it was that they began to open the boxes together, with a newfound zeal, and what she believed to be a rising tide of intimate respect. It became a pleasure: the anticipation, the piecing together of meaning, the guesswork. He was easier in his movement and speech, the angles and corners of previous mannerisms smoothing into softer, more natural alignments.

Weeks passed in this way until, one afternoon, as they excitedly examined the textures and toughness of different kinds of leather, he asked, ‘When will we practise mating?’

She hoped she had misheard. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, with caution.

‘When can I put my man tube inside your cleft? For pleasure and practice?’

She blushed and became tongue-tied, her hands over-gripping the chamois in her clutch. She averted her eyes, looking down and noticing, with surprise, that his trousers were unbuttoned and gaping.

‘It’s been a long time now, and I miss it.’

‘We can never do such a thing,’ she hissed. ‘It’s unnatural and shameful.’ She was about to explain the moral codes and the potential genetic disasters, when his words finally arrived at her understanding. ‘When did you do that before?’ she asked slowly. ‘And who with?’ Even as the question formed, she knew the answer, a picture of it assembling in the furthest recess of her mind.

‘With Luluwa,’ he said. ‘Many times before.’

The shock hit her in the strangest of ways. An unknown taste entered her mouth; her spine shivered, and she had the overpowering sense of being very far away, of being tiny while her body bloated, expanding to become the size of a continent. A flapping edge of swoon treacled her eyes, making everything peripheral to her speeding distance. And worst of all, in this ocean of disgust, fright and repulsion, delight quivered, on a far-off island, on the other side of the world: in her womb.

It was two days before she could bring herself to return. She did not know how she had escaped that last afternoon; her memory had been rinsed to make space for her imagination. The image of their unholy coupling had crowded into her skull, the elbows, knees and heels knocking against the bone. When she opened the door, he was standing by the shutters, picking at paint. He turned and anxiously began to speak. She put her finger to her lips and hushed him.

‘Say nothing,’ she said. ‘Say nothing.’

She crossed the room, taking his raised hand away from the shutters and holding it tightly in hers. Quietly, she led him through the room into the adjoining bedroom, guiding him onto the edge of the bed, and unbuttoning her long raincoat. She stood before him, naked and trembling. He undressed quickly, fumbling with the buttons while she sat next to him. His last garment discarded, he placed his hands on her shoulders and felt her shudder. He was startled by her softness and warmth, and she shivered in the excitement of wrongness, the fear of the unknown and her commitment to the untold levels of power she knew she would wield from that point on. He ran his hands along her body, feeling the curves swell against his touch. She had the same contours as Luluwa, but his first teacher’s cool hardness had never moved under the pressure of his body and her rigidity had been the height of his eroticism. Now, the heat and pliancy was transferred; she was like him, and they exchanged pressures by exquisite degrees. His fingers touched the inside of her legs, leaving tiny flakes of paint from under his nails. There was a jolt when he brushed against her pubic hair. He lowered his head and looked deep into her nakedness. An unmapped cog turned in the pale engine of his near-humanity.

They coupled for two hours, shifting positions and angles until every aspect had been achieved. He fell into sleep while still inside her, his weight balanced across her. She looked down across his back at his breathing. He was drawing out of her, leaving a glistening trail across her thigh, in the shadow of his body. His penis had an anti-clockwise spiral, and turned as it retracted. In future couplings, she would find herself watching it in fascination, but for now the motion was hidden and proclaimed itself in a tickling sensation that made her squirm, waking him from his total slumber.

It had been Ghertrude’s first time with another. She felt tired and exhilarated. There was no blood – she had taken her own virginity many years before. She had learned the conclave joys of auto-satisfaction through hours of practice, and used the secret acts to inform her clandestine ways. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, the way it elevated her above common appetite. The day was a fissure in her containment, one that she would monitor with precise care.

Ishmael lay sprawled across the bed, ecstatic and soothed by his own pleasure, feeling his male dominance rise for the first time on the third floor. He reached out for her as she moved away from him, his fingers just touching her hips as she grabbed her coat and prepared to leave. He wanted to say something warm and appreciative, but did not have the language. Beneath his heart, there was a subtle and churning bonding, and he wanted to be able to stroke and soothe her with its gentle fire. She left him, unrelieved of his thoughts, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom on the second floor, where she had prepared a douche of alkaline salts.

I feel as if I have been asleep, asleep too long. My dreams, if they are dreams, are always in advance of my sleep, awaiting me to continue their tale to unwind their continuity. In daylight, they ache continuously. I have become bewildered by their closeness and my distance. I have been swallowed to this spot of land, the previous arrows stitching the way to here. I cannot see the bow, which must have fallen beneath me, lying somewhere in this place of contradiction, where it smells of snow and glows humid. My feet had held the ground before, but now I am unattached, and the roots and sinews of my pain nag at my hope in dopey, vague wafts. I am being erased by familiarity, the sense of knowing this journey from before. The arrow’s path has made me as vacant as the half-light landscape around me.

There she moves; there in the scrub grass, wire and rotted paper, she turns towards my hand again. I have been too slow on this journey, the air and sky has seduced me. No blood has been shed, and history cannot move without this. I have to cut the light with blood, let her exhale and twist in my hand. Tonight, I will divide a life and paint the future road glorious. Enough of these shallows: the cities lie on the other side of the great forest, and I will burn my way towards them. She is in my hand, demanding arrows and distance.

I loosen the first blue arrow into the evening, towards the first star, which has risen over the lip of the world and would set amongst the far-off trees. The arrow I release stole its colour from the Bunga telang, which grew at the edge of our garden. Its small, vivid flowers give it a female instinct that brushes the curve of the day, telling me to stop at this place and use the last moment of its light to set my direction for tomorrow. I do this as the breeze freshens, and its coolness reminds me of sleep, like a whistle towards an impatient story.

With a fine sable brush, he corrected the moment of death, magnified the tiny errors and removed them. After his focused labours, the crashing horse would be perfect.

Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. He had agreed to create the last set of images to kill the horse. When his brain was on fire, all those years ago, after the stagecoach had overturned and the solid rock that collided with his skull had rearranged his head, he saw them all the time, galloping in headaches, their iron hooves sparking the dendrite fuse-wire. He saw them cantering, all turning to white, eyes rolling savage. He heard them walking, their echo mocking the vacant night streets below his hospital bed. They paced his beginning and his demise with an equal, measured step. He had been empty before the accident, a man filled with vapour, aimless and devout, seeking a place in the world where he might gain weight and merit. When the speeding stagecoach had tripped on the unseen root, it had spun into the air and splintered, mangling and spilling all the lives it carried. He alone survived, tossed amongst the wrenched luggage and the broken, kicking mustangs. He had cut himself out of the canvas, a petticoat staunching his head, blood swooning clear of the hooves that were now running against the sky, trying to gain purchase on the dying clouds.

The court had awarded him funds for a new beginning. On some of the papers, he altered his name again, to match the glitches and eruptions in his new brain. He was topping up with existence, and it pleased him. By the time he saw the doctor in England, he was becoming known. Only the best was good enough for this rising stalwart of art and science.

Their first consultation was in the hospital by the river, at London Bridge. He was early for the appointment; this was something that happened constantly. He deplored tardiness and overcompensated for it in every aspect of his life. He would rehearse the most trivial of deeds: framing the minor in advance of its time; having keys in his hands four streets away from home; talking under his breath to have a convincing answer to questions that would never be put to him. He forced himself to stop on the bridge and allow the slowness of actual time to catch up to his velocity. Placing his hands on the gritty stone, he looked down into the frantic activity of the Pool of London; cargo ships were moored three-deep along its banks, their masts creaking against a spiny forest of cranes and the new verticality of the smoke from the steamers, all extending higher than the buildings that clung, crablike, to the land; dozens of barges obtusely nudged and grated each other in the restless tide and the wake of commerce; hundreds of small craft ferried to and fro, carrying pilots, passengers and information. Every surface seethed and bristled with working men; stevedores and lightermen moved tons upon tons of goods, and exchanged cargos in what looked like ceaseless confusion.

At times, the river could not be seen at all. The vast activity smothered it, and the detritus it bred was like a rough woven carpet, heaving over a secret turmoil. It was impossible to believe it was the same river which so gently flowed through his home town. In Kingston, its broad ripple gave reflection and beauty, it was for fishing, idle boating and rumination. There, you could smell its vitality. The tar, smoke, sewage and proximity of Billingsgate gave the stretch in front of him a very different signature.

He pulled the great watch from his pocket and flipped it open. It had been the only thing he had kept of his family whilst on his travels; they had given it to him to ease his departure and secure at least one dimension in the distant colonies. He squinted at the Roman numerals. Time had finally caught up with him, and he started to walk briskly towards the Surrey Side.

William Withey Gull was on schedule. His consulting room sat high on the brow of the building, facing the river. The spire of Southwark Cathedral and the dome of St. Paul’s could be aligned from his oriel window.

Like them, the two men were almost cartoon opposites: Gull, opulent, padded, slick; a man grounded and in possession of his life; he retained the bones of his labouring family, held them in check with fine but simple tailoring; he wore his growing eminence in saturated gravity. Muybridge, lean and dry, a longing husked in doubt; frowning himself into biblical status; nervous, darting and ill.

They shook hands, each gauging the other. Muybridge sat, and proceeded to relate his medical history: the condition of his skull since the accident, the shifts of perception. Gull stood behind him as he talked, examining the cranium of the agitated man, feeling the words reverberate beneath Muybridge’s scalp. He held the cup of the occiput and moved his hand forward, until it felt the ridge in the bregma, the overriding bone. He fingered the coronal suture, sensing its tension under his controlled pressure. The motion of his square hands under the long, matted hair made it look like a bizarre tableau of ventriloquism; he moved them further forwards to determine the displacement or division in the nasofrontal suture. He then sat back down behind his Jurassic desk, and began to make notes of his observations.

‘Was it your face that took the impact of the crash?’

The patient put his hand to his face and covered his eyes and forehead. ‘Here,’ he said.

‘Tell me,’ the surgeon said, ‘when you came to after the crash, what sensations did you feel? What sensory images do you remember?’

‘I smelt cinnamon, and everything was blurred, like a double exposure, for days.’ His hand fingered the scar where the bone had peeped through that terrible day. ‘Cinnamon and burnt leather; a numbness in my hands; and the horse. I was lying on the earth, near one of the dying horses, staring at it, as it lay on its back, a slithering superimposition of many bodies, multiple legs outstretched. I did not know which of us was upside-down.’

‘How do you sleep?’

‘Badly. Sometimes not at all.’

Unsurprised at the answer, Gull nodded and made a mark in the open book on his desk.

‘Is that a bad sign?’ asked Muybridge.

‘No, not for you. Sleep is a complex matter, the body only needs an hour or so. But the mind requires more, and so the soul sometimes becomes involved, and greedy.’

‘I’m not sure I understand, Dr. Gull.’ But before Muybridge could press his confusion, Gull had sealed the matter and continued in a different direction.

The questions lasted for twenty minutes. Then the surgeon moved across the room to one of his glass-fronted cabinets and selected an instrument from within. He carefully wound its clockwork mechanisms and strapped it onto his patient’s head. It was made of brass and glass, with a delicate set of folding blinkers and mirrors, some darkened by plating. The surgeon pulled up a chair to face his patient, and adjusted the metal discs, close to the sides of Muybridge’s worried eyes. Both his hands worked the device, bringing his face so close to Muybridge’s that each could smell the other’s breath. Tiny ratchet clicks announced the adjustments.

‘It’s a peripherscope,’ the surgeon explained. ‘It should interest you, being a scholar of the optic world.’ He then moved his chair and physically turned the patient’s head towards the oriel window, setting a clamp on his neck and chin. ‘Just like one of your photographic portraits,’ he said mildly. ‘Now, look through the central panel of the window and focus on the dome.’

The patient wanted to correct him about the old-fashioned portraits, in which the sitter was secured in a metal frame, held still while the slow camera collected their deathlike image. He had long since dispensed with such artificial contrivance. He would explain his experiments in chemical preparation of film, he would…

‘The dome, please!’ the surgeon demanded. The middle pane of glass was different to the rest, clearer, with a greenish hue. The distant dome was framed in its bright confines. The patient stared. ‘Now, please, do not move, just stare at the dome.’

These were the surgeon’s last words, as he paced from one side to the other, behind the patient. He touched the headset, activating spinning discs and minute reflections of light, almost out of vision, like the suns and moons of distant planets, contained in an unstable darkness inside the corners of the patient’s eyes. A night which shimmered with endless space, drawing light particles from inside his vision, from his surroundings, even from the glowing dome. Outside, time was changing and the tide of the seething river had turned back towards the sea. Something in the space between the double dome fluttered and shifted in unison.

When the motors were stopped and all movement ceased, the day had vanished. He sat in a twilit room, growing chilled as the stars rose outside in the frosting air. Gull lit a lamp and put a shawl about the patient’s shoulders, gently removing the device from his head. He sat, unclamped and stiff in the wooden chair, his attention still fixed on the oriel window.

‘Please, make yourself more comfortable, Mr. Muybridge.’

The surgeon’s voice seemed far off and above him. The continual, dull pain in his head had gone and he felt exhausted. A growing sense of euphoria was making him feel curiously weightless.

‘It’s the angels,’ Gull said. ‘The angels of silence that hide between the whispering gallery and outer dome of the Cathedral. They have crossed the Thames and are fluttering in your head, it’s quite normal to feel a little dazed.’

He smiled broadly at Muybridge, who was gripping the surgeon’s words like the same vertiginous handrail in the gallery of St. Paul’s.

‘Your eyes are, miraculously, undamaged. The zygomorphic bones of your face conducted the impact of the accident backwards and upwards, into your brain. I surmise that the force of the shock was considerable, but caused no long-term structural damage.’ Gull leant back in his leather chair and looked dramatically into the photographer’s gaze. ‘There may be side effects,’ he said, ‘but I think I might have alleviated or at least diluted those this afternoon. The peripheral vision and its territories of sight and sense are virtually unexplored. My device measures and takes litmus of their emotional potential, their mental humours, do you understand? I have also made some inward adjustments, without the need of the scalpel or the saw.’

He got up and made the necessary movements to conclude the meeting. As he conducted Muybridge towards the door, he said, ‘Are you planning to return to America?’

The photographer nodded. ‘Eventually.’

‘I would do it soon, if I were you. Better to be in a landscape away from people for the next few years. Make pictures of that wilderness, force your sight and your imagination outward. It’s better for you.’

They stood either side of the door, their handshake passing through.

‘Will you send your fee?’ Muybridge remembered to say.

‘No, I think not,’ said the surgeon. ‘We will meet again and I might have a favour that needs your skills.’ He smiled again and gave his patient a white envelope. ‘Read this in the future,’ he said, and closed the door.

The great German cathedral had two towers that should have been twins, but irrational time had delayed one, causing a fluctuation of ideas to warp its mirrored principle. Some shards of fashion and theology had dented its skeletal helix, making the thin needle twist out of symmetry with its sister. A slim, silver bridge joined the towers near their apex and highlighted the subtle difference between them: one tower had the clock, the other the bell. Each month, a trumpeter would celebrate the moon from the dizzying heights of the slender walkway. The pang luna ceremony, one of many that were the responsibility of Dean Casius Tulp, had been imported along with the stones, the design and the meaning of the great church.

(Many of the natives of the area also believed that the freak changes in the weather had been smuggled in with the invaders. It was certainly true that a new cold infested the nights in the winter season. Frost had been seen for the first time after the spires had been made, and different kinds of clouds now lurked above their spikes and tried to swallow the moon. But nothing ever changed in the Vorrh; it seethed in heat and ignored any rumour of ice.)

The dean stood in the whistling, circular room with the pallid musician and one of the younger wardens. They were all panting. After climbing the forever spiralling stairs, pointed clouds of silvered air wheezed from them into the cold chamber, two hundred feet above ground. They were like so many arctic fire-eaters: none had the energy to talk, which made their steamy speech plumes all the more vacant. They were giddy, faintly nauseous and desperately trying not to think about the space below. The inexperienced warden had already opened the arched door onto the frost-covered walkway, which trembled and sang with the wind. The musician was becoming the same colour as the platform from which he would perform tomorrow.

Tulp spoke first. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he said. ‘This weather is very unusual, never seen the like of it before, just like the Old Country. Your music will be heard all the better under these conditions, it will sound out across the whole city.’

Nobody moved or wanted to think about tomorrow, and everybody had forgotten the Old Country. Their thoughts were about the grip of their shoes, the strength of the floor and the little bit of their own personal gravity that enabled them to resist the wind. They clutched the railings, the walls, or anything of a solid nature, with a fervent vigour.

Ghertrude’s bright head appeared through the floor and startled them with its ease. ‘Here are the keys and the moon ring, father.’ She climbed into the room with a wave of excitement that made the men grip their supports even more firmly. Giving the ancient velvet bag to the older man, she turned into the blast from the open door and, in purposeful joy, walked towards it and out onto the bridge. The men’s insides shrank, their spines and stomachs slivering over the threshold and plummeting, with the imagined falling girl, towards the hard, cobbled ground. She was laughing as the wind plucked at the fur of her collar and her hair to make another jealous imitation of fire. ‘I can almost see to the other side of the Vorrh!’ she yelled. ‘Look at the people, like ants!’ Her shoes rattled on the slender metal as she tapped her feet in excitement. She only had one hand on the silver rail; the other waved towards the abyss. Nobody went out, and nobody would have ever dared to look down. It took some effort to get her back into the tower.

She had been fourteen at the time, and had begged to be given the job of organising the moon call every year. After ten days of incessant pleading, interspersed with silent, certain haughtiness, the dean had given in and she had been awarded the position: the first woman and the youngest in history.

Now, all these years later, she stood again on the bridge and gazed out over the city. Flocks of birds were wheeling below, their shrill cries caught in the rising chimney smoke. Further down, a warren of business squirmed in the mud. She looked down onto 4 Kühler Brunnen, lit by the slanted rays of the afternoon sun; into its courtyards and odd-shaped garden; at its shuttered windows and what she knew to be inside. She pictured him, like a flea or a speck of grit, hard and senseless, encrusted into the upper rooms. She thought how tiny his eye would be from here. Looking at the streets that he would never see, she shivered at his growing need to walk in them. A raven crossed her view, circling the roof under which he paced or slept. It landed and looked down into the garden. She grinned at their telescoped comparison, then thought of God peering down at her petty elevation. This was a fancy that she did not care for, and she switched to more practical matters, deciding to go to her parents for dinner that night. There were a few more questions to be asked about the old house.

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 head 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.

But these were malign and tragic fantasies; she knew her son’s appetites ran in opposite directions. Previous attempts to arouse his masculinity had been woeful disasters. She had supplied him with a comely mistress for his twentieth birthday, but the poor woman was driven to distraction by her supposed lover’s endless, limp readings of interminably long poems. So monstrous was the abuse that she had demanded 100,000 francs in compensation from the old woman, for the aural and temporal violation. And Charlotte? She could settle and pretend for a while. There was no need for real marriage in her life, certainly not yet. And thus it came to pass that the two strangers became witnesses in a shared life.

But he was still missing. She looked across the colonial-style room at the grandfather clock, emaciated in its light, timbered case. She thought of calling the chauffeur, but could not face hearing his monochromatic indifference. Dinner was at seven, and after all the fuss he had made about the menu, she dreaded the chef’s reaction to a postponement. She went to the window, threw open its juddering glass and stepped out onto the balcony. This had been the only hotel in Essenwald of sufficient quality to satisfy the Frenchman’s fastidious requirements. They had taken the entire upper floor. The balcony extended around the building. She began to walk its rectangular length. Peering into the crowd below and shading her eyes with her long, delicate hand, she looked into the distance.

Far off, the black shadow of the Vorrh could be seen, sealing the city on its northern side. She searched the faces and the gaits of the seething streets beneath her, unable to find him in their constant shift and bustle. She became suddenly aware that one of the crowd was still and facing her. He was tall and motionless, his face hidden by a tightly wrapped ghutra of black silk. She could feel his stare, even from the distance of several hundred feet. Coldness plucked at her optic nerves with a bony nail, her sight flickered in distress and she grabbed at the squeaking door. From behind her, there was a sound on the landing outside the room. Approaching footsteps, unfamiliar and ponderous, drew her away from the street and its intruder and back into the room, composed and ready to receive anybody. No one knocked, but the brass door handle slowly turned and the Frenchman quietly entered. So pleased was she to see him that she didn’t instantly notice the strangeness of his approach.

She greeted him with lapping warmth. He smiled gently and touched her arm. This was unknown. She was dismayed, overwhelmed and silenced by it. He deflated into one of the enormous Moroccan armchairs and said, with eyes already shut, ‘Charlotte, my dear, I am a little tired.’

They were twelve years away from the other hotel; a road of dilution and addiction would run from here to there. Palermo waited, with the conclusion gilded and marbled in baroque sadness. But this evening was luxuriously calm. The perfume of the jasmine that twisted through the wrought iron of the balcony fluttered into the room. The fireflies buzzed the dusk in overlapping eclipses, and the frogs and cicadas accelerated a chorus. There was a settled peace in their suite of rooms. He was asleep in the chair where he had collapsed. She had checked that he was well, then taken off his shoes and placed his hat and cane in the hall. The cane felt curiously weightless, her excessive use of muscle giving it an illusion of levitation which made her laugh.

He slept for three hours before waking slowly, creaking in the leather and blinking into the room as she lit the lamps. There was a softness about his eyes that had never been present before. She saw the child in the old man, wonder and contentment where cynicism and greed had been scratched before. This was the man she always knew, but hardly ever met.

‘Come and sit with me,’ he said. ‘I want to tell you about my black friend and his vision of the forest.’

They talked for a very long time, only pausing the conversation to fetch wine and delay the dinner. He told her of his new friend, of his kindness and his lessons, of the chapel and the saints and a living Adam, somewhere at the heart of the wilderness of trees. He wanted her to meet ‘The Black Prince’ and share in his tales of belief and wonder. Quietly, out of nowhere, he asked, ‘The little silver crucifix that you sometimes wear; is it of great sentimental value to you?’ She looked a little confused, so he continued, ‘It’s just that I so want to give my Prince a gift; I wondered if I might purchase it from you?’

‘It’s of no real value to me,’ she lied. ‘I have several others, please do take it.’

He was delighted and crossed the little space between them to kiss her cheek. His mouth was surprisingly cold. His request satisfied, he continued to talk about his day.

They moved into the dining room, without a break in his enthusiasm or a pause in her amazement. It was to be a much lighter dinner than he usually demanded: only sixteen courses that night. At times, during his eloquent nibbling, he would adopt Seil Kor’s voice and dash ornate French with a rich Arabic bias and sonorous tones across the tabled landscape of food. She would laugh loudly at his pronunciations and roll against the joy that projected them. He was a genius at imitation. He could copy all voices, whether they belonged to strangers or friends, animals, or even the inanimate. He once held a party of poets spellbound by his portrayal of a collection of old hinges. She loved it when he was playful, when his gift was not soured by malice.

It was almost midnight when he left the table and sat down to the piano with a cigar. She went to the window and walked out into the glittering night. The city was already sleeping, and the heavens took up the sound of the creatures below, the stars making a notation of their trills and bells that rang in the darkness like glass. Whispers of Satie joined them from the room, and there seemed, in this inimitable moment, to be an agreement between time and the proximity of all things, as if clumsy humans might have a place in all this infinite, perfect darkness, if only they played at the edge. Out of sight, blindfolded, and in agreement.

The Nemesis watched from below, standing amongst the trees of a nearby garden, observing the beautiful woman, whose radiance matched the night. The faint music was entirely unknown, but it touched and realigned the heart in absolute and enigmatic ways, seemingly to stand in the shadows of previously unnoticed places. The woman on the balcony was desirable, unique, and conspicuously not part of this country. She stood for a long time, absorbing the stars, her life reaching out to all things. The Nemesis felt the temperature of her heart, the depth of her understanding, and the purity of her hope.

Then it was gone, carrying a clutch of her in its breath and vanishing into the intimacy of the dreaming city.

It was the perfect place for Tsungali’s planned ambush. The road by the water was narrowest here, and it would force the traveller to slow and watch his footfall.

He did not know how long he would have to wait – there was always the possibility of being taken off-guard, or his quarry slipping through while he slept. But white men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys.

Further back down the path, Tsungali had laid traps which would release vapours and spoors into the air when they were trampled. Traps that would tilt the colour of birdsong, or cause insects to stop and listen for too long, giving tiny vibrations of warning to the trained ear. He sat across the river, the tang sight of the rifle raised for a long distance shot. This would be an easy kill, so he had given himself obstacles to sharpen his craft. The last two men he had killed had been close range and far too quick. He wanted to use the Lee-Enfield again and prove his marksmanship.

He had eaten an early supper of fresh river fish and was standing in the bamboo grove when the whistle passed high over his head; it changed into a light, thin rhythm of exquisite tapping. Poised and dry, it slid, beautifully, down through the leaves towards him, in a constant shift of emphasis and pause. The sight of it stopped him dead: a long, blue arrow with translucent fletching gently dropped before him in the rustling leaves.

He was not alone in the evening. He must have a rival for the blood of the plodding white man, and any being who could place such a flight should not be underestimated. Picking the arrow up, he was stunned by its lack of weight. He examined its point and found a tiny seed head of beaks, each individually joined and locked by a stitch of thread, constructing a hexagonal husk that would let air warble through its delineated contours. He knew its high trajectory meant the arrow had come from afar, but he still looked around hastily and felt a shudder course through him.

The next day, late in the morning, the birds in the low trees a mile away stopped singing for a minute or two. He found his practised place, and rested Uculipsa in the slit he’d found at the top of a flat rock. He was ready. He waited for inevitability to cross his sights.

There was no key for the door to the tower, just a slit, its edges rounded by use and the gnawing of rats. She put her flat hand inside and her fingertips touched the string. She scissor-gripped it between the polished almonds of her nails and pulled it out.

‘Let’s come back in daylight, mistress,’ Mutter said.

She heard real concern, not fear, in his voice. The oil lamp was smoking and the night was inking in the volumes around them. What had been magical was beginning to give way to the eerie.

‘Yes,’ she said, letting the string fall back to the other side of the door. ‘We will return in the morning. With new light, we will see so much more.’

They climbed back to the civilised part of the house. Lost in her thoughts, she exited the stairwell brushing cobwebs and dust from the folds in her dress. It took her some moments to realise that her action was purely mechanical, designed to announce her arrival – there was nothing on her clothing to be removed.

The light declared that it would be a glorious day, limply draped in water at first, but with a glowing intensity that would burn off any trace of shadow by noon. They climbed the stairs to the third floor in a saturated brightness that followed their ascent, pencil-thin rays of sun spinning through the singing attic, creating a magnificent landscape of shifting perspective. At the door, she retrieved the string once again and tugged on it eagerly. With a meaty click, the door opened and they stepped into another stairwell.

‘I sometimes wonder if this house will ever end,’ she said, as she began to climb up the wooden, panelled tube. At the apex was a large, circular table, sheltering under the beautiful curves of a domed roof. A brass rod and lever pointed down to the faded silk cloth, which covered the disc. She knew instantly what it was, and her heart pounded with glee.

She pulled the cloth from the disc to expose its subtle curve. Reaching up, she drew the lever down, while holding the thick, brass knob at the end of the rod. A panel in the ceiling slid open, sending dappled light onto the table. She turned the knob and the juddering blurs cohered into an image of the city below. Mutter was leaning on the white surface when a horse and carriage crossed the back of his hand. He pulled away, as if stung.

‘It’s alright, Sigmund,’ she said. ‘It’s just a picture.’

She twisted the knob and the city span and turned under her control. Continually adjusting the lever and the rod, she selected and focused on the distant life at her will. She trawled the contours of the horizon and the black shadow of the Vorrh, before focusing tightly on the cathedral door. Marvelling at her perfect detachment, she caught all the faces of those who passed through the great door, their purpose and activity reduced and smeared across the white dish for her inspection and delight.

It was then that she saw another potential rise up from the milky whiteness: this camera obscura could be the solution to the cyclops’ discontent. From here, he could view the city at a safe distance, saturating his curiosity in its shifting image. She decided to make a surprise of it and bring him up to the attic room without telling him why.

On the morning of the street market in the town square, she dressed him in warm clothes, unlocked the doors and led him through the house. He had not been outside his rooms since the traumatic day of Ghertrude’s arrival and the Kin’s demise. He looked at everything and marvelled at the shrinkage which had occurred, relative to his own growth. Mutter led the way up into the attic, as Ishmael, then Ghertrude, followed behind. They stepped into the singing room and she caught his hand in a gentle camouflage of restraint. Against their expectations, he recognised the contrivance in the room instantly.

‘How wonderful,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s a Goedhart Device.’

Mutter and Ghertrude were stunned. ‘A what?’ she said.

‘A Goedhart Device, one of the rare and unique instruments of Joanhus Goedhart.’

At the word ‘Goedhart’, the floor chimed with a deeper and more significant resonance. He pulled away to examine the strings. Ghertrude felt an irrational anger begin to grow inside her.

‘Let’s go to the door,’ she said, setting off quickly across the room, with Mutter following closely. But Ishmael could not be rushed and made his way slowly towards them, delighting in the wires and their reaction when he murmured into them. He touched them all, pulling at the cords attached to the roof, stroking the feathers and feeling the weight of the metal balls with an increasing pleasure.

‘We have not come to see these things,’ Ghertrude snapped, sensing the importance of her gift was being diluted by the inconsequential and irrelevant intrusions and his understanding of them. He left his enquiries reluctantly and caught them up, strumming five of the strings in a discordant slash en route. They climbed into the dark, octagonal chamber and stood around the circular table. She grabbed the controls and, with a dramatic flourish, twisted the projector into life. The narrow parting in the roof sprang open and the market jumped onto the table, shimmering with activity, colour and bustle. Mutter, sensing the growing emotion, moved back down the stairwell to search in the attic for a window or an opening.

Ghertrude watched the cyclops. He stood very still, slightly bent over the table. His eye was enormous, starting from his head. He was pale, a greasy film of perspiration on his skin reflecting the light of the scene below. Suddenly, her body reinstated the revulsion she had felt when she had first seen him; that moment seemed decades away now. Their intimacy and her growing feelings for him had made his face normal: wonder and secrecy had repaired his learned abnormalities, while familiarity and desire had stitched up their differences.

She was overpowered by the shock of the old feeling, especially as they stood together, in a moment which could turn in any direction. Had she made a mistake in bringing him here? Why did he look so? A tear splashed onto the glowing disc, briefly creating another tiny lens. He made an indecipherable sound, deep in his chest. She thought, at first, that it was a composite of longing, but as it slid over her array of perception it changed, taking on sharper and more alarming tinctures. The second tear fell, and she was overcome by the need to go to him – to touch and reassure – and the desire to escape. The table seemed to get brighter as the room blacked around them.

He started to undress as she watched, unable to do or say anything. As he unbuckled his belt, he became aware of her stillness, its perfection denting the air, and angrily pointed at her blouse while yanking at his trousers. When she did nothing, the pointing hand converted into a clenching fist that snatched the docile lace and wrenched her forward. Pearl buttons flew in all directions, and she was about to cover her startled breasts when he shouted, ‘For me, you for me!’ She closed her eyes and slowly removed the wrecked blouse and the thin straps of her chemise beneath. He pulled away the rest of her clothing, trampling it and cracking the fallen buttons under his impatient, stiff feet.

His purple cock was enormous, its spiralled barrel twisting and telescoping back and forth with his heavily beating heart. His eye continued to drip tears, now onto her legs as he braced her across the table. The blurrily focused crowd and the now-clumsy architecture smeared on her naked belly and her torn clothing. Their bodies united in the silent light and deep inside she gave up, wanting the keys to be taken away. She wanted to be a child again, with no understanding; to rip her guile into a forgetting womb and pamper offspring by a warm hearth, to let milk drown her lime and become inside out, gloving another life that would fold her to a gentle, smiling death, where all spoke of her wisdom and love. In the long time of silence before he withdrew, a ruthless, automatic kindness unfolded in him, its weight matching the shock of excitement which laughed secretly in Ghertrude. The rawness of both expressions bound them together in a shame that was sublime in the depth of its contradiction.

He fell back as she leaked on the polished surface of the porous, inert table. Low on its right-hand side, blind to their panting bodies, a drawer lay open in untraceable measures. It exposed a shallowness in its recess which was gently covered with a curved, articulated piece of polished wood. Had they examined it, they would have a found a tiny cleft, oiled by perpetual moisture, concealed beneath the tongue-like flap. It sat, expectant, and totally unnoticed by the pair above it. As they unfurled, and only their white breathing filled the room, it slid closed, becoming seamless and invisible again.

He stood, his eye still shut; words existed elsewhere. She slanted over the table and gazed across herself. Some previous part of her being wanted to adjust the splutter that moved over her body, twist the focus back into detail and rewind the clock. She watched as he returned to the moment; he began to make small, pinching movements with his finger and thumb, trying to capture the Lilliputian figures that bustled in the streets, to pluck them up. She assumed he was jesting, but discerned no trace of amusement in his stern and twisted expression.

When they left the tower, they found light and the scent of woodsmoke in the attic. Mutter had found a window and opened it onto the rooftops. He had long since gone, driven away by their animal sounds, which had slid down from above to tantalise the recumbent wires.

They returned to the third floor. At the door of his dwelling, Ishmael held his hand out towards her. She reciprocated, touched by his gesture of affection. The instant their hands met, she knew she had made a mistake. His rigid fingers were eloquent in their distance.

‘No,’ he said, ‘the keys.’

Thus, the cyclops changed his status in the quiet house on Kühler Brunnen; the next episode of their life together had begun.

By the time the young Tsungali had returned from his trip abroad, the rumours about Oneofthewilliams had sped well beyond the borders of the True People and reached the coast. He had been horrified to learn, upon entering the village, that the chosen one was the same officer who had given him Uculipsa. The Englishman had shown him kindness and taught him to shoot well, had separated himself from the other whites and shown alliance to the True People almost from the moment he had arrived; he had risked the displeasure of his superiors and made himself an outcast by saving the great prize, the blessed young shaman, Irrinipeste, from the church, and from the abominations that the priest of crossed sticks had subjected her to. But still Tsungali had wondered if this man could be trusted, if he would arise against his own kind when it mattered most and help banish these lying intruders forever.

His deliberations had been short-lived. Minutes into his return, his homecoming was interrupted by the news that his brother and two of their friends were being held by one of the sea tribes, who demanded the return of the long-awaited Oneofthewilliams to the coast, where his own people eagerly awaited their messiah.

Tsungali had gone immediately to explain the situation to Williams. He told him of the kidnap and the meeting with the Sea People, and asked him to come with the rescue party, for his help in the parley; what he did not mention was that the Englishman was the prize, the desired barter that would ensure the safe release of his fellow tribesmen.

They met on the sands – jungle on one side, sea on the other; six of the Sea People holding the three hostages. Tsungali had brought five men to represent his tribe: three warriors, a policeman and, of course, Williams, who stood slightly to the side, motionless and cradling a small rucksack in his arms. He had taken off his boots and they hung around his neck by their laces, leaving his white feet bare in the wet, sucking sand. The hostages were tied together and knelt before their captors, each of whom were armed with spears and blades. The Enfield was not present. Instead, Tsungali carried a ceremonial spear with the colours of authority tied on: he was speaking for his people.

The leader of the Sea People barked out his terms, eloquently concluding by tapping the staff of his spear on the back of Tsungali’s brother’s head; the crouching man’s eyes darted back and forth between his bonds, his brother and the foreigner.

They were finalising the niceties of the exchange when Williams raised his hand and took a step forward. From inside his rucksack, he withdrew a small bundle and threw it between the two parties. He spoke ten words in the language of the True People, before pulling the monstrous pistol from his bag, stepping forwards and shooting Tsungali’s brother and the Sea People’s leader at point blank range. The wounds plumed in the dazzling fresh light, and the force threw the bodies back into the sand. Nobody moved. Williams picked up the barbed spear of the dead leader and walked over to Tsungali, taking the bound spear from his tight grip. He uttered two more words, then turned and paced back towards the camp, the sound of his feet matching the heartbeat of the stationary warriors.

The prisoners were untied from the dead man, who had thrashed against them and tightened their bonds as his blood darkened the beach. Nobody spoke, they just dispersed, going their own way towards jungle and seashore.

The bundle thrown between them had been a shamanistic truce of great potency; no man would argue with it. The fact that it was his proved the truth of what he said, as well as his purpose. His words had confirmed that he was indeed Oneofthewilliams: he had returned. But their betrayal and wrong actions meant that, from then on, he would belong to no one. Sacrifices would have to be made, to appease his anger and hold the tribes in constant balance.

Tsungali had guessed where the bundle had come from; who had made it, and given him the words. The whole incident had been overseen by a shaman; she had warned Williams and given him the power to triumph.

The tide had begun to turn inwards, water filling the impressions in the sand where he stood. He thought about her opal eyes watching him at that moment, thought of her astonishing eminence. She would be the key to the uprising; a key Williams had just turned.

Tsungali did not have anger or sadness. The bundle had smoothed it away; rightness had been performed. He picked up the pieces of his brother and returned home, where the wrath of his tribe was already boiling over.

In his wake, the sea came in and removed the blood. The brilliant red swirled with the yellow sand beneath the crystal green water. The bundle was lifted and carried out, far beyond the land, where it dissolved in the pulsing waves. When the sea retreated, and the endless sun turned the mud back into glittering powder, there would be no trace of the men, or the consequences of their actions.

The atmosphere in the camp was taut to snapping point. De Trafford was scarlet as he spat abuse into Williams’ face in front of the entire company. They were standing in uniform, a small, tidy, geometric rank, before the fidgeting avalanche of True People, a momentum seething with rage and betrayal. They had been thinking and sleeping on all the wrongs Tsungali had described to them, the duplicity and the evil of all these whites. All except one.

The commanding officer tightened their insistence with each pompous word. Just before the snapping point, a quiet movement slid from the centre of the clutching warriors, slipping softly between the stiff uniforms as they secretly revelled in Williams’ humiliation.

She drifted next to the accused like a vapour and touched his hand. He looked down at the beloved shaman and into her impossible eyes. De Trafford raged above them, and then saw their indifference. He stumbled down from his small pedestal and snatched at the girl. Grabbing at her throat, he tried to pull her aside, but it was like yanking on a granite column: nothing moved, and his fingers screamed. He snatched at her but fell to the floor, still barking his orders, with only her torn amulet and part of her dress in his hands. His raging never ceased. He barked orders from the dirt; he barked orders as he scrambled to his feet. He was still barking orders when the .303 round from the Enfield burned through his ribcage and skewered his loud, bulging heart. Chaos ensued.

She guided Oneofthewilliams past the clashing wave of hacking men and out; out of the beginnings of the Possession Wars and into the Vorrh to heal the wounds of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Charlotte smelt the coffee when she awoke; indeed, it might have been its bitter warmth which quaffed her dreams. She slipped on a yellow robe and opened the door to the Frenchman’s room; he was already awake, and seated at the breakfast table. He had never been known to stir before noon. Slightly unsettled, she joined him at the table, an empty cup in her hesitant hand, her eyes never leaving his excited expression. He smiled.

‘A beautiful morning, Charlotte!’

‘Yes,’ she said, noticing for the first time that thick shafts of light divided the room, motes of dust swimming expressively in their beams, giving the simultaneous impressions of animation and stillness.

‘Did I tell you last night that today I go to the Vorrh?’ he asked. ‘Seil Kor is coming for me this morning.’ It was the first time he had used his new friend’s name; previously, he had referred to him as a ‘native’, a ‘black’, or, on occasion, as his ‘black prince’.

She was unmoved by the name, and unsurprised he had endowed his young guide with the same moniker as a character from his Impressions of Africa. She had never seriously undertaken to read any of his books, poems or essays; only the letters he addressed to her. It was not part of her duties. She knew that it would ruin their relationship to hold an opinion on his works: she was merely a woman, and they both preferred it that way. However, she had once flipped through the pages of the African Book. She had found it confused and obscure. No doubt it was art, for she knew him to be a man of dangerous appetites and total selfishness. That was what made the smiling man before her such a disconcerting sight.

‘I have packed my bag for a three-day expedition,’ he said.

Her shock at discovering that he knew where the luggage was kept was augmented by the revelation that he was capable of packing it. ‘I shall take the Smith & Wesson, the one with the pearl grips, and leave you the Colt, the Mannlicher and the Cloverleaf, for your protection. May I borrow your Derringer for my little journey?’

‘Why, of course,’ she replied, ‘anything you wish.’

They always travelled with a small armoury, ostensibly for the pleasure of target shooting, but always with the excuse of protection. He was an excellent shot, and had enjoyed teaching her how to handle and fire his collection of pistols. The guns also gave her some confidence against the ‘street visitors’ he often brought home or sent the chauffeur to find. His taste ran hard into the criminal and the lower manual labourer. They were easy to find and would fulfil all of his sexual morbidities, but they were tricky to get rid of afterwards, difficult to scrape off the shoe. Countless times, she had returned home to find some half-naked urchin or dockyard worker going through her belongings, ejected from the Frenchman’s bedroom after the brutality, so that he might drown and wallow in the true depth of his debasement. Countless times, she had been forced to haggle over the price of flesh. The currency of usury had become part of her vocabulary; she dealt with it efficiently and from a distance. Some small fold of her enjoyed talking to the exotic underclass about the most intimate actions of vice. She felt like an ornithologist, or an entomologist, viewing horrid little wonders through the wrong end of a perfect telescope. But she could not abide the blackmailers, those who went too far and allowed greed to ooze out with the secretions of their bodies. There had been many hushed-up cases, many insidious threats to expose his obsessions. She had brokered them all. Sometimes she was forced to enlist the support of the chauffeur, who liked to wrap metal chains around his fist when dealing with the stubborn.

‘Are you going alone with Seil Kor?’ she asked cautiously.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, in a theatrically disinterested way. ‘He is not to be one of my ‘paramours’,’ he added, a trace of the old acid leaking back into his speech. ‘He is a friend and noble person of these regions – I would very much like to introduce you.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, ‘I would like that. Don’t forget this.’ She handed him a tiny, delicate package of folded tissue paper containing the cheap, silver-plated crucifix that her first love had given to her at the age of thirteen.

On the steps of the hotel, the light was blinding. He wore his Eskimo spectacles and pith helmet, with a costume that needed at least fifteen native bearers to maintain it. Childlike, he gripped his suitcase and strained through the brightness to see his friend in the whirling, dusty clouds of passers-by. Charlotte stood beside him, arms folded and trepidation rising.

‘There!’ he cried. ‘By the tree, he is waving!’

She could barely distinguish a single figure, just a mass of activity in the luminous dust. The Frenchman stepped down the stairs and into the throng, motioning to Charlotte to join him, but the dust was unbearable, and she put her hand over her mouth, averting her face from the onslaught. He reached Seil Kor across the street and tried to explain about meeting Charlotte, but she was lost in the crowd and his guide was anxious to depart. He gave in to the unfolding events and they made their way out of the throng – their journey to the Vorrh had begun.

Seil Kor took the Frenchman to his home, far across town in the old quarter. From there to the station was only ten minutes’ walk, he promised.

‘Why do we go to your house first?’ he asked.

‘To change,’ Seil Kor said, without emphasis.

‘But this is my exploring costume,’ whined the Frenchman, who was beginning to be irritated by the modification of his plans.

‘Trust me, master, it is better for you to melt into the crowd, become one of us. This way you will see more, and get closer to the heart of the forest. We have to travel for a whole day on the train, and I want you to be comfortable.’

They walked down a high, mud-walled street that changed its curve every fifteen paces or so. Alleyways led off at frequent intervals, and there was a sense of a great populace concealed behind the twisting façade. They turned again, stepping into a long, straight street with two ancient, wooden doors set into its crumbling surface. Seil Kor hammered on the first door and, moments later, the second one opened.

They stepped into a broad, sand-coloured courtyard with a square well and a palm tree dominating its luxurious simplicity. A small, grinning boy stepped from behind the gate and closed them in. Seil Kor clapped his hands loudly above his head, and the doors of the low, long building that occupied one side of the enclosure opened. Vividly dressed women emerged carrying a carpet, a squat folding table and brass and copper bowls of fruit and sweetmeats. In a quick flurry, it was all set up under the shade of the tree, and the Frenchman was shown to the guest seat at its centre. The women brought piles of native robes and Arabic-style headgear for the dandy to try on. He liked this game, and once he got over his essential stiffness, became completely engaged in his transformation. He loved to dress up, and had often donned the national costume of the countries he had visited before. But it had never felt this real before, and his guide had never been so gracious, so encouraging. He tried on many different styles and colours, spinning and giggling as the women and the boy applauded. He bowed. They all bubbled over in this pantomime of innocence. Carefree and conceited, he thought to add a dash to his apparel and dug the pistol out of his case, sticking it jauntily in his belt. The party froze. Seil Kor raised his hands and the women covered their eyes.

‘Master, what is this, why do you bring this?’ His bony finger shook as it pointed towards the gun. ‘Please, leave it in the bag. Where we go is sacred, such a thing is a blasphemy there.’

‘But, what about wild animals and those savage people?’ the Frenchman stuttered.

‘We will be walking with the Lord God; his angels will guard us.’

He dropped the pistol back in the bag and stepped slowly away from it. Seil Kor met him with a grin, and he moved to his friend’s side, gripping his arm conciliatorily.

‘Oh! One moment,’ said the Frenchman. ‘I have something for you.’ He removed the little tissue-paper package from his person and carefully unwrapped it, holding the gleaming crucifix up for his new friend to admire.

‘For me?’ asked Seil Kor, genuinely surprised.

The Frenchman nodded and handed him the chain; he fixed it at once around his neck. The cross shone brightly against Seil Kor’s jet-black skin and the others applauded the gift all the way to the door as they prepared to depart. By the time they crossed the threshold, the Frenchman was unrecognisable. He was happy and very at ease in his flowing robes. A prince of the desert, he thought – if only he had a photograph for his collection. He resolved to have one taken on their return, on the steps of the hotel, when he and Seil Kor would present themselves to Mademoiselle Charlotte, in celebration of their triumphant expedition.

Everything in the house was changing. All of the rituals, hierarchies and conventions were sliding over each other to find new settling places; Ishmael moved freely between the third floor and the attic, and the camera obscura had become a focal point for them all, even Ghertrude. Mutter’s collection of the crates was the only thing that continued, unchanged, twice a week.

Through Ishmael’s constant use, the spaces were becoming his own, his domain. Each place had its own sound, and Ghertrude and Mutter were able to track his movements from any part of the house. He could often be heard pacing and moving about in his rooms, rearranging furniture and adjusting the layout. In the attic, the strings would sing his presence, often for hours at a time. It was no longer an access space; he was making it important in its own right.

The tower of the obscura was marked by silence, quieter than sleep itself when he was there. His commitment held the house still, lifting it up by its scruff, so that it could be felt in its roots. But that was the one place he did not go: where she most feared he would be drawn to, where he might betray her more easily. She left nothing to chance, and had Mutter double-check the padlocks and barriers to the cellars almost daily. She told him clearly that it was forbidden to all, and that was the only rule of the house. He did not answer, but nodded in intelligent approval. Even so, she instructed Mutter to keep an eye on him, and the cellar door.

The old servant did not care much for the changes. He liked things in their places, with clear delineations between them. Being in the house now made him uncomfortable. He did not know when or where the cyclops might turn up, and he was still a little startled by his appearance. Furthermore, Ishmael was becoming more familiar: he sought interaction, asking him questions about his employment, his family, the outside world. Mutter had never been a great conversationalist, and with this weird creature he found it easier to scurry away or hide in the yard, with the horses. He enjoyed their dumbness; the rich smell of their bodies and the perfume of the hay soothed him, and he would often take his lunch out to where they grazed. He smoked his bitter cigars in their mute company and watched the seasons turn, unhurried, and mostly safe. Sometimes, he felt keenly that he was being watched from above. He imagined his likeness, smeared on the circular table of that ungodly machine, the gloating eye tasting it like some terrible fish. The idea chilled him, and made him move further back into the stable, reassured by its shared warmth and temporary concealment.

Returning to the house late one day, he found the cyclops standing near the stairs of the ground floor, looking in the direction of the prohibited door. It worried him; he knew that he should say something, or take some action, but it was a position he was neither designed nor equipped for, and he could find no frame of reference with which to begin the necessary conversation. He stood, jaw open, vaguely moving his limp arms in unison, like a broken gate in the wind, or a disused pump, trying to raise a spoonful of water from some immeasurable distance.

‘Herr Mutter, where are the old crates?’ Ishmael asked, stepping into the doubt and reversing it, making the question his own. ‘I wanted to check something before you return them tomorrow.’

‘They are in the tack room, next to the stables,’ the yeoman replied thinly.

‘Show me,’ demanded the cyclops as he walked towards the door. Mutter opened the door for the young master and pointed, expecting his honest direction to be noted and the matter closed.

Instead, Ishmael strode out of the door and across the yard, leaving Mutter without words or action. The cyclops slid back the bolt on the tack room door and walked briskly inside. Mutter blinked hard, hoping that the rapid movement would return all things to their proper place, that this impossible thing would rewind and he would be exonerated of the stupid mistake he had just made. But alas, that was not the case. He dashed across the cobbles and erupted himself at the side of the escapee, who was casually examining the side of a long, thin crate. Showing no sign of agitation, the cyclops asked, ‘At what time will you take these away tomorrow?’

‘At eleven o’clock, sir,’ answered Mutter, automatically.

The word ‘sir’ had entered Mutter’s mouth out of habit, and because there was no alternative. It was the first time Ishmael had been given status, and it marked a further shift in their dynamics – he knew now that the old man could be easily bent.

‘And where will you take them?’

‘To the warehouse.’

‘Good. I would like to go with you.’

Mutter’s heart ceased its beating and leapfrogged into his mouth. The cyclops walked past him into the yard, stopped and looked up to the rooftops, then beyond them to the fleeting clouds.

‘But sir,’ Mutter stammered, ‘it’s impossible, the mistress…’

‘…will never know,’ finished Ishmael. ‘It’s not the mistress who pays your wages, or cares for your family, is it? It’s not the mistress who cares for me, not really. The person or persons who look after this house are responsible for our well-being, Mutter. It’s my family that employs yours. And now, I wish to make a brief visit to them, to see, for a moment, the one other place that I know to be connected to me.’

‘But sir! I was told to take nobody there. Not even my sons may visit before they are ready to be trained in my job.’

‘Sigmund,’ said the cyclops in curved, enduring tones. ‘Don’t you see that everything is changed now? I am no longer a child. I have the house. Soon enough, it will be me who employs you. Ghertrude need never know about our little trip.’

Mutter was silent and horribly perplexed. He looked from his scuffed boots into the pleading eye, then back again.

‘Unless you’d prefer that I go by myself?’

Mutter followed his gaze towards the gate and saw that it was held on a draw bolt, not double-locked as he had been instructed. He knew that the cyclops was agile and could reach the gate long before him; the only way to stop him would be to cuff him, or tackle him to the ground. He assumed that such an act would not be looked upon favourably by his unseen masters. He was beginning to panic, when Ishmael smiled and inflicted the coup de grâce.

‘I have no desire to get you into trouble, Sigmund. And I’m sure neither of us want Ghertrude to know about this afternoon’s little mistake; she is scared of me running away, and it makes her overreact. So, I shall say nothing tonight when she visits, and in the morning we will make a brief, discreet visit to the warehouse, yes? What do you think? Can we make our little adventure together and return without anybody knowing?’

Mutter gave in; there was no alternative. The delighted cyclops clapped his hands together in satisfaction.

‘Excellent! Come then, let us go over my plan,’ he said, propelling the deflated old man towards the stables and telling him to pick up his tools on the way.

The next day, they waited in different parts of the old property for Ghertrude to leave. Mutter stayed in the stables, with the crates loaded onto the carriage, while she and Ishmael ate breakfast together. When it was over, she left by the front door, calling to announce that she would be back by seven that evening. Ishmael waited impatiently for her nippy steps to vanish from the lane outside, then sprang to his feet and unlocked the front door. He hurried over to the stables, slipped quietly inside, and stepped onto the awaiting carriage.

The long, thin crate that had been ‘Lesson 318: Spears & Bows (Old Kingdoms)’ was securely strapped into the open rig. Its contents had been removed and now lay hidden behind a dusty old curtain in the far corner of the stables; their replacement crouched expectantly in his hiding place. A hole had been drilled in the side of the box, about a foot from the closed end, and Mutter saw the glimmer of an eye as he fastened the gates behind them. He hadn’t said a word that morning; his instinct had been to obey in a stoic, inert manner, whilst desperately wishing for it to be over and done with as soon as possible.

The crazed and rattled fragments of the outside that Ishmael saw amazed and excited him. The confusion of scale and the smells of the factories unleashed sensory responses that he did not know existed. The colours were much brighter than the tower projections, and he felt the enormity of everything as the town burst with unbridled life. He had been right about their eyes; Ghertrude had told him the truth, and soon he would find out if Luluwa had too.

By the time they reached the warehouse, he was brimming with questions and choking with answers. Mutter unfastened the gates and led the horse through into the courtyard, tying the steaming beast to the front of the loading bay banisters and returning to the entrance to seal them within. He pulled a huge bunch of keys from under the driving seat of the carriage before knocking brusquely on the cyclops’ crate. Ishmael emerged, his one eye squinting as it adjusted to the light.

They entered the warehouse. Mutter went about his usual business, seeking notes and collecting the details of the next batch of crates. He turned to explain the importance of this function to the cyclops, but he was not there. The old man finished his tasks and waited for Ishmael to return to help him lift the boxes, but the minutes passed and he became impatient and angry, and decided to load the carriage himself. The two new crates were different from the rest, their labels no longer stencilled red, but now painted a regal blue.

As he loaded the wagon with his cargo, Mutter was desperately trying to construct a feasible story about how he had found himself in this position. His lies were monstrous and each more ridiculous than the last; even he could see they were totally unbelievable. By the time the escapee returned, he had decided that the truth was the only option.

‘Shall we go?’ said Ishmael.

The slim crate had remained on the carriage, and the cyclops squeezed back in, pulling the lid tight after him. His coffin journey home, though still eventful, was overshadowed by the stranger things in the warehouse; his mind raced with them. When the bumpy ride was at an end and they were enclosed in the stables once more, he slowly pushed his way out of his confinement with theatrical vigour.

‘Thank you, Herr Mutter,’ he said. ‘Our secret will stay intact. No one will ever know of our time together today.’

The servant opened the door to let him in. The sense of relief was wonderful, and he locked him in place at once, returning home before Mistress Tulp arrived; he had no intention of dealing with her as well that evening, or of letting her look into his far-too-honest eyes.

The next day, with a great lightness in his heart, he returned. He planned to tend to the horses, to spend the day in their magnificent, uncomplicated company and let the intricacies in the house take care of themselves.

He was beginning to feel at home again, the busy muck fork in his hands, when the voice of the warehouse boomed suddenly and gravely, in his ear: ‘Herr Mutter, you have disappointed us and grievously betrayed our confidence. For this, you will be punished. If this should happen again, the punishments will be amplified, and our blessings on you and your family will cease and turn against all. The hands of your first son, Thaddeus, have this day been removed. They have been crossed over and sewn on backwards, right to left and left to right. His palms will always face outwards. He will receive the best medical care until he is healed. His hands will be useless for work, but perfect for begging. You may save him from such a future, but not from the operation. That is the price you owe to us. Be calm, Herr Mutter, and remember our care and protection of your family over all these years. Accept your wrongdoing, repent, and return to our favour.’

When Mutter ventured home that night, he dreaded the reality that the voice had promised, but hoped that it might have been a delusion, a befuddlement. He entered his home with permafrost rotting his heart. The rolling wave of warmth and the hug of coiled noise did nothing to thaw him. His wife took his heavy topcoat and seated him at the solid table as his daughter, Meta, brought him a mug of thick, black beer. He watched them flurry back and forth with steaming pots and clanking plates. The sumptuous energy of home, rich and seamless, stirred the glow of continuity out of the shards of necessity. The food was served, and everybody are enthusiastically. But Thaddeus’ chair was empty, and Mutter stared dumbly at his meaningless dish, its smell arousing nothing within him.

‘Where is Thaddeus?’ he choked.

‘Oh! Wonderful!’ his wife chirped. ‘A letter came with the possibility of employment, so he went to the eastern quarter; he should be home soon.’

The table fell away and sharp, inward tears fell to make a razor chain of slow constrictions inside his throat; it tightened with every joyous mouthful his family ate. No one noticed the change, not even his lifetime wife, and he swamped his horror and guilt in thick, heavy beer that stung with each strangled gulp.

Thaddeus did not return that evening. Nor was he seen the next day, or the one after that. Mutter went to the warehouse and knelt in his son’s absence; he gave his word to the building that he was, forever, a loyal and unflinching servant. He returned to his duties, weighed down by despair.

Early the next day, Thaddeus stood outside the family home, a worn exhaustion in his confused but settled eyes. He was immaculately dressed in a silk suit, his hair elegantly styled like that of a prince, his beautiful new shoes shining in the dusty sunlight, his wrists bandaged, his hands open at his parents’ door.

His prey was edging along the river, as predicted. Tsungali heard him coming half an hour before he appeared, and watched through his binoculars as he entered the light: just another ignorant white man, carrying too much equipment on his back. Then Tsungali spotted the bow. The sight jolted him and his instincts kicked hard against his better judgment. He set the glasses down and adjusted the rifle; his entire attention was drawn along the barrel, anticipating the sights: an elemental flaw in marksmanship, and a lethal practice for a sniper. His mind stopped; there was only the rifle.

The white man pressed himself against the rock, inadvertently presenting his greatest area of target as he nimbly sidestepped the path. Tsungali squeezed the trigger. The Enfield barked deeply into the gorge and the man fell from the path. The hunter worked the bolt and re-cocked the gun, then searched the bank with his glasses to locate the body. It was not there. He stood to see if it had fallen behind a rock, or somehow slipped into the water, but there was no sign of the dead man or his equipment. He had vanished.

He gathered his things together quickly, and started wading across the river, the rifle held across his chest. At the halfway point, his eye flickered between the distant bank and the fast, icy water speeding over the smooth, irregular pebbles. As he stopped to pull his twisted boot free from a stone, the first arrow struck. He saw nothing until the flaring blue pain. The arrow went through his hand, piercing the stock of the Enfield and coming out the other side, its broken head digging into his ribs. He bit hard and flailed in the water, trying in vain to locate his adversary. The second arrow hit him in the teeth, smashing through his mouth and breaking his clenched jaw. It fractured the hinge and severed the strings of muscle that held it in place, exiting close to his pulsing jugular vein, where the shaft pointed behind, like a bent quill. His ruined mouth was full of blood and blue feathers. The fletchings pushed against his cut tongue and throat, choking him as globs of blood splashed into the pure waters. The third arrow would have killed him, but he spun wildly and slipped, falling into the fast tide, which mercifully carried him away from the attack. He kept his head above the wash, swallowing air, blood and river in equal measures.

An hour later, he bumped ashore and crawled onto a gravel bank. Even in his pain and failure, he knew he had travelled a lot faster than the white man, and that the path he’d been on was now many miles away; he had time to hide and regain himself before the battle continued. The shafts of the arrows had broken off, and the river had washed the feathers out of his wrecked mouth. His hand was loose from its pinning, but he had managed to keep hold of the Enfield and his pack, which had swung round his body and partially emptied itself in the raging river. Flinching, he put his hand tentatively to his hanging jaw and crawled through the gravel into the reeds, dragging the split Uculipsa behind him.

He lay down in the grasses, breathing deeply and trying not to suck the cold air past his loose nerve endings. He was drying and coagulating, staring at the growing evening sky. The pain welled and throbbed; every time he swallowed he felt sick, imagining that he had ingested another part of himself. He had no teeth in the front of his face, and no voice in the back of it. Using ripped lengths of fabric, he tied his jaw hard against his head, for fear of it falling away completely.

He was furious at having missed such an easy shot, for not killing him point-blank, like the others. How had he so underestimated the powers of this strangest white man? What kind of force was he up against? The man’s arrows had not only found him with ease, but passed through all his levels of protective charm without a single deflection; no white man could do this. He knew he had to escape the Bowman’s intent. With great difficulty, he swallowed a root that was in his pack, and felt some of the pain diminish. He watched the sky turn to a rich darkness and, as he passed out into its embrace, his heart sank with the acceptance that he was no longer the hunter. Their roles had been reversed: now he was the quarry.

The moon rose full on that same clear night, bringing with it a wind from the distant sea, a gale that gained force as it swept inland towards the Vorrh. By four o’clock, an hour after the good Shepherd Azrael had collected his flock from the world of the living and the night had settled back in the last three fathoms of its darkness, the wind shook Essenwald with a near-tempest velocity. It rattled the old windows in its finest hotel; Charlotte turned over in the warmth of her sleep, untroubled by the gale, tightening the crisp sheet and plaid blanket about her untouched contour. She dreamed of an American who would walk into her forgetfulness and ask about tonight. She was in Belgium, where she slept all day, and a clock without hands said it was an impossible 1961. The young man was telling her that he was a poet. He had a large, kind, soft face, but it was difficult to hear him because of the clattering, glassy sound that emanated from his pencil and notebook.

The wind groaned and bellowed around the tiny rooms where Mutter’s family slept. The yeoman heard it rise and fall, gasping against the corridors and the empty kitchen, where mice, smaller than blurs, darted like needles trying to stitch the gusts. He watched his wife sleeping fitfully, her judders in and out of time with her breathing. He knew that the next day she would tell him that she did not get a wink of sleep that night. He would not remember if he did. He tossed in a thorny bed of guilt and vengeance, anger and defeat. He did not know how he would face his family or the world, or how he would continue in the employment he could never end. His hollow home sighed, and he tried not to think about the coming day, or the creature he now loathed.

From Mutter’s hunchback dwelling, the wind curved upwards to the gleaming mansion of the Tulps. Ghertrude slept in the enforced lie of her childhood room, face down on her soggy pillow, her duvet pulled over her head to diminish the tapping that she hoped was only the sound of the trees lashing against the windows.

There was less turbulence in 4 Kühler Brunnen. The doors there were firmly shut, the craftsmanship precise and tight; the wind could only be heard where damage had occurred. It snarled in the locked lower floors and whispered perilously near the stairs above the ancient well. It droned in the attic, but remained ethereally quiet in the room with the cyclops’ empty bed. In the tower, it watched the occupant focusing on the moonlight, examining the dim glow from the miniature maze of the desolate streets. Ishmael was naked, goose pimples shifting over his pale body, as if offering an index, or a rarefied notation, to the observations of the table. His eye was very close to the surface; like a spoon, it glided among the streets.

The dry storm could have reached the moon that night, such was its magnitude. But a stronger force was demanding its attention, and it billowed northwards, under the influence of a far greater, more dominant presence: it was being swallowed forever into the Vorrh.

On the other side of the world, he was following the doctor’s advice to the letter. He was so far removed from human society that he had almost died of starvation three times. A legend of this thin man’s endurance had begun to spread across the Great Plains, reaching as far as the Indian nations. Many such foolhardy explorers were scavenging this land, tipping themselves from famine-haunted homelands, from frozen pogroms and relentless oppression, to step into the burning sun and huge, endless spaces. They sought gold and silver, pelts and land. They had arrived to be reborn, and to take everything they could with their pale, bare hands.

But he was very different. It was said that he was hunting stillness, and that instead of picks or shovels, guns or maps, he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye which ate time. Some said he carried plates of glass to serve the stillness on. He would eat with a black cloth over his head, licking his plate clean in the dark.

The Europeans and the Chinese gave him a wide berth. Such behaviour was unchristian and suspicious in these new lands, where anything might propagate and swell to dangerous consequences. The other whites said his box stole the souls of all he placed before it, but how could those who had no soul to begin with ever know? The natives were intrigued by the stories and wanted to see the hunter of quiet. He had found their sacred places and stayed close to them. He had not interfered with or desecrated their energy and power. He had sat with his box in their presence for many hours, sometimes days, and then silently moved on.

He had found a race of humans that he could tolerate, and they welcomed him into many clans, even though he was a Lost One, a most-feared being in all small, tight societies. He was a man who survived outside the tribe and the family, a man turned loose and wild. But this one had understanding and silence and was dedicated to motionlessness; all qualities which the plain’s tribes cherished. He was allowed to photograph the great chiefs and their medicine men. Eventually, they would let him see and photograph the Ghost Dance. He sent back to England prints of lonely desolation, stunning landscapes of untouched, gigantic purity and pictures of powerful, noble men, who looked into the camera without seeing themselves. Many he sent back to the wise surgeon, to demonstrate his improvement and to reiterate his gratitude; his instinct told him that the man high in the Oriel window at London Bridge would understand.

Muybridge began to feel himself healed; his growing confidence stood upright in the hollow lava beds of the flat plains of the Tule Lake. He turned his box on the Modoc War, shovelling up images of the vanquished lands and their shivering occupants. The enemy paid him well, so he became the official photographer for the U.S. Army; the stillness could wait while his plates were filled with the pumice of defeat and exile. At the end of it all, he gathered his new fame and his obsessively accumulated wages, and travelled back to the city lights and the crisp linen of San Francisco, to embark on the joys of marriage, parenthood and murder.

Ishmael had only Ghertrude to talk to now. Since their adventure together, Mutter had avoided him entirely; no matter how hard he tried to initiate conversation, the old man refused to be drawn. He barely made eye contact, and when he did it was baleful and suspicious. Ishmael thought it a dramatic and surly way to behave over such a small breaking of the rules. However, he would not be diverted by a servant’s bad humour. He had noticed the market square changing over the last two days, its simple frame being decorated between its daily functions. Something was being prepared. He cornered Ghertrude when she arrived to change his bed linen.

Her visits had become less frequent recently, and she seemed remote and uninterested in his questions. She had certainly lost her appetite for mating, having nothing new to show or explain to him. He still possessed an active interest in the subject, but when he suggested that they might try other ways of doing it, she became defensive and limp. Not wishing to disturb his comfortable position within the house, he chose to let his desires go untended.

Besides, his need to be outside again and explore the city in detail was of greater importance. She had told him of the perils, explained that a rarity such as he would be in danger from the mob. She told him the story of a small, ornate bird she had owned as a child. Its plumage was vermilion, with a trim of yellow. Its voice was exquisite, and she often put it in her window so that it might sing to the sun. Local, indigenous birds would flock to the areas nearby to listen to it and admire its splendid colours. One day she sat, with the bird tamely on her finger, talking to the brightness of its attention. She did not notice the window’s slight opening and, as the curtain swayed, the bird smelt the air and flew to freedom. In horror, she ran to the window and watched it flutter and swoop in poor, close circles. She called to it and it turned in her direction; she saw the excitement in its eyes, just before it was torn to pieces by the same grey flock that had watched it before.

That would be his fate, she had explained. His exotic originality would be seen as a threat, they would call him a monster. But he knew he was superior to the double eyes, and he had proved it. She did not know this, and the time to tell her had not yet dawned.

‘Ghertrude?’ he said, as she worked with her back to him, ‘why are the streets below being decorated?’

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed happily, ‘that’s for the carnival!’

‘And what is ‘carnival’ in this place?’ he asked.

‘Well, every year, the people have a party to thank the forest for its gifts. It lasts for three days and nights, everybody stops work, and the streets are alive with music, food and dancing. Everything is decorated, even the cathedral. The people dress in costumes that they have spent all year making. Lords and ladies mix with peasants and rogues, not knowing each other’s rank or status.’

‘How is that possible, when everybody recognises each other here?’

‘Because of the masks!’ she whooped, carried away in the joyful momentum.

‘Masks?’ he queried.

‘Yes! Fanciful, mysterious masks of every description, angels and demons, animals and mons-’

‘Monsters?’ he ventured slowly.

She had become suddenly quiet and unsure of where to look.

‘Could it be,’ he pressed, ‘that on such an occasion, a ‘rarity’ might hide its strangeness, that an exotic bird might conceal its beauty, and that a monster would be safe amongst so many others?’

And so it came to pass that the beast went the ball.

They stood just inside the gate of 4 Kühler Brunnen. They made a fine pair, plumed and bejewelled, masked and covered, loose and sensuous silks flashing provocatively beneath their cloaks.

‘Will it be like the story you read me, the one you liked so much? With the clock and the coloured rooms, the one that gave me nightmules?’ he asked.

‘Nightmares,’ she corrected. ‘Yes, but not so solemn. It will be much ruder. Everybody is drunk and behaves badly.’

‘How badly?’ he asked, apprehensively.

‘Behind a mask you can be anybody, do anything. No one is found guilty, no one is innocent; there are more children sired during these three days than the rest of the year. And no one looks too closely for family resemblance, nine months later, when the babes are born.’

‘And nobody is ever unmasked?’

‘Never!’ she said, with more certitude than she felt. It was true that one felt a certain freedom under the protection of disguise, and she had committed petty crimes and minor malices before under the mask. But she had never possessed the nerve to engage in open debauchery. Until now.

They peeped through the gap and plucked at the springboard of their nerves, readying to be jettisoned into the whirling throng of dreams that bustled and shoved in the streets outside. The noise was colossal. Hurdy-gurdies and pipers roamed the streets, confusing the vast steam organ that played from the heart of the market square. There were fireworks and pistol shots, trumpets and singing, screaming and laughter.

Suddenly, the gate was open and they were gone. Mutter locked it hard behind them and spat on to the wet cobblestones.

My gentle years are over. A long-forgotten hunger has been rekindled by my unexpected adventure, and I feel its energy course hungrily through my body. The murderer across the water has awoken a coiled reaction – I can taste his blood, even at this distance. Why anyone would find cause to shoot at me remains a mystery. My dealings with other humans are decades past, and all before that is erased. Only my wife keeps the memories in her flesh and moisture, both of which live in my bow. We will find the assassin and dig the answers out of him; my foes in this unfamiliar and treacherous world will not remain hidden.

I will rest, and make an evening camp. In the coming morning, I will make new arrows, and use them to sign my passage and sweep all enemies aside. The man in the water will be in no hurry to meet me again, and the next time he does, the first shot will be mine.

The cleric knew he would not be alone. He slowly prepared himself behind the kitchen lean-to, at the back of the inn, deep in the animal shadow of its primitive architecture. He moved his large hands around his cane, and adjusted his hat and the side panels of his green-glass spectacles.

Walking around to the entrance, he stiffly made his way to the bar, seemingly without registering the other occupants and their irritation at his presence. He hissed the name of a drink in a foreign accent, displacing himself even further from the company’s sympathy. His back was insultingly square against the faces of the seated clientele; his eyes could not be seen, but they picked every detail out of the mirror. All movement was measured and assessed in its cracked, murky glass.

The twins exchanged a twisted look and approached him, breaking a shaft of light at the back of the room as they sauntered towards him, grinning. He stood three heads taller than they, implacable and deadly calm. The twin with the earring was rehearsing a suitably caustic and insulting address, when the cleric’s left hand crawled around from the side of his body to the small of his black back and stopped suddenly, one outstretched finger pointing menacingly towards them, statue-like in accusation. The pair froze, confused by this unpredictable and peculiar gesture. The other twin started to laugh on the strange side of his previous grin. His brother’s mouth was a wobbling slit of anger.

‘Who you pointing at, you stick-legged cunt?’ he said as he approached the hand. ‘We’ll cut your lungs out, yoooo!’

The rest of the wide body slowly turned to confront him, and he swallowed his voice in a gulp. Both hands were now pointing, a digit at each twin, the cane balanced across the stranger’s wrists like a conjuror’s wand. The face above the hands was long, broad, white and totally unnatural, a stretched, boiled egg, with tiny eyes and a flattened, broken nose. It looked unfinished and malleable, as if its shortsighted sculptor had retired midway through its creation. The twins had met and murdered all manner of men and women, but they had never come across an apparition like this before, never stood in the presence of indomitable wrongness.

With a voice like a paper cut, the cleric hissed, ‘Divided one, you have died!’ He drew the blade slowly from the cane with great deliberation, in the manner of a salesman handling a stock of priceless antiquities. As he brought it to a stop at eye-level, the room was reflected in its polished shine. Words, engraved along its length, shimmered in the light for all to see.

It was impossible to tell the span of time which had passed since the cleric’s utterance: it might have been a fraction of a second, or a full day. The ear-ringed twin jolted from his torpor, assessed the distance of the blade, and pulled a curved dagger from his coat. His trajectory was certain to maim the stranger before he could turn his blade into a defensive or aggressive posture, and he charged, eyes locked on one of the blade’s shining words: ‘TRUTH’. With all his strength, he lunged onto the blade which clicked out of the wooden cane’s other end and twitched up, across his rushing throat.

The mortally wounded twin dropped his knife, grabbing at his own neck in a hopeless attempt to strangle the flow. His brother rushed to his side, one hand on his pistol, the other hopelessly attending to the ravaged wound, not knowing whether to fight or save his twin. The debate was settled for him by the lightning point of the written sword, which pierced his eye and was pushed to the back of his brain – he caught flashes of text as the words raced past the confusion of his other oculus.

As children, both twins had received some formal education. In their early years, they had been taught the elemental principles of grammar by a country curate. Later, they attended two years at a nearby seminary, where their reading and writing skills were greatly enhanced. They had not come from the gutter, like most of their kind, but from a respected family of seed merchants; the little town where they were born had been mildly affluent. But, at the tender age of twelve, they had turned from the upstanding paths of scholar and cloth and wilfully run onto the twisted, bitter road that brought them to this place, where they now danced in their own blood.

The stranger brought his face close to the shuffling man and hissed, ‘The scripture of the blade says, THE WAY!’ – he thrust the blade in further, so that the words were deep inside – ‘THE TRUTH!’ – the point grated and stopped against the bone of the skull – ‘AND THE LIFE!’ With this, he brought his other hand down, pushing steel through bone, skewering the blade’s length through the bobbing head. He twisted the blade, the words vanishing with a crunching sliver, and then pulled it clear of the wobbling rag doll in one swift, smooth stroke. Caught in a moment of rubber balance, his victim briefly looked like a child’s toy or a dancing monkey. Still holding the dying man, the cleric cleaned the blasphemous blade on the lapel of his victim’s twitching coat, before letting him drop to the steaming floor.

The dog, inert up to that point, twitched an eye open at the sound. But it had all happened so smoothly, with such minimal movement, that there was almost nothing to be seen and, observing nothing of consequence, he stretched comfortably, lay his head back on the stony floor, and returned to his dreams.

Each action had been focused, precise and confident. It had been an execution in every meaning of the word, and the power of its malice was pristine in its inexorable certitude. There had been an air of delight about the act.

The perpetrator turned to the innkeeper, who had remained motionless throughout, and placed two heavy coins and a flat, wooden sheath on the bar. He opened the sheath and displayed a tablet of hard wood, covered in gold writing, a wax seal at its base and an insignia on the seal. The innkeeper’s gaze was fixed on the coins.

‘The money is for you to clean this away. Do you know what this is?’ The fat man nodded and avoided looking at the stranger’s face.

‘I am Sidrus, and I have jurisdiction in this sector.’ He opened his hand to reveal the same wax insignia, tattooed onto the palm of his hand. ‘How long were these two waiting here?’ he demanded.

‘Eleven or twelve days now,’ said the innkeeper, cautiously picking up the coins, and holding their weight in his closed paw. ‘Them and the other one together, the black one.’

‘And where is he?’

‘I don’t know, been gone two days now.’

The cleric knew he was telling the truth; he had been watching the inn, only entering after the other man had left. ‘Have any others passed this way in recent weeks?’ he asked.

‘Just drifters and strangers, moving on.’

The man dressed as a cleric suspected that there would be many more hunters seeking their prey, more assassins trying to kill the man with the bow, before he got close to the Vorrh. He did not know how many he would have to dispatch to protect the Bowman and allow him to make the impossible journey through the forest to the other side, where he would be waiting for him. He could not enter it at all, and had circumnavigated its perimeter to reach him. It had taken him two months to arrive in this shithole.

The bodies of the twins had stopped twitching. Stepping clear of the lake of their blood, he picked up the wooden tablet he had displayed and made for the door. A dim, gawping youth stood in his way by mistake, frozen to the spot as the incident replayed through his slow brain.

‘Kippa! Kippa, get out of the way!’ barked the innkeeper.

The cleric stopped moving and brought his sheathed cane into view. He knew there was no danger from this faint one, but he had no intention of showing mercy as the other drinkers watched; even the dog had awakened to the danger and watched him with bared teeth from beneath the table.

Kippa was still rendered immobile, unable to take his eyes away from the approaching demon. The blade made a great, circular arc, an elaborate matador flourish that had none of the surgical precision of its previous use. On its upward swing, it cut between the youth’s legs, severing his budding manhood and sending him, toppling and screeching, out of the deliberate path of the living, grinning nightmare called Sidrus.

It crawled across the floor on all fours, its long, white proboscis sniffing, whiskers quivering as it nodded from side to side. Its rangy, pale legs seemed to both tiptoe and slide on the polished wooden floor. The top part of its body was clothed in a green, silken skin, which caught the garish light from the blazing flambeaux on the balcony outside the windows. The lower half of its body was naked, its huge, swollen phallus swaying like an independent entity as the creature approached its next engagement. The last bed was in great disarray, the covers pulled messily around the softly snoring body of its spent occupant. The room was full of whispers and laughter; small, animal noises of hunger and fulfilment rippled the landscape of opulence. Sighs gilded the tangled scent of incense, musk and intoxication.

It reached the next bed and slid its gloved hands beneath the sheet. They were instantly gripped by the smooth, trembling grasp of the woman who waited there. She pulled the beast inside and drew the covers over them both. Her form was older, large and voluptuous, and she too had a distorted face, in the shape of an owl, black feathers accentuating the ivory wideness of her eyes. He slipped a catch on his beak and pulled it backwards, leaving the lower half of his face exposed, so that his mouth was visible and active in their lovemaking. Pulling him close, she kissed him passionately. He jumped back, startled, almost falling from the bed. Neither Luluwa nor Ghertrude had ever done such a thing; it had never been explained to him, and Ghertrude had always looked away when they mated.

The stranger drew him closer still. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said.

He let her suck his mouth again, and it was sweet and arousing. He kissed back, and his manhood surpassed previous dimensions and expectations.

Even in the over-populated room of revellers, the sounds of the owl and her new companion arose above all others. Their bedding thrashed wildly, and something else wallowed out from their conjunctures; other couples and trios found their attention hooked and pulled across the pulsing darkness, away from their own compacted intimacies, peering towards an unnameable eminence that was outside and beyond their own little shudders and sighs.

It was almost dawn when he crept from her bed to search the rooms for his black velvet cloak.

When the owl awoke, she began to cry. She pulled her mask away and started to shout. She stumbled to the window, her hands on her face, and began to scream.

The owl was called Cyrena Lohr. She was thirty-three years old, and had been blind since birth. In the early light of post-carnival, with anxious friends and strangers standing by her side, she shivered, naked and overpowered at the window, watching the brilliant sunrise, yellow and crisp on her first visual day.

How had he done this? Who was this miracle worker who had entered her bed and given her sight? She had to find him. The moment she could be sure she was not dreaming, she would find him and thank him on her knees.

The remaining revellers in her mansion were dressing quickly. One brought a dressing gown and wrapped Cyrena in its warm folds, while attempting to steer the emotional woman away from the window and back to the bed. But she would not be moved, so they brought her a high-backed armchair and seated her safely within it. Most of the crowd that had occupied her many rooms had disappeared; the combination of unmasking and being a witness was too much for their frail identities to bear, and they had fled as the whisper slithered through the house. Miracles are never comfortable; for the hungover, the debauched and the anonymous, they are intolerable.

Four weeks later, she had settled with her sight. All available tests had been completed, and it was unanimously agreed: she had excellent and enduring vision.

With the help of various companions, she spent two of those weeks visiting the city she knew so intimately, adding colour, shape and tone to its sound and texture. She stared for hours at the faces of her friends and the few of her family who were left. The new details were catching up and beginning to make sense. Only her dreams remained slow and auditory; the pictures came, but would not attach properly, flopping and draping over the hard skeletons of sound and becoming transparent. It would take a year for them to solidify into trust.

She redecorated her splendid house. She gave all her old clothes to the poor, and went on a lavish spending spree to dress her body in the rich colour and sumptuous design of her wildest imaginings. She burnt her white sticks, unceremoniously, in the gardener’s fire, the sweet scent of leaf smoke disguising their brittle stink of anguish. And then she focused her zeal on finding him – to become his devoted acolyte, or to make him her own.

His jaw was sewn back on. Tufts of greasy twine stuck out of it in all directions. It no longer moved, and he could not chew or talk. But that could all be fixed later; now, he just had to stay sharp, and kill the Bowman before he ever touched another arrow.

Tsungali waited before the bridge and the mill, high in the rocks, where he had been before. He knew his prey had to come this way to find passage through the damned forest. He held the Enfield in an awkward grip. The first arrow had severed three of the tendons in his right arm, so that two of his fingers no longer worked with any predictability. But this time, he would make no mistake: a closer shot, backed up by the stump-barrelled shotgun, would finish the job.

He had not dared show his wrecked face at the inn; he wondered if those other assassins still lurked there. He knew they would come running at his shots, and in his present weakness those jackals might even take his quarry away, claiming the kill as their own. He did not have the agility for a silent kill, or the strength to fight off three or four strong and armed assailants; all he had was time and cunning, so he laid traps around his planned killing zone, and waited.

It wasn’t long before his attention was rewarded, but he had not expected to see two men walking together. They came along the river road arm in arm, a little tipsy and unsure of foot, one black man and one white. The white man was talking loudly, his associate appearing to nod in approval. Neither carried weapons.

Tsungali had never seen his target clearly, could not know the details of his face or dress. But he knew him to be a loner, and unlikely to be in cahoots with this drunken Negro, so he did not make the shot or stop them on their way to the inn.

They passed below him, and he carefully, quietly stood to catch a glimpse of their faces. He instantly recognised Tugu Ossenti, and the expression on his face revealed that he was not drunk, but grievously hurt. He looked at the loud, laughing face of the white man and saw no mirth: it was a face that could not be, a face that he knew too well. He saw the bow, concealed behind his back, and swung his shotgun down onto the ill-matched pair, sending a loose skree falling in his tilted swivel. As he fired, the white man lifted Ossenti like a puppet, raising him up by his armpit, where the dagger had pierced and guided his pretend drunken walk. The black man screamed before the first barrel removed the back of his head, the second crashing into his broad back. The white man shrugged the twitching carcass to one side, and tucked himself swiftly beneath the rocky shelf where Tsungali stood, out of his sight and out of the reach of his gun.

After the booming roar, the valley fell quiet. Birds stopped singing and the breeze held its breath. A door banged somewhere in the mill, and another figure scanned the scene for the next move, before retreating to a safer, hidden place. All stayed motionless until nightfall, then evaporated into the dark, skins crawling with potential attack. Their next meeting would be in the forest: it had been inevitable all along. Nothing could deflect the viciousness of its defined fate.

Ghertrude had returned to 4 Kühler Brunnen first. She’d expected him to be there already and climbed the stairs to listen at the doors, but he was still out, even though the carnival had ended the night before. Fleetingly, she thought that perhaps he might never return, and the idea bounced far too blissfully for a while. Then she became anxious for him, anxious for them both, and, finally, scared of being found out.

They had stayed together for the first three hours, coupling deeply in the first room of the first house that the party had surged through. He had pinned her to the silk wall, as she looked over his shoulder at another pair, who drank ferociously from each other’s cups as they lounged on the sable carpet. Their hands had gripped tightly in the excitement of wrongdoing, before sliding apart in the grounds of one of the great houses, where the throng of dancing fantasies surged and bumped, entangling and re-partnering at will. She had been whisked away by a small, bubbling party of young people dressed in shimmering foliage. The Green Man theme was rife that year. She spent the first night with a willow, whose languid courtliness extended into all of his surprising attributes. Her time with Ishmael had paid off; the last of her inhibitions had fled. She relished the contrast she had discovered; the Willow and the cyclops had little in common, and she marked and compared the difference, trying to decide where her true taste lay. She balanced passion against technique, hunger against restraint, and dominance against submission. By the morning, she knew she needed even more comparison. The carnival would accommodate her experimentation. She would rise to the challenge of expanding her knowledge of the hidden intimacies of manipulation and the breadth of her own sensual appetite.

She thought that she had seen him the next evening at a tableau vivant in the hall of the De Selby’s. He, or someone dressed like him, stood as motionless as the naked figures that formed the classic scene of Mars disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. The room was packed and concentrated. New arrivals were hushed as they spluttered into the hall, and she saw him whisper to the woman standing next to him, saw her squeeze his arm and quietly laugh, her hand covering the serrated teeth of her beak. Ghertrude assumed the woman to be one of the countless numbers of whores and courtesans who gatecrashed the homes of the wealthy. She had an urge to confront them and reveal the truth behind the mask, but decided that she preferred the lasting prospect of her secret to a quick demonstration of her power. Besides, some of the company there may well have relished his deformity; many of those women may have found it perverse enough to arouse their jaded and cankered passions.

He had arrived back at 4 Kühler Brunnen in the mid-afternoon. He had been lost in the empty streets, exposed in his costume. He was not the only one to be walking dazed, or sleeping in the parks or back alleys: many denizens of the revels still staggered in their grotesque outfits, now stained and wet from nights of rain or morning dew. But, unlike him, they were all unmasked, to share in their embarrassment and have it forgiven. Anyone who wore his disguise past the magic hour of unveiling was prey for abuse, or even attack. The same crowd who crossed so many boundaries, who permitted so many exchanges of lies, fluids and dreams, instantly returned to the stiff rigour of the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year. Everything of those three nights was forgotten forever; it was mutually agreed by all, and strictly enforced. Masked strangers, continuing into the fourth day, were renegades, and a threat to the contract. Worse, they blatantly challenged the anonymity of the group with their audacious arrogance, and became a target for all, from lords to dogs. He would be unveiled, and disclosed by any who crossed his path; he would be beaten and driven through the humiliated streets.

The cyclops had not been aware of the rules as he’d left the owl’s bed earlier that day. Walking across one of the circular arteries of streets, his efforts had gone into trying to retain his bearings against the combined effects of alcohol and lack of sleep, not to mention the stalwart attentions he had paid his companions. Bunting and strings of paper flowers were hanging wet and wild in the air, the wind giving them a disturbing sense of animation; they flapped against what should have been normal gravity with an insolent abandonment. Just as he walked past them, he heard voices calling out to him:

‘You’re late friend, there’s nothing to hide now; the hour has sounded!’

He ignored the two men and the woman, who had turned into the road from a narrow alley, just ahead of him.

‘Did you hear me?’ barked the taller man, stepping away from the other two, who seemed to be propping one another up, interlocking against inevitability. ‘I said take it off, show yourself!’

He stood in Ishmael’s way, but the cyclops was quick and deftly stepped around the big man, who was dressed as a penguin. His movement incensed the man, who shouted a warning to his friends. Ishmael was caught between them when the first man turned, growling. ‘What gives you the right?’ he spat. ‘Better than us, eh?’

Ishmael leapt, but the second man stuck a foot out into his stride and he tripped badly, falling into the leaves and hard cobblestones and banging his knee and the side of his head with great force. Some of the paste jewellery he was wearing broke in the fall and lay strewn across the gutter. The big man was laughing as he dragged him up onto his good knee and tore away his mask; a string of fake emeralds, with which he had been garlanded, snapped and spluttered down, skidding into hiding in the cracks of the murky road.

‘That’s better.’ he leered. ‘Now you’re one of us.’ Then his eyes focused on what he was so firmly gripping. He let go instantly, his fingers splaying out, as if he had been scolded or electrocuted. Ishmael remembered a sound the Kin had sometimes made, and he screamed it out across his rolling tongue. Both men ran, leaving the woman to slide down the wall. She had not seen his face when she hit the pavement. On impact, her yelp turned into giggles.

‘Now you havta carry me!’ she squealed.

He bent down close to her face and grinned with the exaggerated gusto of a demon prince. She looked up at point-blank range and screamed. He punched her over into the gutter and kicked her in the head until his shoe broke and she had stopped crying out. She lay, quietly sobbing, as he limped away, calculating a safer route home. He picked up his crushed muzzle and skull cap from where the coward had dropped it, and refitted it back onto his face. Most of its whiskers had fallen out, and its damaged length now gave him a new comic appearance, not unlike toys that become misshapen by too much love; squeezed and hugged into character, remodelled by the damp affections of their owners until they are abandoned.

He had found his way eventually and hobbled back, bruised, wet and tired, with a rising feeling of nausea. The day was distilling his triumphs of the nights and converting his prowess and conquests into a hollow gruel of cold disgust. He desperately wanted a hot bath and a long, dreamless sleep, so that he might unwind himself from all those sticky, desperate bodies that had embalmed his light with the thickness of their embraces. He wanted to remove every last atom of the tastes and scents, which he had so recently cherished; to comb out all their rotted sighs and smiles, and never touch a human being again.

It was three days before he would speak, locking himself away in his rooms and refusing to acknowledge Ghertrude’s pleas. On the fourth day, when she let herself into the house, she heard the music. She followed its source, climbing the stairs as she listened, spellbound by its eerie resonance. By the time she reached the attic, its volume and complexity had increased. The Goedhart Device had been tuned and set in motion. The lead balls with their attached quills had been tied to the ends of the cords that hung down vertically from the ceiling. They swung in long, pendulum arcs, each of the feathers strumming one of the horizontal piano wires with every passing, sending the shivering strands of metal into melodic voice. Thirty or so such strings played in the dusk, each of a different length and pitch. Plucked harmonies echoed back and forth; the light from the open window shimmered on the pendulums’ movements. Everything sang.

Ishmael sat in the far corner, his back against the wall, hands folded in his lap. Ghertrude found her place and also sat; she knew better than to attempt to open a conversation now. Over the next hour, the pendulums lost their momentum, the pulses changing and the volume dropping, each feather only lightly scraping against the strings, eventually coming to a rest against them. Towards the end, their hearing strained into the attic to fetch each little tremor of the heart-stopping sensitivity. When the concert was over, they sat in silence for a long, intuited amount of time.

‘It’s getting cold,’ the cyclops said at last.

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘hot days and cold nights.’

‘I am going to leave, Ghertrude,’ he said, finally. ‘For good.’

She got colder and hugged herself. Her eyes flickered to the floor; she knew it was useless to argue.

‘Where will you go?’ she murmured in half of her voice.

‘To the wilderness,’ he replied. ‘Away from all people. To the Vorrh.’

His plump life and pink young wife made him happy, for a time. He learned to grin without thinking, to look forward to meeting new people and enjoy coming home. Neighbours once caught him performing a brief skip in the street, coming home from a very successful meeting with some of the influential San Francisco elite (who, to his delight, already knew his name, even though he had changed it once again) to the handsome dinner prepared by his wife. When she became pregnant and he became accepted, they both started to fill out.

The gnawing hollow was replaced with growing, rotating weight, swelling with pride, ambition and a strengthened belief in the unique placement of his potential. His skills were picked up on by the Stanford family, who purchased some of his photographs (including the negatives), Leland Stanford taking him under his wing and changing his life to prove a bet. The first ‘horse in motion’ photographs were made, and both his sponsor and the public applauded their brilliance. He went to soirees and and lavish dinners, gave lectures and readings; he would often leave his wife at home: her gathering size and homely ways might trip or blunder, and he did not wish her any embarrassment.

Yet, even amid this gaiety and triumph, a shadow nagged. Something of the past was travelling backwards, from a journey made in the future, and the rattle of it harried him continually. ‘Doubt’ was too small a word, too uncertain. What troubled him, and curdled his first ever joy, was that the shadow was known. Something was understood, without having a face or a name; it was like the after-blur of his treatment, the moon smear that the surgeon had warned him of, but it was moving in advance of the fact.

The thing it resonated with the most was the Ghost Dance, or rather his ignorance of the Ghost Dance’s meaning. He had photographed it many times and talked at length with its instigators, but he still did not understand; its workings remained a mystery to him. There was a mechanism, on the inside of its action, like an iris or a newly developed shutter on the other side of a lens; he saw the desire and the subsequent result, like the plate, which received the inverted image and displayed it; similarly, he understood the achievement of the circular dance, bringing the dead back to join the living braves in one last war. But he could not feel the process, nor the delineation of its occurrence.

He met several people with interests in psychic photography, but thought them fools. Even though a small cog turned against his will and brought to mind the effects of Gull’s perithoscope, he mainly shrugged them aside. But it was rumoured that higher and higher society was engaging in the new fashion of spiritualism, that the Queen herself had some interest. Sensing there might be a market for an honest man among the charlatans and quacks, he perched the opportunity on a shelf against the collapse of his present, just in case the disquiet which gnawed at his glowing success proved to be the sound of tables turning.

She had combed the city and caught three names, which now wriggled in her teeth. Two had been regular partygoers, inconsequential gentry of deplorable reputation, the kind of creatures whose very existence is antagonistic to miracle. The third had no name. He was said to be the companion of a young woman whose family Cyrena knew. She made more enquiries, buying information and paying street-eyes to unwrap small morsels of sight or whisper.

She found out that the man she so desperately sought had arrived at the carnival with the affluent heiress, Ghertrude Tulp, and that, whatever their relationship was, it allowed them to slip separately into many different beds over those three spectacular days, which had been such travesties of life. She discovered that, some time after he left her bedchamber, he had been involved in a street altercation, in which an ageing doxy had received permanent damage to her saturated brain. She knew that Ghertrude and the man lived at 4 Kühler Brunnen, and that he had never been outside in public. She could not be sure, but suspected that the Tulp girl held some power over him; that she imprisoned him there, her prize, her possession, which she bitterly hoarded.

She stood before the double gate, magnificent in her knowledge and the certain triumph of her discovery. Taking a quick, deep breath through her feline nostrils, she stepped forward and hammered on the shaking wood.

In her heart, she felt sure that he would open the door to her love; that she would see him, beautiful and beaming, moved by her persistence in finding him. As the scene played in her mind, she saw Ghertrude unlock the great secret and give in to her overpowering enquiry and rightful passion. What she did not expect was the hump and shuffle of Mutter, whose sour response did not even seem to recognise her grandeur.

‘Is your master at home?’ she asked, unprepared for the sound and need of her stilted formality.

Mutter gawped at her through bleary eyes. He removed the dead cigar stub from his wet mouth and said, ‘I have none here!’

She jittered slightly. ‘Your mistress then?’

‘Out!’ he said, as he started to shut the gate.

‘Where is he?’ she demanded, her hand against the gate, equalising Mutter’s pressure from the other side.

‘Who?’ he said, genuinely unaware of who she meant.

‘The man,’ she said softly, through a nervous smile. ‘The mysterious young man who lives here.’

There was a long pause while Mutter came to, looking into her working, expectant eyes. ‘Gone,’ he said, ‘he’s gone. The monster has left.’ And with that, he shoved the gate shut.