The Vorrh

rough, scarred bark. Some had assumed coverings of fur or scales to keep their endless life forces protected.
    Their unions with women had occurred thousands of years earlier, the resonant orgasm bleaching their voices and their sense of direction. Those that had mated were the ones that had been left behind with Adam, and with those that had been called the Watchers. Now derelict, their purpose and their application had washed away to rumour and ache. They roamed, pilfered and scratched a life in utter, total substance. Their ambition was to become invisible, to waste away into mist and breeze. But that too had been lost. Their given task was to protect the tree of knowledge, and so they remained in the forest, slowly becoming a forgotten part of it.
    In previous times, a few had crept out, making short, scavenging journeys to the city. Fewer still had stayed away, to sleep with the Rumour, the name that they had given all those humans and semi-humans after Adam, to twin with them in attempts to understand. They were chosen for the task, to go to places full of the Rumours, where land and time had been cultivated in scratched, straight lines and chopped, mean patches.
    Aside from the chosen few, it was forbidden for any others to trespass the places of Rumour; the species carried such a virulent contagion and misunderstanding of knowledge, that even God’s name was slutted by it. No one knew of the Erstwhile’s journeys to Essenwald until they pillaged the chapel of the Desert Fathers. They should have been pitied, or sympathised with, but that was not the nature of men-turned-Rumour, who could not be blamed for following their own righteous teachings.
    The Erstwhile had broken into the little church to look at the paintings. Without strength or tools, they had rubbed repeatedly at a patch in the wall, gradually wearing it away a little more each night, until eventually they were able to squeeze through and crawl about in the clean, closed darkness. Such an enclosure was beyond their understanding; its straight lines and solid walls confused them with wonder and fear. Like an insect at a glass window, everything there contradicted the laws and form of their existence.
    They crept and flapped through the mystifying unity of out and in. When they came to the paintings, they froze. They stood, whimpering, before the framed print and the thick, black icon, shuddering and shaking in great swathes of a moment, until they were stumbled upon the next morning by the young priest. They paid no attention to his presence, and he was oblivious to theirs, until he walked directly into them at the far side of the church. He dropped his box of waxy candle-ends in shock, and yelped as he fell to the floor under the draft of their exit.
    ‘It was a kind of wind, Father,’ he jittered. ‘A kind of bumpy wind, like being pushed about in the market, but there was nobody there.’
    He was standing outside in the sun an hour later, his breathing almost returned to normal, talking animatedly to the old priest and one of the city’s watchmen. The old man was watching him intently, while the other puffed knowingly on a curved briar pipe. As he described his extraordinary experience of that morning, it suddenly became much, much stranger.
    As the images appeared before his eyes, the young priest fell off his chair, screaming and scrambling a pointless retreat.
    ‘Oh God, oh Jesus!’ he flailed in fright. ‘It’s them! They’ve come back!’
    It took them a long time to calm him down. All the while, he looked about him fearfully, gripping the elder priest’s arm with a strength that had almost become painful.
    ‘It was them, Father, I saw them, they were here! Running at me. Terrible things. Oh, Jesus, protect me!’
    ‘Be calm, my son, be calm; God is with you.’
    ‘But Father, it was them, I know it was. It was everything I felt them to be this morning; it was as if their visual form appeared to me from an hour before. How could that be?!’
    The old priest was very concerned, but tried hard not to show it. ‘They have gone now, they won’t come back,’ he said, and the words sounded like they had been said before. ‘Tell me one thing, my son.’
    ‘Yes, Father?’
    ‘Were they frightened?’
    The young man pulled himself up the older man’s arm in small grabs, until their faces were almost touching. ‘They were terrified,’ he said.
    The old man sent the boy home with the watchman and made his way back into the