The Vorrh

embers. A steamy, bluish haze seemed to be condensing above the heat.
    ‘Look, the animation, the halos,’ said Sidrus with an excitement that made his face even more malformed. ‘The gas of their life escaping.’
    An hour later, both men picked up the long-handled tools that they had concealed nearby. They probed the coals and the white, ached wood for anything that might be larger or living. They found only one part, its ash-covering giving it the appearance of presence. It appeared to be a section of hip and upper thigh; the ball and socket joint was exposed and working, swivelling in the gritty charcoal, its stump pointing aimlessly towards the sky. There were other, smaller suggestions of form, but it was difficult to be sure exactly what they saw, because the heat from the fire was still so intense; their eyes smarted with it, causing them to shield their faces and continually turn away from the ripples of temperature.
    As the flames slowly began to lose their power, they started to rake through the cooling embers, breaking up anything larger than a fist, and reducing the wood and the Erstwhile to a low, smouldering carpet of ashes.
    The job done, they quickly parted, not wanting to be together when the visual record of the incineration played in their heads. It would be an inescapable nightmare to watch this, to see the writhing and the screaming projected onto the inside of their eyelids; inflicting it on strangers or fellow brothers would only amplify the terror, and demand a nauseous response that no other should witness: they chose to contain that horror in solitude.
    The young priest, returned from his boundary of exclusion, was quiet and cold by the old man, who was white-lipped and tense.
    ‘Father,’ he said, with great care, ‘Father, is it not a sin, what we have done?’
    The question helped Lutchen, giving him a substance to resist, a grit to stand firm on: ‘Those wrong creatures brought madness and fear into our world. They were never meant to share the time of men. Our work here is God’s work, and the pain of the experience of it will be written in scars that I shall wear with fulfilment and modest pride until the Day of Judgement.’
    The young priest remained silent and still, only moving to comply with Lutchen’s orders. He tied the older man to a chair in the vestry of the church, laying cassocks and a few old prayer cushions on the wooden floor, to soften the blows in case the old man became convulsive. When all was set up, he left, under strict instructions not to return before midnight, and not to enter the room, no matter what noises he heard coming from it.
    Sidrus drank six glasses of absinthe and descended to the basement of his dwellings. In the pitch-black cellar, he would face the seeing on its own terms, and wrench some power from its horror to use to his advantage. No act or crime could ever debase him. It was the way and the duty of his clan to milk cruelty and terror of their own benefaction, and some part of him relished the disgust that was about to erupt in his head. He gripped an iron ring in the wall and braced himself for the visions. He would not have long to wait.
    * * *

    After the slaughter of Larkyns, the shrivelling death of his perfidious wife and the disposal of his son, Muybridge decided to return to the wilderness and keep his eyes to the savage earth and the remote, celestial skies. He should have stayed with it all along, instead of being tempted by the vain hopes of family and wealth: he knew that was what the London doctor would have advised. His love and his money had been squandered; he would never make that mistake again. He justified his weakness with the ill health and puerile wishes that all men have injected into them by their mothers; the belief that finding a good woman and making a home is a solid and resolute accomplishment of maturity. He had never truly felt the draw of that ambition, only its slender side effect of respectability. He had always been aware of his difference, and so had his mother, who doted on his younger brother.
    But at least he had tried giving his thin, forlorn heart in trust to a woman, albeit a fat woman who had trampled it in the smeared bed sheets of her adultery. He now knew what the good surgeon had meant about his injury, and how people might cause its inflammation. It had been mentioned in court: how the lesions in his brain had opened, becoming red raw with her deception; her lies and faithlessness