The Vorrh

running like lava, hot salt, ammonia, tears; her fecund fluids pissing in his wound. He must close it forever and never let another finger his interior, or violate the pristine bone closure of his vision. He was finished with proximity and all the cankers that grew in it.
    He had resolved to never again be the person described in that courtroom: a ‘lost animal, vacant and mad’. People he knew – friends, neighbours, even servants – had told of his seizures; of incoherent jabbering, his eyes starting from his head, jaw hanging open; his dreadful appearance, haggard and shivering all over, a terrible paleness swallowing his humanity, while his breathing shrank to gasps and smelt rank and toothy. At one point in the trial, he was said to have sunk into such a fit, his countenance becoming so horrifying, that the clerk of the court had been obliged to restrain his furiously working hands and hide his hideous, contorting features beneath a handkerchief, while the jury left the room, some in tears, and the judge retired for thirty minutes, needing the consolation of a sturdy bourbon. Why they had told these lies he never knew, but it had somehow helped all to see his righteousness.
    When he stepped free from the courthouse and into the cheering crowd, it had been a sanctified rebirth. Friends and strangers held him up, helped him walk limply home; after only a few steps, he had heard the white, death-faced voices of the singing circle and begun to understand the significance of the Ghost Dance. He slowed and twisted around, weak in the arms of his helpers, to look back at the crowd at the foot of the courthouse steps – they milled and revelled, picking their hats up from the dusty street where they had landed only moments before, a jubilant and temporary resting place after being cast into the air of his triumph.
    * * *

    The sun was fierce that day, and the bald cliff stood clear of the great mass of the forest; like a hermitage in a mythical painting, it shone pale gold against the greens and blacks of the trees. The sky was heroically blue, with vast, rolling, white clouds which seemed to move in all directions in the light breeze.
    The Bowman had scrabbled over the broken terrain for two days before finding the cave, though the notion of having ‘found’ it seemed inaccurate, somehow; he had felt drawn to it by an ungovernable magnetism which seemed to turn his every step; that weak force, which holds every star and cell in check, had tilted him towards the crack in the rock.
    He pulled himself over the last ledge and surveyed the landscape in all directions; the Vorrh seemed to go on forever. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and moved into the mouth of the cave, its coolness overwhelming. Light, shafting in through fissures in the high ceiling above, gave it a church-like atmosphere that suggested sanctum and calm. The sense of having been here before overcame him; he knew this place. Then the bow moved in his hand. At first he thought a gust of wind had caught it, but it moved again, twitching like a divining rod sniffing at water.
    He dropped all of his other possessions and held the bow firmly between his two hands. The inexplicable movement steered him with tiny twitches along its length, twitches that united to make a pull. He went with it further into the cave. It guided his growing excitement to a point at the back of the third chamber. There, a rock seemed to mark the spot that the bow was pointing to. He brushed dust and wind-flung twigs off the stone and gasped at the pictograph inscribed crudely onto its surface, a semi-circle, struck through its middle by a slender, pointed dart: a bow and arrow.
    He rolled the stone aside and started to dig, scraping at the compacted earth with his hands and the large knife he carried at his side. After twenty minutes, and a forearm’s depth of excavation, he struck something solid. He swept the earth around it to reveal a heavy, wooden box. With some difficulty, he freed it from the tight, stony earth, stopping to take several deep breaths before forcing the lid off. It prised free to reveal a heavy parcel and a scrawled note. The words were written in a familiar hand. It read:

You and I are Peter Williams. I already have little memory, so I am writing these words from Este’s dictation. You will find this after she has died and become the bow of your arm. You are returning to whence you came, from the other side of the Vorrh. You are now midway. Many will