The Vorrh

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.