The Vorrh

trees.
    The string drifted, kneading the atmosphere, eager to find its host. It possessed an astonishing longevity, and was capable of lying dormant, but sprung, for years, until the heat or scent of a passer-by triggered its urgent jump and vampire attachment. On this day, it would only have a few minutes to wait.
    * * *

    The years had been kind to Muybridge – his endless labours and determination had paid off, and he now lectured all over the world; he was in demand, a man of consequence.
    His vast portfolio of animals in movement had been a great success. He thought about making another great study, this time of human beings in motion; there was no shortage of subjects.
    He had left the rest of his competitors standing. Marey, as predicted, had been easily sidetracked by pretty machines and worthless fancies, leaving Muybridge as the only contender of worth in the field of science and the application of photography for serious purposes; he had been right to trust his instincts. He had given up his correspondence with Marey after receiving his last letter, in which the whimsical Parisian had rambled on about cameras that might record ‘other’ time. It had been a mistake to ask him about Charcot and his experiments in photography. Marey had incorrectly assumed that a fascination with the potential for capturing mental manifestations (or worse) plagued his ambitions, even though he had explained to him the nature of being an objective artist, involved only with the bare bones of fact. That last letter had talked about theoretical cameras, engaged in the recording of impossibly slow movements, such as trees or the depths of the night sky. It had even suggested that holes might be dug in the ground and different levels of water be used as reflective lenses. What the deluded man could ever hope to achieve by standing over such a pit and seeing the stars and foliage reflected in its dismal mud was altogether beyond him.
    Any further conversations about such nonsensical speculations could have been damaging to Muybridge’s carefully constructed reputation and standing; Marey was duly ignored.
    On his way to developing the twelfth generation of his zoopraxiscope, he set about making a copy of Gull’s instrument from memory, estimating where and how it fitted together. Using an assortment of mirrors, he began to identify the exact flickering phenomena that the surgeon had produced. In the second week of his attempts, he came very close, producing a lapping shadow that made him dizzy; he thought about the frequency, the pulsing light and dark, whether it opened the eye to a different sight somehow, affecting the brain directly; he identified a lens that concentrated his creation’s glare to a pinpoint of burning, incandescent energy. Throughout it all, he wondered whether Gull used this instrument in his private experimental wards of skeletal women, if he had found a way of focusing their distorted but empathic willpower.
    Gull’s paper on their malign mental condition had caused a stir in small medical circles. He had given the tragic illness the name
Anorexia nervosa
, and it cut him another step in history. But Muybridge knew that the good surgeon’s fascination with their brains was on a much deeper level than their eating habits. After all, when half of London was locked in famine, what use could this privileged knowledge about a privileged sickness be to anyone? Gull and he had a lot in common, he thought. The doctor obviously believed this too, because three months later, the letter arrived.

Dear Mr. Muybridge
,

I pen this hasty note as a disclaimer to my previously false assumption about photography and my special patients. I now think you were right in your belief about their response to images of them
.

Please, the next time you are back in London, let us put your suggestion to a clinical test
.

W. W. Gull
    Muybridge was ecstatic. He desperately wanted to see the physician’s private wards; to be given the tour of the rank and raving females, and see the extent of the mania that Gull had merely hinted at before. He replied at once, and the necessary arrangements were swiftly underway.
    He stood in the leafy suburbs of London, having been redirected from Sir Thomas Guy’s hospital by another note, this time held by a surly porter. He was in Forest Hill. The southern railway from London Bridge had deposited him there, where Gull had said his private clinic was situated. He stepped out of the station