The Vorrh

flickering tongue tasting the molecules of his being. Several times, small, deer-like creatures calmly watched him pass without starting in the slightest. He was beginning to feel that he was continuously under surveillance, that the trees and their occupants were watching him; it made him feel safer, somehow, protected from afar.
    Several hours passed, and he stopped to rest, pulling the final chunk of hard, stale bread from his pack. He longed for something more substantial, remembering the dishes prepared for him in the secret basement so very long ago. The memory suddenly seemed so close to him, as though the aroma of cooked potatoes was wafting through the air at that precise moment. Then he realised: this was no mirage – he could smell food! Startled, he clambered to his feet and looked around. A few feet behind his resting place was another bowl, filled with steaming hot food. He laughed at it, astonished, then plucked the dish out of the grass and held it to his nose, savouring the luscious scent of potatoes cooked in a rich sauce and gladdened with sage.
    ‘Is there somebody here?’ he called out. No answer came back.
    He prodded the warm food and tasted his finger. Within minutes he had devoured every scrap. It was excellent, so similar to the dishes the Kin had made for him. Could they be there with him, in the dense foliage? The thought brought back a great and unexpected wave of emotion, one he had never allowed himself before, not since the day of their desertion. The delayed comprehension of his loss overpowered him, and he started to weep in the forest clearing, the warm, earthen bowl in his hand and the taste of his innocence in his mouth. He choked back the unexpected tears and called out again, this time with hope.
    ‘Who is here?!’
    Nothing came back, but he sensed a different kind of stirring in the undergrowth and span to face it.
    ‘Please, if anyone is there…!’
    Nothing met his ears but the sound of birds. For the first time, he thought about returning to the city. He had been foolish to believe that some remnant of the Kin might be here. If he had really wanted to find them, he would have done so before, in the house where they had lived, not in this twisted wilderness of plants and miracles. In frustration, he packed his meagre belongings and stalked deeper into the trees, watching the bends of the narrow path curl and curve with his changing moods.
    An hour later, he found another bowl of water, placed neatly and noticeably in the centre of his route, and he guessed they might be leading him safely towards the forest’s interior. He felt energised and protected, reassured that his path was cared for and significant. Again, he thought of the Kin skulking around him, the bright, dappled light camouflaging their shiny brown bodies with ocelot intensity.
    * * *

    ‘I am now working on making direct contact with that ferocious willpower, trying to set aside the starvation obsession, to cleave it from the unique determination it engenders. I am gaining remarkable results: it has been possible to map its mechanism in the brain and produce its exact responses under experimental rigour.’
    They were walking the corridor again, Gull finally keeping his hands to himself. He had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his breeches, as he strolled past the locked metal doors. There was something unstoppable about his confident posture.
    ‘There is one side effect, however, that does not make clinical sense,’ the doctor was saying. ‘There appears to develop a taint of violence in all I have treated or experimented with, as if there is some fundamental correlation between the activation of peripheral sight and the loosening of moral codes that keep us all in check.’
    Muybridge was about to ask a question, when the implication of the words hit home.
    ‘There is also some distortion of the libido,’ Gull continued. ‘The peripherscope and the Lark Mirror seem to call something wild out of otherwise docile patients; the continual application of the devices seems to heighten these effects in a cumulative manner. In fact, I have some more hypno-optical instruments that I would very much like you to see, while you’re here.’
    As he looked at Muybridge’s troubled and knotted face, which was again taking on the countenance of a vengeful God crossed with a scolded child, he was interrupted by a long, mournful wailing, a sound so unusual that it arrested all other sounds around it.