The Vorrh

Muybridge, his own thoughts disturbed, recognised it as a savage animal, exotic and lethal; he had heard such things before, and instantly knew it was not native to these shores. On his extensive travels, he had heard the calls of many such feral beasts – perhaps these bolted corridors really did contain a zoo?
    Again it sung out, and this time he caught the tincture of its humanity. He had taught himself to listen carefully to many peculiar tongues, to hear and trust his instinct to decode their meaning. This one had the same extreme edges he had heard in the mountain tribes of Guatemala, or the Eskimo shudders of the high Alaskan plains; the songs of the nomads of the fallen land bridges to Greenland and the North Pole. It was totally out of place.
    ‘Ah, this will interest you!’ Gull pointed to the source of the eerie noise and Crane knocked on the metal door. A few moments later, it was opened by a small, bald man wearing a white apron and stiff, red gutta-percha gloves.
    ‘Good day, Sir William. She is restless again.’
    ‘Good morning, Rice. Let’s have a look at her, shall we?’
    The howling stopped when she saw Gull. Her huge eyes widened and she covered them with her ornate, scarred hands. She had luminous black skin, which had been polished into blues and purples by the smooth, uninterrupted breeding of thousands of years. She was slight, but not emaciated like the others, and had a head of statuesque beauty, more horizontal than vertical, like a long lozenge of graceful stone balanced midway on the poised, slender plinth of her neck. Muybridge had seen and met Negroes in America, had seen their plight and their strength. But she was quite a different species.
    ‘Allow me to introduce you to Abungu. We call her Josephine here. Josephine, this is Mr. Muybridge. He is the man who made the picture you so love.’
    She put her hands down and looked into the photographer’s mystified face.
    ‘Show him what you have done with it!’
    Crane grabbed at her clothing, trying to pull her into action.
    ‘Leave her Crane, she will do it herself.’
    Josephine crossed the room, leaving a trail of water, which seemed to be coming from her underskirts. The men pretended not to notice. She went to a small trunk that had been painted the same colour as the cream cell. She opened it and stood aside; it was full of neatly stacked pieces of paper, all the same size, and all with one rough edge, as if they had been torn from notebooks. The men crossed the room to the trunk and its owner.
    ‘Show him, Josephine,’ encouraged Gull. She dipped down to retrieve the top sheet and lifted it in front of Muybridge.
    ‘Take it!’ said the doctor, using much the same tone as he had with the black woman. Muybridge felt he should say something about being patronised in such a way, but curiosity reigned and he followed the command. He glanced at what he was holding, then looked again in surprise: it was a perfect copy of his print,
Phases of the Eclipse of the Sun
. Staring at it more closely, he saw that it was not a photographic print at all, but a drawing made on paper with black ink, identical to the one he had left with Gull years before. Only the five lines of text, which explained its provenance and gave the times of the exposures, had been left out. Each drawing had a hastily scratched ‘A’ in its corner: her signature. Every ‘A’ missed its middle, joining stroke, so that it appeared closer to an inverted ‘V’.
    Muybridge looked from Gull, who was stroking his jaw and partially concealing a smile, to the sleek radiance of the woman, whose huge eyes looked right through him, then back at the box full of paper.
    ‘Go ahead, help yourself. She won’t mind,’ said Gull.
    He picked up a small wad of paper and examined it. Each image was exactly the same. She had made hundreds of copies of his picture, all signed the same way. Gull saw the question and answered it before it became sound.
    ‘Josephine is remarkable. She constantly surprises us. I once showed her your picture. She could not have looked at it for more than a minute. Some weeks later, after a session with one of my new instruments, she was given some paper, pens, pencils and ink. She is allowed those, she is one of our passive patients, the only one not showing the disturbing side effects I told you of before. Anyway, she sat down and started making these copies. From the first to the last, they have all been precisely the same. If I gave her