The Vorrh

Two dozen carpenters sawed and hammered day and night, building and re-building an equally restless architecture to keep her from the hungry ghosts that hunted the inheritor of the wealth of the man who invented the fast, long gun which emptied the plains and filled the skies and the earth with the guilty and the innocent. The ghosts would scratch at every door, even the false ones Sarah built to deviate their closure. She held séances every day. The labyrinthine structure shuddered with spirit rapping, the rich inlaid parquet floors sticky with ectoplasm and the blind stairs aching aloud. The ghosts and the carpenters only stopped when Sarah sat down to play the piano, alone, late at night. The echo notes found their way through all the twisted empty rooms, the wooden, serpentine corridors, the listening attics and towers.
    The altar that grew out of Table 6 also expanded. Prayer nails were beaten into it for expectation. Beads and bells, milk and bloods sang out, to call the ghosts home and weld them back into one solid man called Williams.
    * * *

    The man looked like God. A mane of unkempt white hair, a long, fearsome white beard, and wild smoke eyebrows cocked ragged over piercing, unforgiving eyes. A stern, knowing face which saw the world in a hard light with gauged contrasts. A Lear countenance that let nothing in or out without radical severity. He wanted to look like this – biblical, austere and imposing.
    He had explored the savage wilderness, going beyond his guide’s wisdom, cutting trees away from the untouched landscape to construct the view he desired, squeezing it into his compositional inverted frame, compiling the world in fierce light. He had been with dead and dying men, seen their eyes in his camera; he had slain one himself once, in cold civilian times, calling his emissary out from a party in the silver mine and into the fragrant landscape, cooling under the setting new moon.
    ‘Good evening, Major Larkyns,’ he had said to the man squinting in the doorway, trying to see who was speaking against the bright light. ‘My name is Muybridge, and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife.’
    He had levelled the pistol at the philanderer’s chest and fired. Quick blood coughed into the bright, moving leaves of that October dusk; the victim staggered through the house and died in the back garden, hugging a tree. Muybridge walked behind him, apologising to the players, whose hands were frozen in disbelief.
    But that was back in Calistoga, the old Wild East country of San Francisco. A year later, the murder charge was dropped: he was justified. He remained justified all his life, and even now, in his seventy-first year, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had broken the brain of his deceitful wife and spitefully rejected his son with the certainty of Abraham. He had posed as Abraham once, for the set of photographs that made him known throughout the civilised world – naked, wielding a pickaxe, with taut muscles and hard sinew, stern and unflinching in his sixtieth year.
    Now he stood erect at the centre of the great barn in his native Thames Valley. Five men and a horse waited, cold air streaming in at one end from the tall, open doors. They talked quietly, nodding to his instructions. One man led the horse outside, the others took up their positions in the delineated interior. The walls and the floor had been painted black, immaculately clean and precise. White lines were drawn into the controlled darkness in chalky paint, grid patterns that framed the space into a stiffened concept and held the smells of the farm at bay. When the generated light came, it scrubbed the rural out, a fizzing brightness that tightened the interior into a fiction. This was a reversal of California: the cameras inside, the bright sunlit action outside. In rainy England, all studio life was interior – he had come to prefer it that way.
    Her Majesty’s government had called him out of retirement for this day. They made him a physical negative of his previous studio, where he could photograph what he wanted without anybody knowing. They had dragged him out of his docile years for these images, built his equipment into the old barn, followed every instruction and requirement he had given. He even insisted on the colour of the horse.
    ‘It must be white, pure white,’ he had told them. ‘Preferably with a flowing mane.’
    Some of the government men had speculated, behind their hands, that