The Vorrh

the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, mouthing a silent ‘thank you’ before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
    He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning. There was nothing there, just a few blurred, under-exposed fools sitting at a table. Could she have seen what he did before? Had she shared in the same dim delusion, or had she seen more?
    He closed his empty satchel and made his way out to the hallway; he was met by the usher, who conducted him to the street. The door shut firmly behind him. A breeze had picked up and rattled the new buds on the trees. Spring was early, and the old energy of the land flowed back into the newly made streets. The green scent of optimism roamed abroad, and he stood on the porch, seeing it with a magnificent clarity. In his heart, another autumn was stirring.
    * * *

    Marie assumed Maclish’s extended absence was merely a continuation of his increasingly erratic behaviour. She considered for a moment that it was the regret and shame of what had happened on the night of the dinner that kept him away. But that theory did not swill around her experienced mind for long.
    She savoured the unexpected solitude, enjoying the quiet space, free for the first time of masculine posture and strut, of those endless noises that men make to convince themselves and others of the necessity and toil of their presence.
    She sat and thought about the future of their child. She would be a good mother; she would keep the child safe from any excesses of clumsy love or dictating attitude that her husband might bring to its infancy. She still hoped that he would make a good father, even through all her nagging misgivings. Wasn’t he showing eagerness towards the birth? He had tried to be supportive before, when the last child was stillborn. Hadn’t he even let Dr. Hoffman examine the poor wee thing to understand what had gone wrong? She convinced herself that William would change when their family began to grow. After all, they were stronger now: money was being saved; the house and the job were secure; he was becoming a man of consequence.
    She lit a lamp in the kitchen against the growing night and started to prepare food. It was a notably dark night, with only a curved rind of moon to light the way of any late visitor to their home. Her eyes were continually drawn to the window, expecting to see him walking down the hill at any moment, his form silhouetted against the glow of the slave house and its reflection on the chain-link fence. Then it dawned on her why the gloom was so unusually impenetrable: the slave house emanated darkness. Its humped shadow was entirely black. An iced apprehension infiltrated the warmth of her blood. She opened the back door and stepped nervously through it, into the night. The yard was unnaturally still; the quiet held the loneliness of cooling embers. She returned to the safety of her home and locked the door, a shiver escorting her around the room until the air was stirred by her bustling, and the house had stopped holding its breath.
    The next morning, the Chinese cook found the slave house empty; the night guard was gone, and a chair had been turned over. Apart from that, the prison felt unused, as if no one had ever lived in it. They found the cold train later that day, but an extensive investigation revealed no trace of Maclish or the Limboia: they had vanished into the whispering trees.
    The Timber Guild immediately started a search; one of their representatives was sent to inform Mrs. Maclish. The man would later report that Marie Maclish had seemed taken aback at first but, as he had delicately reassured her that she would not be left alone to struggle, should something untoward have happened to her husband, she had seemed to become less worried, a little euphoric even. He would put it down to shock, and explain that the poor woman was undoubtedly grievously disturbed by the news of her husband’s disappearance.
    They searched for a week but found nothing; they contemplated extending the search area, but were unwilling to delve any deeper into the forest. In addition to the loss of their best foreman, there was the