The Vorrh
blindness, once rolled together, created a mechanism of appalling velocity, and that humans outside of imagination are best kept caged and regulated by severe controls. Never, in all the conflict and the infinity of wounds, had his love and enthusiasm for the firearms changed. Yes, these beautifully designed and crafted machines had only one purpose, but they did not breed it. He knew that their sole purpose, the taking of life, would have been operated anyway, even if the tools at hand had been sharpened sticks and heavy stones. Indeed, he had seen trench warfare move into hand-to-hand combat, where the bayonet was too distant a weapon, where handmade clubs and honed steel had hacked flesh apart in slippery, sightless fury. If men were to be butchered, then better it be done professionally, with a precise tool in skilled hands. With this dislocation as a balm, he could continue.
He had been unpacking a crate of Lee-Enfield rifles when he realised, to his surprise, that they were not reconditioned stock as expected, but a batch of gleaming new models in mint condition. In fact, none of the order had matched his paperwork at all. There were odd and unusual boxes in the shipment which were not mentioned elsewhere, and he had begun to feel a glowing excitement, the thrill of being gifted with all sorts of treasures in a place at the end of all caring.
He understood little of the local people. Their language was impenetrable, their ways oblique, and though their humanity was blatant from the beginning, all of their methods were questionable. But he had begun to be fascinated by the way they watched without looking, bemused by their laughter, which seemed disconnected to events, and intrigued by their shock at new objects and gestures. In fact, his curiosity was fusing him to them in direct proportion to the extent that he was becoming separated from all the other colonists of the outpost. He had not known this. His day-to-day work of demonstrating the weapons and organising target practice had consumed introspection and nullified his nagging doubts. It was only the incident with the girl and the angels that forced his dislocation and pinned him up against isolation and the threat of court martial.
* * *
The Dutch priest was a man of one gear: forward. A dauntless missionary, he had finished his church in a record two months. It was filled with the faithful every day, or at least what looked like the faithful. But on this day it sounded woefully empty as he stood outside, sheepishly peering into the moaning interior. A group of onlookers had started to form around the newly painted entrance steps and the abnormality could be heard by nearly the whole village.
‘Padre, what’s wrong?’ asked the first of the senior officers to arrive at the priest’s side.
‘It’s one of the women,’ he replied. ‘She has gone mad.’
The lieutenant pushed past the priest and opened the double doors to take control. The church still smelt of paint, its whiteness disorientating and off-key. In the aisle, halfway to the altar, a young woman knelt on the floor, surrounded by books, with one heavy foolscap tome open before her. She was naked and menstruating heavily. A low, inhuman groan rumbled constantly from deep inside her, the kind of sound that is heard at a distance, from the centre of a glacier, or lethally close, when it growls from the sleek, unseen darkness of a big cat.
The lieutenant looked back to the priest and understood his reticence. ‘It’s only a girl,’ he said, the greatest lie he could manage, because he too had begun to shrink back in fear. His testicles were sucked up into his pelvis and his hair was standing on end. Whatever was in the church was a girl only in the curves of its black surface: its essence and action were not from the known world. What was in the girl was altogether alien to a trained modern mind, and it was rewriting the rules of phenomena in a language that had an irremediable taste of pure terror.
A second officer and a group of onlookers had begun to bustle at the entrance of the church. The officer had a revolver in his hand already, and had pushed it through the door like a crucifix, ready to dominate anything into submission. He saw a blur that shivered. Its sound unbound him, made him want to flee. He smelt the fear of all those around him and his bladder started to weaken and leak. Pointing his shaking defence down the length of the aisle at the hideous black confusion, he
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