The Vorrh

action. It turned over and his speech began, recapturing the attention of his audience.
    Five minutes later, he got the nod from the projectionist and brought his dialogue to an end; the spotlight went out. The slides flickered into life; Athletes From the Palo Alto series; Men and Women in Motion. He looked back at Gull. He was gone, but two blurs remained in the darkness where he had been sitting. Muybridge strained his sight into the auditorium. The blots looked like eyes, made from smears of light. It rattled him and confused his next speech. He waved the projectionist on, not trusting himself to speak, wanting only to peer into the audience and make some sense of his sight. Women and Children; Running and Jumping with a Skipping Rope; Miss Larrigan Fancy Dancing. He stepped forward to observe the empty seat with greater certainty. They were still there, glaring back at him; amorphous balls of glowing intensity. Why did nobody seated see them there, floating so close? Was Gull playing tricks on him with his mind-mechanics, or was he imagining it? Had he become sick again? He searched every face nearby, but they were locked onto the figures on the screen that rattled past their measuring lines, their muscles and curves bracing against the stillness, the same old charge of strangeness echoing between the bodies and the time they were clad in.
    He felt the eyes even after they had gone, as afterimages, scorched into his retinas. He rubbed at his lids, turning the blurs into dark stains, so that when he opened them and looked at the illuminated screen he saw two dark, unfocused holes; pits, like Marey’s dug-out cameras of slowness. He rubbed them again, growing angrier at the irrelevance.
    He thought he saw something move at the back of the hall; a shadow that ducked down to avoid detection. Could it be? Was it Gull? There must be an intelligent solution; he would hold no truck with ghosts. The latecomer scratched a painful scramble to his feet, his bruised knee exacerbating the embarrassment of his mid-aisle tumble, none of which Muybridge’s blinded logic registered.
    Miss Larrigan danced on the screen, her costume made to resemble the garments of ancient Greek friezes and lofty temples. Its diaphanous nature displayed the elegance of her rhythmic dance and the sensual contours of her body. Projected to this size, it also clearly displayed her erect nipples and the shadow of her pubic mound; her nudity danced gigantically, out of the accepted space of the naked and into the highly charged arena of the erotic. Muybridge had not anticipated such an effect; his audience was noticeably taken aback.
    The fallen man at the back of the auditorium stood with his back to the screen, wholly unaware of the delightful vision playing out to his companions. His friend reached out to help him, and the fallen one let out a short chuckle, to show that he was perfectly alright; by some acoustic whim, the laugh carried and was heard everywhere. Muybridge spun towards the noise, peering down like a wrathful Jehovah.
    ‘Who dares to snigger? These are images of art and science, not brought here to titillate prurient minds! I have not slaved over their perfection so that they might be debased; I have crossed the Atlantic to demonstrate my technique to an educated audience, not to entertain an insolent rabble with the morals of a Turk!’
    There was a stunned silence. He looked at the empty seat again.
    ‘NEXT SLIDE!’ he bellowed at the cowering projectionist.
    At the end of his lecture he stalked off the stage, the audience over-clapping as a means of apology. Muybridge left the theatre to the sound of their applause. When he did not reappear, the claps gradually petered out and the crowd left in silence like hunched, mute sheep.
    When he had eventually cooled down, he vowed to never again give a public speech in England. It was clear that he was not appreciated in his homeland; he would return to America where they knew how to treat somebody of his worth. Before he left, he found out that Gull was indeed dead. What he had seen was obviously somebody playing an elaborate hoax in an attempt to undermine him and turn him into a laughing stock. He made another pledge to himself that he would only return when he was too old to work any longer, when his dignity demanded that his bones be laid to rest in sceptred soil. Only then would he let these wretches celebrate him properly and share in his genius.
    * * *

    ‘I have given flesh,