The Vorrh

politics and the church. She was modest in her skin, charming in her manner, with a tall, willowy vagueness, which mostly concealed the centre of her hunger. Her twenty-two years had been filled with kindness and education, but none of it had thawed her hurt at being born unknowing. She wanted to find out and possess all. Quickly.
    She had always hated being excluded. Not many dared to attempt it socially – her power was too far-reaching and influential to be toyed with. But most had tried to lock her out in more literal ways, with brass and iron puzzles that fooled their owners into trusting their blind servitude. From the age of seven, she had begun to understand their mechanics and principles and, with that realisation, what delicious power and satisfaction lay on the other side of their manipulation. She had gained access to all hours of the day and night. She had tiptoed in forbidden places. She had seen a royalty of secrets: her parents becoming the beast with two backs; treasures being hidden; the dead, rotting in conversation in the catacombs beneath her home. She had seen intrigue, incest, deceit, lies and pleasures, all closed to the assumption of sight.
    Now she stood in the elbow of the next building while the buffoon Mutter disappeared home. She waited a tantalising time, watching the street set into stillness, enjoying the restraint before she touched the door to see if her curiosity really had a menu. She walked quickly across the empty space and pushed the cold gate. It moved, heavy under her calfskin glove.
    Her joy spun and silently shrieked: this was forbidden and ecstatic. The house had been a great secret for all of her life, the only thing denied to a child who was given everything. No one in her family would talk about it.
    ‘Ah ja, the Kühler Brunnen House,’ they would say, and then change the subject. She had stared at it, glared at it and watched it in passing all the days of her life, from her pram to her womanhood. Something in it had tapped at her shell, stirring the wakening within. And now she had breached its outer wall, closing the gate behind her in protection from all vulgar intrusion.
    She lingered over the stables and the basic construction of the courtyard, drawing out her anticipation before approaching the entrance to the building. To her delight and surprise, the lock was simple, an old and well-known type, the kind she had been surreptitiously picking for years in her family’s homes. The door of this house would be no match for her skills, and she thrilled at the thought of devouring the secrets it had concealed for so long.
    She returned through the courtyard. Once back at the gate, she looked again at the lock and laughed, almost too loudly. This was the ridiculous contraption that had held her at bay for so long? She could have opened it years before. It had only taken Mutter’s pantomime of stupidity to give her permission and scrawl the ticket to her fulfilment.
    She shut and padlocked the gate and walked along the darkening street, humming her way home and savouring her strength and the sweet weakness of everything around her. There was no rush now; she already had the conclusion to the enigma firmly in her grasp. She would relish all the possibilities rather than leaping into the outcome; it would pay back all those years of frustrating exclusion. She now owned every imagined room.
    Six days later, when Mutter had again left, she entered the house.
    * * *

    For years, it was said that nobody had ever reached the centre of the Vorrh. Or, if they had, then they had never returned. Business expanded and flourished on its most southern outskirts, but nothing was known of its interior, except myth and fear. It was the mother of forests; ancient beyond language, older than every known species and, some said, propagator of them all, locked in its own system of evolution and climate.
    The banded foliage and vast trees that breathed its rich air offered much to humans, but could also devour a thousand of their little lives in a microsecond of their uninterrupted, unfathomable time. So vast was its acreage, it also made its demands of time, splitting the toiling sun into zones outside of normal calibration; a theoretical traveller, passing through its entire breadth on foot, would have to stop at its centre and wait at least a week for his soul to catch up. So dense was its breathing, it dented the surrounding climate. Swirling clouds interacted with its shadow. Its