The Vorrh

massive transpiration sucked at the nearby city that fed from it, sipping from the lungs of its inhabitants and filling the skies with oxygen. It brought in storms and unparalleled shifts of weather. Sometimes it mimicked Europe, smuggling a fake winter for a week or two, dropping temperatures and making the city look and feel like its progenitor. Then it spun winds and heat to make the masonry crack after the tightness of the impossible frost.
    No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human – some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.
    The logging roads skirted its perimeter, allowing commerce to gingerly nibble at its unprotected edges. There were no commercial means of ingress or egress from its solid shadow, except for the train. The mindlessly straight track that ran towards its heart was laid, line by line, with the hunger for wood. As it grew forwards, it forgot its immediate past. The iron rail carried sleep in its miles of repetition.
    Most of the train that ran on it was composed of open platform and iron chain, built to receive the freshly cut trunks. But there were two passenger carriages, made for short and necessary visits, or for those whose curiosity outstripped their wisdom. There were also the slave carriers, basic boxes on wheels designed to carry the workforce into the forest’s interior. The slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.
    * * *

    The zoopraxiscope was defunct. It had been superseded, overtaken by other machines that defined movement and projected the gait of reality. But he had already given up that task in America. He and his brass hydra of lenses, cogs and light had already achieved that which was now being trivialised. No one had ever seen the new machine – it remained locked away in its haunted East London room.
    Returning to Kingston-upon-Thames after so many years and so many travels had been the natural thing to do. He had contacted what remained of his family and told them he needed help to grow old. ‘Uncle Eddie’ was a celebratory figure and a man of considerable affluence: they had, of course, said yes.
    He knew he would not develop the last machine. Its effect had been catastrophic – everything else that had brought him fame seemed like child’s play by comparison, and he had determined to take its secret to the grave.
    He had recognised, many years ago, what had been screaming at him from his archives of movement: his misdirection, up to that point, had been complete. The measured delineation that filled his life was a lie. Observation was
not
the primary function of photography, but a side effect of its true purpose. The constant gathering of pictures of life was only a harvesting of basic material. Deeper meaning lay within the next part of the process, a kernel waiting to give up its flavour after being savagely reworked: the camera was not a collector of light, but time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death.
    It could look between the seams of existence and sniff out an essence that was missed in the daily continuum. It fed on a spillage between worlds which was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modruc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala, and in some of the invalids who graced his movement porfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently to other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.
    There was an aura of non-visible vibration in his glass slides, an effect that shimmered in the emotional eye but not in reality. It somehow transferred to his prints, so that while they depicted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance which slivered alongside the