The Vorrh

viewer’s subjective intelligence. Astoundingly, the effect was increased when the image was projected, rather than stained, onto paper.
    The twelfth generation zoopraxiscope was not like the rest. It was certainly not like the first four. He needed another name for it, the one that still scared him, yet he had never found it. No one would ever believe what it did, looking at its complex entanglement of lenses and shutters. They would expect more pretty pictures to dance on the wall, yet would meet instead a rippled light which sliced the optic nerve into a whip of driving visions…
    Muybridge was keen in his arrogance, sharp enough to know that such a statement, made publicly, would unbind his esteem and threaten his well-forged place in history. Those little minds that scratched at his achievements would make light work of his undoing, were they privy to such a discovery – but they would never be allowed to snatch away his triumph or his secret. He would let it seep out, after they were all rotted bones. Let others announce his genius, as Huxley had for Darwin, or as Ruskin had for Turner, men not yet born, men of the growing age who would recognise his enlightenment. He would save his strength and maybe live long enough to witness it. He had made the device, found the conclusion. But he had seen others of his age brought to the pillory in the last years of their lives, shredded and broken by their generosity, choked on the crumbs of wisdom they gave, too freely, to the mob. He had better things to roll into the future than explanation. He was too old to debate and be questioned. He was justified and right.
    So he had returned to England, to conceal his knowledge of the brass creature that engineered the invisible and to avoid the native curiosity and gawping interest of the Americans, which he had previously exploited so brilliantly. He wanted the surly indifference of England to hide in, to be unseen, even while apparent.
    A long time ago, what now seemed like hundreds of years, he had visited the Isle of Man, a derelict rock in the Irish sea between England and Ireland, ignored by both antagonistic islands. His parents had taken him there to see the peasants working the thick, dense earth and the violent, ragged sea, and to avoid the questions of a smouldering family horror at home. On a rare, blistering afternoon, without shadows or any other form of shade, he had been trusted to explore alone as they wandered the beach, and not to move from the place in which he winched and roamed without finding interest.
    In a shelter of cupped rock, nailed with white painted cottages to the cliff, he had met a fisherman. His boredom had been like bait to the old seaman, who was hiding his own endless tedium in the morbid actions of work. They had talked intermittently, dribbling sentences into the sand for each to watch without comment. The tide had receded and given a bellowing space to their breath, letting speech occur in salty bubbles. The highlight of the interaction had been in the contents of a battered pail of slopping brine, fetched by the fisherman and dramatically screwed into the sand for the boy’s attention. A clunking, pissing sound had come scratching from the bucket. The boy’s attention was instantly hooked. Walking over to look inside, he saw five crabs of various sizes, struggling against the limited water and the steep tin sides of their containment.
    ‘Are they trying to escape?’ stuttered the boy. ‘Trying to get out?’
    ‘Aye,’ nodded the fisherman, after a tobacco pause.
    ‘But why can’t they do it?’ asked the boy. ‘There are more of them than the water.’
    ‘They be Manx crabs,’ said the man. ‘See – every time one crawls up an’ nearly escapes, the others drag it back down.’
    The boy had recognised this, known it to be as true as the ocean, and he had been instantly grateful for an adult fact. He had known, even then, that he would use it all his life.
    The only time he had let it go was in his marriage, where overpowering love had happened twice and shaken his terse tree of knowledge to its roots.
    His young wife had strolled into the hard sinew of his single life like new blood, warming and radiating every part of his ordered existence, bringing a joy that he could not own, and for the first time had not wished to. The birth of his son had overwhelmed him with more feelings than he had been able to understand; a ball of life burned and writhed inside him whenever