The Vorrh

phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.’
    Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness

PART ONE

“That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.”
    The hotel was ponderous, grand and encrusted with gloom. Its tall baroque rooms and corridors were grudgingly fortified by the vicious light that desperately tried to penetrate the heavy curtains and starched formalities. The Frenchman’s suites of rooms were the hotel’s finest, but drab and without the illusive flair which sometimes makes audacious architecture appear natural.
    He stood naked and shrivelled in the marble and glass bathroom, the last feeble surface scars on his neck and wrists throbbing red, the deep plucking of his other wrist stitched back together. The dose of barbiturates had done nothing and he was being mocked by flights of gilded putti and ignored by the wafting indifferent female figurines that shared the room. He stood with his cock in his hand, trying not to see his reflection in the gigantic mirror before him. He was small and prematurely old. The services of his hand were without effect and the purple veined stump was more fatigued than he was. He could summon no image to his service to enthrall and instigate the action, even though he had witnessed many and imagined more. He knew that Charlotte, his
maîtresse de convenance
, and his servant were waiting for him in the next room. He knew that the chauffeur might have brought him some fruit of the gutter or the docks to arouse him. He knew that they were as bored as he. He knew that he had invented everything in his and their lives and maybe elsewhere in the world. Sometimes he thought he had dreamt reality itself. Dreamt it outside of sleep, which now eluded him continually.
    The drugs sometimes coddled him into that place without his mind nagging on, but it was rare. The right combinations of doses refused to remain stable. The growing quantities of the shifting cocktails wrung him without the softness, the blur that he so craved. He made Charlotte write it all down. The quantities, the mixtures, the times. It must be there, concealed in the now concrete broth of unbeing. He liked the idea of being Dr Jekyll, experimenting with secret potions, when he remembered what it was like. He sometimes doubted Charlotte’s ability to keep accurate records. She could be making careless mistakes or lying about the doses. They were not working in the way he wanted. He had crossed words with her over the last few days. She claimed to be doing exactly as instructed, trying to calm him with her infuriating patience. But he knew she was tricking him with her cunning servant’s slyness. Some nights and most mornings found him on the floor, crawling on hands and knees, away or towards the thing that was strangling his heart. He had begun to sleep on the floor. The terror of falling off his shaking bed made him drag the mattress down there. He had found the medicine and the bathroom and stood again before the smirking mirror.
    Last night, there had been a carnival and fireworks outside. Music and gaiety had clawed at his upper windows. This morning it was wet outside. He could hear the grit and spent festivities being swept away in the quiet rain. A tinge of sulphur and nitrate in the clinging air.
    He raised his eyes to the mirror and smirked. Max Kinder was standing 4 in the gilded frame where the glass should be, naked and looking exactly like him again. He lifted his tired arm and Max mirrored it perfectly. This had been the comedian’s great invention: the live reflection. An act that would be copied throughout the century and beyond. He had often copied Kinder’s acts. The hopeless fop incapable of understanding how the world worked. His comic gestures of abrupt shock and dazed examination carved out the first continual comic character identity to grace the new flickering