The Vorrh

no time at all, it seemed, to offer the converse point of view in her father’s affairs. The family home was at rest and off-guard. It was even rumoured, below stairs, that a man had entered her life, that she had finally found a suitor who could keep up with her copious expectations. Much smirking and giggling occurred at such a prospect, as the servants huddled around the kitchen’s circular table.
    Mutter did as he was told. Occasionally, she would send him downstairs to check on the lock and listen for movement behind the boarded-up room, but nothing was ever heard. Once, she crept down with him to double-check his reports. She smiled at the growing layers of dust and the firmness of the barriers. She detected nothing and was content. Her plan was working, and a regularity forming that created a pleasing rhythm of mundanity in the strange old house.
    The greatest surprise was how easily the cyclops had adapted to his new environment. He was calm and self-reflective, using the time alone to read books she had bought for him. He seemed to have forgotten, or at least disregarded, his time spent in that squalid hutch of a space under the house. He never mentioned the abominations that had imprisoned him. He had stopped calling them the Kin, after she explained how distasteful it was. He seemed content in his new home, and to be growing into his new role as an adult.
    It was in the fifth week that she noticed Ishmael was beginning to grow in more literal ways, stretching the cast-off clothing into a parody. By the seventh week, he had outgrown a second set of new clothes, which she had carefully picked out only days earlier. He was taller, his frame had gained bulk; he was eating the same food, albeit larger helpings, but that alone would not produce such a startling effect. She wondered if it was the room.
    She had seen something like it, years before, when they moved her pet goldfish from its small, glass globe into a much larger aquarium. She had been six years old at the time. So remarkable was the change in the small creature, as it ballooned to a size more relative to its expanded surroundings, that she had accused everybody within earshot of exchanging it for another animal. Even at that age, she had been unflinching in her certainty; no amount of explanation had been able to persuade her that it was a natural phenomenon, and she had held a smear of malice against the unidentifiable perpetrators of the conspiracy ever since. Now, for the first time, she had doubts. It was easy enough to replace a fish with a bigger, older specimen of the same kind, but to find another human cyclops? That would surely be impossible. So it must have been true: he was growing to fit the proportions of his new space.
    Unfortunately, it also coincided with a change of temperament. He started to become listless and morose, finding her visits less and less interesting. A flicker of seething was pulling the strings, manoeuvring his body in sullen, bored lurches. His eye was avoiding hers, purposefully. She knew these movements well – they had been a significant part of her vocabulary for many years, but nobody had ever dared to use them against her.
    It came to a head on the evening of a storm. She arrived later than usual, running up the stairs, shedding her soaking raincoat. He was waiting, his mood thickened and dark. She made little of it at first, busying herself with arrival, removing her wet hat and gloves, manipulating speed to slice through the tension he was broadcasting throughout the room. But this night it did not work.
    ‘Where have you been?’ he said, in a cracked and guttural voice, three octaves deeper than the one she knew. ‘Why have you been so long away?’
    The unmistakable emphasis was on ‘where’ and ‘why’, the words bitten into the air.
    ‘I’m sorry, the rain was very heavy and my class ran on so…’
    ‘YOUR class!’ he boomed. ‘YOUR class? I used to have classes! Now I just sit here, with nothing and nobody.’
    She was taken aback by the vehemence of this statement, the anger and sorrow strangling the space between them.
    ‘You say I must not think or talk about those who kept me before, you say they were unclean and dangerous. I SAY THEY CARED!’
    She noticed, through the coagulated light, that a red rash was forming around his neck, and his ears were burning scarlet.
    ‘I brought you books,’ she ventured, limply.
    This was enough for him to close in on her.
    ‘BOOKS ARE