The Vorrh

NOTHING! YOUR BOOKS ARE NOTHING!’ he bellowed, snatching one up and hurling it across the room. It hit the shuttered windows and ripped its spine, falling twisted and broken, like the game birds she had seen on her father’s estate. ‘I WAS TAUGHT BEFORE.’ A gulp of memory seemed to well up through the house to prompt him. ‘I was taught with care, taught with meaning,’ he said, choking on the ashes of his rage.
    An appalling silence telescoped the room into a reverse perspective, separating each of them to either end of its numbing distance. Mutter had long since crept away, preferring to keep a distance by busying himself with the crates downstairs. He wanted nothing to do with this drama, or with the emotions of the situation, keen only to get on with his work, uninterrupted. He left the house quietly, tiptoeing clumsily across the cobbled yard.
    Water dripped noiselessly from the fingertips of her discarded gloves, slipping off the table and onto the muted carpet. One page of the crumpled book turned in rictus, dreading to be seen in its last moments.
    Finally, she said, ‘I will teach you.’
    He grunted a sound that should have been a derisive snort of doubt, but with his new and unused voice sounded closer to a cough, laden with phlegm.
    The next day was still wet, but without the lashing horizontal wind which had come from the warm sea and driven the rain so relentlessly. Mutter remembered during breakfast that he should have collected another crate. The slab of bread lost its taste mid-mouthful, and he groaned through the melting butter. He decided to go back to the house immediately, when he knew she would not be there.
    Harnessing the horse to the two-wheeled carriage, he led it out of the stables and across to the double gates. While unlocking them, he took a cautious glance up to the third floor. He knew he would see nothing at the windows; he had fastened the shutters tight and padlocked them closed, as instructed. Even so, he could feel the straining thing expanding against the glass, wanting to wash its eye in the city.
    Forty minutes later, he had arrived at the warehouse on the other side of town. After climbing, achingly, down from the creaking carriage, he unlocked the padlock – bigger than his heart, and six times as heavy – and swung the gate inwards, pulling the horse inside. He entered the warehouse, dragging the empty crate behind him. He used to do this mechanically, enjoying the constancy of repletion. There were no questions, just an exchange of objects. Since the dramatic change at 4 Kühler Brunnen, he had dreaded meeting the master of the house. He would be seen as betraying his responsibility, that which his family had been given and conducted without doubt or deception for two generations. Had he damaged that beyond hope? Then he saw the blinding whiteness of an envelope, intersecting the path between the door and the crates, and he suspected that he had. He panicked. A letter, the rectangular diagram of his ignorance, little paper blades that had threatened him all of his life. He could not read, but it had never been a problem. His world of work and muscle, endurance and abeyance, had never required letters to direct it or describe its essential importance.
    He picked up the envelope, gingerly, so that its venom could not rise to touch him. He saw the spider ink trails of writing on its surface, and had no idea what to do.
    Then the voice said, ‘
Sigmund Mutter, you are a good man and we trust you
.’ Mutter gave a start and looked around bewilderedly, amazed and relieved at what he was hearing. It came from the entire warehouse, and yet it felt intimate, close by, somehow. ‘
The Mutter family has pleased us for years. Your father, you, and your sons, will always be trusted by us. All of your work and confidence is greatly valued. Take this letter to Mistress Tulp and say nothing of our conversation. You are protected and your family will endure
.’
    On his way back, Mutter sat as if in a dream. The ebony carriage flexed and curved through the streets, the wheels and the hooves talking through the reins to his cold hands. He stabled the horse and crossed to the house, holding the letter before him like a dead fish or a live centipede, at arm’s length. Entering the mansion, he came upon Ghertrude, fluttering aimlessly in the hall. She feigned disinterest at his arrival, until his changed manner intruded upon her senses. Looking up, she noticed his unpredictable