The Vorrh

of the house, not counting the cellars or the well, which were best ignored. Inside a tiny box-room, which at one time must have been used for servants, they found the stairway. Its carpentry was different from the rest of the house. It was tree-cut wood, still showing forms of branches and organic twists in its length. It suggested that the ladder had been grown, rather than constructed, conjured from the forest for a measured purpose. It was neat and strong, and led to a roughly painted hatch in the ceiling.
    Mutter lit the bullseye oil lamp and started up the stairs. His bulk made the wood creak as he pushed upwards, flipping the door inwards and lifting the light into the dark volume.
    ‘Please wait a moment, mistress,’ he said, and continued to climb until just his feet were visible, huge on the delicate ladder.
    Ghertrude was instantly reminded of the fearful giant following Jack down the beanstalk to terrorise his world. She suppressed a titter and looked up. ‘What can you see?’ she asked.
    ‘Not much,’ he answered.
    She climbed onto the ladder too, intending to ascend, but it objected noisily. She got a whiff of Mutter’s rear end, an aroma that was, essentially, peasant: root vegetables and meat, laced with hard work, tobacco and strong drink, all amplified by a distaste for bathing.
    She stepped back onto the solid floor and into more fragrant air, just as he disappeared into the groaning hole.
    ‘My God!’ he said, in a voice that rang with sympathetic resonance, like a child calling into a lute.
    ‘What?! What is it?’ she cried, hands once more holding the ladder, but this time with firmer intent.
    ‘You better come and see,’ he called.
    The immense attic ran the entire length of the house, with a dramatic, right-angled turn at the far end, suggesting its continuation over an adjoining property. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dry gloom and the resonance, which seemed to be tuning itself to her breathing.
    Mutter spoke with an unearthly, musical clarity. ‘Take care, the floor is covered in wires!’ The words transmuted into a fluttering choir of angels. If his harsh, guttural voice had been so cleansed and extended, what would she sound like?
    Then she saw the taut and gently glinting strings, in the light of their lamp. Spider yarns delineating the distance, causing it to resemble the open fields as seen from above. Nitre, she thought, lines of fungi glistening, but it hummed. Yet again, that impossible word leapt into her mouth. It had been ordained that she would forever question strangeness with strangeness in this unpredictable house. She breathed out the call.
    ‘WHAT!’
    It sang with a liquid vibrancy that coloured the space and made the blood dance in every quivering capillary. A tangible thrill rattled their bones and forced them both to grin like cats. When they drifted back to reality, the attic was ready to show them more.
    They saw limp lines of cord hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the strings. Boxes of iron balls and boxes of feathers were interspaced, placed close to the wall. The prone wires were listening to them, accosting and commenting on their movements and distorting Mutter’s whispers. The wires resonated with their every sound. Her word still sang in the air.
    There was a narrow path across the attic between the strings. Not a straight path, which would have made more sense to the fixed delineations, but a winding track that forced the tense wires to make a more random pattern, or perhaps it was the other way around. Like the rest of the house, there was no dust covering these mysteries. Ghertrude stopped to touch and admire the objects as she walked, in a dreamlike glaze, through the hollow room. Mutter was more cautious and thrust his hands deep into his tarry pockets. Then they saw the door, and knew, without words, that it would lead them to the tower.
    * * *

    The time that had vanished in the high room at London Bridge had been used to cleanse the wound in his head; he had no doubt of that. Gull and his peripherscope had cured a chasm in him, and he had returned to America a different man. It would be another three decades before he could thank the physician and offer his services in return; in the meantime, some part of him relished the prospect of that day, and he became dedicated to catching invisible time with his own device, so that they might share their notes as equals. Little did he know that their weighty conversation might