The Vorrh

be heard where damage had occurred. It snarled in the locked lower floors and whispered perilously near the stairs above the ancient well. It droned in the attic, but remained ethereally quiet in the room with the cyclops’ empty bed. In the tower, it watched the occupant focusing on the moonlight, examining the dim glow from the miniature maze of the desolate streets. Ishmael was naked, goose pimples shifting over his pale body, as if offering an index, or a rarefied notation, to the observations of the table. His eye was very close to the surface; like a spoon, it glided among the streets.
    The dry storm could have reached the moon that night, such was its magnitude. But a stronger force was demanding its attention, and it billowed northwards, under the influence of a far greater, more dominant presence: it was being swallowed forever into the Vorrh.
    * * *

    On the other side of the world, he was following the doctor’s advice to the letter. He was so far removed from human society that he had almost died of starvation three times. A legend of this thin man’s endurance had begun to spread across the Great Plains, reaching as far as the Indian nations. Many such foolhardy explorers were scavenging this land, tipping themselves from famine-haunted homelands, from frozen pogroms and relentless oppression, to step into the burning sun and huge, endless spaces. They sought gold and silver, pelts and land. They had arrived to be reborn, and to take everything they could with their pale, bare hands.
    But he was very different. It was said that he was hunting stillness, and that instead of picks or shovels, guns or maps, he carried an empty box on his back, a box with a single eye which ate time. Some said he carried plates of glass to serve the stillness on. He would eat with a black cloth over his head, licking his plate clean in the dark.
    The Europeans and the Chinese gave him a wide berth. Such behaviour was unchristian and suspicious in these new lands, where anything might propagate and swell to dangerous consequences. The other whites said his box stole the souls of all he placed before it, but how could those who had no soul to begin with ever know? The natives were intrigued by the stories and wanted to see the hunter of quiet. He had found their sacred places and stayed close to them. He had not interfered with or desecrated their energy and power. He had sat with his box in their presence for many hours, sometimes days, and then silently moved on.
    He had found a race of humans that he could tolerate, and they welcomed him into many clans, even though he was a Lost One, a most-feared being in all small, tight societies. He was a man who survived outside the tribe and the family, a man turned loose and wild. But this one had understanding and silence and was dedicated to motionlessness; all qualities which the plain’s tribes cherished. He was allowed to photograph the great chiefs and their medicine men. Eventually, they would let him see and photograph the Ghost Dance. He sent back to England prints of lonely desolation, stunning landscapes of untouched, gigantic purity and pictures of powerful, noble men, who looked into the camera without seeing themselves. Many he sent back to the wise surgeon, to demonstrate his improvement and to reiterate his gratitude; his instinct told him that the man high in the Oriel window at London Bridge would understand.
    Muybridge began to feel himself healed; his growing confidence stood upright in the hollow lava beds of the flat plains of the Tule Lake. He turned his box on the Modoc War, shovelling up images of the vanquished lands and their shivering occupants. The enemy paid him well, so he became the official photographer for the U.S. Army; the stillness could wait while his plates were filled with the pumice of defeat and exile. At the end of it all, he gathered his new fame and his obsessively accumulated wages, and travelled back to the city lights and the crisp linen of San Francisco, to embark on the joys of marriage, parenthood and murder.
    * * *

    Ishmael had only Ghertrude to talk to now. Since their adventure together, Mutter had avoided him entirely; no matter how hard he tried to initiate conversation, the old man refused to be drawn. He barely made eye contact, and when he did it was baleful and suspicious. Ishmael thought it a dramatic and surly way to behave over such a small breaking of the rules. However, he would not be diverted by a servant’s