The Vorrh

them, he heard voices calling out to him:
    ‘You’re late friend, there’s nothing to hide now; the hour has sounded!’
    He ignored the two men and the woman, who had turned into the road from a narrow alley, just ahead of him.
    ‘Did you hear me?’ barked the taller man, stepping away from the other two, who seemed to be propping one another up, interlocking against inevitability. ‘I said take it off, show yourself!’
    He stood in Ishmael’s way, but the cyclops was quick and deftly stepped around the big man, who was dressed as a penguin. His movement incensed the man, who shouted a warning to his friends. Ishmael was caught between them when the first man turned, growling. ‘What gives you the right?’ he spat. ‘Better than us, eh?’
    Ishmael leapt, but the second man stuck a foot out into his stride and he tripped badly, falling into the leaves and hard cobblestones and banging his knee and the side of his head with great force. Some of the paste jewellery he was wearing broke in the fall and lay strewn across the gutter. The big man was laughing as he dragged him up onto his good knee and tore away his mask; a string of fake emeralds, with which he had been garlanded, snapped and spluttered down, skidding into hiding in the cracks of the murky road.
    ‘That’s better.’ he leered. ‘Now you’re one of us.’ Then his eyes focused on what he was so firmly gripping. He let go instantly, his fingers splaying out, as if he had been scolded or electrocuted. Ishmael remembered a sound the Kin had sometimes made, and he screamed it out across his rolling tongue. Both men ran, leaving the woman to slide down the wall. She had not seen his face when she hit the pavement. On impact, her yelp turned into giggles.
    ‘Now you havta carry me!’ she squealed.
    He bent down close to her face and grinned with the exaggerated gusto of a demon prince. She looked up at point-blank range and screamed. He punched her over into the gutter and kicked her in the head until his shoe broke and she had stopped crying out. She lay, quietly sobbing, as he limped away, calculating a safer route home. He picked up his crushed muzzle and skull cap from where the coward had dropped it, and refitted it back onto his face. Most of its whiskers had fallen out, and its damaged length now gave him a new comic appearance, not unlike toys that become misshapen by too much love; squeezed and hugged into character, remodelled by the damp affections of their owners until they are abandoned.
    He had found his way eventually and hobbled back, bruised, wet and tired, with a rising feeling of nausea. The day was distilling his triumphs of the nights and converting his prowess and conquests into a hollow gruel of cold disgust. He desperately wanted a hot bath and a long, dreamless sleep, so that he might unwind himself from all those sticky, desperate bodies that had embalmed his light with the thickness of their embraces. He wanted to remove every last atom of the tastes and scents, which he had so recently cherished; to comb out all their rotted sighs and smiles, and never touch a human being again.
    It was three days before he would speak, locking himself away in his rooms and refusing to acknowledge Ghertrude’s pleas. On the fourth day, when she let herself into the house, she heard the music. She followed its source, climbing the stairs as she listened, spellbound by its eerie resonance. By the time she reached the attic, its volume and complexity had increased. The Goedhart Device had been tuned and set in motion. The lead balls with their attached quills had been tied to the ends of the cords that hung down vertically from the ceiling. They swung in long, pendulum arcs, each of the feathers strumming one of the horizontal piano wires with every passing, sending the shivering strands of metal into melodic voice. Thirty or so such strings played in the dusk, each of a different length and pitch. Plucked harmonies echoed back and forth; the light from the open window shimmered on the pendulums’ movements. Everything sang.
    Ishmael sat in the far corner, his back against the wall, hands folded in his lap. Ghertrude found her place and also sat; she knew better than to attempt to open a conversation now. Over the next hour, the pendulums lost their momentum, the pulses changing and the volume dropping, each feather only lightly scraping against the strings, eventually coming to a rest against them. Towards the end, their hearing