The Vorrh

been involved in a street altercation, in which an ageing doxy had received permanent damage to her saturated brain. She knew that Ghertrude and the man lived at 4 Kühler Brunnen, and that he had never been outside in public. She could not be sure, but suspected that the Tulp girl held some power over him; that she imprisoned him there, her prize, her possession, which she bitterly hoarded.
    She stood before the double gate, magnificent in her knowledge and the certain triumph of her discovery. Taking a quick, deep breath through her feline nostrils, she stepped forward and hammered on the shaking wood.
    In her heart, she felt sure that he would open the door to her love; that she would see him, beautiful and beaming, moved by her persistence in finding him. As the scene played in her mind, she saw Ghertrude unlock the great secret and give in to her overpowering enquiry and rightful passion. What she did not expect was the hump and shuffle of Mutter, whose sour response did not even seem to recognise her grandeur.
    ‘Is your master at home?’ she asked, unprepared for the sound and need of her stilted formality.
    Mutter gawped at her through bleary eyes. He removed the dead cigar stub from his wet mouth and said, ‘I have none here!’
    She jittered slightly. ‘Your mistress then?’
    ‘Out!’ he said, as he started to shut the gate.
    ‘Where is he?’ she demanded, her hand against the gate, equalising Mutter’s pressure from the other side.
    ‘Who?’ he said, genuinely unaware of who she meant.
    ‘The man,’ she said softly, through a nervous smile. ‘The mysterious young man who lives here.’
    There was a long pause while Mutter came to, looking into her working, expectant eyes. ‘Gone,’ he said, ‘he’s gone. The monster has left.’ And with that, he shoved the gate shut.



PART TWO

‘Listen to me. The worlds swarm with an infinity of creatures. Those we see, those we never see: Naga snakes, who live in the depths of the earth. Rakshasas, monsters of the forest’s night, who live off human flesh. Gandavas, frail creatures who glide between us and the sky. Apsovahs, Danavas, Yakshas and the long glittering chain of gods, who live like all beings in the shadow of death.’
    The Mahabharata
‘So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’
    Genesis 3:24
    Dawn, like the first time. The lead-grey clouds are armoured hands with the weak sun moist and limp inside them. The night still sits in the high branches, huge and muscular, rain and dew dripping to the pungent floor. It is the hour when night’s memory goes, and with it the gravity that keeps its shawl spun over everything in the forest. The crescent-eyed hunters sense the shift, feeling the glory of darkness being leeched and, ultimately, robbed of its purity. The vulgar gate of day gives no quarter, and its insistent brightness will tell lies about all, forcing the subtlety back into the interiors of trees and the other side of the sky.
    The brightness lets the humans out and all those who are like them, as well as those who walk in their stead. The trees breathe and accept it all again. Unnatural greens cuckoo the sensible blacks, where all the great forests live. Men, and other, weaker beasts, grow in confidence and dare to believe that the place is theirs. For a few hours they stride and hack at the rim, shouting to match the sunlight. Twilight will soon shush them away and return the forest to its true condition. The sap still rises in the dark; the sun’s pump sucks in the veins, long after the fire is hidden. It is this squeezing, from root to leaf, that finds sympathy in the stenotic memory of men. It is this force field, like magnetism or pressure, that influences all similar structures inside it. The effect on modern men could be explained thus, the persistent rumours of sub-species, living comfortably inside the rings of trees, could find a foothold.
    Herodotus and Sir John Mandeville had already written of the unthinkable: ‘
the anthropophagi
’ and
‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders
.’ Beings such as they would thrive in this environment, where evolution was robbed of memory, hope and purpose, and distortion was not ironed out by the Darwinian uniformity of blind greed.
    * * *

    They stood on the platform. It was painted grey. It had always been painted grey. The layers of its skins