The Vorrh (50 page)

When all had left, the photographer stood adrift in the empty room, unable to make sense out of all that had occurred. There was no meaning in any of it, and he felt foolish and mistaken. God knows what he would find on his glass negative. He suspected there would be nothing but blurs and shadows, and that his cynicism would be justified.

In the red cave of his private darkroom, blood-warm fluids made his hands puffy and succulent. He peered into the night trays and saw patches of light rise up against the settling blacks. He moved them to a fixing tray and rocked them to and fro, simmering them into permanence.

He turned on the light to view the first picture. The image showed the whole group leaning towards the medium, whose out-of-focus head and body had been moving during the exposures. Her edges were undefined in relation to the sharp, delineated forms of the others in the weird room, but it was, in all other respects, a perfectly ordinary image.

The second picture was quite different. All the sitters had been caught in the flash powder, like victims in a blast. All showed agitation; the old woman and the horse-faced one stared directly at the camera, responding to his call of ‘NOW!’. Their eyes were blurred on the inside, and their whites gave off a disturbed incandescence as their faces gawped. Elder Thomas was caught staring stiffly away, looking straight at the medium. Madam Grezach herself was stock still and in focus. She had been speaking at the time and her expression was held in the vice of a twisted smile. He
shivered as he recalled her hocus-pocus about the dead child, suddenly noticing a difference in her face, a change of shape, as if a smaller face was being born through it, not violently, but with a rippled plumping. He was horrified by the notion, but could not deny the effect the flash had caught.

He dragged his eyes to the third print, another open shutter which held a room of blurs. He couldn’t recall any accidental movement, but he must have juddered the tripod or rattled the lens. The sitters and the table were smooth and softened, as if diluted and coming apart at their edges. He laid the print to one side, relief creeping in to cover his initial misgivings.

Then he looked at the last image. The light had not startled the party this time, but they had been upset by something else; he recalled the pitiful voice of the London street woman. They stared at the medium in distaste, the flash catching the repugnance in their postures and on their exposed faces. Madam Grezach looked straight through him and her expression made his blood run cold: it was no longer life and theatre that illuminated the medium’s face; her features and nuances of gesture had been stolen and replaced with facsimiles from another time. The magnesium burn had dredged out a decoy of rank terror, which in turn aimed its shivering sinews and pitiless hunger towards him.

He stepped back from the table of rectangular dishes in dismay. Had he really made a genuine psychic photograph? Had he achieved what others had only faked? With shaking hands, he lifted the wet paper out of the fluids and pinned them up to dry. They had already changed. The significant, unique transformations in the medium’s face had diminished; now it was only conjecture, a matter of interpretation and not fact. The images of Madam Grezach had become normal, blurred pictures of a normal, blurred woman. What had he seen before? Was he imagining things?

He collected the negatives and set them on a glass table with a light beneath them. Their reversed faces seemed skeletal and goat-like, but without any obvious signs of distortion. He became more perplexed: he
had obviously been wrongly influenced by a desire to achieve the images that Sarah Winchester had wanted; her perception must have clouded his defined eye for a brief moment. Indeed, that influence was probably the very heart of the whole meaningless business. The next day loomed in his confused mind; the presentation of the prints worried him. There was nothing to show, and his anxiety at that knowledge forced him to see the inconsistencies in the chemical waters, as if the solutions he sought lay at the bottom of a glass or in the centre of a spinning mirror. He switched off the lights and turned his back on the darkened room, making his way to bed with a desperate sense of having been undervalued again and, in some inexplicable way, tricked.

He slept badly, in a dream of being continuously awake. The pillows aggravated his rest; the sheets clung or slipped; his bladder was the only fact that ruled and divided the short night.

He rose far too early and snatched the dried prints from their stringy line, bustling them into an envelope and a leather satchel. He had not even fully dressed yet, and he roamed about with his lower half naked and ultimately flaccid. By nine o’clock, he was exhausted but did not dare sleep. The outside world was working, and it was time he joined it.

He washed and dressed for his meeting with the Winchester woman, preening disconsolately before his looking glass: if he must present his failure, at least he would do so with some dignity. It had been her idea, he mused in the endless carriage ride, to make these pictures in the first place; he had tried to explain to her from the beginning that it was not his usual subject. By the time he arrived, he had an entire speech prepared, about the true nature of photography and its urgent importance as a scientific instrument. He did not want to insult the old woman or her puerile beliefs; it might still be possible to get her to fund a real project, one worthy of his talents and skills.

He was ushered through the gloomy polished rooms, which seeped
resin from all the fresh wood but refused to shine, and into another reception room where she waited for him. To his horror, she was not alone: Elder Thomas stood by her side, his lank, dark seriousness absorbing the little brightness that the room possessed. He looked at Muybridge with a polite indifference, which the photographer suspected covered a seething contempt. Sarah’s eyes drifted from his nervous face to the satchel in his nervous hands.

‘Thank you for being so prompt, Mr. Muybridge,’ she said, generously ignoring the fact that he was forty minutes early. ‘I do hope your journey over here was not too tiresome.’

‘It is always a pleasure to call on you, ma’am, the distance is of no importance,’ he said.

‘As you can see, Elder Thomas is joining us today; he is as excited as I to see what you have achieved.’

This time, everybody present looked at the satchel. It was time for the speech.

‘Photography is seen by some to be an art and by others to be a science,’ he began. ‘I believe its future lies somewhere in between. With new cameras and developing processes, it will become possible to catch many of the wonders of nature and hold them for examination forever.’

‘Excellent,’ she interrupted, ‘I am so pleased to see that we are of such similar minds on the subject, that we can envisage the wonders of both worlds being brought together so.’ She flushed with an infant joy and he wilted in the blindness of it. ‘Please, may we now see the pictures you made?’

She extended her hand towards him. He had no choice and no more words, so he opened his satchel and brought out the envelope. Elder Thomas retrieved it from him and brought it swiftly to her side. She opened it and removed the prints, laying the images in her lap.

‘It’s not always possible… ’ he began to mutter, but was halted by the look on her face.

She turned the first print over to view the next image and her expression
deepened. The elder peered over her shoulder, his countenance beginning to reflect the same intensity.

‘The third print was more difficult to expose,’ said Muybridge to deaf ears.

As she looked from image to image, he was lost. He had no idea what she thought. It looked as though her face was shifting through amazement and shock, but certainly not into the disappointment he had expected. Her eyes were moist, and small sighs fluttered under her moving lips. Could this be rage, he wondered. She set the prints down in her lap and lifted her head.

‘Mr. Muybridge, I had no idea,’ she gently said. ‘I had hoped something might be possible, but this! I thought at first you seemed a little reticent, a little surprised by my request. Yet these!’ she said, touching the prints and leaving both hands folded over them. ‘These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents.’

Emotion swept over her again and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, mouthing a silent ‘thank you’ before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.

He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning. There was nothing there, just a few blurred, under-exposed fools sitting at a table. Could she have seen what he did before? Had she shared in the same dim delusion, or had she seen more?

He closed his empty satchel and made his way out to the hallway; he was met by the usher, who conducted him to the street. The door shut firmly behind him. A breeze had picked up and rattled the new buds on the trees. Spring was early, and the old energy of the land flowed back
into the newly made streets. The green scent of optimism roamed abroad, and he stood on the porch, seeing it with a magnificent clarity. In his heart, another autumn was stirring.

* * *

Marie assumed Maclish’s extended absence was merely a continuation of his increasingly erratic behaviour. She considered for a moment that it was the regret and shame of what had happened on the night of the dinner that kept him away. But that theory did not swill around her experienced mind for long.

She savoured the unexpected solitude, enjoying the quiet space, free for the first time of masculine posture and strut, of those endless noises that men make to convince themselves and others of the necessity and toil of their presence.

She sat and thought about the future of their child. She would be a good mother; she would keep the child safe from any excesses of clumsy love or dictating attitude that her husband might bring to its infancy. She still hoped that he would make a good father, even through all her nagging misgivings. Wasn’t he showing eagerness towards the birth? He had tried to be supportive before, when the last child was stillborn. Hadn’t he even let Dr. Hoffman examine the poor wee thing to understand what had gone wrong? She convinced herself that William would change when their family began to grow. After all, they were stronger now: money was being saved; the house and the job were secure; he was becoming a man of consequence.

She lit a lamp in the kitchen against the growing night and started to prepare food. It was a notably dark night, with only a curved rind of moon to light the way of any late visitor to their home. Her eyes were
continually drawn to the window, expecting to see him walking down the hill at any moment, his form silhouetted against the glow of the slave house and its reflection on the chain-link fence. Then it dawned on her why the gloom was so unusually impenetrable: the slave house emanated darkness. Its humped shadow was entirely black. An iced apprehension infiltrated the warmth of her blood. She opened the back door and stepped nervously through it, into the night. The yard was unnaturally still; the quiet held the loneliness of cooling embers. She returned to the safety of her home and locked the door, a shiver escorting her around the room until the air was stirred by her bustling, and the house had stopped holding its breath.

The next morning, the Chinese cook found the slave house empty; the night guard was gone, and a chair had been turned over. Apart from that, the prison felt unused, as if no one had ever lived in it. They found the cold train later that day, but an extensive investigation revealed no trace of Maclish or the Limboia: they had vanished into the whispering trees.

The Timber Guild immediately started a search; one of their representatives was sent to inform Mrs. Maclish. The man would later report that Marie Maclish had seemed taken aback at first but, as he had delicately reassured her that she would not be left alone to struggle, should something untoward have happened to her husband, she had seemed to become less worried, a little euphoric even. He would put it down to shock, and explain that the poor woman was undoubtedly grievously disturbed by the news of her husband’s disappearance.

They searched for a week but found nothing; they contemplated extending the search area, but were unwilling to delve any deeper into the forest. In addition to the loss of their best foreman, there was the more pressing problem of finding another workforce as quickly as possible. Many business empires and livelihoods were utterly dependent on the company’s
constant supply of forest timber; the panic of commerce far outweighed the concerns of a lost employee and his tribe of soulless heathens.

But when Hoffman went missing the rumours began to squawk and fly. His working relationship with Maclish was well known, but unclear. Also, for years there had been complaints and rumours attached to the eminent physician’s conduct. These had been brushed under the carpet or paid off, while the larger chunks of accusation had been crushed by threat. All began to surface in his absence.

When officers of the Civic Guard started to look into the doctor’s affairs and lift some of the more conspicuous stones and lumpier carpets, a scree of innuendo came loose and tumbled onto his reputation. They searched his house and laboratory, discovering more facts than rumours, stopping midway to seal the rooms and leave with grey complexions. Pathologists from foreign cities were brought in to continue the search; the findings were never publicly announced. The Timber Guild absorbed the wrongs of its own, even when they revealed malpractice, illegal experimentation and crime. All was stifled and kennelled, patted quiet by wads of money or choke-chained by itinerant accident; perfect erasure by perfect symmetry.

* * *

The ancient black hand shone in the flickering light of the small campfire, its tattoos of spirals and sun-wheels spinning as it passed through the circular clearing of the forest. It moved past the two men sitting close to the flames, and whispered in the dancing shadows, stroking the cheek of its grandson before vanishing out of the circle and into the night.