His young wife had strolled into the hard sinew of his single life like new blood, warming and radiating every part of his ordered existence, bringing a joy that he could not own, and for the first time had not wished to. The birth of his son had overwhelmed him with more feelings than he had been able to understand; a ball of life burned and writhed inside him whenever he held the child in his bony hands. But they had been diversions – things that were never meant to last, moments of deception to rob him of purpose. Now his bitch wife was dead, the bastard child given to a home, and he was free once more. Free to continue, and to never again allow such treacherous emotions to poison his will. When friends tried to update him on the growing child, or on the striking resemblance to him which it had apparently begun to bear, he had cut them dead, severed them from his righteous mind. He moved home again and again, wandered into the deserts and high mountains without a whiff of Christ or Satan as companions. He had never looked back.
The Frenchman was the only modern being to have explored the Vorrh, to enter its interior and scribble down some of its detail. The only one – and all his perilous journey had been fiction. What better way was there to trespass on the sacred and the forbidden?
He had, of course, read or held the weight of every volume related to its existence. He had absorbed all the obscure and fantastic accounts of travellers who had returned by the skin of their teeth, having been hunted by the anthropophagi, the Artabatitai, the dog-headed Hemikunes, and all manner of fabulous denizens, representative of every forest in the world, which had been sucked into the mythical whirlpool of the Vorrh. He knew of the saviour of the forest, the fabled Black Man of Many Faces, and saw in it another reworking of the Green Man of Europe; he owned copies and private translations of Euthymenes the Massilian, and late medieval renditions of Scylax of Caryanda; he had marvelled at the tall tales of Sir John Mandeville, stories of the horrors and wonders to be found in the uncharted depth of unknown lands. He had ploughed through the works of Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, even tried to find the famous mummies that had been bought by René Caillié and shipped, on a torturous route through Timbuktu, back to France, where over the latter years of forgetfulness they had become ‘misplaced’. He had read all the fact and all the fiction and, in later days of need and intrigue, he had created his own version, cut out of the jungles of all the other words, their slippery shadows of meaning translated into a rich weft of description. He had re-seen each moment and the backdrop of the eternal, savage forest. His writing had given it life, with all the detail of its population.
Years before, he, Charlotte and the reluctant chauffeur had driven into Essenwald, through the outskirts of mud and rushes to its fired foundations of imported German dogma. Their huge car heaved and jolted on the deeply rutted road. It was the first ever motor caravan, a grandiose collision of baroque parlour and expensive, petrol-driven truck, which he had invented specifically for long distance travel. During the day, the three travellers would be separated, each sweating in a different compartment of the vehicle, the varnished dark brown interiors sweltering in the buckling heat. The chauffeur was forced to wear his uniform at all times, even in the blistering temperatures. Only at night would his nakedness be tolerated and his name allowed.
The Frenchman had ordered the car to stop when he first smelt the blood. They’d been passing through the outskirts of the city, swerving and bumping towards its stony European heart. A shrine tower, one of the many tall, red buildings with wound-like windows, had given off a pungent aroma, its dried-mud surface still showing the prints of the hands that had made it. Goats had been slaughtered there each day for centuries, and one side of the tower was saturated black with blood and milk. He stepped out of the car into the blinding sunlight, the dust still spinning in circles around the stationary wheels.
In this part of the fabled city, the streets were immaculate in their filth. Taking a pair of bone spectacles from their sealskin case, he arranged them over his eyes; the slits narrowed his vision and gated the sun. They had come from Greenland, purchased from a recent explorer of that frozen, barren place.
He was the most ridiculous of travellers, brilliantly prepared for all events, so long as they never happened. His handmade shoes were instantly discoloured by the red earth, as was his cream suit. He stood and glared at the tower, waiting to be noticed by the throng of local passers-by. They had seen him, the little man stamping in the ground of arrival, but they were much more interested in his vast, grunting cart, enclosed on all sides. They slowed their pace and drifted towards its metal body, some daring to touch it on its blind side. Soon, the Frenchman would meet the young man who was to become the most significant person in his overcast life, but for that moment the crowd was pressed against the car’s windows, trying to glimpse the interior. The woman inside gripped her small clutch bag. Hiding in the perfumed darkness was her silver Derringer, a palm-sized pistol of American origin; it sat like a bright comma in the umbered pouch. It was made to fit snugly in the hand when discharged. It was blunt and inaccurate, but delivered a lethal slap at short range. The Frenchman had never had any feelings of masculine protection for the fairer sex, even the few he had tolerated and liked. He and his paid companion had been locked in a crude democracy forged from selfishness, desire and humiliation.
Turning his back on the angry chauffeur and the twitching woman, he walked towards the tower in the open street.
‘Which is your way father, are you lost?’ A young man had stepped out of the sun, the halo of his head blasted by brightness. ‘Where is your way?’ he asked again, in a French that reflected the rippling mirage of sand that surrounded them.
He stared at the young man, speechless as his face came into focus. There was a resonance in his tone that had stirred a place yet unravelled, but nonetheless known, in his scarred heart. In a voice that was eerily subdued, he told the young black man that he was here to see the Vorrh, to gaze on the fabled forest.
The man’s eager smile broadened, and he looked out over the dust and the Frenchman’s shoulder. He pointed a tattooed finger towards the horizon. The Frenchman turned quickly to follow his direction, to look through the crumbling gap between the rows of buildings, where a dark curtain closed off the most northern aspect of the city with shadow and solid contrast. The redness of earth, animals, plants and buildings ended at its massive edge.
Its suddenness instantly reminded him of a stage set and returned him to the opera he had seen as a child. Vivid and overwhelming, its story had been indistinct, its music brash and bellowing. But its set had transfixed him, a forest of painted darkness stretched across the stage, blindingly artificial, its leaves, roots and hanging tendrils filling his hungry imagination with a longing that had gnawed at all other realities with an unrelenting insistence – the same scene would pass through the last millisecond of his life, as he lay, seeded in oxygen, choking for absorption in the tiled indifference of a hotel bathroom.
That was only the second time he had been to the theatre, though his mother had often told him of it. She would come to say goodnight while he was in the bath, his nanny stopping, mid-sponge, to stand back in admiration while the apparition wafted in. She was always dazzling, in her society gowns and gleaming jewellery. She would tell him of the theatres and balls she was going to; of ballet and the opera; their stories of princesses and kings, demons, maidens, magic and spells. Sometimes she would touch his back or arm with her silken gloves, sending a shiver through his damp, excited body. But she never stayed, and the nanny was always left to dry his cooling hope and dress it for sleep. His mother’s perfume stayed in his heart for hours afterwards.