She stepped back onto the solid floor and into more fragrant air, just as he disappeared into the groaning hole.
‘My God!’ he said, in a voice that rang with sympathetic resonance, like a child calling into a lute.
‘What?! What is it?’ she cried, hands once more holding the ladder, but this time with firmer intent.
‘You better come and see,’ he called.
The immense attic ran the entire length of the house, with a dramatic, right-angled turn at the far end, suggesting its continuation over an adjoining property. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dry gloom and the resonance, which seemed to be tuning itself to her breathing.
Mutter spoke with an unearthly, musical clarity. ‘Take care, the floor is covered in wires!’ The words transmuted into a fluttering choir of angels. If his harsh, guttural voice had been so cleansed and extended, what would she sound like?
Then she saw the taut and gently glinting strings, in the light of their lamp. Spider yarns delineating the distance, causing it to resemble the open fields as seen from above. Nitre, she thought, lines of fungi glistening, but it hummed. Yet again, that impossible word leapt into her mouth. It had been ordained that she would forever question strangeness with strangeness in this unpredictable house. She breathed out the call.
‘WHAT!’
It sang with a liquid vibrancy that coloured the space and made the blood dance in every quivering capillary. A tangible thrill rattled their bones and forced them both to grin like cats. When they drifted back to reality, the attic was ready to show them more.
They saw limp lines of cord hanging from the ceiling, almost touching the strings. Boxes of iron balls and boxes of feathers were interspaced, placed close to the wall. The prone wires were listening to them, accosting and commenting on their movements and distorting Mutter’s whispers. The wires resonated with their every sound. Her word still sang in the air.
There was a narrow path across the attic between the strings. Not a straight path, which would have made more sense to the fixed delineations, but a winding track that forced the tense wires to make a more random pattern, or perhaps it was the other way around. Like the rest of the house, there was no dust covering these mysteries. Ghertrude stopped to touch and admire the objects as she walked, in a dreamlike glaze, through the hollow room. Mutter was more cautious and thrust his hands deep into his tarry pockets. Then they saw the door, and knew, without words, that it would lead them to the tower.
The time that had vanished in the high room at London Bridge had been used to cleanse the wound in his head; he had no doubt of that. Gull and his peripherscope had cured a chasm in him, and he had returned to America a different man. It would be another three decades before he could thank the physician and offer his services in return; in the meantime, some part of him relished the prospect of that day, and he became dedicated to catching invisible time with his own device, so that they might share their notes as equals. Little did he know that their weighty conversation might be stolen by the machine itself.
For now, the wilderness called to him, and he would become lost in its magnitude. He would head north into the Yukon, then west to roam the open plains; he would suck their essence into hand-ground lenses and encapsulate their magnificent bleakness into paper that had been eclipsed under his strengthening hands.
He knew this because he had already seen it all, in the space where the pain used to live, projected brighter than life itself. Held in a place between sleep and waking, and contained by the sides of his vision. The only disadvantage was that he sometimes shared this space with something else, something akin to an ominous, rising moon. That was why he now stood on the deck, gazing at the real moon, high above the black waves. Away from the public lighting of the ship, he opened Gull’s crumpled envelope again, in the white incandescence. The surgeon had known of this afterimage and how its blur might haunt his future clarity.
What you will see is the afterburn of my investigation and suggestive treatment. It will manifest as an absence in your mind, a glowing hollow that will sometimes disturb you, but mostly can be ignored. It is the negative of the dome that you looked on for so long in my rooms, and my joke about angels was only partially a jest.
I will not prescribe drugs to clothe its manifestations, nor to banish it. I suggest hard work at your given science, fresh air and large quantities of solar and lunar light. After a while, the form of this genie will change, and you and it will live in unity. I wish you good health and success with all your endeavours.
W. W. Gull
The motion of the sea settled the man. The moon bathed its interior other, as the written words began their transformation from diagnosis to prophecy. The ship ploughed through the darkness, a pinpoint of light skimming the great curve of water. A million beasts rolled, fled and laughed in the vast distance beneath it, while the stars multiplied and roared in the perpetual silence above.
Tsungali watched the afternoon arrive. He had moved his camp again. He was becoming familiar with the patch of land that would be his killing ground. The spirit of his victim would be offered to his ancestors, and the ritual of its transmutation would occur here in this valley, the name of which he did not know.
He sat by the fast water, enjoying its speed, its splendid indifference and its rippling sound, silently observing the wading birds with their shrill curl of beak and voice. He drank deeply of life so that he knew the taste of it here, knew the vibrant wealth of its dominion, knew exactly what he was taking from the man who would die on this ground.
Looking upriver, he tried to remember the great forest that brooded there. It had been a long time since he once saw it. His visual memory was dimmer than its legends and his grandfather’s stories of it, which burned brightly.
But mostly he saw a painted picture of it, one which hovered at the end of the water. A bearded man stood in a cave. Around the cave was the endless forest, its power darkening the sky. In front of the cave ran the river, depicted as a blue twisting stream. A fish swam under its paint and against the flow, so that it could watch the man, who would soon leave the safety of the cave and enter the wilderness, where he would meet his God or his demons. Tsungali was just about to let the image go when, unexpectedly, it became familiar. Something about it shifted into the actuality of his dreams, or a memory of a different world. He closed his eyes and let the sparkling water flicker on his lids; he stared through them, searching. It was the photograph in the museum, the picture of his grandfather sitting at the entrance of the carved trove house. Both images merged, and he looked into the painted shadow behind the old man, expecting to see himself again. But now it was not the lean, grinning boy who hid there. It was the huge, unfolded wings of the man he had remembered as a saint or a prophet. They filled the space inside the cave and were far too large to ever squeeze through the jagged entrance. Tsungali opened his eyes wide, recognising, at last, the expression on the bearded face.
The cyclops was restless. He had explored every crevice and recess, in her body and in every part of his suite of rooms, and he wished for more. He wanted variety and difference, contrast and resistance. He knew they were outside, he could smell their rub through the shutters. He also knew that all the others out there had at least two eyes. He should have known this before. He had once asked Luluwa why all the animals she brought him had many eyes. She had said it was because they were of a lower denomination. The answer had seemed true at the time. Perhaps it was still true now. He saw nothing superior in Ghertrude or Mutter, certainly not in relation to himself or the Kin. But being locked in these rooms, he would never find out. There were many secrets and mysteries. No one knew who sent the boxes, or who arranged for Mutter to be paid. He had discovered this by mistake; he was learning guile by watching them, by observing the unsayings and the quick looks. He wanted to train his powerful and undivided sight further into the world, but she would not let him. For his own good, she said. She claimed to be protecting him from the cruelties that would befall him, outside the walls of the house. But she could not know that he had already been taught the lessons of cruelty, from the contents of the two crates that had been delivered together, so long ago.