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 strained into the attic to fetch each little tremor of the heart-stopping sensitivity. When the concert was over, they sat in silence for a long, intuited amount of time.
‘It’s getting cold,’ the cyclops said at last.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘hot days and cold nights.’
‘I am going to leave, Ghertrude,’ he said, finally. ‘For good.’
She got colder and hugged herself. Her eyes flickered to the floor; she knew it was useless to argue.
‘Where will you go?’ she murmured in half of her voice.
‘To the wilderness,’ he replied. ‘Away from all people. To the Vorrh.’
His plump life and pink young wife made him happy, for a time. He learned to grin without thinking, to look forward to meeting new people and enjoy coming home. Neighbours once caught him performing a brief skip in the street, coming home from a very successful meeting with some of the influential San Francisco elite (who, to his delight, already knew his name, even though he had changed it once again) to the handsome dinner prepared by his wife. When she became pregnant and he became accepted, they both started to fill out.
The gnawing hollow was replaced with growing, rotating weight, swelling with pride, ambition and a strengthened belief in the unique placement of his potential. His skills were picked up on by the Stanford family, who purchased some of his photographs (including the negatives), Leland Stanford taking him under his wing and changing his life to prove a bet. The first ‘horse in motion’ photographs were made, and both his sponsor and the public applauded their brilliance. He went to soirees and and lavish dinners, gave lectures and readings; he would often leave his wife at home: her gathering size and homely ways might trip or blunder, and he did not wish her any embarrassment.
Yet, even amid this gaiety and triumph, a shadow nagged. Something of the past was travelling backwards, from a journey made in the future, and the rattle of it harried him continually. ‘Doubt’ was too small a word, too uncertain. What troubled him, and curdled his first ever joy, was that the shadow was known. Something was understood, without having a face or a name; it was like the after-blur of his treatment, the moon smear that the surgeon had warned him of, but it was moving in advance of the fact.
The thing it resonated with the most was the Ghost Dance, or rather his ignorance of the Ghost Dance’s meaning. He had photographed it many times and talked at length with its instigators, but he still did not understand; its workings remained a mystery to him. There was a mechanism, on the inside of its action, like an iris or a newly developed shutter on the other side of a lens; he saw the desire and the subsequent result, like the plate, which received the inverted image and displayed it; similarly, he understood the achievement of the circular dance, bringing the dead back to join the living braves in one last war. But he could not feel the process, nor the delineation of its occurrence.
He met several people with interests in psychic photography, but thought them fools. Even though a small cog turned against his will and brought to mind the effects of Gull’s perithoscope, he mainly shrugged them aside. But it was rumoured that higher and higher society was engaging in the new fashion of spiritualism, that the Queen herself had some interest. Sensing there might be a market for an honest man among the charlatans and quacks, he perched the opportunity on a shelf against the collapse of his present, just in case the disquiet which gnawed at his glowing success proved to be the sound of tables turning.
She had combed the city and caught three names, which now wriggled in her teeth. Two had been regular partygoers, inconsequential gentry of deplorable reputation, the kind of creatures whose very existence is antagonistic to miracle. The third had no name. He was said to be the companion of a young woman whose family Cyrena knew. She made more enquiries, buying information and paying street-eyes to unwrap small morsels of sight or whisper.
She found out that the man she so desperately sought had arrived at the carnival with the affluent heiress, Ghertrude Tulp, and that, whatever their relationship was, it allowed them to slip separately into many different beds over those three spectacular days, which had been such travesties of life. She discovered that, some time after he left her bedchamber, he had 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.’