‘Is there somebody here?’ he called out. No answer came back.
He prodded the warm food and tasted his finger. Within minutes he had devoured every scrap. It was excellent, so similar to the dishes the Kin had made for him. Could they be there with him, in the dense foliage? The thought brought back a great and unexpected wave of emotion, one he had never allowed himself before, not since the day of their desertion. The delayed comprehension of his loss overpowered him, and he started to weep in the forest clearing, the warm, earthen bowl in his hand and the taste of his innocence in his mouth. He choked back the unexpected tears and called out again, this time with hope.
‘Who is here?!’
Nothing came back, but he sensed a different kind of stirring in the undergrowth and span to face it.
‘Please, if anyone is there…!’
Nothing met his ears but the sound of birds. For the first time, he thought about returning to the city. He had been foolish to believe that some remnant of the Kin might be here. If he had really wanted to find them, he would have done so before, in the house where they had lived, not in this twisted wilderness of plants and miracles. In frustration, he packed his meagre belongings and stalked deeper into the trees, watching the bends of the narrow path curl and curve with his changing moods.
An hour later, he found another bowl of water, placed neatly and noticeably in the centre of his route, and he guessed they might be leading him safely towards the forest’s interior. He felt energised and protected, reassured that his path was cared for and significant. Again, he thought of the Kin skulking around him, the bright, dappled light camouflaging their shiny brown bodies with ocelot intensity.
‘I am now working on making direct contact with that ferocious willpower, trying to set aside the starvation obsession, to cleave it from the unique determination it engenders. I am gaining remarkable results: it has been possible to map its mechanism in the brain and produce its exact responses under experimental rigour.’
They were walking the corridor again, Gull finally keeping his hands to himself. He had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his breeches, as he strolled past the locked metal doors. There was something unstoppable about his confident posture.
‘There is one side effect, however, that does not make clinical sense,’ the doctor was saying. ‘There appears to develop a taint of violence in all I have treated or experimented with, as if there is some fundamental correlation between the activation of peripheral sight and the loosening of moral codes that keep us all in check.’
Muybridge was about to ask a question, when the implication of the words hit home.
‘There is also some distortion of the libido,’ Gull continued. ‘The peripherscope and the Lark Mirror seem to call something wild out of otherwise docile patients; the continual application of the devices seems to heighten these effects in a cumulative manner. In fact, I have some more hypno-optical instruments that I would very much like you to see, while you’re here.’
As he looked at Muybridge’s troubled and knotted face, which was again taking on the countenance of a vengeful God crossed with a scolded child, he was interrupted by a long, mournful wailing, a sound so unusual that it arrested all other sounds around it. Muybridge, his own thoughts disturbed, recognised it as a savage animal, exotic and lethal; he had heard such things before, and instantly knew it was not native to these shores. On his extensive travels, he had heard the calls of many such feral beasts – perhaps these bolted corridors really did contain a zoo?
Again it sung out, and this time he caught the tincture of its humanity. He had taught himself to listen carefully to many peculiar tongues, to hear and trust his instinct to decode their meaning. This one had the same extreme edges he had heard in the mountain tribes of Guatemala, or the Eskimo shudders of the high Alaskan plains; the songs of the nomads of the fallen land bridges to Greenland and the North Pole. It was totally out of place.
‘Ah, this will interest you!’ Gull pointed to the source of the eerie noise and Crane knocked on the metal door. A few moments later, it was opened by a small, bald man wearing a white apron and stiff, red gutta-percha gloves.
‘Good day, Sir William. She is restless again.’
‘Good morning, Rice. Let’s have a look at her, shall we?’
The howling stopped when she saw Gull. Her huge eyes widened and she covered them with her ornate, scarred hands. She had luminous black skin, which had been polished into blues and purples by the smooth, uninterrupted breeding of thousands of years. She was slight, but not emaciated like the others, and had a head of statuesque beauty, more horizontal than vertical, like a long lozenge of graceful stone balanced midway on the poised, slender plinth of her neck. Muybridge had seen and met Negroes in America, had seen their plight and their strength. But she was quite a different species.
‘Allow me to introduce you to Abungu. We call her Josephine here. Josephine, this is Mr. Muybridge. He is the man who made the picture you so love.’
She put her hands down and looked into the photographer’s mystified face.
‘Show him what you have done with it!’
Crane grabbed at her clothing, trying to pull her into action.
‘Leave her Crane, she will do it herself.’
Josephine crossed the room, leaving a trail of water, which seemed to be coming from her underskirts. The men pretended not to notice. She went to a small trunk that had been painted the same colour as the cream cell. She opened it and stood aside; it was full of neatly stacked pieces of paper, all the same size, and all with one rough edge, as if they had been torn from notebooks. The men crossed the room to the trunk and its owner.
‘Show him, Josephine,’ encouraged Gull. She dipped down to retrieve the top sheet and lifted it in front of Muybridge.
‘Take it!’ said the doctor, using much the same tone as he had with the black woman. Muybridge felt he should say something about being patronised in such a way, but curiosity reigned and he followed the command. He glanced at what he was holding, then looked again in surprise: it was a perfect copy of his print, Phases of the Eclipse of the Sun. Staring at it more closely, he saw that it was not a photographic print at all, but a drawing made on paper with black ink, identical to the one he had left with Gull years before. Only the five lines of text, which explained its provenance and gave the times of the exposures, had been left out. Each drawing had a hastily scratched ‘A’ in its corner: her signature. Every ‘A’ missed its middle, joining stroke, so that it appeared closer to an inverted ‘V’.
Muybridge looked from Gull, who was stroking his jaw and partially concealing a smile, to the sleek radiance of the woman, whose huge eyes looked right through him, then back at the box full of paper.
‘Go ahead, help yourself. She won’t mind,’ said Gull.
He picked up a small wad of paper and examined it. Each image was exactly the same. She had made hundreds of copies of his picture, all signed the same way. Gull saw the question and answered it before it became sound.
‘Josephine is remarkable. She constantly surprises us. I once showed her your picture. She could not have looked at it for more than a minute. Some weeks later, after a session with one of my new instruments, she was given some paper, pens, pencils and ink. She is allowed those, she is one of our passive patients, the only one not showing the disturbing side effects I told you of before. Anyway, she sat down and started making these copies. From the first to the last, they have all been precisely the same. If I gave her paper and ink now she would make another.’