The second drink hit, stirring some mirth out of the sediment of his gloom. Everybody in the cramped, over-varnished rooms of the pub was intensely aware of the gaunt, scraggly-bearded man with crazed, prophet’s eyes, who had started talking to himself and grinning into his drink. He was oblivious to them all.
His mind wandered to an earlier time and place, where he had consumed a weighty amount of the potent black rum and port mixture, with a man who had since become an infamous figure, even to those on this miserable rock. They had been in Cheyenne, in the wild Dakota territories, distinguishing themselves by making loud toasts to the Bard and to Scholarly Conduct, to The Fine Arts and Chivalry. The saloon had been full of armed riff-raff; many there with a price on their heads had ignored them and refused to be stirred by their conduct. Muybridge’s drinking companion that day had been John Henry Holliday, the notorious gambler and gunfighter who had made the London newspapers a year earlier, when he and the Earp brothers had staged a magnificently theatrical gunfight in the little-known and appropriately named town of Tombstone. Muybridge was sure that ‘Doc’ Holliday had done most of the killing and maiming on that day, and he wished he had been there to see it, maybe photograph the heroes afterwards.
He shoved his hand into his topcoat’s inside pocket, looking for more money, but finding instead the loaded Colt pistol. It was getting like the old days, he slurred to himself. He now had the appetite for a bit of gunplay. Then, with all the rhyme and reason of an amateur drinker, his thought switched to Josephine, to her passive and inert reaction today, to her electric performance with his copy of Gull’s device. Her pliant and sensual magnetism seemed a much better option than shooting the worthless clientele of The Roebuck.
He pulled himself up and made for the door. No one caught his eye, and the pub breathed out when he was gone. He sobered on his way back, getting lost twice and deciding never to drink publicly again, especially with a charged revolver. He stopped over a gurgling drain and emptied the bullets out of the gun; they fell like brass comets into the speeding firmament below.
He turned the key very slowly and entered the apartment without a whisper. He crept back towards his camp bed, trying not to make a sound. He did not want to wake her, to let her see him tipsy after she had seen him in defeat.
As he dragged off his coat and unlaced his boots, he heard a noise that made the hair stand up all over his body. Something was scratching in the rooms. This was no faint animal, no rat or mouse scrabbling for figments of foods; something else was clawing nearby. He patted the walls, finding his way to the shelves. He found the simple tin candelabra and matches, lit its three stubs of candles and peered through the rooms. The scratching stopped. He was totally sober, with an icy wire inside his spine. He waited, and the clawing began again. He heard wood splinter and rip, and pushed the hushed light towards it. It stopped again, but he saw a mass on the kitchen floor. It was Josephine’s dark body against the black floor. She was naked and lay very still, staring with unblinking eyes at the flaking ceiling. He brought his light close to her to ward off the unseen creature that scraped in the room. He knelt and touched her arm; it felt very cool, as if she had been out of bed for hours. He held the light high above his head to scan the room and keep the thing at bay; hot wax spilt and splashed across her face. There was no reaction.
‘Josephine?’ he whispered urgently. ‘Josephine!’
He touched her neck and felt no pulse. He bent over and put his hairy, impudent ear between her breasts: there was no heartbeat. She was dead. He sank back like a sullen, wet sack, into the collapsed quiet of the rooms and the world. Then the clawing started again. He spun the candles towards it and saw her left hand, frantically digging a pit in the floorboards. The nails were broken and the fingertips bloodied, but the old wood yielded under their insistence. He looked again at her set, dead face; she was elsewhere, but the floor was being eaten away by the live hand’s independent labour. Then silence fell again. He dared not breathe, waiting for the hellish tattoo to start again, wondering fearfully at the life force that sustained its momentum.
As he watched, he realised that her body was slowly coming out of its coma. It warmed and connected to the arm that was still working, the hand continuing to scratch with a violent motion, as if it contained her entire will. Its furious work had lasted for only a few minutes, but they had been the longest he had ever endured. Gull’s words about the hand’s strength came back to him, as did the insane, frail woman who had gutted herself, and the fact that the doctor had named Josephine as his most successful patient. The context of her success brought a sudden, inexplicable chill to his skin.
Gull’s questionable ethics were in the half-lit kitchen with them, two slumped figures caged in a night of fear and guilt. Had his machine produced this? What would he tell Sir William about his prized patient?
She was sleeping normally now, the black curves of her body glistening in a thin layer of sweat. He decided not to move or wake her, and instead crept towards her bedroom on all fours, pushing the light before him and trying to keep it away from his beard, which brushed the floor; he intended to fetch a blanket to cover her modesty. It briefly occurred to him that it would be more natural for him to be naked too: his animal posture would then complement hers; if nothing else, it would make an excellent series of photographs, two beasts crawling in one small enclosure. All manner of naked people could be caught thus, in fragments of motion; a zoo of measured humanity.
He was about to stand when he heard movement behind him. She was across the room in a moment, standing over him, her scent overpowering, a purple musk of mammalian heat. Her eyes were luminous and locked on his. She suddenly lashed out at the candles, kicking them across the room. Now it was only her eyes that illuminated the shrunken space. She pushed her face into his, grabbing his hair and throat with massive force. He gasped, but was powerless to react. Her strength had become superhuman and all his instincts told him that, if she decided to, she could snap his neck in a moment. Their noses were crushed together, the glowing eyes staring point-blank into his. He could see nothing but the unfocused light; he felt nauseous and terrified. He tried to close his eyes, but it made him feel worse; the thin skin shrivelled under the intensity, and the glow passed straight through.
They remained meshed together in the hideous coupling for only a few minutes, but for him it felt like suffocating hours. Suddenly, she fell away, peeling off into sleep on the cold, barren floor.
He pawed at his eyes, which felt bruised inside. He was drained and trembling; it had all happened so quickly, each incident taking only moments, enormous quantities of focused energy burning for a few minutes. A few minutes. The spell of clawing had been shorter than the intense staring of her eyes… a few minutes! The sequence of minutes she spent in his machine: three, five, eight. It had worked, but it had been delayed! The flash of understanding and triumph was instantly snatched away by the thought of the next attack: he only had a few moments to escape or defend himself before she woke again and launched a full eight-minute strike.