The Vorrh by B. Catling Read Free Book Online

was written throughout the labyrinthine manuscript of its twisting streets.
    One crooked causeway was called Kühler Brunnen, its handwritten name nailed high on its sunless side. A house of significant age stood at its middle; its core was among the first to arrive and be sunken into the heated ground, on the site of a more sacred enclosure that some said was older than humanity itself. Parts of its later exterior had been copied in anthracite-rich stone, mined from a long-extinct quarry. Its proportion and whereabouts were stolen from one of the bitter-clad cities of northern Saxony. Its windows were shuttered. It quietly brooded, while deflecting any attention. Its small, neat stables contained three horses, a polished carriage and a working cart. Cobbles and straw gave movement and scent to its courtyard’s stillness, while far below, beneath the blue and yellow, the brown ones hummed and fussed over the white thing they grew. The air was filled with their scent of ozone and phenol and the slight singeing of their overly warm bodies, an odour of life which led to cracking and brittleness, emitting its own distinctive hum, in the same way we age with wrinkles and softening.
    The house was empty and wanted to be. It thought it had completed its business with full-time occupancy many years before. A trained, tight-lipped servant would visit it mechanically to attend to its upkeep. He, like his father before him, would use and maintain the stables and horses and lock its existence behind him each time he left. The bright, heavy keys were polished from daily use.
    4 Kühler Brunnen contained no people in the balanced and poised hollowness of its rooms above ground. In its basement was a well of astonishing depth – if it were ever given sky, it would reflect the most distant galaxies in its sightless water. But it remained hugged, contained and blinkered by the solid house. In other rooms below, there were crated machines and stagnant presses, boxed carboys and empty, stained vessels. The quietness here had an agreement with dust; neither settled. The old, dark house was always alert and guarding what occurred beneath it.
    * * *

    The cave was lightless, out of focus and red. Its proportions were shunted into afterimage by a scarlet lamp which did not illuminate, but swallowed any traces of normal white light or perspective.
    Water flowed ceaselessly, and the occupant moved with determination in the thick, urine-scented air. He soaked his hands and the glass plates in blind tanks of warm fluids. Sealing them, he counted aloud as he rocked them into waking under the hollow red of the mournful light. When complete, he released them and set them aside, the glass dripping dry while he prepared the next batch of chemicals. Once cured, he gently inserted them into the projector, and opened them out as light and shadow on the flat screen below. Peering sideways into the focused surface, his eyes almost touched the image, seeking errors and imperfections: none were there. It was another immaculate work. Every grain of dust and spit of flying blood could be seen – sharp, white sparks against the inverted black of the horse’s skin. He quickly blocked the flow of light and, with something close to glee, slid the sensitive paper beneath it, unsheathing the glow from the lamp once more. He set a loud clock ticking and adjusted the preciously kept temperature of the bloods. When the alarm bell sounded, he gathered up the paper and drowned it in the floating tray of liquid chemicals, lulling it back and forth until gradually, under his moving hands, a shadow appeared, a shadow darker than anything else in this bolted chapel, a shadow grown to become a space around the screaming void of a horse.
    Muybridge lifted the image of the spilling animal from one tank to another, where it floated with more of its kind in a circulation of fixatives. He dried his hands and pulled his long white beard out from his shirt collar – it had been tucked