Mutter was not an intelligent man, but he knew that he was her litmus, her canary in a cage, to go down there and test for horrors. His skin crawled as he descended. She stood listening, her body in the hall, her head in the dark stairwell, the barrel of the gun pointing into expectation. After three hours, and a lot of banging and sawing, he returned, relieved to be out and buoyant in his fulfilment. She was beaming, as happy as he to have this work done, until he told her that there had been nothing left to clean, just a stain on the floor. The remnants that she had so horribly described were gone. She questioned him again and again to be sure that he was in the right room, and then gave up. Someone or something had moved the evidence and re-written all of their parts in this strange event.
During the first weeks, her plan seemed to work. She made many excuses to her family for her growing bouts of absence. She enjoyed the cunning complexity, the drifting sideways past the walls of the house and slipping in without being seen. Her family believed everything she said. They had no reason to doubt it, and it kept her out of their hair and from under their feet. She had stopped her daily forays to the kitchen to give advice to the cook, and no longer demanded to go through the housekeeping expenditures with the butler. She had less energy to
expend directing her mother’s attention to the new fashions and modes of entertaining, and no time at all, it seemed, to offer the converse point of view in her father’s affairs. The family home was at rest and off-guard. It was even rumoured, below stairs, that a man had entered her life, that she had finally found a suitor who could keep up with her copious expectations. Much smirking and giggling occurred at such a prospect, as the servants huddled around the kitchen’s circular table.
Mutter did as he was told. Occasionally, she would send him downstairs to check on the lock and listen for movement behind the boarded-up room, but nothing was ever heard. Once, she crept down with him to double-check his reports. She smiled at the growing layers of dust and the firmness of the barriers. She detected nothing and was content. Her plan was working, and a regularity forming that created a pleasing rhythm of mundanity in the strange old house.
The greatest surprise was how easily the cyclops had adapted to his new environment. He was calm and self-reflective, using the time alone to read books she had bought for him. He seemed to have forgotten, or at least disregarded, his time spent in that squalid hutch of a space under the house. He never mentioned the abominations that had imprisoned him. He had stopped calling them the Kin, after she explained how distasteful it was. He seemed content in his new home, and to be growing into his new role as an adult.
It was in the fifth week that she noticed Ishmael was beginning to grow in more literal ways, stretching the cast-off clothing into a parody. By the seventh week, he had outgrown a second set of new clothes, which she had carefully picked out only days earlier. He was taller, his frame had gained bulk; he was eating the same food, albeit larger helpings, but that alone would not produce such a startling effect. She wondered if it was the room.
She had seen something like it, years before, when they moved her pet goldfish from its small, glass globe into a much larger aquarium.
She had been six years old at the time. So remarkable was the change in the small creature, as it ballooned to a size more relative to its expanded surroundings, that she had accused everybody within earshot of exchanging it for another animal. Even at that age, she had been unflinching in her certainty; no amount of explanation had been able to persuade her that it was a natural phenomenon, and she had held a smear of malice against the unidentifiable perpetrators of the conspiracy ever since. Now, for the first time, she had doubts. It was easy enough to replace a fish with a bigger, older specimen of the same kind, but to find another human cyclops? That would surely be impossible. So it must have been true: he was growing to fit the proportions of his new space.
Unfortunately, it also coincided with a change of temperament. He started to become listless and morose, finding her visits less and less interesting. A flicker of seething was pulling the strings, manoeuvring his body in sullen, bored lurches. His eye was avoiding hers, purposefully. She knew these movements well – they had been a significant part of her vocabulary for many years, but nobody had ever dared to use them against her.
It came to a head on the evening of a storm. She arrived later than usual, running up the stairs, shedding her soaking raincoat. He was waiting, his mood thickened and dark. She made little of it at first, busying herself with arrival, removing her wet hat and gloves, manipulating speed to slice through the tension he was broadcasting throughout the room. But this night it did not work.
‘Where have you been?’ he said, in a cracked and guttural voice, three octaves deeper than the one she knew. ‘Why have you been so long away?’
The unmistakable emphasis was on ‘where’ and ‘why’, the words bitten into the air.
‘I’m sorry, the rain was very heavy and my class ran on so…’
‘YOUR class!’ he boomed. ‘YOUR class? I used to have classes! Now I just sit here, with nothing and nobody.’
She was taken aback by the vehemence of this statement, the anger and sorrow strangling the space between them.
‘You say I must not think or talk about those who kept me before, you say they were unclean and dangerous. I SAY THEY CARED!’
She noticed, through the coagulated light, that a red rash was forming around his neck, and his ears were burning scarlet.
‘I brought you books,’ she ventured, limply.
This was enough for him to close in on her.
‘BOOKS ARE NOTHING! YOUR BOOKS ARE NOTHING!’ he bellowed, snatching one up and hurling it across the room. It hit the shuttered windows and ripped its spine, falling twisted and broken, like the game birds she had seen on her father’s estate. ‘I WAS TAUGHT BEFORE.’ A gulp of memory seemed to well up through the house to prompt him. ‘I was taught with care, taught with meaning,’ he said, choking on the ashes of his rage.
An appalling silence telescoped the room into a reverse perspective, separating each of them to either end of its numbing distance. Mutter had long since crept away, preferring to keep a distance by busying himself with the crates downstairs. He wanted nothing to do with this drama, or with the emotions of the situation, keen only to get on with his work, uninterrupted. He left the house quietly, tiptoeing clumsily across the cobbled yard.
Water dripped noiselessly from the fingertips of her discarded gloves, slipping off the table and onto the muted carpet. One page of the crumpled book turned in rictus, dreading to be seen in its last moments.
Finally, she said, ‘I will teach you.’
He grunted a sound that should have been a derisive snort of doubt, but with his new and unused voice sounded closer to a cough, laden with phlegm.
The next day was still wet, but without the lashing horizontal wind which
had come from the warm sea and driven the rain so relentlessly. Mutter remembered during breakfast that he should have collected another crate. The slab of bread lost its taste mid-mouthful, and he groaned through the melting butter. He decided to go back to the house immediately, when he knew she would not be there.
Harnessing the horse to the two-wheeled carriage, he led it out of the stables and across to the double gates. While unlocking them, he took a cautious glance up to the third floor. He knew he would see nothing at the windows; he had fastened the shutters tight and padlocked them closed, as instructed. Even so, he could feel the straining thing expanding against the glass, wanting to wash its eye in the city.
Forty minutes later, he had arrived at the warehouse on the other side of town. After climbing, achingly, down from the creaking carriage, he unlocked the padlock – bigger than his heart, and six times as heavy – and swung the gate inwards, pulling the horse inside. He entered the warehouse, dragging the empty crate behind him. He used to do this mechanically, enjoying the constancy of repletion. There were no questions, just an exchange of objects. Since the dramatic change at 4 Kühler Brunnen, he had dreaded meeting the master of the house. He would be seen as betraying his responsibility, that which his family had been given and conducted without doubt or deception for two generations. Had he damaged that beyond hope? Then he saw the blinding whiteness of an envelope, intersecting the path between the door and the crates, and he suspected that he had. He panicked. A letter, the rectangular diagram of his ignorance, little paper blades that had threatened him all of his life. He could not read, but it had never been a problem. His world of work and muscle, endurance and abeyance, had never required letters to direct it or describe its essential importance.
He picked up the envelope, gingerly, so that its venom could not rise to touch him. He saw the spider ink trails of writing on its surface, and had no idea what to do.
Then the voice said, ‘
Sigmund Mutter, you are a good man and we trust you
.’ Mutter gave a start and looked around bewilderedly, amazed and relieved at what he was hearing. It came from the entire warehouse, and yet it felt intimate, close by, somehow. ‘
The Mutter family has pleased us for years. Your father, you, and your sons, will always be trusted by us. All of your work and confidence is greatly valued. Take this letter to Mistress Tulp and say nothing of our conversation. You are protected and your family will endure
.’
On his way back, Mutter sat as if in a dream. The ebony carriage flexed and curved through the streets, the wheels and the hooves talking through the reins to his cold hands. He stabled the horse and crossed to the house, holding the letter before him like a dead fish or a live centipede, at arm’s length. Entering the mansion, he came upon Ghertrude, fluttering aimlessly in the hall. She feigned disinterest at his arrival, until his changed manner intruded upon her senses. Looking up, she noticed his unpredictable focus and the letter in his hand. He pointed it towards her and said nothing.
G.E. Tulp
You have committed the crime of trespass, housebreaking and false occupancy. You have corrupted my servant. Nobody knows of this. Nor do they know of the other acts that you have undertaken to perform
.
I do. However, I want the same as you: silence
.
You are in my house and you have my child. I was at your birth; your parents are in my knowledge and influence. Do not doubt this, or you are lost
.
You will be trusted to follow your own plans. You will be protected.
Do not leave or subtract your stolen responsibility. I will speak to you again in one year
.
* * *
He knew his prey would have taken one of two routes. The first, the main commerce artery, led directly into the city without any diversions, straight through its main street, its industrial flank, and then to the Vorrh. The other was an older track which meandered through the long valley, before entering the city by its layered history. That road splintered at a hub of old buildings, where the river and six other roads met, and then crawled towards the city, the Vorrh and other, lesser-known extremities. These routes were slow and hardly ever used by normal travellers; they were reserved for those who wanted to taste the past, those who had something to hide, those who did not wish to mix with normal men. Often it was a combination of all three. He knew that, while his prey did not want to be seen, he would still have to rest and buy food and information on his approach. The old road would be perfect for his needs.
Approximately a day and a half’s walk from the city, there was a scarred bridge, attached to a working mill and a scatter of huts. It was notched into the bend of a steep, carboniferous limestone valley. Glaciers had edged their razoring weight through, cutting twisting canyons and gorging out riverbeds, so that overhanging walls of jutting cliff leered above. At one point, by the mill itself, the lofty, sheer sides almost touched, either side approaching the other with a heightened tone of suspense; remembrance, perhaps, of historical connectedness. It was rumoured that sunlight could sometimes penetrate at that point for an hour a day; at other times, it proved impossible and darkness loomed beneath.
The mill and its attendant buildings had an equally murky history;
most travellers would go to great lengths to avoid its shadows and crimes. But a man could stay there without being asked questions, and enjoy its muffled expectations without catching the eye of its threat.
Tsungali sat amongst a group of rocks, looking down on the bridge. Its four spans of the river were mighty and compact in their solid structure. It could withstand the dry, burning heat of percussive summers, or the vicious frost of a chiselling winter. It eerily echoed a feeble stream in its arching curves. It would stand fast against floods which hurtled full trees against its stanchion, and catch light from the water beneath, casting polyphonies into its hollows.
Tsungali watched silently. This was one of many beautiful days he had sat through, awaiting his prey. He had visited the mill, to smell its interior and the purpose and strength of its occupants. He knew their number, colour and creed. He had hidden his motorbike in the tall bamboo by the side of the river and walked the water road to this place, stepping between the rippling stones. He had traversed the path to the hamlet, five buildings in a ragged line, swirls of scented log-smoke rising from two of the dingy houses. The tallness of the land and the multitude of trees had filtered and tamed the savage sunlight into a lukewarm dapple that suggested peace, but a stiff, pale indifference stained the air with trouble.
The hunchbacked cottage grafted to the side of the mill was a public house, with noise broadcasting its presence. He walked to its door and tasted its interior; cooking smells; drink; smoke and loud voices; a company of conflict. Inside was worse; a solid décor of masculine tension, sprawled between loud guffaws and sullen quiet, occasionally diluted by drifts of alcohol.