The first stabs of illness and return of the horses in his waking dreams made Muybridge relinquish his demands of his homeland. He would retire. He demanded to live with his cousin back in Kingston upon Thames. He would spend his last years there in quiet and splendid old age. England would have his bones and his triumph to immortalise.
The last thing he expected was a commission from Her Majesty’s government—a commission to kill a horse.
He stood proud and erect at the centre of a great barn. He looked like God. A mane of unkempt white hair, a long, fearsome white beard, and wild smoke eyebrows cocked ragged over piercing, unforgiving eyes. A stern, knowing face that saw the world in a hard light with gauged contrasts. He wanted to look like this—biblical, austere, and imposing. He was seventy-three years old and justified. He had remained justified all his life, and now, as a celebrated patriarch, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had the certainty of Abraham.
Five men and a horse waited on his commands as the cold air and light streamed in from the tall open doors at one end of the hollow building. He spoke to them quietly and they nodded to his instructions. One man led the horse outside; the others took up their positions in the delineated interior. The walls and the floor had been painted black, immaculately clean and precise. White lines were drawn into the controlled darkness in chalky paint, grid patterns that framed the space into a stiffened concept and held the smells of the farm at bay. When the generated light came, it scrubbed the rural out, a fizzing brightness that tightened the interior into a fiction.
Her Majesty’s men had made him a replica of his previous studio, where he could photograph what he wanted without anybody knowing. They had dragged him out of his docile years for these images, built his equipment into the old barn, followed every instruction and requirement he had given. He even insisted on the colour of the horse.
“It must be white, pure white,” he had told them. “Preferably with a flowing mane.”
Some of the government men had speculated, behind their hands, that this was a narcissistic whim, that he wanted an animal that looked like him. But they had been wrong: The photographer had another horse in mind, one from a stable of madness and violent dreams. But that was his business, not theirs; he was ready to make a picture that the world had never seen.
Muybridge picked up a handful of cables and nodded to the two men at the far end of the barn. One put his fingers in his mouth, while the other lifted a gleaming Gabbett-Fairfax Mars pistol from a wooden box. It looked like a forging hammer.
Muybridge called to the other, lesser man, who shuffled nervously at the far end, by the doors. The signal was given. The man outside whipped the horse hard into a stampede. The man with the fingers in his mouth whistled, a series of tearing notes. The horse bolted between them into the glaring, disembodied light of the fathomless hall. The other man lifted the gun. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched in insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the Gabbett-Fairfax, and the sound that followed swallowed everything else. The horse collapsed onto its running legs, sending up a cloud of black, swirling dust, its thrashing body digging into the white grid and splattering the walls from the exit wound in its spine. It snapped its neck in the violence of its death throes, which, like everything else, seemed to be instantaneous. With its last snort of breath, the cameras ceased and a tidal wave of silence wallowed into the barn.
All stood still in the settling air. After a moment, the nervous new electricity was turned off. The scene became operatic in the sliding light of the opening doors. The whistler and the horseman put on overalls and began to clean up around the corpse; the shooter put the monstrous gun back in its icon-like box and unpacked a maroon rubber apron and gloves and a box of equine surgical instruments. Some of the black dust still eddied, high in the shafts of daylight that flooded the barn, giving celestial animation to the actions of the industrious men. Muybridge seemed totally uninterested in the current activities and busied himself with the cameras, collecting their precious thoughts and taking them away, to be unlocked next door in his night-black chapel of chemicals.
Muybridge entered the lightless room, out of focus and red. The darkroom’s proportions were shunted into afterimage by a scarlet lamp that 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 they were complete, he released them and set them aside, the glass dripping dry while he prepared the next batch of chemicals. Once they were 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 in so as not to stir the chemicals and spoil the process. He stepped back, straightening into a position of satisfaction and unbolting the door to the intensity of the world.
An hour later, he laid out the sequence of photographic prints on a long, narrow table in his temporary study, which adjoined the barn. Four men moved together towards the images as Muybridge stepped aside to give them space around his pride.
The running horse had been delineated, flattened to silhouette on a scaled grid. The cameras had erased the noise and the sickening third dimension. Now it could be studied, uncluttered by the stink of actuality. Great beauty strode across the dense chemical papers. The horse had become classical and otherworldly as it charged, buckled, and collapsed in a dignity of aestheticism.
The men were delighted as they pored over the prints. Theirs was a world of mechanical precision, and this gridded slaughter had proved the value of its latest device. They packed away the evidence that would lead to manufacture and thanked Muybridge on the doorstep of his domain, shaking his hand enthusiastically.
He closed the door on their departure. For a moment, in the narrow corridor between rooms, he mused on the effect that monstrous gun would have had on the anatomy of the despicable Major Larkyns, and how his last expression of stunned surprise and pain would have been so much greater. Even after all these years, he would have liked that. He would have liked his treacherous young wife to witness her lover being cut in two.
It was a moment of delightful speculation before he returned to the serious business of the negatives. His military clients had their prints, but he had the negatives, and he had his own plans for the images. He had been at the pinnacle of a life’s achievement when he decided to chase another quality in his work: an elusive ghost that permeated everything he photographed. It had led him into deep speculation and personal violation, but still he could not put it aside. He was an artist, photographer, and inventor of prodigious importance—that was all secured, acquired against all the odds. The last few experiments were his, and they would answer the questions. He pictured a horse that never touched the ground, or one that charged under it, or another that stalked his sleep like a bedsheet phantom. This was to be his ghost dance. Process thrown over anxiety to flap in the corridors of then and his few remaining tomorrows and what beckoned beyond.
Horses had guided his life and crippled his journey. The glass negative was the removal of that splinter in his soul. The last machine he would create would look through the world. The glass negatives of the dying horse in a box of earth, using water to shutter its time and process a glimmer of far-off light that he thought might just be in Africa.
Muybridge died a year later, but only after digging up half of his cousin’s garden. When somebody finally summoned the courage to ask him the purpose of the huge holes he had made, he replied, “I am making a scale model of the Great Lakes of North America.”
No further questions were proffered or answered. His last two names were misspellings. Eudweard Muybridge written in the crematorium register. Eadweard Maybridge carved on the stone that marked his ashes.