Wonders of a Godless World
Andrew McGahan

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

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Praise for Wonders of a Godless World

Also by Andrew McGahan

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

The orphan knew something was up that night, even before the foreigner arrived at the hospital. It was a warm evening, early in the storm season, and she had been feeling strangely restless all day. More notably, the old doctor had stayed on much later than his usual quitting time, sitting quietly in his office, sipping now and then from a bottle, and listening to the radio. He waited in there all through dinner and past sunset, and even until lights-out in the back wards, by which time the orphan and the night nurse were normally the only ones left awake in the place.

The night nurse was annoyed, because most evenings he sat in the office with the radio and the bottle, but now he had to pretend to be working. The orphan wasn’t happy either, because the night nurse, to look busy, was interfering with chores she knew perfectly well how to perform alone. And the inmates in their turn, sensing the irregularity, were making all kinds of trouble for her—climbing out of bed, taking off their pyjamas, wandering the halls and piss-ing in the corners.

Dutifully, the orphan retrieved clothes and dressed bodies and mopped floors, and said no more than she ever said, which was nothing at all. The inmates had plenty to say, of course, but the orphan couldn’t understand them in any case. Between the late hour, the heat and the unusual goings-on, the madness in each of them was bubbling up in their throats, jumbling their words.

Her own madness was alive too. She could feel it beneath her feet, trembling and quivering. It was as if, far below in the earth, a giant machine hummed. The vibrations buzzed against her heels, running right up between her legs, and she couldn’t decide if it felt bad or if she was half on the edge of an orgasm where she stood. But something was about to happen, she was sure. And by chance she was out the front—emptying her mop bucket in the drainage ditch—when the arrival took place.

First, the town’s police car came bumping up the track and parked in the dim pool of light outside the hospital’s front porch. The orphan had to step out of the way, and into the ditch, to let it by. The police captain was behind the wheel; a short, sweaty man, frowning over the dashboard. His presence in itself wasn’t so unusual. The captain was a frequent visitor, if not always so late. But then an old white van drove up and parked behind him, and that wasn’t usual at all. And yet the orphan had seen the van before. She strained her memory. Then she had it. Yes! It was the ambulance. It came from the big hospital, down in the big town. It was used to deliver patients.

A patient! Someone new! Letting the bucket drop, the orphan hurried over to the van’s rear doors and tried to peer in.

Nothing. Darkness through the windows. Then the driver was there, shooing her away angrily. The orphan caught a glimpse of herself through the man’s eyes. He thought she was one of the inmates—a short, stumpy girl with a shaved head and a hairy upper lip and a hospital dress stretched tight over big floppy breasts.

Ha! She was ugly and a madwoman and he was scared of her. She barked out loud, baring her uneven teeth, but then the old doctor appeared, and the police captain, and the night nurse too, and the doctor was explaining to the driver that the orphan wasn’t a patient. As proof, she retrieved her bucket and held it out. But everyone had forgotten her already. The night nurse and the driver opened the rear doors of the van and from the dark interior they heaved forth a stretcher.

A man lay on it, apparently sleeping, covered to the neck by a sheet. His skin was pale, and his face had a raw, scraped look, but there was no other sign as to what might be wrong with him. The night nurse and the driver carried him away inside, but the orphan didn’t follow. She lingered instead by the police car, hoping for clues. The old doctor and the police captain were leaning over the hood, talking, and studying a sheaf of papers the captain had spread there. It was not an easy conversation for the orphan to decipher, full of long words and quick allusions she could never hope to catch. But she had known the doctor most of her life, and the captain too. She was familiar with their voices and their mannerisms and their moods, and that was some help.

She gathered, for instance, that the captain was displeased. It was too hot and he was working late because he had been called down to the big town to collect the new patient. He didn’t like the heat or working late, and he didn’t like the people in the big town. The word he used for them was devils, and they had made him sign a lot of papers and take responsibility for the sleeping man. The captain thought he had enough responsibility as it was. He held out a grimy pen. He wanted the old doctor to sign the papers and then the sleeping man would be the hospital’s problem.

But the old doctor, who was the cleverest person the orphan knew, didn’t take the pen. Instead, he rubbed his chin and asked a very odd question. He wanted to know if the sleeping man had a name yet. At which the captain, odder still, gave him a disappointed look, and then sighed, lowering the pen. No, no one knew the man’s name yet. It was a mystery. The authorities had put his picture in the newspaper down in the big town, and even on television, but no one had claimed him, and it’d been weeks now. The only sure thing was that he wasn’t local to the island.

A stranger, the orphan noted, her brow furrowed with the effort it cost her to take all this in. A foreigner.

The conversation continued. The old doctor suggested that the man might perhaps be a tourist. After all, more and more tourists came to the island every year. And hadn’t he been found asleep on the beach? But the captain shook his head. None of the hotels down in the big town knew anything about the man. Neither did anyone at the airport. And besides, he had been in some kind of fire. His clothes were just ashes when they found him. Burnt to rags. The police in the big town thought that maybe there had been an explosion on a boat out at sea. Perhaps he was a sailor.

The old doctor had another question. Why hadn’t the man woken up, or spoken, in all the time since? Was there a head injury? The captain only shrugged. He didn’t know. The doctors at the big hospital hadn’t told him anything. All they had said was that they couldn’t keep the man any longer. Perhaps if he had turned out to be rich, or someone important, then they would have let him stay. But it looked like he had no friends or family at all. And no money. So here he was.

The old doctor finally nodded, resigned. It wasn’t for him to argue with the big hospital. The captain offered the grimy pen again, but the old doctor, unthinking, took out his own, and scribbled on the papers.

The orphan let out a puff of air and saw spots floating before her eyes. That was that. And yet, did she understand right? The new patient had lost his name? Why, that was almost the same as her! Well, she hadn’t lost her name exactly. But she could never quite remember it either. Or anyone else’s. She knew that everyone had a name, of course—and that other things did too—but try as she might, she could never recall them. They simply refused to lodge in her mind. It was a symptom of her madness, she supposed. Most probably, the foreigner was mad too.

The old doctor was walking back inside, holding the papers, his back bent painfully. He was too thin, the orphan had heard others say. He worked too hard, and was too old. Besides that, she knew, he was ill. The captain, meanwhile, who would never be thin, went to the door of his car. Noticing the orphan there, he winked and asked her a question. She understood him easily this time, because it was the same question people always asked her. He wanted to know if it would rain soon.

The orphan looked up. She didn’t need to look, but people expected it, and were even a little unsettled if she didn’t. The sky was clear, but the stars were muddied by the humid air, and it certainly felt as if water-laden clouds would form soon, and cooling winds begin to blow, and lightning to flicker. It was the storm season, after all. But the orphan knew better. She could tell that the great eddies in the atmosphere were moving too slowly for now. It wouldn’t rain tonight, or the next night.

She shook her head.

The captain sighed once more, and wiped sweat from his face. Then he climbed into his car and drove off—heading, the orphan sensed, not for his little police station in the town square, and not for his home, where his wife and children waited, but instead for the jungle hut where his mistress lived. (The orphan had met both the wife and the mistress, and thought the mistress was nicer.) Shortly afterwards, the ambulance driver emerged and set off on his much longer trip back down to the coast.

Alone, the orphan idled a moment, her bare feet twisting in the sand. She could hear distant noises from the back wards. The inmates would not be settling down any time soon. She stared into the night, restless still, and expectant. Was there something out there in the dark? Not a storm massing, but a subtler thing?

Away below the hospital she could see the scattered lights of the town. They were surrounded by the wide darkness of the plantations. And much further off, in the sky beyond the rim of the plateau, was the glow thrown up by the big town, down upon the sea, where the rich people lived and no one ever slept.

The orphan turned and gazed up, behind the hospital, to the mountain. The jungle on its lower slopes was thick and black and impenetrable, but high above, the peak was a lighter shadow against the stars.

No, there was nothing out of place.

But even as she stared, she felt again the tremble in the dust, felt the thrill run up her bones, making her belly squirm. Oh yes, something was on its way. The orphan smiled her mad smile, then skipped back inside to her chores.

2

Of course, she had not always been an orphan. In fact, she was most likely not an orphan even now. Her mother was dead, but her father was probably still alive, somewhere in the world.

Not that she would ever know. When the orphan was much younger she had overheard a conversation between two pregnant women in the front wards. She had been cleaning nearby, and they had noticed her there and begun to talk about her as if she couldn’t hear them. In particular, they were shaking their heads about all the men the orphan’s mother had been with, and how she had gone down to the big town, where no decent girl would go, and involved herself with criminals. It was no wonder, the pregnant women agreed, that the orphan’s mother had caught a disease. And it was even less wonder that when she gave birth to an ugly little retarded daughter, no man would step forward and claim the child as his own. Why, the father could be anyone.

Young as she had been, the orphan had understood a simple truth—anyone, when it came to fathers, meant the same as no one at all.

She had long since worked out what retarded meant too. Retarded was the same as slow, the same as stupid. Retarded was another term for idiot girl, or for poor dumb child, or for any of the similar things she had heard herself called. Retarded was why she was incapable of speech, and why she had so much trouble understanding the speech of others. It was why she couldn’t read, or write, or do anything they had tried to teach her back in the horrible few years that she had gone to school.

Indeed, throughout her early childhood, as she had no other name to use for herself, words like retarded and slow were the closest she came to an identity. But not long after her seventh birthday (she could remember numbers better than names) her mother had become even sicker than usual, and had been confined to the hospital. The orphan had nowhere else to go and so had stayed at the hospital too, looked after by the nurses. And eventually, after long suffering, her mother had died.

The next day the old doctor had called her into his office. He had explained that she was now a homeless little girl, but that she shouldn’t worry, because everyone was very fond of her, and it had been agreed she could stay on at the hospital. He had said that this was the best she could hope for, because otherwise she was motherless and fatherless and completely alone in the world. She was now, he had announced, an orphan.

An orphan. The gravity of the word had impressed her deeply, and she had accepted it as her true identity, above all others.

Of course, she was only a child at the time. She had grown up since then. The day the foreigner arrived was barely a month after her last birthday; the staff had thrown an especially large party, and declared that she was not a girl anymore, but a woman.

She was, they said, twenty-one years old.

The new patient, meanwhile, was an enigma.

He was admitted to the front wards at first, so that he could be examined in detail. And although the orphan had initially thought of him as the sleeping man, it turned out that often his eyes were open. They were beautiful eyes—wide, the irises a deep brown, the whites unclouded—and yet they were unsettling. There was nothing behind them. No awareness. He might have been a dead thing, lying there.

But he wasn’t dead. His body was warm and alive. His heart beat. His blood flowed. And, to a certain point, he functioned. It did not appear that he could stand, or walk, but if he was propped up in a sitting position, he would not slump over. If liquid was put into his mouth, or soup, or mashed food, he would swallow it. And if, once a day, he was placed in a wheelchair, pushed to the shower block and arranged on a toilet, he would piss and shit on command. Which was a miracle, from the orphan’s perspective. She could only wish that the other patients were all so talented and compliant.

But it was only sleepwalking. There was no consciousness in him. No will. The foreigner never spoke, never looked at anything, never moved of his own volition. Left to himself he would lie motionless on his bed, and seemingly he would do so forever, uncomplaining, until starvation claimed him.

The mystery was, why was he in such a state? The old doctor prodded and probed his new charge, and studied the papers from the hospital in the big town, but found nothing. The man had no infirmities, no diseases, and his only apparent injuries were the burns on his skin. Actually, it was just the one burn, only superficial, and already mostly healed—but it covered his entire body, every crevice, from head to toe. And every single hair had been singed away. He was as naked as a newborn.

What did it mean? How had it happened? The orphan waited, but the old doctor, for all his patience, was unable to solve the riddle, or bring the sleeping man awake. Day after day went by, and he could only shake his head, at first in bafflement, then in frustration, and finally in failure. Of course—the orphan listened to the nurses discussing the situation—if the big hospital with all its experts and machines had failed, what was the old doctor supposed to do, with no money, and no equipment, and so many other patients to care for? Who could expect him to cure the man?

No one. The foreigner hadn’t been sent there to be cured anyway. At length, as was inevitable, he was transferred to the back wards.

The orphan’s home was not in fact the one hospital, but rather two quite separate hospitals in the one compound. There were the front wards, and there were the back wards, and they were very different places.

The front wards, and the hospital offices, were in the forward section of the grounds, housed in a concrete-brick building. This was where the townspeople came if they had everyday medical problems—if, perhaps, they had cut themselves so badly they needed stitches, or if they had broken a bone, or had a cough that wouldn’t go away. It was a free clinic, but it was a long walk from town, uphill along a rutted track through the jungle, so only the common folk made much use of it. Anyone who was well off or important saw their own doctor in town.

The front wards were also where women could come when they were pregnant, to have examinations and, if there were difficulties, to give birth. But it was considered ill-omened by the townspeople to bring a child into the world so close to the demented souls of the back wards, so only the poorest women ever chose to do so. The orphan herself had been born there. A nurse had once told her that it had been a terrible labour, long and bloody and damaging, and the orphan often wondered if perhaps that explained why she was the way she was. Certainly, the pregnant mothers regarded her with suspicion. Sometimes they would hiss curses at her and make signs to drive her away, as if she might spell a similar doom for their own children.

The back wards, on the other hand, weren’t for everyday patients. The back wards were where the dying were kept. And the insane.

The building was hidden behind the front wards, an elongated structure of several wings, with stone walls and high ceilings and narrow windows. It was very old, dating from other times entirely, before the hospital was even a hospital. It had been a grand house once, and grand folk had dwelt there. Or so the orphan was informed. But that was long ago, and she couldn’t imagine it. Now the plaster was flaking away from the walls and the stone was crumbling and the tin roof was red with rust. Inside, it was a grim maze of long wards and metal doors and echoing hallways.

Many people were frightened of the building alone, never mind the inmates. But the orphan wasn’t frightened, no matter how gloomy the wards might be, and no matter how the inmates might scream or yell, no matter even how tangled their hair or bad their breath or shitty their sheets. It was only smell and noise, after all. The building was just a building, and most of the patients were harmless. (The ones who weren’t were kept in the locked ward, where she wasn’t allowed to go.)

She was even happy to work in the back wards at night. The night nurse—coward that he was—was almost too scared to enter there after dark, but the orphan actually preferred it. It was cooler and quieter then, and she was less in people’s way. Most evenings—seeing that the night nurse, apart from being cowardly, was also purely lazy—the orphan was the only soul the inmates might see after lights-out. They liked her for that, and she liked them.

She was less comfortable in the front wards. It wasn’t just the unfriendly looks she received from the townspeople—worse than that, the front wards were the territory of the surgeon, and she didn’t like the surgeon. He was the hospital’s only other doctor, much younger than the old doctor, and all the nurses thought he was very good-looking. But the orphan knew that he cut people open with knives, and whenever he glanced at her, his eyes unsmiling, she felt a little afraid.

To begin with, they put the foreigner in the catatonic ward.

The orphan did not quite understand the word, but to her, these patients were the empty people, the ones with nobody inside them. And of all the back wards inmates, they certainly resembled the foreigner most closely. One, for instance, was a woman who did nothing but sit and brush her hair for hours at a time, staring, even though she had long since brushed herself bald. Another was a boy who rocked back and forth ceaselessly on his bed, his arms clasped around his knees. Others simply slept all day, or gazed blindly at the ceiling, almost exactly as the foreigner himself did. None of them, beyond the occasional incoherent mutter or cry, ever spoke.

But things changed after the foreigner moved in.

Over the following days, the woman with the brush began to rake her skull so severely that blood was drawn. The boy’s rocking gradually became so violent he repeatedly threw himself to the floor. And the others started to moan and shout hoarsely from the depths of their sleep. The nurses were alarmed. What was happening? It was only when they noticed that things quietened down abruptly if the foreigner was removed—when he was taken to the shower, say—that they came to wonder if he might be the cause. True, he hadn’t moved or spoken in all that time, or done anything blameworthy. But there was something strange about him, they all agreed. Those beautiful eyes…

The old doctor scoffed at the idea. He told the nurses that most likely the other catatonics didn’t even know the foreigner was there. But if they really wanted to move him somewhere else, then he wouldn’t stop them.

This time they put him in with the geriatrics.

It was another ward that was usually sleepy and subdued, for only the very old ended up there. Many of the inmates weren’t even all that mad, they were just too infirm to survive on their own, and had no one else to look after them. Others, however, had retreated into deep senility. They drooled, they leered, they smiled and laughed, and sometimes they yelled and cried, but mostly—thanks to the pills they were given morning and night—they dozed in silence. The foreigner, admittedly, was too young to belong there. Although exactly how old he was, no one knew. With his smooth, burnt skin, he didn’t look any particular age. Not young. But not old either.

In any event, he had a peculiar effect on the geriatrics. One old man complained that he was not getting any sleep because the foreigner was climbing out of bed and dancing all night. Other patients concurred. But the orphan knew it wasn’t so. She checked the ward regularly on her evening rounds, and the foreigner never moved. His bedclothes were never even ruffled. Then one morning an old woman, a vague, timid creature who had never made any sort of fuss, was discovered completely naked upon the foreigner’s bed, legs astride his hips, shuddering back and forth in delight. When she was dragged away, she insisted that he had lured her there and possessed her with his eyes and that she would love him till she died. But even while she was on top of him, the man had remained as limp and unconscious as ever.

That was enough for the nurses. Clearly the foreigner was a devil (that word again) of some kind. They wanted him shifted once more. The old doctor was doubtful. It didn’t matter what the old people claimed, he said. They were mad, they imagined things. But the nurses insisted. Of course, they weren’t educated people like the old doctor. They were just working women from the town, full of strange stories and superstitions. But the hospital couldn’t run without them, and so somewhere had to be found to keep the foreigner quietly out of their way.

One option was to lose him among the general community, the everyday mad folk who made up the bulk of the hospital’s inmates. But those wards were chaotic places, full of yelling and running and wrestling, and in fairness, no one thought they were a fitting home for a man who was bedridden and immobile.

Someone then suggested the locked ward. Usually, only violent patients were sent there, to be kept in individual cells, with barred windows, and with strong male nurses on hand. Still, the foreigner would certainly be out of the way. (Indeed, the orphan would never have seen him again.) But the nurses protested. If he had disturbed the otherwise peaceful catatonics and geriatrics so much, what might result if he was placed in proximity to inmates who were already aggressive and unstable?

Somewhere he would do no harm, that’s where he had to go.

In the end, they settled on the crematorium.

3

The crematorium was the nicest of all the back wards. It was somewhat separate from the rest, being contained in a thick-walled bunker that was semi-detached from one end of the main building, accessible only through a single passageway. A large furnace had once been installed there to burn the hospital’s rubbish—including, from time to time, body parts. The stump of a chimney, its upper reaches collapsed, still rose next to one wall. But these days the hospital waste was taken away by truck and the furnace had long ago been removed. The bunker now hosted a cosy little ward with its own dayroom and two small bedrooms.

Such privacy was a rare thing, and reserved for just four lucky patients. They had been placed in the crematorium, these four, mainly because they were the most stable and reliable of the inmates, and thus could be left largely to themselves. Which was not to say they weren’t mad. They assuredly were. It was just that their madness was different. More…coherent. Indeed, the orphan had always found that their particular kind of madness reminded her closely of her own. And the word she had heard used most often to describe the four of them was this—delusional.

It meant, she knew, they believed things that weren’t real. They didn’t spit or rave, but nor did they live in the same world as everyone else. There were two men in one of the bedrooms, and two women in the other. The orphan could never remember their names, of course, but she had titles for each of them, learnt from the nurses.

They were: the duke, the witch, the archangel and the virgin.

Strangely enough, the orphan herself, in her fourteen years at the hospital, had never actually been diagnosed as mad. On the contrary, the nurses had discovered, even when she was a child, that she could be put to good use around the wards. Schoolwork may have been beyond her, but if she was shown how to perform simple tasks, then she was entirely capable. So they had taught her how to mop floors, and how to make beds, and how to bathe the patients and help them change clothes, and how to perform all sorts of other minor but necessary duties about the hospital. The work made the orphan happy, because it was such a relief to be useful to someone at last.

Nevertheless, she knew that there was madness in her.

It wasn’t just that she was retarded. Retarded wasn’t the same as insane, she was sure of that. Her mind was slow maybe, filled with fog, and understanding always came hard, but that wasn’t madness. The madness involved her other senses, her special senses. The things she felt and saw and heard that no one else did. The way she could read the movements of the sky, for example. No one else could do that, and it wasn’t simply a seeing thing or a smelling thing, it was a kind of reaching out from herself into the air—in fact, a way of becoming the air…well, she didn’t know precisely how she did it, she just knew that she could, and had always been able to.

That, of course, had to be a delusion. There was no surer indicator of insanity than the act of seeing or hearing or feeling things that no one else could.

Except…Was it still madness if the supposed delusion was proven real? After all, she genuinely could predict the weather. Everyone knew it.

Ah yes, but there was a madman in one of the wards with an even rarer ability. He could read minds. If someone stood near him and thought of a colour, he could always guess which colour it was. Always. He was never wrong.

But so what? It didn’t make him sane. The same man was incapable of feeding or dressing himself. He was a useless oddity, that was all. Perhaps the orphan herself was no better. Perhaps no one was, in the whole madhouse.

The duke was a straight-backed old gentleman, and his delusion was that he owned the hospital, and that the staff were supposed to take orders from him, not the other way around. He thought he was a rich man. In fact, he claimed to own virtually the entire island, which was why the nurses had laughingly given him his nickname. In reality, though, he was only a poor man. No rich men ever came to the back wards.

The orphan liked the duke very much, for he was always kind to her, and softly spoken. He had been permitted to live unsupervised in the crematorium for years, and she used to wonder why he was in hospital at all, for his madness seemed so benign. But then one day she heard that for the first decade of his confinement, he had been kept in a cell in the locked ward. He had then been considered the most violent and dangerous man on the premises. It was almost impossible to believe, looking at him now. He passed the bulk of his days merely wandering the grounds, or gently working in the gardens.

The orphan too liked wandering the grounds. They were red and bare and dusty in the dry season, and red and bare and muddy in the wet, but still there was a kind of beauty in them. Occasionally she would walk with the duke, and it pleased her that he seemed to see the beauty too, if only through his dementia.

Then there was the witch, who believed that she could cast magic spells. She was a bent old woman, and ugly, and most of her time was spent hunched over her collection of chicken bones, pronouncing curses or blessings upon the world. She wasn’t supposed to have the bones, the orphan knew, and now and then the nurses would confiscate her collection, but she always managed to forage more from the kitchen rubbish.

But if it was only a matter of chicken bones and spells, the witch wouldn’t have been in hospital, let alone the back wards. The real problem was that long ago in the outside world, as a young woman, she had started to dig up human graves. Apparently, for her purposes, human bones were best. The authorities had committed her, and she had lived at the hospital ever since, nearly as long as the duke.

Some of the staff believed she really did have powers, and went to her for charms. The orphan, however, knew full well there was no such thing as magic—there were only magic tricks. She’d seen magicians perform in the town square, and had always been able to detect the sleight of hand by which they achieved their marvels. So the old woman could glare and mutter and point bones and frighten people all she liked, it was only nonsense. In fact, it made the orphan laugh. And yet, sometimes, when she caught the witch’s eye, there was a sly sense of recognition between them, as if the witch knew what the orphan was thinking and laughed in return. That wasn’t so amusing.

Next was the archangel. He was a young man, close to the orphan’s own age, and very handsome—striking even—if a little too thin. For the orphan though he was a far more alien figure than the duke or the witch. This was, partly, because his madness was so centred around the book he always carried.

The orphan was wary of books. They embarrassed her, for the black marks on the paper conveyed nothing to her mind. Even children’s books, which she was told contained pretty things to look at, simple things, were impossible to decipher. She could never see the dogs or cats that were supposedly there, she saw only shapeless blobs—and anyway, how could a dog or a cat be flat on a page? Books were an ordeal.

But to the archangel, his book was the most precious item in the world, even though it was worn and battered, its front cover missing, its many pages creased and greasy from where his fingers ran over the lines. The youth studied it perpetually. He prayed a lot too, on his knees. The orphan couldn’t quite grasp how prayer worked. There was a powerful being somewhere in the sky it seemed—a god—and other beings too, and prayer was how people talked to them. Even normal folk did it. Yet the orphan had searched the sky, many times, and never seen anyone up there.

But that was an old puzzle, and unsolvable. Anyway, the young man wasn’t in hospital because of his prayer. He was there because, as a teenage boy, he had begun harming himself. He cut himself with knives. To the death almost. Suicidal, the authorities declared, and sent him to the back wards. Like the duke, he had been placed in the locked ward at first, but the suicide attempts had abated, and now, as long as he had his book, he was no threat to himself or to anyone. He was, indeed, angelic.

He also had a very big penis, which the nurses liked to joke about. Sometimes they flirted with him, but he never noticed. The orphan didn’t fully understand the jokes, but she too rather fancied the archangel. And not just because he was so handsome. There was a hunger in him, she saw, a passion in the way he studied his book and in the way his lips moved when he prayed, that made something turn pleasantly in her stomach, imagining what those lips might be like on her own.

But of course he never noticed the orphan any more than he noticed the nurses. Even if he ever did, what would he see? A fat, ugly girl, mopping the floor. No, she wasn’t a fool, there was no point dreaming about that.

Lastly, there was the virgin. She was not much more than a girl, slender and slight, but the orphan found her the most intriguing crematorium inmate of all. There was an ethereal air about her. When she moved, she drifted. Languid. Indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she barely seemed aware of her surroundings. She might have been blind, and deaf too. She never spoke, and if she was touched, she would turn away with an aloof displeasure, and shift carefully out of reach.

And yet she wasn’t really blind or deaf, the orphan knew, because the virgin liked to watch television. There were two sets in the back wards. One was in the main dayroom, placed high on a wall, behind wire mesh, where it was yelled at (or occasionally pelted with food) by crowds of inmates. But the other was in the crematorium, in the little dayroom, where the virgin had it to herself. Whenever it was switched on, a dreamy light would come into her eyes and she would fold her long legs to sit on the floor in front of the screen. She could sit unmoving like that all day, watching.

But if books were a riddle to the orphan, then television was an utter mystery. She knew that everyone else saw something fascinating on the screen, but all she ever saw were patterns of colour, randomly swirling. It didn’t matter how hard she tried. When she was very young, her mother had often left her alone in front of the television for hours on end. She had gazed at their little set until her head hurt, the flickering light teasing and promising her, eternally on the verge of becoming something…but invariably she’d had to look away, eyes aching, before she could see what it was.

Nor could she understand the sounds a television set made. Or the sounds that came out of a radio. They could be hypnotic, those sounds, rising and falling like peculiar voices, or thumping with rhythms that matched the beat of her heart. But if there was meaning there, it eluded her. So it baffled the orphan greatly that the girl in the crematorium apparently saw and heard so much when watching TV, her eyes fixed, her head tilted in repose, her mouth open in a distant rapture.

The staff called her the virgin out of mockery. There was her hatred of physical contact, for one thing. But it was also because of her only relative—an elderly grandmother who sometimes came to visit. The old woman would berate the girl endlessly for being such a disappointment and a burden. Oh, if the girl had been marriageable, the grandmother would declare to anyone nearby, it might have been different. Once, men had come calling. Men with money, men with fine houses. But a woman had duties, and what man would want a wife—even a beautiful one—who did nothing but watch TV all day, and who would shrink away every time he reached between her legs?

Well, she would find no man now, not in a madhouse. And with that settled, the old woman would be on her way. The nurses would laugh about it once she was gone, but the orphan never did. She didn’t know what delusion possessed the girl’s mind, but she knew one thing: she didn’t like the grandmother any more than the virgin did.

The foreigner wasn’t like any of these four, and didn’t belong in the crematorium, but that was of no importance to the nurses. They never intended that he should mix with the others anyway. He was a devil and needed to be isolated. The crematorium had a storeroom—reached down a short hall from the dayroom—and it was in there, on his own, that they meant to finally settle him.

The orphan herself helped to convert the room into accommodation, and she did not like the feel of it very much. There was barely space to install a bed, with one narrow chair beside it, and there was no window, only a grate that led into the blackness of the old chimney. The room was, in fact, the remains of the original furnace. It was dim and stuffy, and body parts had been burnt there once.

But it wasn’t for her to question the decisions of the nurses. And she was on hand again when they transferred the foreigner from the geriatric ward. He was in a wheelchair, sitting up calmly, his eyes open and clear. But he looked neither left nor right as he was rolled through the hallways and then down the passage to the crematorium. The place was empty. The duke, the witch, the archangel, they were all elsewhere. Even the virgin was away from her television. So none of them saw him arrive. The nurses navigated the chair through to the storeroom, and then manhandled the foreigner into bed. His eyes were open the whole time. And they were still open, staring up, the orphan saw, as they closed the door to leave him there, alone in the dark.

4

But even though the foreigner was now safely isolated and confined in his cell, the orphan couldn’t put him out of her mind.

Why that should be, she didn’t know. For all his mystery, he was just another patient, one of dozens that she had to attend to in her rounds. Among them were inmates she’d known for years, inmates who talked to her and laughed with her; inmates who played hide and seek with her when it was shower time, who loved to play in the mud when it rained, who did a thousand interesting things that the foreigner didn’t; inmates she liked and inmates she hated. But at the end of each evening, as she lay in her bed, the only face that came into her thoughts was his.

True, she spent considerable time with him. Someone had to spoonfeed him his mush and give him water. Someone had to change his sheets, and sponge his body down, and wrestle him into a wheelchair for toilet trips. If the nurses were busy—and they were always busy—many of those tasks fell to the orphan. Indeed it seemed that most of the tasks involving the foreigner fell to her. But that didn’t explain her fixation. She dealt every day with patients who were likewise unconscious, and sad as it might be, such inmates were little more than bodies to her—an anonymous collection of mouths and bowels and bladders that merely needed to be fed and cleaned up after.

The foreigner was different. From the moment she entered his cell, bent on one chore or another, she was aware of him—in the same way that she might be aware of a spider sitting high in a corner, one of the big hairy jungle spiders that came into the wards sometimes. It was not that the spiders were a threat, they weren’t poisonous, but they made her uneasy, and she always knew if one was there. It was the same with the sleeping man.

He was no physical danger. She’d already proved that to herself. He was naked in the bed, and while changing his sheets she had studied him from head to toe. His body was slight and soft and pale—his new skin clean of blemishes—and quite defenceless. She could do anything to him. She had bent his fingers back until they cracked, she had pinched at his nipples, she had even clutched his hairless balls for an instant and squeezed hard…nothing elicited any response. But still, some instinctive part of her remained wary of him, no matter what her reason told her.

And there was another thing. The vibrations had come back—the buzz against the orphan’s heels, the machine humming far underground, the same tremors that had first appeared on the very day the foreigner arrived at the hospital. They had faded away again on that occasion, but the morning after he was moved to the crematorium, the vibrations returned. Only subtly to begin with, but as the days went by, they grew ever more intense. And even though she could not have explained how, the orphan was convinced that in some way the foreigner was to blame.

It became so bad she could hardly sleep. Even masturbating did nothing to relieve the tension. Yet she knew too that the buzzing was only imaginary. She studied tubs of water in the laundry, looking for some ripple of confirmation, but the liquid’s surface was always smooth. Crockery on shelves didn’t rattle, neither did windowpanes. Walls didn’t creak or groan. Her bones might twitch, and the earth might feel as if it was crawling underfoot, but everything around her was solid and steady.

So it had to be madness, and only that. And the foreigner could have nothing to do with it. But then one morning, as the orphan worked with her mop, hiding how frantic she felt on the inside, a nurse came to her with a message.

It had been arranged, the woman said, that the patients in the crematorium were to be taken outside, to sit in the sun for a while. It would be the orphan’s job, and her job alone, to ensure that the sleeping man joined them.

The orphan leant on her mop and stared. What was this? Yes, sometimes patients were taken outside for an airing. But it was always done in the afternoon, never in the morning. Moreover, it was only done in fine weather, and on cooler days. This particular morning was hot and humid, and heavy showers of rain were crossing over the hospital periodically. Besides, the other four crematorium patients were free to go outside whenever they liked. They were never taken. They didn’t need to be taken. Who had ordered this? For what purpose? And why had they included the foreigner, when he was supposed to be in isolation?

But she could enunciate no such questions, and the nurse seemed to think the outing an entirely innocent affair. Indeed, ever since the sleeping man had been shifted, the staff were satisfied that the problems with him were over. The odd behaviour in the catatonic and geriatric wards had ceased, everyone agreed. And nothing unusual had happened anywhere else, not even in the crematorium.

That was—thought the orphan—until now.

But she did as she was told. She collected a wheelchair and pushed it through to the foreigner’s cell. The nurse was getting the other patients ready; the orphan could hear her snapping impatiently, and the witch shrieking, and the duke muttering in annoyance. This wasn’t part of anyone’s schedule. But in the little furnace room, cocooned by thick walls, the foreigner waited silently in the dark. The orphan hesitated, feeling the floor buzz under her feet. She could see the gleam of his open eyes.

It couldn’t have anything to do with him, could it?

She pulled back the sheet, dressed him in pyjamas, then heaved him from the bed into the wheelchair. It was a familiar enough task, and easier than it might have been. He was not a big man, she was a strong girl, and his arms and legs went where she put them and stayed there. But then in the dimness she thought she saw, very faint on his lips, a momentary smile.

No. When she looked properly there was nothing. He was not capable of smiling. He would not even know that he was being moved. She pushed him along the hall and out through the dayroom, following the nurse and the others.

Outside, the latest burst of rain had just passed, and steam was rising from the ground. Blue sky showed through broken clouds. The wheelchair splashed in puddles. They came to an open area next to the laundry, right up against the back fence of the compound, where the jungle reached down from the mountainside, and where a few old wooden benches and chairs were arranged about a concrete slab. It was here that patients were normally taken on fine days, to sit quietly in the sun.

The absurdity of the whole exercise hit the orphan again. The crematorium patients would never sit quietly. And yet to her great surprise the duke and the witch and the archangel and the virgin all suffered themselves to be led to the benches and chairs. The nurse fussed about them for a few moments, and then—after announcing that she would be back in an hour—she made off again to the wards.

The orphan pushed the wheelchair to one end of the slab and set it there so that the foreigner was facing all the others. A hot silence enfolded them. Even the laundry had fallen quiet. This was becoming more and more weird. The orphan could feel the vibrations so intensely through the cement that she had to keep shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like a child who needed to go to the toilet. Why were they there? What were they meant to do? Whose idea had this been?

And then she realised that the four inmates were watching her. No, they weren’t watching her, they were watching the foreigner, sitting in his chair in front of her. They were doing so shyly, secretly, the witch glancing from under her brows, the duke pretending to study the sky. The archangel wasn’t looking in any direction at all, but for once his book lay unopened and unheeded on his lap, his attention elsewhere. And although the virgin’s gaze was as blind and indifferent as ever, her body leant forward, as if trying to gauge the foreigner by sound.

It occurred to the orphan that none of the four had seen their new wardmate out in the open until now. He had always been alone in his cell, behind a shut door. Naturally they would be curious about him. But this wasn’t natural. She had seen the way inmates behaved when they were curious, especially ones like the witch and the duke. They investigated, they intruded, they intimidated, they poked and prodded and picked fights. They didn’t simply watch in this silent, timid manner.

Was there a low throb in the air? An unheard thunder?

And then, at last, she saw it. Off to the side of the concrete was a muddy puddle, and the surface of the water was juddering in a series of tiny waves.

The vibrations—they were real!

But there was no time for wonder, because a rumbling was suddenly audible, like a hundred trucks driving past the hospital. The ground shook and the orphan, startled, looked up, over the foreigner’s head, to the mountain. She saw that a giant fist of grey smoke had appeared from nowhere and was rising into the sky, and that it came, amazingly, from a high cleft near the mountain’s peak.

Boom! A great, grinding detonation came rolling down.

Linkages flared in the orphan’s mind, one after the other. The mountain, that was the answer! That’s where the vibrations had come from all along. They had been a warning of this event. But what was happening? What process? What violence within the mountain was driving it? And with that thought—using her new awareness, sharp and alive, and without even knowing how—she reached out and felt at the earth.

Sensations filled her head. Pressure. She could detect an awesome pressure, way down below, far beneath the jungle and dirt, deep under layers of rock, at the buried roots of the mountain. Pressure, and heat, and a squeezing, tortured dome of glowing material, boiling and churning slowly. She could picture it down there almost as if the earth was transparent. And above the molten mass were rents and tunnels and cracks in the rock, leading up into the mountain’s heart, filled now with surging steam that roared and rumbled and set the ground trembling, far above.

A volcano. The word was there inside her suddenly, from where she could not say—a memory, perhaps—but she knew it was the right word for what she saw. Such a terrible thing, and she held it all in her mind, livid and ferocious. Even as she watched, another explosion of steam ripped up through the mountain and blasted, in another boom of thunder, out from the cleft.

The orphan laughed her croak of a laugh. She could hear frightened shouts behind her, and sensed a confusion of people milling out of the hospital, but she didn’t take her eyes from the volcano. She wasn’t scared. She was exhilarated. All the tension of the last few days was being burnt away. She watched the pillar of smoke rise and rise into the sky. So much energy! So much power! Cracking sounds rang out, and on the edges of the cloud the orphan could see black shapes spinning upwards. Boulders. Chunks of rock. Flying. And people were screaming now.

Why were they afraid? She studied the boulders as they sailed outwards. She read the weight of each stone, the curve of each arc, and knew exactly where each and every one of the rocks would land. None of them would hit the hospital. They would all fall short. There was nothing to fear. Although one of them…

The orphan ran forward to the jungle’s edge, and watched as a boulder the size of a table came tumbling down from the darkness above. It seemed it must hit her, but instead it smashed into the trees just outside the fence, exploding a wet slap of wind and leaves and mud across her, plastering her face and clothes.

Ha! It was wonderful!

But, ah…too soon, she could see, it was going to end. The pillar of smoke had already lost its upward thrust. The high levels were growing vague, dispersing in the wind, and the lower levels were collapsing upon themselves. Her acute gaze bore into the earth and saw that the rush of gas was spent. The molten dome remained trapped, far down. There was more energy there, yes, but for the moment the mass had merely let off a burst of steam to relieve itself. She laughed again, sadly now.

The mountain had burped, that was all. It had farted.

She felt the pleasure drain from her body. Smoke was tumbling in a slow, billowing avalanche down the mountainside. The orphan heard more screams, and wondered why people were so dimwitted. Surely they could see, as she could, how fast the energy of the cloud was dissipating, how it was cooling and slowing, how it would barely reach the hospital. There was no danger.

Calm, she watched the grey wall come. The jungle was engulfed before her, and then a cloud of ash and warm pungent air settled over the compound. The last rumbles from the mountain died away. Rain began to fall.

The orphan turned back. The hospital buildings were barely visible through the haze. She could see no one moving there, nor hear anyone. Sounds were muted, by the rain, by the ash. The benches still waited around the concrete slab, and she saw that the duke and the archangel must have both run away. But the witch remained. She was on her knees, staring up towards the invisible mountain, her lips moving soundlessly. The virgin was there too, dazed, crawling on the wet concrete. And the foreigner sat upright in his wheelchair, where she had left him.

His eyes stared placidly.

Something stirred in her. She realised that, inexplicably, it was fear. Now, when it was all over, she was afraid. Not of the volcano, but of him. She felt herself drawn reluctantly forward. He had not caused the vibrations, he had nothing to do with the mountain at all. She was certain of that now. And yet…

Why did she feel that he had known it was going to happen? Why did she feel that he was the one who had arranged it so they would all be outside, ready and waiting for the eruption to begin? It was impossible—he couldn’t even speak, let alone manipulate the staff into doing what he wanted. And yet…

She stood before him, dripping wet, streaked with ash. He sat immobile in his chair, as wet as her, but unable even to wipe away the mud that was dripping down his face. He was helpless. Dependent.

Was there a hint of a smile on his lips?

The orphan got down on her knees to look directly into his eyes. Did they see her? Could they see? She stared into nothingness, then suddenly there was a spark, an instant of connection, and his pupils opened like black pits.

Now you, girl, said a voice, are a surprise.

5

She was falling.

Darkness was rushing about her, or perhaps she was moving at great speed through the air, the orphan didn’t know and hardly cared. She was too stunned with pleasure, because of the voice. Such a voice.

For the first time in her life she had understood speech instantaneously. Oh, words had always entered her ears clearly enough before, but always they had then been waylaid by the fog that enveloped her mind, forcing her to strain to discern their meaning. But just this once—the sweet clarity of language. It had been only a single short statement perhaps, but what a dazzling beam of light, cutting through the mist.

Now you, girl, are a surprise.

It must have been the foreigner. The voice was his, surely. She had been staring at him, and his gaze had come alive, and he had spoken.

Except…why hadn’t his lips moved?

A doubt rippled through her, and abruptly she wasn’t falling anymore, she was standing upright, and she was cold.

The orphan opened her eyes. The volcano was gone. The patients were gone, the hospital too, and the compound, and the jungle. She was standing on the rocky floor of a long and narrow valley. Naked mountains rose steeply on either side, their flanks grey under a night sky, their peaks capped with white. A shallow river ran noisily beside her, and a freezing wind scudded across the stones.

She turned a slow circle, her head tilted to the empty slopes. It was all so alien that she didn’t feel afraid. Was she dreaming? Had she fallen over and hit her head? That could explain it. And yet she had never dreamt anything like this before. Her dreams were about the hospital, about places and people she knew, distorted perhaps, and bizarre, but still recognisable. There was nothing she recognised here. She had never known cold like this, she had never seen mountains like these, she had never stood in a landscape so stripped of trees or grass or plantations.

Perhaps it was her madness, then. She knew what it was when people saw things that weren’t there. The nurses called it hallucinating. But surely hallucinations weren’t like this. Not so concrete. She had weight here, the sharp stones bit at her feet. She heard this place, she saw it and felt it and tasted it.

But at the same time there was an unreality too. A distance. She sensed this was not a place that was now. This was not the present.

Correct, said the voice.

Her heart lifted. It was the same voice, the foreigner’s voice. And he sounded pleased with her, applauding her instinct.

This is the past. This is ninety-two years ago.

He wasn’t there. She was alone in the wasteland. But it was him all the same, and once more the sheer thrill of speech elated her. His voice was the most enchanting thing she had ever heard. It came from nowhere, from all around, it encompassed her. She had felt herself falling into his eyes—so was she inside his head now? Held somehow in his mind? In his memory? No, it had to be madness. She was sick. But it felt so good, when he spoke. His approval was as warm as basking in sunshine.

Follow the river, he said.

She walked obediently. He meant upstream, she knew, deeper into the valley, where the mountains crowded together like knives. She waited for him to speak again, but a long time passed and the only sounds were the water and the wind. She tripped on stones, and stared up at slopes so steep and high they made her dizzy. The chill sank into her skin, and slowly, without his voice for company, she did become frightened. How would she ever get back to the green, living warmth of her home?

She trudged on, shivering. A full-moon shone from above, lonelier than an empty sky would have been. But by its glow the orphan saw eventually that she was following a track—two wheel ruts, thinly worn into the rocks, running along the bank of the river. So people did come here, at least sometimes.

Sometimes, agreed the voice. A very few people.

He was with her still. She felt better. If he had brought her here, then he could take her back. She pushed onwards, and finally she saw a light ahead. And then another, some distance along the valley. Dim, flickering firelight. And, half-guessed, the shapes of walls and roofs.

It was a village, a handful of buildings huddled up against the foot of a mountain. They were strange houses, made of mud and tiles. The orphan imagined that the people who lived in them must be very poor. Who else but the poor would inhabit such mean dwellings, in such a hard land?

It’s better in the warmer season. There is a little grass then for the animals, and the ground thaws for planting crops. But yes, this is a hard land. One of the hardest. It’s far from where you live. It’s a place called—

The foreigner paused, and the orphan, while delighting in the flood of words, sensed a sudden frustration in him. Of course—it was her inability with names. He must have seen into her mind and realised that, even if spoken by him, a name would still slip through her head unremembered and without meaning. He was disappointed, and if the orphan could have, she would have cried out that she was sorry.

It doesn’t matter. Look.

She felt her eyes drawn again to the village. A door was flung open in one of the outermost buildings. A smoky light cast out upon the stones, and a man emerged, wrapped in strange clothes and hunched against the cold. He marched down the valley towards the orphan, and she stopped, uncertain, but he hurried by her as if she was not there. His head was hooded, but she caught a glimpse of his face. Young. Bearded. He was singing softly to himself, a formless hum of contentment.

Do you see how happy he is? For a moment the voice seemed to reflect. And why shouldn’t he be? It’s not long since he was married, the dowry was a good one, and his wife is already expecting their first child. By the standards of this place, he is a lucky man. He has land of his own, and a small herd of goats. That’s where he’s going right now, to his barn, to check his flock one last time for the night. Then it will be back to his dung fire and his salt tea and his new wife waiting with her swollen belly.

Was there something cruel in the voice? The orphan saw that the man had reached a low shed partially dug into a bank of rising ground. She had passed it by in the darkness, all unseeing. He disappeared inside, and she was alone again.

She stared back up to the village. It was a desolate encampment, dwarfed by its own landscape. There were no electric lights, no shopfronts, no cars, no activity. There was only the bitter wind, and the rush of the river in its bed, and the mountain, standing forth from the valley walls to crouch above the houses. Her gaze lifted to take it in. This was no gently sloping cone draped in green jungle, like her volcano. This was a great hump of bare rock, rising cliff upon cliff, rimmed with ice.

Fear and loneliness bore down on the orphan again. And a foreboding too. Something was wrong here. It was an unease she couldn’t define, but it nagged at her like the pain of a rotten tooth; an ugly tension that underpinned the whole valley. On some vast level, something, somewhere below, ached.

Soon, said the voice.

A door slammed, and the man reappeared, heading back to his home. Once again he passed straight by the orphan and did not see her. Except, suddenly he paused, and then turned. But he wasn’t looking at the orphan—he was gazing up at the mountain behind the village, alerted in some way, frowning.

The orphan followed his eyes up to the sheer face of stone. There came, as if squeezed from the rock, a pale discharge of light—a misty luminescence that played over the entire mountainside. It shimmered once, again, and then a third time, diffusing into the night sky. Beside her, the man gasped in wonder. It was beautiful. The ground trembled as if in delight, and there was a sound, a single note, soft, and yet profound. The whole mountain rang like a bell. And the young villager laughed out loud.

Dread filled the orphan. The light was a warning, not a spectacle. She extended her senses into the earth, and saw the danger. Deep under the valley, two immense plates of rock, each so big that they extended beyond her vision, and each trying to slide in a different direction, were caught hard on one another, edge to edge. The orphan guessed that they had been caught that way for years, the pressure building remorselessly, the pain of it leaching up through the ground. Until now at last the stress had become unendurable, and in their final agonies the plates were radiating electricity enough to make the mountain glow and sing.

She turned to the villager, even though she could not yell to alert him, even though she knew that she wasn’t actually there, that this had all happened long ago. It was too late anyway. The mountain’s gentle note faltered, became a groan, and far below the two plates lurched and sprang free.

On the valley floor, the ground kicked hard and the man staggered to his knees. The orphan felt it too, and yet she didn’t fall. It was as if she was becoming insubstantial. She was still aware of everything, but she was apart from it too. She watched as the earth jolted and jumped. She watched as the mud walls of the village crumbled and sank. She watched as the man scrambled in the dust, crying aloud in fear.

And then it stopped. The plates shuddered one last time, and locked into a new position. The valley floor ceased shaking. For a moment there was silence, and nothing moved apart from the slow spirals of dust in the air. The orphan watched the villager climb carefully to his feet, his arms held out for balance. His face was white, his eyes black circles. It appeared that every house in the village was levelled.

Then the silence broke, and from the piles of rubble came human cries, and the terrified bleating of animals. But the orphan had ears for only one sound. It was the clatter of small stones and rocks, falling. She looked up at the bulk of the mountain, hanging over the village. Its outline was unchanged to the eye, but she could sense invisible cracks and fissures that had opened deep within the stone, a profusion of them. The ground may have stopped shaking, but those cracks were racing onwards under their own momentum now, this way and that, joining up with others.

The villager was walking in a crazed circle, heading at first towards the ruins of his home, and then turning back towards the ruins of his barn. He was in shock, the orphan understood, unable to choose—and unaware that, very soon, neither choice would matter. He couldn’t feel, as she could, the whole forward half of the mountain, with all its impossible weight, pushing and pushing against less and less resistance. The fractures raced and blurred and became one.

The cliff fell. As a single slab at first, and slowly, defying the mind to accept that something so large could move at all. And then, the thunder of its descent filling the air, it dissolved into a black multitude and came surging down.

There was no escape, and hardly even time for fear. The orphan saw the young man take a disbelieving step forward, hands out to stop the cataclysm. Then they were swallowed. The man, the orphan, the village, and the entire valley floor. All of it lost in roaring wind and stone and darkness.

And afterwards…quiet.

The orphan drifted, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. Until the voice was there again, the foreigner, calmly observant.

It was one of the largest landslides the earth has seen in its recent history. Quite a famous event, to those who study such things.

It isn’t that it killed so many people—only everyone in that tiny village, fifty souls or so. What makes it interesting is that it formed a dam across the valley to the height of six hundred metres, blocking the river. That makes it the highest dam, natural or manmade, that exists anywhere in the world. And in the years since then, the valley behind it has filled with water, over half a kilometre deep.

It was curious and wonderful, the orphan thought. So many of the words he used were unfamiliar to her, she did not really know their meaning, and yet the image was conveyed so easily to her mind. The choked river piling up against the wall of rubble, and all those people, buried forever.

Yes. Buried forever. All of them.

An insinuation in his tone took shape. The darkness solidified around the orphan, and suddenly she was there under the pile of stone, trapped in a coffin of space, an angle between two great boulders, the air clogged with dust.

Except for one…

A man was screaming. The young villager, he was in there with her. She could smell his blood and his shit and his pain. She could see—even in the blackness—that he lay between the boulders, half-buried in smaller rubble, one leg caught under solid rock. How long was it since the mountain fell on him? She couldn’t tell, but his voice sounded hoarse, at its ragged end, as if he had been screaming for some time.

He was calling for help. At intervals he would stop and listen in the awful silence. Then he would cry out again, his voice growing ever fainter. Eventually he ceased and began to weep. For his wife, for his home, for his goats. And for himself. No one was going to dig down and unbury him. He was going to die.

The warmth of the coffin slowly faded. It grew very cold. The man dozed fitfully, shivering. The orphan slept too—or at least, she lost track of how long they lay there in the darkness. The next thing she knew, freezing water was rising stealthily around them. The villager awoke with a spluttering gasp. Panic took him, and he flailed about the space, arching his back to keep his head above the water.

The orphan could understand none of his cries, but she felt the terror that was unloosed in him, and the horror of the death that was going to be his. And she shared his rage at the trickling water. Rage that the world could kill him in this way—so mindlessly, so indifferently—as if his life did not matter.

Then the water closed over his head and his body was in paroxysms, lungs burning, like there was one great shout of anger left in him, bursting to get out. The orphan heard the cracking of bone as he wrenched at his trapped leg. His ankle shattered, and a sleeve of flesh around his foot peeled away. The limb ripped free. He floundered upwards and found air again, his face pressed to the rock ceiling.

The loathing in him was white-hot now. He was not going to die, he was not going to let the earth kill him, he refused. Probing about with bruised fingers, he found a crack above him, barely two hands wide, and, panting with the effort, hauled his body from the bloody water up into the crevice.

The orphan was with him—almost inside him. She had no body of her own, only his. The villager dragged himself along the narrow crack, ignoring the agony of his leg, and ignoring all other pains too, as stones tore at his skin. Sometimes he had to dig through gravel, prying his fingernails backwards until they came loose. Other times there was no room to move any limb at all, and he had to squeeze along on his stomach, the rock scraping welts in him as he went. The earth fought him every inch. And all the while came the hideous drip and trickle of water, rising steadily.

Occasionally exhaustion overcame him and he slept, but the touch of water on his feet would wake him again. A madness of thirst grew in his chest. If only he could reach behind, the water was there! But he was stretched taut. To drink would be to wait until the flood rose to his mouth, and thus to drown. His clothes were gone, he was naked, and the cold was such that even shivering was beyond him now. But still he clawed his way forward. And perhaps even the mountain and the rubble and the river had to admit that there was no crushing his resolve, because finally the stumps of his fingers were clutching open air, and there was no more weight above him.

He crawled forth from the avalanche. The orphan saw that it was night again—although how many nights it had been since the landslide, there was no way to be sure, except that the moon was a different shape now. The villager lay stupefied upon the rubble. It was clear that he had not been buried by the main fall, but merely caught under the apron of the slide. Before him reared a sloping wall of rock and gravel, rising up to nearly fill the valley. And above that, the cloven remains of the mountain itself, a gigantic scoop of pale stone showing fresh on its face.

The man began to climb the wall of debris. It didn’t matter that his ankle was broken and that muscle and bone gleamed where his skin was torn away—he climbed. There was no other sign of life. No searchers, no rescuers. The valley was as cold and deserted as when the orphan had first seen it. The wind muttered the same way, the icy peaks of the mountains frowned unchanged. No one cared that the villager lived, no one saw him creep and drag himself, hour by hour, ever upwards.

It was close to dawn when he reached the landslide’s crest. In the chill light he looked upon the further side. A moan escaped him, the first sound he had made since emerging from the rubble. There was nothing beyond, only the far side of the fall itself, reaching down again to where the river, dammed now, pooled and spread. There were no survivors, no indication that a village had ever stood there. His wife, his unborn child, his friends, his animals—they were all dead.

But he was alive. He had denied the earth.

The villager bared his teeth to the sky. He levered himself upright to see the rising sun, barely recognisable as human, so torn and bloody was he. Not the same man anymore, it seemed to the orphan. He was someone different. Something different. Stripped down to bone and sinew, then fashioned anew.

And so I was born, said the foreigner.

6

The orphan woke to hands touching her. Fingers. They were exploring her body, probing into all sorts of places, skin upon skin, unhindered by any clothing, as if she was completely naked. In fact, coming more awake, she realised that she was completely naked. And the hands kept pawing at her.

She shrugged angrily and the fingers vanished. Her eyes opened. She was in her own room, in her own bed, under the sheet. She was aware of someone hunched by the bedside, but her gaze, blinking and blurred, was drawn to the window. Sky was visible through the glass. Blue, clear of ash or clouds. It felt like early morning, but that didn’t make any sense. Had the day gone backwards?

There was movement at the door, a shape appearing. Her vision clarified. It was the old doctor. He bent over the bed, examining her. The truth came gradually—she must have been asleep a whole day and night. Was she hurt? She blinked again, turned her head, and saw the night nurse sitting in the chair by her pillow. He had been there all along, she supposed. And then she remembered—those roving hands…

Ha! She was quite awake now, and fixed the night nurse with a stare. His watery eyes shied away, but his hands curled reflexively in his lap. She had never really looked at his hands before. The fingers were long and thin and grubby.

The orphan felt her skin twitch.

Then the old doctor was speaking to her, and she had to concentrate, because she found it unusually hard to understand him, as if her skull was especially dense today. But she gathered that she wasn’t hurt. He was telling her not to worry, that she had merely fainted during the fuss with the volcano. He thought it was because of all the ash in the air. But it was over now and there was no reason to be afraid.

The orphan wanted to protest. She had never been afraid, let alone afraid enough to do something so silly as faint. But now that she tried, she couldn’t really recall exactly what had happened. The mountain had farted, and there were billowing clouds, and people had run away, and then she had turned and seen…

Seen what?

The doctor was talking again, but the orphan couldn’t focus and didn’t understand him. Then, with a last smile, he was gone. The night nurse slouched out too—how ugly he was in the daylight—and she was alone.

She stared at the ceiling, not sure what to do. If she was fine, then she should get up. But she felt drained and sore, and her room lulled her with its comforts. She was very fond of her room. It was in a little hut, off on its own behind the kitchen block. It was actually just an old storeroom, but it had a door that she could lock, and a window, and a cupboard, and a mirror on the wall. And there was a socket into which she could plug her radio—the only object she had inherited from her mother. She liked to listen to it at night, even if the noises it made were meaningless.

She flicked the switch on the radio now, but nothing happened. There was no power. The volcano must have damaged the lines. The orphan sighed, stretched her limbs, and rolled over to peer at the floor. Her clothes were strewn across the concrete. Whoever had undressed her hadn’t bothered to fold them or hang them over the chair. She felt sure it must have been the night nurse. She imagined his long fingers tugging at her underwear. Anything could have happened. A whole day and night were lost to her, and there seemed no way to get any of it back.

Except—there was somewhere…a stony place…cold…

The memory wouldn’t come.

Nor would sleep, no matter how drowsy she felt. The orphan climbed out of bed. Arms stiff, she pulled on her clothes and then went out to her front step, into the sunshine. And stopped short, amazed at what she saw.

Ash. It was everywhere, smothering the jungle, the grounds, the hospital buildings. She remembered the cloud rolling down the mountainside, and then white flakes falling from the sky, mixing with rain and turning into mud. Now everything was blanketed in a thin, gritty layer of the stuff, deadening to sight and sound, and a deep silence had settled upon the world, a hush after the great event.

Presiding over it all was the volcano. The orphan gazed at the rocky profile of the peak. Was the mountain different now? Was it fractured slightly, and slumped in on itself? Empty, that’s how it looked. The fires below had gone out. And there were no vibrations anymore, humming under her feet.

Even so, something about the volcano disturbed her. She imagined the upper cliffs bulging forward and overbalancing and toppling down. It was almost like something she had already seen. And again she seemed to remember a biting coldness, and a grey landscape around her, not of ash, but of rock and ice…

A dream? Perhaps. She felt half in a dream even now, her head thick. She stepped out into the ash, and heard it crunch underfoot, a distinct sound in the quiet. She walked around the edge of the kitchen block. A few people were visible—a cook crossing the compound, a woman from the laundry toting muddy sheets—but their movements were somehow muted by the ash, making them seem unreal.

Then she spied the duke, working in the vegetable garden. And at the sight of the old man, a larger fragment of her memory returned. Yes, of course, she had been with him when the volcano erupted. The duke, and the other three patients from the crematorium—they had been sitting in the sun. Then the tremors had started and the mountain had gone up, and the duke had run away. And the others?

Well, she wasn’t quite sure about the others…

She watched the duke. The garden beds were buried under ash, and he was trying to clear the ash away, but she had to smile because he was using a broom, and what he really needed was a shovel. Poor old madman. The garden was his special pride. It was actually maintained by the kitchen staff, but they didn’t mind him helping, even if he sometimes pulled out the vegetables instead of the weeds.

Then she saw that it was her broom, and her smile died. He must have stolen it from her cleaning cupboard. And he was ruining it. The ash was still muddy, and it was clogging up the bristles. That wasn’t funny at all. She strode up behind him. He was too engrossed to notice her, but when she laid a preventative hand on his shoulder, he whirled about suddenly, apparently enraged, the broom raised as if to strike.

The orphan took an involuntary step back. His eyes! Something blazed in them, and for a confounding moment the orphan felt that she was confronting a different man altogether. Emotions flooded out from him. An immense frustration. Humiliation too, at long-endured indignities. And a fury, normally cloaked deep beneath a mildness so regimented that nothing could break it, and yet burning so brightly now at the old man’s core that he wanted to take the broom and—

The orphan blinked, and it was just the duke again, as frail as ever, gentle, his eyes filled with tears. Her hand was out, demanding the broom, and he passed it over. Then, his head bowed in shame, he was hurrying away.

The orphan took a breath. What was that about?

She studied the vegetables and plants. His rage was partly to do with the garden, she had sensed that much from him. He thought that it had been befouled and ruined by the volcano. But in fact no serious damage had been done. The ash was not so thick as to choke out growth, nor was it poisonous. Indeed, it was like new soil, fallen from the sky. In time, the garden would be all the richer for it. Couldn’t the duke see that? Had his madness blinded him? Fertility still throbbed in the earth. This was no dead landscape, no frozen valley, no…

She caught herself, the duke forgotten.

What was it that she was remembering? What place?

It slipped away again.

She looked at the broom in her hand. Work! That’s what she should be doing! The hallways of the wards would be full of ash. She had been off duty for a whole day and night. There must be all sorts of chaos inside.

She set off towards the back wards, but halfway across the compound she slowed. She gazed about at the grey world. Was she missing something? A nurse passed by and smiled at her. The orphan stared at the woman in confusion. It was the same nurse who had told her to take the patients out into the sun.

Face blank, the orphan turned and made her away around to the rear of the laundry, to the spot where they had all been sitting when the eruption began. The concrete slab with the benches and chairs. Something had happened to her there—not only the eruption, but something else, something important.

All she found now was ash. It was heaped on the benches, and had buried the cement square. And yet—there were patterns in the ash. Lines and squiggles and smudges. They meant something, she was sure. Something disturbing.

Laughter startled her. She looked around, but at first could see no one nearby. And then—there, in the bushes by the fence, a huddled, dirty, ash-smeared figure was grinning out at her. It was the witch. Discovered, the old woman grinned wider and laughed again, then came scrabbling out into the open.

Memory stirred once more in the orphan. Yes—that was right, the ash and rain had been falling, and she had turned away from the volcano, and the witch had been there. Of all the patients, she was the only one who hadn’t been scared. The duke and the archangel had run away, and the virgin had been facedown in the mud, terrified. But not the old woman. She had been…excited?

Now the witch scurried over and knelt at the centre of the square. Several objects were cradled in her hands. She dropped them in the ash, then grinned over her shoulder and gestured for the orphan to come and see.

It was a heap of small dead animals.

The orphan saw birds, their wings crooked out stiffly. And mice, their tiny eyes shut. Even a lizard, shrivelled around its own tail. But all of them had been eviscerated, feathers and skin torn away to reveal their bones. And the witch was crooning happily as she prodded at them, her fingers bloody.

The orphan straightened in revulsion. Why had the old woman caught and killed so many creatures? Normally she was content with bones from the kitchen. Ah…but perhaps she hadn’t killed them herself. Perhaps she had just found them that way. The orphan looked up at the volcano. Perhaps that was the answer. The eruption had been harmless enough for people, but for smaller animals the rain of ash and mud might have been lethal.

The witch had followed the orphan’s gaze, and now the old woman rose to her feet, clinging to the orphan’s arm with one withered hand and pointing at the mountain with the other. She was speaking in her low, cracked, spell-casting voice—garbled words, but serious, and terribly eager. Was it some curse she was trying to cast? Some charm? The orphan could grasp no sense in any of it.

She tried to pull away, but the witch clung on. And then abruptly, as had happened with the duke, the orphan was somehow seeing into the old woman—indeed, for an instant it was like she occupied the witch’s skin. All her own perspectives changed and the world warped subtly into something new. The little pile of dead creatures on the ground—what precious things they suddenly seemed, laden with significance, as if to pick one up and pry at its insides would reveal countless secrets. What a gift they were. What a generous thing the mountain had done, to present them so.

And that was the strangest aspect of all. The orphan gazed at the volcano, and it was transformed now. She knew herself that it was only a thing of rock, lifeless, with no intent, and without thought. And yet through the witch’s eyes she saw something else: she saw a being. A slow, inhuman, mighty giant of a thing, exhausted after its fiery labours, and resting now, propped on great arms of stone. A giver of life. A bringer of destruction. A titan to be worshipped and feared and thanked.

Madness. It was just a mountain.

She broke free of the witch’s grip, and the old woman reared back, offended. They stared at each other. Then the witch tossed her head in dismissal. She gathered up her collection of dead things—already, in the heat, they gave off a whiff of decay—and hobbled away, hunched over her prizes, and scanning the ground for more.

The orphan was breathing hard.

What was wrong with everyone today? What was wrong with her? These glimpses, these emanations she was receiving, from the duke, the witch—they couldn’t be real. They had to be something else, a dislocation in her own head.

She was looking at the ground. She could see the patterns again in the ash. Some resembled scuffed footprints. And there were two strange, straight lines. Then she had it—the lines were made by a wheelchair! Of course. The foreigner—he had been there too. Before the eruption. She had wheeled him out there herself. Why had she forgotten that?

And what had happened to him, afterwards? Someone must have come and wheeled him away to safety. She didn’t know who. But studying the ash now, she saw that in front of the point where the lines stopped, there was an impression in the ash that was dimly human in shape. As if someone had lain there for a time, in front of the chair, while the muddy rain fell. And was that another memory? Had she turned away from the mountain, to see him sitting there, unmoving…

Why did the thought frighten her?

She glanced at her hands. She was still holding the broom.

Cleaning. Cleaning would make her feel better. She would settle into her chores. She would sweep out the halls and change sheets and carry meals. And she would not—although she couldn’t have explained why—go near the crematorium, or the little oven of a room in which the foreigner slept.

7

And yet still the day would not come right.

The whole hospital was busy cleaning up from the eruption, and the orphan joined in, but sweeping, it turned out, didn’t help clear her mind at all. Ash was everywhere through the back wards, and no matter how she toiled to shift it, the grains continued to rasp irritatingly underfoot. Dust itched in her nose, and sweat gathered in her armpits. It was so hot. The electricity was still off and the back wards, never brightly lit in the first place, had sunk into an airless gloom.

But worse was the thickness in her head. Faces loomed up at her—nurses and other staff, hurrying by—and the orphan knew them, or at least she knew that she was supposed to know them, but recognition took so much effort. They could have been strangers. And when one of the nurses spoke to her, the orphan could only stare back helplessly. The woman’s speech was incomprehensible. The same thing happened when one of the laundry staff accosted her, seemingly to make some urgent request. The words were nonsense. Not just hard to understand, but impossible.

She retreated at last to the kitchen block, and sat in a corner to eat. Normally it was one of her favourite places. Busy. Full of interesting noises and tempting aromas. But in truth, despite not having eaten in a whole day, the orphan was barely hungry. And the kitchen felt all wrong. The smells were bad, the clash of pots and pans too loud, and the yelling of the cooks might as well have been the hooting of animals.

One of the inmates, a young man, was standing in the doorway. The orphan followed his eyes, watching as a cook added salt to a vat of soup. Only suddenly it didn’t look like salt, or anything else she could identify. The substance was black and loathsome, and something moved in it, alive. It was a secret poison they added to all the food. It was a drug. It was what made everyone mad.

Then the inmate was gone from the doorway, and the cook was putting the salt away, and it was only salt.

The orphan fled the kitchen.

Where was she to go? Back to her room, back to bed? She knew she would never be able to sleep. Energy ached in her limbs. Yet everywhere else seemed too crowded with patients and staff. It wasn’t that they were doing anything objectionable. It was just that she could feel them. That is, she imagined she could—their emotions, pressing like heat upon her skin. It made it hard to breathe.

She returned to the main building and found refuge for a while in the catatonic ward. Here at least there was blessed quiet—no minds pushing against her own. There were only the vacant bodies in their beds. It was soothing, at first. She could sweep the floors unbothered as the figures around her stared at nothing. But with time the silence grew deeper. In fact, it wasn’t a silence at all. It was an absence. It came to the orphan that the catatonics were holes into which life and light and noise vanished. They were emptiness. And such emptiness might be even worse than the crowd. She went back out into the hallways.

And, at length, came across the archangel.

It was the glow of him that caught her attention. He was standing at the far end of a long passage. All around him was shadow, but the archangel himself was positioned beneath a window through which daylight shafted, and for some reason, in the light, his clothes and his face were almost shining.

Reluctant, but unable to resist, the orphan edged down the hall towards him. He was reading aloud from his book, the pages held up to the window, his hollow voice resonating. He was still covered in ash from the eruption, she realised, and that was why he shone—the grey powder flared white in the sunlight. His clothes and skin and hair. He might have been carved from cement.

Madness beat against the orphan’s forehead like the wings of birds. The archangel’s eyes were closed in some transport of inner ecstasy, but still he read on. His voice rolled over her with a hypnotic authority. Had it always been so deep? He was hardly more than a boy, but with his hair grey and his face mud-streaked he looked much older. So stern, so grave, so perfect. It occurred to her then that, although she knew he had once attempted suicide with a knife, she had never seen a single disfiguring scar anywhere on his skin.

But coming close now she saw that the perfection was an illusion. A muddy sweat had beaded on his brow, and his body was not merely motionless, it was locked rigid. Pain transported him, not ecstasy. Horrified, she realised that the window he stood beneath was shattered, and that broken glass littered the floor. The youth’s feet were bare, and as he prayed, he ground his soles against the shards.

And then it happened again. Without volition, she was drawn out of her body and into his. But the experience was more complete this time. She was the archangel. She felt the sun upon his face and the book in his hands. She felt his long straight limbs and his broad shoulders. She even felt the fire in his feet.

But she was also in his mind. And in his mind, he wasn’t tall and strong at all. He was hideous to himself, a misshapen bag of skin and bones. His head was corrupt with forbidden thoughts, his belly ached with evil hungers, and in his loins there coiled a damp, snakelike thing, insidious. Indeed, his body was his enemy, and he had put it away from him. The orphan had a strange impression of height, and of a lonely room, where he was held safe by the power of his book and his prayers.

But now he was ashamed, for when the earth had shaken and the sky had rained fire, he had forgotten his book and his prayers. Instead, he had surrendered to his bodily fear and run away to hide. The archangel was mortified by the memory. He was supposed to be beyond fear. And so now, through the pain in his feet, borne willingly, and through his prayer, he was seeking redemption. But only blood would be sufficient. He ground his heels down, and the glass bit more cruelly.

The orphan recoiled. The link between them snapped, and she was back in her own head. The archangel faltered. He licked his lips a moment, then drew a ragged gasp, turned a page of his book, and plunged on. Horrible. It was horrible in there. She wanted to flee from him, get as far from his suffering as she could. But she hesitated, torn between pity and disgust. She couldn’t just leave him. He would injure himself. He’d done little damage so far, but if he went much further…

Blood trickled from beneath his toes.

She drew a deep breath, and lightly took his elbow. This time there was no black gulf opening. The youth shivered, but something in her touch seemed to reach him, because he lowered his book and fell silent. The tension did not leave his body, but he did at least allow himself to be led away from the window.

Slowly, they made their way towards the crematorium. Patients and nurses passed them by, but the orphan avoided their eyes. She could not cope with anyone else. The archangel and his bloody footsteps were bad enough. She would deliver him to his room and be done. Yet with every step, an aversion grew in her. She realised that she was in dread of their destination. Not the entire crematorium, perhaps, but the little furnace room was waiting there, and within it, sleeping…

Ripples ran like heatwaves across her vision, but they were waves of cold, not heat, and she was walking, not through the hospital, but down a deep valley of stone, somewhere where it was night, and freezing. And there was a voice, a voice like no other, a voice she could understand inherently…

The orphan halted, staring about. No one was visible except the archangel, stiff at her side. She pushed forward, down the last passageway. At its end, all seemed black and quiet. There was something unusual about that, the orphan knew. Then they came to the dayroom, and she realised. Of course. There was still no power. The lights were off. And for once, the television was dark and silent.

Nevertheless, in the dimness, the virgin sat before the screen.

The orphan felt her tenuous grip on reality slipping again. She led the archangel to one of the armchairs, and forced him down. His shoulders were taut under her hands, and immediately he bent himself over his book, his fingers moving across the lines, although surely it was too dark for him to read.

The orphan turned back to the virgin. What was the girl doing?

She looked unharmed. Someone had cleaned her up since the eruption, and changed her clothes. And she was merely sitting as she always sat, legs folded, arms resting on her knees, her head tilted towards the television. Yet there was a distress in her so palpable it vibrated through the room like a thrumming wire.

The orphan was helpless to shut it out. She felt her identity melt away, and the virgin’s blindness come seeping into her eyes. Darkness closed in, and panic. Except, no, it wasn’t quite blindness. It was not a loss of vision, but a dulling of it, until everything was pale and distant. The virgin, in her dementia, seemed to be adrift in a world of the utmost dreariness, in which there was no colour or dimension. A flat world. A false world.

But a real world did exist, a place of brightness and life, and the orphan knew this because the virgin could see it sometimes, through a special window. A magic window. That world was wonderful, with every shape the most vivid, vibrant hue. Heavenly people moved there, radiant and beautiful and fascinating. That was where the virgin belonged. That was where she went, whenever the window was opened for her.

But something terrible had happened. She had been taken away from the window, and the false world had roared and thrown her to the ground, drenched by hot rain. Then brutal hands had assaulted her, prying and stripping and scrubbing. Finally she had escaped them to return to her window—but to her dismay it was shut, and no matter how she stared with her blind eyes, she could not open it again. There was no colour anywhere, no light, no reality. She was trapped in the false world, and now a frantic terror was rising in her that she could not stop.

The orphan turned away, nearly frantic herself. Madness. More madness than she could bear. Ever since waking this morning, her mind had been wide open to it, leaving her defenceless. The duke and the witch were bad enough, and the archangel worse…now this shrilling anxiety from the virgin. What was happening? Where had this hypersensitivity to other minds come from? And why had it occurred with these four patients—these particular four—most acutely?

The volcano, it had begun with the volcano.

The virgin was moaning now, a low, barely audible mew of despair. And the archangel was praying aloud again, fervid, rocking back and forth. He wasn’t a figure of stone anymore, he was a boy and he looked like he was about to cry. He needed help. He was suffering. So was the girl. But the orphan couldn’t help. She didn’t know what it was they needed. But nor could she leave. She felt pinned by their agony and by her own indecision. She was an insect, lanced through by a needle and stuck wriggling to the floor, close to tears, her fists clenched hopelessly.

Take her hand…

Had someone spoken?

Take her hand and put it in his.

That voice, she knew that voice from somewhere! Too shocked even to think or question, the orphan obeyed. She took hold of the virgin’s hand, and lifted it so that it touched the archangel’s fingers where they clutched the cover of his book. A spark of electricity seemed to flash through the room, a stroke of blue light. And in that illumination the orphan saw the archangel and the virgin staring at each other, their eyes suddenly awake, actually seeing, for real, face to face.

There was a heartbeat of all-encompassing silence. Then the room was dark once more. The archangel was muttering his prayers again, and the virgin was slumped back on the floor, blind. Everything was the same—except that something was very different. A searing pain had been removed from the air.

Come here, ordered the voice.

The orphan rose, unhurried. The pin was gone from her back, the strain and the fear and the confusion. She went down the little hall to the door that led into the furnace room. She opened it, and there in the tiny space, unmoving upon his bed, was the foreigner. His skin shone palely in the dark.

She remembered it all then. The cold valley, the huddled village, the landslide, the man buried with her under all those piles of rock, the freezing water rising, and finally his escape, torn and bloodied. Every detail of her dream.

It was no dream, said the foreigner, even though his lips didn’t move and his eyes were shut. It was me. You know that.

8

Oh, his voice. It was just as it had been in the dream that was not a dream. So clear. So crisp. A cool breath wafting through her mind, delicious.

Come closer. Please.

She complied without hesitation, closing the door behind her, staring at him all the while. His chest rose and fell slightly with his breathing, but nothing about him suggested awareness of her or even consciousness. It was a sign of her own madness, surely, to believe that a man could speak without moving his lips and see with his eyes shut. And yet she had no doubt about where the voice came from. It was the foreigner who spoke, as patently as if he had sat upright and opened his eyes and smiled.

Yes. But only you can hear me. No one else is special enough.

Pleasure warmed her. His wonderful voice—it was for her alone. And he had called her special! Not in the way that others did, where special actually meant stupid. No, he meant it in a good way, in an admiring way.

She took one of his hands in hers, fascinated. She had touched him before, while bathing him or changing his sheets, but he had seemed inert then. Empty. Now she knew that a waking, living presence filled him, and that changed everything. She threw the sheet back and stared, taking in the sight of him, naked and entire. How had she never noticed it properly before? He was quite beautiful. So smooth, so supple…

But then she was frowning. In her dream the foreigner had shown her a mountain falling, and a young villager caught beneath it. And she remembered that, afterwards, the foreigner had claimed a strange thing—that he was the villager. But when the orphan looked at the figure sleeping in front of her now…

I know. I look nothing like that man anymore. But that was me, all the same. The beginning of me, and what I became, anyway.

She believed him implicitly—a voice like his could surely never lie—but even so, a part of her was unsatisfied. The villager had torn his foot away to escape from under the rocks. This man showed no sign of any such injury. Besides, the landslide had been a long time ago. Ninety-two years, he’d said in the dream. That was forever. He should be old. Older than the old doctor even. And yet he wasn’t old…

Don’t worry. I’ll explain it all. Eventually.

Again, she could not help but accept this. Somehow, simply, he was young. She had hold of his wrist. She could feel his pulse. It was not erratic or sickly. It was strong and slow and regular. Like his voice. But—another question—why then was he still asleep? His body radiated health, yet it remained limp.

You can ask me directly. I can hear you.

And what did he mean by that?

The foreigner sounded puzzled in turn. You don’t understand ‘directly’?

No, she didn’t.

Ah…I should’ve realised. You’re unfamiliar with the use of the first- or second-person modes of address. How extraordinary. But then, why should you be familiar? You’ve never spoken aloud, never had a conversation in your life.

There was an emotion in his words she couldn’t quite catch. Was it pity? She was searching his body more closely now, running her hands over his hairless skin, looking for the vital wound that kept him sleeping.

You won’t find anything.

Then why didn’t he wake up?

I was hurt. Very badly. Not just in one place, but all over. I’ll have to stay this way for some time yet. While I heal.

She was confused. Hurt? When the mountain fell on him?

No. This injury was much more recent, and far worse.

Worse? But there were no scars on him. No marks.

You wouldn’t understand it.

The orphan withdrew her hands. So he was just like everyone else after all—he thought she was slow. And dumb. Someone to be laughed at.

Regret. No. I’m not laughing at you. I know you’re not slow. On the contrary, you’re unique. You have such abilities. It’s just that you haven’t been taught yet.

A memory of school flashed through the orphan. Of other children mocking her, of teachers rapping her across her knuckles and shaking their heads in annoyance, of being moved to the back corner of the classroom.

Those people couldn’t help. But I can.

The orphan could not stay angry with him. It wasn’t just his soothing words, it was the concern in them. She had never felt anything like it before, another person’s attention focused so intently on herself. Oh, she knew that the old doctor and the nurses cared about her, but they had never concentrated on her like this, never spoken to her so intimately, and offered…

But what was he offering?

You’ll see. There’s so much I can show you…

Like the cold valley of stone? Is that what he meant? She did not want to go back there. And where was that valley anyway? It had felt real, but how could that be? There was no such place on the island, surely.

Again, there was a bemused pause before the foreigner replied, but this time the orphan felt a sharp sensation of exposure. Not physical; it was a thing of the mind, as if the foreigner was peering inside her head, studying her thoughts and her memories, and nothing could be hidden from him.

Oh, child. Is it true? You really have no idea that anything exists beyond this little island?

The orphan bridled. She was no child!

I’m sorry. You’re right. And it isn’t your fault. How could you be expected to know? Without being able to read, without being able to talk, with even TV and radio unintelligible to you, what could you ever learn of the wider world?

Her anger faded once more, and she was blushing now, ashamed. Child or not, he had seen inside her, and knew exactly how stupid she really was.

He laughed. I can prove that isn’t true. Take my hand again.

She looked at his expressionless face. But the laugh hadn’t been cruel, or pitying, or sad. It was a laugh of…promise? She took hold of his hand.

Now, let’s see…through the door first, I think.

And suddenly, the room was melting away.

No, not melting, but the walls were suddenly insubstantial, even though they were made of solid brick. In fact, the orphan had experienced something like it once before. When the volcano erupted, she had looked down into the earth and seen the chamber of molten rock below, as if the layers of stone in between had become as diffuse as a cloud. This was a similar sensation, only much more deliberate. It was happening by choice, not by instinct. It was an act of the foreigner’s will.

And they were moving. Without standing up, without walking, they were drifting across the room towards the door. One part of the orphan could feel that she was still sitting by the bedside, and that her fingers were still clasped around the foreigner’s passive hand. But another part of her felt cut loose. Weightless. Floating. A shadow self. And that shadow self was being pulled forward by a hand far more compelling. The foreigner was leading her on, a shadow too it seemed, a ghost form with no more substance than mist—but in control of her.

They passed through the door as if it was a film of water.

Into the dayroom. There was the archangel, still bent over his book, in prayer. And curled in front of the dead television was the virgin. The orphan felt a stab of concern for them both, but with one look she could tell that the archangel was calmer, his prayers less fervent, and that the virgin’s panic had lessened.

Don’t worry. They’ve discovered each other, those two.

The orphan didn’t understand, lost in wonder at what was happening—through walls!—but her guide was already moving on.

And now, he said, his voice smiling, we go up.

They lifted, like a gust of wind. The orphan cried out at the thrill of it, and in a blur the ceiling and the roof of the crematorium rushed by, and then they were outside, in blinding daylight, suspended in mid-air, blue sky all around.

The foreigner was laughing at her amazement.

You see what you can do?

She could fly! Or at least, he could, and he was taking her with him, for her hand was still held tightly in his. The initial leap had passed, and they were drifting more slowly now, but upwards yet, beyond the broken crown of the crematorium chimney. For a moment the orphan stared down into its choked funnel, but then they were higher, a whisper of a breeze taking them, and the whole hospital was spreading out below—the back wards, the front wards, the outbuildings, all sleeping dreamily under their grey sheets of ash. A few patients and staff were walking in the grounds, but they were oblivious to the miracle in the air above them, the two impossible birds.

Ha! The orphan was laughing, or crying with joy, she didn’t know which. They soared higher, away from the hospital and out over the trees, towards the outskirts of town. And how insignificant the town was from the air, a tiny maze of alleyways and red dirt, dwarfed by the jungle and the plantations around it. And how drab it looked, with its rusty tin roofs and junk piles, and everything dirty with ash.

But they were higher again, and turning away from the town. The orphan realised she could see across a great swathe of jungle—indeed, across a whole flank of the island—and it was clear that the volcano had spewed its debris down just the one valley, and even then the plume had barely reached beyond the town. Past those limits the mantle of ash petered out, and the landscape burst again into vibrant green.

But they were turning further, coming back around over the hospital, and ahead now was the volcano itself, the summit thrust high above them even yet. It was barely recognisable as the same mountain the orphan knew so well. From down in the hospital grounds the profile of the upper peak was stern and unchanging—but from mid-air the mountain was a far more humpbacked thing, its many ridges flung across the island and its high cliffs staring out with a multitude of different faces.

And there! High up on the mountainside was a stony ravine from which a thin smoke leaked. It was the site of yesterday’s eruption. But the wind swept them swiftly beyond it. Onwards they rose, to the volcano’s summit now, and finally, either by chance, or at the foreigner’s choosing, they tumbled a bare arm’s reach above the very pinnacle. A single twisted tree grew there, protected and hidden in a hollow. And then the orphan was staring down a dizzying plunge of stone, as the summit fell away again, sheer, into a deep bowl of jungle on the far side.

And still they ascended, the air beginning to cool noticeably and the wind whistling with a keener tone. The orphan felt as weightless as ever—but now, somewhere in the background, she was also aware of an effort, either within herself, or within the foreigner, or within both of them, and shared through their joined hands. Somehow, this flight was costing them energy, and that energy was not a limitless thing.

But what did it matter? Even the volcano was dwindling away below them now. And around it, slowly forming itself into a ragged circle of green, the whole island was coming into view. The hospital and the small town were barely distinguishable any longer, lost amid the jungle of the central plateau. But the big town was clearly visible, down on the coast, sitting within its own spider’s web of converging roads. Its streets crawled with antlike people and cars, and its harbour swarmed with fishing boats.

It was the island as she had never seen it, a view full of astonishing new things. Not the big town, she already knew about that—her mother had taken her there once, for a day. What truly surprised her now was that she could see other towns—places of which she knew nothing. None of them were as big as the big town, and none of them were up on the central plateau like her own, but there were villages all around the coastline, and more farms, and more roads. So many, and she had never even suspected their existence. Why had no one told her before?

But still the foreigner lifted her, and now the circle of land was shrunken, its coastline fringed with white surf and luminescent reefs, outside of which great ships, much bigger than the fishing boats, plied the water, leaving long wakes behind. And then the orphan’s gaze went to the horizon, and she saw at last, all around, the glittering green sheet that was the ocean.

So immense, so shining, the waves receding off beyond sight. During that one visit to the big town, the orphan had stood with her mother upon a beach and looked out over the wide water, but she had never conceived, then or since, that it extended so far. Now it seemed that no matter how high they climbed, the ocean would simply unroll forever, wild and deep and dark, and that it was all of the world. But then the orphan caught sight of a shape on the horizon, a smudge of blue. It was an island—another island, far away. And staring in disbelief, she saw another, further on, and then, faintly, another still, the three of them in a line.

So high now. Her own island was no bigger than an outstretched hand below, and the air was deeply cold. And it was not only effort the orphan could feel, it was something close to pain. But she ignored it. A hunger had awoken in her. If there were more towns than she had known about, and more islands, then what else might she see the higher they ascended? It wasn’t enough any longer to merely be pulled along by the foreigner, she wanted to soar by herself, faster and further. So despite the cold and the pain, she pushed upwards, and the wind shrieked as they rose.

Sunlight glared at the edges of her vision—but yes, there were more islands out there, and beyond them, a larger, solid mass of land, reaching away unbroken. And something was strange about the horizon now. It wasn’t as straight as it had been before. It appeared to fall away. To curve. But how could that be? What did it mean? A revelation seemed almost within her grasp, and she flew, dragging the foreigner behind her, climbing and climbing, until the shriek of the wind scaled upwards out of hearing and faded away. They were beyond the wind now, and the cold was piercing. Fatal, in fact. There was no way they could have survived if their real bodies were this high, instead of sitting safe in the hospital room below. But their shadow selves lofted onwards, through silence and cold and a pain that was close to agony.

But yes! The arc of the horizon grew more pronounced, and suddenly the orphan understood that it went full circle and joined together. Why, the world was an enormous ball! All the great landmasses, all the sparkling oceans, all the sweeping bands of clouds—they were curved into a sphere. And the sphere itself was suspended in a glowing sheath of air, beyond which was only a profound and icy blackness.

Astounding. And beautiful. And so strange that surely no one else had ever imagined it. Oh, but the pain! Its source, she could tell now, was the foreigner. It poured into her through their clasped hands. This was killing him. She had taken him too far, much further than he had meant to take her. They had to go back.

But even then she could not surrender the vision. The sun was behind them, and as she stared at all the lands and seas glowing in the fierce light, she made another discovery—the ball turned! So slowly that it was not even visible, but her inner senses detected it. The vast sphere was revolving there in its void, rotating the lands on its surface from day into night and into day again. And the weight of that movement staggered her, so much stone and sea and air in perpetual motion. It was worth the agony to behold it just a moment longer, to feel, to wonder…

And then the pain was too much. Someone, herself or the foreigner, cried out in surrender. Something—strained beyond endurance—snapped. The foreigner’s hand tore loose from her own, and she was alone. She was falling, in spinning silence at first, then the air was howling around her, and the ocean and the clouds and the sun were all tumbling in confusion as the land rushed up from below.

And then—nothing. Darkness. Heat.

The orphan opened her eyes. She was back in the little furnace room. Her limbs were covered with sweat, her lungs labouring. From terror. From exhilaration. Before her lay the foreigner, his pale skin dry, his breathing calm, his hands folded on his chest. He might have been sleeping as soundly as when she had first entered the room, except that his eyes were open.

His gaze was blank—but the orphan knew better now. She leant over him, her face above his, her mouth close enough to exhale her hot breath onto his cold lips. Deep in his empty eyes she was certain there was recognition of her. Weary. Pain-ridden. Exhausted even. But approving. And proud.

You see? he said. You see how clever you are?

9

By next morning the hospital had mostly recovered from the effects of the eruption. The electricity had been restored overnight, the ash had been swept from the interiors and from the roofs, and in the yard the pathways were clear again. The laundry had even caught up with the washing.

It was virtually an ordinary morning, but to the orphan, roaming the back wards, such ordinariness was itself extraordinary. Obviously, no one at the hospital knew what she now knew—that the world was round, that it spun in empty space. They couldn’t possibly, because how could people just carry on as usual if they had known—if they understood that the buildings they lived in, the ground they stood on, even the air they breathed, was all spinning on an immense, glowing ball?

The orphan hugged the discovery to herself like a treasure. Never in her life had she possessed knowledge that no one else did. Always she was the slow one, the one left mystified. But this—this was a secret greater than any other. The patients would never guess it. It was beyond even the nurses and doctors. Why, if she told them, even if she could find a way, they would think she was mad. Or madder.

But she wasn’t going to tell anyone.

You must pretend nothing has happened, the foreigner instructed. He had been too exhausted to speak to her after their flight the previous afternoon, and she had left him for the evening. But, delightfully, he was there in her mind again when she woke at sunrise, quite audible, even though she was in her room and he was all the way across the compound in his. No one would understand. They’d only be scared of you.

The orphan didn’t think she was capable of scaring anybody, but there was no question of arguing. Not with him. So she attended to her usual morning chores as if she was still the same old orphan. As if she couldn’t feel the floor moving and moving and moving as the earth revolved beneath her. As if, when she went out into the yard and looked up at the sky, she couldn’t remember what it had been like to soar beyond the warm blue air into a pure and freezing and silent blackness. As if the foreigner wasn’t with her, hour after hour—no matter where she was in the hospital.

We’re connected now, you and I. Distance doesn’t mean anything. We’ll always be able to talk…and do other things.

Other things? Did that mean they would fly again?

A rueful laugh. When I’ve rested more, maybe.

She was sorry. She had pushed him too hard and too high.

Yes, you’re very strong, and I’m much weaker than normal. But when I’m fully healed, I’ll be able to match you. Don’t worry.

Wonderful!

But she was aware of a strange frustration. She was so grateful to him, so open to him, so enmeshed with him—quite unlike anything she had experienced with any other person—and yet it seemed that she had no word to define that to herself. No word to identify the sweet uniqueness of him.

My name—that’s what you’re searching for.

His name! But she could never know names…

No…but there’s no reason that should be a barrier between us. Names aren’t the same thing as knowing. After all, you can’t tell me your own name, and yet I know everything about you.

Yes, he did, it was true. But what did she know about him? Their connection flowed in only the one direction, it seemed. They had soared together, yes, and it was the most sublime moment of sharing she had ever experienced—but the sharing was all on her part. His own mind had remained closed throughout. Who he was, where he had come from, of those things she knew almost nothing.

You will, in due course.

When? Why not now?

More laughter. Mine is a longer story than yours, and much more complex.

But that wasn’t good enough. She needed to know, because not knowing frightened her. He had been trapped under a falling mountain and somehow survived and that was ninety-two years ago and she believed every word—but none of it made sense, and if it didn’t make sense, then maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe she was imagining it all, making it all up in her head. Maybe it was just her madness.

It’s not madness. How could it be? Could you imagine flying? Could you make up the things you saw yesterday?

The orphan wouldn’t have thought so. Certainly, she had never before imagined anything so exquisite as the shining world, spinning in space. But wasn’t that the cruelty of hallucinations? That they could be fatefully beautiful?

Forget the beauty. What matters is—did it feel right?

And, oh, it had felt so right. Indeed, the orphan had recognised the essential truth of what she was seeing even as they first rose above the volcano and looked back down. Those initial, minor revelations—that there were other towns on the island, that in fact there were other entire islands across the ocean—they had all seemed self-evident to her, even at the time. Of course there were other towns and islands. It was just that she had never travelled to them, or heard of them before.

And the greater revelations felt just as manifestly true. Why, having seen it now, how else could the world be but round? Yes, it seemed flat, but it couldn’t actually be flat, otherwise it would have to go on forever, a stretched bed sheet that never ended—and a deep part of the orphan’s mind rebelled at that thought. Besides, if she stood on a high place, she could see for a long way, but not eternally, no matter how clear the air was. The view had edges. And those edges were simply where the world curved away from sight. The solution was so elegant that the same deep part of the orphan’s mind rejoiced in it. This could only be reality.

Even the things she had seen that weren’t obvious, that indeed seemed the opposite of obvious, did not shake her conviction. There was the mystery, for instance, of how people were held to the earth—despite it spinning—rather than being flung away. She had no explanation for that. But nor did she doubt that it was a natural phenomenon, a force rooted in the fabric of the world. Something in the earth pulled objects to itself, and she and the foreigner had only been able to escape it and fly because they had been in shadow form. Weightless. And even then, it had cost them pain.

No, she could not believe that any of this was madness, nothing she had seen, nothing she had heard. It wasn’t in her to create such marvels and puzzles. It was a knowledge that came from outside of her. It was a wisdom.

And it’s all ours, my orphan. Yours and mine alone.

Again, wonderful.

Yet questions remained. In particular—was she truly clever now? If she had learnt so much, was she no longer retarded, or stupid? Had the foreigner made her smart?

By mid-morning, she wasn’t at all sure.

For one thing, if she was smart, then why was she still having so much trouble understanding people when they spoke to her? The foreigner, oh yes, when he was talking his words fairly hummed with meaning—and she’d hoped that it might be that way when anyone spoke now, that the old failing in her mind had been repaired or removed. But it seemed not.

In fact, the problem was worse than ever. In all her various encounters that morning with the patients and nurses, the orphan could not decipher a single word that was said to her. For the most part she coped anyway. She knew her duties well enough to guess what people wanted. But there came a moment when a nurse requested something the orphan could not grasp at all. Nor were there any clues—no patient nearby who needed new sheets, no puddle of urine waiting to be mopped up. The nurse, if anything, seemed to be waving at the empty air.

The orphan was close to panic when—

There’s no cause for alarm. She wants you to replace the mosquito coils in the rooms down the hall, that’s all. The patients are getting bitten.

The foreigner had come to her rescue!

And why not? He was there in her mind, wasn’t he? He could hear everything that anyone said to her. And he was not slow. He could understand exactly, and then tell her what was required. How very convenient.

But as she hurried away to the storeroom, the orphan couldn’t help noting that she’d been asked many times before to change the mosquito coils, and had always managed somehow to understand. So what was wrong now?

Nothing! And even if there was, what did it matter? The problem might go away, and if it didn’t, she was better off anyway with the foreigner there. She wouldn’t have to struggle with words anymore; he could simply translate for her.

Except…

He wasn’t always there. Not every moment. Twice more that day he helped her, interpreting instructions from the staff, but a third time, while she was being addressed by a laundry woman, the orphan reached out for his aid and found nothing. She was alone in her head. And she could only stand there, baffled and ashamed, until the laundry woman, impatient, gave up on her and turned away.

I was asleep, was all the foreigner said when he returned.

Asleep? But wasn’t he always asleep, and yet really awake?

My mind must truly sleep at times. I can’t watch you every moment. I’m a man, not a guardian angel.

But couldn’t she rouse him? Couldn’t she demand his attention? Or was the connection made only when he chose it, and not when she did?

But he was gone again, and didn’t answer.

Indeed, he was gone much of the time over the next few days. And for some reason her duties did not take her to the crematorium at all in that same period, as they usually would have, so she was denied even the sight of him.

And other questions arose for the orphan.

Television, for instance. As an experiment, she went and stood in front of the TV in the main dayroom. Half a dozen patients were there, staring up at the wire cage. The orphan studied the screen hopefully, but, as ever, she could determine nothing from the flickering colours. And the foreigner remained absent. He didn’t take over her eyes and show her what everyone else in the room, apparently, could see.

It was the same with her radio. She turned it up extra loud, and waited for the foreigner to make sense of the tantalising sounds for her. But he didn’t. She even tried staring at posters around the hospital, hoping for the squiggled lines on them to be transformed by the foreigner into messages of some kind. But again, nothing. And when she wondered why this was so—why he either refused to help her, or was incapable of doing so—he offered no excuse and no explanation.

His silences, she began to suspect, could be deliberate. But then she would feel guilty. How could she be so ungrateful, so doubting, after all he had given her?

Finally, late on the fifth night after the eruption, he spoke to her while she was cleaning the old doctor’s office in the front wards.

I feel better tonight, orphan. I’m sorry if I’ve been inaccessible these last days—I was more drained by our flight than I realised.

Oh, he was forgiven, of course. Now that he was with her. Everything was forgivable when he was with her.

Good. There’s something I want to show you. It might be useful. There. Do you see it? On that shelf in the corner?

She looked. It seemed that he was talking about an ornament which sat there. It was a multicoloured plastic ball, on a stand. She had noticed it many times before, and knew that it spun if she flicked it with her fingers. But that was all it did, and she’d always thought it odd that the old doctor would keep such a toy.

Really look at it. Does it remind you of anything?

She stared harder, hearing the test in his question and wanting to pass. But the ball was just a ball.

Strange…but then I suppose any artificial representation or abstraction…the same as it is with names, or pictures…

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