Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.