Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ