Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ