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,