Andrew McGahan - Wonders of a Godless World

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. Some thing different. Stripped down to bone and sinew, then fashioned anew.

And so I was born , said the foreigner.

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.