Wonders of a Godless World

by Andrew McGahan

  Ah, but that was the mildest of storms. That was but a single cell, destined to rise and live and dissipate in no more than an hour or so. What happens in such a storm is that the downdrafts begin to dominate the updrafts. No more warm wet air gets fed into the base. The cloud starves of fuel and rains itself out.

  They were rising again, the orphan noticed.

  But if conditions are right, then new updrafts keep feeding into the front of the storm, keeping pace with the downdrafts, and the cycle stabilises—then the storm is free to grow in size and height and intensity for hour after hour.

  A breeze stirred—a humid breeze that the orphan could recognise now. A new updraft, being sucked into the storm ahead.

  It’s too complex to explain exactly, but if a storm grows in the right way, then it becomes a supercell—a cloud system massively bigger than a single cell, and massively more powerful. And the interior of a supercell, well now…

  Then the giant hand was shoving at their backs again, and they were rushing up into the blackness of the cloud.

  The orphan could never judge, later, how long she and the foreigner rode the storm together, or to what size it built. She was not even sure that it was the same storm as the first, or if it was a real storm at all, and not merely something relived from the foreigner’s memory. Or a mixture of both. But up and down they went, swapping from updrafts to downdrafts, their ghost bodies drenched by rain and battered by hailstones the size of fists. Winds tore and shrieked from every direction, and vortexes plucked at them from nowhere, spinning them off into oblivion. But what terror and delight there was in the speed and in the wrenching changes of direction. And what splendour there was in the fiery blue latticework of lightning that caged the tumult all about, the very atmosphere stinking of electricity and the din of thunder never ending.

  But finally the orphan felt the storm tiring about her. They rode a last updraft as far as it would take them, higher and higher, above any rain or hail, into flurries of shimmering ice crystals. There the last thrust from below died away, and they would have fallen back, but the foreigner took hold now and pushed them higher, until the greyness turned to dazzling white, and then to the deepest blue.

  They were out of the cloud and above the storm. The orphan looked down upon a white cauliflower mass that spilled away in the evening sunshine. From its crown streamed a mantle of ice crystals, sheared off by a high, cold wind, and around its base the dark sheets of rain were fading away to wisps.

  Yes, said the foreigner, the storm is dying.

  The orphan noticed something else. She had expected to see her island far below, but it wasn’t there. Nor was the ocean. Instead they were over a land of hills and farms and rivers. This was some other place entirely, and some other storm. And she was alone. The shadow shape of the foreigner had left her side.

  Yes. This is purely a memory now.

  Where were they, then?

  This is the site of my third death. My private forest, and my endangered butterflies, are almost directly below us. This is the storm that killed me. But it didn’t kill me with rain or hail, or with tornadoes, or with lightning.

  The orphan gazed down in bafflement. If it was none of those things, then what could it be? The storm was all but finished, its power spent.

  True. This phenomenon can only occur as a storm ends. Observe. The updrafts have ceased, the cell is one giant downdraft now. Normally from this point the storm would dump its last rain and dissolve away. But one time in a thousand perhaps, or one time in ten thousand, a dying storm collides with another weather system. A very particular type of weather system.

  Nothing was visible, but the orphan felt it even so. The upper level of the storm was now sailing into a mass of high atmosphere that was unlike anything she had encountered so far. This new air felt…old, that was the only word for it. And stale somehow. Dry. Like a forgotten crust of bread in the sun.

  The lack of moisture is what’s important here. This region of air contains no water vapour whatever. It’s a complex phenomenon in itself actually, such dry air, at such a height. But what matters now is how it reacts when it meets the collapsing storm.

  Slowly, ominously, the air began to drop. It had been suspended there by some means beyond the orphan’s understanding, but now the last downdraft of the storm was opening a vast trapdoor in the sky, through which the dry air could fall.

  The orphan fell too.

  Faster, and then much faster. But this descent was like no other ride the storm had given. The air about her was clear—it held no rain or mist. It was so dry that it made her shadow skin feel taut. Even the wind sounded different; a drone, rather than a shriek. And as she fell, she felt the temperature begin to rise.

  Yes. And that’s the dreadful cruelty of it. As the dry air rushes earthwards, it begins to compress, as any downdraft would, and to heat up. But while a normal downdraft is filled with rain which stops the air from getting too hot, this downdraft is utterly parched. This air will simply get hotter and hotter as it falls.

  In theory, that heat should stop the downdraft descending. But if it began high enough, as this one did, and gains enough momentum, as this one has, then nothing can stop it. It will hit the ground at high velocity and high temperature. It’s the rarest of weather events. But meteorologists have a name for it, nevertheless.

  They call it a heat burst.

  The orphan stared down at the earth speeding up towards her. She was still very high, but directly below, in the midst of a hilly country that had recently been slashed and cleared, she saw a patch of green forest.

  Usually, a heat burst does little harm. The surface winds do not last long, and the air reaches a temperature of only forty or forty-five degrees. Enough to scorch a few plants, enough to be unpleasant to humans, but that’s all.

  But if the atmospheric conditions all line up in the worst possible way, then the dry downdraft can stabilise. If that happens, then the hot winds will last for hours, and the temperature will go much higher. Officially, the record temperature for a heat burst stands at over sixty degrees. That’s dangerously hot. Hot enough to wither crops, kill small animals, and distress larger ones. But severe heat bursts are so rare that very few have ever been measured or studied.

  All I can tell you is that this heat burst—the one that hit me and my forest that day—was more intense by far.

  The foreigner exerted his will, and the orphan felt herself hurried downwards, moving faster than the dry wind, until she emerged into cool, damp air. She swooped out of the sky, aiming for the little forest. Glancing back, she could see no sign of the beast that was ravening down out of the clouds in her wake.

  I was camping in my forest that day, as I often did. I had fallen in love with the place. With its beauty, and its fragility.

  And it was beautiful, the orphan saw, as she flew low between the hills. It wasn’t like the jungle back on her island. This was a sparser, cleaner forest, with tall straight trees and lighter undergrowth. A tangy scent rose up from it, the very embodiment of health. It all seemed so peaceful. The sun was breaking through the clouds, making the hills glow. The air smelt of rain, the treetops glistened. And in a low valley, at the centre of a grassy clearing, there was a tent, and a figure standing beside it.

  I’d paid hardly any attention to the storm. Yes, I’d been forced into my tent for a while, but there’d been no hail, no lightning strikes. In fact, I was glad of the storm, for it had been a hot day, and there’s nothing so refreshing as a forest after rain.

  Small golden shapes, their wings fringed with red, were dancing in the air about the figure, dozens of them.

  My butterflies. They had hidden away during the worst of the weather—they can’t fly if their wings get wet—but now the sun was out again, and so were they.

  But as the orphan slowed and descended to land near the tent, a ghost in the landscape, she saw that the figure standing amid the butterflies was not, as she had expected, a younger version of the foreigner. Instead
it was someone else, someone familiar, yet shockingly out of place. It was the witch.

  It was me by the tent, don’t mistake that. But for our purposes here today, the witch will do just as well, so I’ve brought her along.

  But why? What did the old woman have to do with it?

  I’ve already said. We share a madness, she and I—or at least we once did. I’ve long been cured of it. Indeed, the events we’re about to witness were my awakening.

  The witch hadn’t noticed them. She seemed entranced, as if in a dream. And perhaps that’s all it was for the old woman, the orphan hoped, guessing what was to unfold. A dream where butterflies danced for her.

  Look. It’s coming.

  The orphan gazed up. There was, essentially, nothing to see, but she saw it nonetheless—the downdraft, huge, a cascading mass of air. Unaware, the witch was laughing at the butterflies. The old woman reached out to touch a silken wing, and the orphan would have cried a warning if she’d had a voice.

  There were no warnings for me. No time to run.

  No time at all. The avalanche of air slammed into the hills on the other side of the valley. The forest there shuddered, and the orphan saw the trees turn almost immediately brown, as if dirtied by dust. But it wasn’t dust. Then the winds came roaring across the valley floor, and the oven blast was upon them.

  The butterflies were the first to die. They crumpled and disappeared, tossed away like dead leaves. The heat was even worse than the orphan had feared. She knew that she could not be burnt—that she wasn’t really there—but even so, she curled in on herself, eyes shut, trying to shield her body from the scorching air.

  But notice—no fire. Nothing is alight.

  She forced herself to look. The foreigner was right. It felt as if the wind howled at her directly from a furnace—but there were no flames anywhere. The trees writhed and swayed in their distress, but they did not burn.

  A fire, in many ways, would have been better for the forest. Fires pass quickly and leave the core of most plants unharmed, the seeds still fertile. But a wind like this—so brutally hot, so prolonged—can desiccate everything completely, slowly sucking out every hint of moisture and destroying life right down to the microscopic level.

  Oh, it didn’t happen as quickly as I’m showing you now—it took hours to do the real damage, not merely a few minutes. But eventually even the large trees were baked right through. Their sap turned solid inside them, their wood became effectively petrified. They went from living things to being virtually made of stone.

  For me, flesh and blood, it was even worse.

  The orphan could hear, through the wind, a high-pitched mewing sound. She turned and there was the witch, huddled on the ground.

  At first I wasn’t really aware of it as pain. It was more that it was hard to breathe. The air felt too hot to inhale, my throat too dry. But there was to be no quick end for me, no merciful suffocation. Oxygen got through. I lived on.

  The witch staggered upright. Half-blinded, grimacing bizarrely, she stumbled across the clearing, the wind hammering her to and fro. The orphan drifted in her wake, cutting easily through the heat, untouched and unharmed.

  I tried to shelter in the forest.

  The old woman reached the cover of the trees at last—but it was no better there. The wind was inescapable. A yellow haze whipped across the ground, as thick as smoke, and the witch went blundering through it from tree to tree.

  Eventually my skin turned to leather—cooked, pulled tight, no give at all. It was agony just to bend an arm or a leg. Later my flesh split open, like a chicken’s skin roasting in a pan. But the pain wasn’t the worst thing, you understand. What was far worse was the sense of betrayal. How could the earth do this to me? That’s what I wondered, as I suffered that day. How could the planet inflict such torture upon someone who had done so much to protect it? And why—after I had saved that little piece of forest and those last few butterflies—why had nature itself decided to obliterate them?

  The witch was clawing at the ground. She was trying to dig a hole, the orphan saw, but the soil had been baked as hard as pottery. Around her the forest had become a skeletal thing, the trees stripped of all leaves, reduced to dead pillars.

  Do you see why that appalled me so? The earth was breaking the bargain I’d made with it. There was no cycle of regeneration here, no life emerging out of destruction. On the contrary, life in this one spot was being made irreversibly extinct. This disaster was going to leave only sterilised dust and fossilised tree trunks.

  And for what purpose? For no purpose at all. Thus was the great secret of nature revealed to me. And that secret is this—life doesn’t matter to the earth.

  The witch gave a despairing cry. She rocked back on her haunches and stared upwards, her ghastly face set like a thick mask. Haze hid everything now, but the downdraft was still an open hole in the sky, and the hot winds still fell from above.

  Such is the clarity bestowed to the dying. I understood then, in my last agonies, how wrong I had been. I recognised the randomness of the process that was killing me. I realised that it had no meaning, but was merely the result of gravity and convection. I saw that the earth was nothing but a collection of such systems, and that against such systems life, no matter how beautiful, had no special claim.

  The witch cried again, incoherent. She was peering at her arms, at slashes that had opened on her wrists, the skin tearing apart like old cloth. Her insides were already dried flesh, bloodless. And there was bone. Her own bone.

  See. She will leave no blood-filled corpse to fertilise the soil of some damp garden. She will become part of no plant or tree, she will not commingle with mother earth. Her hope has been a lie, and her death will be barren and useless.

  But the orphan didn’t want to see any more. It was too cruel. It was time to let the old woman go, surely.

  What—you don’t want her cured? This experience will do more to bring her back to sanity than anything the hospital will ever do for her.

  No cure was worth this. No sanity either.

  But it isn’t finished. It took me so long to die. The end only came when my core body temperature rose to fatal levels. I was blind by then, and incapable of movement, my legs and arms locked into place. But I was granted that last hour of consciousness…

  No, no one deserved such pain.

  Did I?

  But the orphan no longer cared. She reached out with her mind to the mummified shape of the witch, grabbed hold, and pulled. Away from the wind, away from the hot air, away from the foreigner’s pain. And instantly, it was all gone. The forest, the wind, the heat.

  Something sharp and cold stung against the orphan’s skin. Her real skin. It was rain. She was back in her body, back in her bloodstained nurse’s dress, lying flat upon the wet concrete behind the laundry. The rain splattered heavily for a moment, then eased away. Thunder rumbled distantly across the mountain. The orphan sat up. The storm had almost passed by. The sun was setting, a rainbow gleamed in the last shafts of light, and there was no hidden downdraft coming. No burst of heat.

  She laughed. None of it was real. It never had been. Beside her the foreigner sat slumped and soaked in his wheelchair, his head askew, gazing at the clouds. And such was the orphan’s relief that no actual harm had been done, this time she did grab hold of his face and kiss him, quickly, on the lips.

  But then the witch was screaming, and rolling on the ground, and clawing at her clothes and skin as if she was on fire.

  17

  By the time the orphan had alerted the nurses, the witch had disappeared from behind the laundry. When the old woman was finally located again, hunched in a cupboard, she had shredded her clothes and lacerated her skin all over. Worst was her left arm. She had gouged it open with a sharpened stick. Blood was everywhere and, horribly, the fingers of her good hand were wrapped around the yellow bones of her left wrist, apparently attempting to pry the bones out.

  When the nurses tried to take the sharpened stick away,
the witch turned wild, shrieking and flailing, and stabbing one nurse’s thigh so deeply the young woman had to be hospitalised overnight in the front wards. Mayhem. But at length the old woman was immobilised, and sedated, and strapped onto a stretcher. Then they carried her off to the only place she could be safely held—the locked ward.

  The orphan was following behind the stretcher, but past the locked ward’s iron door she was not permitted to go. She could only watch from the threshold as the witch was carted down the dark corridor beyond, and listen as there rose, in greeting, a chorus of sobs and moans from the other unfortunates already imprisoned within.

  Then the iron door was slammed shut.

  All night long the orphan stood vigil outside that door. She didn’t even take time to change out of her dress. The old doctor and various of the nurses passed in and out, and she heard the bemusement in their voices as they went, discussing the alarming developments. She knew what they must be thinking. The witch had always been so harmless. What had brought about such a change? Who or what was to blame?

  The orphan knew. She should have acted earlier, she should have made the foreigner stop, but she hadn’t, she had stood by and watched, too fascinated in spite of the witch’s suffering, too interested in what it meant…

  Late in the night, the old woman awoke from sedation and began to rave. Her voice was quite audible if the orphan put an ear to the metal of the door. Up until then, she had been hoping that the witch’s condition might be temporary, that she would be better by morning. But listening now, the orphan realised there would be no such recovery. She could hear, beneath the babbled words, how the heat burst still howled in the old woman’s mind. The witch remained trapped in the forest.

  That was why she had dug into her own arm. She had seen her bones laid bare by the hot winds, and in her madness and terror the witch had reasoned that if only she could dig those bones out—her own bones—then perhaps she could make the earth listen to her again, and ask the wind to stop. But now she had been prevented and tied up, and anyway, she had decided that the bones of her arms would never do. They were too thin. They were useless against the furnace wind.