Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan

Author:Andrew McGahan [Andrew McGahan ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780007352654
Publisher: HarperCollins

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.

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