And that’s what this place is. Less a city than a maze. A maze of stone legs separated by alleys of dirt and short clumps of dry spear grass.
‘Which way will you go, Molly?’ the night sky asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘Go back home, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘I’m not going back when I’ve come this far,’ she says. ‘I’ll die out here if I have to.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ the night sky says. ‘You’ll get yourself lost in here and nobody will ever find you. You’ll waste away at the foot of one of these pillars and the birds will peck out your eyes while you’re still breathing.’
‘Stop it,’ Molly says. ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘Night skies tell no lies, kid.’
Molly makes her choice. Molly makes her move. She walks into a narrow alley between two rows of pillars, some with two heads, one with a head like a dingo, one with a head shaped like an axe blade. She tells herself to follow the lightning. Move forward. If she’s moving forward, she is moving towards the lightning and the lightning was striking on the other side of the stone city. If she moves forward she won’t get lost in the maze of stone legs.
‘No one is going to come for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘Why are you saying that to me?’
‘Greta has turned, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Yukio has turned. Your mother is dead. Your mother left you here alone, and you will be alone always.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Your mother abandoned you.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She left you for dead like a lame fawn, Molly. That’s what happens to people with hearts of stone.’
‘Stop it.’
‘She wasn’t running away from them, Molly. She was running away from you.’
‘Stop it.’
And Molly darts between pillars, skirts the legs of the stone giants, moving forward in diagonals. Diagonally right, diagonally left, speeding through the maze of legs. Always towards the lightning that flashes ahead in the distance. But then she comes to a wall of eight, nine, ten sandstone pillars that are joined together at the hips. She must go hard left or hard right and she chooses hard right and she comes to a rock shaped like a tortoise and she pats it because she feels that if she pats it she will remember it if she passes it again. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she says.
She takes a hard left into another alley and then it splits three ways – left, straight ahead and right – and Molly takes the forward path because she needs to follow the lightning and then she can only turn hard left and then hard right into an alley that runs straight for so long that she can break into a jog and she needs to jog because she is frightened and because in the moonlight the stone figures look like creatures bending down to curse her without words.
She comes to another stone wall and she must turn hard left and she spots a pillar that’s been severed down its middle, as if by a samurai sword and she calls this pillar ‘Yukio’ and she pats it to remember it, and even if she passes it again and is lost she feels that Yukio will save her the way he saved her from the tin miners so far back now in the deep country.
‘He’s not coming for you, Molly,’ the night sky says.
Molly’s heart beating faster. Her mouth dry. She runs down another alley. Forward. Left. Forward. Right. Forward again. Surely she is getting closer to the city’s edge?
She runs and she runs and she runs and she comes to another wall of pillars joined at the hip and she turns hard right and passes a rock she has seen before. ‘Tortoise rock,’ she gasps. And she panics and she runs faster because she feels the pillars are closing in on her now.
As she did before, she takes a hard left into the alley that splits three ways – left, straight ahead, right – but this time she takes the left alley which leads past a row of S-shaped pillars like snakes rising to strike. Like the whipsnakes Bert would slice up at home. Like the brown snakes that would cool themselves on the concrete floor of the laundry back home. Home, she tells herself. I want to go home.
‘I want to go home,’ Molly tells the night sky.
‘Then go home,’ the night sky says.
And Molly turns back and runs right along an alley and she takes a hard left and then a hard right and comes to another set of snake-shaped pillars, four of them this time, and she runs left and right and zigs past a pillar with a small round head the size of a coconut resting on a torso the size of a large ice chest. Then she zags right alongside a pillar with a horse head and then a pillar that curves like a crescent moon.
‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says.
‘Stop it,’ Molly says.
And she runs and she runs and she runs. Left and right and right and left again and she comes to a wall and she turns and comes to a wall and turns and comes to a wall and then she stops to breathe. She rests her head against the sandstone.
She’s in a box of stone legs with only one way out. And there is no lightning to be seen. No lightning to be followed.
‘You are lost, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘Nobody is coming for you. Nobody wants to help you because you are cursed.’
‘Stop
