She emerges into a clearing flanked by rugged and sloping sandstone. Opposite her, a loose path of dirt and small rocks splits in two. The western fork runs to a ridge of sandstone beyond which Molly can see an expanse of stone country in the distance. A fork of silver-blue lightning splits the deep grey sky ahead.
‘The Lightning Man,’ she whispers. ‘“Follow the lightning.”’
But then Molly hears the piano notes coming from down the eastern fork, which heads off through a stand of black wattles and soap trees with flat round black fruits and then down an avenue of trees with mottled cream-grey bark and stiff leaves exploding with small ripe red fruits. These tree clusters are all canopied by a dense climbing vine with orange-yellow flowers shaped like starfish, and the melancholy piano notes float through this forest like saddened spectres.
Greta and Yukio emerge from the tunnel and Greta, holding the baby boy in her arms, the baby boy who fell into her arms from the sky, instinctively follows the notes down the vine forest avenue.
‘Greta, where are you going?’ Molly asks.
Greta says nothing, just walks deeper into the forest.
‘We need to go this way,’ Molly says, pointing towards the stone country. ‘We need to follow the lightning. We’re almost there, I can feel it!’
But Greta walks on, her head turning left and right to study the hall of trees enveloping her, swallowing her whole. Deeper, deeper into the forest, the notes of the piano drawing her along another dirt path that veers off through a wall of crab’s-eye vine with purple pea-like flowers. Beyond this natural barrier, in front of a sandstone rock wall swallowed long ago by snaking and multiplying and unstoppable vines, is a circular clearing. And Greta now sees metal gold rush relics in the foliage around her: two upright wagon wheels rusting away by the rock wall; an ore cart; a wooden ladder; a pile of chains and straps and shafts and poles.
In the centre of the clearing is a single tall bombax tree, maybe sixty feet high, with rough pale grey bark covered in conical thorns. The tree is alive with fleshy red flowers and oblong brown seed capsules, hundreds of which lie on the ground, their capsules split open like they were alien vessels whose absent owners abandoned them long ago. Beneath this tree sits a skeletal old man with long white hair, snowy eyebrows, a bushy chalk-white beard and old worn hands that are moving purposefully across the black and white keys of an old and moulding walnut-wood upright piano. He wears a cheap, cream-coloured Chinese-style flowing tunic over loose brown slacks. No shoes on his feet. He’s lost in his own music, his eyes closed and his head moving along the hills and valleys of his ghost notes that spirit themselves away from the piano and into the dense forest.
And Molly can see now that the old man is playing for an audience of a kind. There are eight bodies scattered behind him across the forest floor. Eight people sleeping – at least Molly hopes they’re sleeping. Chinese men and women in rag clothes. All of the sleepers are old and frail. Some rest on their backs on low stretchers and some rest their backs directly on the forest floor. Some laughing in their sleep, some turning their heads. Two of them look particularly serene: asleep in the daylight, but smiling as though the music is reaching right through to their dreams, conjuring expressions of deep contentment.
‘Come, come!’ the old man says, still playing with his eyes closed. ‘Come closer. Do not be afraid.’ He sounds European. Dutch, maybe.
Greta slowly and cautiously approaches the piano, holding the sky baby close. Molly and Yukio join her and they all stare at the man with hair so lightning-white Molly wonders for the briefest moment if they have not stumbled upon Sam’s Lightning Man here in the flesh, the one who sprays bending rods of electricity from his ear holes.
Yukio rests his hand on the grip of the shortsword hanging from his military belt. His eyes scan the clearing for signs of danger and the fact he sees none does not blunt the edge of his vigilance.
Greta gazes over the sleepers in the forest. ‘What are they all doing here?’ Greta asks.
‘What does it look like they’re doing?’ the old man replies, not skipping a note.
‘Sleeping,’ Greta says.
‘Not just sleeping,’ he replies. ‘Dreaming.’
Piano notes bending through the forest trees. ‘You play beautifully,’ Greta says.
The old man does not stop his fingers to respond. ‘I play nothing,’ he says. ‘The machine plays me. I just sit down at it.’
Notes into notes. Fingers still working across the keyboard. There is little flesh in the old man’s cheeks and even less hanging off his arm bones.
‘I’ve always liked this music,’ Greta says.
‘Your father played it for you,’ the old man says.
‘How did you know that?’
‘I played this for my daughters,’ the old man replies. ‘Fathers should always play the Liebesträume for their daughters.’
When the old man talks Greta can see that his teeth are rotting and there are faint black stains on what’s left of them. There’s a tar-black tinge, too, around the edges of the beard hairs closest to his mouth.
‘Dad said it was from a poem,’ Greta says.
Notes into notes into notes.
‘“O love, as long as love you can,”’ the old man recites. ‘“O love, as long as love you may.”’
Now Greta can see that the old man’s tongue is black too.
‘“The time will come, the time will come,”’ the old man says. ‘“When you will stand at the grave and mourn! Be sure that your heart burns, and holds and keeps love, as long as another heart beats warmly, with its love for you.”’
The old man opens his eyes
