On the right of the main corridor now, in the entrance to another corridor, stands a young red-haired woman in a loose and dirt-stained linen dress.
‘Have you seen Marielle?’ Lars asks the red-haired woman.
‘She’s in the reading room,’ she replies.
‘Inform her of our guests,’ Lars says. ‘We have an infant here in urgent need of milk.’
Molly smiles politely at the red-haired woman as she passes, but the red-haired woman does not smile back.
‘How long have you been living down here like this?’ Greta asks.
‘Seven years,’ Lars says, nonchalantly, as if that is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to live inside a large hole in the earth.
He comes to a stretch of red matting laid down in the corridor in front of the entrance to another, more expansive cave lit up by flamelight. By the side of the natural arched opening sits a row of shoes and sandals. Lars spreads his right arm out. ‘Please, after you,’ he says.
Greta steps into a spacious circular chamber lit by six rows of thick white wax candles lining the walls at separate points. Six wooden workbenches are spread across the room, each one three feet wide and one foot across and poorly knocked together from found timber and nails. Atop these benches rest specimens of native plants, some in large glass jars and some in pots filled with soil and some dried out and pressed flat between sheets of paper.
‘What is all this?’ Greta asks.
‘Test samples,’ Lars says. ‘Research.’
Molly puts her eyes up close to a jar of white globular fruits the size of sweet peas.
‘What are they?’ Molly asks.
‘Magic beans,’ Lars says. ‘Make a paste out of those and rub them across your chickenpox, you’ll be healed right quick. Just like magic.’
This room has given the old man energy. Greta sees a new oddness in him. His speech quickens. His thoughts bounce from notion to notion, idea to idea. He says he is a man of science. He says he is a man of medicine.
‘What’s that one?’ Molly asks, looking into a jar of stalks with red fruits.
‘It’s an insect repellent and a contraceptive all in one,’ he says.
‘A what?’ Molly asks.
He says he calls himself a botanist but the description speaks nothing of his life’s work. He says he came to Australia with his wife, Marielle, to document and share his observations on the uses and compositions of ancient bush medicines long known to northern Australian Aboriginals.
‘What’s that one?’ Molly asks, looking at a prickly bush.
‘The cure for rheumatism,’ he says proudly.
He tells them that he has found things in this wild southern world that could transform global medicine but that the world has always moved too slow for men like him.
Molly studies a jar of lemongrass.
‘Earache,’ Lars says.
Yukio is taken by a jar filled with a succulent bushy plant not unlike a Japanese bonsai. ‘Toothache,’ Lars says.
Greta holds a long green stalk with a green orb at the end opening to a crown of small green-yellow spikes.
‘Papaver somniferum!’ Lars says, with great reverence for the plant. ‘Opium poppy.’
‘You’re making opium here?’ Greta asks.
Lars scoffs. ‘The extraordinary properties of the opium plant figure prominently in my research, but to say I make opium is to say Moses tended to sheep,’ he says, ‘or Michelangelo painted walls.’
He says he has reasons for never going back to Sydney, and the wild beauty and bounty of the northern vine forests are the only things that matter to him now.
‘Yes, I have made my mistakes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I have sinned. But who upon this earth has not?’ He turns to Greta. ‘Have you not?’ he asks abruptly.
Greta shakes her head.
He turns to Yukio. ‘Have you never sinned?’
Yukio struggles to understand but he’s always following Greta’s lead lately and he follows it now, shaking his head.
‘I ask you, what’s the greater sin,’ Lars continues, ‘using my gifts to ease their pain or knowing I can ease their pain with my gifts but refusing to use them?’
‘Ease whose pain?’ Greta asks. Lars does not answer because he’s too gripped by his own increasingly erratic thoughts. ‘We have found God’s medical box,’ he says. ‘We must open it up for all the world to see.’
Molly holds a naked and floppy segment of a tree branch up before her eyes. Shiny dark green leaves and green and white flowers and circular fruits with hard orange skin, like small two-inch-wide oranges.
‘What’s this one for?’ she asks.
‘Nux vomica,’ Lars whispers, wide-eyed and mystical. He leans down to the gravedigger girl. ‘Strychnine tree.’ He pulls a fruit from the branch, holds it up with wonder and awe in his blue eyes. ‘Magic fruit. Eat one of these whole, seeds and all, and you’ll disappear from this earth and reappear in an instant at the pearled gates of heaven! Voilà!’ He shakes his head. ‘Extraordinary! This forest is filled with them!’
Lars moves to the centre of the softly lit chamber. He speaks to his guests now the way he spoke to halls of academics in Sydney and Melbourne, all those men who drove him out of academia with their lack of vision and petty jealousies and their cowardly reluctance to experiment. ‘What an extraordinary continent we have found ourselves in,’ he says, holding up the orange fruit. ‘A place where death grows on trees.’ He tosses the death fruit up in his hand and catches it. ‘Is there a land in this world more in awe of oblivion? Death resides in its branches, in its
