It was not until the words of his late grandfather pushed their way to the front of the crowd, that it became clear to Jorge that the voices living inside his head belonged to the wandering souls of the dead. 

Jorge Asturizaga was seven years old when, what the villagers referred to as a cloud of peculiar, began to follow him around.  Unexplainable mishappenings, misplacements and miracles baffled his neighbours and frightened his peers, though no one was quite as bemused as Jorge himself.

When they demanded to know why he behaved so strangely, he could give them no explanation.  He did not know why he carried an umbrella with him on a day when the sun plagued every scalp and rooftop, or why he held it above his head just before the cloudless heavens opened.  He was unaware of what made him stop in his tracks moments before a car veered off the road, or why he would wake up with a fever the day someone nearby was going to die.  His father did not know what possessed his son, but cast his fishing net out in the direction of his eyes and reaped the rewards.  The village kept a constant watch over him and at the sight of anything unusual, word would be passed from window to window and they locked themselves in their homes, fearful of what waited for them outside.  This, of course, did not stop someone climbing on a stool to reach a top shelf and falling to their deaths or the breath suddenly escaping from their lungs as their hearts beat their final beat.  It was said that if one peered into Jorge’s midnight eyes lit with flecks of gold, the past and future could be found swirling deep within.

A constant traffic of spirits flooded into his young mind and filled it with a discordant static of whispers and collages built from the pieces of their many lives.  Unable to understand their garbled tongue, he carried their desires around with him, coursing through his veins and filling his blood with their woes.  It was only a little later on in life that these hunches and mutterings fought their way into his consciousness, manifesting themselves as clear visions, dreams and voices, lifting the veil on his destiny.

Some of the souls that came to him had recently parted from their dead bodies, others were undead and a few were nearly dead.  Souls are omnipresent, not bound to time or place and exist in the past, present and future of the life that they represent.  It was in this way that the ghosts of the dead and the living appeared to him, entering into his head as scattered apparitions and white noise.  He had no knowledge of what stage of life they came from, if they were dead, somewhere between life and death or about to die.

Jorge could only receive, not communicate with the souls, listen but not reply, and every day envelopes of wishes were posted into the letterbox of his mind but with no addresses and there they stayed, burying him beneath them.  The burden and futility of his knowledge weighed down on him like a crumbling building on the foundations of his conscience and it was not until he reached his twelfth year that he was able to connect the living with the dead, at times with disastrous consequences.

Among the distorted chorus of voices, one note had sung out to him as if it were his own.  It belonged to a wise old soothsayer, who, though he still lived in this world, had surpassed Methuselah in his many years on Earth.  After some enlightened ages, his liberated soul had taken leave of its mortal coil and he soared through the universe, flying on the wings of time.  He was Jorge’s spiritual guide and with his teaching, the young prophet channelled and crafted his gift to translate the messages of the spirits. 

He explained that since the earliest civilisations, the disease of modern man has been to cut the umbilical cord with earth and now only those souls that truly open their minds are able to bridge that gap.  Jorge grew to understand the universe and breathe with it.  He practised the art of meditation and carved himself a path towards a future that was clear and pious.  He studied from his master the reverence of fate, that which was in the hands of man and that which was beyond.  There were roads that had to be followed, turnings that could be taken and paths that forked in every direction at the hands of the lives that walked them, but the point at which the road stopped - death - could not be chosen.  Death’s path was mapped out in the universe.  While the act of suicide or the killing of a man might give the allusion of free will to the perpetrator, it was always and without fail, following a predestined course, with all paths leading to that same end.  It was his role as a prophet to juggle fate with prudence and pass on only the knowledge that would benefit the people, and, of course, be sure that it fell only into right and deserving hands.

Word of the child prophet spread, carried by the wind to distant lands, and Jorge began to deliver the messages of the souls and the universe at large to the people who came to the small fishing village, carrying grief on their backs and hope in their hands.  Each morning, he woke to a queue of ghosts knocking on the doors of his mind, matched by a line of the living, who stood outside the thatched hut he shared with his family.  By noon, the body of people would have stretched down to the shore and along the beach.  It would be past midnight when he closed his eyes to rest, his energy spent and his thoughts emptied.  When a person knelt before him and prayed for the soul of a loved one, Jorge would hear a shuffle of feet, a few curses, some pushing and shoving until, eventually - and not always - a soul came forward.  Grieving hearts were mended with words from beyond the grave, lives inspired and dreams secured.  Yet, as with any group, among the honest, gentle and trusting souls there were also tricksters, con artists and sinners. 

While the living were generally respectful and sometimes fearful in his presence, the dead had the potential to be an unruly, angry, and occasionally abusive mob.  It was as if all sense of courtesy had been shed along with the physical body and it was not unusual for fights to break out, troublemakers to jump the queue or for Jorge to be tortured with their screams when he refused to repeat warnings of death, gambling tips or other backhand opportunities.  Wrongdoers tended to increase in membership on the other side.  Those who had been criminals in life continued to be so in death and those that had been good only out of fear of the law or religion became mischievous when they realised that there was no day of reckoning, pearly gates or jail sentence awaiting them.  The afterlife became a chaotic land ruled by disturbed and jaded souls, and it fell upon Jorge to wade his way through the mud.

It was the day of his seventeenth birthday when they first tricked him.  They had whispered their disguised voices in his ears and urged him to warn the workers of a factory plant to stay indoors after hours and barricade themselves in while a cyclone passed.  Instead, a chemical leak filled the building, burning away at their skin and blinding each and every one of them.  The second time, it transpired that a terminally ill man had hatched a plan to rob a bank with his colleagues, promising that when he was dead he would fix things from the other side and forced Jorge to evacuate the employees, allowing them to empty the safes at leisure.  The third time, he played a part in ensuring the extermination of an entire herd of cattle and ruining a year’s crops.

While still a young man, he could take no more and retired from the dead.  With his mother bedridden and his father’s back beginning to struggle with the weight of the nets, his hands cramping with arthritis when they closed around the ropes, Jorge took to the seas in order to provide for his family.  He married his neighbour, a beautiful girl with eyes that laughed and a spirit that lightened Jorge’s heart on the darkest of nights.  When their daughter, Yemanji, was born, he built a house on the beach made from driftwood and cowrie shells.  Though he continued to advise the village on harvests and warned them of floods and other such disasters, the volume was turned down on the voices and the visions only came to him in his dreams, lapping against his thoughts with the waves.

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One suffocating and dreamless night, the sea breeze having relinquished its nocturnal duties and the air still pregnant with the heat of the previous day, water dripped into Jorge’s ear and woke him from his slumber.  Opening his eyes to find the source of the water, he saw with horror that it was his wife standing over him.  The bowls of her eyes were brimming with black ink that flowed over the edges and the flesh around the sockets was swollen.  Her skin was drained of colour, her lips frosted and her clothes wet through as she stood, shivering.  Holding her hand at the side of the bed was his little girl, her rosy cheeks grey and bloated.  He opened his mouth but no words came, his voice shocked to a whisper and the pair stared back at him with haunting, unblinking, fixation.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see his wife half asleep in the bed with him, her chest gently rising and falling with the rhythm of life.  The relief that fell into his heart was washed away with fear that ran through to his core and clawed at his soul.

Jorge was up before the sun, sleep having evaded his mind and replaced instead with the image of the drowned souls.  Though he was still distrusting of the dead, he could not shake the visions from his mind and without a word of the night visit, he told his wife to pack up the house and say goodbye to the family and the village.  As he stood staring out to sea, the reflection of death in every wave, she put her faith in the eyes of the man she loved with all her aching heart and without protest closed the door on the life that they knew and the three of them rolled off towards the distant mountains.  Overnight, his tousled ebony mane had turned a steely white and the supple youth of his honeyed skin forked with lines that mapped the story within. 

Living above the clouds, where the landscape humbled even the proudest of hearts, the loneliness long replaced with laughter, they were content with the life that they had made for themselves.  The love and bond between them strengthened with each day and they were welcomed into the warm community of villagers with arms wide and embracing. The visions had disappeared and the only voice that filled his thoughts was that of his daughter.  A striking girl with cocoa curls and hazel eyes, she absorbed the life around her, digesting and questioning everything with wonder and amazement.  The last thing she would ask him in her young life was whether the world was going to grow old and die.

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After many years, he was summoned back to the old village.  It was the Ten-Year War, a gathering of five towns and villages every decade in remembrance of their ancestral grievances.  A largely ceremonious affair - though there were inevitably some casualties - the individual communities spent three days of drinking, dancing and celebrating before gathering together in traditional warrior dress to fight one another with fists and stones.  It pained him to leave his wife and daughter, but it was a grand honour to represent his forefathers and would have brought even greater shame than his exile on his family if he had abstained.  His father and brother having passed away, Jorge was the only man to represent the ancient line. 

The days slipped by in an alcohol-induced haze, a frenzy of singing, dancing and beating of chests.  They gave thanks to the memories of their warrior fathers, the ancient trials of politics and territory and the peace that they now enjoyed.  It was also a time for men to settle lingering disputes, to resurrect the fists of the years before and to celebrate that they were still alive.  At the end, they prayed for the souls of the less fortunate, tended to the wounds of the quite fortunate, and cheered on the champions of fortune.  

As the cart rocked its struggle through the valleys and up the hills towards the clouds, his thoughts turned to his wife and daughter, whom he missed greatly.  He tried to prepare the answer for Yemanji that he had promised to give on his return, but he allowed his mind to wander and it marched into the realms of unease.  So remote was their existence, he had been away for no less than six weeks and concern for their safety boiled away inside of him and punched the breath from his lungs.  As he turned the final bend towards the village his heart kicked his throat and the hands of his stomach rang his insides, squeezing out the tears.

Where the village once stood, a lake stared back at him with a disturbing tranquillity that mocked his soul.  In his absence, the cruel sun had set its sights upon the mountain and furiously melted its snow-capped peaks, breaking the banks of its lake and sending a torrent of icy water down towards the land beneath, coming to rest in the basin where the houses once stood side by side.  With no warning or time to run, as the wave tumbled down the mountainside and its roar filled their ears, they had gathered together in the grounds of the school, and it was there they had died, their hands tightly clasped to one another.

The underwater village now stood a mile beneath the clear waters.  He dived down and swam through the empty streets, past the spiral of the church and through the gates to the house that he had built to protect the ones he loved from this same fate. The windows were shattered and his daughter’s doll was trapped in the frame, eyes closed and cheek smashed.  Pots and pans floated around the kitchen and the clock on the wall told him the hour at which death had taken them.  He willed the still water to consume him, but it forced him to the surface again and again, filling his lungs with unwanted air.  Each time he dived down, the rooftops of the houses sunk deeper, further beyond his reach until all that was left above the dark bottom was the distant, sinking clock tower of the school.

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Desperate to save his family, his hubris had allowed him to think that he might be exempt from the universal rules and that he could rewrite their fate.  Instead, death had caught up with them and brought itself not just upon their lives but an entire village of innocents - the price of his punishment.

Riddled with guilt and remorse, each morning he swam out to the centre of the lake and begged for it to swallow him but it refused to take his life.  He prayed that one day he would be relieved of his misery and separated from his wretched being.  He cursed the burden of his visions and wished that he had never known the truth, for it had been the cruellest of gifts.  Unable to leave the water, he cut down the trees that survived along its edges to make a raft and built a small wooden hut with a thatched roof on top, furnishing it with relics the lake delivered to the surface.  He survived on that floating abode for many decades and each night, as he drifted off to sleep, his ears strained to the wind and he would imagine their screams, the murmurs of the drowned souls beneath.

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The last rays of the sun lit the lake as Jorge sat on the edge of the raft with his trousers rolled up above his knees, dangling his legs in the water and swilling a line gently, gliding it through the still grey, hands poised and waiting for the gentle tug of a bite.  As his father before him, his fingers were riddled with arthritis, his bones creaked and his sorrow was sketched across his face.  Years of solitude had closed his heart to the world and he suffered in silent grief.  He felt the resistance taught the string and reeled in the line with the fluidity of habit.  He paused as he felt it slacken, the prize within reach, and peered down to see the metallic glint of scales.

When Jorge pulled the line out of the water, it was not a fish that he found hooked to the end, but instead a tarnished silver paddle brush, its handles strangled with reeds and engraved with lilies, the faint outline of which could just be made out amongst the cockles.  In the cabin, he placed it with the other assorted combs, pocket watches, brooches, mugs and lockets that he had collected over the years - a shrine to the ghosts that lived beneath.  The distant cry of a baby drifted through the wind towards him but, with nothing around for many miles, he thought his aging mind was playing tricks and settled down for the night.

The cries seeped into his dreams and when he woke, he found them still there, bouncing across the lake.  He searched the horizon but he was met with the same scene that taunted him every day, watching with youthful arrogance as his body began to decay and turn to face death, while it remained constant and reliable, changing only slightly with the seasons.  Still, each morning and night the cries came and went, sometimes long, distraught wails and other times quiet, defeated sobs.  As they ate away at his conscience, he found himself pulling up the anchor and rowing his house to the edge of the lake. 

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Jorge’s legs had not stretched to a walk for a very long time.  Progress was slow, he stumbled often and cursed as much.  He did not know where he was going or what he would find there, the voice of the living or the dead, the born or unborn.  All he knew was that he had to walk in the direction of the cries and he allowed his heart, the doors of which were creaking open, to guide him there.

On the sixth day, he came to the gates of a village.  The carving on the wood was crude in its execution but delicate in thought and depicted sympathetic scenes of the surrounding landscape and mountain life.  As he entered, he was struck by the silence, for not even a bird in the sky disturbed the peace and the air was stiff and unbroken.  Cattle and goats lay sleeping in the fields, while chickens brooded quietly.  The window and doors of the houses were open, the walls worn from past battles, faded blood stains hinting at a massacre from wars fought long ago, roofs still unrepaired and singed from fire.  It appeared abandoned, void of life, and as he walked through the houses, he saw pots sat upon the charred remains of dead fires, washing hanging crisp and bleached yellow by the sun, windows caked in dust.  It was as if, in the middle of the day, the people had vanished from their lives, and it was not until he reached the square that he saw the first body.

A man was slouched awkwardly on a bench and another collapsed at his feet, their faces wearing just the hint of a grimace and their eyes tightly closed.  As Jorge approached them, he saw bodies scattered all across the dust, arms twisted, legs crumpled.  From the layers of dirt that covered their clothes and the spoiled vegetables that had escaped from upturned baskets, it appeared that they had been this way for some weeks.  A movement in the corner of his eye turned his attentions to a butcher who was folded, cleaver in hand, across a shoulder of beef that was squirming with maggots.  To his right, a grocer was swimming on a bed of rotting oranges.  

The cry cut through the air and stirred his heart.  He tracked the sound, weaving his way through the houses, stepping over the lifeless bodies, until he arrived outside a hut.  The cries came from within and he faltered at the door before stepping cautiously inside.  A pungent odour invaded his nostrils and he saw the source was a pot of mouldy stew that was fattening an army of rats.  He scanned the room for a cot but found only a woman lying half across a tattered mattress, legs bent on the mud floor, the floral patterns of her dress stretched across her pregnant belly. 

He knelt down and put a tentative hand on her stomach.  The kick sent him recoiling and the cry of the unborn child pierced his ears.  He saw a strand of hair that had escaped her plaits and rested itself across her mouth, and to his relief it was moving with her shallow, steady breaths.  Her face was lit with the glow typical of a life that is inside radiating out, but when he fetched some water and splashed her face, shouting and shaking her by the shoulders, his efforts were fruitless.  It then came to him that none of their faces had been the faces of the dead.  Cheeks flushed, bodies supple and, in contrast to the food around them, they showed no signs of decay.  He went outside and checked the bodies that littered the path, each one with regular breathing and a pulse.  It seemed as though the whole village was sleeping.

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When night fell, the gibbon moon bathing the village in an eerie light, the broken wings of dreams and nightmares fluttered into his thoughts and their beat disturbed the cobwebs of his mind.  The incoherent stream of babbled words, images and emotions swamped his head and spun it on its axis.  They flooded into him, a cacophony of whispered murmurings, the collective hum of bees.  He sewed together a patchwork of their dreams - a child falling from the branches of a fig tree, a woman running through fields of sugar cane scratching at her bare legs, a scorpion crawling over a mango skin dried in the sun, a man riding his horse through a parade, blood streaming down his face, a kitten drowning in a cloth bag, water rushing in as the skies pushed forward, darkening under crumbling hills.

In the blanket of their dreams, Jorge called upon the spiritual strength in his soul that he had buried in the ashes of the past.  He saw clearly and cruelly how wasted his years had been, brooding over the mountain lake, concerned only with himself and his failings as he watched the world pass him by.  He was reminded of the powers within him and resolved to face his demons and open up his heart to the spirits once again.

The people of the village were trapped on the other side - the undead.  They were imprisoned in their breathing, comatose, shells while their souls roamed the other side in limbo.  Their dreams, born from the random remnants of their subconscious, offered him no insight into their disturbing predicament and though he searched for clues, he could not understand what it was that made them sleep.  With every cry of the unborn child, he was reminded of the constraints of time, and he realised that in order to communicate with them, he would have to cross over to the other side. 

There had been only one time in his life, many years ago, when he had stepped out of his body and separated his soul.  It was under the guidance and assistance of his master that he had glided through time and space, over the lives of the past and present and he doubted if he could do so again, alone.  He was wary of the spirits still and it was with fearful anticipation that he shed all thoughts of himself and his surroundings, focusing on the light within him, the residual life inside, until his world exploded in a supernova, a flash of blinding brilliance, and his soul was free again.

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He walked through the village, his body as agile as in the days of his youth, his bones liberated of the aches that had entwined themselves into his muscles like ivy strangling a vine.  The silence was deafening once again - no whispers, no footprints in the dust, no life.  In the land of the souls, the sun was heatless and the wind ceased to blow.  As if in a dream, the air was odourless and without temperature.  He saw no people, cattle or vegetables scattered on the ground, and it was as if only the buildings had been left to stand guard until they returned.

The mob descended upon him from behind, grabbing at his arms, falling at his feet and touching his face, bringing him down to the ground and suffocating him with their screams.  Strong hands pinned him back, with wrists caked in worm-scars, pink and raised, while another wearing an eye patch clasped Jorge’s hands in his and held them to his face.  They cried and begged, scratched and pawed, throwing their arms in the air in exalted, frenzied, prayer.  A tuft of his silver hair came away in the hands of a young woman who gouged his neck with her fingernails, her eyes bright and fierce.  The grocer, the same that he had just seen floating on a raft of oranges in the other village, had fallen back beneath him and was now Jorge’s squirming raft, riding the crowd as their words and tears bonded in an agitated rage until there was nothing more than a static and blurring of frantic lips and pleading eyes.  It was a while before they realised that the man who had come to save them had disappeared from under their feet.

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Back in the land of the living, exhausted and dazed, his thoughts darkened and he was disturbed as the angry crowd danced around his mind, his past doubts about the spirit world working their way to the surface.  His instinct was not to trust them, born from the betrayal he had faced as a young man.  Yet when he played the scene over again, it was their eyes that came back to him, he had seen through their kicks and punches and into the fear that lived behind those windows.  As an old man, he understood that desperation alone could create monsters out of good people and that they could not be judged for defending themselves.  He had to return and save them, his body was weary from the exit and entrance of his soul and it screamed for rest but he did not have time.  He had no idea how long their souls would be drifting in purgatory, but he knew that the coma was not a precursor to death and that, where he had failed with his family and the people of his village, he could succeed in redeeming the past and saving these souls and the life of the unborn child.  Closing his eyes, he disappeared once again.

This time, they were prepared for him.  After his last visit, they had been forced to organise themselves, realising that the man that had wandered into their nightmares was, in fact, their only salvation.  He found himself in the square and the people who had not long ago mauled him were smiling now with compassion and hope.  The fiery eyes of the young woman were now humble and her expression serene, the man with the worm-scars stood before him, head bowed to the side, hands cupped almost in prayer.  As he walked down the line of villagers, some of the younger men eyed him suspiciously and made to attack - a natural instinct after years of unrest - before checking themselves as their faces flushed with shame.  They were proud people and held their heads high, but he could feel the sorrow that was knotted with dread in their hearts. They had formed an orderly queue behind a school writing desk, carved from cashew wood and lacquered with its own resin.  On top lay a neat stack of paper and a freshly sharpened pencil, and beside it was a low stool used by the women to milk cows.  The elder of the village, a frail man with a long, thick mane of hair and a face that had laughed and frowned its life in equal measure, held out his arms to Jorge and greeted him with an urgent warmth, kissing his feet.

‘Please forgive us, we mean you no harm and we are blessed that you have come,’ he said. ‘The people are here to tell you what they know, so that you may understand why we are here.’

After years of not being able to communicate with the souls, Jorge did not vocalise a response and only smiled his assurance.

Jorge was a tall man and dwarfed the child’s desk - which was no more than a metre high and the stool buckled under his weight, painting a rather comical figure with his back hunched over, arms hugging the desk and his knees stretched out either side.  In pairs, they came up to him with their opinions, memories and concerns about the day that they had fallen asleep. 

Severed from the world in his lake dwelling for decades, he knew nothing about the goings on of the world or his country and when they learnt this, they sent the scarred man - the army chief - to the front of the line.  In contrast to his black eyes and body riddled with tales of war, he was patient and gentle with Jorge.  He explained with a heavy heart that the country had been invaded once again by foreigners.  They were creating a small empire through the systematic takeover of lands and tribes, relocating entire villages in order to drill, build, or farm the land by offering bribes or using cunning to dupe people into abandoning their own homes.  When they had received a message that the foreigners were coming to their village, they, like their ancestors, were poised to attack and a bloodbath had ensued.  The land that they lived on was rich in prizes and they protected it with a strong army of men and women that was yet to be defeated and with a violent reputation that sent word of their savagery across the country.  They were not proud of this history, but they thought that they had acted out of necessity and saw no alternative to violence.  They felt remorse for the blood of the slaughtered men that was engrained in their walls and in their streets and many were convinced that their afflictions were a curse for the massacre of the foreigners, for not heeding to their words, that had put them to sleep.

He listened patiently to the other offerings, which ranged from the intelligent and plausible to the bizarre and ridiculous.  Three garrulous sisters were convinced it was an act of revenge, that they had been poisoned and were paying for the unsettled feud of a neighbour or the jealousy of a husband.  The man with a weeping eye - his patch lost in the scrum - thought it might be mercury poisoning because he had heard of voodoo rituals in the north where they sprinkled houses to attract good spirits and repel evil ones.  Many insisted that they were sick with a disease, of which they almost all agreed must have been brought over by the foreigners.  A young girl suggested that it might be an animal in the stream and all manner of proposals followed - a dead goat, sick sheep, infected cattle, deformed chicken, contaminated fish.  Others were convinced that it was one god or another punishing them for their sins or that Mother Nature was acting on her fury at the reaping of her Earth.

One of the last people to reach him was a woman, face pale and thin hair hanging in clumps that fell at her shoulder blades.  It was not until his eyes fell on her stomach that he realised who she was, the radiance had faded and she appeared gaunt and sickly.  She took his hand in hers and placed it on the bump to show that it was still and empty.  She had been separated from her baby, its soul in her womb in the village on the other side while hers was trapped in these foreign lands.  As Jorge promised that he would reunite them for the birth, he began to feel the weight of his body again and he was called back for the final time.  He could not repeat the process again, there were only three times in a life such as his that the body could withstand the exit and entrance of the soul and that was his last.  Now it was up to him to return to the side of the living, find the course of their torment and wake them up.

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Jorge traced the surrounding hills, scouring each blade of grass, each bush, as he followed the river to its source.  The shadows of the clouds painted the ground in the distance a deep purple and as he climbed higher he could make out the snow on the peaks of the mountain range.  The sun fought against him but he battled on, his determination and desire to give the people the chance to live their lives again, another way, spirited him on and he forced his legs to continue though it pained him.  He had concluded from his time with the villagers that they had been poisoned.  He inspected dead animals, plants, algae - anything that he thought might have contaminated the water. 

As the afternoon shadows chilled the air, his spirit wavering and an impending sense of defeat brewing in his guts, he reached the mouth of the waterfall and rested on a rock.  Jorge surveyed the land around him and his eyes fell upon a flash of yellow, half submerged in the water and partly obscured by debris from a fallen branch.  He cleared the leaves and twigs to reveal a plant with broad yellow petals, furry and translucent, streaked with purple veins that met with small, thin leaves of dark red in the centre.  The long thorns that jutted out from the stem secreted a milky sap.  He held it between his fingers and lifted it to his nose, checking it in the light, its texture viscous and sticky.  Despite its innocent appearance, this was undoubtedly the cause of their lament.  It was an evil poison of nature and known to induce hallucinations, paranoia and, at worst, comas.

The antidote often grew nearby, but the plant was not native to these parts, preferring a lower altitude and warmer climate.  Jorge knew it well from growing up on the coast where it was common and could recall even his own mother being affected, writhing in bed and claiming that the Devil was seducing her.  The words of the villagers came back to him and echoed his own thoughts that if the foreigners had planted it there then they would soon be coming to claim their land from the people that they presumed dead or too sick to defend themselves.

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Night was falling and he strained his eyes to find his footing.  Disheartened and blind in the dark, he had given up searching for the plant, vowing to go back out at daybreak but in his heart he felt sure that it was over, it was futile this far north.  As he approached the doomed village, he stood on the hill and looked down at the bodies that he had promised to save, scattered across its paths, and pieces of him broke inside as he mourned his failure.

He woke in the middle of the night to find himself in the garden of the school.  He was not sure how he had arrived there but presumed from the bruise on his hip and the shooting pain in his lower back that he had collapsed or fallen.  Sitting up, he ran his hands through his hair and sighed as the fate of the villagers worked its way back into his mind, bringing with it tears of despair.  As he manoeuvred himself to his knees, the moon lit the flowerbeds and his tears transformed into laughter, laughter that had been absent from his heart for many years.  There, in front of him, grew row upon row of the plant - the shape of a bluebell, the thorns of a cactus and the petals of a rose.  Jorge plucked all of them and, carrying them in his shirt, made his way to the nearest stove, which he found at the back of the school.  After grinding the petals, he mixed them with honey and goat’s milk until they boiled and produced a sticky broth.  As the sun came up across the horizon, Jorge set about spooning a little into each of their mouths and he watched as the bodies began to spasm, eyes wide and hearts beating to take on an awakened pace.

Their eyes were open, but they did not see.  The bodies reacted on reflex but not with choice, remaining expressionless and voiceless.  The nervous twitch of the priest recommenced its habit but the man inside was not to be found and only the scars of the chief spoke of battle.  The silence in his head was proof to Jorge that they were awake and no longer dreaming.  Their bodies had come back to life but there was no light inside of them and he realised that their souls had become entirely disconnected from their bodies after such a long time apart.  The spiritual tie with the physical had weakened and they were lost.  He would have to return to the other side and guide them to their bodies before they disappeared forever. 

At last, it was time for him to depart the living world, where he had watched his life and body rot away for decades, floating on the lake.  It was his destiny, his punishment and his redemption to save the people of the village, and he cradled a selfish hope in the pit of his heart that he might also find his wife and daughter there amongst the souls.  As he heard the pounding of the horses’ feet against his heart, he whispered their names in the wind and looked upon the earth one last time before he gave himself over to the village.

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He held their hands and guided them through the land of the souls towards the border, the sun beginning to warm them through black clouds and scents wafting in from the other side, fighting their way into the air.  They walked in single file, clutching on to one another as they passed the statues chiselled out of frozen hearts and the flying wings of crushed souls that cast shadows on the ground.  This wasteland housed the souls of the dead that washed up on its shore so tortured and broken that they could not be saved, even in the afterlife.  Vultures of grief perched on the dead branches of trees where the clocks of time hung down, each representing the hour of an impending departure. 

With each step they took, they grew stronger and the cracks in the earth that threatened to swallow them up closed, the weight of their sins lifted and hope pierced through the temptations of the past and broke them open to the light of the future.  The chief walked with him and his young daughter held onto Jorge’s hand, squeezing it gently to the rhythm of the song that she hummed, the only sound in the desert of the dead. 

When they reached the river, Jorge rested his hand upon their shoulders and pointed towards the village on the other side and the bodies waiting for them.  He helped them board the boat that would take them across, an old tall ship with sails woven from the eyes of the dead that navigated the water and, without a captain, allowed the desires of the passengers to steer its course.  The chief was the last to get onto the boat and he embraced Jose warmly, thanking him with eyes that smiled from his heart.

‘Are you coming with us?’ the girl asked.

‘No, I will be staying on this side.’

‘Will you come and visit?’

‘Perhaps one day’ he laughed, kissing her gently on the forehead and turning towards the heartland, where he hoped to find his own people and rest his soul.

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As the village woke up from their slumber, eyes wide open to the world, they breathed with the earth and beat with its heart.  The cries of a new born child floated across the air and with the inner strength that now bound them together, they prepared for battle, sharpening not their tools, but their minds.

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