Dressed in burgundy robes, they pick me up and carry me to the village clinic adjacent to the monastery and deposit me in a bed, although it’s hard to call it a bed when it’s just boards and a hard pallet to lie on. They feed me fruit and a bowl of milk. They run off and soon enough bring over a gnarled, grey-haired old man in a rusty wheelchair. He looks at me for a long time, mumbling, before rising with a groan to take a bottle of oil from a shelf. His movements are slow, his hands unnaturally bent. He pours a generous amount of oil on my broken left arm, wraps it in several layers of gauze, sets it with bamboo strips tied tightly together, and tops it off with more oil. Leaning down—I feel like I can hear the movement of his bones fastening him together—he whispers a silent prayer. Shameless demons, naked little creatures, covering their eyes and singed eyelashes with their hands, crawl out of all the cracks in the room, grab me by the arms to check my pulse, touching my left wrist with their dry, chapped lips, hiding in the folds of my clothes and swarming beneath the pillow, poke their fingers into the back of my head. They whisper that I’ve strayed from my path, and their voices ring with tubercular purity, balancing between a defiant “Oi!” and a meditative “Om.” They line up in a living tunnel leading beneath the earth, bypassing the day, and hold in their hands a six-headed snake that they use to stir up the sea of milk, creating with it an elixir of dreams I must give everyone to drink. “Let everything burn,” they whisper, convulsively squeezing my wrist. “If a dream can destroy reality, it can also create it.”

“Leave me alone.” I twitch helplessly, tied to the bed with ropes. Thoughts of war and apocalypse fly over me like vultures. Fear of death breeds killers and all it takes to destroy the world is one psychopath who believes in a dream cooked up just for him. But the killer can be stopped. The fear can be stopped. How? How? The old man has disappeared. Suddenly, it’s night. The panel walls of a tiny room. A web of mosquito netting above the bed. A bowl of milk and a plate of fruit on the floor. Past the door, the patter of bare feet can be heard, the giggling of the monks; overhead, the rat-a-tat of raindrops against the roof. Behind the wall, muffled muttering, a dry, old voice, not praying, not meditating, just monotonously repeating some words over and over.

My plan had been such a good one.

I’m scared. Near the bed there’s a column of large red ants. They’re crawling out from somewhere beneath the floorboards and marching to a far, dark corner.

From that corner, there comes a rustle of clothing, a cough. Someone is sitting there in the dark.