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into his pocket for the envelope containing the antidote he needed to return home. His movements became quicker and more frantic as he didn’t find it. Without the antidote, the night orchid that had brought him here would damage him—even kill him, as he was trying to kill the young stranger.
    ‘Mya, where’s the envelope?’
    Mya stared blankly. He always carried some of the antidote with him. It was a blue powder made from the venom of a naga. Mr. Richard had all sorts of pills and ampules and atomisers in his many pockets. He was a chemist, after all.
    His face was strained.
    ‘Help me look,’ he said. ‘Must have dropped it. Retrace our steps...’
    They began to search the forest floor, but Mya wasn’t even sure which way they had come. She couldn’t see any marks made by the young man’s body where it had been dragged. Mr. Richard moaned and clutched himself and began to froth.
    ‘I can’t see,’ he said. ‘I’m going blind. I mustn’t die here. I am so close to immortality...’
    He fell down. She stopped and went to him. She’d never seen him like this. He must have taken too much of the night orchid.
    ‘What do I do, Mr. Richard?’ she said, kneeling on fir needles. The boy’s ghost formed over Mr. Richard’s head and she shuddered.
    ‘Leave him here,’ snapped the ghost. ‘It’s what he’ll do to you one day, if he doesn’t sell you.’
    Mr. Richard didn’t seem to hear. He let out another groan.
    ‘Do what we always do,’ he managed to say. ‘Make the passage back to my house. Help me through... I need the antidote.’ He coughed.
    ‘Leave him here,’ said the ghost urgently. ‘Don’t you know he’s nothing without you? He can’t come here, and he can’t leave. Not without you.’
    Never listen to ghosts, Mya reminded herself. Anyway, she wanted to be back in the solid world, with its heat and smells and safe walls. With her heart and mind as well as her hands, she felt for the way back through the foliage. The forest began to tremble as its reality gave way.
    ‘Don’t leave me,’ Mr. Richard begged.
    The ghost mocked, ‘Ah, now you know how it feels, yes?’
    But Mr. Richard still didn’t hear the ghost. He clutched at Mya, who closed her eyes and focused her mind on the place where she had come from: the covered porch of Mr. Richard’s stilt house. The forest began to open. She stepped out of the forest and on to the wooden floor, leaving the angry ghost behind.
    She was back in the heat of Mr. Richard’s wooden house in the forest. Under the stilt house chickens were squawking, and clouds of insects moved through the dappled sunlight where the forest met the covered meditation porch. Everything in the forest might have been a vision in meditation—except for the clumps of mud that lay on the wooden floor, fallen from the journalist’s boots as he had been dragged out of the world.
    She saw the envelope with a little of the blue powder spilling out; it must have slipped from Mr. Richard’s pocket. Mya snatched it up and turned back to the immortal world, still hovering in the air. The pathway lay up high, among the branches of the earthly forest, so that she seemed to be floating off the porch into thin air. Again she entered the chill of the immortal world.
    Mr Richard lay on the fir needles, writhing and moaning. She tipped a little of the powder onto his tongue. He stiffened, and although his eyes did not focus, he grabbed her hand and pulled it to his mouth. The powder spilled on him, on the dirt. Some made its way into him. He put his palms on the dirt and licked the spilt powder up like an animal.
    Mya tugged at him and he managed to crawl after her. He crawled out of the forest and between the wooden rails of the raised porch. There he lay on his back, breathing harshly at first, then deeply. In time the twitching subsided.
    Mya did not know what to do. If he woke up and found her in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, he might forget that she had saved