The jungle pressed down, dark and impenetrable. Roots reared up to trip, swamp holes sucked, burning purple slugs dropped. Webs touched and stuck, prickling stems grazed. Alien faces glimpsed from tree knots. Lower branches shook and shimmered with nothing. Strange grunts, shrieks, then drips in heavy silence.

The hita hopped round a tree and vanished. Dante slowed and stumbled to a stop, the adrenalin and drugs that had kept him travelling through the hidden half-light of the previous day and the terrifying night having finally died. His aching fever distorted and distended the nonexistent path. Flies bit. He shook his cloak to send them away then drew it around him, wrapping his burnt hand to protect it. The insects flew back under to nip, borrow and feed at his oozing back. His bruised and cut feet screamed for a rest. The jungle sealed around him. He was lost and abandoned.

From nowhere, a vine lassoed him. He cried out in pain and fear as a side shoot tripped him to his knees. The vine tightened and began to draw him into a gaping hole under a tree. The hita appeared and hacked it away with the guard’s knife. Dante stumbled up, clinging to his rescuer.

"I can’t go on," he whispered, sending the hita the memory of lying in a soft bed, Martha spooning soup into him. His wish dissolved into a longing to drop and curl into a ball, his throbbing arm protected at the center.

The hita pointed ahead and sent him the vision of a clearing filled with soft grass and flowers, a clear spring bubbling up from under a mossy log. Dante thought he saw light in the gloom. Dawn came at last. He nodded. He would try to carry on. The hita snaked an arm around him and they lumbered ahead. The trees thinned to underbrush, then a meadow unclaimed by the jungle appeared. A totem swabbed with blue leaned in the middle. The hita rushed forward and knelt. It crossed its trunks over its front. The totem shimmered with the creature’s vision, an enormous gray maned hita staring down at its child. The hita prayed swirls of gratitude and love to El.

Dante collapsed in the grass. Brown stalks, red and yellow flowers blurred above him. The soft mud oozed cool comfort against his burning face. Every part of him ached. He brushed at the flies sticking to his eyes and mouth. They buzzed up then down again.

"The worms that eat the dead are eating me," he thought, not even caring. He covered his head with his cowl and curled into a fetal ball around his throbbing arm.

"Free me," murmured the mechanical voice in his ear. "Free me. Let me serve you."

"You’re free, I’m free. We’re all free for ice cream," muttered Dante. His mind whirled with the fever. "Or is it you scream, I scream?" He laughed a little to himself. "We all scream for ice cream? I screamed. He gave me ice cream. Madam made me scream. " A note of satisfaction crept into his voice. "Dead, dead, dead, all dead now." Jagged words fluttered about him, dislodging a cloud of insects from his weeping back before dissolving.

The cloak loosened and ballooned up around him, flapping and rippling, blowing the worst of the flies away. Dante shivered naked in the breeze.

The hita finished its homage to the totem. It scraped below the pole and unearthed a bowl of blue paint, gathered a wad in its snout and moved to a small pool below the tiny spring. The hita blew and stirred until the water turned bright blue then pulled some up into its trunks, lifted its arms above its head and sprayed itself. The insects beginning to bother it, buzzed away. The hita added more of the blue paint then sucked up a large quantity of the water and moved over to Dante. The cloak flew off, swirled like a dust devil and straightened. The freed wraith hovered to one side, watching the hita spray the repellant over the shuddering human. The hita sent the emotion of curiosity to the wraith.

The wraith talked in pictures, showing Dante confronting it in the barn. "He trapped me in the material. Most uncomfortable."

The hita envisioned a creature like itself but covered with beads, rare chicken feathers, pouches and magic sticks.

"Yes. The alien is a great shaman," replied the wraith. It continued with images of hita juveniles, grouped hita, then onto fay seraphim peeking through to the material world. "Shine are one of his parents, part of his clan. He belongs to our worlds like no other before him."

The hita thought of the other humans attacking the shaman.

"Perhaps the other aliens feel his difference from them. But the absorption grows among them, many have shine as a small part of their parents now. They are joining the clan of our worlds." The wraith turned to the task at hand. "A shine caller asked me to find and look after him. He’s made it almost impossible. I need the help of your people. This bodhisattva is very ill. His hand rots. His back festers It would be a shame if he left the material world. Your shaman will have medicines and potions. How long until your clan comes?"

The hita sent back a picture of a noon sun.

"Then we wait and hope. I cannot cure him." The wraith collapsed back into the cape and tucked itself around Dante who began to groan and sob in delirium.

"Nanny I want to go home. I don’t like it here." he moaned. "Nanny, Nanny. Where are you? Why aren’t you back yet? It’s getting dark. "

"Dante. Danny. My Danny boy," called Nanny.

She arrived home at last. Dante lifted his head. A blue pole shimmered across the field. It thickened into Nanny’s uniform, then Nanny herself. He stretched out his arms and stumbled up. She smiled her special smile, the smile only for him. He ran half-falling across the garden to bury himself in her skirts.

"There, there. What’s all this?" asked Nanny brushing his curls. Her lap grew wide and comfortable. Martha caressed his head.

"Wordless you’re so sad and lonely," she murmured.

He hugged her waist and wept. His tears turned her robe summer green. Dante looked up into the gentle smiling face of Gaia and saw both Nanny and Martha reflected there. He saw William grin at his lad.

God’s features soured into the careless cruelty of Madam and Reba. His brother’s jet eyes scorned him. Dante watched as his own blank face, starved for love, appeared on her mirror.

Gaia smoothed into the blandness of the huge statue at the great temple in Luxor. Nanny had once taken him there, an unnoticed slave and a boy praying in the roped-off commoner’s section at the back of the cathedral ruled by his family.

"I am," said Gaia. Her hand stroked the wet from his cheeks. Dante cried out:

"Hush, hush, my child. Do not ask the ways of God," answered Gaia. "Know I am with you, even unto the end of time." Her hands blessed his head. Dante felt comforted.

She wavered. The green tea silk of her skirt roughened against his face, splintering into wood. He knelt in pain against a pole, hugging it, shivering naked in the heat. Tall, silent figures surrounded him. The trainers discussed whether he would live or die.

Dante turned his head and saw the wraith alive. He panicked and struggled up to flee. Thick cords wound round his arms and legs and held him fast.

"No!" The living word knifed around him. He felt the trainers rear back but the cords held.

"No one wants to hurt you," soothed the wraith. "We want to help you."

The hita sent calming comfort. Dante wasn’t fooled. He bucked against them.

"Die. Die. Let me go or die."

The words rose weak and cracked, a cloud of annoying insects. Dante tripped backwards in a haze of pain and dizziness, pulling his captors down with him. They pulled back their cords. He flipped over and crawled forward, his bad arm clutched against his chest. An armour of curses bristled around him. The wraith sighed.

"Show him the correction rod," it said with regret.

Protest burst from Dante’s hita friend but another creature, fed-up with the fuss, waved the rod in front of the human’s face. Dante collapsed to the ground, whispering a final "No." After a few moments, he pushed himself up into the cross-legged transpo position. A small red flower grew on the ground before him, taunting with its beauty in the midst of his misery. He snapped it off and crushed it between his fingers, a last defiant act. Dante bowed his head, defeated.

"Put the helmet on him," said the wraith. "And the iron chains." Dante’s companion showed him lying on the floor of the van. A wave of pity ran through the hita clan. The wraith sighed again. "I don’t like it either. But you know iron stops the changing of the material. His fever distorts his thinking, turning us into his enemies. I know you feel it like I do."

The helmet snapped over Dante’s head. A thick tendril pushed open his mouth and clamped down the bit. The chains locked around his ankles and good wrist. Dante whimpered as the hita shaman snuffled and probed his infected back, removing the occasional burrower and eating it. The hita grasped his wrist and examined his swollen hand. It festered with gangrene. The shaman began to gently uncurl the fist. Agony shot up Dante’s arm. He passed out.