Andreas lived at the top of the mountain in his papa's observatory. That morning, he had been woken by the sound of a scooter hacking and spluttering outside his bedroom window. He had pushed his shutters open just in time to see his papa ride off into a sea of mist that had rolled up the mountainside and was lapping the edge of the observatory.

Andreas cursed. His papa was, no doubt, on his way to the market in the village below and Andreas wanted cigarettes. Not for the first time, he rued his papa's refusal to carry a mobile phone. How could a man of science be so distrustful of modern technology? The old war widows, toothless and cloaked in black, would sit on their doorsteps above the harbour wall, texting immediate neighbours with all of the glee and enthusiasm of lovestruck teenagers. But not his father. Andreas looked in the corner of the room where his PC and monitor sat looking shameful, banished from his papa's view because their capacity to connect to the modern world offended him.

He shook the packet of cigarettes on his bedside table until the only one left fell out and took a lighter from a pocket in the jeans he had dropped at the side of his bed the night before.

Maybe his papa would buy him cigarettes. He disapproved of Andreas smoking, "Disgusting habit," he would say, top lip curled so that Andreas could see his yellow teeth; but sometimes, if the work was going well, there would be a spontaneous act of gratitude; and sometimes that spontaneous act of gratitude was a packet of cigarettes.

Andreas lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. He thought of Melea and wondered where she was at that very moment. He wondered if she was naked, in her bed, wondering about him, and almost put his cigarette out so that he could indulge his thoughts further.

But it was his last cigarette, and he would see Melea ñ in all of her fulsomeness - that night.

He kicked his blanket off the bed and shivered. His room was colder than he expected. He pulled a t-shirt over his goosepimples and pushed his feet into his jeans. The cigarette still dangled out of the corner of his mouth, a crooked tail of ash burning right up to the stub. It fell and Andreas rubbed it into the floor with his bare foot. He flicked the butt through his open window and watched the mist shift and fall in soft cascades all around the observatory.

It wasn't often that they had a mist like this in August. Was it going to rain? He poked his head through the window and looked up. The sky was flawless blue, not even a vapour trail scarred it. That made the mist even more incongruous. But Andreas didn't know much about the weather. Unusual was all it was. If the sun could shine during a rainstorm, why not have fog with bright sunshine above it?

He shuffled out of his bedroom and went to the kitchen. There wouldn't be any food - well, nothing to get excited about ñ otherwise his papa wouldn't have dragged himself away from the work. He wondered why his papa hadn't woken him and asked him to go to the village? Perhaps he had wanted a break from the work.

This speculation was doing nothing to satiate Andreas' growling stomach. He cut a wedge of the day before yesterday's bread, took some olives and cheese out of the pantry, and gobbled his way through breakfast.

As he ate, he heard the village bell clang dully through the mist. The sound normally rang through their Sunday mornings like Venus rings through a clear, winter sky; but the mist made the bell sound like it was rusty and filled with damp towels.

As if to compensate, whoever was ringing the bell rang it quickly, without any concern for cadence or drawing the villagers into the church. It was frantic and set Andreas' nerves on edge. He put his bread down on the plate. The bell stopped with a muffled clang that had no resonance to it, and all was quiet.

Andreas tried to ignore the silence. He pushed an olive around his plate pretending that it was a football and that his fingers were Saka FC's strikers, Hami and Falouk. On bored afternoons, when his papa didn't need him for the work, it was a game that could absorb him for hours. But within seconds the silence invaded the pitch, paralysing that part of his imagination. His fingers were just fingers and the olive was just an olive.

Why was it so quiet?

He kicked his chair backwards and stood up suddenly. The hairs on his arm stood up like cactus prickles. Who was there? He looked around the room without moving his head.
He knew that he was being irrational. The back door was locked. The kitchen window and shutter were intact. There was no one lurking in the dwindling morning shadows in the corners of the room. Why, then, was he trembling? Why was his mouth as dry as sandpaper? Why did he want to shout as loudly as he could, and run from the room?

He wasn't prone to panic or anxiety; quite the opposite. His calmness and phlegmatic attitude to life were renowned amongst his friends and family,

"If you were any more relaxed," his papa used to say, "you'd be dead."

He put both hands on the table and stared at the blank wall in front of him, imagining that there was a mirror there,

"Come on, Andreas! You're not a kid anymore! What would Melea think if she saw you shaking like this?"

He did not dare shout. He questioned his imaginary reflection in a hoarse whisper.

Then, the phone rang. Its ring was so loud and shattering to the silence and Andreas' bristling nerves that he jumped and banged his knee against the edge of the table,

"Shit!" he said, limping out of the kitchen towards the phone in the passage. The ring echoed through the vastness of the observatory to Andreas' left, but he didn't notice that the door had been left open. He was too busy damping down the sharp pain in his knee, whilst trying to limp to the phone before it stopped ringing.

"Hello" he said, when he had picked up the receiver.

"Andie!" his papa's voice was fraught and desperate, "Climb onto the roof! Quickly, Andie! Now!"

Andreas could discern shouts and screams in the background, but it was difficult to hear anything with any clarity. Every other sound that filtered through the phone was subsumed into a great roaring noise, like the wind at the top of the winter mountains, that rose in amplitude until all of the other sounds submitted to it. Andreas thought he heard his father's voice, one final time, say something about the roof, and then the phone went silent.

However Andreas could still hear the roaring noise, quieter than it was on the phone, but growing in intensity and all around him.

He dropped the phone and ran into the observatory. It was dark and cool, but even in here he could hear the roar rising in volume: a million people surrounding the summit of the mountain, all exhaling their last breaths. Behind the squat bulk of the telescope there was a ladder that led up onto the observatory's dome. He could see the ladder in the crack of light that filtered through the opening above and ran towards it without questioning what he was doing. He reached the bottom rung and began to climb.

The white noise sound was deafening now. It echoed around the cavernous chamber until it was a maddening, physical presence.

He pulled himself up the ladder to a maintenance hatch and pushed it open, fearful of what he might find outside, but even more fearful of what might happen to him if he was engulfed by whatever it was that was the source of the calamitous roar.

The white morning sunshine that blasted his eyes when he pushed the hatch open blinded him for an instant. He stood at the head of the ladder trying to master his fear while his eyes acclimatised. When the definition returned to the view around him, there was little to see from his vantage point. He couldn't see the ground without leaving the hatch, so he looked up. The sky was cloudless, brazen in its utter blueness. But it was an auditory change that drew his attention. As quickly as it had risen, the roar had subsided. He crawled onto the gangway that circumnavigated the observatory and, when he saw what had caused that storm of sound, he almost fell over the edge.

The fog that had rolled up the side of the mountain had drawn back, but instead of being able to see the valley below, and the village clinging to the mountainside, all Andreas could see was a vast, new sea undulating and laced with wires of gold. The sea rolled on and on in all directions, providing no clue as to what it had done with the world below.

The mountaintop and the observatory were a solitary island in a bigger expanse of water than he could hold in his imagination.

Andreas stared without blinking at the water waiting for the mirage to evaporate, to roll back as surely as the fog had done, but it was there as if it had always been there, three thousand meters above sea level.

The surface of the water was unblemished by boats or any sign of human life. Which meantÖ his self came rushing back in a wave of vertigo and nausea and he vomited over the gangway and onto the gravel below. Sea sick. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and almost laughed. This was ludicrous! Melea? His papa? And then, as an afterthought in the rubble of his shock, he cursed the fact that he had smoked his last cigarette. How he could do with a smoke now.

Andreas stood staring at the sea for over an hour. His brain was like a fly trapped in a jar. It flew haphazardly around, bouncing off the edges of his sanity, unable to make any headway, to make any sense of the nightmare in front of him.

It was a very placid nightmare. There was no fire or smoke, no sense of destruction. The view was supernal, too beautiful. But his father ñ all of the villages and towns he had ever known ñ were buried underneath that water. Why was there no sign of them? Nothing floated on the surface: no wood; no debris; no bodies. It defied any kind of rational explanation. He couldn't ñ even for a second ñ accept that everyone he knew was dead, drowned under this sudden, cataclysmic flood.

As the sun began to dip into the glorious gold of the new ocean, and Andreas's senses started to return, a more terrifying consideration leached upwards through his feet until his whole being was paralysed by it. Why had he survived? Why had the waters stopped in a ring around the observatory? Who, or what, had preserved him, and why? What torture was this, to be alone at the end of things?

"No!"

He shouted and shouted until he thought he had torn the fabric of his throat, but his voice sank, unheard, in all directions.

In the midst of his despair a thought came to him ñ a rational, pragmatic thought so at odds with the emotional turmoil that boiled inside him that it gave him something to cling to.

Their mountain wasn't, by any means, the highest even in his own country. In a worst case scenario, not allowing for odd, tidal variations, if this abominable flood had blanketed the rest of the earth's surface, to the same height, then there would be significant mountainous regions in the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Urals and the Andes, that would not have been covered: which would mean that there would be other survivors.

He raced back to the hatch and descended the ladder as quickly as he could. One of the advantages of living in so remote an area was that the observatory had its own generator. The local electricity grid was far too unreliable. His papa could not take the risk that a cut in supply would interrupt the work.

Andreas ran back through the darkened observatory to his bedroom. He sat down on his chair and pressed the power button on his PC. The red LED lit up immediately and Andreas could hear the whir of the fans inside and the chirrup of the hard disk as it slewed through the millions of 1's and 0's that gave it a semblance of consciousness.

He knew what he wanted to do, and he knew he would have to do it quickly, before the horror that was amassing in the shadows overwhelmed him and drove him mad with grief and despair.

He double-clicked on his internet connection icon and felt reassurance in the familiarity of the connection procedure, as the little dialogue box asked him for his password, and the animation below showed a signal ñ illustrated by a spark ñ travelling from one computer to another. Surely what he had seen outside had been a hallucination? In a few second's time, his inbox would be filling with spam, offers of drugs he had no use for, certainly not when Melea was anywhere near by, and everything in the world would be normal again.

"Dim connectivo."

The message was direct and impossible to misinterpret.

He sensed the shadows thicken and crowd in on him.

One more time! Quickly! Perhaps the satellite had been temporarily obscured. He closed the dialogue box and tried to reconnect. This time every stage of the procedure increased his palpitations and helplessness,

"Dim connectivo."

His stomach filled with a lead porridge of horror so heavy he could not move. He sat weighed down in his chair and stared at the empty screen until, some hours' later, a base instinct forced him up to get water for his numb mouth.

The cool water did nothing to break him from his daze. He felt his loneliness, like a cold ghost, envelop him. They were alone together. Whether there were other survivors was unimportant. He had no way of getting to them. There was no boat in the observatory. It would have been madness to keep one there, thousands of metres above the sea. And there were no trees, nothing he could cut down and put his hands to use fashioning into an engine of hope.

That was the worst of the merciless hands strangling his heart; the one squeezing hope away. His grief for his papa and for Melea and his friends was nothing compared to the horror he felt at this desertion of hope. He wanted to die, to be off with them, but even with nothing to do, nothing to hope for and no belief upon which to lean, he still could not countenance killing himself.

Death would come to him, he understood that and was reassured by the thought.

He walked back through the observatory and climbed the ladder onto the roof. He could hear the shoreless sea rolling back and forth, sounding no different, no louder, than it had at Andreas's favourite, midnight beach in the secluded bay at Trevisi. He had loved Melea there on many occasions with a passion that seemed ñ at the time ñ as bright and unquenchable as the multitude of stars that stared down at them. But she had gone, they had all gone, their loves, beliefs, flaws and souls nothing more than a ripple on an infinite sea.

Where were the newspapers, the policies and rules, the primped-up vanities of the masters of the world now? Those men had been nothing more than fleas in a wolf's coat.

Andreas looked at the undimmed stars dusting the firmament. It was their time. It always had been. He felt no more significant than an atom in their presence and was content. The quest for significance had been his species' ultimate vanity. As an atom, he had no significance. He could spin, vibrate and shine, and be part of a greater wonder. There was peace in the notion and he lay down on the gangway and fell asleep.

In his bedroom, a tendril of thick blue smoke snaked out of the back of his PC, wrapping itself around and around the case until all that could be seen of the computer was the red LED, blurred and forlorn. There was a wrenching and a grating noise, no louder than a large door in need of some oil, and something cracked. The red LED went off and a pair of smaller red lights pricked the darkness in its place.

The lights swung back and forth, looking up at the bed and then at the doorway.

There was a skittering sound and the lights disappeared through the door, trailed by an amorphous, fuzzy shadow.

Andreas' last dream was a beautiful one. He, his papa and Melea were sat on their favourite table outside Odi's, on the beachfront. There was a plateful of the biggest langousti that he had ever seen on the table in front of him. His mouth flooded with saliva. Melea picked one off the platter for him and freed its sweet meat from the shell before putting it in his mouth. Her eyes were filled with the canopy of stars, but the sight did not disturb him. He smiled back at her, langousti juice running out of the corner of his mouth and having to mop it with the back of his hand, making her laugh with such abandon and joy that both he and his father joined in and relinquished themselves to the unfettered sound.

Back behind her shoulder, Andreas could see a blur over the sea on the horizon. His laughter intensified and shook all of his worldly despair and anxiety from every pore of his being. The blur rose and rose on the horizon until it was clear that it was a vast wave. Some of the others on the terrace looked over at it and smiled, or raised a glass to it; but most of the patrons ignored it and continued to drink and laugh and talk with their loved ones.

There was no roar and no vibration. The wave reared above the beach and Odi's bar and crashed down towards them in an avalanche of liquid gold. Melea leaned over and kissed him and he knew no more.

A dialogue box flashed up on the monitor a floor below Andreas's throatless body.
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