She spoke of the Dunink places, parts of the world that had unusual resonance with what she called “the world unseen.” Dr. Bausch felt that these were delusions based on tortured and twisted reinterpretations of events in Milly’s life; for example, she had been troubled by a bully by that name in childhood, and her brother confirmed that, before his early death from cancer, Milly’s father had regaled his children with tales of strange and beautiful things beyond the ken of mankind.
John agreed with Bausch for the most part, but there were some places where things didn’t quite fit. The bully, for instance, had spelled his name “Dunninc” but Milly had become hysterical when John suggested that she use that spelling for her Dunink places.
“The words have power, and by breaking them you unleash it!”
Then there was the detailed list of Dunink places that Milly drew up. The Belcher ribbon islands in Hudson bay, Kerguelen in the south Indian Ocean, Severnaya Zemlya in the arctic…John needed to consult a good atlas to find any of them. It didn’t seem in keeping with Milly, who had no books and had reportedly been a mediocre student before her psychotic break, more concerned with gowns than geology. She had even identified one Dunink place not by name but by number, scratching out 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W longitude 48.8767°S latitude. It took a trip to the local library to determine what she meant by this: the coordinates were for Point Nemo, the furthest place from dry land in all Earth’s oceans.
