The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  But her old self … her old self had once believed things that went quite beyond science. And that old self was horrified. To taunt the power of a storm that way, to mock the presences born within all that violence, to recline under glass in a comfortable chair, and to employ all that force and fury for no more than your own entertainment …

  For the old Rita, that would have been foolhardiness beyond belief.

  ‘But, of course, it’s not for storm watching that I use the room mostly,’ the billionaire said, his head in silhouette, tilted to the stars. ‘It’s for nights like this. I sleep here as often as not in clear weather, and there’s no better sight to wake to in the night than this.’

  ‘And in the morning?’ Rita enquired, glancing about, for there was no sign of any curtains or blinds fitted to the walls and ceiling.

  A shrug. ‘The glass is electro-chromatic, and can be set to dim as daylight approaches. Pretty old hat, these days.’

  The voice, accented faintly French, of the designer came from where she lounged. ‘We have used various forms of switch glass all through the Observatory, especially in the grander spaces where there are big walls of glass or skylights that would be difficult to cover otherwise, when the sun is too bright. It’s a useful technology, to be sure, but a rather sterile one. That’s why, for the private quarters and other intimate spaces, we have generally used more traditional blinds and curtains.’

  Kushal interjected. ‘Is it just me, or are there clouds forming way up there?’

  He was staring up at the Wheel, and everyone now followed his gaze.

  High, high above them, the great curved rampart that was the Wheel terminated in a crest against the stars. But whereas only five minutes earlier that crest had been a remote shadow, now a caul of pale white was coalescing there, a faint sheet of cloud, hanging just above the summit. Even as they all gazed up, it seemed to shimmer more brightly, wave-shapes glowing as if lit from within.

  ‘What is that?’ Rita could not help but ask, amazed at the delicate beauty of the sight. She could swear that there was even a hint of colour, iridescent, in the different bands of the sheet.

  Richman let out a whistle. ‘You don’t see that every day. It’s a nacreous cloud.’

  Eugene said, ‘But I thought there couldn’t be any clouds that high, not at the level of the summit anyway. That’s right in the stratosphere, there’s no moisture for clouds to form.’

  ‘Normal clouds, no,’ said the billionaire. ‘But nacreous clouds—they’re sometimes called a polar stratospheric cloud—are different. Very high, and very rare. They’re made up of chemicals from the ozone layer. No one is really sure how they form, but the Wheel sees them more commonly than most parts of the world. We had atmospheric scientists along with us, during the expedition, trying to study them.’

  ‘But what makes it glow that way?’ asked Madelaine.

  ‘I’m guessing the Moon,’ Richman answered. ‘It must be rising. We can’t see it; it’s on the other side of the Wheel. But the time is about right. We’re just short of the third quarter, so it’d be pretty bright as it comes up.’

  They all watched in silence for a time, sheer beauty holding them spellbound. Richman must have been right about the rising Moon, for slowly, minute by minute, the silhouette of the whole upper Wheel was becoming more defined, the outline glowing dimmest red, a penumbra cast from the invisible eastern horizon. And about the summit, the pearl cloud glimmered ever brighter in ripples.

  The billionaire broke the silence. ‘I’ve been in one of those, believe it or not.’

  Kushal was disbelieving. ‘Inside a cloud like that?’

  ‘Just the once. We were at about twenty-four thousand metres, from memory. It was very weird. You get used to having no weather up there. Then one morning there was this wind blowing, and a bizarre fog all around us. The air was so thin you couldn’t feel the wind, mind you, but you could see it—the mist was streaming by in all sorts of colours. There was some worry about our pressure suits, actually, as those clouds can be quite acidic. But we got through okay in the end.’

  Rita felt a shudder of insignificance as she stared up, the realisation hitting her as if for the first time. The man beside her had been up there, up on that impossibly remote summit. It was as if she was standing with Neil Armstrong and both of them were staring at the Moon.

  Where he had walked.

  It was hard to accept, and even harder to broach. She would have liked to ask Richman, as any curious child might, what it was like up there. But she couldn’t, it was a question both too immense and too small. He must have been asked it ten thousand times since he climbed the Wheel, and he must have a dozen automatic responses at his call. And how could it really be answered anyway, other than by clichés? Amazing, wondrous, inspiring—all equally meaningless.

  He said, ‘We didn’t learn that much about nacreous clouds even then. It’s still largely a mystery as to how and why they form, though we do know that they represent severe disturbances in the middle stratosphere. Which can, as it happens, be a precursor to severe weather down here in the troposphere, a day or two later.’

  ‘You think we’re in for a storm?’ Eugene asked. ‘I was checking the forecast for the Southern Ocean just this afternoon, and there was no mention of anything all that severe on the way.’

  The billionaire shrugged. ‘Maybe. The link isn’t direct. We saw a couple of these types of formations during the expedition. Once, the worst storm of the whole climb hit the lower mountain a day later. The other time nothing happened at all. So who knows? But you’ve been here long enough to know the forecast doesn’t count for a lot when it comes to the Wheel. The mountain makes its own weather.’

  Silence followed for a while. Eventually the pearl cloud about the peak began to lose its iridescence, fading to a monochrome grey, as if the angle of the rising Moon on the far side of the Wheel could no longer summon the colours of earlier. Then it was gone.

  ‘A final nightcap in the Saloon, I think,’ said Richman.

  They descended the way they had come, back down through the stone tunnel, down the cast-iron steps to the lower level of the Cottage, and from there by elevator to the Library and the Saloon.

  Where they found the security chief Kennedy waiting for them at the bar. He was sipping a soda water and talking with the barman.

  ‘You’ve been up to your idiot glasshouse, I take it?’ he asked, addressing Richman.

  The billionaire smiled to Rita. ‘Kennedy hates that room. He’s the toughest man I know, afraid of nothing. Except thunderstorms.’

  The blunt face of the security chief showed no amusement. ‘I’m not afraid of thunderstorms, I respect them is all.’ And to Rita he added, ‘I saw a man get hit by lightning once. Wasn’t pretty. The odds might be low, but storms are nothing to play around with—and there’s certainly no need to court trouble deliberately, lighting rod or no lightning rod.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ Rita said, meaning it.

  Kennedy seemed slightly surprised. He gave her another look. ‘So, you’re saying you didn’t like that room?’

  Something in his tone brought Rita alert. She said, ‘It’s impressive. But I’m like you, I wouldn’t go up there in a storm.’

  His eyes held hers. ‘And on a night like tonight? Not a storm to be seen. Did you pick up any vibrations, say?’

  ‘Vibrations?’

  Richman cut them off. ‘Leave her alone, Kennedy. I promised we wouldn’t harass her for opinions about the place yet.’ His tone was entirely genial, but Rita didn’t miss the flash of resistance in the security chief’s face before Kennedy relented.

  The barman now took their various orders for coffees or digestifs. And to drink them they settled once more in the couches by the fire, for though the Saloon was not by any means cold, for those who had been up to the Lightning Room the memory still lingered of the freezing night and the wind beyond the glass, and of the great icy rampart of the Wheel rising—so the flames beckoned warmly. />
  But the conversation was desultory, the climax of the evening having come and gone. Rita soon found herself suppressing yawns. She had begun this day, she recalled, in her cabin on the Wanderer.

  Richman too seemed to have lost his enthusiasm; his manner was restless and detached. When Rita finally spoke up to say that she was tired, he nodded as if he had been waiting for the announcement.

  ‘Right, right,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day for all of us.’ He rose, leaving his glass of port barely touched. ‘Now, I may not see much of you tomorrow, Rita, my schedule is pretty full—but never mind, you’ve got the whole Observatory to enjoy, and the others for company. But tomorrow night the party starts for real. Clara, if I might grab you for a few minutes upstairs? There are some details we need to discuss.’

  A general movement began. Kennedy departed for another security sweep. Madelaine declared she would accompany Rita down to the guest wing and likewise retire. Kushal said he would have a last cigar, and Eugene volunteered to keep him company with a final whisky. Richman made his goodnights and swept off to the Library, accompanied by Clara. The barman was packing up behind the counter.

  Goodnights complete, Rita and Madelaine made their way to the Helix Staircase and began the descent. They did so in stiff silence at first; of all the people Rita had met so far here in the Observatory, the designer was the one with whom she had the least rapport.

  But to break the silence she said, ‘So Richman will be working while he’s here? He mentioned his full schedule tomorrow.’

  The stout Frenchwoman nodded. ‘He’ll be on the phone or in video conference all day, most like. Usually his schedule is broken into fifteen-minute intervals, and each slot will be always be full.’ She raised an eyebrow to Rita coolly. ‘I hope you realise how unusual tonight was. I’ve never seen him take an entire evening off before, not just to sit around and chat to no purpose. He did it just for you, you know. He is determined to be welcoming and to put you at ease.’

  Rita was somewhat staggered, first by the thought of a day plotted out down to every quarter hour, and second that someone like Walter Richman had broken his own regime just for her. She said, ‘But of course it’s all really for my father’s sake, isn’t it? I’m just his stand-in here.’

  Madelaine gave a snort. ‘You must not think that your father and Richman were friends. Walter Richman does not have friends, only employees who are of service to him, and your father’s service was complete, even before he died. It’s you he’s interested in now.’

  ‘But why?’ The question came out more entreatingly than Rita had intended, but the puzzlement had been mounting in her all evening. Why had these six strangers been at pains to be so nice to her? Why did she matter to these people—to Richman most of all?

  Madelaine considered a moment. Then she asked a strange thing. ‘The matter that Kennedy raised, about the Lightning Room. You did not feel anything … unpleasant … about that place?’

  ‘Should I have?’

  ‘Not to my thinking, no. But … well, some people are bothered by such things, if they know about them. A man died in that room, during the construction. Died in a very unusual fashion. Do you know of it? It was in the news, though not all the details.’

  Rita shook her head. This was the first she had heard about it. She had made no effort, after all, to keep up with the news about her father’s work. ‘What do you mean, in an unusual fashion?’

  ‘Well, I did not see this myself, and it was rather hushed up, but I gather that the man was a security guard, and he was alone on the site. All the other workers had been sent down from the top levels because of severe weather. They always kept a security guard up here during the build, because there was trouble early on with protestors.

  ‘Anyway, for some reason the man went up to the Lightning Room. It wasn’t glassed in then; it was open to the sky. And he got trapped. There was a manhole hatch covering the access tunnel in those days, and somehow it shut behind him and he couldn’t get it open, though he was found with his hands on the latch. But meanwhile, the storm was at its worst and there was hail, incredibly large hail, and he had nowhere to hide from it. It seems he got his skull bashed in.’

  Rita blinked. ‘Awful,’ she said.

  The designer nodded. ‘The stranger thing, though, was that he was found naked. His clothes were all neatly folded at the bottom of the tunnel. That’s what had everyone so mystified. In a terrible storm, at temperatures well below zero, he went up to an exposed height, totally nude. Why on earth would he do that? People have been mistrustful of the room ever since. Some say they get bad feelings there. That’s what Kennedy was asking you about. He was being wilful. He knows why Richman asked you here, and he does not approve.’

  Rita shook her head. ‘So why have I been asked here?’ she demanded, but it was dawning on her now. All that talk about her book really should have warned her. Her damn fool of a book.

  They had reached the level of the guest wings. ‘It’s not my place to say,’ demurred the designer, ‘it’s up to Richman. But I will tell you this. I must be honest: when I read your book, I thought it was nonsense.’

  ‘I think it’s nonsense too,’ Rita replied levelly. ‘Obviously I didn’t think so when I wrote it, but I was only twenty-four then, and in a very different state of mind. Now I’d rather that it didn’t exist. I’m hideously embarrassed whenever it’s brought up.’

  Madelaine appeared surprised. They had arrived at Rita’s door, and the Frenchwoman paused there, rounding about to study Rita more closely, looking up from her six inches less in height. ‘Seriously? You don’t believe those things you wrote anymore?’

  ‘No.’

  Madelaine’s expression turned perplexed. ‘Then I really don’t know what use you’ll be to Richman, whatever he is hoping.’

  With a ghost of a smile in apology, she raised a hand in farewell, then strode off down the passageway towards her own suite.

  1

  THE PROMISE

  Introduction to The Spawn of Disparity

  by Rita Gausse, 1995

  Everyone has felt it at some point in their lives: an indefinable sense of awe at the scenery of the natural world. A tall mountain rising to catch a sunrise while all around you is dark; a canyon opening before your feet, plunging away precipitously; a waterhole nestled in some secret forest glen, the only sound a hypnotic drip of water.

  In such situations something in the human spirit becomes aware of an otherness in the scene it is beholding, aware of a singularity and preciousness that it cannot quite identify or grasp, but which stirs up wonder and reverence, sometimes even unease or fear.

  Why is this?

  Why, for instance, should the sight of a mountain evoke any emotion in us at all? A mountain is only a prominent pile of stone. Why should the view over a great canyon, which is only an elongated depression in the ground, stimulate us so? Is it because such things are beautiful? Perhaps, but that only raises the next question: why do we think mountains or canyons or waterholes are beautiful?

  Is it because they are wild and untamed? But there is nothing inherently wild about a canyon; it is only erosion at work. The same could be said of any waterhole, no matter how captivating. And there is nothing untamed about a mountain, it is merely a wrinkle in the landscape cast up by either plate tectonics or volcanic processes. Besides, we can look at a piece of scrubland or a jungle gully in which no man has ever lived, and which indeed is wild and untamed, and feel no awe at all.

  And yet consider this. Take a mountain around which a city has been built—Table Mountain at Cape Town in South Africa, for instance, or the soaring stone spires of Rio de Janeiro. People still consider these features impressive, yes, but do they look at these mountains and spires with the same wonderment that they would if the peaks reared alone in the wilderness? No. Something about such mountains and spires, with houses on their flanks, and roads and streetlights all about, does indeed feel tamed and non-wild. They are, in a word, dimini
shed.

  So what’s going on? What is it that we are perceiving when we feel that something is awe-inspiring? Is it a question of wilderness, of the lack of human presence? Is it a recognition of something bigger than us, or older than us, or apart from us in some other way? Is it an appreciation of danger and physical threat? Is it some primal memory in us, longing for a freer past that we have long since lost as we civilised ourselves? Is it all these things together, or something else entirely?

  Well, I have the answer. It’s not one that most people expect, or will find easy to believe, but I can’t help that—a closed mind is a closed mind. But there are already many who know I speak the truth, many who have sought me out to employ the special talents I possess, talents that were vouchsafed to me, terrifyingly, when I was sixteen.

  Those people were in trouble, and this book is for those who are likewise in trouble, those who are in discomfort and fear, experiencing the deeper and darker side of what lies behind our awe of certain natural landscapes, and who need guidance on how to respond.

  I promise, I can help you.

  2

  LUXURIATING

  Rita awoke to snow.

  She had left the great glass wall of her bedroom uncurtained the night before; with the Wheel filling the entire view eastward, there would be no sun peeking in to wake her at dawn. As it turned out there would have been no sun anyway, for when she opened her eyes she saw only a field of grey through which snow descended in silent flurries towards the unseen ocean over two-and-a-half kilometres below.

  She stretched in her bed; it was king size and superbly comfortable, the sheets a deliciously soft linen. The entire bedroom was as snug as a cave, its dark walls and lush carpet shutting out the freezing morning beyond the glass. Lingering indulgently, she stared at the falling white flakes and listened to the distant mutter of wind from the balcony. Then, on the bedside table, her phone dinged with a text message.