There was no one there. But to the right another passage opened off the room, and even as Rita stepped towards it, a woman poked her head around the corner, and blinked at Rita in surprise.
‘Where the hell did you come from?’ the woman demanded. Then, glancing past Rita to the corridor Rita had just come down, she added, ‘Wait, where does that go? I didn’t see that before.’
Rita was not quite sure what to make of this. ‘Um—I came from the pool.’
‘The pool?’ The woman shook her head disgustedly. She was plump and fiftyish, and dressed in a grey smock, a cleaner’s uniform by the look, her accent Australian. ‘Christ, I’m miles out of my way. But bloody hell, I looked in here and I swear I didn’t see that door.’
‘Are you lost?’
‘Lost? I’ve been wandering around in here for a bloody hour! When I got to this place it was the last straw, which is why I started bawling out for someone to come and get me. I couldn’t even find a damn intercom to call for help.’ She beckoned to Rita and pointed down the passage from which she had emerged. ‘Look at it. How would you like to have to negotiate these damn tunnels day in and day out?’
Rita looked. The passage extended for maybe thirty metres, lit only by sparse bulbs overhead, the walls lined with more pipes and conduits. Other passages opened from it to the left and right, and at its furthest end was a landing for a stairwell that went both up and down.
‘Looks awful,’ Rita agreed.
The woman shuddered. ‘I hate it. I shouldn’t be anywhere near here, I was in the B Guest Wing, vacuuming, and I was just trying to get to the break room for a coffee! I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, then I couldn’t find my way back.’ She looked at her watch as if to confirm the worst. ‘Jesus, it really has been an hour!’
‘Aren’t there signs to show the way?’
The cleaner rolled her eyes. ‘There are, but they never make sense to me. I swear I follow them properly, but I get lost anyway. Everything looks the same and it’s always so damn dark in there, and hot too, with all the vents and pipes. You wouldn’t believe how much water and heat has to be pumped around this place just to keep a few people warm …’ She pulled herself up, gave Rita a sudden look. ‘You’re a guest, aren’t you.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Oh lord, sorry to have bothered you then. It’s the first rule, never bother the guests; don’t even talk to them unless they talk to you first. I’ll get out of your hair. The pool is down this way, you said?’
‘Just through the door.’
‘Good. We’re not supposed to use the public areas to get around, but I’m not going back that other way again!’
They retreated the way Rita had come, emerging through the alcove to reach the poolside, where everything was as Rita had left it.
The cleaner shook her head as she stared about. ‘I still can’t believe I’m so far off! Did I interrupt your swim?’
‘I’d just got out.’
‘Oh. Good. Well, I’m sorry again—and thank you for coming for me, it must seem very stupid to you, getting lost where I work.’
‘Not at all. I didn’t like the look of those tunnels either.’
‘Stupid damn maze. Who on earth would design a house this way, I ask you?’ The woman turned towards the main exit, then hesitated, turned back. ‘You’re all alone down here?’
Rita nodded.
The cleaned glanced to the door of the spa section. ‘You’re not … um … you aren’t thinking of using the steam room, are you?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
The woman looked reluctant. ‘I wouldn’t, that’s all. Not after what happened. They say it’s perfectly safe, and always was. I know even Mr Richman uses it, so it must be. But still.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘You don’t know? Well … I shouldn’t be telling you, I guess … but someone died in there. He was on his own too. So I just thought …’
‘Died? How?’
The woman shook her head. ‘He was a staff member, but I’d be lying if I said I knew all the details, there’re all sorts of rumours about it. An accident, we were told. Anyway, if you’re a guest, then you’re a friend of Mr Richman’s. You could ask him. Cheerio.’
She turned, marched to the swinging doors and banged through them, leaving Rita nonplussed. And alone once more.
She stared about the Cavern, hearing once more the gentle splash and mutter of falling water from the cascades. But the effect did not quite ring true anymore, now that she knew about the tunnels that lay behind the cavern walls, with their great steel pipes humming, and the heat and the darkness, miles and miles of it apparently. What a place to get lost. No wonder the poor woman had been so upset.
But as for her talk of a death in the steam room, well, it sounded like a tragic event, yes, but deaths were hardly unheard-of in saunas and spas. Maybe the person had been old, or overweight. All that steam, it was a strain on the body, and some people just couldn’t cope.
It was certainly nothing to get spooked about.
Yes … but then this was the second death in the Observatory that Rita had been told of. The man in the Lightning Room that Madelaine had mentioned, and now another in the sauna.
But no, wait, it was three deaths in fact, because of course she was forgetting her own father.
Three people dead in the one house. That was different.
Wasn’t it?
She glanced at the sauna doorway again. Richman himself still used the steam room, the cleaning woman had stated. So it must be safe. And Rita was no believer in ghosts, never had been, even back when she had believed in all the other mad things.
But no, she didn’t want a spa. Never had wanted one. With a shrug, she headed for the change rooms to get out of her suit.
3
FALLING MAN
Excerpt from Reaching for the Hand of God,
by John Soliola, 2007
In all, twenty-two climbers died during the Richman expedition upon the Wheel. Of those, seven were killed in avalanches, three in rockslides, three in pressure-suit failures, four in a single horrific HAEV hut blow-out, and five by falling. Each of these fatalities was, of course, its own tragic tale of ill fortune or misjudgement. But it was one of the five deaths by falling that was perhaps the most cruel and haunting of all.
The incident took place just three weeks before Walter Richman stood on the summit. The victim was an Australian climber by the name of Matt Yale, commonly known as Red. Cheerful and popular, thirty-one years old, married with two school-age children, he was an experienced mountaineer, having climbed extensively in New Zealand and the Himalayas and upon the Wheel itself before signing up with the Richman campaign. At the time of the accident he had logged seventeen ascents and descents on the mountain, all of them without trouble.
On 21 October 1974, however, at an altitude of twenty-three thousand nine hundred and fifty metres, all that changed.
The location was Hut 119, set high on the mountain, at the base of the final summit ridge. The hut itself was only newly installed: indeed, Red’s team was carrying the last load of supplies that would make the hut officially operational. It was an exciting, expectant time for, as everyone knew, the expedition would only need to construct two or three more huts now before the final assault on the summit could begin.
(Note: the system of having two lines of huts, one as a backup for the other, had been abandoned for the narrow last two kilometres of the ascent, the two lines meeting and climbing on as one.)
The day before the accident had been unremarkable—as unremarkable as any day can be high in the stratosphere. Red’s team had overnighted at Hut 118 before donning their HTF suits for the three-hundred-metre climb to Hut 119. The route was well marked and laid with guide ropes, and each man was carrying some twenty kilos of rations that would complete the stocking of the higher camp. They arrived mid-afternoon, unpacked and stored their loads, then spent the night in the hut, with the intention of descending
at dawn to make way for the next team, an assault crew, who would begin the harder work of pioneering a new route up to a prospective Hut 120.
The night passed smoothly, as did the morning ritual of checking and donning their suits. They emerged a half-hour after sunrise. However, during the final external inspection of the hut before departure they discovered that overnight a malfunction had occurred with the water line. The coupling that attached the heavily jacketed and heat-traced piping to the valve in the hut wall had not sealed fully—or had come loose under pressure—and a leak had occurred. Not a major leak—cut-off valves would have activated with any large surge of flow—and most of the water that had escaped had evaporated away in the thin atmosphere, but a crust of ice was still visible around the partially detached coupling. A new coupling would have to be installed.
This was an inconvenience at most. The problem had occurred before at other camps, and there was a spare coupling ready and waiting in the hut. It was a matter of half an hour’s work to attach the spare to the water line, and reconnect it. Two of the men re-entered the hut, leaving Red and one other climber outside. Red was walking along the water line, inspecting it for any further sign of damage, while the other climber took advantage of the break to admire the view.
For good reason. Hut 119 boasted the most spectacular outlook of any of the camps on the mountain. For a start, it was only the second hut to be sited on the summit ridge, after the long zigzag route up the West Face, giving it open views to both east and west. But more than that, Hut 119 was sited at the very top of the awesome Grand Couloir.
For those not familiar with mountaineering terminology, a couloir is a vertical gully or chute in a mountainside. If narrow and sheltered enough, they can sometimes offer a safer and simple route up a steep face. But at other times they can be even sheerer and more deadly than the face into which they are cut. The Grand Couloir is of the latter sort.
There are in fact three large couloirs on the West Face of the Wheel. Two slightly smaller but still immense couloirs can be found to the north and south of the centreline of the face, and are called, predictably, the North Couloir and the South Couloir. But the Grand Couloir, positioned close to the centreline, just south of the summit, is the undisputed king.
The West Face is, of course, itself steep and sheer, but it is not utterly vertical. However, from a beginning point just below the summit ridge, a channel has been cut—as if by some godlike hand wielding a mighty chisel—which drops straight down, bare and terrible, for fully eight thousand metres. And at its base, heaped in what is by then a dark, uptilted canyon, there awaits a deadly fan of razor-sharp scree.
What formed this great scar on the mountain is not known. Some theorise it was created by an ancient landslide, others that it was a trench in the ocean floor, millennia ago, before the Wheel was lifted above the water. Whatever its origins, the Grand Couloir’s vertical walls present a dire obstacle. No one has ever tried such sheer and technical climbing at such an extreme altitude, and it’s doubtful anyone ever will.
The Richman expedition had certainly made no attempt to do so. For the last seven kilometres of the ascent, their route had passed safely to south of the Grand Couloir. Only now, as they traversed back northwards along the summit ridge, were they coming close. In fact, Hut 119 sat directly above the Couloir, the ridgeline at that point forming a giant overhang, a roof over the terrible chute below.
Little wonder then, on that fateful morning, that Red’s companion took a moment to stare about at the incredible prospect on offer. But it meant that he did not see exactly what happened next.
What he heard, over the radio in the helmet of his suit, which linked all four climbers of the team, and the team to Base Camp, was Red give a muffled exclamation, followed by a strange scrabbling sound, and then an alarmed cry for help. The climber turned to look, but found, astoundingly, that his companion had vanished.
Then, over the com, the screaming began.
▲
What had happened, it emerged during the later inquiry, was this. A greater amount of water had leaked from the defective coupling than the team had realised, and not all of it had evaporated. A steady trickle had dribbled from the hut down the westward side of the ridge—i.e., towards the top of the overhang above the Grand Couloir—mostly evaporating as it went, but leaving behind a very thin sheen of ice, bonded fast enough to the rock to resist immediate sublimation into the frigid air.
This sheen of ice would have been difficult to see at the best of times, but on a west-facing slope, shortly after sunrise, cast into shadow, it was all but invisible. At such a high altitude, with so little air to diffract or diffuse light, shadows are deeper and darker than those at sea level. So, all unknowing, Red, in his inspection of the water leak, must have taken one step too far into this shadow, and suddenly found that the footing was ice slick beneath him.
He fell—but not only fell, he then slid. For the slick of ice actually ran a full ten metres, all the way from the hut down a steady forty-degree slope to the edge of the overhang, which, even worse, had a slight uptilt at its lip. Without hope of purchase, Red accelerated swiftly down this slide, flew up over the lip, and sailed helplessly into space.
(Had the day progressed normally, once underway the four climbers would have been either roped to each other or clipped to fixed lines to prevent such falls. Freshly out of the hut, and on ‘safe’ ground, however, no one had clipped on yet.)
But even this wasn’t the worst of it.
Usually, in a fall from a high face, a climber is dead long before they reach the bottom. Few cliffs are completely sheer, and so the falling body will slam and bounce against the slope as it descends, hitting with such speed and violence that not only is the person soon rendered insensible, their bodies are completely torn apart.
Red was not to be so lucky. The walls of the Grand Couloir are almost completely sheer, and he had fallen from an overhang, some distance out from the face. Even worse, he had been thrust still further out by the speed of his slide. So he hit nothing. Red simply fell, a stone dropping straight down into a hole eight kilometres deep.
And he fell fast. In the thin atmosphere above twenty kilometres high, there is virtually no air resistance to slow down a falling object. Experimental jumps from high-altitude balloons have seen skydivers fall, for brief periods, in excess of the speed of sound. Red would have reached similar velocities, the sides of the couloir flashing by in a terrifying rush. And even that wasn’t the worst, for if he had merely fallen to the bottom of the couloir and smashed into the scree there, at least his ordeal would have been over in little more than a minute.
But he didn’t hit the bottom of the couloir. Instead, as he reached about the eighteen-thousand-metre mark, Red at last began to meet some air resistance. Indeed, wind resistance. For on that day a strong jet stream happened to be blowing, striking the West Face dead on. Part of the jet stream was being diverted down the mountain, but most of it was being diverted up and out from the face, and it was this torrent of up-rushing air that Red encountered. It slowed him down, yes, but it also thrust him further out and away from the mountain. So much so that even as he reached the level of the base of the couloir, he was already by then clear of the entire West Face and moving further out all the time.
And so he kept falling.
In the end, he would miss the mountain completely. In an epic five-minute descent, dropping twenty-four thousand metres, Red would travel horizontally some fourteen kilometres to the west—slamming down finally in the ocean a mile and more from the shoreline. By then, in the denser air, he had slowed to a terminal velocity of around only two-hundred kilometres per hour. But this lesser speed was, of course, more than enough to kill him when he hit.
But even that isn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was that Red was fully conscious all the way down. For every second of those five minutes.
The microphone of his com system remained open for the whole descent. The range
of the HTF suit radios was only a few kilometres, so he soon passed out of the hearing of his shocked companions at Hut 119. But as Red fell, he was picked up successively by receivers at lower huts, each of which sent a signal by hardwire down to Base Camp, where everything from every channel was recorded. So there is a playback available of Red’s every utterance on the way down.
It makes for harrowing listening.
At first, as his teammates at Hut 119 heard, there is his exclamation as he slips, and then a cry for help as he is sliding down the ramp, followed—as he sails off the lip—by incoherent screaming.
This resolves after about fifteen seconds into a series of gasps and expletives, the tone of which is sheer disbelief. By then Red had already fallen over a kilometre and was still accelerating, his body whirling in a flat spin which would have left him completely disorientated.
At about forty seconds, however, as he began to encounter the up-flowing jet stream, Red’s spin, either by accident or design, slowed and stabilised. He ended up in a spreadeagled position, head slightly down and forward, and in this pose continued for almost the rest of the descent, with a clear view of the land rushing by beneath, and of the ocean rising, inevitably and inexorably, to claim him.
On the recording, after the confused swearing and panting, there comes, at about the time that his spin ended, a silence. Then, at the one-minute mark, comes actual speech.
Red: Fuck. Oh Jesus. Fuck. No. No.
In the background is a thin whistling, the air rushing around his helmet, only a distant whine at first in the higher altitudes, but becoming a dull roar as he descends into thicker air.
Red: Oh fuck no. I’m fucked. I’m fucked.
And still he is falling past the mountain.
At the one-minute-fifty mark another voice intrudes, an emergency hail broadcast across all channels. By this time, expedition management had been alerted, and now Geoff Lodge, who was the chief of operations on duty at Base Camp that morning, gets on the line. Lodge himself was indoors and could not see Red, but he was receiving constant updates via radio from other observers sited either on the Wheel, or on the main observation post on Observatory Mount. The babble of these watchers can at times be heard in the background.
The Rich Man’s House Page 19
