The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  But here is the next important point: these forms of awareness do not exist in just any piece of stone, or in any patch of sky, or in any reach of ocean. They are born only when something unusual happens within a landscape or environment. They are a consciousness that comes into existence when change occurs; they are defined by it; their first thought, so to speak, is not I think therefore I am but rather I am because I am not as everything else is.

  Some examples will help explain. You are wandering through a forest. The ground gently rises and falls, there are trees and creepers everywhere, birds sing; it’s all very nice, but you feel no sense of anything special. Then you come upon a deep fold in the land, and descend into a gully of overhanging cliffs. It comes to a dead end, where a deep rock pool waits, water dripping into it from the stone walls above. You are alone there, cut off from the rest of the forest, and all is hushed and still and cold.

  Now you sense something, an otherness to the landscape, a hush, an awe.

  Or you are hiking across a desert plain. It is stark and bare and striking in its own way, but it leaves you untouched. Then you come to a lone pinnacle of stone, raised long ago by some volcanic or geological upheaval. It is not dauntingly tall, maybe only forty or fifty metres high, but as you walk around it, noting how strange and isolated it is there amid the flatness of the desert, you once again begin to sense something else, something that dwells there, not human, not animal, not plant, that you cannot name.

  Or take one of the most common experiences of all. You are in your backyard, gazing up at the sky and the clouds, and all is as normal. Then a storm approaches, the great thunderheads advancing from the horizon to loom over you, the air stirring, lightning flickering, thunder rumbling—and something in you awakens at the sight, something in you quickens, you feel dwarfed by a manifestation that is alien to you, bigger than you, indifferent to you.

  In all these moments, what you are sensing is the presence that inhabits these landscapes or phenomena. Your own awareness is interacting—imperfectly, blindly—with the alien awareness that was created by the formation of the forest gully, or by the raising of the stone pinnacle, or by the brewing of the storm. Your human consciousness is detecting—confusedly—inhuman consciousnesses that are born of violence and change and difference. You are sensing, as this book is titled, the spawn of disparity.

  Thus, they are not everywhere. In a landscape with a thousand mountains, for example, only a mountain that stands out from the others will have a presence within it. This is easily tested. Travel through some mountainous region where, as you go, snowy peak appears after snowy peak. You will find that amid so many mountains, summit after summit will excite no special awe in you. But eventually there will be one—not necessarily the highest—that is different, either standing alone and apart, or rising more sheerly, or at stranger angles, and that mountain will stir a response in your heart. That mountain, forged differently from its fellows, will hold a presence within.

  I should say here that the presences that inhabit mountains, or storms, are about the largest that the human soul can detect. I suspect that there are larger presences in larger formations—continents for instance, and whole oceans, maybe entire planets. But if so, those presences are simply too huge, too diffuse, for any human mind to comprehend. We have not the perspective—though perhaps astronauts, who have looked back upon Earth from a distance, would beg to differ. On that I cannot comment.

  Now, what are these presences exactly, you ask? Well, it may be easier to begin the answer by explaining what they are not. They are not merely a human type of consciousness trapped in a rock. Banish all notion that they think or feel or experience the world as we do. They are alien to us in every way, non-living, non-corporeal, non-pretty-much-every-concept-we-have of awareness. Yet they are aware, of themselves, and of their surroundings.

  And though they are not living as we understand it—they do not eat or drink or reproduce—they are mortal; they do die. They exist only as long as the formation that gave birth to them itself exists. When the gully is weathered away, so is the presence within it. When the pinnacle is worn down, its awareness is worn down too. When the storm blows itself out, nothing other is left behind.

  Presences exist, and they die. Their life expectancy, however, is nothing like ours. The time between their birth and death can be a million years, or a few hours, or—say, in the case of the giant rogue waves that form upon the ocean, rearing vastly up before collapsing into foam—even a few fleeting moments. Time has no meaning to presences. A millennium or a microsecond, all is the same. And they do not fear their end, or resist it—except in one unique manner, which we will come to.

  But why do I call them presences? Why that name, over the alternatives? After all, there are many names that could be used instead.

  Humans have called these awarenesses gods or demons, spirits or elementals. I could do the same, borrowing any number of such divine titles from a hundred different mythologies.

  But I don’t think it would be wise. To call them divinities would be misleading. Quite apart from religious dogma, we humans tend to envision our gods and demons as essentially just pumped-up versions of ourselves. Supernatural beings, yes, powerful and frightening and mysterious, and endowed with all sorts of hidden knowledge and motivations, but still beings that think and reason much as we do.

  But as I’ve said, the presences of which I speak are in no way human: they don’t lust or fall in love or crave power; they don’t feel hot or cold; they have no gender. They are not alive in any way that we are. To repeat, they are inorganic.

  Should we therefore simply call them inorganics, as does the famous shaman (or fraud, take your pick) Carlos Castaneda? Certainly there are echoes of presences in his writings. But alas, his other-dimensional beings, for all their inhumanness, are still imbued with human-like motivations of greed and control. Indeed, Castaneda’s inorganics are closely tied to humans (they farm us, basically) whereas the presences of which I speak, if left to themselves, have no interest at all in humanity.

  What then of the old term numens, which dates back to classical times, and was the name given to bodiless, sexless, inhuman consciousnesses that were believed to inhabit the landscape, and which it was wise for humans to honour and placate? That sounds very close, surely, to the meaning I’m after. And likewise, what of animism, and of other eastern religions and philosophies which see gods within hills and mountains, such as the sacred peaks of the Himalayas. Indeed, such mythical concepts can only have grown from a keen appreciation of the concept of presences as I now seek to explain it.

  Still, ‘numens’ is a term I have elected not to use. For one thing, numens and other animistic gods inhabit not only hills and rocks and rivers, they also abide in living objects like trees and forests, or sometimes even in man-made objects, like statues or crossroads. Also, while they live within a landscape, they are viewed as separate from that landscape, able to move, for instance, to other mountains or trees, if encouraged, rather than being entities that are of the landscape, with no discrete existence beyond it. It is a subtle but crucial difference, as I will show in later chapters.

  In short, therefore, having examined and discarded every known term that refers to inhuman presences in the landscape surrounding us, I have settled, if reluctantly, upon the word with which I began. In fact, it came to me in childhood, in those first terrifying moments that I was enlightened, against my will, to the true nature of the world.

  Yes, presences may be an unsatisfying word, too general in its meaning, but by that generality is at least neutral and free of so many of the misleading implications that other terms carry.

  Oh, and there is one last avenue of terminology that it is important to reject immediately and completely. Presences have nothing—nothing—to do with the notion of Gaia, or with any sense of Life Force or Mother Nature, or with environmentalism. Remember, they are non-organic. They do not rely on the system of photosynthesis; they do not care about global wa
rming, or about preserving forests, or about saving the whales. The scurrying life of plants and animals is of no consequence to a consciousness that is born of motionless stone, or of shifting air masses, or of the upthrust of an ocean wave.

  That said, however, there is one crucial aspect of life that does matter to them, and that is conscious life, human life, in other words, for only humans are truly conscious. Why does the human mind matter? For a simple and brutal reason: it can kill a presence before that presence’s due time.

  To an inorganic awareness, the proximity of an organic awareness is toxic. And the proximity of massed organic awareness—i.e., a crowd of humans coming into close contact with a presence—is toxic fatally.

  In short, we humans, us, our very thoughts, are poison to the presences we encounter.

  And that’s where all the trouble starts.

  8

  PREMONITIONS

  Rita woke trembling and flushed to her third day as Walter Richman’s guest.

  It was a hangover. She had drunk far too much the night before. On top of what she had imbibed during dinner, she had gulped down several wines with dessert, and then indulged in whisky and port with Kushal and Eugene. And, ah yes, she remembered now, once back in her apartment, she had drunk another wine on her own. No, two wines, actually. Or had it been three …

  It was almost, she noted ruefully, as if she had been drinking in self-defence.

  In the old days, alcohol had been her first resort when she had wanted to escape the presences around her. Other drugs—pot, cocaine, LSD and the like—only heightened her awareness of them (that was one way of putting it, another might have been that those other drugs created her awareness of them) but alcohol, mercifully, had always been deadening, shutting her special senses down. So, in drinking so much, had she been making a pre-emptive strike last night? Washing away the memory of her episode on the Terrace, and ensuring that it was not repeated?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  Either way, she was paying for it now. She swung gingerly out of bed, swayed her way to the shower, and under the hot blast of the four nozzles began to feel a little better. Afterwards, she ordered bacon and eggs and coffee. She really could get used to daily room service, she noted bleakly, taking the first hot sip of the long black.

  And then there it was: the rest of the day to be filled. Her only engagement was for dinner—another formal affair in the Dining Hall, she had been told—otherwise she was free.

  What to do?

  A swim?

  Or a sauna perhaps?

  In the steam room where the man had died, cooked through in his own skin?

  But she did not think she could face the Cavern Pool. There were few better hangover cures than a swim or a sauna, and it wasn’t as if she was seriously put off by the story of the dead man. But the thought of venturing down there all alone again, through the empty halls to the great dark cavity dug from the heart of the Mount, silent except for the splash of water, and beneath that, the hum from the hidden machinery in the tunnels … no, not today.

  The upper pool then? It was heated, after all, and refreshingly open to the sky. But when Rita gazed out through the glass walls of her apartment, the sky itself was a washed-out grey, drear and uninviting, and the weather panel by the balcony door warned of strong winds and bitter temperatures.

  Again, no …

  The plush couch in the living room beckoned, and the huge TV screen with its full suite of cable and streaming channels. Later, she promised herself, going to the couch and sinking into it and reaching for the remote, later she must get out and do something, or meet someone, but for now, for the rest of the morning at least, she could curl up and indulge.

  But she did exactly that—turning the fire on, fetching a soft blanket to snuggle under, nibbling on some high-quality chocolate she found in the larder, locating a few favourite old shows to watch—the hoped-for sense of comfort and cosiness refused to eventuate.

  The hangover was partly to blame. It lingered stubbornly. But it seemed to be more than just that. Something else nagged at her, a nameless tension, as if somewhere, just beyond her hearing, a drill whined, or an alarm wailed, or a dog barked, or a baby cried, making it impossible to relax.

  Occasionally, she found herself all of a sudden sitting up and turning to the windows to stare out at the Wheel, as if some half-heard report had come from that direction. But there was never any actual sound, and the Wheel was always as it ever was, an immutable wall of grey and ochre and white. Oh, doubtless the West Face, overburdened with so much stone, must crack and groan constantly, and the many glaciers, grinding slowly in their beds, must at times split and shatter and shed ice in great crashes, but from this distance there was nothing to see, and nothing to hear. The Wheel was silent.

  And yet, something emanated from it, Rita’s ragged senses told her. There was an echo of what she had felt last night (though in truth she couldn’t remember exactly what she had felt last night, the alcohol she had consumed since had dulled the memory), something increasingly strained and drawn out and expectant. Something—

  Goddamnit, no.

  Stop it.

  What she was thinking was impossible, even her old self would have said so. No presence could be so strong, no presence could make itself felt across such a distance … And there were no such things as presences anyway. She had made it all up, when she was young and hurt and furious.

  The ring of the house-phone was a welcome distraction. Rita muted the TV and answered. It was Clara. ‘If you’re not busy this afternoon,’ said the major-domo, ‘we can fill in a gap in your tour.’

  ‘Tour?’ Rita echoed, not understanding.

  ‘The Museum—it’ll be ready for viewing in a few hours. The last piece we were waiting for arrived yesterday; they’re installing it now.’

  ‘Oh … well …’

  ‘Are you fixed for lunch? We could meet in the Conservatory for a bite, if you like, before visiting the Museum. Or I could simply meet you there, say at three, if you’d rather eat on your own.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’d prefer that, I’m actually a bit tired after last night,’ Rita said with inward relief. A simple sandwich in the apartment would be much easier in her current mood than lunch with company. ‘I’ll see you at three then.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll be waiting.’

  ▲

  Both of them were prompt, meeting within the arched doorway to the Entrance Hall.

  ‘I didn’t even think to ask before,’ Rita said straight up. ‘But when you say museum, what sort do you mean? A museum to what?’

  The major-domo blinked. ‘You’re right, I never said. Well, you won’t be surprised. It’s a museum to mountain climbing. More specifically, a museum to the Richman expedition and the Wheel.’

  ‘Ah.’ And that certainly made sense, although Rita greeted the news with a sinking heart. She did not think she would be all that interested in a museum stuffed with climbing memorabilia at the best of times, even less so now. Lunch had not helped much. She still felt hungover and nervously irritable, on edge for no cause she could pin down.

  Yet Clara was smiling as she ushered Rita through the archway. ‘I can guess what you’re thinking, but it’s worth your while, really.’

  They passed down the Hall, ignoring the artworks, and came to the stairs that led below. The chain that had previously blocked entry was now gone.

  ‘Down we go,’ said Clara.

  They descended. It did indeed feel as if they were passing from the main body of the great cathedral to its secret subterranean catacombs. The stairs described three turns through the solid rock, leaving all light of the upper world behind, before reaching the bottom.

  A low, wide chamber awaited them.

  It was quite windowless, lit only with an orange light from braziers set on the walls. Squat pillars ran off in rows, supporting a flat ceiling; it was at least fifteen feet high, but felt low after the soaring space of the Hall above.

  It was a sho
wroom, Rita realised, designed to display not itself, but the exhibits within. A museum to mountaineering, to the expedition that had conquered the Wheel, so the major-domo had called it. But Rita could see that it was really a museum to one man, Walter Richman.

  He waited at the foot of the stairs, across an expanse of red carpet. There, upon a podium, stood an upright slab of stone carved into human shape and imprinted with a life size photographic image—the same image indeed that Rita had seen inscribed upon the Wheel in the darkness last night, twenty kilometres high: the famous photo of the triumphant mountaineer standing upon the summit of the world.

  And next to Richman’s likeness, on a matching podium, was a high-altitude climbing suit, standing freely as if a man was inside it even now. And Rita knew, even before asking, what it must be. ‘Is that the one?’ she said as they approached the display. ‘The one he was wearing, on the summit?’

  The major-domo nodded. ‘It is.’

  ‘And is this what you were waiting for?’ Rita guessed. ‘The final installation?’

  Another nod. ‘Mr Richman didn’t consider the Museum complete without it. He loaned it to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum in Washington, back in the eighties, which is where it’s been ever since, in pride of place, I’m told. But of course he always reserved the right to take it back, and they have other suits they can use, if not quite as special as this one. It was a complicated procedure, however, getting it here, and there were delays, hence the curators only finished their work on it this morning.’

  Rita was circling the suit slowly now. She could not deny her fascination, having only ever seen photos or film of the strange attire, never the actual thing up close, let alone the only suit to have made it to the summit. (And where, she wondered, did they keep the pressure suit that Neil Armstrong had worn while he walked on the Moon? Was it also at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum? Wherever it was, at least it couldn’t be taken away at whim—it had always been government property, not private.)