The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘I’m riding down too,’ grinned Eugene. ‘I’ve been waiting an hour up here; I was supposed to be down at the mainframe straight after lunch.’

  Kennedy shook his head ill-temperedly. ‘He’s not the only one. We should’ve had the whole change of shift done an hour back, but everyone is stuck because of the service elevator. If it’s not fixed soon I’ll be sending the bloody cleaners and dishwashers down on the main lift too, and to hell with the silk carpets and the velvet on the couches.’ And with that, he and Eugene and the house manager moved off, Kennedy’s walkie-talkie crackling all the while.

  Rita and Clara watched them go a moment, then continued in the opposite direction. ‘Is that common?’ Rita asked. ‘The lift breaking down, I mean?’

  ‘It’s happened once or twice. But thankfully never both lifts at once.’

  Rita rubbed a hand against her brow, the hangover headache, or whatever it was, getting worse by the minute. ‘If they did both go, there’d be no way down but those stairs you talked about, right?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t come to that even then. If both lifts failed the next option would be a helicopter ride down, from the helipad. There’s always a chopper on standby down at Base. It’s all fail-safe. So the stairs would be very much a last resort, I’d say.’

  Jesus. A helicopter ride or a climb down two kilometres of stairs. Rita didn’t fancy the thought of either. But she said no more.

  They came to the Atrium and climbed the small spiral staircase to reach the Conservatory. Through the glass walls and ceiling, the wide world swung into view.

  Rita squinted painfully at the brightness. The dull covering of cloud from the morning had now largely broken up. Westward, a mid-level bank still lingered, riven by great shafts of sunlight that cast shining patterns on the sea, but overhead the sky was clear apart from a few fleeting cumulus, and to the east the Wheel reared in all its immensity, naked of any cloudy ornament, brutal in the sunlight.

  ‘I’ll order the tea,’ said Clara, making for the bar. It was unstaffed at this mid-afternoon hour, but a house phone sat on the counter.

  Rita, left to herself, turned fully to the Wheel, determined to face the worst, opening herself to it—could she truly feel an emanation there, radiating from the stone and the ice? Or was she being foolish? But what she sensed was only confusing. There was nothing coherent, no presence, if that’s truly what she was looking for. But the tension was still there, unfocussed, below any threshold of sight or hearing or sixth sense, but still grating, still nagging at her like fingernails dragging on a blackboard.

  She suddenly remembered the Black Band the major-domo had mentioned, the landmark that climbers had set as their target. It was curious, Rita thought, that she hadn’t noticed it herself already. She searched for it now, figuring that at about ten thousand metres high it should lie roughly between a third and half of the way up the mountain. Though in truth from this perspective, with the face of Wheel tilting away from her, it was hard to judge exactly.

  She let her gaze rise slowly, starting from the lower slopes of the great mountain, as a climber would, below the snowline even, where the smattering of vegetation, stunted trees and grasses, gave the face a bluish hue. This gave way to the vast snowfields of the lower heights; unimaginable tonnes of snow packed thickly all across the forty-five-kilometre arc of the Wheel, dazzling white in the clear air. Above that came the broad horizontal fracture across the face that formed the great ledge known as the Plateau, at five thousand metres. And above that more snowfields, then finally the rockier, even sheerer cliffs of the middle face, where ice clung instead of snow, and where, in couloirs and plunging valleys, huge glaciers hung precipitously.

  But upwards still travelled her gaze, leaping in instants vertical miles that it would take a climber days to master. At last, where the snow and ice began to thin towards the barer upper half of the mountain, there it was. Not a black band, but a greyish strip that ran level across the face, the stone notably duller than the ochre and red to be found elsewhere. By Clara’s description the band was nearly a kilometre thick, but from so far below it looked narrow, a line drawn by some gigantic pen, like a border. And so it was, for in truth it marked the divide between the habitable lower part of the mountain, and the airless, inhuman part that reared above, clear into the stratosphere.

  And god, even this lesser landmark, not even halfway up the Wheel, seemed to Rita impossibly high and remote, now that she knew that men had indeed climbed so high up with scarcely any aid at all, no pressure suits, but only flimsy oxygen masks. She felt dizzy just contemplating it, and to steady the sudden nausea took a seat at a table.

  At the bar, the major-domo (who had climbed to that distant Black Band, Rita reminded herself in wonder, at the price of a finger and the tip of a nose, and the loss of some unknown part of her feet) put down the phone, frowning.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Clara said, ‘no one in the kitchen is answering.’ She peered over the counter. ‘But actually, all the fixings to make tea are back here anyway. Shall I go ahead and boil the kettle?’

  ‘If you want,’ Rita answered faintly. ‘But really, just a glass of water would be fine.’

  But the major-domo was now among the cupboards. ‘Here we go. Hmm.’ She held up a small black glass jar. ‘Yellow Gold Buds tea. Not too extravagant for your tastes, I hope?’

  Rita didn’t know what this meant—was Yellow Gold Buds an expensive brand? She only shook her head, the ache behind her eyes lancing more sharply than ever. What was wrong with her? She had never had an attack like this before, not even in the old days. In the old days she had always known where the sensations, the bad vibes if you will, were coming from, and also what they meant. But now she was only bewildered, distracted unbearably.

  As Clara attended without fuss to the tea, Rita rubbed her temples hopelessly, staring at the floor like a victim of seasickness. When she dared a glance up at the Wheel again, vertigo leapt at her, so that it felt the entire mass of the mountain was toppling forwards, and she had to look away again quickly.

  ‘Here we go,’ said the major-domo at last, placing a steaming pot and cups upon the table, accompanied by milk and sugar.

  At the same moment, Kennedy appeared at the top of the stairs, his walkie-talkie still in hand. ‘Tea? Haven’t you got any damn coffee?’

  Clara ignored this, filling cups. ‘Got everyone down?’ she asked the security chief.

  ‘The fireworks crew, yes, but there’s still the change of shift staff—they’re all milling around at the service lift like a herd of cattle.’

  ‘Ah. Is that why I couldn’t get an answer from the kitchen? I did wonder.’

  ‘It’s not just the kitchen staff, it’s cleaning and maintenance too, and my own boys—’

  He broke off as his walkie-talkie squawked, and for the next minute engaged in an esoteric conversation with the distorted voice on the other end. A conclusion was reached, after which he put the device in his pocket with a sigh.

  ‘That’s it, then. They just got the service lift working at last, and of course now everyone wants down at once. Problem is protocol says you don’t go down until your replacement has come up, just to be sure every station is always tended. But it’s a fifteen-minute wait for the lift to go down and come up again, and it turns out some of the staff are starting annual leave today and are supposed to go out on the same ship with the fireworks crew, and it absolutely has to get going or else … so what the hell, I’ve sent them all down. I think we can survive a quarter hour up here without cleaners and kitchen hands.’

  Clara nodded smoothly. ‘Well, do you want some of this tea or not?’

  The security chief sank into a seat. ‘It’s not that gold-plated shit again, is it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s all I can find.’

  ‘Jesus. Fine then.’

  A third cup was produced. For a few moments the three of them sipped on the tea, the two staff members chatting about in-house topics. Rita paid little a
ttention. The hot liquid in her cup had no taste (was it really gold-plated?) and her eyes were drawn repeatedly to the sky and the Wheel, searching. It felt to her as if thunder was rumbling constantly just beneath her hearing—or was it just the throbbing in her head? The ache was a migraine now, all-encompassing, body and mind.

  Finally, Kennedy’s walkie-talkie rasped a few words, and he rose. ‘That’s everyone down. I’d best go and meet the crew coming up. Thanks for the tea.’ He was at the top of the stairs when he paused again. ‘You know, if that fool Eugene was here, he’d love this, because right this second, with the firework teams gone, and with both staff shifts down at Base, there’re only six people in the entire Observatory right now. Us three here, Kushal and Madelaine, and of course Richman himself. I don’t think there’ve ever been so few as that at any moment since I started here.’

  And he was gone.

  ‘The place does feel empty,’ Clara remarked, sipping the last of her tea.

  Empty. Empty. The word rolled about Rita’s scattered mind, but it wasn’t the right term; there was a better one; not empty; not empty … but vulnerable.

  She blinked. Now why did she think that? Vulnerable to what? The headache was making her paranoid. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

  Clara was gathering up the cups. ‘What did you think of the tea? Supposedly this stuff was once served only to Chinese emperors. Apparently it’s harvested by hand with golden scissors on a single day on a single mountaintop, and then the leaves are genuinely dipped in gold. It’s meant to be for flavour and good health, they claim, not just to be outrageously pretentious. But I don’t know. All I do know is that this single pot would cost you a hundred dollars in a restaurant. And yet it’s the only tea Mr Richman drinks …’

  It was all so much prattle to Rita, with her aching nausea. She couldn’t care less about the tea. Kennedy’s statement was still resonating, like a hateful song replaying in her head. Only six people … I don’t think there’ve ever been so few …

  And suddenly Rita had it; suddenly she made the connection between the words and her unease. Of course, how could she have been so dense? She had written an entire book about this; she had believed it once, implicitly. It was all about the numbers. Presences were affected by the proximity of human minds, especially by many human minds. A crowd made them weak, debilitated, helpless. But when there were fewer minds about, then presences could …

  Oh no.

  She started from her seat, but it was already too late. With an almost audible twang, the pressure behind her eyes snapped, and she was free of pain, free of the sense of foreboding and suspense. Because the waiting was over, the preparation was over.

  ‘We have to get out,’ she gasped aloud.

  Clara stared at her in amazement.

  Then the long disaster began.

  11

  THE SMALLEST OF THE BIG

  Extract from The Cloven Sky—A History,

  Roger Fitzgerald, 1991

  The Wheel is the most unusual mountain in the world. The highest, yes, being well over twice the height of Mount Everest, the next in line. But it is also singular in other properties. It is, for instance, far steeper, far sheerer, than any other comparable mountain.

  Improbably sheer, in fact.

  Now, measuring the steepness of any mountain is a complicated business, as generally mountains do not rise from base to peak with a regular slope, the way a pyramid does. Nor is it always possible to define exactly where the base of a mountain is, if for instance it exists as part of a complicated range or massif, or if it sits atop a much vaster plateau.

  But by any measure, the Wheel is extraordinary. Mountains like Everest and K2, say, while possessing sheer and awesome faces on some approaches, can, on other routes, be virtually walked up, following inclines that average as little as thirty degrees. (This is steeper than it might sound, by the way. Thirty degrees—zero degrees being flat, and ninety degrees being vertical—is a severe slope. It’s walkable, but not easily. And by the time you reach forty-five degrees, you’ll be scrambling on hands and knees.)

  Of course, no one just walks up Everest or K2, because whatever the slope, there’s the cold and the thin air of high altitude to contend with, not to mention ice falls and avalanches, all of which make the upper reaches of such mountains difficult and deadly. Still, the average slope of most of the great mountains in the world, combining their sheerer cliffs with their gentler inclines, comes in at around fifty or sixty per cent. Yes, there are vertical faces to be found on these mountains, defying even the best climbers, but such faces seldom rise more than a few hundred metres, and the biggest in the world (away from the Wheel) are no more than a thousand metres or so high.

  Now consider the Wheel. It has just two faces, the East and the West, divided by a single central ridge that rises in a roughly north–south line. We’ll discuss the central ridge later, as climbers rarely venture there. It is the two faces that matter.

  They are astoundingly steep.

  The sheerest is the East Face. From the waterline to the summit, it climbs twenty-five kilometres vertically in only six kilometres of horizontal distance, an average slope of seventy-seven degrees. The West Face (which is the most commonly climbed) is only slightly gentler, rising to the same height over seven kilometres, and so checking in at about seventy-five degrees.

  Remember, these are averages. There are, of course, steeper and gentler sections as a climber progresses. But as an average, a slope of seventy-five degrees and over signifies, in practical terms, a single cliff twenty-five kilometres high.

  Such a thing is barely comprehensible, given our knowledge of rock and its weight-bearing capacity. In theory, no known rock is really strong enough to maintain integrity in such a face. Put simply, the stone at the bottom of a cliff so high and steep should be crushed by the appalling weight of the rock above, and bit by bit the whole face should have collapsed an age ago. The fact the Wheel has not collapsed (at least not entirely and not yet) is self-evident, but we’ll get to the theories as to why that is in a moment.

  Meanwhile, what of the Wheel’s central ridge? Why don’t climbers venture there, when it is patently less steep than either of the faces? Indeed, following from the northern tip of the mountain to the summit (the North Ridge, as it is known) the horizontal distance is some twenty-one kilometres, a mere fifty-one-degree average slope. From the southern end (the South Ridge) it is twenty-four kilometres horizontally, which gives an average slope of forty-seven degrees, even more eminently climbable.

  The answer lies in that term average again. For the North and South ridges do not ascend in a smooth diagonal. They are, in fact, fantastically jagged, with pillars and peaks leaping up continually, riven by great rifts in between. To ascend one of these ridgelines therefore is to be forever climbing and descending a progression of smaller faces, each of which is sheer. Indeed, it has been calculated that to reach the summit via either ridge would involve twice as much hard climbing as going by either of the faces.

  Of course, in practice, almost all expeditions have attempted just one route, and that is a direct line up the West Face. Why the West? Well, there are several reasons, but the one of interest to us here has to do with the unlikely matter of slabs.

  What on earth—asks the non-climber—are slabs? And how do they affect a mountain?

  Well, begin by imagining a pyramid again, a stepped pyramid, four-sided. Now, to walk to the top of the pyramid up any of its sides would take exactly the same amount of effort and skill, yes?

  But now imagine that the pyramid has been tilted twenty degrees to one side—say, to the east side. This time, when you try to walk up the pyramid, each face will be different to ascend. The north and south faces will still be okay to climb, although it will feel a little strange, as each step will be tilted twenty degrees to the left or right. Even the west face will still be climbable, as each step will tilt twenty degrees inwards, towards the face, so that even if you stumble, you’ll only fall
forwards against the next step.

  But the east face will have become very uncomfortable to walk up, for now each step tilts twenty degrees away from the face, so that any slip or misstep will tip you outwards and backwards, perhaps even toppling you clean off the pyramid.

  So it is with mountains sometimes, if not quite as obvious as the example just given. As a face ascends in great pitches and slabs of stone, the ledges that are formed may have a predominate slope one way or the other. Sometimes they lean into the face, sometimes they lean away from the face. Inward-tilting slabs, and the V-shaped ledges they form, are friendly to climbers, as they provide secure resting places. Outward-tilting slabs, with their upside-down V overhangs, are more exposed and more dangerous.

  So it is with the Wheel. The West Face is an inward-tilting face, while the East Face tilts out. But how did this come about? How can a mountain as immense as the Wheel tilt at all? And to return to the earlier question, how does this great pile of rock even hold together, when the laws of geology suggest it should long ago have fallen apart?

  The answers to both questions are linked to the past. And to begin the explanation, a crucial distinction must first be made: in geological terms, the Wheel, the biggest and tallest mountain the planet has ever known, is not, in fact, really very big at all.

  What was that?

  Not very big?

  It’s true. Indeed, the Wheel, far from being big, is the very smallest of its geological brethren.

  Okay, what’s that supposed to mean? Who or what are these brethren I’m talking about?

  Well, it’s not other mountains.

  Indeed, the Wheel is not a mountain at all in the sense that other mountains are. All other mountains in the world owe their existence either to volcanic activity, or to the action of tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are the vast, continent-sized slabs of the Earth’s crust that, in their slow creep and thrust, constantly reshape the surface of our planet. As these monsters shove against each other, their edges rear up in wrinkles that we call mountain ranges.