The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  A wavefront.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ yelled Clara in fury at her phone. ‘No answer! Nothing!’

  Rita had no memory of moving, but somehow both of them had crossed to the eastern edge of the Terrace and were now at the parapet. The drop away to the ocean was as appalling as ever, but Rita’s fear of heights was lost in the face of the disaster across the water. The wave was thrusting slowly out from the Wheel’s shoreline now, a sinister up-swelling that had formed into a bowed line dozens of kilometres long. And it was not slow. It must be racing across the sea.

  Towards Theodolite Isle.

  How long would it take to cross the ten kilometres? She had no way to calculate. But already, even as the wavefront moved out from the Wheel, Rita could note a terrible thing. Because of the way the mountain curved in a gigantic amphitheatre shape that focussed upon Theodolite Isle, the wave too would focus upon the island. So the surge would amplify as it came, building and crowding upon itself as it narrowed upon the one central point …

  And behind it, still the avalanche roared on, still the ice piled and piled into the sea. The lower half of the Wheel was lost now behind the thunderhead of snow blown up and out by the collapse. The underside of that cloud was shadowed blue-black, but its upper reaches dazzled white as it soared towards the stratosphere, ten or fifteen kilometres high, matching the mountain itself for grandeur.

  It was a scene fit for the world’s end, but the cloud was harmless in essence. Rita’s gaze was drawn back to the ocean below, to where the true danger lay. The forefront of the tsunami swell was sweeping towards her, flattening out as it reached the deeper waters, but all the more threatening for that. Rita knew enough of such things to understand that when it reached the shallows again, as it neared the shore of the island, the wave would rear with renewed fury.

  Clara was punching other numbers into her phone now. ‘Why the fuck doesn’t anyone answer down there? They’ve got to get people into the lifts and get them to safety up here with us!’

  Did they even know they were in danger down there? Could they see what was coming towards them? Up here, far beyond the reach of even the most fantastical wave, she and the major-domo could see it all. But down at sea level the wave might not even be visible yet.

  She watched it coming. It was halfway across the gap now, a swollen arc converging relentlessly upon the hub of the island.

  ‘Get out of there!’ Clara was yelling. She was leaning over the parapet, staring down wildly, as if her warning shout might reach the town below. But Base was not visible from anywhere up here; it was hidden by the shoulder of the Mount, and it was certainly beyond the hearing of any human voice, all as Rita’s father had designed. ‘Get out!’

  The wave was three-quarters of the way across now. It was not really a single crest, it was a great swollen bruise freshly inflicted upon the sea, the water latent with a hideous, compressed power. There was nothing to be done from up here, no life-saving action to take. But surely those below must see it now, only a few miles offshore, looming from the sea? Surely by now people were running, climbing, dashing madly for any high ground they could find?

  But there was so little time, the surge was racing so fast, and already its forefront was beginning to rear and froth terribly as it neared the shore. How high was the wall of water rising? Rita could not tell, but a new note had come to the thunder, an underpinning boom and thud, like surf on a beach, but amplified ten-thousandfold.

  Rita too was leaning over the parapet now, but even so the forefront of the wave was passing from her view beneath the Mount’s shoulder. Her final glimpse of it was of an improbable cliff building from the sea, water cascading down its face even as it rose higher, surely dozens of metres tall, no, scores of metres, and more …

  Then it was out of sight, and to Rita there was only the bloated surge of its wake to stare at for five seconds, ten, twenty—then she felt it. The very stone beneath her trembled like an earthquake anew, not so much the effect of single concussion, but of a vast violent push against the Mount’s foot.

  Long moments later, an enormous rush of sound swept up over the Mount and engulfed her, a crash of booming and rending and smashing, and even, Rita was sure, of human wails.

  Nor did it die away. The terrible din went on and on, for this was a flood, not a mere wave—a great swathe of the ocean displaced and shoved massively forwards by the titanic volume of the avalanche. And the flood would not end until the avalanche that drove it, ten kilometres away, ended too.

  Rita raised her horrified stare. How long had it been since the collapse began? Five minutes? Ten? It felt like an hour, though it could not possibly have been as long as that. But ah—thank god—it did now seem that perhaps the tumult over on the Wheel was finally exhausting itself. Through the storm cloud of swirling debris it was hard to see what was happening on the lower face, but a bass note to the thunder was dying away. And yes, all along the Wheel’s shore, the great fountains of water were falling back. Surely that meant that the last of the descending ice and snow had finally finished its long plunge to the sea.

  Even so, the shockwave of water that had been sent out still had to run its course. For perhaps five minutes more Rita and the major-domo could only watch and listen as the ocean surged and roared about the island, drew back, then surged again. Only gradually did the surges lessen and the coherence of the flood break apart into cross-currents that roiled and conflicted with each other, and slowly, slowly, faded.

  The thunder of earlier also dwindled at last, leaving an aftermath echo, the lesser cascade of the floodwaters sulkily retreating into the sea. The ocean all about was now a muddy wash of foam and of flotsam swept from the island. Rita did not want to study the wreckage too closely.

  She looked up at the Wheel once more. Smaller, subsidiary slides of ice and snow were still moving here and there on the face, but the great snowstorm cloud was drifting southwards now on the winds of the world, thinning as it went.

  So—was it over?

  Clara was staring dully at her phone. ‘I’ve got no reception anymore. Nothing. The whole system must have been knocked out. Christ, people must be dead down there. Lots of them.’

  Yes, people would be dead. But Rita couldn’t process the thought properly. Shock was sinking too deeply into her; she felt only a cold hollowness, a complete exhaustion of her emotions.

  ‘Clara? Rita?’

  It was Kushal, emerging through the airlock doors. Behind him came Madelaine. Each of their faces was pale and drained, staring.

  ‘Did you see?’ Kushal asked, and Madelaine’s wide eyes echoed the tone of the plea. Did you see what we saw? Was it real? Did it really happen?

  The major-domo nodded. ‘We saw.’

  ‘And down at Base?’ the builder pressed. ‘Do you know? Are you in contact?’

  To which Clara only shook her head.

  On the other side of the Terrace a door was flung open at the top of the stairs that led up to Walter Richman’s private Cottage, and the billionaire himself emerged. For once, in contrast to his usual air of assured calm and command, he looked as stunned and bewildered as everyone else.

  ‘Are you all okay?’ he enquired, descending the stairs. ‘No one is hurt?’

  ‘We four here are fine,’ Clara replied. ‘But I haven’t seen Kennedy. As for everyone else down at Base, we don’t know yet …’

  ‘When the quake began Kennedy came up to the cottage,’ said Richman. ‘He’s okay, I sent him to the Control Room to see if he can contact anyone. But it must be bad down at Base, real bad. The lights went out at the same time that the wave hit, so the power station must have been taken out, and you know what that means—the station is higher above sea level than almost all the other buildings down there. So if it’s gone …’

  ‘So is everything else,’ finished Clara, the understanding dark in her eyes.

  Richman was gazing at the Wheel, shaking his head. ‘It shouldn’t be possible. An avalanche of that scale, it’s …
it’s unprecedented. But god, look at that mountain, will you! Look at the colour! It’s like it’s stripped itself for battle or something.’

  Rita followed his gaze. The last of the avalanche thunderhead was shredding away now, a mushroom cloud long after the atom bomb has exploded, revealing more and more of the Wheel. There was still snow and ice upon the West Face, by no means had all of it fallen. But the mountain was changed nonetheless, denuded of much of its protective coat of white. Great reaches of native rock now stood bare.

  And Richman was right: the colour! For now that the cloud was gone the afternoon sun was striking the face full on, lighting the newly bared rock with a glow that seemed almost preternatural. And for the first time Rita understood—really understood—why the mountain was named what it was.

  She had always known the Wheel’s full title, of course. But even after seeing the mountain firsthand, she had thought it was a name given more in romance than in accuracy, for before now there had really been only the faintest of a rose blush to behold here and there where the rock was exposed.

  But now—now she saw the truth! Indeed, the French explorer, sea captain Marion du Fresne, who had discovered and named the Wheel, must have seen this same truth too. He must have happened upon the mountain after some earlier avalanche had scraped the West Face as bare as it was now.

  La Grande Crete Rouge.

  The Great Red Ridge.

  Red. That was key.

  Red. The colour blazed from the stone, as deep and fierce in the sunlight as patches of fresh blood splashed amid the remaining stretches of white. It was as if the hide had been flayed from some titanic beast to reveal the livid muscle beneath. But—so it seemed to Rita’s eyes—far from being hurt, the beast itself was glorying in its nakedness, rearing with renewed dominion over an ocean that was still all in tumult.

  Richman was right again; it did look stripped for battle. Worse than that, it looked …

  Rita felt it then, in a sickening rush, and knew that the whole question of whether she believed in her special senses of old, of whether she had rejected them or not, was irrelevant. For it was as undeniable to her as the sun. Palpable, a single emotion was radiating from the naked face of the mountain.

  Satisfaction.

  The Wheel was pleased with itself, pleased with what it had just done. But not only that. Rita also detected a sense of anticipation in the titan as it gazed down at the tiny human figures standing atop the little Mount, a dark, gleeful expectancy for something even more terrible that was yet to come.

  The earthquake and the avalanche and the giant wave that had swept over Base below, killing who knew how many people, these were not the culmination of the great mountain’s malice—they were merely the opening flourishes.

  For the six of them who remained, the Wheel had only begun with its breaking.

  1

  THE LA FLIGHT

  It had been a bad day even before they got to the airport and found the flight delayed. Truth was, it had been a bad week. It shouldn’t have been, it should have been an exciting, happy period, because everything was coming together, everything they had wanted: the book tour, the whole US market, the big-time at last, the fame, the money that would follow …

  Instead it had all been a pain. The packing and repacking; the last-minute hunt for a house-sitter to look after the garden and pets after the friend they had organised had to pull out suddenly; the even more last-minute dash to attend to Rita’s lapsed passport. And Anne was in a foul mood throughout. The two-month trip couldn’t have come at a worse time for her; she was at a crucial stage of editing a manuscript by one of her favourite writers, and now was being forced to hand it off to a colleague. Then there was the muddled disaster of the going-away party that neither of them wanted to host anymore, but at which they drank too much anyway, and snorted too much, meaning only more time lost to hangovers and fights …

  A shitty week, in all, and in a way—even though she hated air travel—by the time they were in the cab to Melbourne airport, Rita was actually looking forward to the flight. Because at least everything was done now, and for the next sixteen hours they would be able to relax. More to the point, so keen had her new US publishers been to get her to the States they had chimed in with Business Class tickets, so those sixteen hours would pass in pampered comfort.

  But barely had they settled into the Qantas Club Lounge at Tullamarine when the announcement came that their flight would be delayed by some hours due to a maintenance issue with the aircraft.

  Her nerves immediately back on edge, jammed into an uncomfortable corner of a couch (as even the Qantas Club was crowded that day) Rita’s first reaction was to flag a passing waiter and order a glass of champagne. To which Anne sighed, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, you’re not going to get drunk already, are you?’ And it went downhill from there.

  The delay ran fully six hours (a part needed to be flown in from elsewhere) and Rita did indeed get drunk in the meantime. And why not? It was not as if she needed to be sober for anything; there was only the flight ahead, and after that, a hotel room waiting in LA. She wasn’t due to meet with her publicity team for a full two days after touching down.

  And anyway, Rita always had a few drinks before flying. Anne knew that, and knew why, too. The alcohol was necessary to dull Rita’s special senses before take-off, to blot out her ability to detect presences. She had learned that lesson in her youth, in the months after her great revelation. Flying sober, encountering the presences of the air with her mind wide open and aware, was awful.

  She well remembered her first flight in the wake of her mother’s death. The plane had passed around the edge of a thunderstorm, and encountered severe turbulence. Locked in the flexing, leaping metal tube that was the aircraft, the younger Rita had been overcome by waves of hostility that originated from outside the plane, from a presence in the thunderstorm, malign and wild, that wanted to hurl the intruder from the sky. It was only the force of the jet engines, and the cunning give and flex of the fuselage, that was preventing the plane from being torn apart.

  Rita had wanted to scream, or vomit, or go dashing madly along the aisle, anything but sit there strapped into her seat as the plane shuddered and the attendants staggered by, their smiles brittle. If it had gone on for more than a few minutes she would have. But that was the saving grace of air travel. In an airliner moving at nine hundred kilometres an hour, contact with any presence was at worst a fleeting one. And so the plane had moved beyond the turbulence before it—or Rita’s control—broke.

  But it was enough to make her dread flying. And so when she was a little older, and understood presences and her reaction to them better, Rita had begun to self-medicate with several strong drinks before and during a flight. Alcoholically dulled, she could fly untroubled by any malevolence through which the plane might pass. And she had come to trust that the plane always would pass through. That for all their loathing of humans trespassing in the upper airs, the presences there were not strong enough to do any serious damage to a modern jet.

  The LA flight was about to prove that belief wrong, alas, but she didn’t know that yet. All she knew, there in the Qantas lounge, was that of course she must have a drink or two before take-off, and that Anne also knew that perfectly well, so why the hell was she being so snooty and disapproving about it?

  Ah, but then Anne was disapproving about almost everything these days …

  Okay, yes, so the timing of this trip was inconvenient for her, but that wasn’t Rita’s fault. It was the US publishers who had changed the dates, moving the tour six weeks forward. But Christ, Anne worked in publishing herself, she knew how these things went.

  It was typical, really, of how their whole relationship had been lately. (So ran Rita’s thoughts as she moved from her fourth glass of champagne to her first of chardonnay. Anne was drinking too by then, but much slower, and without looking at Rita.) Typical of how Anne had started to resent Rita’s work, and the way it dominated their lives.
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br />   It hadn’t been like that at the beginning. Anything but. When her book was first accepted for Australian publication, and the publishers had assigned her an editor, Rita had been nervous about her initial meeting with the woman. She had pictured a hardened chain-smoking professional aged fifty or more, a sergeant-major type used to whipping young first-time authors into shape, and also completely cynical about Rita’s claims and theories.

  But instead it had been Anne, only a year older than Rita herself and surprisingly shy, not hardened or cynical at all. Far from dismissive about the book, Anne was oddly reverent. She believed it, accepted that it was real, that Rita’s abilities were real. She was fascinated by Rita. Which certainly made the editing process easier than Rita had expected.

  In return, Rita found Anne insanely sexy, in a tight, repressed, bookish sort of way. There was a settled submissiveness to her that contrarily promised—and indeed delivered, when it came down to it, one night after they’d known each other a few weeks—a wickedly dirty nature underneath.

  In short, they fell in lust and love, though they managed to keep the affair secret until after the book was published. It would have been unprofessional otherwise, Anne had insisted primly.

  Through the years that followed, in addition to being Rita’s partner, Anne had assumed the role almost of acolyte, of dutiful disciple to Rita’s prophet. She had put her own career on hold, leaving her secure in-house post and going freelance, just so that she could follow Rita around to the distant corners of the country and assist in the ritual lustrations.