The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  And the blood was accepted.

  It was like a vast sigh; the night seemed to take a great breath, full of portent, and then to exhale with a rush of grief and resignation. And with that, the hostility in the air began to fade, the menace in the shadows slipping up and away like an invisible bird. Suddenly I was alone on the platform, my arm dripping blood, and the stone was empty and harmless all around me. The presence was gone.

  I dressed and bandaged my arm and waited out the rest of the night until dawn came, but the sensation of a watching otherness never returned. The hillside and the platform felt like any other place in the bush now, still beautiful, but no more than that, stripped of its awe and malign strangeness.

  When the family returned with the rising sun they looked askance at me, sleepless and half-manic with exhilaration, my bloody arm wrapped in a rag. But I assured them that the place had been ‘cleansed’ and that they could reside there untroubled, that their home would welcome them now.

  And so it did.

  ▲

  That was my first lustration. Not that lustration was a word I used at the time. I had no word for it. That first morning, indeed, I didn’t even consider that I would ever do such a thing again.

  But I was wrong. The family I had helped were very grateful, and they weren’t reticent about telling other people what I had done. Soon word was spreading through the underground bush networks about a woman with a special talent.

  Within weeks I was getting requests from people in similar situations, folks who had built houses in remote areas, places where no one had ever built before, and who were experiencing an inexplicable unease upon the site. Some thought they were being haunted by ghosts, or stalked by demons, or cursed by witchcraft; others wondered if they were picking up on electromagnetic movements within the earth, precursors to earthquakes maybe; one lone man was even convinced it was extra-terrestrial aliens that were plaguing him at his little hut up in the hills.

  But in common they all felt that something in the landscape around them wasn’t right—and so they called on me to do what I had done for that first family, to cleanse their property of whatever was disturbing it, and to bring peace back to their lives.

  And time and time again, I did exactly that. The problem was never ghosts, electromagnetism or aliens, of course. It was always because a presence existed somewhere nearby, protesting at the intrusion of the newly arrived humans. But by spending a night alone with each of these threatened presences, acknowledging them, and shedding a symbolic amount of blood in sacrifice, I could placate their hostility, and send them, in dignity, on their way.

  Except—as I started to wonder more and more—why should they have to be sent away? Why did the presences have to die? Just so a human family could build themselves a new house?

  It didn’t seem fair.

  So I began to try something new. After spending a night in commune with a presence—but not dispatching it—I would explain to the landowners what was happening, and enquire as to whether they could build their house elsewhere on their property, out of the presence’s way. Just a hundred metres could be enough to make a difference.

  True, often there was nothing to be done, the house was built, or the owners were resolute, and I’d spend the next night doing my usual lustration. But sometimes the clients were amenable; a construction site could be shifted, or the layout of a farm altered, and the presence could be saved. Indeed, this has become my preferred option, and I now see myself as an advisor on how to preserve presences as much as a facilitator for aiding their departure.

  But in any case, the ceremony, the lustration, remains much the same. Even if I have convinced the owners to preserve a presence, I still let blood for it, as payment for its suffering.

  But why lustration?

  Well, I’ve been aware from the beginning that I am treading quite a well-worn path in this. After all, priests and priestesses have been making blood sacrifices for the same reason—to placate or dispel local gods or demons—since the dawn of human history. It still goes on daily in many cultures of the world. It’s really only in the latter days of Western and Middle Eastern civilisation, swamped by monotheisms or atheisms or various other contemporary isms, that the notion has fallen out of favour.

  Needless to say, I do not actually consider myself a priestess, for I believe in no god, not even of the local variety. Presences have nothing to do with divinity. Nor do I consider myself a witch, nor a medium, nor anyone who has anything to do with magic or the spirit world or an afterlife. I have just this one ability and talent, and beyond that I claim no beliefs or dogma or authority.

  Nevertheless, in searching about for terminology to describe what I was doing, I settled upon a religious term from ancient times: lustration. It derives from the Latin lustratio, a ritual to cleanse an area of malign influences, or perhaps of the memory of violence that has occurred on the site. Attendant with the ceremony, there was often a sacrifice to appease the local spirit being driven out.

  The parallels with my ‘cleansings’ are obvious. Indeed, the fact that the notion of sacrifice has been retained throughout the ages fascinates me. After all, the blood I spill, or the cattle and sheep that ancients sacrificed to their deities, is of no earthly use to the presences or spirits that are being placated. So why does the sacrifice have any effect at all?

  I have no sure answer. I only know that my payment, however token, is accepted.

  But like many a priestess before me, I now charge a fee in turn for my services.

  At first, I had no interest in making money from lustrations. What I did was as much for the sake of the presence as it was for my human clients, so money never entered my head. But some of the places I was visiting were interstate, or even overseas, so I did not protest when my clients began to reimburse me for my travel and living expenses. And in time I saw that if I was to make this my life’s calling—which it seemed to be—then it was only sensible to charge a rate which enabled me to do it properly.

  Hence my professional lustration career was born. In the years since (I am now twenty-five) I have performed perhaps a hundred such ceremonies. And yet still the truth about presences remains unheard-of in the wider world, known only within an underground circle of alternativism and mysticism. With this book, however, I hope to change all that.

  It is time I, and the reality of presences with me, emerged from the shadows.

  I can’t tell you how excited I am.

  1

  ONE DOWN

  Rita came awake with a groan. Throwing off the tangled sheets, she found herself bathed in sweat, her limbs trembling as if from heavy labour.

  What? Had something happened? Her sleep-fogged memory was full of some undefined struggle, as though in her slumber she had been held down by an oppressive, suffocating force, fighting in vain to wake up but unable to do so.

  She sat up, glanced at the curtained windows. A dim grey glow shone at the edges. It was six a.m. The pounding in her chest fell away, and slowly the recollections of the previous day came to her: the failure of rescue to come, the hope of escape down the emergency stairs thwarted, Richman’s harassment of her last night, then her foray out onto the balcony to attempt contact with the Wheel, and wine, far too much wine …

  No wonder she felt like shit.

  What was she even doing awake so early? It must have been well past midnight when she had gone to bed, though she didn’t remember falling asleep—unconsciousness seemed to have hit like a black slab. But maybe it was just the alcohol that had given her the nightmare sense of oppression.

  She shrugged the memory away, climbed from the bed, went to the windows and pulled the curtain aside. A wall of dank grey greeted her.

  Damn. More fog. As thick and dark as yesterday. And—she glanced at the weather panel—actually colder than yesterday. Minus twenty-two degrees Celsius. Small, sharp spikes of white had formed on the parapet rail where she had stood last night, the ice coalescing out of the misted air.

&
nbsp; Ice. Ice …

  Something about its dull gleam made her uneasy. She couldn’t say why. She had no intention of venturing out there, and here in her apartment it was perfectly warm and safe. And yet … she could not shake the feeling that somewhere, something vile was waiting. Something to do with ice.

  It slipped away again. She looked at the bed, but even though she still felt tired, she did not think she would be able to go back to sleep. Wandering into the kitchen she gazed at the coffee-making equipment a moment, and at the fridge, full of food, if she wanted to cook breakfast. Then she shook her head. It wasn’t coffee or food she wanted, it was human voices and light, something to dispel the silence and the creeping anxiety left over from her dreams.

  Would anyone else be awake yet? Kennedy had mentioned something about an early start—there were more things he wanted to try in the Control Room. And some of the others could well be up and already breakfasting in the Dining Hall. They might even have a fire going. Decided, Rita went back to the bedroom and dressed.

  Out in the hall, the quiet pressed against her like a chill, the dim lighting and the windowless walls giving an air of eternal, timeless night. She glanced down the passage towards Madelaine’s and Kushal’s apartments, hoping that one of them might appear, company for the walk. But neither did. She moved numbly down the hall to the Well and the Helix Staircase, and began the long climb.

  Was it colder out here, or did it just feel that way in so much space? High above she could see the Atrium dome, its windows blue-grey with the approaching dawn, but there was no sound anywhere other than her own tread on the carpeted steps. No friendly voices from above, no music. And when at last she came to the top and looked about she saw no one in the Dining Hall or the Saloon.

  Was she the first up after all?

  The gloom and silence were preying heavily on her now. Oh, to see some proper sunlight shining in. But overhead the fog against the windows of the dome still only hinted at the coming day. It was a twilight time, night not yet banished.

  The great wedge of glass that contained the lower waters of the Terrace Pool had become, by night, a black monolith since the power failure.

  But she noticed it was not entirely black now. She stepped closer. In normal times, an observer on this level would be able to watch swimmers in the pool as if they were fish in an aquarium. Of course, no one swam there now, but in some strange undersea effect the grey ghost of dawn above had made the whole mass of water glow subtly.

  She peered up, remembering their inspection of the pool the day before—had it frozen over yet? Normally, the surface above was a silvery roof through which the sky was a distorted shimmer. Now she saw only a hazy fixed whiteness. Yes, it looked to be a solid sheet of ice, complete from edge to edge.

  Except …

  She stared, her face against the glass. In the centre of the pool’s surface there was a flaw in the ice, a pattern of dark shapes, five of them, seeming to protrude down from above.

  What could they be? She stared a moment longer, a terrible suspicion dawning as the shapes resolved into something recognisable.

  Then she was screaming.

  ▲

  By luck, at almost the same moment Clara emerged from the private elevator in the Library.

  Otherwise, no matter how Rita might have screamed, no one would have heard her, no one would have come running. She would have been left there alone with the thing hanging above her in the pool, screaming until she went mad. But the major-domo was there at her side, staring up to where Rita’s rigid finger was pointing.

  ‘Oh god,’ Clara said. ‘Come on, there might still be time!’

  That broke Rita out of her paralysis. There might be still time? Sweet Christ, did that mean … ? But no, it was too appalling to consider.

  She hurried after the major-domo. They ran up the stairs to the Conservatory, and at the air-lock doors did not even pause to pull on overcoats—though the weather panel was flashing orange for caution, the temperature reading minus twenty-five degrees Celsius—but passed straight on through to the Terrace.

  The cold! Rita might have been naked for all the protection her indoor clothes gave. A breeze was blowing over the top of the Mount, no great gale, but it was enough to make the mist stream forbiddingly across the Terrace, and for the chill to be knife-sharp against every inch of her skin. But she followed after Clara, hastening across the icy ground as swiftly as she dared.

  The pool emerged from the mist, a curved shoreline of black stone, beyond which was a frozen sweep of white. They paused on the rim. So dense was the fog that the further side of the pool was barely visible, but at the same time everything was glowing within the mist as dawn grew in the unseen sky. They could see well enough.

  Too well.

  At the centre of the pool, a dark hunched shape rose from the unblemished whiteness.

  A human, embedded in the ice.

  That is, the torso of a human, chest down, hunched over the ice, shoulder blades to buttocks visible, the body naked, frosted white and unidentifiable even as to sex.

  Everything else, the person’s head, and their arms and their legs, were—

  Clara broke the horrified silence. ‘It can’t be. It couldn’t … happen like that.’ She cast her gaze about desperately a moment then lunged aside to a low stone seat. Its top was hinged, and raising the lid, she drew something forth. It was a lifesaving buoy, an orange ring attached to a line. The major-domo unravelled the stiff rope, then extended one end to Rita. ‘Hold this—I’ll go out. Pull me in if the ice gives way.’

  Rita took the rope dumbly, and watched as the former mountain climber, the ring hooped over one shoulder, ventured cautiously out upon the slick surface. The ice seemed solid, however—there was no cracking, no shifting. There were no tracks across the whiteness, no footprints, no path of something being dragged, no sign at all of how the body out in the middle of the pool had travelled there.

  Clara stood over the shape now. Her hands hovered helplessly a moment, as if she was unsure how to touch the thing. At last she tried to grip the torso about its midriff, but Rita could see how her bare hands recoiled from the cold. The corpse—for a corpse it surely was—was as frozen as the ice.

  ‘I can’t …’ Clara called across in confusion. ‘There’s nothing to grab onto.’

  Rita could only nod. She had seen it for herself, from below. The figure’s arms and legs, and its head, were buried in the ice, extending through into the water beneath, they were the five shapes that had so puzzled her as she stared up to the surface. Two arms dangling down, hands spread wide in supplication, two legs splayed and limp, and finally a face, locked in the ice, drowned, staring at nothing …

  ‘I need an axe,’ the major-domo added, an uncharacteristic hysteria fringing her voice. ‘We’ll have to cut … I think … Oh Jesus, I think it might be Kushal. It’s fucking Kushal.’

  And sure enough, once everyone else was roused from their sleep to confront the horror, the builder was the only one absent.

  But it was some hours, even with the help of several axes, before they could retrieve the body, and confirm its identity for certain.

  ▲

  Later, after they had hacked Kushal free and stowed him, still frozen grotesquely in a crouching position but draped at least in a blanket, in one of the kitchen’s walk-in freezers (yes, they could have left him on the Terrace, where it was even colder, but that had been psychologically impossible) they gathered, numbed, by the fire in the Saloon.

  It was noon by then, and still the Observatory was wrapped in its grey shroud. The only difference now was that the wind had picked up, so that the fog outside had begun to stream across the Terrace and past the windows, and a subtle thrum underlay the silence within. There had still been no hint of an approaching rescue, no helicopter or plane to be heard, no ship’s horn from below in the harbour. It was as if the world beyond the fog had ceased to exist, and there was only the Observatory left.

  Looking at her gr
ey-faced companions gathered before the flames, it seemed to Rita that everyone had aged years within a single morning. The annoyance and perplexity of their entrapment had become something infinitely more grim and baffling. A man was dead, his absence as acute as a missing tooth. Yes, they had known already that people must be dead, possibly many of them, down at Base, drowned by the great wave. But this was different. This death had struck not amid the thunder of a natural disaster, but silently in the night, in mockery of the warmth and luxury and security of their high fortress.

  Inexplicable.

  ‘How could it have happened?’ Richman finally asked softly. They had been asking the same question all morning, but now the billionaire looked up from the fire and at each of them, as if the time had come to settle the matter once and for all.

  ‘I can’t see how it could have,’ answered Clara wearily. ‘I’ve been going over and over it, but nothing about it adds up. I mean, forget poor Kushal for a minute, and how it was that he got stuck in the ice. The ice itself doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘The ice?’ asked Madelaine, her usually stylish hair still mussed from being woken rudely by Rita five hours ago, with no time to tend to it since. ‘What do you mean, the ice doesn’t make sense?’

  ‘I mean, it was nearly six inches thick. But yesterday the pool had barely begun to freeze over. There’s no way the ice should have been able to get so thick so quickly, not unless the temperature went down to minus sixty or worse overnight out there. But that kind of cold is unheard-of on the Mount. Higher up on the Wheel, yes, maybe, but …’

  ‘Look, the pool froze,’ said Richman, impatiently. ‘I don’t see that it matters how it froze, it’s a fact that it did. All I want to know is how Kushal got trapped there. Why on earth was he even up on the Terrace last night? Naked, for Christ’s sake. Had he gone mad? Was it … was it a suicide?’

  The word lingered in a short silence, the flames in the fireplace crackling.