The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  Kennedy was gentle. ‘Can you see anything below you?’

  ‘No. No. God, my feet hurt.’

  ‘What number is on the panel you’re at now.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you.’

  ‘Tell me, Clara.’

  A groan. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It says ES negative one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Negative one!’

  Kennedy’s expression was pitying. ‘But Clara, you know there isn’t a—’

  The major-domo wasn’t listening. ‘I can’t have gone past the way out, I can’t have missed the exit tunnel. I’d have seen that, wouldn’t I? Even if the shaft and the stairs go lower than ground level. Does the shaft go lower, do you know? How much lower? I point my torch down and there’s nothing, no bottom! Where’s the damn way out?’

  ‘Calm down, Clara. You’re not reading the panel right. The shaft does not go lower than ground level. There is no intercom negative one.’

  ‘I’M LOOKING RIGHT AT IT!’ It was a shriek over the intercom, the panic vibrating even through the small speaker. Then softer, almost a sob: ‘Don’t tell me what I can and can’t see, all right?’

  ‘Then forget about the way out or the bottom. Forget all that. Come back up.’

  Weary. ‘It’s too far. My feet hurt too much. I cut my heel on some metal. There’s a lot of blood.’

  ‘You cut your heel? Through your boots?’

  ‘Of course not.’ The tone was chiding. ‘I took my boots off a long time ago.’

  Kennedy eyes went wide. ‘You’re … you’re barefoot down there?’

  Rita too was staring in shock. Clara had taken off her boots? She had bared her maimed feet, her toeless half feet, to the metal stairs?

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the climber, blithely. ‘I got rid of all my clothes. It’s better this way.’

  ‘Your clothes?’ Kennedy sounded as if the breath had been knocked from him. ‘Clara, what are you thinking? Can’t you see? You’re delusional. You have to stop going down. You have to go back to where you left your shoes, and then keep on coming up.’

  ‘No, no.’ The climber below sounded vague and careless now, as if on the verge of sleep. ‘I’ll go down. I’ll keep going down. This hole has to end somewhere. It can’t go on forever. Goodbye for now.’

  And she was gone again.

  Kennedy immediately tried to call back on the intercom, and then the walkie-talkie.

  No answer.

  The three of them looked at each other. There was no need to vocalise what they were each surely thinking. In Rita’s mind at least the image was very clear: the major-domo, confused and naked, far below in the shaft, limping on bloody feet down the staircase in a vacant, sleepwalker’s daze.

  Just as Kushal had appeared on the security camera footage.

  On the way to his death in the pool.

  ▲

  Clara’s final call came some forty minutes later, just as the three listeners—exhausted and strained to breaking point after their nightlong sleepless vigil—were on the verge of giving up.

  A squawk rose from the intercom, and then a whisper, ‘Negative nine now. I’m underground, way underground. I still can’t see the bottom. There isn’t one. But it’s all right. I understand now …’

  Kennedy broke in. ‘Clara, please. Tell me exactly where you are. What can you see?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me. But you’ll see for yourself, eventually.’ A small laugh came, a giggle, from a mind that was lost. Rita could not imagine it coming from the mouth of the woman she knew. ‘Are you there, Walter? I’m talking to you.’

  Richman swallowed. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Good, good,’ crooned the voice from the abyss. ‘Because it’s not me that it wants, you know, not really. Or any of the others. It’s you, Walter, you bastard. It’s you it wants, because of what you did up there. That disgusting thing you did.’

  ‘Clara …’ warned Richman lowly.

  ‘You did it to me too,’ muttered the voice. ‘And I let you. But no fucking more. I quit, Walter. I quit as of this minute.’ There was a pause, then, quite calm and clear, she added, ‘Jumping now.’

  The link clicked off.

  ‘Clara!’ Kennedy yelled into the dead microphone, useless as it was. ‘Clara!’

  For a beat there was nothing.

  Then, bizarrely, there did come the blare of an intercom connection being made, and a strong clear voice was shouting at them excitedly.

  But it wasn’t Clara.

  It was Madelaine, calling from the Conservatory. ‘There’s a helicopter! I can hear a helicopter outside! Come up! They’re here at last!

  3

  ON THE TERRACE

  They went, the three from the Control Room, abandoning the woman below in the shaft. Richman, Kennedy and Rita were up and running through the service tunnels, madcap, so eager were they, after the long night, to escape the underground darkness and to see the sky and a helicopter promising rescue and salvation.

  Morning greeted them as they emerged into the Dining Hall and the Atrium—but here was disappointment, for the light was the same pale grey that they had known for the last two days. Fog still turned every window of the dome overhead into a monochrome slab. The Mount remained swathed in cloud.

  Yet at least a helicopter had come. They hurried across the Atrium. Could they hear the aircraft yet? No. Not from inside. There was only an unearthly quiet in the Atrium, without even the thrum of wind. The blustery conditions of last night must have eased. That was good, that would only help.

  They dashed up the spiral stairs and so came to the Conservatory. Madelaine was not there. Was she outside in the fog? Rita moved to the airlock doors and searched the mist through the glass. Yes, there, out on the Terrace, a shadow figure was moving back and forth—indeed, now it came to the glass. It was Madelaine, peering inwards.

  The designer saw them, beckoned urgently. ‘Hurry up!’ she called, her voice diminished through the thick glass to a faraway bird call. ‘Hurry up, come out here, before it goes away!’

  Kennedy was already yanking back the inner door as he grabbed one of the jackets from the stand, Richman following close behind. The weather panel, Rita took an instant to note as she clutched a jacket of her own, was orange, and read minus twenty-nine degrees Celsius.

  Then she was following the men through, out into the infinity of grey.

  The air clamped vicelike on her brow, set her throat afire. The fog itself seemed to consist of drifting ice crystals. She fumbled to button her overcoat and pull the hood closer about her face, then jammed her hands deep into the pockets. The two men and Madelaine were huddled out at the centre of the Terrace, and she hurried as best she could on the ice-slick ground to join them.

  ‘I don’t hear it!’ Kennedy was saying when Rita came up, his face—frost already forming on his upper lip—turned to the invisible sky.

  ‘Wait,’ the designer replied excitedly, breath puffing as a denser cloud into the fog before disappearing, her cheeks so bright red they seemed to shine in the gloom. ‘Just listen!’

  They all stood silently a moment. The mist oozed without sound about them. Just visible off to one side was the frozen-over pool, a dark hollow at its centre marking the spot where they had dug Kushal from his horrid resting place. But no sound of rotors came. Rita thought she would have to remove her hood if she was to have any hope of hearing—

  But there!

  Now it came, fading in like a tuning radio signal, an insectile vibration in the air—the throb, both high and low, of whirling blades.

  ‘Not close,’ was Kennedy’s verdict, his neck craned to stare into the mist. ‘High up still, east I think, maybe above the cloud level.’

  ‘But it’s someone at long last,’ said Richman. To Kennedy, ‘Can you tell what type of chopper it is? Big? Small? Civilian? Military, even?’

  The security chief listened a moment, the sound rising and fa
lling as the unseen thing seemingly turned to and fro above the cloud. ‘It’s not small, but then it wouldn’t be, not if it flew here from Hobart. Military, maybe, or a big air-sea rescue craft.’

  ‘Can they land up here in this fog?’ Rita asked of both the men.

  ‘Probably not,’ answered Kennedy. ‘Not without an improvement in visibility. But they should be able to land down at Base.’

  ‘Then they can’t help us?’

  ‘Not this minute. But Christ, at least they’ve finally arrived. Three damn days!’

  ‘Oh, they’ll land up here,’ said Madelaine.

  The other three glanced at her in surprise, so confident was her tone. The designer was not looking at them, her eyes were to the heavens, her glowing face almost beatific in the gloom.

  ‘They’ll land up here,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve known all night they were coming. I could feel it somehow; I could feel it through the fog. Someone was on their way, someone would arrive today.’

  Rita remembered suddenly that Madelaine had missed all that had transpired in the Control Room overnight. She said, ‘Listen, Madelaine, we don’t know what happened to Clara. She got halfway down the shaft, but something went wrong …’

  The designer did not appear to have heard. ‘I couldn’t wait; I had to come out here to see. They’re getting closer now, don’t you think?’

  Rita hesitated uneasily. Did the designer understand? Clara was in trouble; she might be dead. Overhead, the helicopter sound swirled once more. Was it louder? Nearer? Rita couldn’t tell. The noise seemed to shift about in the mist, coming from different points at different times.

  ‘They can’t land in this soup, I tell you,’ Kennedy insisted. ‘You’d need a special radio location beacon to have been installed up here, and then the right instruments on the chopper.’

  Madelaine only smiled. Belatedly, Rita noticed something strange about the way the designer was wearing her coat. The rest of them had the furred hood pulled up and the front buttons all fastened, with their hands plunged deep into the pockets, but Madelaine’s hood was down and her coat was hanging open, revealing her light house-dress beneath, while her hands, completely bare, were clasped almost prayer-like over her breast. It was bizarre. She had been out here longer than any of them, and she was, in effect, half naked to the deadly cold air.

  Indeed, how much longer had she been out here? Rita was unable to recall exactly when was the last time she had observed Madelaine, over the security camera, still in the Conservatory. Four in the morning, five in the morning?

  ‘Madelaine? Aren’t you cold? How long have you been standing out here?’

  The designer shrugged. ‘I came out in the dark. It was so lovely, and I wanted to hear.’

  The dark? What did that mean? A half-hour ago? An hour? More? But that was madness, dressed the way she was. Now that Rita looked closely, she could how thick the frost was on Madelaine’s lips and in her eyebrows and hair. Worse, the fingers of her bare hands were an ominous greyish-white, and the red of her cheeks was like a wound.

  ‘You need to get inside and …’ Rita began. But then she trailed off as the sound of the helicopter swelled suddenly, very loud, as if the machine was passing low overhead. They all stared up, ready for a dark shadow to appear through the mist, rotors shimmering in a blurred circle.

  No shape appeared. The sound lifted, seeming to bifurcate as it did so, as if two helicopters were sweeping away in opposite directions.

  ‘What the—?’ Kennedy demanded.

  ‘It’s just the echoes,’ Richman assured him. ‘It’s just the way sound gets twisted around up here.’

  Rita shook her head, cursing the mist. If it would only clear for a moment, allow just one glimpse of open sky and of the helicopter. For two days this damn cloud had held them, as much a part of their prison as the solid rock of the Mount itself.

  ‘The fog doesn’t bother them,’ breathed Madelaine, ‘they can see us easily.’

  Something was seriously wrong with the designer, but Rita was too distracted to concentrate on that, the air was too full of noise now; it was as if there were not one or even two helicopters circling the Mount, but a whole squadron of them.

  Even Richman’s assuredness seemed to waver. ‘What on earth are they up to? Why are they just circling the fuck around?’

  Rita addressed Madelaine finally. ‘Look, your hands, they must be freezing. Put them in your pockets at least. I’m asking. Please.’

  The designer ignored her still. ‘They told me to wait for them out here. Just me, they said. But I thought I should call the rest of you, even so.’

  The roar beat at Rita in confusion; she couldn’t think. It didn’t even sound like helicopters to her anymore; it was too big, too far away.

  Kennedy was shaking his head, his voice a yell. ‘This isn’t right! That’s not a chopper!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Richman shouted back. ‘Of course it is. What else could it be?’

  Abruptly, a new sound wailed out across the Terrace, the whooping of a siren. Rita had heard it once before, it meant something terrible—but when, and what? She couldn’t remember.

  Then an amplified female voice, calm and clear, was sounding from hidden speakers, loud enough even to cut through the roar in the sky. Emergency. Strong winds approaching. Seek shelter. Emergency.

  And god, now Rita remembered: five days ago, her tour of the Observatory with Clara, the major-domo explaining about the winds that could descend from the Wheel, about the Doppler radar that monitored the mountain constantly, about the …

  Kennedy’s expression was stricken. ‘Jet stream! That’s the goddamn jet stream coming down!’

  Horror filled Rita. Yes. That’s what Clara had said. The jet stream. The monster that Rita had met all those years ago in the sky—it was descending to Earth now, to blow here, across this very Terrace!

  Emergency, the voice repeated. Strong winds approaching. Seek shelter. Emergency.

  Rita turned aghast to the east, to where the Wheel reared, unseen in the fog. And there was no mistaking it. The roar in the air no longer sounded anything like a helicopter. It was a ripping, whistling, jet-engine sound now, the sound of winds halfway supersonic in speed tearing down the face of the Wheel, the tumult loud enough to be thunderous from even fully ten kilometres distant.

  And when those winds hit the sea, Rita remembered, they would be turned and pushed westwards towards Theodolite Isle, the streams of air focussed and piled upon the island by the arced shoreline of the great mountain.

  Focussed and accelerated.

  ‘Inside!’ Kennedy was yelling. ‘Inside, quick, we don’t know how long we have!’

  The four of them were maybe twenty yards from the airlock doors. Kennedy and Richman were already running, and Rita followed.

  Yes, Clara had told her that the alarm was no cause for panic, that it was designed to sound within plenty of time to get to safety, that there was no need for wild haste, they had only to make an orderly withdrawal. But it was all very well to be told that on a fine sunny day when everything else was normal—it was another matter entirely in this fog, with the hellish roar filling the sky, and amid the litany of disaster that these last few days had produced. Rita was in a panic, and like the men, she ran helter-skelter.

  Except, where was—?

  Rita stuttered to a stop, turned. Madelaine had not moved; she was still gazing serenely up into the fog, as if no disaster threatened.

  There’s plenty of time, Rita told herself. She forced her legs to move, stomping back across the Terrace towards the designer. It couldn’t be thirty seconds yet since the alarm had sounded, and they surely had at least several whole minutes.

  ‘Madelaine, what are you doing? We have to get inside! Can’t you hear the alarm?’

  The designer finally seemed to become aware of Rita. ‘But I can’t go now. I want to see them. You know what I mean. You’ve seen them before; you’ve heard them. I didn’t believe you at first. But last night—l
ast night I began to understand.’

  Rita stared, appalled. Presences. The fool of a woman was talking about presences; she thought that was what was coming down from the sky.

  ‘Madelaine, no, it’s the jet stream; it’s terribly dangerous; it’s going to hit here any second, more powerful than anything you’ve ever experienced. You’ll die if you get caught in it. Come inside!’

  Rita had hold of the designer’s arm, tugging at it, her own panic growing all the while. The sound from the east was fiendish, the wind would by now be ravaging across the intervening sea …

  ‘Madelaine, please.’

  The designer was immovable, and there was nothing rational in her eyes. ‘But you can wait with me,’ she said, and now she was holding on to Rita. ‘You can help me when they come.’

  Jesus.

  ‘Rita! Madelaine!’ came Kennedy’s shout, barely to be heard over the approaching cataclysm. ‘What the hell are you doing? Come on!’

  Rita turned, pulling at Madelaine and trying to pull free of her at the same time. Kennedy and Richman were hesitating at the airlock doors, not yet going in—but not coming to help her either.

  ‘She won’t come!’ Rita shouted to them. ‘We’ll have to drag her in! Help me!’

  Kennedy hesitated, took several uncertain strides forwards. Richman, however, retreated a step within the doorway, stone-faced.

  Then, awful, the air stirred about Rita. Not a hurricane blast, not the jet stream yet, only a precursor gust that set the fog dancing, then died. But the temperature seemed to plummet in an instant, ice lancing at Rita’s skin like blades.

  Kennedy froze, backpedalled. ‘Leave her! Just get the fuck inside! It’s almost here!’

  ‘Madelaine!’ Rita pleaded.

  But the designer was lost, gazing upwards. The wind returned, another gust that rose, then fell, then rose again. Madelaine let go of Rita and raised her arms to the fog. It was swirling in great slow whorls and billows now, opening to tantalising vaults of clear air. Rita was reminded, in a chilling flash, of a video she had once seen, showing the sandy ocean floor stirring gently as only a few feet above great breaking waves crashed and raged and foamed.