Liar, Rita thought, fucking liar. She had come to the edge of the field and was crossing the running track, the exit beckoning ahead.
‘Where are you going now?’ Richman’s amplified query came.
Where indeed? She didn’t care, as long as it was away from here, away from his smooth rich voice. She shuffled through the doorway into the passage that led back up to the well, but she had hardly gone ten paces along it before god spoke again.
‘You can’t escape me, if that’s what you’re trying to do. I can follow you everywhere.’
She paused. The voice was not as all-surrounding as it had been in the Arena; it had a thinner quality here, tinny, but yes, there, set within the ceiling was a small black hemisphere from which Richman’s voice emanated.
‘There are cameras and listening devices and speakers covering pretty much every inch of this place; you should know that by now. Well, actually no, not every inch. There aren’t any cameras or microphones in the bedrooms or bathrooms. It’s purely a security thing, it’s not about voyeurism.’
Rita was limping on again. She came to the well, gazed up at the dizzying whorls of the Helix Staircase. And yes, there were more of the black hemispheres here too, dotted around the walls.
‘Just so you know,’ Richman’s voice informed her from the nearest of these, ‘in case you have it in mind, you can’t come back up to the Cottage. I’ve locked the lift by remote control.’
Fuck.
But the last thing she wanted to do was give him the satisfaction of knowing he had guessed rightly. ‘Why are you following me then?’ she snarled to the atmosphere. ‘You’re safe in your Cottage and your room, so why do you care what I do?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing personal,’ he replied. ‘But I need to be watching, in case the Wheel takes control of you again. If it does, I need to see what happens. It might be helpful to me later.’
Still there was no apology in his tone, no shame, just unshakeable self-justification. And in that brute drive for his own survival, Rita heard the overture of her own death. If the Wheel came for her, he would do nothing but watch coldly, and learn from it what he could for his own advantage.
But would the Wheel come for her? She was not its prime target, of that she understood. Surely its time, its energy now would be focussed on Richman, and him alone. But if Richman was truly unreachable there in his refuge, then might not the mountain, denied, strike out in its anger at whomever it could reach?
The anger was back. Fuck him. She said, ‘I wouldn’t be so sure that you’re safe, even in your little spider hole. The Wheel doesn’t need you out in the open; it can still make you harm yourself, just like it did to me. You must have knives in there with you, and other sharp things, if not a gun.’
Was his laughter a little more forced this time? ‘I’m not as dumb as you, Rita. I’m not going to open my soul to the damn mountain and invite it in. And I’m not going to let it hypnotise me like it did the others. I’ve got enough of Kennedy’s cocaine in here to keep me wide awake for as long it takes, plus I’ve got a mental discipline that someone like you can’t even dream of. It’s a mountaineering thing. If you can’t keep control of your own thoughts on a high peak, if you let your mind wander, then you die. Not all climbers have it, true. Clara didn’t, not really. But I do.’
And damn him, he was probably right. That was the genius of sociopaths, after all. It was their very inhumanity that gave them endurance.
Rita had set foot on the stairs, climbing without knowing where she was going, her injured leg so stiff and swollen she could scarcely bend her knee anymore, the material of her pants stretched tight about the thigh. But up she climbed in spite of the pain, three times, four times around the spiral, until she came to the guest level, the two wings extending off north and south from the landing.
She paused, considering. Should she return to her old apartment? Would she be any safer there? She did not really think so. There was no ‘safer’ to be had in this situation. But after hesitating, she left the landing and headed down the southern hallway anyway, for sheer lack of an alternative.
Then the lights went out.
There was no flicker, no warning: blackness swallowed her with a silent snap, and she reared back instinctively, almost as if a wall had appeared from nowhere right in front of her.
She stood, frozen, her hands partly outstretched, eyes bugged wide. But there was nothing to see, not a hint of light anywhere.
‘Sorry about that,’ came the godlike voice out of the darkness. ‘Seems there’s a bit of a problem in the generator room. Those gens really aren’t meant to run so long unattended; there’s supposed to be an engineer on duty to look after them, to change oil and filters and so on. I’m getting “engine overheating” warnings up here, so I’m afraid I’ve been forced to cut power back to the barest necessities. But never fear, some lights are still on up on the main levels.’
It was more bullshit, Rita knew. Oh, it might be true that the generators were not meant to run so long without maintenance, but that they had developed a fault at this very second? No, that was pure crap. Richman had turned off the lights deliberately. For some reason, he did not want her lingering down here, hiding out in her old apartment. He wanted her up in the public sections of the Observatory.
And there was nothing she could do, no light she could create. If she’d had her phone, she could have used its torch, but she couldn’t even remember where her phone was. It had been useless ever since the disaster had taken out the coverage.
Shit. She did not want to go up—not if it was what Richman wanted—but she couldn’t fumble around down here in the blackness forever either. It was just too awful, too close. Even when dawn came (god, how many hours away was sunrise?) no light would reach down to these sections.
Reluctantly, she turned around (or hoped she had) and inched back the way she had come, eyes casting about for any glow or glimmer at all. Finally, she sensed that she was moving into an open space once more, and looking up, she could see high above the faintest of glows from the top of the Helix Staircase. She let out a long shaking sigh, and after a moment more, began to slowly climb.
The time, what was the time? It felt like it had been a week since Kennedy’s death, but she went back over all she had done since then—searching the Cottage, getting lost in the tunnels—and in truth it might have been only two hours, certainly no more than three. Which made it maybe four a.m. The winter sunrise was still hours away yet.
She laboured on, gasping with pain from time to time as her leg stabbed sharply. But in spite of her physical exertion, the air felt colder as she rose. Was she just imagining that in the dark? No, the chill was palpable, as if a freezing draft was curling its way down the stairs. What was going on?
She reached the top. Disappointingly, the Atrium level, with all its grand rooms, was almost fully dark. The faint light she had seen from below came from higher up still, from the Conservatory, a glow spilling down the small spiral stairs.
She was too hungry for that light to care now what Richman was up to; she just wanted to see electricity burning. She limped over to the stairs, began the final ascent. Ah, but the cold draft was even worse here, a stream of freezing air in her face.
She came to the Conservatory. Its wide floor was in shadow, but behind the bar, two lamps glowed to illuminate the shelves and the bottles there. That was all. Richman had left her no other relief from the darkness. And all around, night pressed at the glass walls and windows. The storm had long since blown out, it seemed, for all was silence now.
But the cold!
Rita saw the reason then. The airlock doors leading out to the Terrace—both the inner and outer doors—were standing open.
That was supposed to be impossible, she knew. There was supposed to be a failsafe mechanism that forbade both the inner and outer door being open at the same time. Nevertheless, there they stood, ajar, a passage clear to the open air.
Fascinated, she drifted closer. The doors
could be opened both manually and automatically, she knew—so had Richman done this by remote? Were all the external doors throughout the Observatory like this now, wide open? And at that thought Rita felt a frisson of new fear, for if that was the case, then how quickly would the whole building be reduced to freezing? How long before she could not survive here at all?
The lights behind the bar flicked off, and darkness slammed down again.
Rita whirled. Fuck fuck fuck. He had done it again, the bastard. But why? Why lure her up with light, and then deny it to her?
What did he want?
She stood motionless, trying to calm herself, listening in the silence. Nothing moved, nothing threatened, there was just the cold.
Eventually, as her eyes adjusted, she found that in fact she could see, just a little. A pale illumination was coming from outside, through the windows. Not electric light, but the faint wash of starlight, and yes, moonlight. There, overhead: the waning Moon, riding high in the pre-dawn sky, was peeping in and out between slow-moving shreds of cloud, the last remnants of the storm, maybe.
It wasn’t much, barely dispelling the darkness within the Conservatory, where Rita could detect only shadowy shapes and the outline of the windows. But through the airlock doors, out on the Terrace, everything was awash in a blue glow …
She stared. Why, the entire area was sheathed in ice. It was not snow, not hail, but a clear frozen coat of water that somehow caught the moonlit and magnified it. Every edge and corner on the Terrace was delineated clearly, like a ghost landscape under the dark heavens. It was beautiful.
But so, so cold. The air oozing in from outside nipped at Rita like teeth, although the weather screen by the doors was dead along with the lights, so there was no way to know the exact temperature. She took a coat from the rack, wrapped it about herself as defence, and edged closer.
Her every nerve was singing in alarm (she must not step through those doors) but she was also fascinated beyond measure by the silver-blue light, and the stillness of the night out there.
She stopped at the threshold, gazing through the opening. The ice, the silence, was entrancing. It came to her that in the entire Observatory, this, the Terrace, was the only truly engaging place. Everything else was underground, hollowed out caves and tunnels, no matter how well camouflaged. But the Terrace remained close to what the peak of the Mount had always been: a summit beneath the sky.
And something called to her from out there. Something in her cried to stand under an open heaven, free at last of rock walls and rock ceilings and the eternal night of underground.
But it was madness, surely, to step through that inviting outer door. Two deaths already had been inflicted out there, and no matter how calm the air might seem now, how gorgeously the ice might glitter, how native and natural the peak might seem, it could all turn in an instant; she knew that. In her right mind, she would never consider it.
So was she in her right mind? Or was she being hypnotised again, as she had been in the Lightning Room? Was this the feeling that lured Kushal out onto the Terrace to his doom, and then Madelaine, after her long night of staring through the glass?
Rita experimented mentally. Do I have to go out there? No, was the answer. Could she step back from the brink. Yes. She took two steps backwards, and felt no tension rise in her, no contrary voice demanding that she go forwards instead. Her will seemed entirely her own.
But she wanted to go out.
She glanced around, feeling Richman’s eye upon her once more. He was silent, but he must be watching on his screens, for after all, he had driven her to this very spot, presumably for a purpose.
Did he want her to go through the doors? She felt it suddenly as a truth—he did. These doors weren’t open by accident. He had overridden the failsafe system, then forced her up here using darkness as a spur, all in the hope that she would accept the invitation and step out and find …
Find what?
Her death?
Was that what he was doing? Was he making it as easy as he could for the Wheel to reach her? Nowhere was more exposed than the Terrace, nowhere would she be more vulnerable. To lure her out there would be to place her utterly at the Wheel’s mercy, and the Wheel had so far shown no mercy at all, so that was as good as … as good as …
Sacrificing her to the mountain?
In his place?
Yes. That was exactly what he was doing, exactly what his billionaire instincts were no doubt telling him he must do, if he was to survive. Such brutal logic would even appear to him as a virtue, as a hard but unavoidable choice that a weakling would ignore, but which the strong-willed must take.
The piece of shit.
She stared at where she knew the camera was, letting disgust fill her gaze, even though her expression would be unreadable to him in the dark.
Fuck you, arsehole.
And yet still she wanted to go outside.
Her gaze returned to the Terrace, where the ice glimmered in soft lines. To the left, a monstrous shadow loomed in the night, the Wheel, hulking over the little Mount. There would no defence against it out there, nowhere to hide. And even so, knowing it was a trap set by her host, knowing how deadly it would be, still she longed to stand out there.
Why?
She extended her inner senses minimally, cautiously, and felt nothing, no threat, no awareness in the atmosphere, either benign or hostile. There was only a sense of … what? Abeyance? Yes, something like that. Vast perils still hung on the horizon but in this instant, all the elements, the ice, the Wheel, the night, the Terrace, were waiting, all powers held in cessation for a moment that had not yet arrived.
And that moment was not quite imminent. If she stepped out into the air, the Wheel would not suddenly seize her. She would, although vulnerable and as crushable as a mite, be safe.
She blinked. Madness. Madness. Her very thoughts were being manipulated, surely. Why else would she ever go out there?
And yet she went anyway.
Treading as if to make a single noise would break the spell, she moved one deliberate step at a time through the inner door and then paused at the outer. Nothing happened. The inner door did not slide shut behind her, no wind stirred ahead on the Terrace. In the sky, the Moon shone pale.
She moved again, taking two steps, three, clearing the outer door and then several paces further, out into the open air, silent all the while, treading with the most extreme care upon the ice floor.
Still nothing, and behind her the doors did not slam shut and trap her outside. Perhaps having opened them both simultaneously, against all the protocols, Richman could not now shut them. Perhaps he didn’t want to. No matter. She was out there now, right or wrong.
The night held its breath, as did Rita for a moment, feeling her brow and cheeks and the flesh of her nostrils burn with the cold. But oh, the air felt so fresh, so alive with possibilities, she had to inhale it, no matter how painful. And the sky!
Away to the north, a black bulk of cloud was dwindling, still with shimmers of lightning within, the storm dying in the final hours of the night. But overhead and to the south and west stars blazed, glittering dust against black. And rearing vast against them was the Wheel, its West Face, like the icy Terrace, shining faint silver in the moonlight.
It was beautiful beyond bearing. Rita seemed to be able to behold the mountain entire; its every rising bastion and precipice; its every fang of rock or wasteland of snow or perched glacier of ice; its shadowed couloirs, great and small; its bare upper faces of stone; its summit ridge, so high, so far above, and yet still, in the crystal air, etched brilliantly against the Milky Way. The mountain’s majesty, its might, its imponderable, unbearable, crushing weight of age and stone; it was there above her.
She could not help it. She fell to her knees under the weight and wonder of the mountain, enraptured and horrified at once, too transfixed to feel even the knife-cold of the ice beneath her.
She did not open her mind to the Wheel, she made no invitation,
the force of it simply flooded in, and she was defenceless against the flood, a beetle impaled upon a pin. The mountain, unlike the Moon, was not waning, not even after all its efforts of the last five days. No, it was waxing to the peak of its power. And that power was all-encompassing.
Tears bit coldly in her eyes. She seemed to feel herself spinning with vertigo, and all she could think of was the breaking wheel, the torture device from The Triumph of Death, the wheel of torment and mortality. She was fixed upon it now, and would die thus, as it spun faster and faster. She was a mote on the crest of a wave about to violently break and she was helpless in every way to stop it. The Wheel would spin on and on until her limbs were flung away …
But then, unaccountably, the breaking wave released her and passed on; the terrible sensation of whirling stopped abruptly, and with a jagged lurch the night righted itself. She was still alive. On her knees and gasping and freezing, but alive.
The mountain had let her go.
She stared, baffled beyond relief. The Wheel had held her, effortless in its supreme strength, examining her in the fullness of its loathing, and then, instead of destroying her, it had tossed her aside.
She gazed up at the great mass, the silvered precipices of its West Face brooding with a vast single expression of age-long, inexhaustible anger. And she read there an astonishing thing.
The mountain did not want her. The focus of its titanic malevolence lay elsewhere. It wanted Richman, and only Richman now. Rita was a microscopic thing not worth even contempt anymore.
But no … that wasn’t quite right either. The Wheel had killed the others all too willingly, just to isolate Richman, so why not her?
The West Face above was immovable, not deigning to answer. Ah, but she could read it now. And again, the irony. The mountain was letting her go for one reason only: because Richman wanted her dead. It had recognised his intent in luring her out here into the open, and it was the Wheel’s freezing pleasure to foil that intent.
Beyond that, her fate was of no interest to the mountain. But even so, staring up, she caught a last fleeting consideration of her before it forgot her entirely, an acknowledgement that she at least had the ability to discern its true nature. For the sake of that ability came one stern and final warning, delivered without voice and without mercy.
The Rich Man’s House Page 53
