The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  Flee this place if you wish to live.

  Flee now.

  Then she was dismissed, might never even have existed, as far as the mountain cared.

  And still she could only kneel and weep and stare up in stupefaction. Flee? Flee? Flee how, flee where? There was nowhere in the Observatory, nowhere upon the whole Mount, where she could escape the Wheel’s wrath when it came. For that wrath—she could feel it growing like a cataclysm ready to fall upon Richman—would be all-consuming.

  In which case, she must flee the Mount entirely. But that could only mean … ?

  Oh no. Not that.

  Yes, that. The emergency stairs. They were the only way down and out of here.

  But Clara, look what had happened to Clara, and she had been an experienced climber, she had been able to face those teetering ladders without fear. Rita had never climbed, was terrified of heights; she would panic at the first challenge, and fall, screaming as she plummeted into the shaft. And if she was to die on the emergency stairs anyway, what did it matter if she died here in the Observatory instead? Why put herself through the dread and agony of descending into that awful shaft, for the same result?

  Except … she might not die on the stairs, that was the appalling truth of it, she might not. Whereas if she stayed here in the Observatory, even if she hid herself away in the lowest, smallest room in the under levels, as far as she could get from Richman and from the vengeance that would fall on him …

  She stared again to the summit of the Wheel, an argent dagger against the stars, and at last she could behold what was gathering there.

  Not with her eyes exactly, and not with her mind, but with some terror-inspired combination of both, she could see. The unchanging, unmoving air of the high stratosphere was moving and changing now, perhaps for the first time in millennia. Currents were circling slowly around the summit, winds blowing where by rights no wind could ever blow. And though they looked slow from far away, Rita knew that up there, twenty-two thousand metres above her, the revolutions were in truth howling gales, gaining in strength as they spun and spun, a giant whirlpool, round and round about the peak.

  Whatever was coming, whatever punishment was to descend upon the Mount and upon Walter Richman, it was beginning up there. And when it was ready, when it fell, it would be unimaginable.

  Rita groaned, rose convulsively from her knees, and went stumbling and slipping across the ice towards the Conservatory doors.

  Her choice was made. Between the horror of the stairs and the horror of what would descend from the mountain, there was no comparison. Better to tumble to her death in the shaft than to face what was being summoned by the Wheel high above.

  Rita skittered through the airlock doors to the firmer footing of the interior, then made for the spiral stairs. As she went, she glanced up to the watching security camera. She felt no responsibility or loyalty to Richman, he deserved none. Even so, she summoned her breath and called a warning to him. ‘You’re gonna die up there, if you stay here. Can you see the Wheel from your little hidey-hole? Because if not, it’s a shame you can’t go outside now and take a look.’

  Then she forgot him and went lurching down the stairs. Her wounded leg protested immediately. Jesus, how was she going to manage the thousands upon thousands of steps in the shaft? It didn’t matter. She would find a way.

  She gained the Atrium and hesitated a moment, staring about. It was still very dark down here, the moonlight no more than a hint through the dome overhead. She could just make out a path to the Dining Hall, but it would be pitch-black in the kitchen, and even worse in the service tunnels.

  How on earth would she find her way down to the emergency stairs? Then she remembered, yes, back when this had all started, when she and the others had first been marooned, they had gathered together an assortment of torches to have handy, just in case the emergency generators failed. They had left a couple of those flashlights waiting on the sideboard in the Dining Hall, she was sure.

  She limped forwards again. Which was when the godlike voice sounded once more, booming softly through the gloom of the Atrium.

  ‘Nice try,’ said Richman, sounding amused. ‘What am I supposed to see on the Wheel?’

  She glanced ceiling-wards. ‘You really don’t have a window? You can’t see the mountain?’

  ‘Windows would be a weakness in a safe room. And I don’t need one anyway. I’ve got one of the external cameras turned to the Wheel, set on night vision. There’s nothing there.’

  Rita shrugged as she passed into the Dining Hall. Well, she had warned him; it was more than he was owed after what he’d done, but the fool was determined to be blind. No camera in the world—night vision or not—could capture those ominous movements around the summit. It was a strangeness that had to be felt as much as seen.

  ‘Your funeral,’ she muttered, and paused in the dark, groping about first to locate the sideboard, then feeling across its surface. Yes, she had them, two LED flashlights, small but powerful. She slipped one into the pocket of her coat, flicked on the other one, and passed into the kitchen, chasing its beam.

  She grabbed two small bottles of water from a shelf and added them to her pockets. She should probably hunt out some food as well, she knew—when had she even eaten last?—but the urge to be gone was too strong, there was no time.

  She plunged into the service tunnel. Awful. In the hard white light of the torch, the concrete walls looked even starker than her visit of only hours earlier. But on she went, her footsteps echoing in the darkness. She must concentrate, she must not get lost in here again.

  Don’t think about the route, she told herself, just walk it, you’ve done this before. Down one level, left at the bottom—and Christ, now she remembered, not straight ahead through two junctions, but left at the second junction, then hold on around a rightward bend—and ha, thank god, there it was, the Control Room, right where it was supposed to be.

  To her surprise, the door was hanging open. She paused to look in, veering the torch beam about. Everything was dead, the computer and video screens blank, the server towers no longer blinking their green and orange lights. Well, it was only to be expected, Richman was in command from his second Control Room now. All that mattered was that Rita knew the way to the emergency stairs from here.

  She set off again. Another level down she passed by the generator room. Its door was shut, and, at her try, locked fast, but she could hear the muted roar of the beasts within. Oh yes, Richman could turn the lights back on any time he wanted, the bastard. But there was nothing Rita could do about it.

  She pushed on, and the roar faded to silence again behind the thick walls. Another two levels down and she was there, at the threshold of the service elevator and the emergency stairs.

  She had feared, on her way down, that Richman might have closed the bombproof security door, barring her escape route. But no. Or perhaps he did not even know she was here, did not guess what she intended. Perhaps he could not track her on his cameras in the darkness of the tunnels.

  She crept across the threshold and onto the concrete lip. She was careful at first to keep the torch focussed solely at her feet, to not let the beam stray to the yawning abyss of the shaft. But the sense of unseen space opening all about her in the darkness was simply unendurable. At the rail, she tremulously aimed the torch down, and forced herself to look.

  And oh god …

  Deprived even of the dim emergency lights, the shaft was a circular well of freezing dark. The beam reached no further down than a few dozen metres, etching out starkly the gantry of the useless elevator on one side, and on the other the first few flights of stairs, so thin, so insubstantially attached to the scaffolding, or worse, hanging askew … and beyond that just a plunging blackness, infinite.

  She couldn’t really be going down there, could she? Clara had gone down, a mountain climber with gear, afraid of nothing, and been driven mad by what she found. Was Rita really going to follow?

  A voice crackled into l
ife behind her, and she started so violently she almost dropped the torch, almost sent it tumbling two and a half thousand metres into the blackness, turning and turning and turning, its spiralling beam marking its fall …

  ‘You’re seriously fool enough to try this?’ came Richman’s inquiry, scratchy now; the only speaker available to him at this point was the intercom by the elevator doors. There was, Rita remembered, a camera somewhere here too, but it was the last camera he would be able to track her on; there were none down in the shaft, only the blind intercom system. ‘You’re going to climb all that way? In the dark? You’re going to shimmy down the ropes that Clara left behind? Very daring, for a non-mountaineer.’

  ‘What does it tell you that I’m prepared to try this, rather than stay up here, after what I saw happening on the Wheel?’ she said.

  ‘Goddamnit, there’s nothing happening on the Wheel!’ And the sangfroid was gone.

  ‘Have you been outside and looked?’

  Silence.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, I forgot. You can’t go outside, can you, not for three days. Well, it’s by your own hand that you’re stuck here. So fuck you.’

  And with that last word of bravado, and before the panic could overwhelm her again, she set foot on the first flight of steps and climbed briskly down, out of his sight, and into the ordeal of the shaft.

  9

  THE UPPER STAIRS

  Two days earlier, when she had watched Clara venture down these same stairs, nearly as steep as a ladder, Rita had sworn to herself that if she ever had to do likewise then she would not climb face-outwards, as Clara had, but rather face to the steps, as if it was an actual ladder she was descending.

  But she had not known then that she would be descending in darkness, that she would need to be holding a torch continually. To climb down a ladder with only one free hand, trying awkwardly all the while to illuminate the rungs below her feet as she went—no, that would be horrible. She went face outwards, the torch lighting her way, her other hand clutched fervently to the rail.

  But it was horrible anyway. It would be so easy to overbalance, so easy to tumble forwards into the eager air. Her initial rush lasted all of four flights down, switching to and fro, before the reality began to sink in, the shaft expanding around her as vast as the throat of a volcano, and the stairs shrinking to wisps of slippery metal beneath her feet.

  She slowed, each step becoming harder, and on the fourth landing she froze, legs shaking, her grip on the rail locked. Another five or six switchbacks below, the torch clearly picked out the first of the ladders that had come askew, breaking away at its lower end from the landing, leading now into the open abyss. No, no, no …

  She couldn’t do it. Clara had avoided the broken ladder by simply climbing down the scaffolding itself, but Rita could never do that. She could never scramble like a spider between the crossbeams while the awful drop sang its siren song beneath …

  But fuck, she had known she would have to, otherwise why come here at all?

  Paralysis held her for some minutes, her breath coming hard, nausea swirling a red mist at the edge of her vision. She wanted to go back. More than anything in her life she yearned to go back, to climb the ladders to the solid stone of the passages above, to be safe, to be held secure …

  But even in her terror she could remember the slow swirl of the air about the peak of the Wheel, and could feel from afar the threat implied by that movement. Maybe that slow swirling, which was not slow at all, was already moving down the sheer face of the mountain, ice crystals glittering as they were torn from the rock by some unspeakable potency. And of the two terrors, the stairs or the mountain, still the second was greatest.

  So even as she hung there, impaled by one fear, she knew she must keep going.

  With an act of supreme will, she unclenched her hand and forced her numb legs to move, her blocks-of-ice feet to seek for the next step down, and the next. Two flights, four, her heart beating hard, then she was at the top of the loose ladder.

  Could she descend the ladder and maybe leap (god, leap?) across the gap to the lower landing? Rita set a foot on the first rung, then withdrew it instantly as if stung, for the flight immediately quivered at her touch, and a thin metal shriek rang out, a bolt snapping, maybe, or a weld breaking free.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  No choice. She placed her torch in her coat pocket, beam pointed upwards. It was the best she could do for light, as she would need both hands here, no matter the cost. Then she reached to the side and took hold of the scaffold—there was a crossbeam at chest height—and stepped sideways, one foot at a time, onto a beam level with the landing. And there she clung, frozen again, for a minute more.

  Move, you useless bitch.

  She moved. Her hands slick with cold sweat, her mouth set in a rictus, she let one leg—her bad leg—sink below the beam, lower and lower, until her arms were outstretched above, and still her foot only dangled in midair, while her even good leg was bent nearly double and about to give out.

  Then—bang—her swinging foot found metal, and locked there. Oh fuck god thank you. She let her whole body sink, her bad leg holding out, just, her arms dropping to the next rung. Before doubts could assail her, she down-climbed two rungs more, a jerky windmill of awkwardness. Then she was nearly a whole flight down, and giddy with success.

  But she was only halfway. Because of the switchback pattern of the ladders, the next landing down was on the far side of the scaffold, beyond her reach. She had to descend two flights, to the landing directly below the one she had left.

  She sucked in air. You can do this. She swung her bad leg free once more and climbed another rung down. A pause, and then again she sent her foot searching, found metal, let her weight settle—and with a metallic click the crossbeam under her shoe gave way completely to go clattering away into oblivion, leaving Rita hanging by her arms.

  She let out a formless wail, scrabbled to climb back up, but her bad leg couldn’t rise that high, and her slick hands were losing grip, and—

  She fell.

  A metre, no more, onto the lower landing. It rebounded with her weight, shuddered a moment, then held. She lay in a heap on the grating, legs bent painfully beneath her, arms wrapped around a railing support, her eyes closed as she wept helplessly. Oh god oh fuck oh Jesus Christ …

  But in time she got up again, wiped at her red eyes, and continued on down.

  ▲

  If Rita had thought about it at all before, she might have supposed that terror could not be an endless state of mind. No matter the peril, no matter how prolonged the danger, surely exhaustion or boredom would set in eventually, numbing the worst of the fear.

  But it wasn’t like that. For the next hour—although time was the merest guess—as she forced herself downwards step by step, not once did the acuteness of her terror ease.

  Nor did she become in any way accustomed to the hideous ladders. Each new flight was a different experience in instability, some of the ladders trembling silently under her feet as if about to break free, others groaning and complaining with metal-stressed voices, even as the rungs held firm.

  Twice more in that period she was forced to climb down by the scaffold to avoid damaged flights, and each time was worse than the last. The accumulated experience only made it harder, not easier, her fears of a misstep, or of another beam giving way, building with every attempt.

  And even when she did not slip or fall, she took no reassurance from it, only leapt ahead in her mind to the next gap that would come, and the even worse collapses that she knew awaited her, from Clara’s account, still further below.

  Also because of Clara’s account, Rita did not try to measure her progress. She did not, for instance, count each ladder as she climbed. With twelve hundred flights to descend, it would be too cruel to watch how slowly the tally mounted. More importantly, she ignored the numbers on the intercom panels when, every now and then, she passed one by. For that was how poor Clara had been led astray. Either the
panels themselves were misarranged, or—as Rita thought more likely—the Wheel had got into Clara’s mind and made her see numbers that weren’t there. Either way, Rita would not tempt the same fate.

  She even stopped searching downwards with her flashlight, to see what lay ahead. The shaft was always a limitless gullet beneath her, awful at every glance, crushing her spirit. So why look? Better to simply face what she must face when it arrived. So she focussed her beam only on her shoes and on the rungs underfoot, and crept on down.

  It was a shock, thus, when she turned at a landing to move to the next flight and found nothing to step onto, no stairs at all, and hardly any scaffolding remaining, only a vast vacancy and darkness dropping away.

  For a moment she stared down, mesmerised, her foot wavering in midair as if it wanted to carry on regardless and walk out into the void—then she was clutching convulsively to the rail, pulling back and sinking to her knees in terror.

  God, she had almost walked into space. The ladders, half the gantry supporting them, it had all tumbled away in the earthquake …

  But then, as her heart laboured, she saw it—a rope. It was tied fast to the last solid crossbeam of the scaffold, and dangled into the darkness. Clara’s rope. With dread fascination, Rita played her torch down its length. Four flights below, the scaffolding appeared to reassemble itself, as if out of nothing, and the rope was tied firmly to the landing there.

  No no fuck no.

  Shimmy down that, like a kid on some obscene piece of playground equipment?

  Was she fucking kidding?

  And yet, if she could not go down, then she could only go back up. And strangely, it was the thought of recrossing the three gaps she had already crossed, of climbing back up the rickety scaffold, that daunted her most. Down it was.