Only, how? She hunched there, staring at the rope and the awful distance to the lower landing. Four flights equalled eight metres. Only eight metres. But it might as well have been a thousand miles, the way the gulf of the shaft mocked and tempted.
Never had Rita felt so trapped by indecision, so bereft of company, so far from human advice. No one could assist her here, and yet if she didn’t get moving she would simply linger on this perch until the time stretched into days, until she weakened from hunger, and in exhaustion simply toppled off.
Except, she didn’t have that long. She had only a matter of hours. Whatever it was that was coming down from the Wheel, it would hit before the day was out, and in her gut the warning was inarguable: she could not be anywhere near the top of the Mount when that happened. Not even the lower shaft would be protection. She had to get to the bottom, and then escape through the exit tunnel, and fast.
With a sigh, she once again put the torch, beam up, in her coat pocket, to free both of her hands. Then she addressed the rope. She took hold of it, testing it for give, and found only a little slack, so well had Clara secured the lower end. Clara herself must have climbed down a freely swinging rope, but then tied it off to make it easier for anyone following.
Easier? Fucking easier?
Rita gritted her teeth. She had to do this, must do this. Hands gripped tight, she hefted herself slightly and wrapped her legs around the rope. There would be a proper way to do this, no doubt, a mountaineer technique of shimmying down a line, but she did not know it. All she could do was loosen the grip of her legs a little, and then relax her hands—
Oh fucking lord.
She slipped maybe a foot, the rope burning like a hot wire against her wounded thigh. But she came to a stop when she tightened her grip again. And so, after a pause, she repeated the exercise.
Down she went in a series of lurches, each one making her injured thigh shriek more stridently. Worse, the blood from the bandage was making the rope damp, it felt greasy and slick to her hands. But, damn it, she couldn’t do this with only one leg to scissor around the line, she needed to use both.
Down she dropped, and down again, and all the while the rope, tied though it was, danced and swayed under her ill-disposed weight, so that sometimes it felt she was swinging far out from the landing below and hanging ludicrously over the void.
Halfway, more than halfway. And she was sliding faster now, the rope slipping smoothly between her blood-wet legs and hands, but that was okay, she was in control still, she was in—
How it happened she did not know. The rope somehow caught around her ankle and then jammed hard around her knee: the shock of the sudden stop tore her hands from the rope and with a sickening flip she was dangling upside down, her arms flailing wildly as only her legs still held to the line.
A sudden blackness had possessed the shaft; she could see nothing; she was going to fall and die. But then her scrabbling fingers brushed against metal below, the grating of the landing. She let go with her legs and slumped with a wet thwack onto the platform.
Thank you thank you thank you she prayed, curled up in a foetal position and eyes squeezed shut, praying—not to any god certainly, she was an atheist as much as ever, but sometimes there was no other form of expression. She had made it. And then, as she shuddered and cried through her closed eyes, it came to her that really she should be thanking Clara, for if the major-domo had not strung the rope, then Rita could not even have got this far.
And what had happened to Clara, for her troubles? It was something that Rita had avoided thinking about, but now, as she lay there recovering, the major-domo, having trod the same path, seemed a very immediate presence to her.
Was Clara really dead? They had all assumed she was, but there had been no confirmation of it. Her last communication could have meant almost anything—and after that there had been only silence. Still, what could that silence mean other than that she had met her end somewhere down here—that the Wheel, having toyed with her so long, had ended it finally?
And yet again, maybe, just maybe, she was not dead, but alive somewhere below, insensible and deranged perhaps, but not dead. Maybe Rita would even meet her if she climbed down far enough, and then they could help each other, Rita to bring Clara back to sanity, and Clara to assist Rita with the technicalities of the remaining climb.
It could be, couldn’t it?
Rita opened her eyes, found only blackness. Her flashlight must have switched off in the last tumble. She fumbled for it in the jacket pocket, felt horror suffuse her. It wasn’t there. It had fallen out. She scrabbled about on the platform, searching for a mad instant, before she remembered her second torch. It was still there, thank god, in the other pocket, and gasping in relief she switched it on.
Light, beloved light. But search as she might on the landing, the first torch was nowhere to be seen. It must have gone, plunging away down the shaft. Curious in a dreadful way, Rita switched off her second torch, then peered into the void. Was the first torch still alight down there? Would she be able to see it, from two thousand metres above?
But in the blackness she could discern nothing other than the phantoms that shifted and expanded within her own blind eyes.
And if she called down into that blackness, would Clara answer?
Rita shuddered, clicked the torch back on. No, she would not be shouting into the abyss, the very idea was terrible. And she would have to be careful now, painfully so, with her sole remaining flashlight. If she dropped it, she was done for. And even if she didn’t drop it, how long would the battery last? These newer LED flashlights were vastly more long-lived than the older incandescent models, she knew that much, but even they couldn’t go on forever.
Another reason not to linger. She had to move. The refuge of this landing, reached with such hardship, was illusory. There was no refuge anywhere in the shaft, it lay only at the bottom, through the tunnel and so finally to the outside world.
Groaning, Rita rose to standing, and then set her foot gingerly to the descent once more.
▲
Back and forth she went on the switchback ladders, down and down, the sameness monotonous, but also endlessly terrifying, as each flight tilted differently under her feet, or gave a different groan or screech. Now and then would come a gap, and another debate within herself, wearier each time, before she gathered the nerve to climb on the scaffold.
And still it got no easier; still her fear did not relent. Still she felt, every second, the acute exposure of her position, the frailty of the thin metal that held the stairs to the scaffold and the scaffold to the walls of the shaft. And even if the whole thing did not collapse beneath her, then at any instant she might simply misstep and plunge over the rail.
How long could a mind bear this kind of strain, she found herself marvelling, before the screaming started, and the mad rush to oblivion?
And yet, even though she was listening acutely all the while for the fatal sound of metal parting, it was some time before she realised that a whispering had arisen around her in the shaft.
It came from above and below equally, almost a radio static mutter, and when she finally paused to listen to it more attentively, still she could not make any sense of it. She descended another four flights, ears cocked and eyes wide. Now the whisper was coming more strongly from below, and she could, straining her hearing, resolve it into words.
‘Rita. Rita … Are you there? Talk to me, Rita. Just press the Talk button.’
It was Richman on the intercom system. He did not know exactly where she was, she reminded herself, the shaft intercom didn’t work that way. He was merely broadcasting on all panels at once, and she was drawing near to one now.
Ignore him, she told herself.
Ignore him. Don’t talk to him. Let him rot unanswered in his precious safe room.
Ah, but it was a voice, a human voice, here in this soulless stone purgatory, where she had no company but echoes and the cold air running up from the unseen depths.
And besides, he would only go on whispering at her if she didn’t reply.
So when the intercom panel appeared three landings further down, she paused there, her finger hovering over the Talk button.
‘Rita, Riiita,’ he was crooning, like a man trying to lure his pet cat out of hiding. ‘I know you can hear me somewhere down there …’
Her finger pressed home. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ she demanded, her own voice surprising her, it was so ragged and high and strange.
‘Rita!’ came the response in a delighted tone. ‘How far down are you?’ She had already noted the panel number, even without wanting to. It read ES41, which made it the sixth panel down from the top, which meant that she had come down one hundred and fifty flights. God, was that all? That meant she still had over a thousand flights to go. So many, so many …
But she wasn’t going to tell Richman any of that. ‘None of your fucking business,’ she rasped. ‘So, again, what do you want?’
‘Oh, only to report that everything is fine up here. I don’t know why you’re risking your life down in that hole when the worst is over. The sun is out, and there’s no wind, so when the rescue helicopter comes it’ll be able to land with no trouble at all.’
She stared bitterly at the little speaker. Oh, the cunning bastard. It was a lie—or a wilful denial on his part—but oh, how she wanted to believe it. For if everything was calm and sunny up there, and if a helicopter did come, then she could stop this, she could stop the torment. She need not even attempt to climb back up, she could simply remain here on this landing, which felt perfectly solid, and wait for professional rescuers to reach her. Maybe they would have to abseil down, maybe they would get the service elevator restarted and bring it to her level. But either way, she could stop, the fear could stop.
She couldn’t hide the hateful weakness in her voice, the hope against hope, when she spoke again. ‘You can see all that on your TV screens? You know for sure that everything is okay?’
His response was cheery and swift. ‘Better than that, I’ve been outside. I was lying about that whole “time lock on the door” thing. I’ve been out and I’ve been on the Terrace and looked up at the Wheel, and I tell you, it’s a beautiful day out there.’
The perverse flicker of hope in her died. Definitely he was lying, the sunniness in him was as brittle as chalk; even through the distortions of the intercom she could hear that.
It was just more bullshit. He had not been outside, and everything was not okay, even from what he could see on his security screens. And now he was trying to convince her to come back up, to … well, why exactly? What did he want from her?
Maybe just company. Maybe he had begun to sense what Rita had already sensed, the disaster brewing above him, and he could not bear his isolation. Maybe it was as simple a need as that. He did not want to be alone. He wanted her back.
But maybe, a wiser part of her whispered, it had occurred to Richman, locked in his self-imposed cell with his cameras, that she might in fact reach the bottom of the shaft and escape.
He would not like that. Even if he survived the nightmare that was coming, he would not want her to be a fellow survivor. For the story she would tell of their ordeal would not be the same as his, would not be at all flattering to Walter Richman. And she understood by now how much that would matter to him. Enough, certainly, for him to be willing to discard her life in the meanwhile.
In which case, all he was trying to do here was to confuse her, to either goad her into making the mistake of going back up the shaft, or to at least delay and bewilder her, so that she might, like Clara before her, become lost and despairing.
She clicked the button a last time. ‘I’m gonna survive this, Richman. Just watch.’
And then she was moving on, limping down the next flight of stairs as fast as she dared.
‘Good luck!’ his voice spat behind her. ‘You’ll need it, if even Clara couldn’t make it down. You’ll fall sooner or later, and down you’ll go, tumbling over and over, screaming, hitting the walls, the rock tearing an arm off here, a leg off there; I’ve seen what it’s like, what a fall can do to a human body …’
It went on, but she was two flights down now; the voice had shrunk to a mutter once more and she could ignore it—even though he was right. She still had impossibly far to go, and for all she knew the greatest horrors still lay ahead of her, and she was already at the borderline of her willpower.
She could not win here.
But she crept on doggedly, and when, an eternity later, she passed the next intercom panel—ES40 it said, which was the right number, for what that was worth—the speaker was silent.
▲
A long, ragged interval followed.
Rita had given up trying not to look at the intercom numbers whenever she passed them, her resolve worn away. Indeed, she was counting them down now, her target intercom ES24, which would mean that she was halfway to the bottom. She celebrated every milestone. ES35. Then, much later, ES30. Just six intercoms to go.
And another thing: all the numbers were in their proper order, so she had guessed right, the panels had not been incorrectly installed, and poor Clara had been misled by the Wheel into seeing things that weren’t there. But the mountain had no interest in Rita. She was being left mercifully alone.
So she might make it.
She might really make it.
But as she passed by intercom ES29, there came a sudden sharp vibration through the stairs. It swiftly grew into a jolting tremor, kicking at her legs as she clung to the railing, teetering dangerously. A low rumble sounded up and down the shaft, and the stone of the walls seemed to flex, setting all the spider’s web of the scaffold and the stairs swaying and creaking, and raising a storm of dust from every surface, particles dancing in the beam of Rita’s torch.
Terror flew back at her in a sickening wave. What was happening? Was it the end?
Then the movement calmed, and she was alive still, the stairs holding firm. But her alertness only grew the more taut, for, from far above, there came an even stranger sound: a faint, high-pitched whistling, a hooting as of wind. Then silence.
Oh sweet holy motherfucker.
It was starting up there. Whatever the Wheel had summoned, it was getting close.
What was the time? If it had been, say, five a.m. when she had begun, then surely it must be at least eleven a.m. by now, as impossible as it was to believe in this shaft that there was daylight anywhere in the world. And she still had more than halfway to go. At this pace it would be after dark by the time she reached the bottom, and that was too late. She had to move faster, for she knew in her heart that if she wasn’t down by sunset, if she wasn’t out from under the Mount before nightfall, then she would not make it down at all.
A hopeless sob escaped her, but she forced herself to stagger down the next flight, trying to go with greater speed, willing her injured leg, stiffened taut now, to bend and bend again. And so on, down the flight after that, and the flight after that …
In time, she fell almost into a doze as she went, terror notwithstanding. Only to be awakened when a voice was suddenly laughing raucously up and down the shaft.
‘Rita! Ha! Can you hear me down there? You should have listened to me! I told you!’ It was Richman again, hailing on the intercoms.
She stared down blearily, saw that there was a panel only two flights below her. As the billionaire’s mutterings and laughter echoed in the darkness, she limped down to it. It read ES24, the halfway mark, but that did not seem to matter now. She pressed the Talk button. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘There you are! How far down are you now? However far it is, it doesn’t matter, because you’re going to have to come back up!’
‘For fuck’s sake, what?’
The billionaire’s distorted voice was gleeful. ‘Clara! I’ve talked to Clara!’
Rita stared at the hateful little speaker in shock. ‘What do you mean—Clara?’
‘She’s alive after al
l. She made it out. But you’ll never do it. You’ll have to come back up.’
‘Clara is out? Since when?’
‘Since yesterday. But she lost her walkie-talkie, and it took her until just now to find another one that works, so she could call and let me know.’
Since yesterday? Clara wasn’t dead at all, but had escaped and been free for a whole day? But … but her last message. I’m jumping now. What had that meant? ‘What happened to her?’ Rita demanded. ‘What happened to her in the shaft?’
Laughter. ‘She didn’t jump; she just lost her mind there for a while; she had a blackout; she doesn’t know for how long, a few hours probably. When she came out of it she had climbed almost to the bottom. But that’s where it gets really difficult, climbing wise. The stairs, the gantry, everything is gone completely down there, and she was out of rope to rappel with. So she had to free climb—tough, technical climbing—down the wall of the shaft itself. She barely made it. You never will, Rita. Never.’
‘But she got out?’
‘Yes, yes, she got to the tunnel and got out. She says it’s a hell of a mess outside; half of Base is washed away. But not all of it. The security office is still standing. That’s where she found the radio.’
Conflicting emotions raged through Rita. Hope, fear, doubt. ‘Is there help down there, did she say? Are people alive? Has a ship come yet?’
‘People are alive, I don’t know how many, but yes, help is coming. Clara found the satellite phones, too. She’s been talking to Hobart. They’ve had all sorts of troubles getting choppers in here because of the weather, but there’re two on the way right now to take us all out, due in an hour or so. You have to come back up, or you might get left behind.’
Rita sagged against the panel. Thank every god imaginable, rescue at last. And yet, and yet … here was Richman again, insisting that she go up. Could it be another trick? Was it true, what he was saying about Clara? And what about the Wheel?
‘Richman,’ she said, ‘did you feel a tremor a while ago? And hear … I don’t know … but is there any wind blowing up there?’
The Rich Man’s House Page 55
