He sounded puzzled. ‘There’re no tremors, no wind. Why are you still worrying about that?’
She frowned. The tremor had been very real; he must have felt it. Was he lying?
She pressed the button again. ‘Can I speak to Clara myself? Can she call me on this?’
A pause. ‘No, no, she can’t, not from where she is. The intercom system in the shaft only talks to the control rooms up here. Remember?’
Damn. She did remember; it was true. But what about the rest of it? The tale of Clara’s survival? Despite her doubts, it sounded tantalisingly plausible. It explained Clara’s long silence, if she’d been in a fugue state for hours, and lost her radio in the shaft, and then had to search for another amid the wreckage of Base …
If only it didn’t mean that Rita had to go up again. For even if rescue was really coming, even if a chopper would be landing on the Terrace an hour from now, there was still the Wheel to consider. It was not done with them, not done with Richman—something awful was coming, and Rita knew she had to be at the bottom of the Mount, not the top.
She said, ‘Is Clara sure I can’t follow her down and get out the way she did?’
‘Not a chance,’ Richman came back confidently. ‘Coming up is your only hope.’
But there was a peculiar edge to his voice. An eagerness, it seemed to Rita. An enthusiasm that didn’t fit. After all, hadn’t Richman already shown that he didn’t care if she lived or died; indeed, that he probably preferred the latter? Why then was he suddenly so keen for her to be rescued alongside him?
In any case, was it really out of the question for her to keep going down? Consider: a helicopter would be landing at Base as well as up at the Observatory, to pick up Clara, right? If Rita could just get close to the bottom of the shaft, even if she couldn’t quite reach ground level, then surely the rescuers would be able to find a way to climb up to her?
Yes, yes … anything would be better than going upwards. Upwards felt wrong.
But something warned her not to tell Richman about this, not yet. She chose her words carefully, pressed the button. ‘Okay. Okay, I’ll get going. I’ll call you when I’ve made some progress.’
‘Excellent.’ The relief in him was, once more, too eager, too quick. ‘You’re doing the right thing, Rita. I know things got pretty hairy these last days, but the worst is over now. You’ll see.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Over and out for now.’ And took her finger from the button. No. No, she did not trust him, or that eagerness, at all.
She turned to the stairs once more, playing her torch beam over the flights below. Yes, she would continue on down and at least see for herself, at least be sure that the way was really blocked, before she even considered going up again.
Was there a faint tremor beneath her feet—and again, was there, just within hearing, a distant piping sound from high, high above?
She shook her head. Maybe it was phantoms. Maybe everything was okay up there.
But she headed down anyway.
10
THE LOWER STAIRS
It was perhaps about an hour later—outside, in the normal world, it must now be past noon—that Rita saw the thing, hanging below her.
She had been in another of her walking dozes, hurrying as fast as her fear would allow, still in constant terror at every groan and shiver of the stairs, but her thoughts, from sheer monotony, drifting away. Within the small pool of her torch beam the ladder she climbed was eternally the same ladder, rung by rung leading down to the same steel grate, and then, when she reversed direction, it would be the same ladder again. The uniformity was hypnotising. And all around, the walls of the shaft were unchanging.
Or was that, in fact, true? A doubt came dimly, and Rita paused upon the next landing, played the flashlight across the shaft walls. Was the colour different? She was sure that, when she began the climb, the stone had been a grey-blue. But now the walls were almost an ochre tan. Could that mean that the quality of the rock itself was changing, as she sank deeper into the heart of the Mount? And god, she really was in the belly of the great spire now, wasn’t she, with all those vast tonnes of stone above her, pressing down. If she thought about it too much the shaft itself seemed to squeeze and shrink … and oh, it would be so easy to lose one’s wits in this awful place.
Like Clara had.
Stop it. Clara made it out, remember? Clara is fine. And so will you be.
It helped. Rita took a water bottle from her pocket and drank. It was almost all gone, the water. She should have brought more, not to mention some food, the very notion of which made her feel faint. But why was she so thirsty? It wasn’t hot in the shaft; it was cold, with a steady flow of chill air rising from below. Blood loss, maybe. Her injured leg was soaked, that was a lot of fluid to replace …
Her thoughts wandered again, dangerously vague. Funny how Clara had said that it was actually hot in the shaft, so hot that she had taken her clothes off. She must have been very confused.
But she made it out.
Rita put the bottle away, wearily turned her torch to the next flights below.
And saw it.
Far down, at the limit of the torch’s reach, something was hanging in the shaft.
A white bundled shape. Rita stared in puzzlement, not understanding how the thing could be suspended there. It seemed to be floating in midair, in the wide vacancy between the stairs and the curved wall of the shaft. But then she realised that whatever the thing was, it was connected to a long rope that hung from one of the lateral support struts—the narrow iron beams that, here and there, stretched from the tower of the elevator scaffold across to the shaft walls, steadying the entire structure.
Was it a bag?
Clara had mentioned throwing her backpack away, hadn’t she? So was that it?
But it didn’t look like a bag. In the torch beam shadows it looked more like—
Oh god. Oh no. Not that.
It couldn’t be, Rita told herself. She stared a moment longer, unable to tell, then went clambering down the stairs, heedless of any danger. She had to get close; she had to see for certain.
Maybe a dozen flights down she stopped and aimed the torch again. The thing was there, no more than ten metres below her now, dangling motionless over the abyss, white and hideous in the light. And there could be no doubt anymore.
It was all a lie.
Clara hadn’t got out.
Clara hadn’t made it to the bottom. She was hanging dead in the torch beam.
In mute horror, Rita let her gaze rise up the rope from which the body dangled. The line was tied in a knot around the horizontal strut, which speared out just below where Rita stood.
Tied. So, after sending her last message—jumping now—the majordomo, lost in the Wheel’s spell, must have shimmied out along the strut, fixed the line, then dropped into the empty air.
Had she done it to hang herself, like some criminal executed on a gallows?
If so, she had failed cruelly, for the rope must have tangled about her as she fell. Clara now dangled not upright from her neck, but almost sideways, with her feet uppermost, the rope looped about each of her legs, spreading them wide apart. Her arms were lashed helplessly to her sides by another loop, and the final noose about her neck had yanked her head back grotesquely, forcing her tongue out and making her dead eyes bulge as they stared up.
Oh no no no …
The major-domo was naked, other than the adornment of the rope. And finally Rita was answered as to the mystery of Clara’s frostbite. For yes, each of her feet was missing not only its toes, but the whole lower half, leaving only blunt stubs of heels. And the heels were bloody. She had hobbled to this final end on feet cut and crippled by the metal stairs.
Rita moved again, descending the last few flights to come level with the corpse, her torch beam held on the atrocity all the while. Tears blurred her vision, but she was mute, too torn with pity and grief to weep, or to even give vent to profanity.
She was leve
l with Clara finally—but there was nothing she could do. The body hung a good three metres out in space. Rita could not reach to cut it down, could not even ease the obscene indignity of its pose. Clara must simply hang there, as she had through the last two days, choked and dead like this, while high above the others had worried, and then forgotten about her in their own troubles.
But—oh fuck, had she died straightaway? Or had she woken up from her Wheel trance to find herself like this? Please god let it be that she died without waking up, let it be that she hadn’t lingered like this, agonisingly aware, but her arms trapped, unable to help herself in any way …
Then suddenly rage was sweeping Rita’s grief aside. Fucking Richman. Clara had been dead all along; she had never reached the bottom. Never. He had lied again; he had fabricated all of it, the whole fantasy about the major-domo escaping. It was deception, designed yet again for one purpose: to get to her.
It was unspeakable. In her fury, she turned brutally from the dangling corpse—there was nothing she could do for it, nothing—and stomped heedlessly down the ladders again, flight after flight, until she came to the next intercom panel.
There, she stabbed the call button and hissed into the mike. ‘You bastard; you fucking bastard. Clara is dead. I just found her. She never got out.’
There was a pause, then a clatter of static. ‘What? What did you say?’
‘Clara is dead! I just found her body! She’s hanging from the end of a rope!’
‘What?’ Richman sounded bewildered. ‘What are you going on about? I was talking to her just five minutes ago. She’s fine.’
‘Stop it, just stop the fucking bullshit, all right? I’ve seen her damn body; I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not working!’
Another pause, then Richman again, sounding deadly cold. ‘Rita, I don’t know what game you’re playing, but Clara is alive. I’ve talked with her. You’re the one who’s lying. Or maybe … Christ, how long have you been in that damn shaft now? You know how confused Clara became, maybe the same is happening to you? Think. How come you didn’t notice her body on the way down, but only discovered it now that you’re heading up again? Makes no sense.’
‘I’m not going upwards, you fool, I’m still going down. And I’m not losing my mind. But Clara did, and it got her killed. I’ve seen her.’
‘No, goddamnit, you haven’t!’ Richman was angry now. ‘You can’t have!’ A chill curled in Rita. The billionaire’s anger sounded genuine. It was not the embarrassed annoyance of a liar caught out in his lie, or even the defiance of a shameless conman doubling down—it was the alarmed irritation of a man hearing news that conflicted with his own reality.
And it came to her starkly: Richman really believed that Clara was alive.
For a second she doubted herself instead. Could she be the one imagining things? Had she hallucinated the corpse? Reluctantly, she played her torch beam upwards—and shuddered. Clara was still there, dangling above now like some awful broken sack, half lost again in shadows, but real.
Rita lowered the flashlight, her vision blurred with new tears, and pressed the Talk button. ‘Richman, when you spoke to Clara on the walkie-talkie, did you really recognise it as her voice? It couldn’t be someone else that you’re confusing for Clara?’
‘Of course fucking not! I’ve known Clara for years. Do you think I don’t know her voice when I hear it? And why would someone else say they were Clara if they weren’t? You’re not thinking straight, woman.’
One of us isn’t thinking straight, Rita noted, but it wasn’t her. Richman was being deliberately misled—his thoughts, his very hearing, were being played with. And it could only be the Wheel doing it. The mountain was toying with him.
She tried again. ‘Richman, listen to me. What’s happening with the weather up there? Are you still watching the Wheel on your screens?’
‘That again? Look, the mountain is fine, the weather is fine. Let it go, already.’
He sounded sure—but if the Wheel could convince Richman that he was talking to his dead major-domo on the radio, then surely it could also make him see whatever it wanted him to see through the cameras, and hide what was really happening.
Even as Rita pondered, another tremor rumbled and shook the shaft, rattling the stairs. And once more a sound sighed down from above, a distant whistle of wind that rose and fell, as if a gale had blown briefly in the passageways at the top of the shaft.
But apparently the billionaire could hear none of it, feel none of it, see none of it.
She gave a final effort. ‘Walter, look, I don’t know if you can really leave your room or not, but if you can, for the love of god leave now and head down. It might not be too late.’ She didn’t believe that; it was too late, but surely it was better that he try, rather than sit there meekly to await his end.
But the reply was only scathing. ‘Fuck you, I know what you’re doing with all this crap about Clara. You’d do anything, say anything, to try and put me in danger, now that rescue is here.’
‘Rescue? You really think that’s coming? You said the helicopters were less than an hour away. Shouldn’t one have landed by now?’
‘They’re coming! Clara is in constant contact with them via satellite phone. They’ve struck stronger headwinds than expected, that’s all. But it’ll only delay them another hour at most.’
Rita shook her head. For the first time there was a hint of mania in his certainty. And maybe none of this mattered anyway, maybe he truly was trapped in his safe room by the time lock, come what may. Enough then. She could no more help Richman than she could help poor Clara, hanging above.
Time to move. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said into the intercom, as her farewell. ‘I don’t know how to convince you. Good luck.’
She turned away, ignoring the tide of invective that spewed from the speaker in her wake, and returned to the ordeal of the descent.
▲
Now she was on unexplored ground.
It was doubtful that poor Clara had made it much further than this, before the Wheel took her mind away and sent her climbing randomly up and down over the same section of stairs. So there would be no more fixed ropes to help Rita in the difficult spots. She was on her own.
On the other hand, she could at least dismiss Richman’s tale about the stairs having collapsed entirely near the bottom of the shaft. That was a report he had supposedly received from Clara. It was possible thus that the stairs remained intact all the way down.
So she had to hope anyway. But in fact her progress, in the hour or so following her final conversation with Richman, was more torturous than ever. The stairs only deteriorated the deeper she went, with more and more ladders wrenched askew, forcing her to climb again and again on the scaffolding, dropping painfully from beam to beam, knuckles white on the metal. Terror assailed her afresh every single time, and there was still so far to go.
And Richman would not shut up. She had sworn to herself that she would not speak with him again, but there was nothing she could do to stop him hailing the intercoms. His voice, sometimes a faraway mutter when she was between intercoms, sometimes a hectoring shriek if she was passing by a panel, was her constant companion in the darkness.
‘Clara called again,’ he was saying at one point as she passed by a speaker. ‘She doesn’t sound very dead to me, you know. And she’s worried about you, Rita. She says you’re crazy for not going back up. She says you’re going to die down there.’ And his voice sounded almost dreamily detached now, as if envisioning something pleasant.
By the time she approached the next panel down, he had moved on, by some process of free association, to the subject of her father. ‘Of course, Richard always said you were unstable. Yes, he was happy that you two were talking again, but it was his belief that the death of your mother permanently unhinged something in you. He thought that maybe if you hadn’t been so set against men and against marriage, that maybe if you’d had children of your own, it might have fixed you …’
> Good god. She shut it out and shuffled down more ladders until his voice was reduced again to indistinct mutterings. But when she came to the next intercom, he was still on the same theme.
‘Displacement, he thought it might have been. Delusions of grandeur. All this nonsense about presences that only you in all the world can detect. It’s one way to feel special, I suppose, when you aren’t special at all. Was that how it was? The daughter of a man like him, born without any of his talent, and denying her own womanhood, cooking up something that would make her important?’
Rita raised an eyebrow. So Richman was not even a believer in presences anymore? It was all nonsense, something cooked up? After everything that had happened, and was happening still, he was suddenly a master of reason, a sceptic?
Blind fool.
For all the while, the signs were clear that the final cataclysm was brewing up above. Tremors were shivering through the stairs every few minutes now, and strange moans and whistles and thuds sounded again and again from the top of the shaft. And down where Rita was, the slow ooze of air from the bottom had strengthened to a gusty upward breeze, drawn by some vacuum-like hunger above.
Oh yes, it was a warning, she must hurry, she must hurry. It must be mid-afternoon by now. But shortly after passing an intercom panel marked ES14—which meant she still had three hundred and fifty flights to go, or seven hundred metres, nearly a third of the journey yet—she came upon exactly what she had been fearing most, ever since finding Clara.
It was another collapsed section. Two ladders and most of the scaffolding had fallen away, leaving a complete gap of four metres, a naked drop without a single crossbeam that might be climbed down. Yes, Rita had previously descended gaps just as wide—but this time there was no rope, ready strung, to help her do it. Clara had not made it this far.
Rita crouched on the upper landing, shining the torch about in growing panic. And that was another thing, the torch itself—was the beam getting dimmer now? How long had it been since she switched it on? Four hours, five? It wouldn’t last forever. But forget that for now, it was a distraction. Concentrate. Think. How the fuck was she going to get down to the platform below? There was nothing but air.
The Rich Man’s House Page 56
