Well, no, that wasn’t quite true. The load-bearing upright struts of the scaffold still remained in place. One of them ran from her landing to the landing directly below. Couldn’t she use that to climb down, just as she had used Clara’s ropes?
Except that it wasn’t a rope; it was a steel girder, smooth and sharp-edged. She could not hold onto that. She would slip and plunge away in the darkness, the walls of the shaft rushing by, tearing off her skin, the wind wailing in her ears—
Stop it. Stop thinking. Just do it. Force yourself to move. You have no choice anyway.
And maybe even fear itself does approach prostration eventually, for without any of the moans of her early forays over the abyss, Rita only swung in grim silence down onto the strut, the torch stuffed once more in her pocket. Her arms and legs wrapped around the steel, the corners digging into her flesh, she began her sliding descent, for all the world like a slow-motion fireman on a pole.
Bizarrely, as she slid she was suddenly aware of Richman’s voice, wafting up on the cold breeze, lecturing. ‘It’s what a superior mind, all superior minds, realise at the ultimate point of decision, and it’s this: there is no right and wrong, there is only the decision, and the act, and the results of the act, victory or loss, survival or death, nothing else …’
Jesus. That tired old shit now?
Fuck. Stop. Ignore him. She was a metre down, three metres to go to safety.
Then abruptly the shaft throbbed and rumbled around her, and the girder seemed to warp like a bowstring under her grip. Another tremor! She clung there an absurd moment, a hapless rider at a vertical rodeo, then the metal kicked her free.
For the second time, she fell.
And for the second time, she crashed into the landing below, and was saved.
But the impact was harder this time, much harder. She slammed face first into the grate, her nose blossoming with pain as if broken, her shoulder hitting too, and a bone—a collar bone, maybe—snapping audibly. But worst of all, by the far the worst, she felt the torch being jolted free from her pocket, watched as it bobbled a moment on the platform. She reached for it and missed, then shrieked as it went over the edge, tumbling, dropping irretrievably away into the abyss, the beam drawing endless circles, mapping the shaft as it went, an eternity of falling, until the light snapped out all of a sudden, either hitting the ground or some other obstruction, and then—
Darkness. Utter lightlessness. And silence, thick, as the tremor passed, leaving only the whisper of Richman’s voice rippling along the shaft walls, like an echo of the disaster, ‘… someone like you would never understand, for, as the saying goes, to a creature born in a cage, freedom itself is the crime.’
▲
Rita made herself move on quickly.
Yes, she could have given up there and then. She could have curled into a ball of catatonic despair, or retreated into hysteria, shrieking into the void until the darkness could be borne no longer, and she threw herself off her ledge to end it.
But she allowed herself none of these luxuries. Instead, before terror could paralyse her, and before even taking stock of her injuries, she reached out in the blackness, found the first step of the next descending ladder, and on her hands and knees began to crawl her way down, lizard-like, pressed flat to the rungs, feeling ahead with the touch of her bruised fingers. One flight down, then a landing, then turn, hands groping blindly, to find the next flight, and so on.
It could be done; it could be done.
That mantra, and the fact of motion, was enough to make the terror withdraw a fraction.
Now she could take stock, even as she crept on. Her nose was bleeding, or at least it was warm and wet whenever she put a hand to it; and there were other cuts on her face; and her left shoulder cracked with every moment, the pain fresh and sharp compared to the throb of her wounded thigh. She was, in all, a wreck: exhausted, delirious, losing too much blood altogether—but so what? She was still capable of movement, that was all that mattered.
Fine. Except that she was blind now; she might easily, even at a crawl, plunge off a landing by mistake. And what if she came to another gap, a collapsed section, a missing ladder? What if, searching for a rung that wasn’t there, she simply overbalanced and went tumbling down? Even if she didn’t actually fall, another such gap would be the doom of her anyway, as it could never be crossed in the blackness.
But that didn’t matter either, not until it occurred. In the meantime she must move, and move, and not let herself scream.
In the intensity of such focus, it was some time before she realised that Richman had stopped talking. The only sounds in the shaft now, other than her own, were the faint rumbles and groans caused by the tremors. They had become almost continuous, an eternal, half-heard thunder. That, and the whisper in her ears of the air rising around her, the breeze tugging more and more insistently, a nagging alert that the fatal moment above was coming closer.
Ignore, ignore, just move.
Down Rita clambered. Already she had lost count of the flights she had descended since dropping the torch, nor was there hope any longer of getting her bearings from the numbers on the intercom panels. She must merely forge on in her blindness until some end was reached—the bottom, or some impassable gap and the inevitable fall to her death, or simply until insanity took her completely.
Then Richman suddenly spoke again, loud, almost in her ear, making her jump even in her crouch, as if he had touched her in the dark. But of course it only meant that she must be alongside an intercom speaker. Yet it wasn’t just his voice that shocked her out of her stupor, it was what he said.
‘I took a piss in the Hand of God. Did you know that, Rita? I pissed on it.’
Her eyes went wide in the blackness. His voice had lost its hectoring tone. Now it was reflective, and perfectly sane-sounding, for all that he must be speaking from pure madness.
‘No, seriously,’ he said, as if in answer to her thought. ‘Nobody knows it, because I’ve never told anyone before, even though I was asked all the time about what I did on the summit, what I saw in the cave there. Of course, I’m only telling you now because you’ll be dead soon. Do you hear? When the helicopter comes for me, I’m not going to tell them you’re down there. I’ll tell them you vanished, that I don’t know where you went. We’ll all fly away without you, and no one will find your body for months.’
She nodded to herself. Unquestionably, he was mad. For one thing, he had forgotten that, by his story, Clara was alive and knew Rita was in the shaft. Even his own crazed logic was collapsing.
Richman chatted serenely on. ‘Now, I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking that I was in an altitude suit when I reached the top of the Wheel, sealed and pressurised, so how could I take a piss? Well, fair enough, obviously I didn’t simply hang my prick out at minus seventy degrees and in almost zero atmosphere. It’s not even possible, in a suit. There’s no zip, no fly. But the urine is accessible—it’s captured via tubing and stored in a compartment in the thigh, and that compartment can be opened and emptied without removing the suit. Are you following all these details?’
Rita almost nodded again, as if he could see her. She was hesitating on the landing, knowing that she should keep moving, but bizarrely fascinated by his tale. Was it true, had he really done it?
‘So there I am, in the Hand of God, and I step into the cave, and I know that no one can see me there. I look around and there’s nothing of interest, it’s just an overhang of rock, nothing there at all, for all the stupid myths that people believe. And I think to myself, should I leave some mark that I was here? Carve my name in the stone?
‘Then it comes to me, something even better. I pop the urine compartment and pull out the container. The piss in there is not fully heated; it’s a half-frozen mush, not quite solid, not quite liquid. And quick as I can, I smear it all around the cave. Most of it is boiling away as I go, but enough of it clings there to make it worthwhile, frozen to the walls forever.
‘And that’s the point—forever is exactly how long it will be there. As long as the Wheel itself stands, my piss will be on its summit. Is there a better way to say how much I fucking own that mountain? I owned it on that day; I’ve owned it ever since; I own it still, and there’s nothing the Wheel can do about it. Even after all the shit of these last few days, I’m still here, my house is still here. So I’ve beaten it again.
‘You can feel that, right? With your precious special senses? The Wheel has spent its all in this attack; it’s got nothing left. And what’s more, it won’t get another chance. It took it forty bloody years to save up the strength to try and get me this time, so if it wants another shot it’ll take forty years more—and by then who cares, I’ll be long gone.
‘So I win.
‘Do you get that?
‘I win.’
Rita started moving again, not needing to hear more. And lord, the question wasn’t whether or not he was mad now, the question was had he been mad all along, even when he was young and famously leading his huge team in their efforts against the Wheel? To scoop out his frozen piss to slather about the summit … was that a sane act? But then what did madness or sanity even mean to people like him, when money and power were their only standards?
It was all irrelevant. Movement was all that mattered. Because whatever else Richman was right or wrong about, he was dead wrong in thinking that the Wheel was exhausted. Rita’s every sense shrilled that it was instead coming to the full flood of its power, and to the long-awaited fulfilment of its vengeance upon the billionaire. And he was oblivious.
On, on she pressed, crawling in the blackness, the breeze gusting in her face, almost a wind now. Sometimes she reached too far with her groping hands and overbalanced and fell chin first to the step below, banging her broken nose, or wrenching her fractured shoulder, reigniting the agony. But she let none of it stop her; there was less time than ever, the urgency in the air a greater prod than all the pain in the world. She had to get out, had to.
She didn’t know how many intercoms she must have passed in the darkness without hearing a word from Richman, but suddenly he was calling out once more from a speaker close at hand, piercing and exultant. ‘Do you hear that, Rita? Do you hear that sound? There’s a helicopter out there, at last. It’s landing on the Terrace. Listen to it!’
He left the channel open, apparently so that she could hear the noise of the helicopter in the background. And the thing was, she could hear something: a droning over the speaker, tinny and distant, yet powerful, rising and falling.
But it didn’t sound like a helicopter to Rita. It didn’t sound like anything human at all. It reminded her of the hum a swarm of bees would make, or worse, a swarm of wasps, rising furiously to attack an intruder. But it wasn’t bees or wasps either.
She knew what it was.
It was the voice of the Wheel, ululating in full cry now around the Observatory.
11
THE BOTTOM
The intercom clicked off at last. Rita lingered a few moments by the panel anyway, wondering. What was Richman doing now up there? Was he looking eagerly from screen to screen in his safe room, trying to spot an imaginary helicopter landing on the Terrace, on an imaginary calm, sunny day? Was he so far gone, maybe, that he could actually see that?
But lord, even down here, something like two kilometres below Richman, the imminence of disaster was becoming ghastly. The stairs trembled constantly under Rita’s hands, jolting fiercely now and then, and the wind was starting to race up the shaft, moaning through the scaffolding as it went.
She must keep going. Yet she hesitated still, wondering if she should call Richman back on the intercom, to try one last time to save him, to tell him what was really happening. Even in the dark, she might be able to find the button. But no … it was too late, she knew, much too late. Move.
She crawled on again, down flight after flight. She gave no quarter to the pain any longer, or fretted about what would happen if she came to a gap in the stairs. There was only the urgency, and the wind streaming upwards, beating against her. Soon she could hear little else but the rush of it in her ears.
Faster, faster she pushed, heedless of anything but escape now—and yet, what was that scratching sound that barely cut through the din?
Then she had it: she was passing by another intercom panel, and Richman was yelling through it, she could just discern his words.
‘I told you! I told you! The chopper has landed and Clara is right outside my door now. She’s banging on it. I can hear her yelling. I can’t open it, but she says they’ve found a way to get in anyway. It’ll only take a little while, then I’ll be gone!’
And Rita had time to shape only a single thought, horrified: that whatever it was that was banging on Richman’s door, it was not his major-domo, it was nothing remotely human at all …
Then she was plunging on into the wind, and really it had grown into a gale now, a vast inhalation drawn by the impending catastrophe above, roaring up the shaft, stinging her already battered flesh and making the stairs clank and sway on their loosened moorings. Awful, awful, nothing she had known had ever been as bad as this, the darkness, the shout of the wind around her, the fear that she had only minutes left to live, that once more she was a tiny mote caught upon a giant wave that was about to break.
Then she fell again.
Her hand groped out, found only the wind, and she tumbled into nothingness, screaming soundlessly. For an immeasurable instant she plummeted into the gale. Then she hit metal again, hard, the breath slammed from her so completely it did not seem, as she writhed and rolled and came to a stop, that she could ever get air back into her lungs.
But at last breath came, gasping and convulsive, and amazingly nothing seemed broken, or at least broken any worse than before. She must have toppled only a flight or two, and maybe even the wind had helped, uplifting and slowing her fall, even as its awful voice bawled endlessly at her.
There was no time to stop, no time to wonder. She righted herself somehow in the nightmare dark, crawled on again. Down and down, thinking nothing, hoping nothing, deafened, but feeling great thuds and contortions from the stone tube around her, the whole Mount hunkering under the assault.
Then she came up against a barrier of some kind, a great tangle of metal. She clutched about in the dark, felt steel all bent and twisted, piled heaps of it. It must be wreckage fallen from above, ladders and scaffolding, all tangled together. The blockage seemed huge, as if it filled the shaft from side to side.
But she must not stop. She ducked belly flat and squirmed beneath the mess. There was just space enough down along the ladder. Jagged points tore at her skin, ripped her clothes to rags. Naked, she thought crazily, they were all naked when they died. But at last she was through, and the stairs seemed clear once again. Down another flight, and another. And then—
The ladder she was descending ended, and she felt something utterly shocking under her hand. It was stone. Flat, smooth stone. Not metal, not the grill of one of the landings. It was bedrock.
She scrabbled about in wonder. Stone, stone—it was the bottom of the shaft!
She had made it, despite everything she had made it!
She was weeping again, her bruised cheek to the ground. Her hands now came upon a wall. She groped along it sideways for a metre or so, and yes, it curved as it went, it was the shaft’s circular wall. There was no mistake. She was down!
But—
Her scrabbling became more urgent. Where was the way out? There should be a door of some sort here, opening into what would be a long tunnel that led away through the base of the Mount to the final exit. But as she continued to crawl along the curving wall, occasionally climbing over wreckage fallen from above, she found nothing. Where was it?
The wall went on. Goddamn, it couldn’t be that long of a circuit, could it? Had she already completed a full turn? How could she know in the dark? She pushed on, and it was only when she was clambering over a third piece of
wreckage that she finally realised: it was actually the same piece of wreckage that she was climbing over for the third time. She stopped, blinking blindly.
There was no door.
She huddled there a moment, eyes wide and unseeing and terrified. There was no door. But that was madness. Terror raging through her, she completed another circuit, again found only smooth bedrock, refusing her. She had been tricked! It was all a lie, there was no tunnel, no exit. She had come all this hideous way only to be trapped.
She collapsed then, sobbing. Beneath her, the cruel stone was throbbing with earthquakes, and the wind was an ecstasy of noise, the Mount groaning in mortal pain. It was almost time; it was almost the end, and she was blind. There was nowhere she could go now, nothing she could do; she was defeated; the shaft had won; she was going to die here.
No, said a voice.
But not a voice. Rita did not stir in the blackness, she remained huddled and weeping on the floor, but her mind seemed to withdraw from herself now, lifting away and then looking down on her own body, even though there was no light to do so. And in that withdrawn space, she was not alone.
You don’t need to die, said the voice calmly. You only need to think, and you can live.
She regarded this statement with bemusement, strangely unworried. Who was speaking to her? No one else was in the shaft. It wasn’t a presence, not as she had ever known one. And it certainly wasn’t the Wheel; the voice had none of the lofty austerity with which she associated the mountain. And yet she wasn’t alone.
So who was there?
Who spoke?
The voice ignored her. There is indeed an exit, and you have all the clues you need to find it.
Clues?
Can you feel the wind anymore?
The wind? Rita could hear it, god knew, but now that the voice drew her attention to it, she could no longer feel it. It wasn’t shrieking around her anymore; the air where she lay was almost still. And yet from over her head the howling went on. So from where was the air being drawn into the shaft?
The Rich Man’s House Page 57
