The Angry Mountain

by Hammond Innes

  “Yes,” I said.

  I was just about to tell her to run for the doorway through which the others had gone when she cried out, “Look!” She was pointing to the roof of the monastery buildings opposite. For an instant I saw the figure of a man outlined against another shower of sparks. He was running along the roof. “Is that him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “The lava’s scared him. He’s coming for the car.” I got out the little automatic Zina had given me, loaded it and stood there waiting.

  He wasn’t long. He flung out through the doorway and jumped into the Fiat. I heard the starter buzz. Then the sound was drowned in the crumbling roar of another building going down. The dust rose as the sound died. Sansevino was still pressing the starter button. Then he abandoned it and dived into the Buick. Again the buzz of a starter. I could see his face in the dashboard light. The eyes glittered with panic and I suddenly wanted to laugh. I’d have stood in the very path of a thousand streams of lava to see fear so stamped on the man’s face.

  When he realised it wouldn’t start he got out and went back to the Fiat. He tried the starter again. Then he opened the bonnet. It didn’t take him long to realise what the trouble was. He straightened up, looking about him as though sensing our presence. For an instant he stared at the doorway where we were standing. His hand reached to his pocket and he began to come towards us.

  At that moment a great vomit of fire sprawled into the sky. He turned and glanced upwards, his body crouched as though to ward off a blow. He stayed like that as though petrified while the arch of flame spread over the under-belly of the black, billowing gases that covered the sky and the roar of the mountain shook the ground under our feet. There was a whistling sound and something fell with a thud into the courtyard sending up a little puff of ash. Then he straightened up and at the same moment a rain of stones descended on the courtyard, hot stones that smouldered where they fell. They clattered against the stone of the monastery building and rolled to our feet, smouldering and stinking of sulphur.

  Sansevino was running now, slithering and stumbling on the loose ash. In the ruddy glare I could see his face twisted with terror. He almost made the main gateway, but then suddenly he was struck down. It seemed to catch him by the shoulder and send him sprawling in the ash. Above the sound of the mountain and the thump of falling stones I heard his squeal of fear. He twisted over and over, his body contorted, and then he was up again, limping painfully and making for the archway. He reached it and disappeared into the shadows.

  The fall of stones ceased as abruptly as it had begun. I gave Hilda one of the rotor arms. “See if you can find the others,” I told her. “I’m going after him.”

  “Why not let him go?”

  “No,” I said. “He may be the only one who can lead us to your father. I must try and stop him. You get the others.”

  I left the shelter of the archway then and crossed the courtyard. “Please be careful,” she called after me. I floundered in the sifting surface of ash. It made my leg very difficult to handle. The sound of my feet on the clear paving stones of the main archway seemed unnaturally loud. Then I was out in the street. I could see the piazza with its pump and the cart lying drunkenly on its broken wheel. The ash was pitted by the fall of stones as though there had been a brief shower of heavy rain. Not a living thing moved in all that street. It was as though a grey desert had moved in and destroyed all life.

  I turned then and looked back up the narrow rise of the street. Sansevino was standing in the middle of the road, quite still, his back towards me. He was staring up the street and I saw why he’d stopped. It was a truly terrifying sight. The road was narrow like a cutting between the sheer walls of the houses. But instead of going up out of the village into the open vineyards of the mountain slopes, that street ceased abruptly in a great wall that towered as high as the houses. In the lurid glow the narrow cut seemed choked with an enormous coke pile.

  There was a sudden shifting sound as the coke spilled forward and as it spilled a white molten glare filled the end of the street. The house fronts flickered with light, their faces seeming to be twisted in agony as they saw their doom, and a blast of furnace-hot air ran down the shaft of the street, blistering hot and chokingly sulphurous. Then the light died as the outer surface of the lava-spill cooled.

  Sansevino turned and started down towards me. I was so astonished by the sight of the lava that I did nothing. I just stood there in the middle of the street and watched him trying to run towards me, his right side twisted with pain. He didn’t see me for a moment. When he did he stopped. He had the startled, frightened look of a thing trapped. He gave one glance over his shoulder at the spilling face of the lava and dived into the open doorway of a house.

  If he’d had a gun he could have shot me down from the shelter of that doorway. But he hadn’t got a gun. His gun was lying in the villa, one bullet in Roberto’s body, the others embedded in the floorboards. As I followed him through the doorway where he’d disappeared there was a crumbling sound and I saw one of the houses at the end of the street topple into the lava stream in a cloud of mortar dust.

  The building was very dark after the glare of the street. It smelt of garbage and earth closets. Dusty windows gave the shadows a reddish gleam. I listened. I could hear no sound but the distant gaseous hiss of the crater. He wasn’t climbing the stairs. Either he was waiting in the shadows for me or else he had gone straight through the building. I switched on my torch. The beam showed stone steps leading upwards. A passageway led past these to the back of the house. The stone floor was worn smooth and deep by the footsteps of many generations. It led to a back room. There was a big double bed with huge Birmingham brass knobs, an old chest of drawers and a table supported at one corner by a packing case. The place was littered with household things all mixed up with straw on which animals had been bedded. The door on the other side stood open.

  It led to a small patch of ground backed by a low wall and then more houses. And in the ash that covered the garden I saw the track of a man’s feet. I followed them, over the stone wall, to the back of the next row of houses. They ended at the steps to a balcony. The balcony was arched with pillars of stone. Stone steps led upwards from one corner and down the funnel of the stairs I heard the sound of footsteps climbing.

  I followed. At each floor there was a balcony with stone arches and as I climbed higher the arches became blacker as they stood out against the lava glow. At each balcony I caught a glimpse of rooms that had suddenly been vacated. The panic litter of clothes and household things bore dumb witness to the haste with which the occupants had fled. At last I reached the top floor. A wooden ladder ascended to the roof. I switched my torch off and went cautiously up, gripping the tiny automatic in my hand.

  The roof when I reached it looked red hot. It was quite flat and as my head emerged through the trap-door I saw Sansevino not fifty feet away, his body a black silhouette against a huge flow of lava that ringed Santo Francisco to the west. He was climbing the low balustrade to the next house. I followed him, running as best I could on the treacherous surface of loose ash. I glanced up to my right and saw the mountain leaning over me. The great welts of the lava flow streamed down towards the village. There were four flows—one reaching down to the houses, one to the west and two to the east. And over it all was the red, roaring mass of the crater column of gas like an oil gusher that has been fired. Looking up at the incredible sight I trod on a stone and fell with my face in the ash. I think it was the ash that saved me from hurting myself. I spat it out of my mouth and got to my feet, rubbing my eyes.

  Sansevino had reached the end of the block now. I saw him hesitate at the edge and turn back. Then he disappeared into a doorway. The stump of my leg was beginning to ache and a piece of ash had got into my left eye, hurting damnably. The filthy stuff was in my mouth, too, and as I clenched my teeth against the pain of my eye they gritted unpleasantly.

  I reached the doorway where Sansevino had disappeared and s
tumbled through. There was a ladder like the one I’d come up. And then I was descending through stone arched balconies, hearing Sansevino’s footsteps clattering ahead of me. I nearly slipped on a patch of oil—olive oil spilled from a big pottery jar that someone had dropped on the steps.

  At the bottom we came out into a garden full of stunted orange trees, the fruit glowing like little Chinese lanterns. I followed his footsteps to another row of houses, taller this time and in bad repair with the plaster hanging in great mouldering slabs. Here were big rooms littered with beds of bare wooden boards. Many people had slept and lived and kept their livestock in those overcrowded, dirty rooms. An old stone archway led in from the shadow of a narrow street that smelt of rotting garbage and in the far corner of one of the rooms I found a narrow ramp running up to the floor above. It was cobbled and ridged with stone. I could hear Sansevino climbing above me and I followed.

  The ramp was slippery with manure and smelt of horses. With the beam of my torch lighting the way I struggled up to the floor above and then to the next. Here a gaunt, big-boned mule stared at me with rolling, frightened eyes and wisps of straw hanging from its sulky mouth. It twitched its long ears in the light of the torch, laid them back and looked as wicked as hell.

  The ramp finished there, but stone steps led on upwards. I was beginning to feel very tired—a combination of nervous exhaustion, lack of sleep and the ache in the stump of my leg. I stumbled and the tin of my leg clanked against the stone where the treads had been worn into two deep little hollows. I thought of all the people who had climbed up and down those stairs every day of their lives. Generation after generation of them. Parts of these old houses had probably been in constant occupation for well over a thousand years, and in a few hours they would be wiped off the face of the earth.

  The room above was less dirty. There were family pictures on the walls and a little shrine stood in one corner. I went on up. Another floor with a broken bicycle and a small blacksmith’s forge and a smell of charcoal. Would I never get to the top? I felt pretty well at the end of my tether. I seemed to be stumbling on and on, up never-ending flights of worn stone.

  Then suddenly I was out again in the eruption glare. There was a breath of suphurous heat on my face and I had a glimpse of a building, black against the red glow of lava, toppling slowly, toppling and crumbling as it crashed downwards. Then something smashed against the side of my head and I was falling, like the building had done, falling in a shower of sparks to a red, eyeball-searing glow.

  I felt something wrenched out of my hand and then I was struggling back to consciousness with a voice I knew saying, “I hope I do not hurt you.” The voice was the voice I’d heard on the operating table and I screamed.

  “Ah! So now you are frightened, eh?”

  I opened my eyes to find the face of il dottore wavering over me. The cruel lips were drawn back in a thin smile. I could see the tongue flicking over them and the pointed, tobacco-stained teeth. His eyes gleamed like red coals.

  “Don’t operate again,” I heard myself say. “Please don’t operate any more.”

  He was laughing at me now and suddenly I saw that he had no moustache. The face dissolved into Shirer’s face. But the red, sadistic excitement of the eyes remained.

  Then my head cleared and I knew where I was. I was in Santo Francisco and Sansevino was bending over me. A torch was switched on and his face vanished in the blinding light of it. He had my automatic in his hand and he was laughing, a horrible, tensed-up, tittering sound. “Now, my friend, perhaps you will be good enough to let me have a look at your lovely new leg.”

  His hands were tearing at my trousers. I jerked upright at his touch. He hit me in the face with the torch then, knocking me back into the grit of the ash that covered the roof-top. I felt the blood trickling down from a cut above my right eye. It reached my mouth. I licked at it with my tongue. It was salt and full of grit. He had pulled my trousers clear of my thigh now and his hands were working at the straps of my leg. Involuntarily I flinched. He gave a soft snicker. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “I do not have to operate this time to remove your leg. See, it is only held by straps—leather straps; the living tissues have gone.” I could hear his tongue savouring the relish of his words. And all the time I was thinking there was something I had to do. Fear clutched at me at the touch of his hands. I fought it, struggling to clear my brain, to think what had to be done. I couldn’t think with those bloody fingers moving over the flesh of my thigh, touching the cringing skin of my stomach.

  Then suddenly he had my leg free. “There. You see. It is quite painless, this operation.”

  I sat up. He stepped back quickly. The metal of my leg gleamed a dull red. It looked absurdly horrible as he held it in his hands—like looking at my own leg, severed from my body in one lump and bathed in blood. He had switched off the torch now and he was smiling at me. “You can do what you wish now, Mr. Farrell. You’re not very mobile.” It was Shirer’s voice. But almost in the same instant he had reverted to il dottore. “I make a nice job of that leg, eh? The stump has healed well.”

  I cursed him then, mouthing obscenities in an effort to drown my fear. But he only laughed, his teeth a red, pointed gleam. Then he had ripped the pad out of the artificial limb and turned the contraption upside down. He gave a little cry of satisfaction as a chamois leather bag and a roll of oilskin fell into the ash. He picked the bag up, tearing excitedly at the cord that bound it, his eyes gleaming with greed.

  “So!” He peered into the mouth of the bag, crooning to himself “Tuček told the truth. Bene! Bene!”

  “What have you done with him?” I cried.

  He looked at me. Then he smiled. It was a wicked, devilish smile. “You need not worry about him. I have not hurt him—very much. He is quite safe. So is Maxwell and the lovely Contessa. The stupid American is safe too.” He laughed. “He come all the way from Pittsburgh—where I come from, eh?—to see Vesuvius in eruption. Well, now he has a grandstand view. I hope he likes it,” he added venomously.

  “What have you done with them?” I demanded, anger suddenly getting the better of my fear.

  “Nothing, my friend. Nothing at all. I give them a good view of the eruption, that is all. Would you also like to see how a village can disappear under a mountain? You see all these houses?” His hand indicated the roof tops of Santo Francisco. “This village is built in the days when Rome is a great power. And in a few hours it will be gone. And you will go with it, my friend.” He re-tied the mouth of the leather bag and slipped it into his pocket. Then he stooped and picked up the oilskin package.

  He was coming towards me now and suddenly I knew what it was I had to do. I fumbled in the pocket of my jacket, found the rotor arm and showed it to him. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Ah, you think to barter, eh?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t barter with a murderous swine like you. You can try and get out on foot.” I struggled up on one elbow and flung the little bakelite and metal arm as far as I could. He ran after it. But it fell clear of the roof. He stopped at the edge, staring down into the black pit into which it had fallen. Then he came back, his face livid with rage. He lashed out at me with his foot, kicking at the bare stump of my leg, mouthing curses at me in Italian. I felt grit searing the flesh and the pain of his kicks ran up the left side of my body and struck like hammer blows on the nerves of my brain. Then suddenly he turned, picked up my artificial leg and flung it after the rotor arm. I watched it fall with a red gleam of metal beyond the edge of the roof and a sickening feeling of fear took hold of me. It was silly to be frightened by the loss of an ugly metal attachment. But without it I was helpless and he knew it.

  “Now try to get out of Santo Francisco on your bare stump,” he snarled.

  The black vault of the night flared redder as the mountain blew off again. He glanced up to the glare. I could see the sweat shining in drops on his face. He turned to me, lashed out at my pelvis with all the frust
rated violence of a man who is scared of death. I rolled over involuntarily and caught the kick on my thigh. He didn’t kick me again, but bent down, searching through the pockets of my coat and trousers. “What have you done with it?” he screamed at me.

  “Done with what?” I asked.

  He drove his fist into my face. “The other rotor arm, you fool.”

  “I haven’t got it,” I mumbled through my broken lips. “Maxwell has it.” I thought the He might send him back to them and give them another chance.

  He beat at my face with his clenched fist until the mountain flamed again. Then he dived for the door of the roof and disappeared. I heard bolts being shot home and then I was alone in the red glare of the mountain.

  I wasn’t frightened—not then. I was too relieved at his departure. Fear came later with the dawn and the lava eating at the buildings across the street and the heat of it withering my body.

  After he’d gone I crawled to the shelter of the door and lay there for a while recovering my breath and trying to sort things out. Stones fell clattering against the stonework, throwing dust in my face. Huddled close to the door they missed me and when the shower of lapilli had ended I started on a painful tour of my roof-top prison.

  It was about fifty feet by thirty, surrounded by a stone balustrade a foot high. On one side was a drop to a street and on the opposite side, the side where I’d thrown the rotor arm, the house dropped to a garden carpeted in ash. In the middle of it I could see the faint metallic glimmer of my tin leg. The house was one of a row, but it was separated on either side from the neighbouring houses by a narrow alley, a sheer crevice about five feet across. There was no hope of crossing the gap and there was no way into the house from the roof other than by the door. If there’d been a clothes-line, even an old piece of wood to act as a crutch I would have felt less helpless. But there was nothing, just the flat expanse of the roof, covered in ash, the foot-high balustrade, and in the middle the stone-built rabbit hutch with the door that led to the floor below. I hadn’t even a knife or any implement with which to set to work on the door.