‘Four days at the most? How can you be so specific?’ asked the designer.
‘Well, it could be sooner,’ the billionaire replied. ‘If we find the satellite phones, or if we can get the security door open, then we could be out of here by tomorrow. But even failing all that, there’s no need to fear a prolonged imprisonment.
‘Consider the situation. I, for one, have already missed half a dozen business calls that I was due to make to people around the world, people who were waiting for me to do so—and I’m not a man to miss calls that I’ve set up. They’ll already be wondering what’s wrong, and trying to find out.
‘And that’s just me. The rest of you no doubt had similar arrangements, and people who will be wondering by now why you’ve gone silent. And that’s not even considering the hundreds of folk down below, and all their worldly affairs.
‘And even that’s not all. The earthquake will have been measured in Tasmania, and seismologists there will be trying to contact the seismic station here and wondering why they can’t. Plus we have a weather station down at the port and other maritime facilities that are meant to report in regularly, and won’t have, if it’s as bad down there as we think.
‘So trust me, for a whole host of reasons, a lot of people will be turning their attention to this island even as we speak, and putting two and two together. By late tomorrow morning I’m quite sure that a plane or a chopper or a fast ship will be dispatched to investigate. We could easily see a helicopter landing up here by lunch time.’
Madelaine was frowning. ‘Then why did you say four days at the most?’
‘Well, even in the absolute worst case, in which for some inexplicable reason no one notices that we’ve been cut off and no one is sent to look for us, we’ll still be fine, because a ship is due to dock here then.’ The billionaire gave a nod to Rita. ‘It was all arranged a month ago. It’s Rita’s lift home, the Aurora Australis on its return trip from Antarctica to Hobart.
‘It’s due three days from now. True, the Australis doesn’t keep as tight a timetable as some vessels, given the ice sheets and other arctic hazards, but it was on schedule last I heard from it earlier this week, so if it’s not here exactly on time, I’d expect it to be no more than a day late. So let’s say four days at the utmost, before the outside world discovers our predicament here, and the rescue starts. So you see, there’s little to worry about.’
So relaxed was his assurance, and so reasonable his argument, that Rita felt her own fears recede a little. Truly, what harm could they come to in a mere few days, here in such a stronghold, provided with stores and supplies enough for far longer than they would need them?
‘In the meantime though,’ Walter Richman concluded with a winning smile, ‘we do have to fend for ourselves. The first concern is dinner. There’s a fully stocked larder back in that kitchen, but I don’t claim to be much of a cook, other than the basics. In my mountain-climbing days that meant not much more than beans or stew or instant noodles. Anyone interested in volunteering?’
Kushal gave a laugh. ‘Why not? If everyone is agreeable, I still remember a recipe or two from my mother—as long as your cooks have the right spices, mind, and some golden basmati!’
And so the bizarre evening progressed, somehow cosy and pleasurable for all that everyone knew a mile or so below them there must be ongoing chaos and suffering. The camaraderie was fed by a make-believe air of roughing of it, of living by candlelight during a storm, and by glass after glass (in Rita’s case at least) of superb wine.
They ate casually, the meal spread out on the low tables of the Saloon, with music playing on the bar sound system. Kushal turned out to be an excellent cook, serving up a feast of two curries, lamb and chickpea, along with coconut dal, all accompanied by fragrant rice and pappadums.
Not that all practicalities were forgotten. Periodically, Richman went off to visit Kennedy in the Control Room, to see if there was any progress with the security door (once also to take him some food). And several times Clara departed to try her walkie-talkie again on the Terrace, or to continue the search for the satellite phones as she remembered possible hiding places in which no one had yet looked.
By eleven p.m., however, it was clear that the emergency stairs were beyond reach for now, and that the quest for the phones was hopeless. It was decided that nothing further could be done that evening. Kennedy would remain on duty in the Control Room, in case someone below somehow re-established contact, but otherwise the rest of them should go to bed, and wait to see what the morning heralded.
Even then, everyone poured a final nightcap, lingering by the fire for a last half hour to marvel at the day they had just lived through.
‘Tell me, Walter,’ Kushal enquired of Richman, the builder sipping on cognac by then, ‘would you have even attempted to climb the Wheel, if you had known avalanches on such a scale were possible?’
The billionaire was staring sombrely into the flames. ‘I don’t think I could have justified the risk, no. Oh, we accepted there was an avalanche danger, of course we did. And sure enough we had some big falls, some that took out multiple huts at a time, and claimed several lives too. But that display this afternoon? Something like that would have killed all of us, even sunk our ships. Little though we knew it, obviously we were lucky that whole time.’
Clara was musing over a sauterne. ‘I do remember reading a theory about mega-avalanches on the Wheel. It was in an article somewhere. But they were talking about the past, millions of years ago, when the Wheel was still being shaped by great quakes and landslides. There was no suggestion that anything like what we saw today has happened in historical times, certainly nothing has been recorded in the last few hundred years. So I wouldn’t say that you were lucky back during your expedition, Walter, instead I’d say that we have been incredibly unlucky today. It’s got to be a one-in-a-thousand-year event—no, a one-in-a-hundred-thousand-year event.’
‘That certainly would make it bad luck,’ Richman agreed thoughtfully. He gave a sudden glance to Rita before returning his gaze to the fireplace. ‘Even worse luck that the quake hit at exactly the moment it did, exactly in the ten-minute window in which there were unusually few people up here.’
‘What on earth does it matter how many of us were here exactly?’ asked Madelaine in some annoyance. ‘What are you talking about?’
Richman looked mildly at the designer. ‘You read Rita’s book, didn’t you?’
Rita flushed silently. Not the damn book again. But she did not interrupt.
‘I read it, yes,’ said Madelaine, ‘though only quickly, I admit. I might not have absorbed every last detail. But what of that? What does her book have to do with how many of us are here?’
‘Well, the phenomena Rita discusses in that book, her presences, are supposedly more likely to manifest and act when people are alone, or in small groups. Presences are much weaker, by her theory, if there’s a big crowd around. And think about it: there has always been a crowd up here, twenty or thirty people, until just one brief instant this afternoon, when it dropped to six. Going by Rita’s logic, you could argue that it’s a suspicious coincidence that the quake happened to strike just at that moment.’
‘You could argue it if you believed any of that nonsense,’ Madelaine replied. Then added, with a look to Rita, ‘But even she no longer believes the things she wrote. She told me so herself.’
Rita shifted reluctantly. She had indeed said that to Madelaine. And up until today she would have repeated it. But now, after what she had witnessed from the Terrace, after the hateful, gleeful expectation she had sensed in the Wheel …
She said, ‘I’d rather not talk about any of this. I’m sure it’s no help to anyone.’
Richman smiled. ‘Oh, Rita still believes it all, Madelaine, and always has, whatever she tells you, whatever she tells herself. Otherwise she wouldn’t have refused to fly here in a helicopter like a normal person, she wouldn’t have demanded a ride on a cruise ship instead. Deny it or not, she’
s still too scared of her invisible beings to fly, or even to go to sea without the security of having hundreds of people, hundreds of minds, around her for protection.’
Rita met this with a stare. ‘It isn’t that simple,’ she said. But went no further. For how could she explain without delving into her whole sorry life story, and they did not need to hear that.
‘Well, never mind.’ Richman drained his glass. ‘Maybe this is all by chance and maybe it isn’t, but it hardly matters, we’ll be out of here by tomorrow night, whatever the mysterious forces might intend. The Wheel has done its worst, after all, and we’re still fine. So I’m off to get some sleep.’
And with a wink to Rita, and a nod to the others, he rose and strolled off to the Library.
After a moment’s hesitation, Clara drained her glass and followed after him.
3
THE THIRD MAN FACTOR
Extract from ‘Strange Tales of the Wheel’,
George Wilkins, 2005
Third Man factor stories.
Every mountain in the world has them. At some point or other, some hapless individual or small group of two or three climbers, will become lost on the high slopes, stranded there by storm or mishap. Isolated from all other human help, close to death in the cold and the dark, they will despair. But then—behold! They encounter a mysterious only-half-seen figure that leads them somehow to safety before vanishing, leaving them shaken but alive to tell of the event to other awed, fascinated climbers.
They have met the legendary Third Man.
The phenomenon is quite well known in other situations too—anytime, indeed, that humans find themselves on the brink of death. It could be someone lost and dying of thirst in a desert. It could be a sailor forsaken and drowning at sea. It could be a victim trapped and fighting for breath in a burning building. The Third Man can appear anywhere, and to anyone in mortal peril. But something about mountains and icy landscapes in particular seems to summon the vision.
The incident which led to the name is as good an example as any. In 1916, the famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, his ship trapped and crushed in the Antarctic ice, his crew stranded on a desolate shore far from rescue or resupply, set out in a small boat with a few companions to reach the nearest hope of help, a whaling station seven hundred miles away on South Georgia Island. After a horrific storm-filled voyage, they finally reached the southern shore of the island—a frozen, mountainous place—but salvation was not yet at hand. The whaling station lay on the northern side of the isle.
Now, South Georgia is a long, thin landmass; narrow north to south, but much more extended east to west, with a jagged shoreline. To sail all the way around to the whaling station would thus have meant yet another torturous voyage for the weary mariners. So Shackleton decided to take the shorter route and go directly overland, on foot. This would mean a twenty-mile trek across the island’s pathless interior, climbing, along the way, a range of high, icy mountains. A desperate venture. Even for men well fed and equipped such a route would have presented a stern challenge. For men hungry, exhausted, wet and cold, it might well prove to be fatal.
Even so, Shackleton set out with two others. And after thirty-six hours of tribulation the three of them, with almost no mountaineering equipment to speak of, did indeed manage to conquer the inner range and reach the whaling station to summon help. In time, all of Shackleton’s crew would be rescued, a miraculous achievement, celebrated ever since. But later the explorer would report an interesting thing about the crossing of South Georgia.
In their extremity, as he and the other two men struggled amid the ice and rock, Shackleton had become convinced that there were four of them on the long march, not three. The other two men revealed that they also had felt this. All of them had known they were only three, but they all felt a fourth, a companion comforting and supportive, though silent and never directly seen, who stayed with them as far as the whaling station, then disappeared.
The tale became well known, and was referred to by the poet T.S. Eliot in his landmark work, The Waste Land, with the following haunting passage.
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
Eliot had changed the numbers involved, and so, in time, the phenomenon, which many later explorers and adventurers would report, and which by rights should have been the Fourth Man, came to be known instead as the Third Man factor.
The history of mountaineering has since abounded with examples of the phenomenon. Almost always in such tales, the Third Man is a helpful influence. Usually this is only in the sense of the companionship it offers, silent and unseen at one’s side, or waiting somewhere up ahead perhaps in the snow, promising companionship; the conviction that one is not alone, despite the fact that you are very much alone, and in deep peril.
But sometimes the Third Man is of more overt assistance. A voice may speak to the stranded climber, encouraging them to continue up or down the mountain, or warning them that they must not rest any longer, but move on, before they lose the ability to move at all. Sometimes the voice will point out a new route that must be taken, or warn of one that must be avoided, sometimes it will even seem to physically push a climber along. Mostly, the Third Man is anonymous and faceless, but there are tales in which the visitor, though unseen, is held to be a dead relative or some other absent loved one.
Unsurprisingly, many of the individuals who experience the phenomenon find it to be a deeply spiritual encounter. There is talk of guardian angels and spirit guides. Others are content to attribute it to the hallucinations of an oxygen-starved brain, or point to theories about consciousness and bicameral minds. But however you explain it, the Third Man, wherever and whenever it appears, is almost always a benign, indeed a life-saving, visitation.
But not on the Wheel.
On the slopes of the world’s highest mountain, something else seems to be afoot.
Something malign.
There is no shortage of examples—Third Man tales from the Wheel are legion. This in itself is hardly surprising, the Wheel being the most dangerous mountain on the planet, a place more than any other where climbers are likely to find themselves lost and hallucinatory and close to death. But what is less expected is that the reports brought back of the Third Man—at least, from those who survived the encounter—are universally negative ones.
Some of the tales speak of an acute sense of hostility that comes from close at hand, a resentment that seems uniquely personal, almost as if a figure was beside the climber, glaring in anger. Others speak of an actual figure, elusive but glimpsed on the edge of vision, that seems to be hunched as if ready to spring and attack, a deranged demonic presence, causing climbers who behold it to flee in haste, whatever the risks to their safety. There are no friendly companions in these tales, no silent but supportive figures, only creatures that promise hatred, and, if given the chance, violence.
Other tales report more overt incidents. Ropes that were securely tied somehow become untied. Necessary items left in tents in high camps—oxygen or cooking fuel or food—will inexplicably go missing, even though there is no one else high on the mountain at the time, nor any scavenging animal or bird that lives so far up. Few of these incidents cause fatalities, maybe—but then, such reports only come from those who made it off the mountain alive. Who knows how many of the unexplained deaths on the Wheel, or the disappearances of climbers, may have been because of a rope that somehow became loosened, or from lack of an oxygen bottle where one should have been waiting?
The dead tell no stories.
But in any case, it is widely agreed that the most disturbing of all the many Third Man stories from the Wheel is that of the tragic demise of the Japanese
mountaineer Keizo Yuko.
Born in 1960, Yuko was too young to take part in Walter Richman’s massive assault on the Wheel in 1974. Indeed, although Japan boasts a strong climbing culture, relatively few Japanese climbers took part in Richman’s venture, owing to the rule that all climbers must be fluent in English, the notion being that the expedition could not afford to have any language confusion in emergency situations. But already a keen climber at fourteen, Yuko followed the assault breathlessly, and swore that one day he too would climb upon the world’s highest mountain.
As soon as he was old enough, he cut his teeth first on the Japanese and European Alps, then progressed to the Himalayas in the early 1980s, bagging three eight-thousand-metre peaks in quick succession. Then, considering himself ready at last, he turned to the Wheel. The great mountain was by then no longer undefeated, of course, but there were still challenges aplenty upon its lower slopes.
Yuko arrived there in the summer of 1984, a junior member of an eight-man Japanese team. They were one of only three teams on the mountain that year, historically a low number. In truth though, in the decade since Richman’s triumph, the count of serious expeditions had been even lower most years. It was understandable. Now that the mountain was beaten, some of its allure was gone. Also, most of the climbers of the 1970s generation had worked for Richman and so had more than satisfied their own curiosity about the Wheel. It wasn’t until the next generation matured—those who like Yuko had missed the Richman affair—that teams began to visit the mountain once more in greater numbers, eager to carve out their own achievements there.
The goal of Yuko’s team was to be the first ever to ascend to Black Summit Three. This is one of the many subsidiary peaks set along the Wheel’s North and South ridges. Black Summit Three is on the South Ridge, a lumpish pillar that rises about eighty metres above the general ridgeline to nine thousand two hundred and twelve metres, set some eleven kilometres to the south of the Wheel’s actual summit. Its name refers to the fact that it is the lowest of the three notable sub-peaks that exist within the range of the famous Black Band.
The Rich Man’s House Page 35