And now a new note keened, close and immediate. It was the piping of something immense and fast whistling across the uppermost point of the Mount, across the top of the Cottage raised on its knoll, across the peak of the Lightning Room, maybe only fifty metres above Rita’s head.
‘Run!’ came the scream from behind her.
She ran.
It was only twenty yards, Kennedy waving her in madly, like some crazed airport worker directing an airliner to its gate. Only twenty yards—but five yards out a gust dropped from above, instantly hurricane force, a scream in Rita’s ears. Disbelieving, she went reeling sideways and fell. Something peppered her skin and clothes—was it grit, blown loose from the stone floor? Then the scream ebbed, leaving her to scramble to her knees and flounder to the doors, where Kennedy grabbed her and hauled her through.
For an instant longer he hesitated, ready to slide the outer door shut.
‘Madelaine!’ he called.
The gust that had knocked Rita over had not touched the designer. Still far out upon the Terrace, she remained upright, her arms spread and raised. Even as Rita looked the wind roared anew and Madelaine’s coat streamed out behind her like wings, her dress pressed flat against her body. ‘I’m here!’ she cried to the heavens. ‘I’m ready to go now!’
A hammer blow of air, as wide as all the mountaintop, swung out of the sky. It was visible somehow, like a shockwave in the fog. The roar became a freight-train howl, metal screaming on metal, and the world outside turned to madness. Madelaine staggered, then was thrown backwards, light as a toy, even as the outer airlock door was torn from Kennedy’s hands and slammed shut. He and Rita, both on their knees, scrambled through the inner door where Richman heaved it closed behind them. There was an instant of silence in the Conservatory as Rita and Kennedy lurched upright. Then, outside, the wind bellowed afresh, louder than ever.
And did not stop.
‘Holy shit,’ uttered Richman.
Rita stared out. The jet stream had come. It raged in stupefying brutality across the Terrace, blasting from gust to gust. But it was not, Rita could sense even in those first instances, the jet stream in its natural state, not as she had experienced it in those tortured moments of the LA flight. This was no freely flowing river of the upper airs.
This was a jet stream that been captured by the stony heights of the Wheel, a jet stream that had been dragged, furious at the insult, down from its proper home in the high atmosphere, and then herded and enraged and strengthened threefold by the immovable arc of the great mountain. It was a jet stream driven mad by the Wheel, and then inflicted here upon the naked summit of Observatory Mount.
She gazed transfixed. Gust after great gust hit the mountain, shaking the very bedrock, but with no trees to bend beneath it, with no external curtains to flap in it, with no rain to be driven by it, with just a bare arena of stone across which to blow, the only visible indication of the speed of each gust was the fog whipping across the Terrace. But even judged by such an insubstantial medium, that speed was staggering, too fast for the eye to follow, too fast for the head to turn, a mad careen, east to west.
She was safe, Rita reminded herself. The Conservatory windows were of thick and specially toughened glass, inset deep into the walls which were themselves part of the stone of the mountaintop. None of it was going to blow away; she was as secure as if in an underground storm cellar. A bomb bunker. But even so, she shrank back from the glass. For the panes were flexing inwards. Not cracking or smashing, true. But the force it would take, to make glass so thick, and so solidly embedded, flex like that …
She tore her gaze away for an instant to consider the weather panel by the door. The figures glowing there were scarcely believable.
Temp: –43C
Wind Av: 249 kph
Wind Max: 338 kph
Then she was staring back to the windows, remembering the most horrifying fact in all this, and searching for … yes, there.
Out upon the Terrace, defenceless beneath the wind, Madelaine lay flat to the ground.
At first, Rita was amazed that the designer was even still there, that the initial gusts had not simply blown her clean off the peak. There was nothing out there to hold onto, no shelter.
Except, no, that wasn’t quite true. Here and there about the Terrace large glass panels were set flat into the ground. They were the tops of the window shafts that opened into the Atrium dome below. Around these glass panels low fences had been erected, made of metal posts and stainless-steel wire. Their function was to protect the panels, to make sure no one walked on them and damaged the glass.
Madelaine, in falling, had managed to grab hold of a post of one of these fences, and she held there still, her hands white around the steel as her long coat beat in the shrieking air above her like a whip.
In fact, her position was further protected by the eastern parapet of the Terrace. The low stone wall, though only a little above waist height, was enough to divert the full force of the jet stream slightly upwards and over the spot where Madelaine sprawled. Rita could see the curve of the wind in the way the fog moved, as clearly as in a wind tunnel.
Madelaine was even free to shift her body minimally. As Rita watched, the designer inched one of her hands to the lowest wire of the fence, and began to edge herself sideways, crablike, towards the airlock doors, her nearest hope of salvation.
‘No, damn it,’ Kennedy moaned. ‘Not this way. Go towards the parapet, you fool, get in under the lee there. Don’t come this way!’
Rita stared at him blankly.
‘She won’t be able to get in this way,’ Richman explained to her, his face pale with shock. ‘We can’t open the doors. They lock automatically from both sides at winds of over two hundred kays.’
‘So override the lock!’ cried Rita, her gaze returning to the creeping figure out in the tempest. ‘Get the door open and let her in!’
The billionaire was unmoved. ‘You don’t understand. There’s a reason for the protocol. In winds like this—Christ, look, it’s gusting near four hundred now—you don’t dare open the outer door. The inner door wouldn’t take the strain. And if the inner door goes, then you’ve got a pressure differential in here that would pop all the windows in the place, and then all of us would be dead. Not just her.’
‘Anyway,’ said Kennedy more grimly. ‘I doubt we could get the outer door open even by force. Look at the way it’s buckling in its frame.’
It was true. The sliding door was holding, but it was bowed inwards and contorted. Rita could not imagine the strength it would take, quite apart from the courage, to venture out there and somehow wrest it open to the nightmare beyond.
But then what of Madelaine? The designer had inched another foot closer as they debated. Her head was down as if she did not dare raise it to look, but somehow she knew which direction to take. Except that it was the wrong direction.
And the wind mounted still. There were no longer separate gusts that Rita could discern; there was just an everlasting blast that scaled higher and higher in ferocity. On the weather screen, the average wind speed and the maximum gust read the same.
410 kph.
Out on the Terrace, Madelaine had come to the end of the fence. Still ten metres at least of open stone remained between her and the door.
‘Don’t try it, for the love of god,’ moaned Kennedy. ‘Just stay the hell there.’
But Madelaine would not be able to stay there, Rita could see that. The wind was only getting stronger; the shelter of the parapet would never be enough. The designer’s fingers, cut and black with blood, were already slipping from the wire. Inevitably she would lose her grip and be blown away, she had no choice but to make the attempt …
At last Madelaine lifted her head, just by a fraction, and looked their way. Her face was white, almost unrecognisable to Rita, its expression pure bewilderment and terror, as if she had just woken up to find herself in this horrific predicament, with no memory of how she came to be there.
&n
bsp; And perhaps it was true, Rita thought. Perhaps Madelaine had been in a kind of fugue state before the wind came, which would explain why she had behaved so strangely. Perhaps she had only come back to herself when she was thrown to the ground. Had it been the same way with Kushal? After sleepwalking to the pool, had he awoken, too late, to find the ice sealed around his limbs, so that he could only scream uselessly into the water as he drowned? And what about Clara, lost and dazed upon the endless stairs, counting the wrong numbers?
Across the wilderness of wind and whipping fog, and through the glass, Madelaine’s gaze met Rita’s; one woman trapped and doomed, knowing she was doomed, the other, only yards away, safe and yet helpless. It was unspeakable. Finally the jet stream mounted again on itself, shaking the Mount more profoundly than ever, a banshee scream, and Rita let her gaze shift to the weather readout, to see there the impossible figure of five hundred and two kilometres per hour. When she looked back, Madelaine was bowling away across the Terrace, limbs and coat flailing like a broken umbrella.
Rita gave a sobbing cry, expecting to see the lost woman disappear over the western parapet—but in fact the tumbling scarecrow was halted short of the edge, fetching up instead, with sickening force, against a second of the stainless steel fences.
‘Oh dear god,’ breathed Kennedy.
For now the designer was displayed as if crucified upon the wires, propped up face on into the jet stream, her head held against one of the poles, her arms pinned outflung, her torso bent beneath her and her legs trailing behind, their bones already broken, to judge by their unnatural angle.
But her face … The wind tore at it savagely, deforming it into a loose, hideous mask of gaping eyes and bloodied mouth, flapping about her skull. Her clothes, meanwhile, were shredding as if blades were cutting in the air, her overcoat tearing away in strips, followed quickly by her flimsier garments beneath, until she was suspended there quite naked, other than a last few rags that somehow hung on.
521 kph, said the readout.
Rita had a hand to her mouth, feeling vomit rising with her horror. Naked. Naked. Kushal had been naked when he died. And Clara as well, down in the pit, had declared that she had thrown off all her clothes, even her shoes. And the man in the sauna. And the one on the Lightning Room.
All of them, naked.
Was that what the Wheel demanded of them? That its chosen victim must be stripped to bare skin before the mountain inflicted its punishments? Would they all end up naked this way—Rita and Kennedy and Richman too—before they died?
And still Rita could only stare. The designer’s body, stripped of its stylish apparel, was stout and pale, but in truth it was scarcely human anymore, so mangled was it by the wind, the skin rippling and stretching in ways beyond bearing.
539 kph, said the readout.
‘Jesus, I hope she’s dead,’ Kennedy was praying. ‘Jesus, let her be dead already.’
But Madelaine was not dead. Her battered face—it had turned blue, either from the lethal cold or from some sort of internal haemorrhaging—turned purposefully even now, slowly, laterally across the gale, so that the sockets of the eyes looked once again towards to the airlock doors. But if there were eyes within the sockets still capable of sight, Rita could no longer tell, and did not want to know.
566 kph, said the readout.
And now the fence itself was bending. Unburdened, it might have withstood the jet steam, but with Madelaine’s body acting as a sail, the steel uprights were surrendering to the onslaught, leaning further and further. And still the ruined face, flapping red about the mouth, streaming blood into the air, seemed to stare at Rita, safe in the stillness behind the Conservatory glass.
Then the fence gave way completely, and Madelaine tumbled backwards once more. And yet even then she was not set free. Entangled from the waist down now in a long snarl of stainless-steel wires, fixed at their further ends to mooring points set deep in the stone, she flailed about like some misshapen kite, lifted into the air and slammed down upon the ground, again and again and again.
580 kph, said the readout.
Not a shred of clothing remained on her now, she was only a mass of white and blue and red flesh, and she must be dead, she must surely be dead, her skull crushed as her head was driven into the stonework, over and over again.
And yet somehow Rita knew that even now there was a mind alive in that shattered body, blinded and dazed beyond belief by the violence done to it, but thinking still, aware still …
Then, even though Rita would have thought there could be no scale of ferocity left to the jet stream, it notched higher yet, like thunder and shattering steel and a thousand women screaming all at once. The windows bent so much under the strain that everything went blurry outside as if through coke-bottle lenses, and Rita was sure, as she cowered, that the wind readout clicked over to six hundred kilometres per hour before flashing an error signal and going blank.
Then one of windows gave an awful crack, a jagged fracture appearing in the glass. At the same moment, Kennedy clutched Rita and dragged her away, leading down the stairs to safer quarters in the Atrium below, following Richman who had already fled.
And so they saw no more.
▲
Hours later, after the jet stream had withdrawn, rising to its usual haunts far above, they crept carefully up to the Conservatory once more, and found that the cracked window had held anyway.
But out on the Terrace, in the fog that once again swirled lazily in air gone calm, all trace of Madelaine, and the fence in which she had been entangled, were gone.
4
THE RITUAL
So now they were just three.
‘We’ll withdraw to the Cottage,’ said Walter Richman, as they stood surveying the deserted, wind-blasted Terrace. His handsome face was as drawn and haggard as if five years had passed since Rita’s arrival, not five days. ‘And lock the doors.’
Rita and Kennedy glanced at him questioningly. The Cottage? Locked doors?
‘Madelaine was alone all night before she died,’ explained the billionaire. ‘Clara was alone down in the shaft. Before that, Kushal was alone in his apartment. So, the three of us aren’t going to let each other out of our sight until rescue finally gets here. And we’re not going to set a foot outdoors again.’
Rita stared at him, the questions rising to her lips. Yes, his proposal was sensible, but what did Richman now think was happening here, what did he believe was doing this to them?
But the billionaire forestalled her. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘First, if you or Kennedy want any gear from your rooms, we should collect it now.’
Together, they descended first to Rita’s apartment, where she gathered up her luggage, then went to Kennedy’s quarters in the other guest wing, which until now Rita had not visited. That done, they returned to the upper levels.
And already, as they climbed the Helix Staircase, then passed through the Saloon and the Library, the Observatory felt abandoned in their wake. As they passed through each great chamber, it seemed to Rita the space was in the act of becoming a ruin, an artefact, never again to be inhabited.
They came to the secret lift in the Library—the only elevator in the whole building that still functioned under the emergency power protocols—and rode it in silence up to the Cottage. And the feeling of desolation only grew in Rita. Below them now all the Observatory, with its great Atrium and its Halls and its Cavern Pool and its Games Arena (which she had never beheld and probably never would) and its guest wings with room enough for dozens of visitors at a time, and with all its luxurious appointments and priceless art, and its miles of service tunnels and other secrets, all of it was left untrodden now by a single soul.
So quick, Rita thought hollowly. Was this how the end always came to houses, to cities, to civilisations? One moment there was life and order, then the next, simply, it was gone?
The lift chimed their arrival.
Stepping out into the foyer and then into the living room, there was com
fort at least in the smaller dimensions here, in the simulacra of a normal home. Of course, it was anything but a normal home. But the evidence of that remained hidden by the fog that was grey against every window. Rita chose to concentrate on the familiar, on the warm colours of the walls, the welcoming couches by the fire, and in the kitchen, beckoning, the coffee equipment.
She got the water boiling, then joined the men flopped in exhaustion on the couches. The shock of the morning’s events still filled the air between them, like a painful ringing in their ears after an explosion they had somehow survived.
‘We need sleep,’ said Richman. ‘Or at least god knows I do. But before that, we need to work out some strategy. We need to work out … well, what’s going on here, and what we’re going to do about it. There can be no more kidding ourselves.’
This last was offered almost as a rebuke to Rita, as if she had been the one who had been kidding herself, as if she was the one in denial. A weary anger rose in her and immediately vanished. ‘So you accept that it’s the Wheel behind all this?’
The billionaire gazed at her emotionlessly. ‘We’re under attack; I know that much, and it’s not just the earthquake or the avalanche or the wave. Those could have been natural things, maybe they really were. But now something is getting into our heads, and there’s nothing natural about that. Look at Madelaine … she wanted to stay out there on the Terrace, no matter the alarms, no matter that she was going to die if she did. It was like she was hypnotised. And Clara, you heard her down there, she wasn’t herself anymore. And Kushal too. Three times it’s happened. That’s no coincidence; that’s organised.’ He paused, then at last gave a slow nod. ‘So is it the Wheel behind it all? Yes … I think maybe we have to say it is.’
But Kennedy, even after all he had heard and witnessed, balked at this final step. He shook his head stubbornly. ‘The Wheel is a just a mountain; it’s a pile of rock; it can’t get into people’s heads.’
‘How do you explain it then?’ said Richman. ‘What’s making us act these ways?’
The Rich Man’s House Page 46