The security expert searched about, threw up his hands. ‘Maybe it’s something in the water, or the air, or something we ate, something toxic. That plus the earthquake and lack of rest. I don’t know.’
Richman turned to Rita, ‘But you know, don’t you? You know it’s the Wheel.’
Rita simply nodded.
The billionaire stroked his jaw. ‘Your father told me it was, months ago. All the things that were going wrong here during construction, the accidents, the deaths. He tried to convince me it was the Wheel, and that we needed you here. But why would I have believed him? I’m a rational man; I need proof, and he didn’t have any proof. If he’d come up with something concrete I would have listened …’
Rita said nothing. So now it was her father’s fault, for not being convincing enough.
The billionaire went on. ‘In the end, it was only when he died that I began to wonder.’
‘When he died?’ queried Rita. ‘Why then, exactly? Dad died from a heart attack. It had nothing to do with the Wheel.’
Richman nodded easily. ‘Of course. I just meant that after he died I had to be here more to oversee the project, and so I began to realise firsthand that something was wrong with this place.’
Kennedy had been heedless of the exchange, preoccupied. Now he said suddenly, ‘Okay, let’s say for a second that it is the mountain doing all this. Why, for fuck’s sake? What does it want?’
Richman considered him mildly. ‘To get to me, obviously, that’s what. Because I beat it, I climbed it, because it lost and I won. Now that I’ve come back, the Wheel wants its revenge.’
‘Do you hear yourself? It’s a piece of stone. It’s not alive. It can’t hold goddamn grudges.’
The billionaire dismissed his security chief and turned once more to Rita. ‘I should have called you in from the start. I should have got you here to do your little magic trick before we turned the first sod over.’
A lustration, Rita realised. By little magic trick, he meant a lustration. Even when he was asking for her help—and he was asking for her help, wasn’t he?—he had to belittle her art. But again the anger faded. After all, she herself, for the last ten years and more, had scorned her own faith.
She said, ‘It wouldn’t matter if you had called me. I wouldn’t have come. Not for that.’
‘And now?’
‘Now what?’
His patience snapped. ‘Are you going to perform a fucking lustration, or aren’t you?’
She blinked, and the urge in her was to tell him to fuck off, that this was his problem, not hers. Except it wasn’t just his problem. Oh, the Wheel wanted him and him alone, she was sure enough of that. But it seemed intent on cutting its way through the rest of them first, each of them that was trapped here.
So it was her problem too.
She sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Okay. Okay then. Now we’re getting somewhere.’ The billionaire drew a hand across a sweating brow. ‘So, how can we help? What do you need from us to get set up?’
‘You want me to do it now?’
‘Can you think of a better time? Can’t you feel it? We’ve got a moment here while things are quiet, while the Wheel is … spent, I guess is the word. You think waiting will make things better?’
He was right. There was a sense of lull now, of the malice that surrounded them being, for the moment, exhausted. But it would build again. It would build again fast. So yes, they shouldn’t wait.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘all right. Just give me to a moment to think. I haven’t done one of these in over twelve years, you know.’
She pondered as the men watched her. God, was she really going to go through with this? She had not forgotten her attempt of two—or was it three nights ago?—to make deliberate contact with the Wheel. It had been awful, and that was before anyone had died, before she had known how lethal this could all be. The idea of reaching out to the mountain now filled her with a dread that was nauseating.
But again, to not try it, to sit here and wait for the rest of the day to pass and night to fall, and for the Wheel to regain its strength and then … Who knew what then, or who it would target next?
So, yes, she was really going to do this.
In the kitchen the electric kettle piped to show that it was done, breaking her reverie.
She said to the men, ‘I’ll need coffee and some food before I do anything.’ She hesitated. ‘But for the lustration itself, well … in the old days, it helped if I’d taken certain substances first.’
‘Drugs, you mean?’ asked Richman.
Rita nodded. But, of course, it was more than a matter of help. Towards the end, lustrations had been all but impossible without the extras.
‘What kind of drugs?’ Richman pressed.
‘Small amounts of LSD were very good. Marijuana was also useful. But mostly, the last few years I did this, it was cocaine.’
‘Jesus,’ swore Kennedy. ‘You were high all the time? People paid you to do this shit?’
Richman glanced without expression at his security chief. ‘Coke we’ve got, yes, Kennedy? But I don’t know about pot or LSD.’
Kennedy, too, was unabashed. If his habit had ever been a secret, it hardly mattered that it was out now. ‘Oh sure, coke, yes, I got. LSD, no. But I do know that Eugene liked a joint recreationally, so there might be some pot in his apartment.’
Rita blinked. She had not given the IT specialist a thought in days now. Was he even alive still, down at Base? Was anyone alive down there?
‘Okay,’ said Richman, ‘we’ll go down together and look in a few minutes.’ He studied Rita again. ‘Drugs aside, what else do you need?’
‘A vantage point,’ she answered. ‘Usually in the old days I’d do this on a hilltop, or by a waterfall or deep in a cave or the like. The idea was to get as close to the presence in question as I could.’
Richman considered. ‘Obviously, we can’t get you closer to the Wheel. But the Lightning Room is the highest point of the Mount, and if not for the fog it would give you the best view of the Wheel.’
Rita felt a shiver of dread, of some distant foreknowledge confirmed. The Lightning Room. Yes, yes, of course it would be there …
‘And if we get you all that, then you can do your thing, your lustration?’ Richman demanded. ‘You can make all this stop? If there’s really a presence in the Wheel, you can force it to go away?’
She shook her head. ‘I have no idea what I can do anymore. Even in the old days I never tried anything on this scale. Make it go away? No, I doubt that. At best, maybe, I can placate it. Enough so that it might leave us alone until rescue comes.’
Richman was disappointed. ‘That’s all?’
‘All?’ Rita retorted hotly. ‘It’ll be a fucking miracle if I can get us that much!’
‘Okay, okay.’
Shaking her head, Rita got up to make the coffee. The fog, she noted, pressed thick to the windows, making her think of a spy dressed in grey trying to eavesdrop on all that was said.
▲
An hour later—one p.m. by the clock, but time had ceased to have meaning—Rita sat cross-legged on Walter Richman’s bed in the Lightning Room, and set a lit match to the end of a freshly rolled joint.
She was alone, having banished the men to the floor immediately below, down the winding, narrow access staircase cut into the rock—close enough for them to come quickly if she called out, but far enough away to not be a distraction.
In the old days, especially towards the end, she had not been so shy about being watched during a lustration, even if she was naked. But she wanted no observers today—and she sure as fuck wasn’t going to be taking her clothes off. Back then, the nudity was all about getting physically close to the earth, about removing all barriers between her and a presence. But with the Wheel there was no need of that, the mountain was already all too palpable.
She took a deep drag of the joint, coughed for a few moments from the unfamiliarity—it had
been a while, god knew—then inhaled again.
She contemplated as the hot smoke permeated her lungs. The nudity and other fripperies could be abandoned, yes, but not this, not the altered state of consciousness that the drugs provided. Yes, there had been those times, from the traumatic first event onwards, when she had made connection with presences spontaneously. But in those instances the connection had usually been too uncontrolled, too wild, to be of any use as a lustration.
She took another puff, already feeling the cotton wool numbness at her extremities.
The danger was, of course, that the pot might simply put her to sleep. She had eaten down in the kitchen, and drunk three strong coffees in a row, but still, it was over a day since she had slept, and the exhaustion in her was very real. But thankfully Kennedy’s cocaine was ready to come to the rescue there. Three lines of it lay already set out on a little mirror lying flat at her side.
The cocaine to keep her mind alert, and the marijuana to open it up. She looked up to the glass walls of the Lightning Room. She was facing east, directly towards the Wheel. There was nothing to be seen through the fog, but Rita could feel the mountain out there, vast and potent, dwarfing her by a factor of billions. Sweet Jesus …
She heaved a deep breath, took another toke, and then waited the coughing out.
It was very quiet. Listening hard, she could hear nothing but her heartbeat and the crackle of the joint in her hand. Beyond that, the silence was profound, as solid as the stone floor below, the many feet of it between her and the next floor down. There was not even a whisper from the air-conditioning ducts, though the room was pleasantly warm against the freezing air on the other side of the glass. Her father had done his work too well; the room was perfect.
To sleep here would be wonderful, Rita decided, taking a last drag from the joint, now down to a nub. The bed was firm yet inviting beneath her, and as vast as her entire bedroom back at home. And oh, the temptation to lie down now in the grey warm gloom, and to surrender to sleep, her mind slipping away into oblivion, where there were no problems, nothing to fear. It need only be for a few minutes …
Her head bowed drowsily, but an instant later she started upright as the joint was suddenly scorching in her fingertips. She stubbed it out in the ashtray firmly, and picked up the small mirror. Time for the cocaine—and not a moment too soon.
She fumbled with the rolled-up US fifty-dollar bill (donated by Kennedy, Richman had no cash on him) and snorted two of the lines, feeling clumsy and idiotic, so long had it been. When she was done, she wiped at her nose and waited as the numbness took hold in her nostrils, and as the familiar tart aftertaste leaked at the back of her throat.
No particular rush came, and there was no change to the languor of the marijuana, but her underlying exhaustion faded, as if a new reserve of strength had been tapped inside her. Not an adrenalin surge, something smoother and more fluid, something almost lazy in its power. True, it was surely just the cocaine, but it felt entirely natural.
And good.
She was ready now.
Sitting up straighter, she addressed the eastern windows and the great wall of fog. It came to her that she had never done a lustration before by daylight. Always, in the past, she had performed these rituals by night, as often as not by a burning fire. But then the gloom of the mist was almost like night anyway, and as for a fire, that had only ever been an extra, for effect’s sake, it had never been a necessity.
She was distracting herself with these thoughts, she knew. Playing for time. She was scared, that was the truth of it. Scared that it would not work anymore—and even more scared that it would.
But—she reminded herself, forcibly—the alternative was to sit in this luxurious trap and wait until the next one of them was taken. She no longer hoped that rescue would come in time to save them. Not while this fog held. She could not even fool herself that she might be the one who was left until last. Richman would be the last. It was him the Wheel wanted isolated, not her or Kennedy.
So she had to do this.
She glanced to her side. Lying next to the mirror and the last line of cocaine was a box cutter knife. Marijuana to expand the mind, cocaine to energise it … and a blade to draw the blood.
If it came to that.
She pushed the fear down, focussed again, looked up towards the hidden Wheel, and gingerly, carefully, sent her mind out questing.
Out, out through the thick glass and into the mist beyond, into the damp grey and the biting cold and the shifting of the middle airs, here three thousand metres above the sea. Her eyes were closed now, but she saw not blackness but the glowing grey of the fog, and she searched through it eastwards, suspended above nothing, only a disembodied thought now, but listening, wide open to receive.
And at last, through the mist, the Wheel advanced like the coming of night. The fog did not dissipate, but within her mind the mountain became visible anyway, dark, shadowed, but with clarity, as if she beheld it on a clear moonlit night, all of it, stretching to either side of her in its immense arc of forty-five kilometres, surrounding her, leaning over her, twenty-five kilometres high.
She quailed a moment, almost withdrew her mind there and then. All she had to do was open her eyes and shake her head and she would be back in herself. The Wheel was just too overwhelming, too heavy a weight of stone and ice. She had forgotten, during these last few days, lost in cloud, just how crushing the mere sight of it could be.
But she held on somehow, until the dizziness and vertigo settled. Then, cautious once more, she let her mental eye begin to climb. Up, up, she gazed, past the frowning lower slopes, past the snowfields, now swept bare and bleak by the great avalanche, past the snouts of glaciers hanging perilously, past the chasms of the great couloirs, past all whiteness of snow or ice and on to the naked faces, sheer and terrible, of the upper half of the mountain. And then onwards still, far into the airless, waterless, warmth-less stratosphere, all the way up to the uttermost crest, cut hard against the black sky of space, where, remote but clear, the summit clenched, the very Hand of God …
Out of nowhere, Clara’s last words from down in the abyss of the shaft came to Rita. It’s you, Walter, you bastard. It’s you it wants, because of what you did up there. That disgusting thing you did.
Disgusting thing? What disgusting thing was that? What crime had Richman committed upon the summit that the Wheel could not forgive? Or was it just the crime of standing there at all?
Rita shook the thought away. It didn’t matter. She searched again, probing beyond the mere visible face of the Wheel now and opening herself to the essence of the mountain entire, to the awareness that existed within the heart of so much immensity of stone. She was ready to find hatred there. She was ready to find rage. She was ready for resentment to bear down upon her, weighted with all those billions upon billions of tonnes of rock and ice.
But instead, sensed at first almost as only the faintest of emanations, a dying echo from the high cliffs, but then strengthening as she focussed upon it, until like a tide that had turned and was now quickly flowing towards its full flood, came another emotion, one she had not expected at all.
Not anger … but grief.
Rita let her mind’s eye play across the mountain. She had encountered grief before during lustrations, yes, in presences that were dying, that were being slowly extinguished as humans gathered about them with the poisonous consciousness of man. Presences could indeed mourn their own deaths, their passing too soon from knowledge.
But this was different.
The presence within the Wheel was different. Entranced, Rita drank it in, a consciousness that had been forged half a billion years ago by the trauma of the Wheel’s birth, by the wrenching of such unimaginable weight, tectonic plate grinding inexorably against tectonic plate, so high into the sky.
It was a circumstance unique in all the world, and it had produced, in its violence, an awareness, a presence, that was likewise unique.
And the Wheel knew it.
The great mountain understood that not only was it different from its immediate surrounds, as did any presence, it understood that it was different from any other formation to be found upon the entire planet, that it was the only one of its type and kind, that there had been no other like it before, and never would be again, in all the age-long life of the Earth.
In the vast loneliness of that realisation, the presence of the Wheel had looked beyond itself to the wider world—an ability that Rita had never sensed before in any other presence. It had looked, and had discovered the existence of all the lesser presences about the globe, in their thousands and millions. Only little entities of little landscapes, but alive and aware, bright sparks in the darkness, and the only companionship the Wheel could find.
But in the millennia since, no more than an eye-blink by the eon-long standards by which it judged time, the Wheel had been forced to watch as one by one those same presences were killed, a constellation of candle flames being doused long before they were due to fail, as human consciousness ravaged across the planet, erasing all other thought.
Until even the Wheel’s own turn had come. People had arrived in their hundreds and scaled its unscaleable heights, and one had even stood atop its inviolate pinnacle, and the mountain had been unable prevent it. Oh, that brief invasion had not been enough to kill the presence within the Wheel, or even to injure it beyond indignity and insult. But it was a sign that the mountain well understood.
It too would be killed soon, at humanity’s hand. One day, be it a century from now or a century of centuries, people would return to the mountain, not in their hundreds but in their thousands, and they would remain, even at the summit, and then even the mighty presence of the Wheel would be drowned in their noxious thoughts, and so expire, as so many of its lesser cousins had already expired.
It was for all this that the mountain mourned. For itself, and for all of its kind. The acuteness of that grief cut at Rita’s mind and heart like an icy edge. Yes, there was anger there too, and the slow smoulder of rage and the desire for vengeance. Why else, after all, would the Wheel have done what it had done in these last days, if not to be revenged? But the anger was almost a minor note, lost in the symphony that was the Wheel’s sadness and loss.
The Rich Man’s House Page 47