The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  And that gave Rita hope. Rage she did not think she would be able to placate. But sadness? That was another matter. Sadness, perhaps, she could assuage.

  For after all, she shared the Wheel’s grief. Not its response to that grief, not the violence it had enacted and was enacting, but the mourning for all that was being lost, yes, that she shared. And for that, in part, she was prepared to pay.

  She summoned the sadness now, and sent it flowing from the well of herself towards the monolith of the Wheel. It was a daunting prospect, so small was she and so limited was her store of empathy, when proffered to the towering mountain. But she persisted nonetheless, giving all that she had.

  And she was heard.

  For a moment, the great tide that was the Wheel’s grief slowed, a thoughtful ebbing as it became aware of another mind, one alien to it, and yet one somehow able to tune itself to the mountain, offering it sympathy, offering it understanding.

  The Wheel might have lashed out then, spurning the offering, but it did not. The tide held in abeyance, considering, weighing, not yet rejecting and not yet accepting; acknowledging, but not prepared yet to be placated. If it was to cease to flow—so the silent pause within Rita’s mind seemed to say—it needed not only shared grief, but also something actual, shared pain, shared loss.

  A sacrifice.

  Rita took a deep mental breath. Yes, she recognised this desire, having sensed it in so many other dying presences. There was always a need for recompense in exchange for destruction, for a payment in exchange for withdrawal, for a fee to be offered, no matter how small or symbolic, as long as it was real, as long as it was given in life source.

  In blood.

  Unseeing, her eyes closed, her mind still adrift in the fog, Rita reached for the box cutter at her side, and slid out a quarter inch of the blade.

  See, she said wordlessly to the mountain, see what I am prepared to do for your sake. And for a further moment the tide waited, withholding, watching in cold silence to be paid the price.

  Where to cut? The place of easiest access, Rita decided, given that she was clothed. Her arm. Eyes still closed, she shoved up her sleeve, and then traced the razor edge slowly along the smoothness of her wrist, the pressure just enough to pierce the skin.

  Yes, she felt the cut open, and a wet warmth well forth. There was virtually no pain. But then it wasn’t about the pain; it was about the lifeblood that would be released. Rita turned her wrist as she cut, holding it out over the edge of the bed, and felt the tiny droplets go, spattering to the stone floor. She projected the sensation to the mountain.

  Did the Wheel hear and see? Did it accept? It was too early to tell. Rita cut for another slow inch, knowing without sight that it would soon be time to stop, that already she had inflicted a wound maybe three inches long that would bleed copiously for many minutes before clotting. She had cut no major blood vessel, it was not life-threatening, but it was still blood aplenty, and more than enough.

  But when she went to raise her hand, the cut complete, she found she could not lift it.

  What?

  Suddenly the box cutter was a stone weight and her arm was powerless to control it, powerless to lift it away … and, she realised with a surge of horror, powerless to stop it cutting. The blade was still tracking slowly along her arm, coming to the fold of her elbow. Smoothly negotiating the bend, it began to slice along her upper arm.

  Her eyes snapped open, staring down. It was no illusion. Completely beyond her volition, her hand and the knife within its grasp were continuing the cut. She could neither halt nor even delay it. She could only gape at the blood that was running down her wrist and onto the bedspread, more and more of it …

  Abruptly she became aware of a new mood in the Lightning Room, immensely strong.

  It was glee, and it came from the Wheel. Even with her eyes wide open and her mind shut and the entire lustration forgotten, still the sense of the presence around her was overwhelming. And it was laughing at her. It had tricked her.

  There was no gentle grief, no mourning sadness in the mountain. Or rather, there had been once, but it had long since curdled into rage. And not just any rage, but an all-encompassing, cruel, pitiless fury. The Wheel sought no understanding or atonement or placation from humanity; it sought only destruction. And who better to inflict that destruction upon than the man who had defiled the mountain’s undefiled peak, the man who stood as symbol of all humankind’s contempt for any awareness other than its own.

  Yes, the Wheel would kill Walter Richman. It would glory in doing so, and it would kill anyone else it needed to, in the effort to render him helpless and alone. As for the pretensions of a woman who had the temerity to offer the Wheel sympathy, to try and atone for mankind’s misdeed with a trivial flow of her blood—well, the Wheel was going to show her now how much blood would really be needed.

  All the while Rita could only stare. The blade was almost up to her shoulder now, still remorselessly slicing her skin. But then, an inch short of the shoulder joint, the knife stopped, and after a moment her hand lifted away. It wasn’t her doing, however. No part of her body was under her control; she was watching through a TV screen instead of her eyes.

  Now the box cutter hovered above her lap. Her thumb moved to the catch that adjusted the blade. It had been set at a quarter inch, but now her thumb pushed, and a full two inches of naked segmented razor extended out wickedly.

  Her other hand, moving likewise on its own, now pulled back her skirt to reveal her legs crossed beneath her, and to expose the pale and defenceless expanse of her upper thigh. There, beneath a crisscross of ancient shallow scars from the past, secure within her flesh, pulsed her femoral artery.

  Oh dear god.

  Panic suffused Rita, but she could move nothing, do nothing; there was not even a surge of heartbeat, so divorced was her consciousness from her body. The Wheel held her fast in its grip, moving her like a fluid puppet, and she understood exactly now how Kushal must have felt as he walked to his death, and Madelaine too, and poor lost Clara.

  The knife lowered to her thigh.

  And yet even in her terror, her most coherent emotion was not fear of death or pain, rather it was one of embarrassment at her own stupidity—that she had walked so open-eyed into this trap, that she had surrendered herself so willingly to the Wheel’s control, that she had bought the knife with her, and even begun the cutting of her own accord!

  The blade dipped, made contact with the skin. Even though she was otherwise unconnected with her limbs, the steel sent an exquisite thrill of threat through her mind. Then as she watched, helpless, her hand pressed down, and the point of the blade sank into her flesh, slow, steady, deep.

  No, she was screaming in the prison of her skull, but it did no good. The Wheel was going to kill her by her own lustration, and it was going to force her to watch every slow second of it.

  Buried deep, the razor began to cut, and already blood was flowing, not yet the bright vermillion of arterial blood, and not yet the spraying heart pump of arterial pressure, but any moment—

  Her head rocked violently. Then rocked again. Her eyes rolled, dazed.

  What?

  Kennedy stood before her, his hand raised and open from having slapped her, his mouth contorted in anger, yelling something, though she could not hear. And when she did not respond, for she could not, he clutched madly at the wrist of the arm that held the box cutter, and tugged it upwards.

  Rita watched, a distant spectator, as the blade withdrew a fraction. But then the arm was fighting him (the arm, not her arm) and pressing down again, sawing, sawing at her thigh, and the security chief did not seem to have the strength, for all his brawn and size advantage over her, to stop it. She was stronger than him. The Wheel was stronger.

  Baffled, Kennedy gave up the fight and glared at her for an eternal instant, as if searching in her eyes for reason or volition. Apparently finding none, he raised his hand again, now clenched into a fist. Rita stared at it in her daze. The
fingers were curled hard and tight as stone, and it was utterly beautiful.

  He reared back, and with all his strength—she could discern the practised way he threw his entire bodyweight into the movement—he hit her high on the cheek, and in the explosion of pain she knew joy and relief before oblivion swept her away.

  5

  MEDICATIONS

  Concussion, marijuana hangover, cocaine come-down, sliced wrist, hacked thigh …

  Rita considered the list in a darkness that seemed to heave like a small boat on an unsettled sea. Concussion, yes, she might well have concussion, to have been hit as hard as Kennedy had hit her. And the rest, the drugs, the wounds, were already established facts. When she woke up, when the darkness lifted and the boat stopped rocking, she was going to feel fucking awful, her head would be throbbing, her arm and her thigh on fire, her thoughts scrambled …

  Except, wasn’t she awake already, to be thinking this? But what was she doing in a boat?

  Her eyes slipped open and there was the world waiting for her, slightly blurry but quite solid. She was not on a boat at all, though the seasick feeling didn’t leave her; she was in the living room of the Cottage, stretched on one of the couches. Far away by the tall windows were her two fellow prisoners, Richman and Kennedy, talking, their backs to her.

  She tested her limbs cautiously. Immediately there was pain, the stiff, bound sensation of wounds only freshly sutured and crusted over, the hurt seeming to come more from her arm than her leg, even though she knew that the wound in her thigh was the more serious. Someone had stitched and bandaged her, and she assumed it was Kennedy, because of his military and security training.

  She glanced down. Someone had also stripped her to her underwear to do the first aid, and then wrapped her loosely in a blanket. And god her head hurt, though really it was more the whole left side of her face, which felt terrifically swollen. Was there a fracture there? A cheekbone? Her jaw even?

  But none of that mattered. The important thing was that her hand lifted when she told it to lift; her toes curled when she ordered them to curl; she could move her dry lips and lick them with her tongue. There was no one, no thing, controlling her body anymore. She was her own property again.

  Celebrating, she tried to rise against the cushion, and fell back with a groan as her head pulsed, and the stitches in her limbs gave coinciding shrieks. Darkness hovered again.

  ‘You awake?’

  Rita gazed up. She had not seen them move, but somehow the two men were now at her side, staring down. It was Kennedy who had spoken.

  She did not dare nod. ‘More or less.’

  The security chief’s stern face softened slightly. ‘Thank god. I was worried I’d knocked you into a coma. You’ll be in pain. I stitched you up, but I haven’t given you any medication yet, because I wanted you to wake up again first. Do you understand?’

  A tiny nod this time.

  The relief withdrew from his expression, his gaze hardening. ‘So what the hell happened up there? Why were you trying to kill yourself?’

  Talking was painful, but she forced it out, firm. ‘It wasn’t me. It was the Wheel.’

  ‘Oh, come on! I was there. I saw. You were cutting your own leg. No one else.’

  But Richman was nodding with a light of understanding in his eyes. ‘The lustration went bad, is that what happened?’

  Rita gave another minimal nod.

  ‘Tell us everything.’

  But Kennedy was shaking his head. ‘Wait, dammit, she needs some pain relief first, and some water; she’ll be dehydrated. Let me get her comfortable first, then she can tell her tale.’

  The security chief disappeared to the kitchen for a time, returning with water, a pot of tea, and a several pills. Before swallowing the latter Rita, as a vet and medical professional, demanded to know what drug they were. Kennedy duly told her, and she forgot immediately. The water was delicious, the tea, very sweet, even more so. Meanwhile, Kennedy checked her dressings to be sure all the bleeding was stopped, and finally wrapped her in a thick dressing gown and propped her up on the couch. Only then did Rita, as best she could, still sipping on the tea, report what had happened in the Lightning Room.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Richman, when she was done. ‘So there’s no way we can deal with this thing?’

  Rita shook her head, the pain drifting in her skull as she did so, but only mild now. The pills were working. She felt as if she had just downed four or five glasses of wine very quickly. Not drunk, but definitely out of sync with the rest of the world. She put her tea aside, sank back into the couch.

  Kennedy was still wrestling with his scepticism. ‘I’ll give you this much at least,’ he said finally, ‘you certainly acted like someone who was possessed. There was nothing that recognised me in your eyes at all. But to say it was the Wheel …’

  Richman wasn’t listening. ‘Then that’s that,’ he pronounced. ‘If we can’t negotiate with it, we have to focus strictly on survival, on staying alive until rescue comes.’ His eyes went to the windows. ‘At least the fog is lifting at last. That’ll help.’

  Rita followed his gaze. It was true, she saw to her dim surprise. Beyond the glass, the weather had changed. A breeze had arisen, and the mist that had clung so thickly while she was in the Lightning Room was now rolling past in fragments and billows, first thin, then thick again, then offering a glimpse of a cold, pale sky. But it was so dark. Evening was coming on. She must have been unconscious for several hours.

  ‘Too late to be of any use to us today,’ muttered Kennedy. ‘We’re stuck here one more night at the least. That’s if anyone ever shows up.’

  Richman shook his head. ‘I don’t know why no helicopter has come from Hobart; it makes no sense at all. But even forgetting that, we haven’t got much longer to wait. There’s the Aurora Australis, remember? It’s due to dock here some time tomorrow, by our arrangement. Sure, it might be a day or so late, if bad weather delays it. But even the Wheel, no matter how strong it is, can’t close down the whole damn Southern Ocean. The Australis will be here.’

  Kennedy shrugged. ‘Even if it does come, how does that really help us if we’re still stuck up here? We can’t use the emergency stairs.’

  ‘Christ, it’ll be a start …’

  Rita could only wonder at the men’s blindness. Tomorrow, the day after, it didn’t matter: the ship would be too late, no matter when it arrived. The Wheel—she was sure of this, having shared her soul with the mountain—knew with exactitude how long it had before any rescue intruded, and it would be careful to finish the three of them off before then. In its malice and cunning, the Wheel was master of all timing here.

  Richman and Kennedy’s conversation had moved on while she had drifted.

  ‘No one is to be left alone again,’ Kennedy was saying. ‘We knew it was a risk leaving Rita on her own up in the Lightning Room, and look what happened. So, lesson learned. We three stay in each other’s sight. We stay awake too, and we check on each other all the time, to make sure none of us is losing it. The next question is—where do we hole up? Here? Is there anywhere safer we could go?’

  Richman seemed to consider a moment, as if debating some point privately, then nodded. ‘I can’t really think of anywhere else.’

  ‘Maybe we should barricade ourselves in a storeroom or something, down in the main residence,’ opined Kennedy. ‘Or in the Control Room maybe. Take food and water for the night. With the cameras there, we could watch everywhere else.’

  But Richman was decided. ‘There’s nothing and no one to watch. We’re the only ones here now. No, the Cottage is the securest place.’

  A stray thought wandered into Rita’s world. Something to do with Kennedy’s mention of the Control Room. Something unfinished.

  She spoke. ‘Clara.’ The men turned to look at her, and she explained in a pained whisper. ‘Do you know what happened to her yet? Have you tried to contact her … since this morning?’

  Kennedy shook his head. ‘Aside from going b
ack to the Control Room, there’s no way to communicate with her from here. Other than with that thing.’ He nodded to a walkie-talkie that lay on the coffee table. ‘I’ve tried, but no answer. The signal might not even be reaching her, way down in that shaft.’

  Rita said, ‘Maybe she’s not in the shaft anymore. Maybe she made it down and got out.’

  Kennedy’s gaze allowed no such hope. ‘I think we have to face the facts about Clara. You heard the state she was in at the end. And unlike you, she had no one with her to snap her out of it.’

  Rita could not deny the truth of this. She had felt what it was like to be in the Wheel’s grip, the impossibility of fighting against it.

  Richman was gazing moodily at the windows again, where banks of fog were fleeting by against the growing darkness. ‘Clara gone, and Madelaine, and Kushal, and all the people down at Base. Christ, I don’t understand this. All this death—and why? Because I climbed a mountain? Why is that such a crime? How do any of us deserve all this in response?’

  Rita, dozing again, smiled to herself at his frustration. Richman was doubly blind, if he hadn’t worked it out yet. But she knew. It was the one useful thing she had taken from her near-death encounter with the mountain. It had possessed her, yes, but she had seen into its heart in return.

  ‘I mean, someone was going to climb the Wheel sooner or later,’ Richman went on bitterly. ‘What does it matter who, exactly? And it’s not as if we stayed when we got to the top, or changed anything up there. We left straightaway and took everything with us. We treated that mountain with goddamn respect. So why all this, and why now? Is it because of the Observatory? Because I chose to build a house here? Is that supposed to mean I’ve defiled something? Defiled what? The Mount here was hardly pristine before we came; it was covered in crap a century old, all those huts and bunkers and radar dishes. I cleaned all that up. I made it better. And Jesus, this is what mankind does, we build things where there were no things before. If we didn’t, the whole damn planet would still be a wilderness. Everyone does it everywhere. So why single us out? What’s the problem here?’