Yes, thought Rita calmly. In one way he was right, fool that he was. He had only done what all humans had done throughout history, be they rich or poor. Humans explored and climbed mountains, they built homes where there had been no homes before, they spread and multiplied, and the presences of the landscape withdrew before them. It was the way of things. Yes, maybe on rare occasions the landscape struck back, and people died, as Rita’s mother had died. But not often. And there had never been anything like this, never an attack so prolonged or of such magnitude as was happening here.
So why was this different? What entwined Richman and the Wheel in such mortal enmity?
Rita almost giggled in her drowsy state. The irony of the answer was too delicious. Fiendishly so, despite the fact that the consequences spelled her own doom as surely as Richman’s.
It was his own pride, of course, his towering ego, that had caused all this. For when Richman had defeated the Wheel all those forty years ago, he had claimed it solely for himself, and himself alone. He had allowed no one else to share the summit with him, to share the glory of the victory. And in that monumental act of conceit, he had sown his own fate.
The terrible truth was this: if he had shared the Wheel, if he had let the hundreds of other climbers in his team ascend to the summit in turn, as he had promised them, then none of this would be happening. The presence within the Wheel could never have hoped to avenge itself upon hundreds of individual climbers. Indeed, it may not even have survived their intrusion, especially if Richman had left all his camps in place, so that even more climbers, in the years following, had continued to reach the summit. Faced with a ceaseless parade of humanity, the presence within the Wheel would have dwindled and died like so many lesser presences before it.
Instead, by ruling out the summit for all but himself, Richman had not only ensured that the presence within the Wheel survived, he had also made himself, one lone man, the sole focus for the mountain’s rage and hatred.
For forty years the mountain had nursed that hatred, untroubled by climbers save for on its lower slopes, and building its reserves of strength to immense potency, waiting for the day when Richman would come back within striking range. Indeed, calling to Richman, willing him to return, luring him with his own vanity to revisit the scene of his triumph, and, in his pride, to build his home there.
And so Richman had come.
And still the mountain had forborne its vengeance, waiting all through the construction of the Observatory, allowing no more than a hint of its malice to radiate upon the Mount. Even that hint had been enough to disturb those on the site, to drive several of them to their deaths. The Wheel could have done worse at any time, had it chosen to. But instead it had waited, ever patient, until the one man it wanted was in residence, relaxed and unguarded. Then, with exquisite timing, it had finally struck.
Not to just kill him. No. It was content to kill hundreds of others, but it did not want Richman himself dead, not immediately. It had a slower form of torture in mind for him. And now he was almost alone. Soon his last two companions would be gone, and once they had been dealt with, then the Wheel would take possession of Richman and—
Rita blinked, coming back to herself with a shock of alarm. She opened her eyes to the room. God, for a second there she had been the mountain, she had been sliding out of her body once more, and letting the Wheel slide back in, insidiously.
She shook her head, welcoming the pain it summoned, the way it cut through the haze of medication and exhaustion.
Was it real, what she had been dreaming? The fate the mountain held in store for Richman—she had received only a hint of it, only the dimmest suggestion, but it had been … abominable.
The men, meanwhile, had moved again without her seeing it. They were at a different window now, looking westward, and it was almost full night. Sky was visible above the thinning fog, the blue-black of late dusk. But there was a fringe of orange too, low, beyond her sight, the afterglow of sunset.
‘We’ll have stars tonight,’ Richman was saying, ‘and a clear sunrise in the morning. The mountain is losing its grip, I tell you. We’ve outlasted it. All we have to do is get through this night intact.’
But whatever Kennedy’s murmured response to this was, Rita did not hear it. Already she was drifting away again on the medication.
The mountain losing its grip? Richman could not be more wrong. All the breaking up of the fog meant was that the fog had served its purpose, and could now be dismissed. And if the Wheel had finished with its cloak of cloud, then that only meant it had some other device at the ready to deploy against its target. Something even worse.
Whatever else she did then, she must not sleep; she must not let down her guard. She must remain alert through this coming night, against what was surely to come.
And so thinking, she succumbed completely, closed her eyes, and began to snore.
6
THE WITCHING HOUR
She was not allowed to sleep uninterrupted, however. over the next several hours, she was woken at intervals by Kennedy, usually with a gentle touch to her shoulder. ‘It’s to check for concussion,’ he told her the first time. ‘It’s okay for you to sleep, but I need to make sure you can be woken easily.’
‘Fine,’ she would grumble, and then mumble her answers to the questions he asked her: what was her name, when was her birthday, did she know where she was, was she in any pain?
Then she would sleep again, and when woken once more would find that an hour or so had vanished. At some point the men must have cooked dinner, for dirty plates and cups suddenly appeared on the coffee table. Another time she woke without prompting and found that music was playing softly on the stereo, something classical that she did not recognise. The men were at the windows, talking as they gazed out, and beyond the glass the fog was gone. ‘Look at the temperature,’ Richman was saying, ‘it’s back up to zero, it’s almost warm out there now.’ And for some reason, even as she drifted under again, the notion of warmer weather filled Rita with unease.
In between, her sleep was blessedly dreamless, the unconsciousness of the drugged. But pain hovered in the background, her face, her arm, her leg, coming ever closer as the time passed, until finally she swam towards consciousness again, stiff and sore even as she lay unmoving. She knew she would not be able to drift off again. Not without more pills.
She opened her eyes. The living room was silent about her, no music, no voices.
What were the men doing now? She turned her head a little and she found that she was gazing at a small clock that sat on a low table by the couch opposite, an antique of some kind.
It was one o’clock. A nothing time, she thought, a time for insomniacs and invalids. Sunset was far behind, dawn still hours ahead.
She shifted stiffly on the couch, now very sore indeed. She needed those pills, and also, her bladder was complaining. She’d have to get up. Could she do it without the men? Propping herself on one elbow, she rose painfully to a sitting position—and saw that in an armchair at the far end of the couch Richman was sprawled, fast asleep. His hand was draped next to a half-empty wine glass on a side table, and his chest rose and fell slightly with a soft snoring.
Well, that was surprising. Wasn’t the idea for the men to both stay awake through the night? Rita shifted her gaze further about the room, searching for Kennedy. He must be awake at least, if Richman was dozing. But he was nowhere to be seen.
Stranger still.
A dim rumble came, an undertone to the billionaire’s snoring. Rita recognised the sound, faint though it was within the cocoon of the Cottage. It was thunder, from far off out in the night.
Her gaze moved to the windows. Was rain on its way? A storm? At first, she could see nothing through the glass, only darkness, and reflections of the living room interior. Then came a pale blue shimmer from somewhere off to the west, and after a long pause another faint rumble sounded. Yes, a storm was out there, but still some distance away.
For a few mo
ments more she remained propped as she was, staring at the windows, her mind not fully emerged yet from the medicated sleep, thinking nothing, detached still from the waking world. Again the blue shimmer trembled out in the night, and for the third time the low rumble muttered against the glass, almost gentle, a lullaby that might soothe her back to sleep. It faded to silence.
And then, a new sound.
Her detachment vanished. The noise was barely audible, high and thin and far off, but she knew screaming when she heard it, and this was the awful scream of a man in utmost terror.
She sat up, ignoring the pain that ignited everywhere in her body. The screaming went on, demented, bereft of all poise or dignity. It had to be Kennedy, but where was he? The sound was so distant, on the bare threshold of hearing.
She turned to the snoring Richman. ‘Wake up! Wake up! Something’s wrong!’
Richman stirred, opened his eyes groggily to stare at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Why are you asleep?’ she hurled at him. Her feet were on the floor now, dizziness and nausea threatening. ‘You two were supposed to stay awake and watch each other!’
Richman only blinked at her, dazed, then gazed down at himself in amazement. ‘I didn’t … I mean, I don’t know … I was just …’
‘Shut up!’ Rita hissed. ‘Listen.’
He obeyed.
They listened. The screaming went on, more regular now, though still high with terror, shouted words, but too muffled to grasp. It came, Rita decided, from one of the floors overhead.
‘What the fuck?’ breathed Richman, lurching to his feet. ‘What’s happening up there?’
Rita herself had risen by now, clutching the robe about herself, her wounded leg protesting wildly. ‘How the hell could you go to sleep?’
‘I didn’t! Kennedy and I were just sitting here, talking. I don’t remember even feeling tired.’ His eyes went to the clock. ‘Christ, but that was two hours ago! Come on! We have to get up there.’
He was hurrying for the stairs. Rita followed, limping painfully, feeling the fire of individual sutures tugging free in her thigh. Thunder muttered again, and the screaming above renewed in pitch.
‘Christ,’ Richman moaned as they climbed, ‘what the hell is happening up there?’
The Wheel, Rita thought. Whatever it was, this was the Wheel at work again, and this time it had chosen Kennedy. But what had it done? What could be so terrible that it could make a man as tough and capable as Kennedy scream that way?
They had climbed one flight to the level of the guest bedrooms, but still the desperate shouts came from far above, so Richman led the way further on, to the level of his private bedroom and office. Here the screams were louder, and words were at last discernible.
Help! Jesus, fuck, help!
But the cries still came from above, and there was only one level left: the Lightning Room.
They dashed up, Rita not caring how many stitches she tore. Round and round the stairs in the tunnel of stone they went, emerging at last to the platform beneath the open sky, roofed only in titanium framed glass, where that very afternoon Rita would have died, had not Kennedy saved her.
Fucking help me!
Richman and Rita gazed about in bewilderment. The room was dark, but shadows could be guessed at, and none of them were Kennedy. And yet, bafflingly, his cries were immediate now, close.
Get me off this!
Overhead, they still came from overhead. Rita stared up in confusion, and then—
Lightning flickered. It was only sheet lightning, hidden within cloud, pale and blue, but it was enough to briefly turn the exterior world to day. There on the mountaintop, surrounded by glass, it was as if Rita hung suspended in midair. Faraway below was the black sheet of the sea and her back was to the Wheel, but now another titan reared to the west, soaring high above her and dropping far away below. It was a great mass of roiling cloud, the storm, much closer than she had thought, and much larger. Great thunderheads were already looming over the Mount, frozen in an instant of their own internal lightning, but potent with motion, updrafts and downdrafts racing in misted chasms, dragging curtains of dark rain.
But revealed also by the lightning—it flickered again as Rita stared, as if to confirm the impossible thing—was a silhouetted figure, a man, spreadeagled across the glass ceiling overhead.
A man outside the glass.
Help me! Kennedy screamed, his voice strangely deadened, even though he was only a few feet above them, for he was on the wrong side of glass that was inches thick, glass that was bulletproof. And Rita could still not understand in the darkness what he was doing there, or what help he needed.
Get me fucking loose!
Thunder rumbled again, louder now, a long tumble of boulders clashing in the middle airs. Kennedy screamed above them and Richman was fumbling at the bedside table until finally he found a lamp and switched it on. It was dim, only a reading lamp, but the night withdrew at last, and through the glass Kennedy could be seen in full.
He was naked, contorted strangely upon the crest of the glass and titanium dome—and Rita grasped finally the reason for his terror.
He was trapped there.
Clenched about his left wrist was one manacle of a pair of handcuffs—his own handcuffs, presumably, the ones that Rita had seen him wear on his belt—and the other manacle was locked around the base of the stout bar of iron that speared up to the night and to the storm from the peak of the roof.
The lightning rod.
But that wasn’t all. If he had been otherwise free, Kennedy could have risen to his feet and so lifted his hand clear of the rod to escape. But he wasn’t free. A second set of handcuffs—the security chief must have carried two pairs—bound one of his ankles to the top rung of the ladder that climbed the outside wall of the Lightning Room to give access to the roof. Stretched out flat on the glass, fully extended between the ladder and the rod, he could scarcely move.
Get the fucking bolt cutters! he was yelling at them, eyes and mouth wide in the gloom. There’s a set up here with me. Do you see them? Get up here and cut me loose! A fucking storm is coming!
The storm. Thunder grumbled once more from all about. There were still no actual forks of lightning visible, only the blue flashes from within the massing clouds, but inevitably, as the storm crossed over the Mount, a bolt would strike the lightning rod. Why, they had all discussed this very topic only four, no, five days ago. The rod always got hit, Eugene had said. Multiple times for every storm. And when it did …
In her final horrified understanding, Rita traced the line of the grounding cable that was meant to run from the base of the rod across the roof, then down the side of the room to the bedrock of the Mount. The line had been cut, she saw. The upper end was now wound around the rod, and the lower end had been tied roughly about the security chief’s cuffed ankle. Which left only Kennedy himself as the single link now between the rod and the ground.
Blue light flickered bright overhead, starker than before, and thunder boomed loud, and the man on the roof writhed to stare up at the sky, screaming, and tugging manically at the handcuffs. But the rod was of solid iron, and the access ladder was of titanium alloy, and both had been fixed there with strength enough to withstand all manner of gales and tempests. His struggles were in vain.
The bolt cutters! he howled.
Richman cried, ‘I see them!’ To Rita’s amazement, the billionaire then dashed to the stairs and disappeared downwards. What was he doing? Where was he going? But then she remembered. There was no access from the Lightning Room itself to the narrow balcony that ran, below eye level, around the base of chamber. That balcony—it was for the use of staff, to clean the glass—could only be reached via a small door in the tunnel below.
She stared up, helpless, as Kennedy contorted and struggled and peered wildly at the storm-filled sky. She saw the bolt cutters finally, a large pair of them, lying at the base of the sloping roof, near Kennedy’s feet, out of his reach.
T
he picture formed with hideous clarity in her mind of how it must have been, how Kennedy had ended up in this hellish predicament. After all, she had experienced herself what it was like for the Wheel to take possession of her limbs, and to move them beyond her will, even to her own destruction.
Such it must have been for Kennedy. Having dispatched Richman to slumber, the Wheel must have seized hold of the security chief and guided him as an automaton to do its bidding: namely, to collect his handcuffs and the bolt cutters—the latter from who knew where—and then to ascend, naked, to the balcony of the Lightning Room, and finally up the ladder and across the glass roof.
Had he been aware all along of what was happening to him? The way that Rita had been aware as her own hand had hacked away unstoppably at her thigh? Had he been forced to watch, helpless, as his body, under the Wheel’s impetus, cut the grounding cable, then cast away the cutter, then handcuffed itself first to the rung of the ladder, and lastly to the base of the rod, trapping himself there irrevocably?
Had the Wheel been that cruel? Had it released his limbs, and given him back his voice to shout for help, only when it was too late, only when the first flashes of lightning began?
Hurry the fuck up! screamed the trapped man, calling not to Rita, she knew, but to Richman, who still had not appeared outside the glass.
The sky flared blue again, and this time Rita caught a glimpse off to one side of a naked bolt etched against the night, and the thunder when it came had a deadly crack before the rumble.
Oh Jesus god shrieked Kennedy above her. Rita stared about uselessly, as if something might appear, something with which she could smash the glass, but there was nothing in the room but the bed, and some low chairs, and the lamp, and anyway, the glass was smash-proof, that was the point of it.
Again a streak of lightning flared, the sky turning brilliant, and she saw once more the soaring chasms of cloud churning, before the thunder cracked and the man attached to the lightning rod screamed and tugged insanely at his bonds.
The Rich Man’s House Page 49