What was keeping Richman? Rita had just resolved to descend herself to see when the billionaire appeared once more at the top of the stairs, his expression bewildered and harassed.
‘I can’t get the fuck out,’ he swore. ‘The door is locked and the keys are gone.’
What are you doing? screamed Kennedy from above. The security chief was scarcely recognisable as himself, stripped of his suit and of his air of brute resourcefulness, his naked flesh pale and shrivelled in the freezing air. Help me!
‘I can’t!’ Richman called back. ‘The keys! You must have taken them out there with you!’
Smash the fucking door then!
‘He’s right, smash it down!’ Rita echoed. ‘What are you even doing back up here?’
The billionaire shrugged desperately. ‘The door is bombproof, like every other external entry. I’m not going to be able to just break it down, not without some heavy tools or machinery.’
‘But we have to do something!’
‘I don’t know wha—’
He broke off as above them a great forked network of fire blazed, and thunder cracked splittingly. Illuminated in the shutter flash, a giant black cloud seemed to be reaching down to the Mount, bursts of rain lowering from it like fists.
Oh sweet god help me! Kennedy screamed as he fought, staring up, rapt, to the monster.
Neither Rita nor Richman moved. Rita was frozen, sensing (and perhaps even Richman could too) a terrible coherence gathering in the night beyond the glass, her nerves singing with a tension that rose and rose. All was dark overhead now, the storm invisible, but the blackness grew heavier every instant, more pregnant with electric potential.
Damn you, Richman! Kennedy screamed. Damn you and your fucking mountain!
His last words. For in answer the lightning descended from the sky.
Rita remembered enough of her school lessons to know how lightning worked, how a grasping network of feelers came creeping down from a thundercloud until one reached the ground or some other point, and then the main stroke leapt upwards, but that it all happened too fast for the human eye to discern anything but a single flash.
Nevertheless, staring up into the impending doom of the storm, she saw the fingers come searching down, in two main branches, for all the world like the fingers of two elongated hands, questing in the potent air for the right path by which to make the fatal connection between sky and mountain.
The instant seemed to be drawn out agonisingly. Down, down, the glowing tendrils reached, grasping all about in the middle airs above the Mount. Kennedy’s body was arched in a final paroxysm of effort to escape, but it served only to thrust him up towards the groping fingers.
And then one feeler, having jagged far to one side of the lightning rod, jagged back in a single gleeful leap, and touched the iron tip.
The world blazed stark white, a burning river of silver cleaving the night in two, the main bolt searing up into the darkness, a million-fold brighter than the trailers. The light alone threw Rita to the floor even as the thunderclap hit her like a falling wall. The concussion was stunning, shattering everything surely, all the glass of the Lightning Room …
Yet when the blaze was gone an instant later, and the thunder was rolling away into the night in thumping echoes, Rita’s dazzled gaze revealed that the glass dome remained perfectly intact, and that it was only Kennedy who was broken.
She didn’t know what she had expected, perhaps that he would be reduced instantly to smoking cinders. But it was not so. He had not been set on fire, no smoke rose from him, but his spine appeared to have been snapped. At least, Rita could not imagine how a human body could be bent back on itself in such a way if the spine hadn’t snapped. Even so, he wasn’t dead.
Indeed, as the thunder faded, she could hear that he was still screaming, although incoherently now, a stroke victim’s gurgle. And though his arms still flailed in an effort to escape, his lower half was unmoving, and something in the way his head moved suggested that his eyes had been blinded.
Then the sky ignited again. There were no warning feelers on this occasion, just another explosion of light and noise as electricity scalded the iron rod a second time, and squinting into the glare, even as she cowered down, Rita could see Kennedy’s broken body arch again in orgasmic spasm as the energy coursed through him.
But lightning doesn’t strike twice. Except that she had already been warned that here upon the Mount it often did strike twice, and anyway, natural laws no longer applied, for this was the Wheel’s doing. And then she thought of blood being boiled by the electrical surge, and of muscles and tissue cooking even as Kennedy yet lived, and was sure she could hear him scream through the thunder.
Then the lightning hit again.
And again.
And did not stop.
Rita was huddled on the floor now, weeping as the detonations pummelled her over and over. The bolts were harmless to her there within the Faraday cage of the room, but each blast wrenched at her heart and at her sanity, until she was screaming herself at the tumult to Stop, stop, stop!
And then finally it did.
The continuous thunder drained away, and she could take her hands from her ears and peer up to see what was left on the roof above.
And yes, now there was smoke rising—but oh Christ, Kennedy still wasn’t dead. His limbs, especially his cuffed arm and leg, those that had carried the charge, were charcoal-blackened, and the rest of him was reddened strangely, reminding Rita of cooked meat upon a frypan, but he was moving still, writhing, his head shaking from side to side.
Die, she willed. God, please, just die.
Something white and hard and the size of a brick fell from the blackness above and smashed against the glass like a gunshot. It was followed quickly by another. Rita stared beyond Kennedy’s tortured form into the upper night, and in the light from a faraway lightning flicker saw that the entire sky was descending, a mass of falling white shapes. Then she was ducking her head instinctively as she realised what she was seeing—hail.
The stones seemed to strike all at once, the din even worse than thunder, sharper and crueller and more painful to the ear. Rita huddled in terror, arms over her head, for surely the glass must smash. And surely, surely, she couldn’t be hearing through the wall of noise the wet smack of ice upon flesh and the ripping of skin and the crunch of bone.
She should flee, she knew—she should be scrambling for the stairs to get out from under the dome that could give way at any moment, but she was incapable of movement, could only remain in a crouch as the murderous din went on and on.
Until it, too, finally stopped.
It was raining by then, but only the normal, heavy rain of any storm, and with the depletion of the hail she sensed too the withdrawal of the influence of the Wheel. Not an exhaustion of its influence, merely a cessation; its hunger for the moment sated, leaving the storm to blow without hostility.
She dared at last to look up. Amazingly—and she had to tip a mental nod to her dead father for his design—the glass of the dome was still intact, its strength proof against any onslaught.
Kennedy, however, had been made of less stern stuff. He was reduced to bloody tatters. His chained arm had broken away at the elbow, the upper limb still dangling from the cuff, while the rest of him had slumped down upon the ladder, a sodden mass, blood and brain matter and other bodily fluids streaming away across the dome in the rain. But yes, dead at last, unquestionably. There was not enough of him left in one piece to possibly be alive.
Lightning flickered through the downpour, and thunder rumbled from nearby. Rita noted even through her shock that although the Wheel’s malign guidance was gone, lightning could still strike the peak, and now with the grounding cable severed and even the link of Kennedy’s body broken, it might no longer be safe here, even on the inside.
She turned to Richman to say that they must leave, that there was nothing to be done for Kennedy now, not until the storm was over.
But Richma
n wasn’t there. She peered about the dim space, but no, he was nowhere within the Lightning Room. When had he gone? She couldn’t remember. He had been there when the first bolt of lightning struck, hadn’t he? Yes, but after that? She couldn’t recall. Had he dashed off in a last attempt to reach Kennedy? Or had he fled simply in horror of the lightning and the hail, as Rita herself should have fled, once the end was inevitable?
It hardly mattered either way. Lightning flashed again and cracked loudly, too close for comfort. Rita moved at last, limping down the tunnel stairs, her wounded leg burning and stiff, now that the adrenalin had left her. She felt weary and sick and despairing. So it was only the two of them now.
But when she regained the living room, Richman wasn’t there. And though, increasingly exhausted, she climbed the stairs again and searched his private quarters and the guest bedrooms and everywhere else she could think to look in the Cottage, she could not find him anywhere else.
It wasn’t the two of them at all.
It was just her now.
The billionaire had vanished.
7
ALONE
It wasn’t until the end of her third frantic search through the Cottage, when Rita spied herself in one of the guest bedrooms’ full-length mirrors, that she finally gave up her quest for Richman, and forced herself to take stock.
Her reflection was appalling. With her swollen cheek and tear-reddened eyes, she was a stick figure wrapped in an oversized robe that was falling off one shoulder to reveal a bra strap and her bloody, bandaged arm. The robe itself was wet, she noticed, around the groin. How had that happened? Had rain leaked through the dome of the Lightning Room, cracked by hail? Then she realised: at some point in the horror, her full bladder must have emptied itself. She hadn’t even noticed.
Jesus. Suddenly she stank to herself of urine and sweat and blood. She needed a shower, but there was no question of that until she found Richman. There was no way she could shut herself in a bathroom and stand under running water, deaf to what was happening around her, deaf to anything that might be creeping just outside the door, while she was still on her own. And oh god, she couldn’t really be on her own, could she? Alone? In this terrible place?
Which set her off on another circuit of the Cottage, even to the point of trying the little door that led out onto the balcony around the Lightning Room, even though she knew Richman could not be out there, would never go out there while the storm still blew. But it was locked fast anyway, as Richman himself had said, and there was no sign of any key.
At last she drifted aimless and distraught to the guest bedroom in which she had left her luggage when they had all moved into the Cottage—there had been no chance to actually sleep there. She stripped, wiped herself down with a damp towel, then put on fresh underwear and clothes. She should have changed her bandages too, blood was oozing from her thigh after all her exertions, but she couldn’t face that yet. The mystery of Richman’s disappearance was too urgent.
Where was he?
Had the Wheel taken him? Had Kennedy’s gruesome execution merely been a distraction, during which Richman, the true target, could be snatched away to some unseen end?
No. Of that much, Rita was sure. Attuned as she was to the moods of the Wheel, she knew she would have felt it if the mountain had already claimed its prize, the vengeful exultation would have been overwhelming. And there had been no such sensation. The Wheel had killed Kennedy, and then withdrawn patiently to prepare its next move.
So Richman could not simply be gone. He had to be somewhere. He had to have taken the chance in the Lightning Room to abandon Rita for a reason of his own, and he must be hiding from her still. And yet patently he was not in the Cottage, the place was simply too small and too plainly laid out for him to have secreted himself there.
Which left only the Observatory below.
She shivered at the thought. Lord, she did not want to go down there again, to return to all those cavernous, empty halls. The Cottage, even after Kennedy’s death, at least felt partially secure. To go back to the Observatory, to its immensity and silence and shadows … it made her heart shrivel.
And yet what choice was there?
No choice. The loneliness was unbearable already, and besides, she was angry now. How dare Richman just desert her like that, without a word? If for no other purpose, she wanted to find the billionaire to berate him for his selfishness, for putting her through this, on top of everything else.
Gathering her resolve, she crept down the stairs to the living room. All was quiet there. The couches were empty, the blanket where she had slept remained thrown aside as she had left it, likewise the plates the men had left on the coffee table. Beyond the windows rain still sluiced heavily across the Terrace, and thunder murmured in bass support, but again, it was only weather now, not an enemy.
The enemy was her own fear.
She moved first to the airlock doors that led down to the Terrace, to check, as she had already three times in the last half hour, that they were locked. They were. So if Richman had left the Cottage, he must have gone down by the elevator.
She went to the lift. There was a key by the doors that could be turned to lock the elevator in the up position, securing the Cottage from any entry via the Observatory. Rita had seen Richman turn that very key yesterday, and listened to him explain its function. She had hoped to find it unlocked now, and the elevator car gone, for that at least would prove her theory that Richman had gone below.
But the key was still in the lock position, and when she turned it, and pressed the button, the elevator doors opened immediately, the car waiting at the ready. She stared at it in pained concentration. So … so that meant that Richman had not gone down? Or was there a way to send the car back up? But why would he bother? And either way, he couldn’t have reset the key from down there, could he?
Or could he? What if he was in the Control Room now? Wouldn’t that give him access to all sorts of security systems? Maybe the lock could indeed be reset from below, in which case, had he done so just for this purpose, to confuse her search?
But why? Why vanish in the first place, and why hide his tracks? It made no sense.
She rubbed her aching head. No, she couldn’t reason it all out; her mind was too fogged with pain and shock. She should do something about the pain at least. The medical kit that Kennedy had used on her must be lying about somewhere, and it must be a proper, hospital-grade kit, because he had dosed her with something powerful, god knew. She should find it, take some more of the pills.
Ah, but then she would probably fall asleep—and for an instant the temptation to do just that was near irresistible. To simply sleep! To block out this nightmare and descend into oblivion! It would be so lovely, and after all, when she woke up it might all be over, rescue might have come, and she would have spared herself hours of suffering.
Or—she reminded herself with tremendous effort—she would never wake up at all. Drugged, she would have no resistance to the Wheel whatsoever. It could walk her half-conscious body off the side of the Terrace, for all she would know about it. So no, she could not, must not, succumb to the lure of painkillers and slumber; she must accept the throb and ache as best she could, and stay awake.
With a bitter sigh, she took a step into the elevator, and pressed the Down button.
As soon as the doors closed and the car began to descend, her terror returned. What if this was what the Wheel had been waiting for, to trap her alone in a stalled elevator with no help that could possibly reach her? The car was so small, and there was no one to call, no one to notice now if she vanished …
But in moments the car slowed, stopped, and at the chime the doors slid soundlessly open to reveal the shadowy expanse of the Library.
Calm down, Rita told herself.
She stepped out. Despite her own admonishment, she could not help a nervous glance to either side, as if Richman might be lying in wait to spring at her. Which was stupid. Whatever he was up to, he wasn’t some
crazed killer.
But nor—she stared from corner to corner—was he anywhere in sight in the Library.
A whisper came from behind and Rita jumped, looked back. Christ, it was only the elevator door—the fake bookcase—sliding shut. Stop it, she told herself again. Then, taking a shaky breath, she made herself walk towards the Saloon.
But god, it was cold down here. Not actually freezing, maybe, but it felt much colder than the Cottage. This was, what, the fourth day now since the main power supply had failed? The emergency generators could obviously keep the intimate rooms of the Cottage warm, but here in the vaster spaces of the Observatory, the native chill of the upper Mount must be finally beginning to seep through.
It was darker down here as well, the few lights falling too dimly in so much space. Also, it was silent. Cocooned in rock, the Library was disturbed by no sound of rain and barely any rumble of thunder. There was only the rich, secret quiet of opulence, of polished oak and soft leather, and of unopened books slowly decaying.
Hand to her mouth, as if to stop herself from screaming, Rita moved on past the tables and shelves and couches, and saw Richman nowhere.
She came to the Saloon and found it similarly empty and dim. But here the sense of abandonment was even more acute. It was in the small details—unwashed plates on a table, a bottle lying on its side on the bar, a couch shoved out of alignment—that stood out because they would never be attended to now, or tidied up. Humans had departed this place. It was if she were walking through Tutankhamen’s tomb only moments after it had been sealed, knowing that nothing would change, nothing would move, for the next three thousand years.
But was that true? Was the Observatory genuinely abandoned forever? Would no one ever live here again, walk here? Rita could not know that, but she felt it, of that there was no denying.
She moved on into the Atrium, its dome lost in shadows and its windows showing only rain-streaked darkness. No one was there. She glanced into the Dining Hall and saw that it was empty. She peered down into the well of the Helix Staircase but no one moved on the twin snakes of the staircases. Of course, the guest wings waited down there, beyond sight, and all the other levels. At some point, she would have to descend into the heart of the Mount, if she really meant to search.
The Rich Man’s House Page 50