The Lazarus Hotel

by Jo Bannister

  It wasn’t good enough. It might be strong enough, but it might not. It would have to be joined in several places, and then it would be impossible to grip tightly enough to haul a man’s weight twenty feet up a shaft.

  Richard shook his head. ‘I’ve done a bit of climbing – nothing too demanding but enough to know what you can and can’t do. That’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘More trouble than Will’s in now?’ demanded Sheelagh incredulously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Richard said with certainty. ‘He’s fallen once, he doesn’t need to fall again. Midge, how do you climb in the shaft? Can I do it? Can I go down to him and bring him up?’

  For answer the boy leaned casually into the shaft and directed the torch into the narrow end of the oval.

  Will had been looking for a ladder when he fell. This wasn’t one but it was designed to serve as one for short distances, so that an engineer in a harness might reach a problem from the level immediately above. Even Jacob’s angels would have thought twice about using it for any other purpose.

  Fretted tracks either side of the shaft guided the gondola and provided an emergency braking system. The frets were just wide and deep enough to support someone who knew what he was doing.

  They all looked where Midge indicated. They reached the same conclusion. Tessa put it into words. ‘You’re crazy even thinking about it. Even if you get down to him without falling, how do you get Will to climb back up? He wouldn’t do it for Midge – why should he do it for you?’

  ‘Because he’s bloody got to,’ Richard grunted. It wasn’t much of an argument but it was all he had.

  Tariq was at least prepared to think about it. ‘Seriously – do you reckon you could climb down that? And back up again, without falling?’

  Richard took another moment to be sure. ‘Yes. Hell, I can’t guarantee it, but I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble.’

  The bigger man nodded. ‘You realize the builders might have remembered us already – that you could be halfway down to the lift when the damn thing starts up to meet you?’

  Richard hadn’t. He blinked. ‘Tariq, I know it’s risky. But if we leave Will where he is he’s going to die. Don’t talk me out of this. Help me work out how to do it.’

  Improbably enough, Tariq was smiling. ‘Aren’t you the guy who came here because he’d lost his nerve in dangerous situations?’

  That brought Richard up short. He barked a little edgy laugh. ‘Me? No. That’s my twin brother. I’m the one who goes bungee-jumping and runs the Pamplona bulls. Stop asking stupid bloody questions and help me here. So I get down to him – what do I do then?’

  ‘OK. You take the cords with you. You fashion a safety rope that’ll steady him if he starts to wobble. Maybe you could belay it round the cable? If he actually falls you won’t be able to hold him, but if he thinks you can, maybe that’ll do. Get him climbing up the track ahead of you, and don’t follow him till he’s damn near out of reach. By then he’ll be halfway to where we can grab him.’

  Richard was visualizing it. It sounded reasonable enough, but experience told him that putting it into practice would reveal unexpected difficulties. ‘What if the worst happens and we both fall? Will the lift hold us?’

  There wasn’t a lift engineer among them. But Tariq had the sort of mind that absorbed useless information, and he’d once seen a television programme on the subject. ‘Should do. It’s designed to fail safe – it can only move if the cable’s taking the strain. If the weight goes above a certain level the brakes lock automatically.’

  ‘Do do,’ said Richard, ‘or should do?’

  ‘Do do,’ Tariq said with more confidence than he felt. ‘It must be safe or they wouldn’t have let us use it.’

  ‘What about the gondola itself? That acrylic or perspex or whatever it is – we’re not likely to go straight through it?’

  Tariq had never seen a programme on thermoplastic resins. All he could do was shrug. ‘Will didn’t and he fell twenty feet. Of course, he could have loosened something…’

  The point had come for Richard to do it or not. The longer he thought about it now, the less likely it was to happen. ‘OK,’ he gritted, ‘give me the cords and I’ll see what I can do.’

  Midge said, ‘Midge too.’

  Richard paused a moment, scanning the boy’s eyes, thought what he saw there was an earnest desire to help and nodded. ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  A small hand gripped his wrist tightly, and he turned to meet Sheelagh’s urgent gaze. ‘No. Richard, don’t take him. You’ll be safer on your own.’

  Tariq was watching Midge, saw him recoil as if she’d slapped his face. He said nothing, but plainly he understood what was being said. Blood flushed sullenly in his sun-starved cheeks.

  Richard scowled, offended on the boy’s behalf. ‘He wants to help. He’s only here because he thought he could help.’

  ‘Yes?’ she retorted, hard and fast. ‘And he thought he was helping Miriam, did he, with a rolling-pin behind the ear? Richard, you’re proposing to do something desperately dangerous on the word of a crazy boy who’s notched up two victims already. All right, you can judge for yourself whether you can climb the track and whether you can get Will to. But you don’t need a juvenile psychopath on your back while you’re doing it.’

  The speed of the exchange, and the long words, left Midge floundering. He knew he was being accused of something, wasn’t sure what. His forget-me-not eyes went from one to the other of them. ‘What?’

  Tariq would have liked to dismiss it as paranoia. But that was too easy, and the consequences could be too expensive. ‘She has a point, you know. He’s at home in there – you’re not. Let’s at least try and find out why he hit Miriam, if only so you can avoid annoying him the same way.’

  After a moment Richard nodded. ‘But make it quick. Before my brother gets back.’ He flashed Tariq a tight grin that Fran, had she been there, would have recognized with joy and wonder.

  ‘Midge, can you help us with this? Can you tell us what happened to Miriam? You know, the fat lady? She got hurt. Can you tell us how?’

  He understood that well enough. His eyes widened with indignation. ‘No!’

  ‘Did she startle you – did you hit out before you realized who she was?’

  ‘Midge never hit anyone!’

  ‘Midge sure as hell bit someone,’ grunted Larry sourly.

  ‘You frightened me!’ The boy’s skill with language was developing even as he spoke, Tariq noted. Personal pronouns now. Maybe there wasn’t as much wrong with him as they’d assumed.

  ‘Miriam could have frightened you,’ he suggested. ‘It was late, it was dark – I thought maybe she surprised you and you struck out in self-defence. Is that what happened, Midge? Tell us, we won’t be angry.’ That probably wasn’t true, he thought, but necessity justified a fib or two.

  But still Midge shook his head, long tangles of fairish hair flicking across his face. ‘No.’

  ‘OK,’ said Tariq then, casually, as if it didn’t matter; and when Sheelagh opened her mouth to protest he shook his head. ‘Leave it. There’s no point everybody getting angry when we can’t prove anything. Richard, it’s up to you – do you want his help?’

  Richard too had accepted the obvious explanation of Miriam’s misfortune. Now, though, it seemed less clear. For a boy set on mayhem, Will’s accident would have come as manna from heaven: why on earth would Midge have brought them the news of his survival? Assuming that’s what he was doing. Assuming it wasn’t just the first thing that came into his mind when they caught him by the lift.

  In the end, there was no way of knowing. In the end he had to guess. But since it was him going down the shaft no one had a better right to. He nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I’ll be glad of his help.’

  Sheelagh blew out her cheeks in explosive disbelief. No one else said anything.

  Richard pocketed one of the torches, passed Larry the other. ‘Shine it down on top of us. It’ll be steadier than mine.’ He turned to Midg
e. ‘You want to show me how to do this? Bearing in mind that I won’t be as good at it as you?’

  The boy nodded. Then he stepped into space.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When the lift doors opened so abruptly, caught off balance Will fell into his worst nightmare. The blackness wheeled beneath him: six hundred feet of it, the chill air sliding aside for him, stroking his face and running icy lover’s fingers through his hair. Six hundred feet of falling through nothing, so bathed in gravity he seemed weightless, accelerating earthwards at a rate of thirty-two feet per second per second; at least until his spinning body started to ricochet, bones breaking and organs rupturing with every impact, dying even as he fell.

  Though he had no time even to yell, all this raced through his mind in the less than a second, much less than thirty-two feet, that he fell before the acrylic dome of the gondola came up like a piston to hit him in the ribs.

  The blow drove all the air out of him; he thought it had broken him in half. Nor did he come to rest where he landed. The smooth curved dome, designed to shed the dust and other detritus that would inevitably fall into the shaft, shed him just as easily and he found himself swallow-diving for the crack between the car and the wall. If there’d been anything in his lungs to do it with, then he’d have yelled.

  His hands, clawing at the acrylic and failing to slow him in any measurable degree, were not there to buffer him; so he hit the wall head first, hard enough to stun himself. His body went limp, sprawling over the curve of the dome, his feet higher than his head, one arm sliding into the abyss, just too big a piece of detritus to follow.

  For some minutes he lay in a kind of limbo. He wasn’t even afraid any more. Despite the distant hot ache in his ribs it occurred to him he was already dead. If not, he couldn’t imagine why not: in the darkness of the shaft, unable to see what he was lying on, he failed to piece together the circumstances which saved him.

  He’d assumed that the lift was down below when power was cut. The alternative, that it was still at penthouse level, evaporated when the doors slid apart and instead of merely squashing his nose against the glass he fell. But the last person to use it was not Larry Ford arriving but an apprentice electrician fetching the builders’ afternoon tea. He came up in the lift and went down later in the cradle, leaving the gondola parked immediately below the gallery.

  But in the dark and with his head swimming Will could fathom none of this. He came gradually to understand that he was still alive, but the return of his fluttering wits like tardy pigeons to the loft warned him that was the only good news. He wasn’t safe; perhaps he’d merely delayed the inevitable. If there was some way of using this shaft as a thoroughfare his hopes of finding it in the dark were vanishingly small. He tried shouting but knew from the frailty of his voice that it would never carry outside the shaft. He didn’t think there was anything else he could do.

  So when somebody said, ‘Help?’ his first thought was that it was him, his second that he might as well save his breath. He pressed his cheek flat against the cool dome, spread his arms for the meagre stability they gave him, and indulged a tear of sheer self-pity. He wasn’t ready to die but he thought it was going to happen anyway.

  But – was that rusty voice his? He was willing to believe that almost any pathetic little squeak might be him. Even in court he couldn’t produce the sort of clarion delivery that moved mean old magistrates to mercy. He won, when he won, on logic rather than personality. But he didn’t smoke and he didn’t sleep in damp sheets, and if his voice had been getting rusty his secretary would have made an appointment with his doctor.

  And if it wasn’t him it was someone else, not seeking help but offering it. ‘Who – what—?’

  ‘Here.’ In the darkness the shock of the touch made him jerk and gasp aloud, and his head cannoned off the wall again. Instantly the touch on his arm firmed to a grip and the rusty disembodied voice by his ear promised salvation. ‘’ S all right. Midge got you.’

  Afterwards Will was ashamed of how he reacted. He knew full well the danger he was in, that without help he was probably going to die in his own personal worst-case scenario. But when he realized who was holding his wrist he didn’t think of rescue: he thought of Miriam Graves with blood in her hair, felled by a maniac with a rolling-pin. He snatched his arm away, even though it set his body sliding on the smooth surface. A soft wail of pure terror escaped him.

  Midge could no more see Will than Will could see Midge. But he knew his way around in here, was used to relying on touch alone. Even the top of the gondola was an unexpected luxury: mostly he scampered between the levels on the tracks, his fingers grown strong as an ape’s.

  He didn’t have to see to know where the noise was coming from. One grimy hard-padded hand clamped over Will’s mouth, the fingers gripping his jaw. ‘Stop,’ he said sternly. ‘’S no help. Midge’ll get you out of here. But you gotta do what he says.‘

  If there was anything essentially ludicrous in the idea of a teenage squatter of dubious mental capacity and an apparent propensity for violence taking responsibility for an intelligent grown man in this way, neither of them acknowledged it. Will needed help, Midge was able and seemed willing to give it.

  Will allowed himself to be half-guided, half-towed to the top of the gondola, where he fell on the cable like a lost child on his mother’s hand and knelt clutching it to him. By a judicious combination of cajoling and bullying, Midge got him to his feet – groaning as he stretched the damaged muscles in his side – and even persuaded him to release the cable with one hand and reach for the track with the other.

  But try as he might he couldn’t get Will to forsake the cable and start to climb. ‘’S not far,’ he promised. Lacking a conventional mental geometry he described it as ‘One man on top of another on top of another.’

  Will felt the narrow frets with outstretched fingers. ‘I can’t do that,’ he murmured in quiet conviction.

  ‘Easy,’ insisted Midge; but Will didn’t dare try and when Midge, despairing of success any other way, yanked his hand off the cable and slapped it beside the other on the frets, Will gave a terrified little howl and dropped to his knees, groping in panic for his lifeline.

  Finally Midge admitted defeat. ‘Midge’ll go get help.’ Unseen in the darkness he smiled. ‘Don’t go away.’

  Will had lost his self-command and his dignity but not the last vestiges of his sense of humour. ‘Believe it.’ He clung to the cable, shuddering, as Midge climbed away from him.

  Richard had tackled harder climbs than this. He was reminding himself of the fact all the time he was watching how Midge did it – exactly how he did it, where he put each hand and foot.

  Getting on to the track was the worst part. Midge chose the left-hand route so Richard did the same, stepping out over the abyss to reach for it. He had the cords looped out of his way over his shoulder. Tariq kept hold of one end to jerk him to safety if he missed. It was the last help he could expect from the people in the penthouse until he climbed back up.

  The next hardest part was keeping steady. The frets were barely the width of a boot, could accommodate only one hand or foot at a time, and as he started his descent Richard’s body swung from side to side, threatening to tear him off the track. ‘Slowly,’ he said aloud, and it wasn’t an instruction to Midge so much as a reminder to himself. He crept down the thread like an infinitely cautious spider, and though the distance was a scant twenty feet he took minutes to do it and felt he’d taken hours.

  At last Midge said, ‘Here.’ Looking between his feet Richard saw a change in the quality of the darkness where some other light source was beginning to compete with the torch now far above his head. The night outside was just starting to lift, the rumour of sunrise entering the shaft by the clear tube through the open gallery.

  Will was huddled against the cable, didn’t let go even as Richard stepped carefully off the track on to the dome beside him. The gondola didn’t move. ‘Who …?’

  ‘Richard.
Jesus, Will, it’s good to see you.’ He took out his own torch. So close, after so long in the dark, the beam made Will screw his eyes up and raise his arm defensively. ‘How’re you doing? Midge said you hurt your head.’

  ‘I banged my head. I gave my ribs quite a thump too. I’m all right. But Richard’ – finally he looked round, white-faced in the beam – ‘I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get out of here.’

  ‘Same way I got in,’ Richard said briskly. ‘Up the track.’ He took the cords off his shoulder, began laying them out across the dome.

  Will watched in horror. ‘I hope you’re not thinking—’ His teeth chattered uncontrollably.

  ‘Listen, Will.’ Richard straightened up, eyeing him levelly. ‘You can’t stay here. We’re taking you back upstairs. There’s heat and food, and Tessa can check out your head and your ribs, and you’ll be OK. You’ll be safe enough. Midge’ll go first – he’s better at this than I am– and you’ll be roped to him. I’ll be right behind. If you freeze, or if you slip, I’ll hold you. A few minutes is all it takes. It’s not difficult. If you can climb a ladder you can do this. OK,’ he hurried on, ‘I know you’d rather not climb a ladder. But with your neck at stake you’ll be surprised what you can do.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Will with certainty.

  ‘You got no choice. I mean it, Will – you’re going up there if I have to carry you.’

  In the end Will allowed himself to be manoeuvred to the track, his hands to be placed on the frets. Midge led, trailing the makeshift rope like an umbilical. When the cord tightened about his waist Will obeyed its summons. Richard’s hand in the small of his back both held him safe and left him no room to retreat. After only a brief pause he started to climb.

  The idea that time is a constant is patently absurd. Midge, accustomed to using the shaft as other people use staircases, climbed up to and then past the open door in the space of a few minutes, throwing the safety cord to Larry. But at the other end of the same cord, his hands raw, his muscles cracking with tension, his eyes stretched with a terror he could control but not contain, Will hung in the void almost for ever before Tariq gripping one wrist and Larry the other hauled him bodily into the corridor.