Stairwell

I did not sit and wait.

I have thought a great deal about that since, and I should like to say that I weighed the matter and chose with open eyes. It would be a lie. There was no weighing. There was a bell, and a heat on a screen, and a man in a tower, and then I was already moving, with my coat flapping about my knees and my gold spectacles bouncing on my nose, down the length of that smoking room, with Leo's voice rising behind me like a shout from the bottom of a well.

"Doc! Doc! Get back here! Atticus!"

I did not turn.

Two of the tactical team had heard the same thing I had. They were young men, broad and quick in their black armor, with their rifles up and their visors pushed back, and as I came out of the machine shop into the dim nave of the church one of them looked at me, and then at the other, and nodded. They fell in on either side of me without a word. It was the nod of men who have decided that the thing is going to be done and that it had better be done properly.

"The tower's that way," said the taller. "North end. There's a stair."

"Show me."

…

It was a spiral staircase of iron.

It ran up the inside of the tower in a tight, rusty coil, wrapped about a central shaft of stone, with a narrow handrail on one side and a drop of ninety feet on the other. The steps were open grids of metal, and as I climbed them the light of our torches fell through, in bright rings, onto the dark floor below. The cold came down out of the dark like water. The walls were wet. Every few yards a narrow slot of a window opened in the stone, and through each, as I passed, I saw the same dim patch of sky and rain.

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

I counted the steps. It is a habit. I count things when I am afraid, and on that night I was more afraid than I had been in years, and the counting steadied me. At forty I paused for breath. At seventy my legs began to burn. The younger man in front of me climbed with the loose swinging ease of an athlete, his breath a thin white plume, his boots ringing on the iron. The other came behind. His torch swung wildly across the walls, and I saw, in glimpses, the old stone, the black stains, the rust-eaten rungs of a ladder that went up into nothing.

Leo's voice crackled on the officer's radio.

"Tower team, this is Maddox. Stand down. I repeat, stand down. That's an order. Do not proceed above the second landing."

"Sir?" said the man in front.

"Come down, damn it. That is a trap."

The man looked back at me.

I should have told him to obey. I know that. I knew it then. I knew every word of what Leo was saying, and I knew that it was true, in the same cold clear part of my mind that had told me in the elevator, a few days earlier, that the lights did not hum. I knew that the man who had built this place had built it for me. He had set a bell to ring. He had put a pin of heat in a cold tower. He had wanted a hunter, and he had made a bait, and I was the hunter he had been waiting for.

It is a frightening thing, I thought, to be wanted.

And my feet went on climbing.

"Dr. Vaughn," said the officer.

"Go on."

"Captain says—"

"I heard him." I took hold of the rail. "Go on."

…

At the hundred and fortieth step the stair ended.

There was a small stone landing, perhaps six feet square, with a low arched doorway on the far side, and a heavy iron door standing open. Beyond it the dark was complete. A wind came through the doorway, thin and sour and wet, smelling of pigeons and old iron. From somewhere beyond, closer now than it had been, the bell swung, and rang, and cracked.

The first officer put his light through the door.

"Clear," he said softly.

I stepped in.

It was the belfry. It was a bare stone chamber about the size of a drawing room, open on four sides to the weather through great arched windows hung with rotting slats. The floor was a rough plank deck, strewn with feathers and droppings. Through the louvers the rain blew in, and beyond them lay the whole spread of the northern city, a vast dim carpet of rooftops and railway yards and the distant pale smear of the river. And in the center of the room, hung from a massive oak beam by a pair of rusty chains, there hung the bell.

It was larger than I had expected. It was black with age and streaked with green. A great jagged crack ran from its lip halfway up its flank. As I watched, the wind sighed, and the heavy tongue swung, and struck once against the metal with a cracked, hollow, awful note.

But it was not the wind that moved it.

I saw that as soon as I raised my torch. Beside the bell, bolted to the beam, was a small gray mechanism the size of a lunchbox. A thin metal arm projected from it, ending in a rubber-tipped hammer, and as I watched, the arm drew back, and paused, and swung forward in a gentle, regular, rather mournful tap. Tock. And the bell rang.

And beside it, standing on the planks with its little orange coils glowing, was a space heater.

It was a cheap one. Ten dollars at a hardware store. It stood in a puddle of wet feathers, switched on, humming, with its small bar of red wire turned to a warm fierce stare. Beside it was a digital timer, plugged into an extension cord, counting down in green numerals.

"It's a puppet," said the young officer slowly.

"Yes."

"There's nobody here."

"No." I turned in a slow circle. My voice sounded very small. "There was never anybody here. A heater, to fool the thermal. A motor to move the bell. He set it going before we arrived. He knew we would come. He knew exactly what we would see on the screen." I stopped. "He wanted us to climb."

Behind me, in the black archway, with no sound at all, the iron door swung shut.

…

It struck like a thunderclap.

The whole tower rang with it. The noise went through me like a bar of iron. I whirled, and saw the second officer hurling himself at the door, and heard the shriek of a bolt shooting home on the far side, and the dull flat clunk of a lock. The door did not give. He hit it with his shoulder, again, again, with a terrible hoarse grunt. It did not even tremble.

The lights flickered.

They were not our lights. Our torches burned steadily. These came from somewhere above and behind, from a cluster of small bulbs I had not noticed in the rafters, hung like fruit. They began to flash.

Very fast. Very white. A stammering pulse that threw the shadows of the beams across the floor in stuttering bars and made the belfry leap and jerk about us like a film run too slowly. I threw up my arm. I felt the beat of it go through my eyelids.

Eleven hertz, I thought. Eleven. I could almost see the number.

And then I smelled it.

It was faint, at first. It crept into the room on the cold air, sweet and sharp and dry. Bitter almonds. The smell I had breathed in a dead woman's lift, five days ago, and gone on breathing in my sleep ever since. It rolled over me in a slow, gentle, intimate wave, and I knew, with a flat and absolute certainty, that I had been wrong. I had been wrong about the whole of it. I had been so sure of myself that I had run up a hundred and forty steps to be shut inside the very room I had spent a week dissecting.

I had not been hunting him.

I had been walking into the laboratory.

…

"The walls," said the tall officer.

His voice was high and strange. He had dropped to one knee on the planks with his rifle across his lap, and his visor had fallen down over his eyes. His shoulders were shaking.

"The walls are—Sarge, the walls are coming in. Do you see it? Do you see it? They're moving."

"Easy," said the other. "Easy, Danny, it's the lights—"

"They're moving." He tore off his helmet. His face was gray and wet. "They're going to—oh, God. Oh, God, they're going to crush us—"

He began to scream.

It was not a loud scream. It was worse. It was a thin, breathy, whistling cry like a kettle, and it went on and on, and he pressed himself against the floor and put his hands over his head. The other man was on his knees as well, retching. The stone chamber swung round me like a ship in a gale.

I tried to do what I have always done.

I tried to read. I turned to the nearest man and fixed my eyes on his face, and began the old quick litany. Pupils dilated. Respiration shallow, rapid. Skin pale. Perspiration. Lips drawn back. I read him as I had read Bernie Tuck, as I had read Holt, as I have read ten thousand men. And it was a wonderful, clear, familiar relief, until the moment I turned the lens on myself.

My pupils.

I could not feel them. I could not tell whether they were large or small.

My breathing. I tried to count. I got to six, and lost it.

My blink rate.

Nothing. A blank. For the first time in thirty-four years I could not tell how often I was blinking. I stood in the flicker of that terrible light, with my tongue like a dry sponge in my mouth and my heart going in my chest like a bird in a box, and the thing that had always been the foundation of me, the cold quiet counting eye, was simply gone.

The walls were moving.

I knew they were not. I told myself so, in words, in a clear, calm, schoolmasterly voice. It is the lights. It is a trick of the lights. The walls are stone. Three-foot stone. They cannot move. But the stone was bowing in at the edges. The arches were narrowing. The ceiling, a black blur of beams, was coming down, slowly, like a lid.

I seized the iron railing of the stair.

"One," I said aloud. "Two. Three."

I do not know what I was counting. I think it was my breaths.

…

The voice came from a speaker in the wall.

I had not seen it. It was tiny, no bigger than a coin, set in a crack in the stone at the level of my head. It spoke very softly. It spoke with that precise, courteous, metallic rasp, and the sound of it was so ordinary, so civil, so entirely without hurry, that for a moment I did not realize what it was saying.

"You looked into the abyss so very long, Doctor," said the voice, "that you forgot the door."

I heard it. I heard each word. I heard the faint humane regret in it, the note of a teacher who is sorry to see a clever pupil fail.

"I am sorry. I did hope you would be better than this."

I opened my mouth. I do not know what I would have said.

The lights went out.

The dark came down with a soft heavy thud, like a hand. The flashing stopped. The torches had died, one after another, as though someone had pinched them. In the sudden blackness I heard the officer's scream break off into a gasp, and then the dull flat clatter of a rifle on boards, and the thud of a body, and then nothing but the wind, and the rain, and my own breath, going in and out in the dark.

And from above me, in the empty belfry, the cracked bell rang.

Once.