Airs Above the Ground (25 page)

I was now half way back along the centre block, about level with my own turret – I recognised the pointed roof and the winged dragon catching the moon. Deep in a shadowed corner I risked a pause to listen, fighting to control my breathing and hear above my thudding heart if there were still sounds of pursuit.

I heard him straight away. He wasn’t coming fast; he was some distance away, at fault, casting about like a hound that has lost the scent. But a hound that knows its quarry’s there ahead of it, and that it only has to go on to drive that quarry into a corner, will hardly give up and turn back for lack of scent. He came on.

But he cannot have been sure which way I had first run. Now, just as I tensed to bolt again, I heard him stop. He stood there for what must have been a full minute, listening (I supposed) as I was listening. I could imagine him, lithe and tough and black in his sleek animal’s suit, peering among the angular shadows for a sight of me. I kept very still.

He took two slow steps forward, then stopped again. I was pressed back into my corner, my hands digging into a crevice of the stone, almost as if I would have burrowed my way into it, like a worm burrowing into a bank. Under my rigid fingers a piece of mortar broke away. It fell into my hand, silently, harmlessly, but the moment’s imaginary sound that it might have made brought a spasm of terror so intense as to bring the sweat out on to my face.

Next second the feel of the rough mortar, a piece about the size of a pigeon’s egg scoring my sweating palm, suggested something to me; an old trick, but worth trying – and I had very little to lose by trying it. Cautiously, I eased myself away from the stone, making no sound at all, then, still hidden, lobbed the piece of mortar as far as I could the way we had come, back towards the south wing of the castle.

The sound it made, falling with a crack and a slither
a long way off, was satisfactorily loud; even more satisfactorily, it sounded very like a stone disloged accidentally by someone’s foot. I heard the creak of rubber as he whipped round where he stood, and then the sounds, light but distinct, of his feet racing back the way he had come.

For a moment I thought of following quietly in his wake, and taking the chance of slipping down the same turret stair; but there was too much open roof to cross, and he might well be watching it.

I couldn’t hear him now. It was to be assumed that he was hunting me along the southern wing. Turning the other way, I dodged along through the sharp lights and shadows, stumbling sometimes, both hands spread out in front of me, for so weird was this lunar landscape that, however brilliant the moonlight, one felt as if one was running blind.

In front of me loomed the turret at the north-east corner, the twin of the one up whose stairway I had come. Here, surely, must be the second stairway which I was so sure that I remembered . . .?

There was indeed a stairway: the head of it lay in the shadow away from the moon. But as I ran up to it I saw that it was ruinous, its top railed stoutly off with timber, and the first half-dozen steps hanging, crumbling, over vacancy.

But beside it, in the wall of the tower, straight in front of me there was a door.

This was like all the other castle doors, heavy, and lavishly studded and hinged with wrought iron. There was no latch, only a big curved handle, which, as I
seized it and pushed, felt under my hands as if it were the shape of some animal, a griffin or a winged lizard. The door was immovable. I pushed and pulled, hardly believing that this, which had loomed up in front of me as a sort of miracle of escape, was not, after all, going to work.

I think it was at this moment that it occurred to me seriously, for the first time, that perhaps I was not going to get away, that the thing which happened to other people might, now, soon, be going to happen to me. Possibly the very fairy-tale atmosphere of the castle – the lonely valley, the turrets, the moonlight, the battlements, this door with the griffin handle – the trappings of childhood’s dreams and of romance, once become actual, were seen to be no longer dreams but nightmare. Caught up in one’s own private world of fantasy, perhaps one would always trade it for an acre of barren heath under the grey light of day.

There was even, set in the stone beside the door, the familiar bell-push mounted in wrought iron. I pressed it. It seemed the perfectly normal thing to do in this crazy night. I believe it would have seemed perfectly normal if the door had opened silently and a wizard had bowed me in among the cobwebs and the alembics . . .

But nothing happened. The door was immovable, blank in the moonlight.

They say that every end is a beginning. Even as I stood there, with my hand on the silly bell, feeling the courage, and even the driving fear, spill out of me to leave me sprung and spent, I remembered where I had seen the other stair.

For me it couldn’t have been better placed. It was a wide stone stairway leading down beside one of the gate towers – the twin turrets which flanked the main gateway at the bridge. Originally these towers had been joined by a stretch of machicolated curtain wall, a narrow catwalk above the gate, but this had fallen into disrepair and was a mere skeleton, simply an arched span of crumbling stone joining the two towers. The southern gate tower, similarly, had fallen into ruin, and had been left in its decay with its stairway fallen away and its roof sticking up like a jagged tooth. But the northerly one, I knew, was whole and perfectly negotiable, and it gave on the courtyard and the steps and the front door of the castle and the bridge and the road up which Lewis would be coming . . .

There was still no sign of Sandor. Chin on shoulder I slithered out of the shadow of the turret, round the curve, and then ran and dodged my crazy way along the rooftop towards the gate tower on the west front.

I was right. The stairway was there. And it was open. The head of it lay full in the moonlight, fifty yards ahead of me. As I burst out of shadow into the full glare of the moon, running, I saw Sandor again. He had done just as I had hoped. He had run right round the other wing of the castle, and was now heading for the opposite side of the gate – the side with the broken turret.

He had seen me. I saw the gun flash threateningly into his hand; but I knew that, here of all places, he wouldn’t dare to shoot. In any case I couldn’t go back;
there was nowhere to go back to; he could reach the turret up which we had come before I could. And I could get down to the courtyard, down my stairway. He couldn’t. His was broken, the turret itself just a jut of crumbling fangs. To get to me he would have to go all the way back. I ran forward.

I had run twenty yards, not looking at him, my whole being intent simply on the head of that stone staircase, when I suddenly saw what he was doing. I had forgotten who – or what – Sandor was. To a man who worked daily on the high wire, a nine-inch wall, in whatever state of repair, was as wide as a motorway. He never even hesitated. He went up that broken turret like a leaping cat, and then was on top of the arch and running – not walking, running – across it towards me.

As I stopped dead, I saw something else. Away below, down the hillside, down among the dark trees away to the right, I thought I saw the lights of a moving car.

It was silly, it was futile, but I screamed his name. ‘
Lewis, Lewis!
’ I doubt if the cry could have been heard from farther than ten yards away; it came out only as a sort of sobbing gasp, not even as loud as the cry of an owl. Sandor was three brisk strides from the end of the arch, straight above the stair head. I turned and ran back the way I had come.

He leapt down to the leads and came after me.

At least now I knew my way, and at least I now knew he didn’t intend to shoot me. With a thirty-yard lead I might yet make the corner turret and the steps down to
my own room. And now there would be someone to run to. Lewis.

Almost immediately I realised that, even with the lead I had, I couldn’t hope to do it. My very fear had exhausted me, and Sandor’s physical strength and fitness were far greater than my own . . . I didn’t have my hands held in front of me now. Blind or not, I simply ran as hard as I could back the way I had come along the rooftop maze of the north wing, round the turret where that nightmare magic door stood in the shadows fast shut . . .

It was wide open.

I was almost past it when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the blank, black oblong of the open door. Sandor was barely ten yards behind me. I could never reach my own turret now. This, whatever it was, was the only port in a storm. I jerked round like a doubling hare and almost fell through the open door.

He overran me. My sudden movement, as I seized the jamb of the door and swung myself round and back in through the gap, took him completely by surprise. I must have vanished almost literally from under his hands. I saw him shoot past me as I swung back into the shadow, and then I found myself sprawling breathless against a slippery wall on the inside of the tower.

I had not known what to expect inside the door – some kind of stairway, perhaps; but there was no such thing. As I swung round the door-jamb into the blackness, I found myself on a level slippery floor, and then, as I staggered and put my hands out to the wall to save
myself, the door through which I had come slid fast shut behind me, and a light came on.

The floor, the shining steel walls, the light, dropped frighteningly downwards like a stone and I went with them. It was the lift.

O Lewis . . .!

Shakespeare:
King John

There was barely time even to register this. It was only afterwards that I knew what had happened. When the lift had been installed they had made a thorough job of it and extended the shaft to the roof to give access to the rampart walks, and (I found later) a belvedere on the south side. My half crazy, wholly thoughtless action in pressing the bell-push had summoned it, and as I had swung myself into the small metal box one of my hands, outstretched and flailing for balance, must have caught the controls as I fell, and sent the lift earthwards.

I hardly realised when the dropping motion ceased. I was gasping and sobbing for breath, and still just picking myself up shakily from the floor, when the drop finished as smoothly as it had started, and with a click the doors opened. I caught a glimpse of some dimly lit passage outside, empty and silent. Dazedly, my hands slipping on the ribbed metal of the lift wall, I pulled myself to my feet, still barely aware of what was happening, and moved shakily towards the open doors.

They shut in my face. The metal cage moved again – this time, upwards. He had called it from the roof. He must have been standing with his thumb pressed on the button, and now, locked in my small metal trap, I was being hurtled straight back to the roof.

I flew at the controls. I had no idea what they were, and in any case all the labelling was in German. But one knob was red, and at this I shoved with all my strength. With a sickening sensation and a jar, the lift stopped in mid-flight. I jammed hard with my thumb at the lowermost of the rank of buttons, released the red, and after perhaps two seconds of intolerable pause I felt the lift drop once more . . .

This time I was pressed against the doors, waiting, one hand spread against the metal, ready to push, the other clutching the only movable object in the lift, a big oblong trough for cigarette butts, a foot long by nine inches wide, which had been standing in the corner underneath the control panel.

The doors slid open easily on to darkness. Before they were a foot apart I was through them and had turned to ram the metal through between them as they slid shut. They closed smoothly on the metal, gripped it, held – and stayed open, nine inches apart.

It was enough. The lift didn’t move. I turned in the shaft of light from its wedged door to see where I was.

I was standing on stone, rough stone flags, and I could tell somehow from the feel of the air around me that this was no corridor, but a large room or space. It was cold with the dank chill that one associates with cellars: and in a moment I saw that this was in fact
where I must be. Back in the dimness, the faint glint from crowded ranks of bottles showed me that this was the wine cellar, neatly situated at the junction of the kitchen wing and the central block of the castle. They had certainly made a comprehensive job of the new lift, roof to dungeon. And, I reckoned, if they used the lift to come down for the wine there must surely be a light switch near it . . .?

There was. My fingers, slithering and padding over the wall to either side of the lift, found the switch and pressed it, and a light, dim enough, but more than adequate, flicked into life just as the lift light (presumably on a time switch) went out.

If the lift had been an anachronism behind the panelling of the castle corridors, here it seemed like something from another world. I was in a great vaulted space, treed like a forest with squat massive pillars which supported the low ceiling on great branches of stone. Stacked here and there between the pillars were the racks for wine, themselves by no means new, but young compared with this Gothic dungeon, partly hewn, I suspected, out of the living rock of the crag. The shadowed spaces between the pillars seemed to stretch infinitely in every direction. From where I stood I could see neither door nor staircase, though patches of deeper darkness seemed to indicate where passages might lead off underneath the rest of the castle.

I swung back to face the lift and tried, remembering how it was situated on the upper floors, to imagine exactly where under the castle I stood now. Somewhere along to my right would be the main part of the
castle with the central staircase. Off to my left the kitchen premises, and beyond them the stables and the gatehouse . . .

I bit my lip, hesitating. It was impossible to guess what Sandor’s next move would be. I didn’t know whether he had seen the lights of the approaching car; I thought not. But in any case it might be supposed that, with time slipping on, he would cut his losses, abandon the chase, and make straight for the stairway by the gate and the stable. Or he might go back by the way he had come, through my bedroom, in which case he would come down by the main staircase . . .