Unable to postpone things any longer, he raised the trap again and got ready to step out. Then, thinking that somebody (but who?) might put the broken padlock through the chains while he was on the roof, he used his handkerchief to slip the padlock into his pocket. Only later did it occur to him that anyone who wanted to lock him out need only loop the chains — no padlock needed. But it would be too late to go back by the time he had the thought.
He went up a step; his head rose above the roof, and he was able to look along the slight incline and beyond to the grey sky. Up another step, he could see housetops and chimney pots, and if he’d dared look that way, he could have seen the edge along the Inventorium where the roof plunged down its final dozen feet to the eave. He went up another step.
Edgar Allan Poe had written a story about the pull of an abyss on the onlooker, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. That imp had tempted Denton all his life — on barn roofs, on cliffs, on the rail of a steamship. Now, it beckoned to him from the edge of the roof:
The central peak was to his left, the slope down towards the Inventorium’s edge to his right. Ahead — he didn’t dare turn his head yet — was the peak and then the panorama of London. Even dimmed by autumn mist, it seemed inhumanly large, the sky as huge a bowl as over Montana. Far off to his left was St Paul’s; nearer to his right, the sand-coloured bulk of St Pancras station, Euston beyond it; move the eyes a bit to the left, there was the British Museum. The Thames was there somewhere in the middle distance, hidden by buildings, but he could make out London Bridge and the clock tower at Westminster. Looking from a height at this distance, the depth of the house separating him from the void, he didn’t hear the imp.
He took a breath and went out. Not daring to stand out there, he sat down. He looked all the way around, the entire compass of London. The thudding of the machine was clear, but under it, around it, was a steady roar made of iron wheels on pavement, the scuffing of shoes, voices, music, hooves, the clatter of machinery — the city.
He would have to look at the Inventorium’s side of the building, which was the side, he was sure, where he had seen an open window. Only look.
He removed the black silk that served as a sling. He took off his shoes. His stockings were instantly wet from the slates, which were shiny from the mist and which had moss growing in their chinks.
He swung around with his feet pointing down the gentle slope and his heels trying to dig into the moss. The roof was slippery with condensation, but at intervals of a dozen feet or so iron prongs curled up like monkeys’ paws to support roofers’ or repairmen’s ladders. A few were broken off; all were rusty. Still, as he started to work his way down on his rump, he clutched one for as long as he could. It felt solid enough, as did another, and then one crumbled away in his hand, and his heart rate accelerated and he had to lie back with his head on the slates.
He started down again. His injured arm ached. He thought he must look like an inchworm, sliding his rump down until his knees pointed up, then straightening his legs and sliding again. His suit was being ruined. He didn’t look where he was going but used the lines of the slates as a guide, his face turned to the sky, until he felt a change under the backs of his calves and knew he’d reached the end of the easy part, and his feet were now sticking out over empty space. The imp was shouting with glee.
He told himself he couldn’t go any farther. He told himself he was too frightened to go farther.
He wished he’d taken his coat off, because he was running with sweat. He could feel it in his hair and trickling into his eyes. He breathed once and forced himself to look towards his feet.
He saw his own legs and shoeless feet, then empty air, London rooftops a distant background. His heart lurched. The next building was a storey shorter, but he could see its peak and part of its roof. It seemed far down. Down there, four storeys below, he thought, was the weedy gap he’d peeked at through the gate. Dizzied, he looked to his left: there was the roof he was lying on and, jutting from it, the triangular bulk of a dormer — if he was right, a dormer of the Photographic Inventorium.
Well, he had looked. He didn’t dare do more.
He brought his feet back and reversed the inchworm motion of coming down, pushing himself up several slates, palms slipping, then crab-crawled sideways until he could by reaching — heels braced, legs flat against the roof, back arched to keep his balance back — touch the beginning of the dormer.
Now.
He wouldn’t try to go down, but if he did, the worst part would come right at the beginning of the last descent, when he would have to put his feet on the sharp pitch downwards but couldn’t yet get a grip on the dormer eave. A glance told him that there was no gutter there, only a rotten soffit and eave and the slates, one of which was hanging out into space from a single nail.
Heart pounding, Denton inchwormed down. His buttocks reached the beginning of the sharp downslope. His palms, braced on the tiles, were just at the point of sliding. He told himself that he hadn’t committed himself yet; he wasn’t really going down there; the imp wasn’t tempting him-
He rolled on his belly. He put his feet down until toes felt slate, his torso and arms extended up the central, gentle slope, his right hand with a death grip on an iron monkey’s paw. He groped left and right with his toes, then up and down, looking for one of the iron supports, trying not to think of what he was doing — lowering himself to a seventy-degree pitch with no support. Sweat was running stingingly into his eyes; he tried to wipe it off on the moss that was pressed against his face. He swore.
His left foot found an iron paw. He pushed on it; it felt solid. He put more of his weight on it. Still solid. He looked to his right, twisting his neck, to locate the dormer. Three feet away. Could he put his weight on the iron support and still reach out for the dormer eave and-?
The iron support broke. Not slowly, not crumblingly like the other one, but like a snapped twig, and he slid off the central part of the roof. He was still twisted towards the dormer and he made a grab at it, actually touched the broken slate, but the slide was accelerating, and he tried to get on his back, not knowing why — what good would it do? — but down he went, fingers scrabbling at the slates, nails breaking, like a nightmare, the worst of nightmares realized: he was going over the edge and into the abyss.
The iron paws had been put up in lines at right angles to the eaves, so that one jutted up eight feet below the broken one. His foot caught it, slid over, and would have gone on except for his turn-up, which snagged and held — good British woollens. The paw sagged, bent, but held. He felt it, felt his direction change from a downward plunge to a swing as the turn-up became the centre of a circle on which his weight spun, throwing him down and to his right, closer to the dormer. He dug with his hands, his arms; he tried to force his chest into the slates; his injured arm felt a jolt like electricity as it took all his weight. His hands, swinging around, struck the side of the dormer and he slowed and stopped, his hands spread against the wood as if he were a suction-toed frog, held for as long as his trousers and his arms could hold out; and then there was nothing for it but to look down, terrified, down the steep slope to the vertical drop-off. Just short of the edge, another iron support jutted up, closer to the line of the dormer than his right foot, which had got within inches of the edge. He thought he could have hung there longer except for the pain that was burning up his injured arm and into his shoulder, now spreading over the top of his left arm towards his clavicle.
He moved the foot over and caught the iron paw. And then hung there. Listening to the imp.
He could see the dormer’s corner now; it rose in line with the building’s external wall, about eighteen inches from the edge of the roof. He was still two feet above the corner, his right foot six inches below it. He had either to move his left foot so as to put all his weight on the one support, or move his hands down the dormer wall until he could grasp something, perhaps a window ledge, to pull himself up.
The fingers of his right hand inched down the wall, palm flat against it. At the bottom, an irregular brick gave a kind of fingerhold. Then he inched his left foot off its support and moved his left leg over towards his right, finding it impossible to put both feet on the paw because he couldn’t get his left leg under his right, and then he was lying partly on his left side. Bending his legs, he let himself down the dormer and felt around the corner, up, then a few inches across the face, and at last to the sill of the open window.
He found a handhold in the windowsill, a blessed, blissful handhold, and he pulled his weight to the corner and then up, and then he could pull his right foot up and put the left foot briefly on the paw, and then he was sitting in the open window with his feet on the slates, his toes six inches from the edge of the roof.
Then he was going to be sick, and the imp was tempting him to be sick over the edge, and he scrambled
