anywhere. I was about to give up on it when suddenly there was a quick rustle of movement from the dark above me, instantly stilled. I waited, but nothing followed on from this flurry of sound. Interesting. There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then. From my earlier wanderings, I remembered that the fourth floor was mainly additional office space and nonsecure storage, and above that there were the empty shells of rooms where the building work was still going on.
I climbed up the next flight of steps slowly, with laborious stealth. There was no sign of anyone or anything there. I waited for another long, uneventful while and was rewarded by another microscopic fragment of sound from just above my head: a floorboard protesting as someone shifted his weight. I climbed again, into the attic level, where the palletloads of bricks waited in the dark like the ghosts of strong rooms yet to be born. I trod carefully here; the ropes of the block and tackle hanging down into the stairwell had reminded me that the railings had been removed from the top landing. One foot out of place, and I’d be doing a vertical quick step.
The building got less extensive horizontally the farther up you went; most of the extensions had been to the first and second floors. Up here in the roof space, there was a single straight corridor with half a dozen rooms leading off it, three to each side. The great rose window was directly over my head here, and through it I could see a few stars breaking cover as a mass of black cloud shifted off westward. They did nothing to relieve the darkness, though; it was even more dense and opaque up here than it had been on the floor below. I squinted down the corridor. Nothing to see, but that didn’t mean there was nothing there.
I walked down the corridor, trying each door in turn. They all opened, and they all gave onto empty rooms. Those on the right-hand side were completely bare, just dusty floorboards and nailed-up plasterboard, without even electric sockets or lights. Those on the left were in a more finished state, but turned out, when I flicked on the shadeless lights, to hold nothing more interesting than a few boxes and stacks of old papers.
But the last door on the left was already slightly ajar. I pushed the door fully open and scanned the room from the corridor without trying to walk in. I found the light switch to the right of the door and pressed it. Nothing happened. Either the bulb had given out already, or more likely nobody had bothered to put one in the socket yet. It was too dark to see much, but the room seemed to be little more than a cupboard; shelves extended from floor to ceiling on the wall facing me, which was only about six feet away. More box files and stacked papers: a smell of sour, unbreathed air.
I took a single step forward, over the threshold. I just about had time to take a paranoid glance behind the door before someone barged me hard from behind, sending me staggering forward into the room. I slammed painfully into the shelving before I could even fall. One of the shelves tipped under my weight, but I got my balance back and turned around.
The light from a torch dazzled me momentarily—and then the torch itself, wielded in a more blunt-instrument kind of way, smacked me on the side of the head. But since the light of the torch telegraphed the movement, I was moving with it; instead of being brained, I just got a clip to the side of the head, and then I was up and fighting.
Fighting someone who seemed a fair bit more solid than me and who took my body punch in his stride. He hit me again, with his fist this time instead of the torch, and I went down on my back.
I heard the door slam to; that got me up again fast. If my attacker had a key, I could be locked in here. I got both hands around the door handle and leaned down and in. I pulled, and he pulled back against me. I braced myself with one foot on the wall, the other on the floor, and pulled harder.
When the door flew inward, I staggered back and almost went down again—but for the second time I hit the shelves and managed to stay upright. As my attacker’s footsteps retreated along the corridor, I was out of the door and after him. I couldn’t see him up ahead, but I could hear him, his feet crashing on the bare boards. I came out onto the landing at a flat run, registering about a second too late that those pounding footfalls had stopped.
I just about caught a blur of movement from off to my right-hand side, and I started to turn. His shoulder hit me midchest, knocking the breath right out of me and sending me backward in a drunken, flailing stagger. One step, two . . . I would probably have managed to get my balance back if there’d been anything under me on step three. Instead, my trailing foot stepped out into nothingness, and I tipped and fell without a sound off the edge of the landing.
I’m too introspective, maybe, to make a good man of action. Certainly on that short fall, I didn’t have enough time even to react to what was happening. I remember throwing out my arms as if there might be something conveniently placed for me to catch hold of. Only empty air rushed through my fingers, and I closed my eyes, bracing myself—metaphorically speaking—for a solid chunk of marble tiling to rush through my head.
But something writhed out of the shadows to one side of me like the business end of a lash, thwacking solidly against my chest and the side of my head and then snaking around me once, twice, three times. Along the line where it touched me, fire ate its way inward from my skin to my core, and I opened my mouth to scream.
The sickening jolt as I stopped falling turned the scream into a voiceless bullet of breath that shot through my clenched teeth and ricocheted away into the darkness. I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time. Then the rope loosened and unraveled from around me, and I fell the remaining few feet to the ground.
I landed heavily on the cold tiles, unable for a moment even to suck breath back into my lungs. Someone ran past me, and I got a blurry view of his back as he sped through the open door.
By the time I could get back on my feet and stagger to the door, there was no sign of anybody out on Churchway. A sudden gust of cold wind blew newspaper pages and Styrofoam burger boxes along the pavement, and that was the only movement. After a few moments to get my breath back to normal, I went back inside and climbed the stairs back up to the attic. This time, though, I turned on the lights—so this time, I saw the short dogleg at the end of the corridor, off to the left, that I’d missed the first time around.
There was another door there, too, off the end of the dogleg, and so on the same line as the other left-hand rooms, but maybe slightly smaller. This was where my attacker had hidden—after pushing open another door on the main corridor so that I’d be that bit more likely to turn my back on him before I reached him. Clever guy. Clever and scared and just a bit desperate. Someone who had taken advantage of the archive being open after hours to slip back inside and . . . well, and what?
I tried the door. It opened like all the others, and there was a functional light switch just inside. It showed me a room no different from any of the ones I’d already seen. No shelves this time, but a big bundle of flat-packed storage boxes tied with string stood propped against one wall. On the floor there was a roll of brown parcel tape and a plastic supermarket bag that, on inspection, proved to be stuffed with a great many other plastic supermarket bags. No big revelations here. Maybe the guy had just retreated in front of me as I came up the stairs until he ran out of space to retreat into and came out fighting. They say you ought to be careful when you corner rats.
But there was a cupboard. I only saw it as I turned to leave, because it was a low, squat sort of cupboard, and it was completely hidden behind the door. I pulled on the handle: locked. I probably had the key that would open it sitting right there on Alice’s key ring, but my hands were shaking from my recent air-miss, and it could take me a long time to find it—with the risk that someone down below would see the light where no light should be and draw the wrong conclusion. All in all, it was probably better to wait.
I went downstairs, let myself out, and locked up. I was about to post Alice’s keys and ID card back through the mail slot, but I yielded to a wicked temptation and put them back in my pocket instead. You never knew.
I was intending to go home, but somehow I found myself heading south instead of north. Just down from Russell Square, I found a late-night bar that was still open, went in, and ordered a whisky sour.
I was bone weary, and I wasn’t thinking all that straight, but coming to the archive by night had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. It wasn’t some freak accident that had tangled me up in the ropes of the builders’ pulley. It wasn’t the air that had held me and stopped me from falling. It was her. And in wrapping herself around me like that, she’d come in so close that I couldn’t possibly fail to get what I needed. I had her now, had her mapped out in my mind in many dimensions—a vivid sensory snapshot of her essence and her parameters that was untranslatable except into music and that I could no more forget than I could forget my own name.
I toasted myself in silence. They think it’s all over, said Ken Wolstenholme’s voice from deep within the dusty archive of my head.
Well, it is now.
