Signs greeted Otto on the doors of each lift: COUNCIL ALERTED – REPAIR IMMINENT.
‘Blast,’ he said, looking around and waving his cane at nobody in particular.
Up to this point, he had been fortunate. Only one of the lifts had been out of action at any one time. This afternoon, all four of them had broken at once. Clearly the central pulley system had given up completely.
Just to be certain, he pushed some buttons and held his ear to the doors. No sound of mechanical activity could be heard inside the shaft.
‘Scheiße,’ he added, not especially wishing to begin the journey up the central staircase. He stood around rather pointlessly for a moment, as though hoping for some alternative route to appear. There was not even a sign of any other residents with whom he could at least have shared his displeasure.
‘Fucking building,’ he concluded, as a final insult to the empty hallway, before bracing himself and taking his first tentative steps on the stairs.
This was a nuisance. Otto felt tired, even a little disorientated. He was running late and in danger of missing his flight back to Geneva. If that were to happen, the phone call to Anika would not be one he would relish.
He regretted, now, having made the difficult journey to Bloomsbury. He could have chosen to visit any number of destinations that afternoon, perhaps taken a stroll along the Thames. Yet for some reason he had chosen to inflict that upon himself, and he no longer understood why. The trip had achieved nothing, beyond resurrecting some deeply painful memories, and it had left him feeling physically unwell into the bargain. The tube trains back had been packed and stifling. He couldn’t get a seat and his spine had developed a painful twinge. During the walk up to Marlowe House from the station, his stomach had started to hurt once more.
Otto was at a loss to explain his behaviour.
It must be that maudlin streak again, the one that Cynthia warned me about. She would not have been happy about my choice of sightseeing today. The neurological hospital – what on earth was I thinking?
Just three flights up, with nine more to go, he was already feeling breathless. Resting his hand on the flaking yellow paint of the banister, he glanced above and saw the radiating spokes of the staircase, circling to the furthest reaches of his vision. High, high above him, they disappeared into the darkness near the top.
The air felt solemn and heavy. His footsteps echoed in the silence. He would like to rest, but was aware of how many things he still had to do. Use the lavatory, collect his case, make sure the gas was off and lock the door as he left. Oh, and he must remember to post the key back through the letterbox of his apartment. It seemed straightforward enough, but Otto was of an age when even the simplest actions could take him an eternity. Some hours, some days, were much slower than others. Clearly he wasn’t up to speed today.
Glancing off to the left, he saw a series of narrow windows, running up the walls like arrow slits in a turret. As the sun broke free of a cloud, needle-thin points of light pierced the gloom.
Otto set off again, circling steadily in his ascent – one hand gripping the peeling banister while the other pressed the tip of his cane into the step above. He thought of their walking holiday in the Lake District, all those decades before. Travelling at a steeply sloping angle had seemed straightforward enough back then. Now it felt unnatural, as though he were asking his body to perform some task for which it was simply not designed. With irritation, he pictured himself just a few hours earlier. He remembered gazing up in self-satisfaction at the endless turns of the staircase. Poetic, he had called it then.
‘Silly old sod,’ he muttered.
It wasn’t for him to judge the building’s aesthetic value: he really ought to leave all that to others. Anyway, what was more important: a beautifully crafted staircase or an elevator system that worked properly? This question seemed increasingly pertinent, the higher up he climbed.
Otto wished they had spent more time on the lifts, back when Marlowe House was being planned. They should have focused on improving their quality, maybe at the expense of the ill-fated sculpture garden. Eight sculptures seemed extravagant, with the benefit of hindsight, especially since they had all disappeared or ended up headless.
If the place is saved and given a listing, maybe we can do something about that.
He paused again to look up to the roof, but the intimidating spiral above his head did not appear to have decreased by much. More beads of sweat had broken out on his brow. He mopped these away impatiently with his handkerchief. The great dizziness he was starting to feel, however, was less easy to brush aside.
Oh, for a moving staircase right now, an escalator to glide on …
And then, as if upon command, as if the thought had somehow brought itself into existence, the staircase began to move. Otto felt himself lift slowly forwards, gasping slightly at the unexpected motion. His feet were no longer moving, but somehow he was moving. His body was being propelled by an invisible force. The staircase moved silently, winding steadily upwards, level by level, with no churning of a motor to reveal the hidden source of its magical power.
Once his initial surprise had passed, Otto found himself starting to smile. He even began to giggle in childish delight. The staircase was taking him ever higher: fifth floor, sixth floor, seventh. He had settled down, and was enjoying the ride, when a troubling thought suddenly occurred to him.
What if the escalator didn’t stop moving? Not just on his floor; on any floor. What if it kept going – spiralling ever higher, beyond the rooftop he had stood upon recently, through the clouds and out the other side? What if it kept going until the wind was howling, the sky was deepening from blue to black and he could see the curve of the earth’s surface appear below him? What if it kept going until the oxygen ran out?
At this point, Otto decided it was time to halt the rising staircase. But how exactly did one achieve such a thing? Looking down at his feet, he pushed the cane hard into the step before him, trying through leverage to halt its movement. When this didn’t work, he tried pressing it between a gap in the banisters, leaning on it with all his meagre strength. Some sparks flew up, but it hadn’t quite worked.
As the staircase continued moving, he pulled the cane from between the banisters, steadying himself as he prepared for another attempt. In order to gain greater purchase on the cane, he took a firm step backwards. The staircase seemed to crumble away beneath him. Grasping at the air with both his hands, he tumbled into the void, the only sound the clatter of his cane upon the stairs.