The door into the second winding house yielded easily. There was an impressive bolt padlocked shut on the outside but the screws holding the bolt had rusted and the wood into which they were screwed was dust. At Robert’s first push, the whole thing simply tore loose and the door swung inwards on screaming hinges. There was just enough light to see the machinery inside, and to register the fact that it was every bit as rusty as the bolt and hinges were. Caught between desperation and the grudging realisation that it had been a long shot that anything here could have been of much use to them, they went on into the big room.
It was the view ahead which claimed them first, for beyond the rust-red shape of the machinery, the wall was open to allow the cables access. Through the opening, it was possible to see in the glimmering blue distance the far horizon where the vivid sky crushed down upon the quivering, brick-red earth. After the claustrophobic closeness of the jungle they had been fighting through, the distances were breathtaking.
Ann blinked tears out of her eyes and looked away. On either side of them were two rooms, glass-panelled, containing the controls of the machines which squatted in front of them. Ann looked into the nearest of the control rooms, noting with wry amusement the posters on the wall above the main control board. One depicted a range of half-familiar black faces — the freedom fighters of a generation or two ago. Beside it hung a poster showing a huge black woman, stark naked, full frontal, with legs astride and hands on hips, all arrogant lip curl, overflowing curves and rich, dark promise trembling on the edge of threat.
The bull chimpanzee came through the door behind them at a full charge slowed only by the fact that it was crippled. The speed and noise of its entrance had all the impact of an attack by a mountain gorilla. The creature was massive of its kind, a metre and a half high, though hunched and twisted by injuries to spine and legs. Its bones were huge and made all too obvious by the state of the flesh and hide upon them — the one reduced to string and the other to mange by a combination of starvation and disease. Its face was emaciated too, making the size of its red eyes and the length of its yellow fangs all the more obvious. A foam of drool overflowed its thick black lips and spattered onto the black-haired breadth of its chest. Its cavernous belly heaved as it bellowed at them and, below, its gender and its rage were alike shockingly obvious.
The two humans ran at once, rushing to take refuge behind the hulking metal of the winches themselves. As each of them went a different way, the chimp was given pause and it fell forward onto the knuckles of its massive hands. The thunder of the impact seemed to make the wooden floor shake and it was suddenly borne upon Ann’s mind that the solid foundation of the building ended just beyond the weighty machine. The wooden section which she and Robert were currently cowering upon was in fact built out over the sheer drop down which the cables reached. As if to emphasise the point, the hot red wind battered in through die open section immediately behind them and the cables groaned as though they were in eternal agony. The chimpanzee at once took up the cry, battering the floor with its knuckles, obviously building itself up to another charge. ‘Give me the gun!’ yelled Robert.
As though the creature understood the words, it ran bellowing round Robert’s side of the machine at once, hurling itself at him bodily, long before Ann could free the weapon from the camera bag. It missed on its first charge and brushed past Ann as it rushed wildly across the open area of the overhang, the fetid stench of its rancid body, rotting flesh, and putrid breath making her gasp. It was slow to turn, giving her an instant more to rip the zipper wide. The gun came clumsily into her shaking fists as the rest of her precious equipment cascaded unnoticed onto the floor. ‘Give it to me!’ snarled Robert at her shoulder and she would gladly have done so, but there was no time left.
The beast hurled itself forward again just as her wildly twitching thumb found the switch which ignited the red dot. By sheer chance, the dot was on its left nipple. She didn’t even register this consciously before she was pressing the trigger. Her wild attempts to switch on the red dot had set the gun to automatic and it spat a skein of bullets at the chimpanzee, which stitched up the left side of its chest, shattering its ribs and detonating its collar bone, hurling it up in the air, still screaming, and chucked it out through the open wall. Ann watched it go over the edge, utterly unconscious of the fact that the bullets were spitting through the corrugated tin of the roof, following the red dot across the ceiling above her head. The thunderous pounding of the impact was deafening and the dust billowing down the air was joined by a thickening rain of insects.
‘STOP!’ screamed Robert and jerked Ann back part of the way towards reality. She dropped the gun altogether. Then, still held by the dark magic of the moment, she stepped over the smoking gun and walked across to the opening. She stood against a low rail, looking down to see where the creature had gone.
It had not gone far. On the left-hand side of the wood-floored balcony which overhung the two-hundred-metre drop down to the river was a tall structure of wood and metal which had clearly once contained a lift car. On one strut of this, perhaps twenty metres down, the animal hung like a length of tatty black carpet. Even as Ann watched it, overwhelmed by a disorientating surge of guilt, the creature twitched, probably in its final death throes, and fell free of the strut to disappear down the hollow shaft. After a while, there came a dull thud, flat and final, carried up on the red wind.
Robert’s arm came round her shoulder then and he folded her in against his broad chest. She began to sob uncontrollably. It was not simply the death of the creature which affected her, nor even the fact that she had actually killed it with her own hands; it was this coming on top of all the death and destruction with which she had been surrounded since she came out into the bush with him. He knew that. He probably also knew that the kiss she had pressed against his lips in the hiding place on the cliff had been nothing more than a ploy to keep him silent. In any event, his embrace was avuncular and bracing, designed to strengthen, not seduce. His gaze in any case was reaching out over the dark curve of her head and down the lift shaft which had just swallowed the body of the chimp. If the rest of this place was anything to go by, its fastenings were probably about as solid as that rusty bolt’s. And the wood struts were probably so wormy they would crumble at a touch. But there was no getting round it: that was the best way down they were likely to come across.
He shook her gently until her sobs choked off. ‘Come on,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s get out of here before Tarzan arrives looking for Cheeta there.’
Wisely, she would not venture onto the wooden structure without a safety harness, so after picking up the contents of her bag they spent die last half-hour of daylight searching for rope. They found it in a supply room off the late chimpanzee’s indoor kingdom just at that trembling blood-red moment when the last of the light died at the end of the short tropical evening. There was an awful lot of it — more than a hundred metres. They searched desultorily in the dark for something to cut it with, without success.
‘We’ll have to wait now,’ she said, not too sadly, as they walked back across the compound towards the main rail track, for she was bone-tired and envisaged a night’s exhausted sleep.
‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll go back to the winding shed then you can get forty winks. I’ll wake you at moonrise.’