“No, no, no. It went down there. Into that little indention, below that rocky ledge.” Alice was pointing and peering down into a concave portion of the ridge, darkened by the shadows of the angled afternoon sun.
“Then it is lost forever. Let us resume our climb, Alice.”
“But I must have it! I really must have it!”
“Don’t be a blockhead. You cannot go down there and look for it. There is no time.”
Alice shook her head with such violence that she surprised even herself.
“If you do not leave the pendant where it is, I will call for my father to come and carry you the rest of the way. And he would do it, I’m certain, for there is not that much farther to go to the top.”
“Please, I beg of you, Cecilia. Give me but a minute or two to climb down there and give a look. The pendant is all that I have left from my mother and father. I must take it with me to remember them by.”
Cecilia gave a heavy sigh of exasperated displeasure. She tapped her toe. She put her hands upon her hips. “Take only the time required for those behind us to pass, and then I will not let you delay us even a second longer.” Even as Cecilia was granting Alice permission to slip down a little into the brushy indentation to search for the lost pendant, Alice was doing that very thing, removing herself from the trail and proceeding down into the thick foliage that would make for a most challenging hunt-and-probe even under the best of circumstances. “Oh, look at you!” bellowed Cecilia. “You have lost your mind. I’m certain of it.”
“Is that what the girl has lost — her mind?” chuckled Dr. Fibbetson, who now approached Cecilia, quite winded and no doubt happy to take a brief rest from the arduous climb.
“She has dropt some stupid little thing given her by her mother and father,” answered Cecilia with a roll of the eyes. “But you know that the Trimmers are daft. They always have been.”
“I have known it for years, my dear. I have known it for years.” Fibbetson took a few more breaths whilst excavating dust from his nose with his finger.
Alice was inclined to shout up in response to the arrant rudeness of her friend Cecilia and the disgusting medical practitioner that “no, the Trimmers are not daft. They may be different, but they are not half so daft as all of those climbing this mountain round me.” But she bit her tongue and narrowed her gaze upon all the green and brown in search of something green and grey and glistening.
“Will you come up now?” pleaded Cecilia, as Fibbetson, representing the very last of the train, moved on. Cecilia reached out her hand to assist Alice in climbing back up.
“A moment longer, I beg you.”
“Absolutely not. Take my hand. There is no time to lose. They will leave without us if you tarry.”
“One moment more. That’s all I ask. There is something reflective in that litter of dead leaves. I must have a look at it.”
Cecilia retracted her hand. “You blithering, dunderheaded fool! You don’t deserve to come with us. You should die in this place for your stupidity. I am going. I have done with you!”
Cecilia righted herself and proceeded to climb up the trail now unaccompanied by the girl who was once her very best friend and then her near-sister, and now was someone who apparently meant nothing to her. “Over a pendant,” she muttered to herself. “A ridiculous pendant, which should mean nothing to any sane person.”
But the pendant did mean something. I meant everything to Alice Trimmers, in fact, for as it turned out, it meant her very life.
For here is what happened next. There was a woman’s scream. And then another, easily perceptible to Alice’s ears, although she was still a few hundred yards removed from the Summit and situated in a small hollow. Then came the booming sound of a man’s voice. “At will, men.” And then a sound that would echo in Alice Trimmer’s ears forever thereafter: gunfire, terrible thunderous gunfire, that did not relent for a long time — the guns firing away to be thorough, to be certain, to leave nothing undone. Alice clapped her hands over her ears but the terrific sound could not be fully blocked out. She felt faint. She reeled, losing her footing. She fell backwards into a crevice — fell directly into a break in the ground that nearly swallowed her up, that placed her into rocky, cobwebbed half-darkness, but did not dull the sound of the guns, which continued to fire away, to tear at her delicate ears with the intensity of their blasts. Then Alice heard a different sound; she heard something topple down the path as if it were a body falling, tumbling downward. She saw something in the crease of light above her that looked at first like dripping water, but was too dark for water, too red for water. There was blood spilling off the Summit of Exchange — fresh rubiginous blood — blood mixed with the soil and sand of its freshly made rivulet. She heard a rustle and the thumping of feet as unseen persons now descended the path. Was she missed? Had they come looking for her? Or was it the tumbling, somersaulting body they were after — the body that had fallen off the mountain when all the others were felled neatly upon their spots. Was it the last to have reached the top? Was it Cecilia? But no, it was not Cecilia, for there was a moan — a man’s anguished moan that could be faintly heard.
“Holy shit! This one’s still alive,” said a voice. Alice did not recognise the voice. It belonged to a man, and the accent was strange to her ear.
“It’s Fibbetson. Don’t you know him? It’s the doctor — the screw-up— probably killed more people with his one scalpel than all of those we just took out.”
“Help me,” Fibbetson moaned.
“Be glad to, Doc.” And then came a sound like ripping cloth, like tearing flesh, and an agonising cry — a blood-clabbering cry.
And then fading, grunting voices: “Where did you — uhng — learn to gut like that?”
“I…uhng…fish,” explained the other man.
Then silence.
And then darkness, as Alice Trimmers sank into merciful unconsciousness.
Chapter the Fiftieth. Thursday, July 10, 2003
ermit me, kind reader, to turn the clock back to a time preceding the massacre on the Northern Ridge — only a few minutes, if you will indulge me — so that you may know what was being said and done in other places when those tragic shots were fired. Let us begin with Newman Trimmers, who stood within the attic room looking down at a man lying asleep upon a pallet on the floor. The man had kept him up for most of the previous night with shouts and groans and troubled thrashings in his sleep. Yet Newman wasn’t angry with him. Didn’t Newman have such nights as this one himself? Indeed, all of the eight men and one boy who shared this room had been plagued with nightmares of equally terrifying intensity. The dark dreams came, in part, in remembrance of their time in the Outland (for each of the men, save one, had been there and had seen things there of a haunting nature). The dark dreams also came from the fact of their secret imprisonment at the top of an insane asylum — each of these “Limbo Returnees,” long thought dead and gone by most — a veritable gathering of ghosts.
“Does he still nap?” asked George Muntle in regard to the sleeping man, putting a hand upon the shoulder of the boy.
Newman looked up into the eyes of the enquirer and nodded.
Vincent Muntle’s brother George bore a similarity to his younger brother only in the eyes, which were dark blue and shaded by thick brows. Where Vincent was bluff and hardy and a bit rounded in those places where musculature had softened, George was rail-thin and possessed of a rather cadaverous aspect that shewed not only in the hollowness of his ocular orbits, but also in the concave cheeks and the narrow, withered neck. Perhaps it was the fact that George had lived all of the last twenty-five years of his life in this sunless attic room, which had drained the life and sinew from him, for his brother had always thought him robust.