The Ladder
The phone rings, waking me.
It's the middle of the night and I would normally ignore it but for some reason, I feel it's important so I go to get it. It's the hospital, saying my mum's operation went well. I didn't even realise she was ill, and feel a bit bad about that but I ask whether she can talk. They say it's better if I came in: "about eight in the morning would be best."
The next morning, I arrive at the hospital and go up to the room where my mother is. The floor is strangely deserted - no nurses in the nursing station, no doctors on their rounds. My mother is asleep, and I feel it might not be a good idea to wake her yet. The early morning sun is glowing through the curtains suffusing the small room in a peach coloured glow, the soft pinging of the monitors almost soothing me back to sleep. I go back down to the lobby and sit in the waiting area.
Now, it's less like a hospital and more like a shopping mall. Various familiar stores line the modern arcade and shoppers are starting to teem in. I'm sitting at the reception area feeling awkward, opposite the window to the reception office, where you talk to the orderly on duty when you come to the hospital. The office behind the closed hatch is dark, but as I watch, a light goes on and the window is slid open. A youngish, well-built man in a nurse's tunic is sitting there, arranging papers. He has messy blond hair and a smug-looking face. He looks over at me and beckons me over with an upward gesture of his head - you know, the reverse nod.
I walk over to the hatch.
"What are you doing?" he asks rather brusquely. He sounds German, or Central European.
"I, uh, I'm here to visit my mother," I mumble.
He glances at the clock behind him, shaking his head in overplayed weariness. "No, no, no. It's too early for you to be visiting. Didn't you know?"
I feel like telling this rude man that the nurse told me to come at eight, but I'm gripped by a sudden tiredness.
"Here," he says, scrawling on an appointment card, "take this card and go and sit down. I'll call you when you can go up." He turns back to his paper shuffling, ignoring me.
Furious, I go to sit down, then realise that I can do whatever the fuck I want and walk off to find a lift to take me up to my mother's floor.
The mall is now full of people. I debate whether to go into Tesco's for a sandwich, but decide I can probably eat later. Pushing through the crowds of shoppers, I look up. Through the faux Victorian vaulted glass ceiling, I can see the grey tower of the main hospital block. It projects up from the centre of the ground floor mall. I'm almost at the base of the main tower, and come to a bank of lifts that I don't recognise. I press the call button, suddenly realising that these are service elevators and maybe I'm not allowed in them. The lift comes and a bunch of paramedics with trolleys rush in before me. The full lift departs. Sighing, I call another.
Soon, there is a pinging behind me and a lift arrives on the opposite side. I get in, but a couple of theatre-gowned nurses tell me that I should get the public lifts as these will only take me to a restricted private section of the hospital. I get out of the lift and start to wander the crowds, trying to locate the public elevator.
I look up through the roof again. This time, behind the grey tower block, which I realise is merely the private administrative block, is a much larger mass. A vertiginous finger of rock, the width of two skyscrapers and four times as high, looms behind it. On its distant, mist-enshrouded peak, I can make out buildings and lights. The main hospital block. I redouble my pace.
Soon I come to the correct elevator. It looks shabby and small, tucked into a darkened side alley of the mall away from the crowds. The red call light winks balefully at me as I wait.
When the lift arrives, I get in and look at the floor buttons. I can't see the one my mother was on. Then I notice that there is a concealed flap above the buttons. Scrabbling with my nails, I manage to lift open a small metal hatch. Behind is the button for my mother's floor. Irritated, and slightly disquieted, I press it.
The lift shoots up at a tremendous speed, almost flattening me to the grimy floor. The lights flicker with the sheer acceleration. Grimly, I hold onto the walls, trying to steady myself.
After what seems an impossibly long time, the lift lurches to a halt, hurling me bodily into the air. Peculiarly, I seem to float for a while, before settling back down. The doors creak open. A watery sunlight floods in.
I step out of the lift, which has come to rest on an open hillside covered with scrubby grass. There seems to be no sign of a shaft. It's as if the lift has just landed there.
Small, wispy clouds drift around me at head height. We're clearly at a vast altitude. The air seems thin and cold. Strange, dark birds wheel above me in unnatural looking patterns. Before me, a huge outcrop of rock rears up. At its top is the hospital. A mass of gothic architecture that looks like it's grown naturally out from the rock. In some windows, I can see faint lights, but the bulk of the building looks dead. It reminds me of the mythical floating island of Laputa, surrounded as it is by scudding clouds and shining sky.
In front of me, at the base of the grassy slope, is a road. Following the road with my eye, I see that it seems to wind up in a series of switchbacks to the hospital town. Parked across the road in a layby are three vehicles, like golf cars, or mini-mokes. These are public use vehicles that are for shuttling visitors up to the mountaintop town. I walk across the road and get into the cleanest looking cart.
For a while, I seem to be making no progress. I'm driving round and round and I seem to be ascending switchbacks but getting no nearer the summit. Frustratingly, the electric cart is also very difficult to control. The steering is oversensitive and I'm constantly having to compensate to stop coming off the road.
Soon, I realise I really am just going round in circles, and the sensation of climbing is just a peculiarity of the road and its surroundings.
As soon as I realise this, it becomes suddenly obvious that there is a turn off the ring road that goes straight up to the top. Annoyed at my lack of observation, I turn up the side road and soon arrive at the old town's gothic centre. As I drive through it, I realise more and more that this is a ghost town. The buildings are intact, but decaying, doors hanging off hinges. The streets of the old town centre are made of loose cobbles that are losing their grip with their mortar and my cart crunches unsteadily over them as I make for the parking lot at the town's centre from which the hospital is accessed.
The ramp of the car park is dangerously decayed, so I abandon the cart in the rubble and make my way up by foot. The view from the top is spectacular. The entire mass of the decaying town is laid out below me in the gathering dusk. The silence is incredible. The air seems thinner and gravity's grip looser up here. I feel like I'll float away if I stop concentrating.
As I stand and breathe, I realise that a loud thumping noise is disrupting my sense of calm. I walk over to the rusty fence at the edge of the parking lot, trying to trace its source. Below me on a lower tier of the parking lot is a deserted tourist coach, two wheels missing. The sound is emanating from this vehicle, and I realise it's a muffled rendition of "Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones. Someone must have left a radio running inside before they left the coach for the last time.
Then I notice movement inside the coach. Peering closer, I see that there seem to be five figures inside with musical instruments playing the music I'm hearing. Shading my eyes, I try and make out more detail, and I realise that they're not actually people at all, but waxwork automata of a band, quite crude, and roughly animated using gears and cogs to keep time with the music. Shaking my head, I turn away, looking for the entrance to the main hospital wards.
Across the parking lot are a series of wooden doors set into a crumbling brick wall. They are numbered 1-20, though the metal numbers have long since fallen off their mounts, leaving their less-weathered outlines behind. Suddenly I remember the card the rude reception nurse gave me and retrieve it from my pocket. Written on it are the words, "Try Room 3". Nodding, I scrunch up the card and make for door number three.
I open the door and step in.
The room inside is the same room I visited earlier, with the same peach coloured light suffusing it. But the pinging machines have been turned off and the bed is empty, neatly made up.
I sit down, unable to decide what to do next.
Then I notice flickering, shadowy movement behind the curtains.
Slowly, I reach up and pull one of the orange curtains aside. Outside, the city is laid out below me like a painting. Instantly, I think of the painter William Blake. In the sky above the city are wheeling a mass of the strange birds I saw earlier, but now I realise that they are more like winged people, in dull, grey armour. Smaller than normal people, about four feet tall, with inhuman, grey, gargoyle-like faces, that turn towards me as one, and leer.
A hand taps me lightly on the shoulder.
I jump and turn. A young woman is standing behind me in a tattered nurse's uniform. Her eyes are fixed on the invaders massing in the sky in the window.
"Come with me," she says grimly. "If we can get to the generator on the tower roof we may be able to stop the invasion force and rescue your mother."
This seems to make sense to me, so I nod and get up. The woman has already left the room. I follow her outside.
The sky is dark with the grey flying creatures. They seem to be massing in fighter-plane formation as if preparing to attack the city laid out below us. I look for the woman and she's running towards a metal ladder that leads up the side of a huge, cylindrical black tower that I've not seen before. I run after her.
She makes her way up the rungs of the ladder. I start to follow, but immediately, I sense that the thin metal and rusting bolts holding the rickety ladder to the crumbling brick can't take both our weights.
"You go up first!" I yell. "It'll fall if we both go at the same time." She looks down and nods tensely, her mouth pressed into a thin line. I watch her receding up the ladder. The top of the tower is lost in the cloud, but I can tell she's still climbing due to the vibrations in the metalwork. Soon, she too disappears into the murk above. I wait, with my eyes closed, feeling her regular footfalls through my hands gripping the rung in front of my face.
After a long time, the vibrations in the ladder finally stop. Taking a breath, I look up at the lowering sky and start to climb. The ladder seems loose and skittish in my grip. I can see little skirls of powdery dry grouting crumbling down from around its metal moorings with every step that I take.
It feels like I'm climbing for an eternity. There's utter silence around me interrupted only by the occasional flapping in the mist around me as one of the invading creatures flies near to have a look. Below me, the city is laid out like a map, I'm so high up now. It's unbearably cold, and I'm losing all sensation in my grip. The thought of saving my mother is the only impulse that's propelling me upwards.
I look up. Is that the outline of the top of the tower that I can see in the mist? It seems quite near now. Once again, a flapping approaches, very close, and I flinch, but it recedes. The ladder judders again and seems to move about six inches away from the wall with the accompanying sound of crumbling rubble. If I fell from here, I'd die before I even touched the ground. I freeze.
Momentarily, the ladder stops shaking, so I restart my climb. Then all of a sudden, I hear the nurse's panicky voice. It seems ridiculously close.
"You have to stop! You're not going to make it!"
I look up. In the mist, I can see the shadow of her head, as she leans over the buttressed top of the tower looking down at me. She's barely twenty feet away.
"What did you say?" I whisper.
"The top of the ladder's come away," she yells. "You must go back. It won't take any more weight!"
Frozen in place, I can sense that what she's saying is true. The ladder has lost all grip in the rotten brickwork and is poised to come away from the tower all at once. I close my eyes, trying to think. Despite the ferocious cold, I'm drenched in sweat and my eyes are stinging from the salt.
"See if there's any rope, or anything you can throw down to me," I hiss as loudly as I dare. With a judder the ladder moves again, then settles.
"OK," she says. I hear her scampering off.
The roof of the tower can't be that big as she's soon back. "There's nothing," she says. "Can't you go back down?"
"Are you joking??" I shout. Angered, I start climbing the ladder again. I'm ten feet away from the top. Five feet. I see her hand reaching from me as the ladder finally begins to shake itself free.
I try to reach up, to grasp her hand.
But it's too late. My hand grips thin air as the ladder gives up its dying embrace and I fall with it through the thin air and the attenuated gravity, hearing the girl's scream receding from me into the mist and the gathering darkness.
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