No response. As Henry Sill was concerned, Jack might well have been invisible.
Jack changed his suit of armour from gold to steel again.
Henry Sill stopped sc.r.a.ping away at his bowl. He raised his head, and this time Jack saw that the banker"s expression had twisted into a rictus of mindless rage. He flung himself from the stool like a wild beast, knocking the table, knife and bowl aside. He lunged at jack, his arms outstretched, his eyes aflame with murder.
Jack leaped back instinctively, but he wasn"t quick enough. Henry Sill bulled into him, pitching them both backwards into the humus of coins. Jack landed amid a great clinking and clattering of metal, pinned under the weight of the other man"s body. He kicked out wildly, sending coins clattering away in all directions, but he could not extract himself from beneath his opponent. Sill reached for Jack"s faceplate, as though he meant to rip it open.
But those impotent stumps could grip nothing. Jack watched the banker"s wrists glancing repeatedly off the tiny gla.s.s window before his own eyes. He felt the blows through the nerves embedded in his armour, but they were as weak as those of a child.
And then he noticed other more dangerous hands reaching for him. Overhead, a section of the tower"s wall had started to deform, the stonework bulging down towards him even as he watched. It appeared to form itself in the semblance of an arm. He saw a mighty stone fist, the fingers opening...
He changed his suit from steel to gold.
The tower wall retreated at once. Henry Sill stood up, dazed and uncertain, and gazed around him. Both the table and stool lay on their sides. He loped over, and set each of them upright again. He retrieved the bowl, scooped more coins into it, and replaced it on the table. Then he scrambled across the gleaming ground to where the knife had fallen. He crouched beside it, and began the tortuous process of trying to pick it up again.
Jack got to his feet. The banker"s soul had no real defences down here at all. Everything he"d ever desired now lay around him in great glittering mounds. There seemed to be precious little left of the man himself, but the greed which now caused him so much suffering. Perhaps that"s all there ever had been.
Jack now thought he understood why King Menoa, Lord of h.e.l.l and Lord of the Maze, had built this edifice for Henry Sill.
He left the banker to his ghastly feast and wandered among the mountains of gold until at last he heard the sound he had hoped to find.
Clack-clacka-clack-clack-clacka-clack.
He froze, listening keenly. Silence, but then after a pause, the noise started up again.
Clack-clacka-clack-clack-clacka-clack. It sounded like typing, and it was coming from back of the tower. He followed the noise until he located its source. There, perched upon a small mound of coins, was a dusty old typewriter and a pair of severed hands.
Clacka-clack-clacka-clack.
Jack watched as the desiccated fingers tapped away at the typewriter keys. The hands themselves looked just as dead and bloodless as the corpse of the banker to which they"d once been attached. The skin was wrinkled, parchment yellow, and as dry as dust. Stubs of bones extruded from the wrists. No paper or ink had been loaded into the machine itself, leaving the type-bars clacking impotently against the bare metal plates with every strike, but then the Lord of the Maze would hardly require such physical accoutrements to send his messages back to Cog.
Jack picked up one of the hands, but then dropped it at once. His golden armour crawled with revulsion. His stomach bucked and he stifled the instinct to vomit. The boundless evil he"d sensed within those remains could not have come from the simple mind of Henry Sill. Those bloodless fingers were guided by a distant, and yet vastly more powerful force. The instant Jack had touched that hand, he knew he"d touched the black and corpulent heart that resided at the centre of h.e.l.l itself. He closed his eyes and waited until his racing heartbeat began to slow. When he opened them again he saw the hand laying on its back among the coins, striking the air with its fingers, while its twin continued to work at the keyboard. If Menoa"s will was indeed behind these dead appendages, then it did not yet appear to know that Jack had displaced one of them.
But how could he retrieve the things, if he couldn"t bear to touch them?
A terrible wailing noise filled the air. Jack tried to ignore it as he pressed himself flat against the section of wall through which he"d entered the tower. He took a deep breath, and then he turned his armour from gold back to steel. The wall quivered once, and then softened. It flowed outwards over him, enveloping his arms and legs and chest, and finally covering his gauntlets in which he clutched the wooden bowl containing both the knife, and the severed hands, of Henry Sill.
Gillespie"s concern was reflected in the expressions of the other residents, who each sat behind their respective windows and stared at the severed hands upon the table. Even now, Henry Sill"s dissociated extremities continued to twitch. One of them had, by a series of arbitrary jerks, somehow managed to escape the confines of the wooden bowl, and ended up on its back among the residents" plate of biscuits, where it fidgeted like a dying spider.
Jack thought about trying to retrieve it, but decided against it for the moment. He stood patiently beside the table in his steel suit, waiting for those around him to come to a consensus. Even Dunnings had turned up, and his dark brown eyes now peered out from under the shelf of his eyebrows with a degree of interest every bit as intense as that of his fellow residents.
Ariel leaned closer to her own window, her face evincing a mixture of fascination and disgust. "I don"t understand," she said. "How did his real hands come to be here in h.e.l.l?"
"They were sent here from Cog," Jack said. "The Lord of h.e.l.l must have made a deal with the Henry Sill Banking Corporation. Menoa managed to use Sill"s own flesh as a link to the living world. It gave him total control over the corporation. In return, I imagine he promised the banker all the wealth he could ever desire."
"Why would the Lord of h.e.l.l want to run a bank?" Ariel asked.
Gillespie grunted. "Think about it, Ariel."
She continued to frown at the twitching hands.
"He wanted to extend his influence," Gillespie said. "So he needed an outpost, a place from where he would be able to inflict the greatest possible degree of suffering on mankind. Look around you, and then ask yourself how we all ended up here."
She huffed. "So Henry Sill"s soul is still safe inside that tower?"
"It wasn"t much of a soul in the first place," Jack said. "I think Menoa tricked him by building that tower. Henry Sill is trapped in there, a victim of his own greed. He"s enduring far more suffering than we could ever cause him."
"But if Menoa controls the hands..." Ariel began.
"Then we need to get rid of them quickly," Gillespie replied.
Clementine had a deliciously savage look in her eyes. "Do you think they still feel pain?"
"The hands?" Jack said. "No. They"re just dead flesh."
She slumped back down in her chair.
"But we"ve broken h.e.l.l"s line of communication with the bank," he added.
Dunnings gave a bark of disapproval. "Won"t make any difference," he said. "You can"t hurt a corporation that big. When Sill"s subordinates realise n.o.body"s giving any orders, they"ll just find another soulless b.a.s.t.a.r.d to replace him."
Clementine perked up again. "We could always break the fingers."
Most of the others frowned at this suggestion, with the notable exception of Charley, who simply gazed at the girl with the sort of unbridled empathy that implied he"d do the grisly task himself if he only had a hammer.
Gillespie sighed. "I think we should just throw them away and hope Menoa never finds them."
Ariel and Dunnings nodded. Gillespie glanced at the miners and then at Doctor Shula, who each added their own approval. And one by one, the residents all agreed. Clementine chewed her lip for a while, but finally bowed under pressure, and Charley was quick to follow her lead.
Gillespie turned to Jack. "Will you do the honours?"
And so the residents parted their Midden again to permit their newest neighbour to leave. Jack carried the last remains of Henry Sill to the top of the building and then flung them out across the wastes of h.e.l.l. They splashed into a small square pool, where they disappeared from sight. He remained up there for a while, gazing out through his faceplate at the endless fluidways and whorls of rotten stone while the Midden crept away from the tower. He wondered what he was going to do for the rest of eternity.
And then it hit him. The severed hands and the typewriter together formed a link to the living world. But what if the hands could no longer respond to Menoa"s will?
We could always break the fingers.
"Gillespie," he cried, leaping to his feet. "Stop this thing! I"ve got to get those hands back."
His neighbour appeared on the balcony, and frowned up at him. "What?"
"The hands," Jack said. "I need them. And we have to go back for the typewriter."
"Whatever for?"
"To write our own messages."
"But what about Menoa?"
Jack didn"t care. It was a risk he was prepared to take. If this new plan worked, eternity might even turn out to be fun.
end.