The Angry Mountain (28 page)

“Yes.” His voice was muffled by the door, but quite audible. “We're all here.”

“My father?” Hilda murmured. She couldn't nerve herself to voice the question aloud. I think she feared the answer might be No.

I had taken the can of petrol from her and was forcing back the cap. “Is Tu
č
ek there?” I called through the door.

“Yes. He's here.”

I heard Hilda give a gasp of relief.

“Get up the ladder to the roof,” I said sharply. I was afraid she was going to faint. “Stand back now,” I called. “I'm sprinkling the door with petrol.” I had tipped the can up and as the petrol ran out I flicked it with my hand on to the woodwork of the door. I put about half a gallon on and around the door. Then I hauled the can up the ladder and passed it through the gap to Hilda. “Are you well back from the door?” I called.

“Yes, you can light the bonfire,” came the answer.

I climbed out on to the roof. “Pull the ladder up, will you, Hilda,” I said. I tipped the can of petrol up, soaking a strip of cloth in the stuff. Then holding one corner of it, I leaned down through the opening, struck a match and lit it. As the handkerchief blazed I tossed it down into the darkness below. There was a whoof of searing flame, a blast of hot blinding air and I flung myself backwards on to the roof of the tower.

“Are you hurt?” I felt Hilda's hands grip my shoulders, lifting me up. I wiped my hand across my face. It smelt of petrol and burned hair. “The damned stuff had vapourised,” I mumbled. My face felt raw and scorched. Flames were licking out of the square hole in the roof. I crawled to the edge of the roof and leaned over the crumbling battlement
above the slit. “Are you all right down there?” I shouted. I was scared I'd put too much of the stuff on the door.

It was Hacket who answered. “We're fine, thanks.” His voice was faint and muffled. “Quite a fire you started.”

I stood up then and looked down on the stone roof of the monastery. Half the building had gone already. Beyond lay a flat, black plain of lava slanted gently upwards and thinning out to a dark gash in the mountainside. Above the gash the conical top of Vesuvius belched oil-black smoke shot with red lumps of the molten core of the earth which rose and fell, rose and fell like flaming yoyos in the crater mouth. Higher still, faint streaks of forked lightning cut the billowing underbelly of the cloud that hid the sun and blotted out the light of day. Hilda gripped my hand. She, too, was staring up at the mountain and I saw she was scared. “Oh, God! Do you think we shall ever get out?”

“We'll get out all right,” I said, but my assurance sounded false and hollow. The lava seemed to be advancing faster. Already it had obliterated the flower garden where we'd stood and was pouring across the vineyards beyond in a slow, inevitable wave. Another section of the monastery fell with a crash and an up-thrust blast of dust. Soon it would reach the chapel. We must get out before then or …

I went forward to the opening that led into the tower. The flames had died down now and in the light of my torch I saw the door was charred but still solid. “We need more petrol,” I said. I didn't dare pour it down. I needed some sort of a container. Hilda still had her handbag looped over her arm. “Give me that,” I said. I opened the bag, filled it with petrol and tossed it down through the opening. There was a sound like an explosion and flames leapt up through the square again.

I stood watching them, praying that the fire would soon burn through the door. Another section of the monastery fell in a blaze of sparks. I glanced across to where I had been imprisoned on that other roof. I could gauge the spot by
the position of the monastery. There was nothing there, just the flat desolation of the lava. “
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.
”

“What do you say?”

I realised then that I had spoken aloud.

She must have read my thoughts for she said, “What happened over there, before I found you? Did you catch that man?”

“No. He caught me.”

“What happened? You looked terribly hurt.”

“Nothing happened,” I said. She wanted to talk—anything to take her mind off the waiting. But I couldn't tell her what happened. It was too close to our present situation.

At last the flames died down again. I went to the battlements and called down, “Can you break your way out now?”

I could not hear their answer. It was lost in the sound of the lava. “They are kicking at the door now,” Hilda called. She was leaning over the hole. A shower of sparks shot up and she flung back, coughing, her face black with smuts. “I think it breaks down now.”

There was a sudden shout, the sound of splintering wood and more sparks. Then Max's voice called up: “We're almost out now.” More sparks and then a crash. “Where are you?”

“Up here,” I answered.

Hilda and I pushed the ladder through the smoking gap. “Go on down the stairs,” I shouted. “We'll follow.”

The light of a torch flashed in the opening. Then I heard footsteps on the stone stairway. “Quick!” I said to Hilda. “Down you go.”

She stepped into the smoking gap and scrambled down. As I stood there holding the end of the ladder the last section of the monastery before the chapel fell in. The lava was right across the monks' vineyards now, slithering in towards the base of the tower. I glanced behind me, towards Avin and the way out to safety, and my heart stood still. The lava
streams that had swung past Santo Francisco on either side were curving in like pincers. I remembered how I'd seen this pincer movement from that other roof. But now it had developed. The two ends of the pincer were curved in towards Avin. One arm was already eating into the village. The other was only just outside it, following the slope of a valley.

“Dick! Hurry, please.”

I realised suddenly I was sweating with fear. “I'm coming,” I called. I swung myself on to the ladder. The air was choked with smoke, and wood still blazed at the foot of the ladder. I heard someone coughing below me, then my eyes were streaming and I fell suddenly into the charred wood. I put my hand out to break my fall and felt a searing burn on the palm. Then I was clear of the charred debris and on the stairway.

“What happened?”

“One of the rungs had burned through,” I told her. I had my torch on now and we hurried after the others. We caught them up in the passage leading to the chapel. It was with a sense of wonderful relief that I climbed out of the passage into the robing room. I had had an awful feeling of claustrophobia there, picturing the lava slithering over us and imprisoning us for all time underground.

We went through into the dim light of the chapel just as Max came out of the archway leading to the refectory room, his arm upraised and his eyes showing white in his blackened face. “No good,” he gasped. We stood there for a moment staring at him in a daze. I was dimly aware of Zina, her clothes torn and charred, and Hacket with his chest naked under his jacket and matted with singed hair. He was supporting two other figures, whose bodies drooped. Hilda ran forward, clutching one of them and called hysterically, “
Co se stalo, tati?
” It was Jan Tu
č
ek. I barely recognised him.

I think Hacket and I moved forward at the same moment. We came together in the doorway and stopped there, holding our arms up to shield us from the heat and staring in blank
hopelessness. There was no passage any longer, no refectory room—no courtyard, no main archway. There was nothing there but a pile of broken stone and beyond it the lava heaped twenty, maybe thirty feet above us.

“The abbot's room,” Max shouted suddenly. “There's a window there.”

We scrambled back to the robing room in a body, choking the doorway. The window was high up, narrow, and of stained glass, leaded and barred. Hacket seized hold of a crozier. I saw Zina's mouth open in horror at the sacrilege. But it was just the thing we wanted and Hacket was essentially a practical man. Max and I dragged chairs in from the chapel and piled them up while the American smashed the glass in. The lead was thin and bent easily. He smashed at the crossbar. The iron gave and broke under his blows. “Up you go, Countess. And you, Miss Tu
č
ek.”

They scrambled up. “Feet first,” Max called. Zina was halfway through when she looked down. Then she cried out something and clung frantically to the stone frame of the window. “Jump!” Hacket shouted at her.

“I can't,” she screamed. “It's a long—” Her voice died in a fluttering scream as Hilda, who had seen more of the lava and realised the urgency, pushed her through. Tu
č
ek and Lemlin we got up that crazy scaffolding of chairs somehow. They seemed weak and in pain. Hacket went up with them and helped them through. “They're drugged,” Max explained. “And the bloody swine had them chained.”

“Chained to the wall?” I asked.

He nodded. “Imprisoned in the fetters they used for heretics. Fortunately they were rusty and we were able to smash some of the links. You go on, Hacket,” he called. “Now you, Dick.” I hesitated. “Go on, man. I'll give you a hand up, if it's your leg that's worrying you.”

I scrambled up, caught hold of the stone of the window and slid my legs through. Max was right behind me. It happened as I clung there, steadying myself for the drop, getting my
tin leg under me. There was a crumbling roar. I caught a glimpse of the roof cracking and falling and then I let go. I fell on my good leg and rolled sideways, conscious of a horrible jar on the stump of my left leg and hearing a thin scream that for a second I thought was myself screaming with pain.

But it wasn't I who had screamed. It was Maxwell. He had his head half out of the window and his face was contorted to a frightening mask of pain. Above the window rose the dust cloud I'd seen so often in the past few hours. We were looking at a wall with nothing behind it. I shouted up to Maxwell. He didn't say anything. Blood was running down his chin where he was biting through his lower lip as he heaved at the rest of his body. “It's got my legs,” he hissed down.

“Try and pull ‘em clear,” Hacket shouted. “We'll catch you.” He signalled to me to join him under the window. “Easy does it, fellow. Come on now. Get out of that and we'll soon have you safely tucked up and comfortable.”

There was a sudden shifting of masonry and a cloud of dust swirled through the broken gap where Maxwell's head was. “I've got one leg free,” he hissed. “The other one's broken, but I think I'll—” He screamed then and suddenly slumped over the sill of the window, his face running with sweat that dripped down on to us. It was only a momentary black-out for a second later he was hauling himself forward.

He fell head first on top of us, tumbling us in a heap. We scrambled up and dragged him clear of the wall. “We must get him to the car,” Zina said.

We were on a path and I could see gates wide open leading to the street. “I'll get the car,” I said. “Hilda. Give me the rotor arm.”

She stared at me. Then her mouth fell open. “It—it was in my bag. I put it in my bag—the one you filled with petrol.”

I stared at her blankly. I felt dazed and sick with tiredness and the reaction.

“You don't need to worry about the cars,” Hacket said. “There aren't any cars. Come on. Help me get him up. We got to get away from the lava.”

“No cars?” Zina exclaimed. “But we've two cars here. We parked them—” Then her eyes widened as she realised that the courtyard was now buried under the lava. She began to cry. “Get me out of here. Get me out of here can't you. You brought me here. You made me come. Get me out—” Hilda slapped her twice across the face with the flat of her hand. “You're alive and you're not hurt,” she snapped. “Pull yourself together.”

Zina gulped and then her face suddenly seemed to smooth out. “Thank you—for doing that. I'm not frightened. It's just my nerves. I'm a—a drug addict, and I haven't—” She turned away quickly. She was crying again.

“Only a nurse would have known what to do, Miss Tu
č
ek.,” Hacket said. “You have been a nurse, haven't you?”

Hilda turned to him. “Yes. During the war.”

“Then see what you can do for this poor fellow.” He nodded to Maxwell, who lay writhing in agony on the ground. “We'll get him down to the street, clear of the lava first. Then you go to work on him while we rig up some sort of a stretcher.”

We got Maxwell and the other two to the street and went down as far as the piazza. We were safe there for the time being. There was a pile of bedding on the broken cart and we laid Maxwell on a mattress and covered him with some blankets and a quilt. Hilda said she thought she could set the leg temporarily at any rate. “What we need is some sort of a conveyance,” Hacket said to me. “There's those other two guys can't walk far and we can't carry Maxwell, let alone them. You look about all in and I'm not feeling so fresh myself.”

I told him about the other lava streams then and how they threatened our line of retreat through Avin. He nodded. “We'll have to hustle.”

I suddenly remembered. “George!” I said. “George may get us clear in time.” I looked about the piazza. There was no sign of a living thing. “I wonder where he's got to?”

“Who's George?”

“My mascot. A mule I rescued from a building. I let him go just outside the monastery.”

“He's probably bolted out into the country by now. Come on. We got to find something.”

“No,” I said. “I don't think he'll have bolted. He's the sort of animal that likes the company of humans. I don't think he'd go out of the village.” I began calling.

“How do you expect him to recognise a name you've only just given him?” Hacket said irritably. “Come on. We've got to do something practical.”