hand grips my belly and I see it painted in blood. Stagger to the staircase to my left. A grand marble and wood staircase sweeping in an arc to the hall’s second floor. I pull myself up each step and Iwan Krol staggers behind me, dragging his severed left foot, evidently bandaged now and stuffed agonisingly into a black leather shoe. Two cripples playing cat and mouse, one more accustomed to physical pain than the other. The word is ‘help’, Eli. Say it loud. Just say it. ‘H . . .’ But I can’t get it out. ‘Hel . . .’ The wound won’t let me scream it. Three audience members descend the stairs from the second floor, a suited man and two women in cocktail dresses, one wearing a fluffy white scarf like she’s shouldering a white wolf. I burst through them, clutching my stomach. They see the blood now over my hands and across the shirt beneath the old black jacket I took from the newsroom’s emergency coat rack.
‘Help!’ I say, loud enough for them to hear.
The woman wearing the white scarf howls in fear, reels away from me like I’m on fire or diseased.
‘He’s . . . knife,’ I spit at the man in the descending trio and this man makes a dot-to-dot connection between my bloodstained belly and the man waddling after me with the look on his face like a thousand fires from a thousand hells.
‘Hey, stop,’ demands the suited man, bravely standing in front of Iwan Krol who promptly stabs the brave suited man in the top of his right shoulder with a lightning-swift and masked downward stabbing motion that leaves the man collapsed instantly on the marble staircase.
‘Harold!’ howls the woman in the white scarf. The other woman in the trio banshee-screams then runs down the stairs and across the foyer in the direction of the gathered police officers. I stagger on, reach the top of the stairs and turn a sharp right into a hall space and I burst through a nameless brown solid wood door and then another hall space that curves around through sky-blue walls for twenty metres and I look behind me to see the drops of blood I’m leaving in my wake, blood crumbs for the beast whose rabid old-man wheezing tells me he’s slower than me but hungrier. I burst through another nameless door – no people, nobody around to save the boy – and this door opens to a staircase zig-zagging up to another level still and I know this level. I know this white wall space and I know this elevator. I know this, Slim. This is the room from my youth. This is the room where we met the maintenance man who showed us how the city clocks work and how the clock faces look from the inside out.
I stagger to the old yellow steel clock tower elevator and I try to open the cage door but it’s locked and I can hear Iwan Krol bursting through the doors behind me, so I stagger to the door of the maintenance stairs. Your friend Clancy Mallett’s secret stairs, Slim, the ones he showed us years ago, around the corner and through the door running off the elevator room.
Total darkness in the secret stairwell. I’m fading now. I can’t breathe right. My belly doesn’t even hurt so acutely any more because my whole body aches. Numb now. But still moving. Up and up and up the secret stairs. These concrete stairs zigzag upward, eight or nine steps going up sharply, then I bang into a wall I can’t see, then I turn and step up eight or nine more steps, then I bang into another wall hard and turn and go up another eight or nine steps. I’ll do this until I drop, Slim. Just keep going up. But then I stop because I want to lie down on these steps and close my eyes but maybe that’s called dying and I don’t want to do that, Slim, not when there’s so many more questions to ask Caitlyn Spies, so many more questions to ask my mum and dad about how they fell in love, how I came to be; about August and the moon pool and all those things they were gonna tell me when I was older. I’ve got to get older. My eyes close briefly. Black. Black. The long black. Then my eyes open because I hear the door to the secret stairs