open below me, a shaft of yellow light flooding the entry then vanishing as the door closes. Move, Eli Bell. Move. Get up. I can hear Iwan Krol below me, wheezing and sucking in the dank stairwell air. His crippled psycho legs and his crooked heart driving him up the stairs in search of my neck and my eyes and my heart, all of which he wants to stab. Frankenstein’s monster. Tytus’s monster. I drag myself up another cramped flight of stairs, then another, then another. The woman with the white fox around her neck. She screamed on the curved staircase. She bellowed so loud the police had to hear her. Keep walking, Eli. Keep going. Ten flights of stairs. I’m ready to sleep now, Slim. Eleven flights of stairs. Twelve. I’m ready to die now, Slim. Thirteen.
And then a wall with no more stairs zig-zagging up. Just a thin door with a handle for turning. The light. The room with the lights that shine at night through the four clock faces of the Brisbane City Hall clock tower. The north clock. The south clock. East and west. Illuminated from here for the city of Brisbane. The sound of the clockwork. The machinery of the clockwork. Rotating wheels and pulleys working into themselves, not beginning at any point but not ending at any point either. Perpetual. A polished concrete floor and a caged elevator shaft in the centre of the engine room. Four grand ticking clock faces on each side of the tower, engines at the base of each clock encased in protective metal.
Both hands clutching my stomach now, I stagger along the square concrete path around the elevator shaft, past the east clock face, blood dripping on my shoes and on the concrete, past the south clock face and the west clock face. Eyes closing. So thirsty. So tired. Eyes closing. I come to the north clock face and there’s nowhere else to go, the concrete path ends here, blocked by a tall wire protection gate giving access to the elevator. I fall to the ground, push myself up so I’m leaning against the metal casing of the engine that pushes the long black steel minute and hour hands of the north clock face. The minute hand moves up a notch and, cupping my stomach, holding my hands over the blade wound to stop the bleeding, I mark the time on the clock from the inside out. Time of death. Two minutes to nine o’clock.
I hear the door to the engine room open and close again. I hear Iwan Krol’s footsteps. One foot steps and the other foot drags. And I see him now through the wires and steel beams of the elevator cage. He’s on one side of the engine room and I’m on the other. The elevator shaft between us. I just want to sleep. I’m so lifeless now he doesn’t even scare me any more. I’m not afraid of him. I’m angry. I’m furious. I’m vengeful. But I can only channel that rage into my heart, nothing else. Not my hands to pull myself up or my legs to stand.
He limps past the east clock face and the south and the west and turns a corner into my path, my body spread out before the north clock face, my useless punctured flesh and my weak bones without any marrow.
He limps closer now. All I hear is his wheezing and his left shoe dragging along the concrete. Up close he seems so old. I see his wrinkles, the lines in his forehead like dry desert gullies. His face is covered in farming sunspots. Half his nose has been cut away surgically. How could he be so filled with hate at such an old age?
He steps closer. One step, drag. Two steps, drag. Three steps, drag. And he stops.
He stands over me now, studies me like I’m a dead dog. A dead bird. A dead blue wren. He kneels down, placing his weight on his right foot, relieving the pressure on his cut left foot. Then he prods me. He feels for a pulse in my neck. He spreads open the flaps of my black jacket to study the wound in my belly clearly. He lifts my shirt up to study the wound. He pushes my shoulder. He squeezes my upper left arm in his hands. He’s squeezing my left bicep. He’s feeling my bones.
I want to ask him what he is doing but I’m too spent to