Bright Air - Barry Maitland [113]
She stood panting on the narrow ledge, pressing herself back against the hard surface of the rock. At her feet the second rat lay crushed in the crack in which she had finally cornered it. Five days it had taken her, days of headlong pursuit, of lung-bursting effort and numbing strain. There had been times when she had almost given up, despairing of the impossible task, and at the end her quarry, as exhausted and defeated as herself, had stared up into her face and seemed to welcome its fate.
She raised the bloody stone with which she’d crushed it, and threw it out into the void. It was all she could manage, a final gesture. She was so exhausted, so dehydrated and weary, her body so depleted, that she could barely think or see.
Then she heard a voice, far below, calling her name. She tried to answer, but her throat was parched and no sound came. They had heard the stone, clattering down the cliff to the sea, and now they knew where she was. She waited, and gradually made out the sounds of their voices getting closer, calling to each other as they climbed. Curtis, she thought, and someone else, come to make amends. She wondered how they could face her now.
There had been a time, at the summit, on the very tip of this rocky spike, when she had given way to despair, when the thought of seeing them again had filled her with such hopeless disgust that she had decided to finish with it. How could she bring a child into such a world, where even the finest and the bravest could not be trusted or believed? She had stood on the edge of the pinnacle, arms outstretched, ready to step into the void. But it had been the child that had stopped her. It was a decision she could make only for herself, not for her child. And so she had gone on.
She looked down at a sudden sound and saw Curtis’s head appear five metres below her.
‘She’s here!’ he shouted, and gave her a cautious smile.
He clambered on up, pulling himself onto her ledge, a little to her right.
‘Jeez!’ he gasped, and began hammering an anchor into the rock. He clipped himself to it and called out, ‘On belay,’ then turned to her. ‘Goodness, are you all right? Where’s your gear, for God’s sake?’
She just stared at him, and his face flushed and he turned away to concentrate on the other climber coming up behind him. It was Damien, she realised. He paused when he came into view, staring straight up at her, and something in his face, a kind of grim emptiness held in place by willpower, chilled her. He worked his way up to her left side, and anchored himself, and said not a word.
She looked from one to the other, seeing the hesitation on Curtis’s side, the determination on Damien’s. Damien reached for her, but before his hand could touch her she had stepped forward, out into the bright air.
Author’s Note
In 1997 a research team reported cloning an immortality gene called MORF4. Four years later the American Geron Corporation patented an immortality gene that encodes telomerase, and in 2003 Scottish scientists discovered the immortality gene Nanog, which was reported by New Scientist to ‘keep embryonic stem cells in a state of youthful immortality’.
At the time of writing, a few surviving specimens of the Lord Howe Island Land Lobster, the phantom phasmid, Dryococelus australis, once thought to be extinct and now possibly the world’s rarest invertebrate, have been recovered from Balls Pyramid and taken to the mainland, where they are undergoing a breeding program with a view to their eventual return to Lord Howe Island.
Read on, as Brock & Kolla return
with a vengeance in the remarkable
Dark Mirror
1
Nigel Ogilvie hurried up the stairs to the Reading Room on the first floor, and made his way, panting slightly, to the big windows