Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [81]
I’d gone straight up to my contact on 24. He didn’t seem surprised to see me again, or that this time I wanted Rapt that had been less cut. I gave him everything I had, and he passed it over. I shot up in the back of his store.
By the time I got back down to 8 it had kicked in. Climbing into the chute at the back of the women’s rest room was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. But the last, dying tendrils of my working mind told me that if Maxen was tied so heavily into the NRPD, I couldn’t afford to leave by a normal route, so I soldiered on with it anyway.
More by luck than judgment I found my way to the main shaft, and laboriously clambered down. I don’t know if you’ve ever descended eight floors, hand over hand on a ladder, while full of designer hallucinogenic amphetamorphines, but it takes a certain degree of doggedness. It was very dark, for a start, the shadows brown and continually slithering over my hands and face. They were like snakes in that they were drier than they appeared, but unlike snakes in that they whispered bad things to me, which reptiles rarely do. I slipped once on the way down, and because of my condition believed that I was falling upward. This, I thought, was fine, and I was mildly interested to see where I might end up. Perhaps I’d fall as high as the 200’s, in which case I’d give old Arlond Maxen a piece of my mind.
Him and his brother both, I muttered, the fucken dead fucken fuck.
Luckily—I guess—my back brain realized I was unlikely to have conquered gravity anywhere except inside my head, and my hands grabbed a lower stair entirely independently of my will. I failed to dislocate my wrist by the barest of margins, and made it down most of the remaining steps, only falling about the last six feet. I landed heavily on my back, and checked out for a while.
When I came to everything was worse. But I stood up laboriously, deciding I ought to go somewhere.
Then I got lost.
I’ve done the back route in and out of New Richmond more times than I can recall. A lot of it takes place in the dark, so you have to be pretty good at remembering the way. On this particular occasion, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even especially good at remembering how to use my legs. I tried shutting my eyes, but this merely put me into a spotless operating room, where a cake fashioned out of eye-splittingly bright yellow and white icing was waiting for an operation. This scene remained for a number of minutes after I opened my eyes, before finally fading into the darkness. I resolved to keep my eyes open for the time being. I seemed to have been walking for an awfully long time without reaching the landmarks I was expecting, but on the other hand each time a droplet of sweat squeezed out of the pores on my forehead it seemed to take about an hour and I was worried about being drowned, so it’s possible my judgment may have been impaired.
Then I was very, very frightened of something. I wasn’t sure what, and the fear only lasted a few minutes. Or half an hour.
When that passed, I entered a brief spell of relative lucidity, which is generally the prelude to the second—and more momentous—Rapt rush. I took the opportunity to accept that I was completely and utterly lost, and in a part of the MegaMall’s lowest level I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have gone down right to the bottom of the main chute, but got off one level above as I always had before. I was somewhere near the heart of the engine block, and had no clear way of finding my way out. The corridor was circular, and reinforced with very thick ceramic panels. It could only be the main exhaust duct.
Something which I took at first to be a series of pink flowers exploding at a distance then revealed itself, in time, and with a few cautious steps forward, this turned out to be not a visual phenomenon at all, but a sound. A quiet, pistony sound. I crept toward it, giggling, reasoning that whatever