The Evening's Entertainment

The evening deepened, and the apartment building withdrew into the darkness. As usual at this hour, the high-rise was silent, as if everyone in the huge building was passing through a border zone. On the roof the dogs whimpered to themselves. Royal blew out the candles in the dining-room and made his way up the steps to the penthouse. Reflecting the distant lights of the neighbouring high-rises, the chromium shafts of the callisthenics machine seemed to move up and down like columns of mercury, a complex device recording the shifting psychological levels of the residents below. As Royal stepped on to the roof the darkness was lit by the white forms of hundreds of birds. Their wings flared in the dark air as they struggled to find a perch on the crowded elevator heads and balustrades.

Royal waited until they surrounded him, steering their beaks away from his legs with his stick. He felt himself becoming calm again. If the women and the other members of his dwindling entourage had decided to leave him, so much the better. Here in the darkness among the birds, listening to them swoop and cry, the dogs whimpering in the children's sculpture-garden, he felt most at home. He was convinced more than ever that the birds were attracted here by his own presence.

Royal scattered the birds out of his way and pushed back the gates of the sculpture-garden. As they recognized him, the dogs began to whine and strain, pulling against their leads. These retrievers, poodles and dachshunds were all that remained of the hundred or so animals who had once lived in the upper floors of the high-rise. They were kept here as a strategic food reserve, but Royal had seen to it that few of them had been eaten. The dogs formed his personal hunting pack, to be kept until the final confrontation when he would lead them down into the building, and throw open the windows of the barricaded apartments to admit the birds.

The dogs pulled at his legs, their leads entangled around the play-sculptures. Even Royal's favourite, the white alsatian, was restless and on edge. Royal tried to settle it, running his hands over the luminous but still bloodstained coat. The dog butted him nervously, knocking him back across the empty food-pails.

As Royal regained his balance, he heard the sound of voices surging up the central stairway a hundred feet behind him. Lights approached through the darkness, a procession of electric torches held at shoulder height. The beams of light cut through the night air, scattering the birds into the sky. A portable casette player boomed out its music over the clicking of dumb-bells. As Royal paused behind an elevator head, a group of his top-floor neighbours erupted on to the roof. Led by Pangbourne, they spread in a loose circle across the observation deck, ready to celebrate a recent triumph. Without Royal's approval or foreknowledge, a raid had taken place on the floors below.

The gynaecologist was in high excitement, waving the last stragglers up the staircase like a demented courier. From his mouth came a series of peculiar whoops and cries, barely articulated grunts that sounded like some Neanderthal mating call but, in fact, were Pangbourne's rendering of the recorded birth-cries analysed by his computer. These eerie and unsettling noises Royal had been forced to listen to for weeks as members of his entourage took up the refrain. A few days earlier he had finally banned the making of these noises altogether-sitting in the penthouse and trying to think about the birds, it unnerved him to hear the women in the kitchen next door emitting these clicks and grunts. However, Pangbourne held regular sessions in his own quarters at the opposite end of the roof, where he would play through his library of recorded birth-cries for the benefit of the women crouching in a hushed circle on the floor around him. Together they mimicked these weird noises, an oral emblem of Pang-bourne's growing authority.

Now they had left Royal, and were giving full vent to everything they had learned, hooting and growling like a troupe of demented mothers-to-be invoking their infants' birth-traumas.

Waiting for the right moment to make his entrance, Royal heeled the alsatian behind a tattered awning that leaned against the elevator head. For once he was glad that he was wearing his tuxedo-the white safari-jacket would have stood out like a flame.

Two "guests' had been picked up, a cost-accountant from the 32nd floor with a bandaged head, and a myopic meteorologist from the 27th. The woman carrying the cassette player, he noted calmly, was his wife Anne. Sloppily dressed, her hair in a mess, she lolled against Pang-bourne's shoulder and then wandered about in the circle of torch-light like a moody trollop, brandishing the cassette player at the two prisoners.

"Ladies… please, now. There's more to come." Pang-bourne calmed the women, his slim fingers like brittle sticks in the confused light. The portable bar was lifted upright. A table and two chairs were set beside it, and the guests uneasily took their seats. The cost-accountant was trying to straighten the unravelling bandage around his head, as if frightened that he might be called upon to play blind man's buff. The meteorologist squinted shortsightedly into the torchlight, hoping to recognize someone among those takingpart in this revel. Royal knew everyone present, his neighbours of the past year, and could almost believe that he was attending one of the many cocktail parties held on the roof that summer. At the same time he felt that he was watching the opening act of a stylized opera or ballet, in which a restaurant is reduced to a single table and the doomed hero is taunted by a chorus of waiters, before being despatched to his death.

The hosts at this party had been drinking long before their two guests arrived. The jeweller's widow in the long fur coat, Anne with her cassette player, Jane Sheridan waving a cocktail shaker, all were lurching about as if to some deranged music only Royal was unable to hear.

Pangbourne called for quiet again. "Now-keep our guests amused. They're looking bored. What are we playing tonight?"

A medley of suggestions was shouted out.

"Gang Plank!"

"Flying School, doctor!"

"Moon Walk!"

Pangbourne turned to his guests. "I rather like Flying School… Did you know we've been running a flying school here? No-?"

"We've decided to offer you some free lessons," Anne Royal told them.

"One free lesson," Pangbourne corrected. Everyone sniggered at this. "But that's all you'll need. Isn't it, Anne?"

"It's a remarkably effective course."

"Solo first time, in fact."

Already, led by the jeweller's widow, they were dragging the injured accountant towards the balustrade, everyone tripping over the bloodstained bandage unwrapping around his head. A pair of tattered papier-mâché wings, part of a child's angel costume, were fastened to the victim's back. The grunting and hooting began again.

Dragging the reluctant alsatian after him, Royal stepped into view. Involved in their imminent execution, no one noticed him. As casually as he could muster, he called out, "Pangbourne…! Dr Pangbourne…!"

The noise slackened. Torch-beams flicked through the darkness, whipping across Royal's silk-lapelled dinner-jacket, fixing on the white alsatian trying to escape between his feet.

"Flying School! Flying School!" The sullen chant was taken up. Looking down at this unruly gang, Royal could almost believe that he was surrounded by a crowd of semi-literate children. The zoo had rebelled against its keeper.

Hearing Royal's voice, the gynaecologist turned from his prisoner, whose bandage he had expertly refastened. Wiping his hands, he strolled across the roof, almost mimicking Royal's casual saunter. But his eyes were examining Royal's face with a wholly professional curiosity, as if he had already decided that its expression of firm determination could be readjusted by cutting a minimum number of nerves and muscles.

The chant rose into the air. The torch-beams beat rhythmically across the darkness, striking Royal's face. He waited patiently for the clamour to subside. As Anne broke away from the crowd and ran forward he raised the chromium cane, ready to strike her. She stopped in front of him, smirking as she fluffed up her long skirt in a provocative gesture. Suddenly she turned the cassette player to full volume and thrust it into his face. A gabble of birth-cries filled the air.

"Royal…" the jeweller's widow shouted warningly. "Here's Wilder!"

Startled by the name, Royal flinched back, thrashing at the darkness with the chromium cane. The torch-beams swerved around him, the shadows of the overturned chairs swinging across the concrete roof. Expecting Wilder to lunge at him from behind, he stumbled across the awning and entangled himself in the dog's lead.

He heard laughter behind him. Controlling himself with an effort, he turned to face Pangbourne again. But the gynaecologist was walking away, looking back at him without hostility. He waved to Royal with a quick movement of his hand, as if flicking a dart at him, dismissing him for ever. The torches swung away from Royal, and everyone returned to the more serious business of tormenting the two guests.

Royal watched from the darkness as they argued over the prisoners. The confrontation with Pangbourne was over-or, more exactly, had never taken place. A simple ruse had unnnerved him, leaving him with the uncertainty of whether or not he really feared Wilder. He had been humiliated, but in a sense this was only just. The gynaecologist was the man for their hour. No zoo would survive for long with Pangbourne as its keeper, but he would provide a node of violence and cruelty that would keep alive in others the will to survive.

Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening. Holding to the alsatian, Royal let the dog drag him away towards the safety of the darkness near the sculpture-garden. The white forms of the birds were massed together on every ledge and parapet. Royal listened to the whimpering dogs. He had no means now of feeding them. The glass doors of the penthouse reflected the swerving birds, like the casements of a secret pavilion. He would close down his apartment, block the staircase and retreat to the penthouse, perhaps taking Mrs Wilder with him as his servant. Here he would preside over the high-rise, taking up his last tenancy in the sky.

He unlocked the gate of the sculpture-garden and moved through the darkness among the statues, releasing the dogs. One by one they scrambled away, until only Royal and the birds were left.

A Happy Arrangement

An uncertain scene, Robert Laing decided. He could no longer trust his senses. A curious light, grey and humid but at the same time marbled by a faint interior luminosity, hung over the apartment. As he stood among the garbage-sacks in the kitchen, trying to coax a few drops of water from the tap, he peered over his shoulder at the dull fog that stretched like a curtain across the sitting-room, almost an extension of his own mind. Not for the first time he was unsure what time of day it was. How long had he been up? Laing vaguely remembered sleeping on the tartan rug that lay on the kitchen floor, his head pillowed on a garbage-sack between the table legs. He had been wandering about the bedroom where his sister Alice lay asleep, but whether he had woken five minutes ago or the previous day Laing had no means of telling.

He shook his watch, picking at the fractured dial with a grimy finger-nail. The watch had stopped during a scuffle in the 25th floor lobby several days earlier. Although he had forgotten the exact moment, the hands of this broken watch contained the one point of finite time left to him, like a fossil cast on to a beach, crystallizing -for ever a brief sequence of events within a vanished ocean. However, it barely mattered now what time it was-anything rather than night, when it was too terrifying to do more than shelter in the apartment, crouching behind his dilapidated barricade.

Laing turned the cold water tap on and off, listening to the faintly changing tone. At rare intervals, perhaps for a single minute during the day, a green, algae-stained liquid flowed from the tap. These small columns of water, moving up and down the huge system of pipes that ran throughout the building, announced their arrivals and departures with faint changes of note. Listening to this remote and complex music had sharpened Laing's ears, a sensitivity that extended to almost any kind of sound within the building. By contrast his sight, dulled by being used chiefly at night, presented him with an increasingly opaque world.

Little movement took place within the high-rise. As Laing often reminded himself, almost everything that could happen had already taken place. He left the kitchen and squeezed himself into the narrow niche between the front door and the barricade. He placed his right ear to the sounding panel of the wooden door. From the minute reverberations he could tell instantly if a marauder was moving through the abandoned apartments nearby. During the brief period each afternoon when he and Steele emerged from their apartments-a token remembrance of that time when people had actually left the building-they would take turns standing with their hands pressed against the metal walls of an elevator shaft, feeling the vibrations transmitted to their bodies, picking up a sudden movement fifteen floors above or below. Crouched on the staircase with their fingers on the metal rails, they listened to the secret murmurs of the building, the distant spasms of violence that communicated themselves like bursts of radiation from another universe. The high-rise quivered with these tremors, sinister trickles of sound as a wounded tenant crawled up a stairway, a trap closed around a wild dog, an unwary prey went down before a club.

Today, however, befitting this timeless zone with its uncertain light, there was no sound at all. Laing returned to the kitchen and listened to the water-pipes, part of a huge acoustic system operated by thousands of stops, this dying musical instrument they had once all played together. But everything was quiet. The residents of the high-rise remained where they were, hiding behind the barricades in their apartments, conserving what was left of their sanity and preparing themselves for the night. By now what violence there was had become totally stylized, spasms of cold and random aggression. In a sense life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside-there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.

Still uncertain how long he had been awake, or what he had been doing half an hour earlier, Laing sat down among the empty bottles and refuse on the kitchen floor. He gazed up at the derelict washing-machine and refrigerator, now only used as garbage-bins. He found it hard to remember what their original function had been. To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this-sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

Squatting beside his dried-up water-hole like a desert nomad with all the time in the world, Laing waited patiently for the taps to flow. He picked at the dirt on the backs of his hands. Despite his tramp-like appearance he dismissed the notion of using the water to wash. The high-rise stank. None of the lavatories or garbage-disposal chutes were working, and a faint spray of urine hung over the face of the building, drifting across the tiers of balconies. Overlaying this characteristic odour, however, was a far more ambiguous smell, putrid and sweet, that tended to hover around empty apartments, and which Laing chose not to investigate too closely.

For all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise. Now that so many of the residents were out of the way he felt able to relax, more in charge of himself and ready to move forward and explore his life. How and where exactly, he had not yet decided.

His real concern was with his sister. Alice had fallen ill with a non-specific malaise, and spent her time lying on the mattress in Laing's bedroom or wandering half-naked around the apartment, her body shuddering like an oversensitive seismograph at imperceptible tremors that shook the building. When Laing drummed on the waste-pipe below the sink, sending a hollow drone through the empty pipe, Alice called out from the bedroom in her thin voice.

Laing went in to see her, picking his way among the piles of kindling he had made from chopped-up furniture. He enjoyed cutting up the chairs and tables.

Alice pointed to him with a stick-like hand. "The noise-you're signalling again to someone. Who is it now?"

"No one, Alice. Who do you think we know?"

"Those people on the lower floors. The ones you like."

Laing stood beside her, uncertain whether to sit on the mattress. His sister's face was as greasy as a wax lemon. Trying to focus on him, her tired eyes drifted about in her head like lost fish. It crossed his mind briefly that she might be dying-during the past two days they had eaten no more than a few fillets of canned smoked salmon, which he had found under the floorboards in an empty apartment. Ironically, the standard of cuisine in the apartment building had begun to rise during these days of its greatest decline, as more and more delicacies came to light.

However, food was a secondary matter, and Alice was very much alive in other ways. Laing enjoyed her wheedling criticisms of him, as he tried to satisfy her pointless whims. All this was a game, but he relished the role of over-dutiful servant dedicated to a waspish mistress, a devoted menial whose chief satisfaction was a total lack of appreciation and the endless recitation of his faults. In many ways, in fact, his relationship with Alice recapitulated that which his wife had unthinkingly tried to create, hitting by accident on the one possible source of harmony between them, and which Laing had rejected at the time. Within the high-rise, he reflected, his marriage would have succeeded triumphantly.

"I'm trying to find some water, Alice. You'd like a little tea?"

"The kettle smells."

"I'll wash it for you. You mustn't become dehydrated."

She nodded grudgingly. "What's been happening?"

"Nothing… It's already happened." A ripe but not unpleasant smell rose from Alice's body. "Everything is starting to get back to normal."

"What about Alan-you said you'd look for him."

"I'm afraid he's gone." Laing disliked these references to Alice's husband. They introduced a discordant note. "I found your apartment but it's empty now."

Alice turned her head away, indicating that she had seen enough of her brother. Laing bent down and gathered together the kindling she had scattered on the floor beside the mattress. These dining-room chair-legs, well impregnated with glue and varnish, would burn briskly. Laing had looted the chairs from Adrian Talbot's apartment after the psychiatrist's disappearance. He was grateful for this reproduction Hepplewhite-the conventional tastes of the middle-floor residents had served them well. By contrast, those on the lower levels found themselves with a clutter of once-fashionable chromium tubing and undressed leather, useless for anything but sitting on.

All cooking was now done over fires which the residents lit for themselves on their balconies, or in the artificial fireplaces. Laing carried the sticks on to the balcony. As he squatted there he realized that he had nothing to cook. The secret cache of cans he had long ago been obliged to surrender to the orthodontic surgeon next door. In fact, Laing's position was secure thanks only to the morphine ampoules he had concealed.

Although Steele frightened him with his unpredictable cruelties, Laing had attached himself to him out of necessity. So many people had gone, or dropped out of the struggle altogether. Had they deserted the high-rise for the world outside? Laing was sure that they had not. In a sense he depended on the uncertainties of his relationship with the dentist, following his murderous swings like a condemned prisoner in love with a moody jailer. During the previous weeks Steele's behaviour had become frightening. The deliberately mindless assaults on anyone found alone or unprotected, the infantile smearing of blood on the walls of empty apartments-all these Laing watched uneasily. Since his wife's disappearance Steele had been as tautly strung as the huge crossbows which he constructed from piano wire and mounted in the lobbies and corridors, their vicious arrows fashioned from the shafts of golf-clubs. At the same time, however, Steele remained strangely calm, as if pursuing some unknown quest.

Steele slept in the afternoon, giving Laing a chance to prospect for water. As he picked up the kettle he heard Alice call out to him, but when he returned to her she had already forgotten what she wanted.

She held out her hands to him. Usually Laing would have rubbed them for her, trying to kindle a little warmth in them, but out of some kind of peculiar loyalty to the dentist he made no effort to help Alice. This petty show of callousness, his declining personal hygiene, and even his deliberate neglect of his health, were elements in a system he made no attempt to change. For weeks all he had been able to think about were the next raid, the next apartment to be ransacked, the next tenant to be beaten up. He enjoyed watching Steele at work, obsessed with these expressions of mindless violence. Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last.

Laing waited for Alice to subside into half-consciousness. Looking after his sister was taking up more of his energy than he could afford. If she was dying there was little he could do, apart from giving her a terminal gram of morphine and hiding her body before Steele could mutilate it. Dressing up corpses and setting them in grotesque tableaux was a favourite pastime of the dentist's. His imagination, repressed by all the years of reconstructing his patients' mouths, came alive particularly when he was playing with the dead. The previous day Laing had blundered into an apartment and found him painting a bizarre cosmetic mask on the face of a dead account-executive, dressing the body like an overblown drag-queen in a voluminous silk nightdress. Given time, and a continuing supply of subjects, the dentist would repopu-late the entire high-rise.

Carrying the kettle, Laing let himself out of the apartment. The same dim light, pearled by a faint interior glow, filled the corridor and elevator lobby, a miasma secreted by the high-rise itself, distillation of all its dead concrete. The walls were spattered with blood, overlaying the aerosolled graffiti like the tachist explosions in the paintings that filled the top-floor apartments. Broken furniture and unravelled recording tape lay among the garbage-sacks piled against the walls.

Laing's feet crackled among the polaroid negatives scattered about the corridor floor, each recording a long-forgotten act of violence. As he paused, wary of attracting the attention of a watching predator, the staircase doors opened and a man in a flying-jacket and fleece-lined boots entered the lobby.

Watching Paul Crosland stride purposefully across the debris-strewn carpet, Laing realized that the television announcer had just returned, as he did every day, from reading the lunch-time news bulletin at the television station. Crosland was the only person to leave the high-rise, maintaining a last tenuous link with the outside world. Even Steele side-stepped him discreetly. A few people still watched him read the news on their battery-powered sets, crouching among the garbage-sacks behind their barricades, perhaps still hoping that even now Crosland might suddenly depart from his set text and blurt out to the world at large what was happening within the high-rise.

Inside the staircase Laing had set up a dog trap, using a tropical mosquito-net he had lifted from an anthropologist's apartment three floors above. A plague of dogs had descended the building from their breeding grounds on the upper floors. Laing had no hopes of catching the larger dogs in the spring-loaded contraption, but a dachshund or pekinese might become entangled in the nylon mesh.

The staircase was unguarded. Taking a chance, Laing made his way down the steps to the floor below. The lobby was blocked by a barricade of furniture, and he turned into the corridor that served the ten apartments in the northern wing of the building.

Three doors along, he entered an abandoned apartment. The rooms were empty, the furniture and fittings long since stripped away. In the kitchen Laing tried the taps. With his sheath-knife he cut the hoses of the washing-machine and dishwasher, collecting a cupful of metallic water. In the bathroom the naked body of an elderly tax-specialist lay on the tiled floor. Without thinking, Laing stepped over him. He wandered around the apartment, picking up an empty whisky decanter on the floor. A faint odour of malt whisky clung to it, an almost intoxicating nostalgia.

Laing moved to the next apartment, also abandoned and gutted. In a bedroom he noticed that the carpet covered a small circular depression. Suspecting a secret food cache, he rolled back the carpet, and found that a manhole had been drilled through the wooden floorboards and concrete deck to the apartment below.

After sealing the door, Laing lay down on the floor and peered into the room beneath. A circular glass table, by a miracle still intact, reflected his blood-spattered shirt and bearded face, staring up from what seemed to be the bottom of a deep well. Beside the table were two overturned armchairs. The balcony doors were closed, and curtains hung on either side of the windows. Looking down at this placid scene, Laing felt that he had accidentally been given a glimpse into a parallel world, where the laws of the high-rise were suspended, a magical domain where these huge buildings were furnished and decorated but never occupied.

On an impulse, Laing eased his thin legs through the manhole. He sat on the ledge and swung himself down into the room below. Standing on the glass table, he surveyed the apartment. Hard experience told him that he was not alone-somewhere a miniature bell was ringing. A faint scratching came from the bedroom, as if a small animal was trying to escape from a paper sack.

Laing pushed back the bedroom door. A red-haired woman in her mid-thirties lay fully dressed on the bed, playing with a persian cat. The creature wore a velvet collar and bell, and its lead was attached to the woman's bloodied wrist. The cat vigorously licked at the bloodstains on its coat, and then seized the woman's wrist and gnawed at the thin flesh, trying to reopen a wound.

The woman, whom Laing vaguely recognized as Eleanor Powell, made no effort to stop the cat from dining off her flesh. Her serious face, with its blue cyanosed hue, was inclined over the cat like that of a tolerant parent watching a child at play.

Her left hand lay across the silk bedspread, touching a pencil and reporter's note-pad. Facing her, at the foot of the bed, were four television sets. They were tuned to different stations, but three of the screens were blank. On the fourth, a battery-powered set, the out-of-focus picture of a horse-race was being projected soundlessly.

Uninterested in her reviewing, Eleanor teased her bloodied wrist into the cat's mouth. The creature was ravenous, tearing excitedly at the flesh around the knuckle. Laing tried to pull the cat away, but Eleanor jerked at the lead, urging it back on to her wound.

"I'm keeping her alive," she told Laing reprovingly. The cat's attentions brought a serene smile to her face. She raised her left hand. "Doctor, you may suckle my other wrist… Poor man, you look thin enough."

Laing listened to the sounds of the cat's teeth. The apartment was silent, and the noise of his own excited breathing was magnified to an uncanny extent. Would he soon be the last person alive in the high-rise? He thought of himself in this enormous building, free to roam its floors and concrete galleries, to climb its silent elevator shafts, to sit by himself in turn on every one of its thousand balconies. This dream, longed for since his arrival at the high-rise, suddenly unnerved him, almost as if, at last alone here, he had heard footsteps in the next room and come face to face with himself.

He turned up the volume of the television set. A racetrack commentator's voice emerged from the speaker, a gabble of names that sounded like a demented inventory, a list of unrelated objects being recruited to repopulate the high-rise in an emergency transfusion of identity.

"What-? Where's the programme?" Eleanor raised her head, peering disjointedly at the television set. Her left hand scrabbled around for the dictation pad and pencil. "What's he saying?"

Laing slipped his arms under her. He intended to carry her, but her thin body was surprisingly heavy. He was weaker than he had thought. "Can you walk? I'll come back later for the set."

She shrugged vaguely, swaying against Laing like a drunk in a bar accepting a dubious proposition from an old acquaintance. Sitting beside him on the edge of the bed, she leaned an arm on his shoulder, inspecting him with a shrewd eye. She tapped Laing aggressively on the arm. "All right. First thing, though, find some batteries."

"Of course." Her show of wilfulness was pleasantly encouraging. As she watched from the bed he pulled a suitcase from the wardrobe and began to fill it with her clothes.

So Laing took Eleanor Powell and her portable television set back to his apartment. He arranged her on a mattress in the living-room, and spent his days hunting the abandoned apartments for food, water and batteries. The reappearance of television in his life convinced Laing that everything in the high-rise was becoming normal again. When Steele moved on to the richer pastures above, Laing declined his offer to join him. Already Laing had decided to separate himself and his two women from everyone else. He needed to be alone with Alice and Eleanor, to be as aggressive and self-reliant, as passive and submissive as he wished. He had little idea at this early stage of what role he would play with these two women, but whatever he chose he would have to play out within his own walls.

Laing knew that he was far happier now than ever before, despite all the hazards of his life, the likelihood that he would die at any time from hunger or assault. He was satisfied by his self-reliance, his ability to cope with the tasks of survival-foraging, keeping his wits about him, guarding his two women from any marauder who might want to use them for similar purposes. Above all, he was pleased with his good sense in giving rein to those impulses that involved him with Eleanor and his sister, perversities created by the limitless possibilities of the high-rise.

The Lakeside Pavilion

As if nervous of disturbing the interior of the apartment building, the morning sun explored the half-shuttered skylight of the 40th-floor stairwell, slipped between the broken panes and fell obliquely down the steps. Shivering in the cold air five floors below, Richard Wilder watched the sunlight approach him. He sat on the steps, leaning against a dining-room table which formed part of a massive barricade blocking the staircase. After crouching here all night, Wilder was frozen. The higher up the building he moved, the colder it became, and at times he had been tempted to retreat to the floors below. He looked down at the animal crouching beside him-a black poodle, he guessed it had once been-envying its shaggy coat. His own body was almost naked, and he rubbed at the lipstick smeared across his chest and shoulders, trying to insulate himself with this sweet grease.

The dog's eyes were fixed on the landing above. Its ears pricked as it detected the sounds, inaudible to Wilder, of someone moving behind the barricade. During their ten days together the two had formed a successful hunting team, and Wilder was reluctant to urge the dog to attack before it was ready.

The threadbare remains of Wilder's trousers, cut away at the knees, were stained with blood and wine. A ragged beard covered his heavy face, partly concealing an open wound on his jaw. He looked derelict and exhausted, but in fact his body was as strongly muscled as ever. His broad chest was covered with a hatchwork of painted lines, a vivid display that spread across his shoulders and back. At intervals he inspected the design, which he had painted the previous afternoon with a lipstick he had found in an abandoned apartment. What had begun as a drink-fuddled game had soon taken on a serious ritual character. The markings, apart from frightening the few other people he might come across, gave him a potent sense of identity. As well, they celebrated his long and now virtually successful ascent of the high-rise. Determined to look his best when he finally stepped on to the roof, Wilder licked his scarred fingers, massaging himself with one hand and freshening up his design with the other.

He held the dog's leash in a strong grip and watched the landing ten steps above him. The sun, continuing its laboured descent of the stairwell, at last reached him and began to warm his skin. Wilder looked up at the skylight sixty feet above his head. The rectangle of white sky became more and more unreal as it drew closer, like the artificial ceiling of a film set.

The dog quivered, edging its paws forwards. Only a few yards from them, someone was straightening part of the barricade. Wilder waited patiently, moving the dog up one step. For all the savage-like ferocity of his appearance, Wilder's behaviour was a model of restraint. Having come this far, he had no intention of being caught unawares. He peered through a crack in the dining-table. Behind the barricade someone pulled back a small mahogany writing-desk that served as a concealed door. Through this gap appeared an almost bald woman of about seventy. Her tough face peered into the stairwell. After a wary pause, she stepped through the gap to the landing rail, a champagne bucket in one hand. She was dressed in the remnants of an expensive evening gown, which exposed the mottled white skin of her muscular arms and shoulders.

Wilder watched her with respect. He had tangled with these crones more than once, and was well aware that they were capable of a surprising turn of speed. Without moving, he waited as she leaned over the landing rail and emptied the slops from the champagne bucket. The cold grease spattered Wilder and the dog, but neither made any response. Wilder carefully wiped the cinecamera lying on the step beside him. Its lenses had been fractured during the skirmishes and assaults that had brought him to the roof of the high-rise, but the camera's role was now wholly emblematic. He felt the same identification with the camera that he did with the dog. However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him-they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot.

Thinking of this supper to come-his first decent meal for weeks-Wilder watched the old woman muttering about. He wiped his beard, and cautiously raised himself from his knees. He pulled the dog's lead, a length of electric cord, and hissed between his broken teeth.

As if on cue, the dog whimpered. It stood up, shivering, and climbed two steps. In full view of the old woman it crouched down and began to whine plaintively. The old woman retreated swiftly behind her barricade. Within seconds a heavy carving-knife materialized in her hand. Her canny eyes peered down at the dog cringing on the steps below her. As it rolled on to its side and exposed its loins her eyes were riveted on its fleshy stomach and shoulders.

As the dog whimpered again, Wilder watched from behind the dining-table. This moment never failed to amuse him. In fact, the higher he climbed the building, the greater its potential for humour. He still held the lead, which trailed behind the dog down the steps, but was careful to leave it loose. The old woman, unable to take her eyes off the dog, stepped through the gap in the barricade. She whistled through the gap in her false teeth, and beckoned the dog forward.

"Poor pet. You're lost, aren't you, beauty? Come on, up here…"

Barely able to contain his glee at the spectacle of this bald-headed crone fawning with exaggerated pathos over the dog, Wilder leaned against the table, laughing soundlessly to himself. At any moment she would be in for a shock, his heavy boot on her neck.

Behind the barricade a second figure appeared. A young woman of about thirty, probably the daughter, peered over the old woman's shoulder. Her suede jacket was unbuttoned to reveal a pair of grimy breasts, but her hair was elaborately wound into a mass of rollers, as if she were preparing parts of her body for some formal gala to which the rest of herself had not been invited.

The two women stared down at the dog, their faces expressionless. As the daughter waited with the carving-knife the mother edged down the steps. Muttering reassuringly, she patted the poodle on the head and bent down to take the lead.

As her strong fingers closed around the cord Wilder leapt forward. The dog sprang to life, hurled itself up the steps and sank its teeth into the old woman's arm. With surprising agility, she darted through the gap in the barricade, the dog clamped to her arm. Barely in time, Wilder followed her, kicking back the writing-desk before the daughter could lock it into place. He dragged the poodle from the old woman's bloodied arm, seized her by the neck and flung her sideways across a stack of cardboard cartons. She lay there stunned, like a dishevelled duchess surprised to find herself drunk at a ball. As Wilder turned away, wrestling with the dog, the daughter ran towards him. She had thrown the carving-knife aside. In one hand she held her hair curlers, in the other a silver handbag pistol. Wilder sidestepped out of her way, knocked the pistol from her hand and clubbed her backwards across the barricade.

As the two women sat panting on the floor, Wilder looked down at the pistol at his feet, little more than a child's bright toy. He picked it up and began to inspect his new domain. He was standing in the entrance to the 35th-floor swimming-pool. The tank of foetid water, filled with debris, reflected the garbage-sacks heaped around the tiled verge. A small den had been built inside a stationary elevator in the lobby. Beside a burnt-out fire an elderly man-a former tax-consultant, Wilder seemed to recall-lay asleep, apparently unaware of the spasm of violence that had taken place. A chimney flue, fashioned from two lengths of balcony drainage pipe, exited over his head through the roof of the elevator.

Still holding the pistol, Wilder watched the two women. The mother sat among the cardboard cartons, matter-of-factly bandaging her arm with a strip torn from her silk dress. The daughter squatted on the floor by the barricade, rubbing the bruise on her mouth and patting the head of Wilder's poodle.

Wilder peered up the staircase to the 36th floor. The skirmish had excited him, and he was tempted to press on all the way to the roof. However, he had not eaten for more than a day, and the smell of animal fat hung in the air around the fire by the entrance to the den.

Wilder beckoned the young woman towards him. Her bland, rather bovine face was vaguely familiar. Had she once been the wife of a film-company executive? She climbed to her feet and walked up to him, staring with interest at the emblems painted across his chest and shoulders, and at his exposed genitals. Pocketing the pistol, Wilder pulled her towards the den. They stepped over the old man and entered the elevator. Curtains hung from the walls, and two mattresses covered the floor. Holding the young woman to him, an arm around her shoulders, Wilder sat down against the rear wall of the elevator. He gazed across the lobby at the yellow water of the swimming-pool. Several of the changing cubicles had been converted into small, single-tenant cabins, but they were all now abandoned. Two bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture.

Wilder helped himself to the last of the small cat that had been barbecued above the fire. His teeth pulled at the stringy meat, the still warm fat almost intoxicating him as he sucked at the skewer.

The young woman leaned affably against him, content to have Wilder's strong arm around her shoulders. The fresh smell of her body surprised him-the higher up the apartment building he moved the cleaner were the women. Wilder looked down at her unmarked face, as open and amiable as a domestic animal's. She seemed to have been totally untouched by events within the high-rise, as if waiting in some kind of insulated chamber for Wilder to appear. He tried to speak to her, but found himself grunting, unable to form the words with his broken teeth and scarred tongue.

Pleasantly high on the meat, he lay back comfortably against the young woman, playing with the silver handbag pistol. Without thinking, he opened the front of her suede jacket and loosened her breasts. He placed his hands over the small nipples and settled himself against her. He felt drowsy, murmuring to the young woman while she stroked the painted stripes on his chest and shoulders, her fingers moving endlessly across his skin as if writing a message to him.

Lying back in this comfortable lakeside pavilion Wilder rested during the early afternoon. The young woman sat beside him, her breasts against his face, nursing this huge, nearly naked man with his painted body and exposed loins. Her mother and father pottered about in the lobby. Now and then the old woman in her evening gown pulled a piece of furniture at random from the barricade and chopped it into kindling with the carving knife.

Wilder ignored them, conscious only of the young woman's body and the huge pillars that carried the apartment building upwards to the roof. Through the windows around the swimming-pool he could see the towers of the four high-rise blocks nearby, suspended like rectilinear clouds within the afternoon sky. The warmth within the elevator, which seemed to emanate from the young woman's breasts, had drained all will and energy from him. Her calm face gazed down at Wilder reassuringly. She had accepted him as she would any marauding hunter. First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

Rallying himself, Wilder sat up and put his boot into the poodle lying asleep on the mattress outside the elevator. The yelp of pain revived Wilder. He pushed the young woman away. He needed to sleep, but first he would move to a safer hiding-place, or the crone and her daughter would make short work of him.

Without looking back, he stood up and dragged the dog behind him. He slipped the silver pistol into the waistband of his trousers and checked the patterns on his chest and shoulders. Carrying the cine-camera, he climbed past the barricade and re-entered the staircase, leaving behind the quiet encampment and the young woman beside her yellow lake.

As he moved up the steps everything was silent. The staircase was carpeted, muffling the tread of his boots, and he was too distracted by the sounds of his own breathing to notice that the walls around him had been freshly painted, their white surfaces gleaming in the afternoon sunlight like the entrance to an abattoir.

Wilder climbed to the 37th floor, smelling the icy air moving across his naked body from the open sky. He could hear now, more clearly than ever before, the crying of gulls. When the dog began to whimper, reluctant to go any further, he turned it loose, and watched it disappear down the stairs.

The 37th floor was deserted, apartment doors open on the bright air. Too exhausted to think, he found an empty apartment, barricaded himself into the living-room and sank into a deep sleep on the floor.

The Blood Garden

By contrast, Anthony Royal, high on the open roof three floors above, had never been more awake. Ready at last to join the sea-birds, he stood at the windows of his peat-house, looking out over the open plazas of the development project towards the distant mouth of the river. Washed by the recent rain, the morning air was clear but frozen, and the river flowed from the city like a stream of ice. For two days Royal had eaten nothing, but far from exhausting him the absence of food had stimulated every nerve and muscle in his body. The shrieking of the gulls filled the air, and seemed to tear at the exposed tissues of his brain. They rose from the elevator heads and balustrades in a continuous fountain, soared into the air to form an expanding vortex and dived down again towards the sculpture-garden.

Royal was certain now that they were calling for him. He had been deserted by the dogs-as soon as he freed them they had disappeared into the stairways and corridors below-and only the white alsatian remained. It sat at Royal's feet by the open windows, mesmerized by the movement of the birds. Its wounds had healed now, and its thick arctic coat was white again. Royal missed the stains, as he did the bloody hand-prints that Mrs Wilder had washed from his jacket.

The little food Royal had taken with him before sealing himself into the penthouse he had given to the dog, but already he felt himself beyond hunger. For three days he had seen no one, and was glad to have cut himself off from his wife and neighbours. Looking up at the whirling cloud of gulls, he knew that they were the true residents of the high-rise. Without realizing it at the time, he had designed the sculpture-garden for them alone.

Royal shivered in the cold air. He wore his safari-jacket, and the thin linen gave him no protection against the wind moving across the concrete roof. In the over-lit air the white fabric was grey by comparison with Royal's chalk-like skin. Barely able to control himself, and uncertain whether the scars of his accident had begun to reopen themselves, he stepped on to the terrace and walked across the roof.

The gulls sidled around him, rolling their heads and wiping their beaks against the concrete. The surface was streaked with blood. For the first time Royal saw that the ledges and balustrades were covered with these bloody notches, the symbols of a mysterious calligraphy.

Voices sounded in the distance, a murmur of women. In the central section of the observation deck, beyond the sculpture-garden, a group of women residents had gathered for some kind of public discussion.

Unsettled by this intrusion into his private landscape, and its reminder that he was not yet alone in the apartment building, Royal retreated behind the rear wall of the sculpture-garden. The voices moved around him, talking away informally as if this were the latest of many similar visits. Perhaps he had been asleep during their previous excursions, or with the cooler weather they had decided to move their meeting place further along the roof to the shelter of his penthouse.

The vortex of birds was breaking up. As Royal returned to the penthouse the spiral had begun to disintegrate. The gulls dived away across the face of the building far below. Urging the alsatian ahead of him, Royal emerged from behind the rear wall of the sculpture-garden. Two of the women were standing inside the penthouse, one of them with a hand on the callisthenics machine. What startled Royal was their casual stance, as if they were about to move into a vacation villa they had recently rented.

Royal retreated behind an elevator head. After being alone with the birds and the white alsatian for so long the sight of these human intruders unsettled him. He pulled the dog against his legs, deciding to wait in the sculpture-garden until the visiting party had left.

He pushed back the rear door of the garden, and walked between the painted geometric forms. Dozens of the gulls surrounded him, crowded together on the tiled floor. They followed Royal expectantly, almost as if they had been waiting for him to bring something to them.

His feet slipped on the wet tiles. Looking down, he found a piece of gristle attached to his shoe. Pulling it away, he leaned against one of the concrete sculptures, a waist-high sphere that had been painted bright carmine.

When he drew his hand away it was wet with blood. As the birds strutted ahead, clearing an open space for him, he saw that the whole interior of the play-garden was drenched with blood. The tiled floor was slick with bright mucilage.

The alsatian snuffled greedily, wolfing down a shred of flesh lying by the edge of the paddling pool. Appalled, Royal stared at the blood-spattered tiles, at his bright hands, at the white bones picked clean by the birds.

It was late afternoon when Wilder woke. Cold air moved through the empty room, flicking at a newspaper on the floor. The apartment was without shadows. Wilder listened to the wind moving down the ventilation shafts. The screaming of the gulls had ended, as if the birds had gone away for ever. Wilder sat on the floor in a corner of the living-room, an apex of this untenanted cube. Feeling the pressure of his back against the wall, he could almost believe that he was the first and last occupant of this apartment building.

He climbed to his feet and walked across the floor to the balcony. Far below, he could see the thousands of cars in the parking-lots, but they were screened from him by a faint mist, part of the corroborative detail of a world other than his own.

Sucking at the traces of animal fat that clung to his fingers, Wilder entered the kitchen. The cupboards and refrigerator were empty. He thought of the young woman and her warm body in the elevator beside the pool, wondering whether to go back to her. He remembered her stroking his chest and shoulders, and could feel the pressure of her hands on his skin.

Still sucking his fingers, and thinking of himself abandoned in this huge building, Wilder stepped out of the apartment. The corridor was silent, the cold air stirring the tags of refuse on the floor. He carried the cine-camera in his left hand, but he was no longer certain what its function was, or why he had kept it with him for so long.

The silver pistol, by contrast, he recognized immediately. He held it in his right hand, pointing it playfully at the open doorways, and half-hoping that someone would come out to join him in his game. The top floors of the building had been partially invaded by the sky. He saw white clouds through an elevator shaft, framed in the skylight of the stairwell as he climbed to the 40th floor.

Feinting with the pistol, Wilder darted across the elevator lobby of the 40th floor. There were no barricades here, and a recent attempt had been made at housekeeping. The garbage-sacks had been removed, the barricades dismantled, the lobby furniture re-installed. Someone had scrubbed the walls, clearing away all traces of the graffiti, duty rosters and elevator embarkation times.

Behind him, a door closed in the wind, cutting off a shaft of light. Enjoying this game with himself in the empty building, and certain that someone would soon turn up to play with him, Wilder dropped to one knee and levelled the pistol at an imaginary assailant. He darted down the corridor, kicked back the door and burst into the apartment.

The apartment was the largest he had seen in the building, far more spacious than any others on the upper floors. Like the lobby and corridor, the rooms had been carefully cleaned, the carpets re-laid, the curtains hung around the high windows. On the polished dining-room table stood two silver candlesticks.

Impressed by this sight, Wilder wandered around the gleaming table. In some confused way he felt that he had already been here, many years before he came to this empty building. The high ceiling and masculine furniture reminded him of a house he had visited as a small child. He wandered around the refurnished rooms, almost expecting to find his childhood toys, a cot and playpen laid out for his arrival.

Between the bedrooms a private staircase led upwards to another chamber, and a small suite of rooms overlooking the roof. Excited by the mystery and challenge of this secret staircase, Wilder began to climb the steps. Licking the last of the fat from his fingers, he trumpeted happily to himself.

He was half-way up the staircase, climbing towards the open air, when something blocked his path. The gaunt figure of a tall, white-haired man had stepped forward from the shadows. Far older than Wilder, his hair dishevelled by the wind, he stood at the head of the staircase, looking down silently at the intruder below him. His face was concealed by the harsh light, but the scars on the bony points of his forehead stood out clearly, like the fresh hand-stains that marked his white jacket.

Dimly recognizing this wild old man of the observation roof, Wilder stopped on the stairs. He was unsure whether Royal had come to play with him or to reprimand him. From Royal's nervous posture, and his destitute appearance, Wilder guessed that he had been hiding somewhere, but not as part of a game.

Hoping nonetheless to enlist him, Wilder waved his pistol playfully at Royal. To his surprise the architect flinched back, as if pretending to be frightened. As Wilder climbed towards him he raised the chromium cane in his hand and hurled it down the staircase.

The metal rod struck the hand-rail and whipped across Wilder's left arm. Stung by the pain of the blow, Wilder dropped the cine-camera. His arm was numb, and for a moment he felt helpless, like an abused child. As the architect advanced down the steps towards him, Wilder raised the silver pistol and shot him through the chest.

When the brief explosion had faded across the cold air, Wilder climbed the last of the steps. The architect's body lay awkwardly across the staircase, as if he were pretending to be dead. His scarred face, drained of all blood, was turned away from Wilder. He was still alive, staring through the open windows at the last of the birds that the explosion had driven into the air.

Confused by this game, and its unexpected turns, Wilder stepped over him. The cine-camera lay at the bottom of the staircase, but he decided to leave it there. Rubbing his injured arm, he threw away the pistol that had jarred his hand and stepped through the french windows.

Twenty yards away, children were playing in the sculpture-garden. The doors, chained for so long to exclude them, were now wide open, and Wilder could see the geometric forms of the play-sculptures, their vivid colours standing out against the white walls. Everything had been freshly painted, and the roof was vibrant with light.

Wilder waved to the children, but none of them saw him. Their presence revived him, and he felt a surge of triumph at having climbed all the way to the roof to find them. The strange, scarred man in the blood-printed jacket lying on the steps behind him had not understood his game.

One of the children, an infant boy of two, was naked, running in and out of the sculptures. Quickly Wilder loosened his ragged trousers and let them fall to his ankles. Stumbling a little, as if he was forgetting how to use his legs, he ran forward naked to join his friends.

In the centre of the sculpture-garden, beside the empty paddling pool, a woman was lighting a large fire from pieces of furniture. Her strong hands adjusted a heavy spit assembled from the chromium tubing of a large callisthenics device. She squatted beside the fire, stacking the chair-legs as the children played together.

Wilder walked forward, shyly hoping that the woman would notice the patterns painted across his chest. As he waited for the children to ask him to play with them he saw that a second woman was standing ten feet away to his left. She was wearing an ankle-length dress and a long gingham apron, her hair drawn back off her severe face and tied in a knot behind her neck.

Wilder stopped among the statues, embarrassed that no one had noticed him. Two more women, dressed in the same formal way, had appeared by the gate. Others were stepping forward among the sculptures, surrounding Wilder in a loose circle. They seemed to belong to another century and another landscape, except for their sunglasses, whose dark shades stood out against the blood-notched concrete of the roof-terrace.

Wilder waited for them to speak to him. He was glad to be naked and show off his body with its painted patterns. At last the woman kneeling by the fire looked over her shoulder at him. Despite her change of dress he recognized her as his wife Helen. He was about to run forward to her, but her matter-of-fact gaze, her unimpressed appraisal of his heavy loins, made him stop.

By now he was aware that he knew all the women around him. Dimly he recognized Charlotte Melville, a scarf around her bruised throat, watching him without hostility. Standing next to Jane Sheridan was Royal's young wife, now a governess supervising the smallest children. He recognized the jeweller's widow in her long fur coat, her face made up like his own body with red paint. Looking over his shoulder, if only to confirm that his escape was blocked, he could see the stately figure of the children's-story writer seated in the open window of the penthouse like a queen in her pavilion. In a last moment of hope he thought that perhaps she would read him a story.

In front of him the children in the sculpture-garden were playing with bones.

The circle of women drew closer. The first flames lifted from the fire, the varnish of the antique chairs crackling swiftly. From behind their sunglasses the women were looking intently at Wilder, as if reminded that their hard work had given them a strong appetite. Together, each removed something from the deep pocket of her apron.

In their bloodied hands they carried knives with narrow blades. Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers.

Night Games

Dinner was about to be served. Sitting on his balcony on the 25th floor, Robert Laing stirred the bright embers of the fire he had lit from pages of a telephone directory. The flames illuminated the handsome shoulders and thorax of the alsatian roasting on its spit. Laing fanned the flames, hoping that Alice and Eleanor Powell, lying together in his sister's bed, would appreciate all he had done. He methodically basted the dark skin of the alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.

"One rule in life," he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right."

For the moment, at least, everything was highly satisfactory. The alsatian was almost cooked, and a large meal would do the women good. Both had become querulous recently as a result of the shortage of food, and had been too tired to appreciate Laing's skill and courage in capturing the dog, let alone the exhausting task of skinning and disembowelling this huge animal. They had even complained about its nervous whimpering as Laing turned the pages of an advanced cookery book he had found in a nearby apartment. Laing had debated for some time how best to cook the dog. From the extent of its shivering and whining, the problem had communicated itself to the alsatian, as if it was aware that it was one of the last animals in the high-rise and for that reason alone merited a major culinary effort.

The thought of the weeks of hunger to come momentarily unsettled Laing, and he fed more sheets of paper into the balcony fire. Perhaps there was game to be found on the lower levels, though Laing never ventured below the 20th floor. The stench from the swimming-pool on the 10th floor was too disturbing, and reached up every ventilation flue and elevator shaft. Laing had descended to the lower levels only once during the previous month, when he had briefly played Samaritan to Anthony Royal.

Laing had found the dying architect while chopping firewood in the 25th-floor lobby. As he pulled an antique dressing-table from the disused barricade, Royal had fallen through the gap, almost knocking Laing to the floor. A small wound had opened Royal's chest, covering his white jacket with huge bloodstains in the outline of his hands, as if he had tried to identify himself with these imprints of his own death to come. He was clearly on his last legs, eyes unfocused, the bones of his forehead cutting through the over-stretched skin. Somehow he had managed to descend all the way from the 40th floor. Rambling continually, he stumbled down the staircase, partly supported by Laing, until they reached the loth floor. As they stepped on to the shopping mall the stench of rotting flesh hung over the deserted counters of the supermarket, and at first Laing assumed that a concealed meat-store had burst open and begun to putrefy. Appetite keening, he had been about to drop Royal and head off in search of food.

But Royal, eyes almost closed, one hand gripping Laing's shoulder, pointed towards the swimming-pool.

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like the tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust.

Disturbed less by the sight of these mutilated bodies-residents who had died of old age or disease and then been attacked by wild dogs, Laing assumed-than by the stench, Laing turned away. Royal, who had clung so fiercely to him during their descent of the building, no longer needed him, and dragged himself away along the line of changing cubicles. When Laing last saw him, he was moving to