MONOLITH Read Free

the darkened maw beyond. He looked up towards the bottom of the lift car and then down. From his vantage point he could see right to the bottom of the lift shaft twenty-four storeys below.
    Inside the shaft it smelled of oil and fresh concrete. He slipped a torch from his belt and shone it over the guide rails that ran down either side of the shaft. The metal glinted in the glow of the powerful beam and Bishop swept the light around in a wide arc aiming it at areas he needed to scrutinise.
    He muttered something to himself under his breath then stepped back and looked up in his companion’s direction.
    ‘It’s not the rail,’ Bishop proclaimed.
    ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Wilkinson replied, only his feet visible from where Bishop was standing.
    ‘It must be the sensor or one of the cables.’
    ‘Do you want me to check on top?’
    ‘Let me have a look at the sensor first.’
    There was a narrow ledge running around the inside of the shaft that was barely wide enough for a man to rest the whole of his shoe but Bishop seemed unintimidated by the lack of space or by how high up he was. As he stepped into the shaft he could hear the cables above and below the lift clanking softly in the breeze that was circulating within the vertical concrete corridor.
    ‘Switch the power off, Bob,’ Bishop shouted, his voice echoing inside the chamber.
    There was a drone and then silence.
    He moved further out onto the ledge.
     

FOUR
     
    Standing in the motionless lift car Robert Wilkinson could hear the grunting and muttering from his colleague below him in the shaft and he smiled thinly to himself as the litany of curses continued, floating up on the cool air inside the shaft.
    Wilkinson glanced out of the open doors towards the corridor that stretched away into the building itself. He tried to imagine what kind of person would be working or living in such sumptuous surroundings once the tower opened for business and residents. He earned a decent living but he knew he’d never come even remotely close to the kind of money that was earned by the workers who’d flock to these offices or the owners and renters who would inhabit the apartments above.
    Rich bastards.
    He smiled to himself. He couldn’t imagine any of them crawling around in a lift shaft at two in the morning. People like himself and Bishop were paid to take care of tasks like that.
    They had worked for the same contractors for the last six years and the two of them had become something approaching friends. Perhaps friendship was too strong a word to describe their working relationship. They spent their work hours together and occasionally they would eat a hurried breakfast or lunch together but they never socialised out of work. He didn’t even know that much about his companion he realised. Other than the fact that he was married with a teenage daughter and a son of eleven (and that he was a Leyton Orient supporter) Wilkinson knew little about his colleague’s background or how he spent his life when he wasn’t working and the exchange of knowledge had been similar. Wilkinson didn’t speak much about his small family of eight-year-old twin girls and he divulged even less about his partner who had presented him with them. The two men had exchanged stories about parenthood naturally and each knew the other’s views on most subjects but they had never visited each other’s homes or spent time together unless it had been to do with work.
    Wilkinson had lots of acquaintances like that. People he liked and got on with but who he wouldn’t consider as close friends. Other than his partner he confided in no one and he got the impression that Bishop was the same. Perhaps that was why they got on so well he reasoned. They were very similar in a lot of ways even if those ways were unspoken.
    ‘Anything?’ Wilkinson shouted, dropping to one knee and lowering his head towards the bottom of the lift.
    ‘I don’t get it,’ Bishop called back. ‘The sensor’s