Which, of course, she would be, since it had already been announced by one of the Seattle independent channels that “crusading Seattle Herald journalist Anne Jeffers” would be interviewed immediately after the execution.
If he hurried, he could finish the inspection of the building in plenty of time to catch the broadcast at the office. Picking up his pace, he completed his usual six laps in five minutes less than his normal time, and felt a sense of aerobic virtue flood through him as his heart pounded during the final two-block sprint home.
By the time he arrived at the construction site an hour and a half later, though, Glen’s feeling of well-being was fading. When he first began to feel an odd hollowness in the pit of his stomach as he gazed up at the skeleton of girders soaring above him, he attributed it to nothing more than excitement at the structure finally being topped out. But as he studied the network of beams, struts, and girders — and the open cage of the construction elevator that seemed to rise upward to nowhere — the hollowness in his belly congealed into a tight knot of pain, and he felt a clammy sheen of sweat break out over his whole body despite the cool of the morning.
Could he be coming down with some kind of bug?
But he’d felt fine just a couple of minutes earlier. Deciding to ignore the strange sensations in his body, he took a tour of the ground floor, talking rapidly to the contractor and the foreman as he inspected the building’s structural framework. Though his stomach lurched as they took the elevator to the fifth level, he focused his mind tightly on the job at hand, and managed to put down the slight wave of dizziness that broke over him when he neared the precipitous edge of the subflooring, unguarded by even the most vestigial of safety railings. “Shouldn’t there at least be warning tapes across here?” he asked the construction chief, trying not to let his voice betray the faint feelings of panic he was experiencing.
“Only gets in the crew’s way,” Jim Dover replied. “By the end of the first day, they’d all be torn out, and the whole street’d be littered with ’em.” The foreman eyed the architect uncertainly. “You okay, Glen? You look kinda green around the gills.”
“I’m okay,” Glen said quickly, but as they progressed up the next twenty floors, he suddenly realized what was happening to him.
Acrophobia.
But where had it come from? He’d never had trouble with heights before — he’d always loved the sensation of shooting up the sides of buildings in glass elevators, watching the ground drop away from him. But this morning, unaccountably, he found himself growing increasingly reluctant to get back into the elevator after each of the incremental inspections had been completed. He told himself it was nothing serious, that all he was feeling was the natural insecurity brought on by having nothing solid between him and the abyss below. He decided to ignore the fear growing inside him, determined that whatever it took, he would make it to the top of the building, where he himself would crack open the bottle of champagne Alan Cline had brought to celebrate the building’s topping out.
“Quite a view if you look straight down.” As George Simmons, the chief engineer on the project, spoke the words, Glen had to steel himself from automatically glancing down through the heavy grate that was all that separated him from a twenty-story plunge to the concrete floor of the shaft.
“You sure you’re okay?” Alan Cline asked as the elevator jerked to a stop and the contractor and foreman stepped off, leaving the two architects alone in the cage.
Up here, even the subflooring hadn’t been installed yet, and all there was to support them was a series of thick wooden planks laid in what looked to Glen like a very precarious manner across the huge I-beams of which the building was constructed. “You sure those are safe?” Ignoring Alan’s question, and struggling to control the terror that was now threatening to overwhelm him, he directed his question to Jim Dover.
Dover grinned. He was a ruddy-faced, six-foot-four-inch bear of a man who had worked his way up from a one-man odd-job operation to running one of Seattle’s biggest construction firms. “They’re fine, as long as they don’t collapse under your feet.” Then, seeing Glen’s face pale, his smile faded. “You look kind of sick, Glen.”
“I thought it was flu,” Glen replied. “But now it’s starting to feel a lot more like something else.” He forced a grin, trying to make light of his ballooning terror. “A high-rise architect with acrophobia — kind of like someone who’s scared of the water joining the navy, huh?”
“Want to go back down?” Dover offered. “Alan and I can finish the inspection.”
“I’ll be okay,” Glen insisted. He moved toward one of the planks that would carry him out into the open network of girders, but as he neared the edge of the small platform around the elevator shaft, panic rose up in him again. He reached out to clamp his fingers onto one of the building’s main supports. A terrible urge to stare down into the gaping void below gripped him, but he put it down, forcing himself to gaze straight outward, over the top of the building across the street and across Elliott Bay past West Seattle, toward Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Peninsula.
“Wait’ll you see it from the top,” Dover said, following Glen’s gaze with his own eyes. “Gonna be the best view in the city. Not so high that it flattens everything out like Columbia Center does, but high enough so you can see damn near the whole town. Well, come on — if we’re gonna do this, let’s get it over with.”
As Glen watched in growing terror, Jim Dover, followed by George Simmons and Alan Cline, set off along the planks. Dover moved swiftly, only steadying himself now and then by reaching out to one of the struts with one hand while he pointed out various features of the construction with the other. Glen, his stomach churning, his groin tingling, managed to follow only a few steps before he realized the acrophobia was going to win. Too terrified even to risk turning around, he gingerly crept backward until he regained the platform by the elevator. His knees trembling, both hands clutching the heavy mesh cage of the elevator, he struggled to control the paralyzing fear that was on the verge of overwhelming him. Slowly, taking one deep breath at a time, he got his breathing back to normal and felt a little strength come back into his muscles.
A few minutes later, when the rest of the group had completed the inspection of the twentieth level and returned to the elevator, Alan Cline gazed worriedly at his partner. “This is nuts, Glen,” he said, reading the terror in the other man’s face. “It’s only a building. It’s not worth scaring yourself to death over.”
“And my problem is only a stupid phobia.” Glen uttered the words through clenched teeth, then felt himself relax as the others surrounded him. “I’m not giving in to it, and the only way to get over it is to face it head on. Let’s go up to the top.” Standing to one side, he let the rest of the men precede him into the small cage, then stepped inside himself. Closing the mesh gate, he hit the up button, and instantly the metal contraption rattled to life.
As the cage ground upward, Glen felt the familiar terror surging inside him again.
He began to sweat once more, and then the worst part of the panic began: suddenly it felt as if metal bands were wrapped around his chest, and every second someone was screwing them tighter and tighter.
So tight, he could barely breathe.