December 15, 2025 • 26 mins
https://www.solgoodmedia.com - Listen to hundreds of audiobooks, thousands of short stories, and ambient sounds all ad free! "Mind Webs Daily" rekindles the charm of old time radio with a daily infusion of psychological and speculative tales. Each day offers a unique journey into the enigmatic and often eerie realms of the human mind, reminiscent of classic radio storytelling but with a contemporary flair. Perfect for daily listeners who appreciate a blend of nostalgia and modern narrative depth.
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Mind Way.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to a half hour of mindwebs short stories from
the world expectable. This is Michael Hanson. The mind web
(00:58):
story at this time is my William Sansom. The Vertical
Ladder copyright nineteen sixty from the stories of William Sandsum.
As he felt the first watery eggs of sweat moistening
the palms of his hands, as with every rung higher
his body seemed to weigh more heavily, this young man
(01:18):
flagg regretted in sudden desperation, but still in vain the
irresponsible events that had thrust him up into his present
precarious climb. Here he was isolated on a vertical iron ladder,
flat to the side of a gasometer, a huge swage tank,
and bound to climb higher and higher until he should
reach the vertigenous skyward summit. How could he ever have
(01:42):
wished the sun himself, how easy it had been to
laugh away his cautionary fears on the firm ground. Now
he would give the very hands that clung to the
ladder for his safe conduct, Solider. It had been a
strong spring day, abruptly as warm as midsummer. The sun
flooded the park streets with sudden heat, and Flag and
(02:03):
his friends had felt stifled in their thick winter clothes.
The green glare of the new leaves everywhere struck the
eye too fiercely, and the air seemed almost sticky from
the exhalations of buds and swelling resins. They had wandered
out from the park by a back gate into an
area of back streets. The houses there were small and old,
(02:23):
some of them already falling into disrepair, short streets, cobbles
and narrow pavements, knowly shops at tobacconist or a desolate
corner oil shop to color the gray. It was the
outcrop of some industrial undertaking beyond. At first these quiet,
almost deserted streets, it seemed more RESTful than the park.
But soon the dusty air of peeling plaster and pottering brick,
(02:45):
the dark windows, and the dry stone steps, the very
dryness altogether had proved more worrying than before, so that
when suddenly the houses ended and the ground opened to
reveal the yards of the disused gasworks, Flag and his
friends had welcomed the green of metals and milkwork that
grew among the scrap iron and broken brick. They walked
(03:06):
out into the wasteland with two girls and Flegg and
the other two boys, and stood presently before the old
gasometer itself. Among the ruined sheds. This was the only
erection still whole. It still predominated over the yards, towering
high above other buildings where hundreds of feet around. So
they threw bricks against its rusted sides. The rust flew
(03:30):
off in flakes, and the iron rang dully. Flegg, who
wished to excel in the eyes of the dark haired girl,
began throwing his bricks higher than the others. He felt
the girl's eyes follow his shoulders, and his shoulders broadened.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
But you talk, crawl the crowds it to fall.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Flegg turned around, scoffing, so that the girl had quickly
shouted again, laughing shrilly and pointing upward.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Crowding covering the doctor them good cross so the top
tight to the top.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Even then Flegg had a second chance. It occurred to
him instantly that he could laugh at off. But a
hysterical emphasis now possessed the girl's face. She was dancing
up and down and clapping her hands insistently in this
confused flag. So off we go, then, he had said,
and he had turned to the gasometer. It was not,
(04:23):
after all, so very high. It was hardly a full
sized gasometer. Its trellised iron top rail would have stood
a level with the roof coping of a five or
six story tenement. Until then, Flagg had only seen the
gasometer as a rough mass of iron. But now every
detail sprang into abrupt definition. He studied it intently, alertly,
(04:46):
considering its size and every feature of stability. The brown
rusted iron sheeting smeared here and there with red lead,
curious buckling that sometimes deflated its curved bulk as though
a vacuum were collapsing it from within. The ladders scaling
the sides flush with a sheeting, the grid of girders,
a complexity of struts the bolting. There were two ladders,
(05:08):
one of Jacob's letterer clamped fast to the side, another
that was more of a staircase, zig zagging up the
belly of the gessometer in easy gradients, and provided with
a safety rail. This must have been erected later as
a substitute for the Jacob's letter, which demanded an unnecessarily
stringent climb, and was now unused for some twenty feet
of its longer rungs had been worn away. However, there
(05:31):
was apparently some painting and progress, or a painter's wooden
ladder had been propped beneath, reaching to the undamaged bottom
of the vertical ladder. The ascent was thus serviceable Again.
Flegg looked quickly at the foot of the wooden ladder.
Was it well grounded? And then at the head farther
up was this secure? And then up to the top,
(05:52):
screwing his eyes to note any fault in the iron rungs,
reaching innumerably, indistinctly and dizzyingly to the summit form. The
two boys and his own girl kept up a chorus
of encouraging abuse. But the second girl had remained quiet throughout.
She was already frightened, sensing instantly that the guilt for
(06:13):
some tragedy was hers alone, although she had never in
fact opened her mouth. Suddenly the chorus rose shriller behind him.
They still kept up at din, still kept him up
to pitch, worrying at him viciously. So Flegg realized finally
that there was no alternative. He had to climb the
(06:34):
gasometer by the vertical ladder, and as soon as this
was finally settled, the doubt cleared from his mind. He
braced his shoulders and suddenly found himself really making light
of the job. After all, he thought, it isn't so high.
Why should I worry? Hundreds of men climbs such ladders,
as every day no one falls. The ladders are clamped
(06:54):
as safe as houses. He began to smile within himself
at his earlier perturbations. Added to this, the girl now
ran up to him and handed him her handkerchief. As
her black eyes frowned to smile at him. He saw
that her expression no longer held its vicious, laughing scorn,
but now instead had grown softer, with a look of
real encouragement and even admiration.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Solese, you tried tell you Rush, you really have to
dos how babble you?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
But this came too late. Flegg had accepted the climb.
It was fact, and already he felt something of an
exhilarating glow of glory. He took the handkerchief below the
girl a dramatic kiss, and started up the lowest rungs
of the latter had a run. The splinter's letter was
placed at a comfortable slant, but nevertheless, flag had only
(07:43):
climbed some ten feet, which might have corresponded to the
top of the first floor window. When he began to
slow up, he stopped running and gripped harder at the
rungs above, and placed his feet more firmly on the
unseen bars below. Although he had not yet measured his
distance from the ground, somehow he sensed he was already
unnaturally high. With nothing but air and a precarious skeleton
(08:06):
of wooden bars between him and the receding ground, he
felt independent of solid support. Yet according to his eyes,
which stared straight forward at the iron sheeting beyond, he
might have been standing on the lowest rungs by the ground.
The sensation of height infected him strongly. It had become
an urgent necessity to maintain a balance. Each muscle of
(08:29):
his body became unnaturally alert. This was not an unpleasant feeling.
He almost enjoyed a new athletic command of every precarious movement.
He climbed methodically until he reached the ladder head and
the first of the perpendicular iron rungs. Here, for a
moment flag had paused. He had rested his knees up
(08:51):
against the last three steps of the safely slatting wooden ladder.
He had grasped the two side supports of the rusted
iron that led though straightly upward. His knees then clung
to the motherly wood. His hands felt the iron cold
and gritty. The rust powdered off and smeared him with
its red dust. One large scrap flaked off and fell
(09:14):
on his face as he looked upward. He wanted to
brush this away from his eyes, but the impulse was,
to his surprise, much less powerful than the vice like
will that clutched his hands to the iron support. His
hands were made firmly gripping the iron, He had to
shake off the rust flake with a jerk of his head.
Even then, this sharp movement nearly unbalanced him, and his
(09:36):
stomach gulped coldly with a sudden shock. He settled his
knees more firmly against the wood, though he forced himself
to laugh at his sudden feet, so that in some
measure his poise did really return. Nevertheless, he did not
alter the awkward knock knee position of his legs. Cling
for safety. With all this he had scarcely paused. Now
(09:57):
he pulled at the stanchions of the iron ladder. They
were firm, as if they had been driven into rock.
He looked up, following the dizzying rise of the rungs
to the skyline. From this ankle, flat against the iron sheeting,
the gasometer appeared higher than before. The blue sky seemed
to descend and almost touch it. The redness of the
(10:18):
rust dissolved into a deepening gray shadow. The distant curved
summit loomed over, black and high. Although it was immensely stable,
as seen in rounded perspective from a few yards away,
there against the side, it appeared top heavy, so that
this huge segment of sheet iron seemed to have lost
(10:39):
the support of its invisible complement behind, the support that
was now unseen and therefore unfelt. And flag imagined despite himself,
that the entire erection had become unsteady, that quite possibly
the gasometer might suddenly blow over like a gigantic, top
heavy sail. He lowered his eyes quickly and flitted on
(11:00):
the hands before him. He began to climb. He looked down.
His friends appeared shockingly small. Their bodies had disappeared, and
he saw only their upturned faces. He wanted to wave
to demonstrate in some way a carefree attitude. But then
instantly he felt frustrated as his hands refused to unlock
(11:21):
their grip. He turned to the rungs again, with a
smile dying on his lips. He swallowed uneasily and continued
to tread slowly upward, hand after hand, foot after foot.
He had climbed ten rungs of the iron letter when
his hands first began to feel moist. When suddenly, as
though a catastrophe had overtaken him, not gradually, but in
(11:44):
one overpowering second, he realized that he was afraid. Incontrovertibly,
he could cover it no longer. He admitted it all
over his body. His hands gripped with pitiable eagerness, there
were now alert to a point of shivering, as though
the nerves inside them had been forced taut for so
long that now they had burst beyond their strained tegument.
(12:07):
His feet no longer trod firmly on the rungs beneath
the first, stepped for their place timorously, and then glued
themselves to the iron. In this way, his body lost
most of its poise. These nerves and muscles in his
two legs and two arms seemed to work independently, no
longer integrated with the rhythm of his body, but moving
with a dangerous, unwilled jerk of crippled limbs. His body
(12:31):
hung slack away from the ladder, with nothing beneath it
but a thirty foot drop to the ground. Only his
hands and feet were fed with the security of an attachment.
Most of him lay off the ladder, hanging in space.
His arms revolted at the strain of their familiar angle,
as though they were flies feet, denying all natural laws.
(12:53):
For the first time, as the fear took hold of him,
he felt that what he had attempted was impossible. He
could never achieve the top, if at this height of
only thirty feet, as if it were three stories of
a building. He felt afraid. What would he feel at
sixty feet? Yet he trod heavily up. He was afraid,
(13:15):
but not desperate. He dreaded each stop. It forced himself
to believe that at some time he would be over.
It could not take long. A memory crossed his mind.
It occurred to him vividly, then flashed away, for his
eyes and mind were continually concentrated on the rusted iron
bars and the white knuckles of his hands, but for
(13:37):
an instant he remembered waking up long ago in the
nursery and seeing that the windows were light, as if
they reflected a coldness of moonlight. Only they were not
so much lit by light as by a sensation of space.
He had crawled out of bed and climbed on to
a chair that stood beneath the window. It was as
(13:58):
he had thought outside there was space, nothing else, a
limited area of space. Yet this was not unnatural, for
soon his logical eyes had supplied for what had at
first appeared an impossible infinity the later image of a
perfectly reasonable flood, A vast plain of still water. As
(14:19):
far as his eyes could see. It lapped silently at
the size of the house, and in the light of
an unseen moon, winked and washed darkly, concealing great beasts
of mystery beneath its black, calm surface. This water attracted him.
He wished to jump into it from the window and
immerse himself in it, and allow his head to sink
(14:39):
slowly under. However, he was perched up too high. He
felt alone at the window, infinitely high, so that the
flood seemed to lie in miniature at a great distance below.
As later in life, when he was ill, it seen
the objects of his bed room grow small and infinitely
remote in the fevered reflection behind his eyes. Isolated at
(15:01):
the little window, he had been frightened by the emptiness
surrounding him only the sky, in the water, in the
marooned stone wall of the house. He had been terrified,
yet drawn down by dread and desire. Then a battle
ship had sailed by. He had wakened up, saved by
the appearance of the battle ship, And now on the ladder,
(15:25):
he had a sudden hope that something as large and
stable would intervene again to help him. But ten rungs
farther up, he began to sweat more violently than ever.
Another flake of rust fell on his forehead, this time
it stuck in the wetness. He felt physically exhausted. Fear
was draining his strength and the precarious position of his body.
(15:49):
Each stressed muscle ached, his body weighed more heavily at
each step upward. It sagged beneath his arms like a
leaden sack. His legs no longer provided their adequate support.
It seemed as though they needed every pull of their
muscles to force themselves as independent limbs. Close to the ladder,
(16:12):
the wind blew faster. It dragged now at his coat,
It blew its space about him. It echoed silently, a
lonesome spaciousness.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Don't look it down, don't look down down.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
The blood whispered in his temples. Three quarters up the
gasometer and fifty feet from the ground, flag grew desperate.
Every other consideration suddenly left him. He wanted only to
reach ground as quickly as possible, only that nothing else mattered.
(16:48):
He stopped climbing and clung to the ladder, panting very slowly,
lowering his eyes carefully so that he could raise them
instantly if he saw too much. He looked down the rung,
and another passed his arm, fit passed his waist, and
focused them on the ground beneath. He looked quickly up again.
(17:11):
He pressed himself to the latter. Tears started in his eyes.
For a moment they reeled red with giddiness. He closed them,
shutting out everything. Then instantly he opened them, afraid that
something might happen. He must watch his hands, watch the byes,
watch the rusted iron sheeting itself. No movement should escape him.
The struts might come creaking loose, the whole edifice might
(17:32):
sway over. Although a fading reason told him that the
gasometer had remained firm for years and was still as
steady as a cliff, his horrified senses suspected that this
was the one moment in the building's life when a
wind would blow there was too strong for it, and
some defective struck would snap, and the whole edifice would
heel over and crash to the ground. This image became
(17:55):
so clear he could see the sheets of iron buckling
and folding like cloth as the huge wight sank to
the earth. The ground had recedd horribly. The drop now
appeared terrifying out of all proportioned of this height he
had reached. From the ground, such a height would have
appeared unnoteworthy, but now from here the distance seemed to
(18:15):
have doubled. Each object familiar to his everyday eyes, his friends,
the lamp posts, the brick wall, occur, a drain, All
these had grown infinitely small. His senses demanded that these
objects should be of a certain accustomed size. Alternately, the
world of chimneys and attic windows and roof coping would
grow unpleasantly giant as his pavement red eyes approached. Even now,
(18:39):
the iron sheeting that stretched to either side, and above
and below seemed to have grown. He was lost among
such huge, smooth dimensions, grown smaller himself and cling now
like a child lost on some monstrous desert of red dust.
These unfamiliarities shock his nerves more than the danger of falling.
(19:03):
The sense of isolation was overpowering. All things were suddenly alien,
yet exposed on the iron spaces. With the unending winds
blowing around him. Among such free things, he felt shut in,
trembling and panting so that he stifled himself with the
shortness of his own breath. He took the first step downward.
(19:27):
A commotion began below. A confusion of cries came drifting
up to him. Above all he could hear the single
voice of the girl, who had so far kept quiet.
Flegg thinking that these cries were to warn him of
some new danger, apparent only from the ground, he gripped
himself into the ladder and looked down again. He glanced
(19:50):
down for a fractional second, but in that time, sorry enough,
he saw that the girl was screaming and pointing to
the base of the iron ladder. He saw the others
crowding around her, gesticulating. He saw that she really had
been crying. Put it back, and he realized now what
the words meant. Someone had removed the painter's ladder. It
(20:13):
lay clearly on the ground, outlined white, like a child's
drawing of the ladder. The boys must have seen his
first step downward, and then from fun or from spite,
they had removed his only means of retreat. He remembered
that from the base of the ladder to the ground,
the drop fell twenty feet. He considered quickly descending and
appealing from the bottom of the ladder, but he foresaw
(20:34):
that for precious minutes they would jeer and argue, refusing
to replace the ladder, and he felt then that he
could never risk these minutes, unnerved with his strength failing. Besides,
it already noticed that the whole group of them were
wandering off. The boys were driving the quiet girl away,
now more concerned with her than with flag. The quiet
(20:54):
girl's sense of guilt had been brought to a head
by the removal of the ladder. Now hysterically terrified, she
was yelling to them to put the ladder back. She
only she, the passive one, sensed the terror that awaited
them all. But her screams defeated their own purpose. They
had altogether distracted the attention of the others. Now it
(21:16):
was fun to provoke more screams to encourage this new distraction,
and they forgot about flag far up and beyond them.
They were wandering away. They were abandoning him casually, unconcerned
that he was alone and helpless up in his wide
prison of rust. They were wandering away. There was no retreat.
(21:38):
They did not even know he was in difficulty. So
Flegg had no option but to climb. Here desperately tried
to shake off his fear. He actually shook his head.
Then he stared hard at the rungs immediately facing his eyes,
and tried to imagine that he was not high up
at all. He lifted himself tentatively by one rung and
by another, and in this way dragged himself higher and higher,
(22:00):
until he must have been some ten rungs from the
top over the fifth story of a house. But now
perhaps only one more story to climb. He imagined that
he might then be approaching the summit platform, and to
measure this last distance he looked up. He looked up,
and he felt for the first time, panicked beyond desperation.
(22:22):
He almost let go. His senses screamed to let go,
yet his hands refused to open. The nerves left his
hand so that they might have been dried, bones of
fingers gripped around the rungs. He shivered, grew giddy, and
flung himself fog like unto the ladder. The sight of
(22:43):
the top of the gasometer had proved endemically more frightful
than the appearance of the drop beneath. There lay about
it a sense of material danger, not of the risk
of falling, but of something we moved in unhuman, a
sense of appalling isolation. It echoed its elemental iron aloofness,
(23:05):
a wind around it that had never known the warmth
of flesh nor the softness of green flibers. Its blind
eyes were raised above the world. It was like the
eyeless iron visor of an ancient god. It touched against
the sky, having risen an awful perpendicular to this isolation,
solitary as the gray Gannet cliffs that marked the end
(23:29):
of the northern world. It was immeasurably old, outside the
connotation of time It was nothing human, only washed by
the high weather, echoing with wind, visited, never alone, and
in this summit. Flag measured clearly the full distance of
(23:53):
his climb. This close skyline emphasized the whirling space beneath him.
He clearly saw a man fall through this space, spread
eagling the smash with the sickening force of a locomotive
on the stone beneath. The man turned slowly in the air,
yet his thoughts raced faster, and he fell. Flag clutching
(24:16):
his body close to the rust, made small weeping sounds
through his mouth, Shivering, shuddering. He began to tread up again,
working his knees and elbows outward like a frog, so
that with a hot roaring he hurried himself. He began
to scramble up, wrenching at his last strength, whispering urgent,
meaningless words to himself, like the swift whispers that close
(24:39):
in on a nightmare. A huge weight pulled at him,
dragging him to drop. He climbed higher. He reached the
top rung and found his face staring still at a
wall of red dust. He looked wild with terror. It
was the top rung had ended, yet no platform the
(25:04):
real top rungs were missing the platform shotted five impassable
feet above flags. Stared dumbly and circling his head like
a lost animal. Then he channed his legs in the
lower rungs, and his arms to the armpits in through
the top rungs, and there he hung, shivering past, knowing
(25:28):
what more he could ever do. You've heard the Vertical
(25:59):
Ladder from the Stories of William Sanson, copyright nineteen sixty.
I'm Michael Hanson. Technical production for this program by Rich
Grody mind webs is produced at WHA Radio
Mind Way.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to a half hour of mindwebs short stories from
the world expectable. This is Michael Hanson. The mind web
(00:58):
story at this time is my William Sansom. The Vertical
Ladder copyright nineteen sixty from the stories of William Sandsum.
As he felt the first watery eggs of sweat moistening
the palms of his hands, as with every rung higher
his body seemed to weigh more heavily, this young man
(01:18):
flagg regretted in sudden desperation, but still in vain the
irresponsible events that had thrust him up into his present
precarious climb. Here he was isolated on a vertical iron ladder,
flat to the side of a gasometer, a huge swage tank,
and bound to climb higher and higher until he should
reach the vertigenous skyward summit. How could he ever have
(01:42):
wished the sun himself, how easy it had been to
laugh away his cautionary fears on the firm ground. Now
he would give the very hands that clung to the
ladder for his safe conduct, Solider. It had been a
strong spring day, abruptly as warm as midsummer. The sun
flooded the park streets with sudden heat, and Flag and
(02:03):
his friends had felt stifled in their thick winter clothes.
The green glare of the new leaves everywhere struck the
eye too fiercely, and the air seemed almost sticky from
the exhalations of buds and swelling resins. They had wandered
out from the park by a back gate into an
area of back streets. The houses there were small and old,
(02:23):
some of them already falling into disrepair, short streets, cobbles
and narrow pavements, knowly shops at tobacconist or a desolate
corner oil shop to color the gray. It was the
outcrop of some industrial undertaking beyond. At first these quiet,
almost deserted streets, it seemed more RESTful than the park.
But soon the dusty air of peeling plaster and pottering brick,
(02:45):
the dark windows, and the dry stone steps, the very
dryness altogether had proved more worrying than before, so that
when suddenly the houses ended and the ground opened to
reveal the yards of the disused gasworks, Flag and his
friends had welcomed the green of metals and milkwork that
grew among the scrap iron and broken brick. They walked
(03:06):
out into the wasteland with two girls and Flegg and
the other two boys, and stood presently before the old
gasometer itself. Among the ruined sheds. This was the only
erection still whole. It still predominated over the yards, towering
high above other buildings where hundreds of feet around. So
they threw bricks against its rusted sides. The rust flew
(03:30):
off in flakes, and the iron rang dully. Flegg, who
wished to excel in the eyes of the dark haired girl,
began throwing his bricks higher than the others. He felt
the girl's eyes follow his shoulders, and his shoulders broadened.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
But you talk, crawl the crowds it to fall.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Flegg turned around, scoffing, so that the girl had quickly
shouted again, laughing shrilly and pointing upward.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Crowding covering the doctor them good cross so the top
tight to the top.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Even then Flegg had a second chance. It occurred to
him instantly that he could laugh at off. But a
hysterical emphasis now possessed the girl's face. She was dancing
up and down and clapping her hands insistently in this
confused flag. So off we go, then, he had said,
and he had turned to the gasometer. It was not,
(04:23):
after all, so very high. It was hardly a full
sized gasometer. Its trellised iron top rail would have stood
a level with the roof coping of a five or
six story tenement. Until then, Flagg had only seen the
gasometer as a rough mass of iron. But now every
detail sprang into abrupt definition. He studied it intently, alertly,
(04:46):
considering its size and every feature of stability. The brown
rusted iron sheeting smeared here and there with red lead,
curious buckling that sometimes deflated its curved bulk as though
a vacuum were collapsing it from within. The ladders scaling
the sides flush with a sheeting, the grid of girders,
a complexity of struts the bolting. There were two ladders,
(05:08):
one of Jacob's letterer clamped fast to the side, another
that was more of a staircase, zig zagging up the
belly of the gessometer in easy gradients, and provided with
a safety rail. This must have been erected later as
a substitute for the Jacob's letter, which demanded an unnecessarily
stringent climb, and was now unused for some twenty feet
of its longer rungs had been worn away. However, there
(05:31):
was apparently some painting and progress, or a painter's wooden
ladder had been propped beneath, reaching to the undamaged bottom
of the vertical ladder. The ascent was thus serviceable Again.
Flegg looked quickly at the foot of the wooden ladder.
Was it well grounded? And then at the head farther
up was this secure? And then up to the top,
(05:52):
screwing his eyes to note any fault in the iron rungs,
reaching innumerably, indistinctly and dizzyingly to the summit form. The
two boys and his own girl kept up a chorus
of encouraging abuse. But the second girl had remained quiet throughout.
She was already frightened, sensing instantly that the guilt for
(06:13):
some tragedy was hers alone, although she had never in
fact opened her mouth. Suddenly the chorus rose shriller behind him.
They still kept up at din, still kept him up
to pitch, worrying at him viciously. So Flegg realized finally
that there was no alternative. He had to climb the
(06:34):
gasometer by the vertical ladder, and as soon as this
was finally settled, the doubt cleared from his mind. He
braced his shoulders and suddenly found himself really making light
of the job. After all, he thought, it isn't so high.
Why should I worry? Hundreds of men climbs such ladders,
as every day no one falls. The ladders are clamped
(06:54):
as safe as houses. He began to smile within himself
at his earlier perturbations. Added to this, the girl now
ran up to him and handed him her handkerchief. As
her black eyes frowned to smile at him. He saw
that her expression no longer held its vicious, laughing scorn,
but now instead had grown softer, with a look of
real encouragement and even admiration.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Solese, you tried tell you Rush, you really have to
dos how babble you?
Speaker 2 (07:22):
But this came too late. Flegg had accepted the climb.
It was fact, and already he felt something of an
exhilarating glow of glory. He took the handkerchief below the
girl a dramatic kiss, and started up the lowest rungs
of the latter had a run. The splinter's letter was
placed at a comfortable slant, but nevertheless, flag had only
(07:43):
climbed some ten feet, which might have corresponded to the
top of the first floor window. When he began to
slow up, he stopped running and gripped harder at the
rungs above, and placed his feet more firmly on the
unseen bars below. Although he had not yet measured his
distance from the ground, somehow he sensed he was already
unnaturally high. With nothing but air and a precarious skeleton
(08:06):
of wooden bars between him and the receding ground, he
felt independent of solid support. Yet according to his eyes,
which stared straight forward at the iron sheeting beyond, he
might have been standing on the lowest rungs by the ground.
The sensation of height infected him strongly. It had become
an urgent necessity to maintain a balance. Each muscle of
(08:29):
his body became unnaturally alert. This was not an unpleasant feeling.
He almost enjoyed a new athletic command of every precarious movement.
He climbed methodically until he reached the ladder head and
the first of the perpendicular iron rungs. Here, for a
moment flag had paused. He had rested his knees up
(08:51):
against the last three steps of the safely slatting wooden ladder.
He had grasped the two side supports of the rusted
iron that led though straightly upward. His knees then clung
to the motherly wood. His hands felt the iron cold
and gritty. The rust powdered off and smeared him with
its red dust. One large scrap flaked off and fell
(09:14):
on his face as he looked upward. He wanted to
brush this away from his eyes, but the impulse was,
to his surprise, much less powerful than the vice like
will that clutched his hands to the iron support. His
hands were made firmly gripping the iron, He had to
shake off the rust flake with a jerk of his head.
Even then, this sharp movement nearly unbalanced him, and his
(09:36):
stomach gulped coldly with a sudden shock. He settled his
knees more firmly against the wood, though he forced himself
to laugh at his sudden feet, so that in some
measure his poise did really return. Nevertheless, he did not
alter the awkward knock knee position of his legs. Cling
for safety. With all this he had scarcely paused. Now
(09:57):
he pulled at the stanchions of the iron ladder. They
were firm, as if they had been driven into rock.
He looked up, following the dizzying rise of the rungs
to the skyline. From this ankle, flat against the iron sheeting,
the gasometer appeared higher than before. The blue sky seemed
to descend and almost touch it. The redness of the
(10:18):
rust dissolved into a deepening gray shadow. The distant curved
summit loomed over, black and high. Although it was immensely stable,
as seen in rounded perspective from a few yards away,
there against the side, it appeared top heavy, so that
this huge segment of sheet iron seemed to have lost
(10:39):
the support of its invisible complement behind, the support that
was now unseen and therefore unfelt. And flag imagined despite himself,
that the entire erection had become unsteady, that quite possibly
the gasometer might suddenly blow over like a gigantic, top
heavy sail. He lowered his eyes quickly and flitted on
(11:00):
the hands before him. He began to climb. He looked down.
His friends appeared shockingly small. Their bodies had disappeared, and
he saw only their upturned faces. He wanted to wave
to demonstrate in some way a carefree attitude. But then
instantly he felt frustrated as his hands refused to unlock
(11:21):
their grip. He turned to the rungs again, with a
smile dying on his lips. He swallowed uneasily and continued
to tread slowly upward, hand after hand, foot after foot.
He had climbed ten rungs of the iron letter when
his hands first began to feel moist. When suddenly, as
though a catastrophe had overtaken him, not gradually, but in
(11:44):
one overpowering second, he realized that he was afraid. Incontrovertibly,
he could cover it no longer. He admitted it all
over his body. His hands gripped with pitiable eagerness, there
were now alert to a point of shivering, as though
the nerves inside them had been forced taut for so
long that now they had burst beyond their strained tegument.
(12:07):
His feet no longer trod firmly on the rungs beneath
the first, stepped for their place timorously, and then glued
themselves to the iron. In this way, his body lost
most of its poise. These nerves and muscles in his
two legs and two arms seemed to work independently, no
longer integrated with the rhythm of his body, but moving
with a dangerous, unwilled jerk of crippled limbs. His body
(12:31):
hung slack away from the ladder, with nothing beneath it
but a thirty foot drop to the ground. Only his
hands and feet were fed with the security of an attachment.
Most of him lay off the ladder, hanging in space.
His arms revolted at the strain of their familiar angle,
as though they were flies feet, denying all natural laws.
(12:53):
For the first time, as the fear took hold of him,
he felt that what he had attempted was impossible. He
could never achieve the top, if at this height of
only thirty feet, as if it were three stories of
a building. He felt afraid. What would he feel at
sixty feet? Yet he trod heavily up. He was afraid,
(13:15):
but not desperate. He dreaded each stop. It forced himself
to believe that at some time he would be over.
It could not take long. A memory crossed his mind.
It occurred to him vividly, then flashed away, for his
eyes and mind were continually concentrated on the rusted iron
bars and the white knuckles of his hands, but for
(13:37):
an instant he remembered waking up long ago in the
nursery and seeing that the windows were light, as if
they reflected a coldness of moonlight. Only they were not
so much lit by light as by a sensation of space.
He had crawled out of bed and climbed on to
a chair that stood beneath the window. It was as
(13:58):
he had thought outside there was space, nothing else, a
limited area of space. Yet this was not unnatural, for
soon his logical eyes had supplied for what had at
first appeared an impossible infinity the later image of a
perfectly reasonable flood, A vast plain of still water. As
(14:19):
far as his eyes could see. It lapped silently at
the size of the house, and in the light of
an unseen moon, winked and washed darkly, concealing great beasts
of mystery beneath its black, calm surface. This water attracted him.
He wished to jump into it from the window and
immerse himself in it, and allow his head to sink
(14:39):
slowly under. However, he was perched up too high. He
felt alone at the window, infinitely high, so that the
flood seemed to lie in miniature at a great distance below.
As later in life, when he was ill, it seen
the objects of his bed room grow small and infinitely
remote in the fevered reflection behind his eyes. Isolated at
(15:01):
the little window, he had been frightened by the emptiness
surrounding him only the sky, in the water, in the
marooned stone wall of the house. He had been terrified,
yet drawn down by dread and desire. Then a battle
ship had sailed by. He had wakened up, saved by
the appearance of the battle ship, And now on the ladder,
(15:25):
he had a sudden hope that something as large and
stable would intervene again to help him. But ten rungs
farther up, he began to sweat more violently than ever.
Another flake of rust fell on his forehead, this time
it stuck in the wetness. He felt physically exhausted. Fear
was draining his strength and the precarious position of his body.
(15:49):
Each stressed muscle ached, his body weighed more heavily at
each step upward. It sagged beneath his arms like a
leaden sack. His legs no longer provided their adequate support.
It seemed as though they needed every pull of their
muscles to force themselves as independent limbs. Close to the ladder,
(16:12):
the wind blew faster. It dragged now at his coat,
It blew its space about him. It echoed silently, a
lonesome spaciousness.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Don't look it down, don't look down down.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
The blood whispered in his temples. Three quarters up the
gasometer and fifty feet from the ground, flag grew desperate.
Every other consideration suddenly left him. He wanted only to
reach ground as quickly as possible, only that nothing else mattered.
(16:48):
He stopped climbing and clung to the ladder, panting very slowly,
lowering his eyes carefully so that he could raise them
instantly if he saw too much. He looked down the rung,
and another passed his arm, fit passed his waist, and
focused them on the ground beneath. He looked quickly up again.
(17:11):
He pressed himself to the latter. Tears started in his eyes.
For a moment they reeled red with giddiness. He closed them,
shutting out everything. Then instantly he opened them, afraid that
something might happen. He must watch his hands, watch the byes,
watch the rusted iron sheeting itself. No movement should escape him.
The struts might come creaking loose, the whole edifice might
(17:32):
sway over. Although a fading reason told him that the
gasometer had remained firm for years and was still as
steady as a cliff, his horrified senses suspected that this
was the one moment in the building's life when a
wind would blow there was too strong for it, and
some defective struck would snap, and the whole edifice would
heel over and crash to the ground. This image became
(17:55):
so clear he could see the sheets of iron buckling
and folding like cloth as the huge wight sank to
the earth. The ground had recedd horribly. The drop now
appeared terrifying out of all proportioned of this height he
had reached. From the ground, such a height would have
appeared unnoteworthy, but now from here the distance seemed to
(18:15):
have doubled. Each object familiar to his everyday eyes, his friends,
the lamp posts, the brick wall, occur, a drain, All
these had grown infinitely small. His senses demanded that these
objects should be of a certain accustomed size. Alternately, the
world of chimneys and attic windows and roof coping would
grow unpleasantly giant as his pavement red eyes approached. Even now,
(18:39):
the iron sheeting that stretched to either side, and above
and below seemed to have grown. He was lost among
such huge, smooth dimensions, grown smaller himself and cling now
like a child lost on some monstrous desert of red dust.
These unfamiliarities shock his nerves more than the danger of falling.
(19:03):
The sense of isolation was overpowering. All things were suddenly alien,
yet exposed on the iron spaces. With the unending winds
blowing around him. Among such free things, he felt shut in,
trembling and panting so that he stifled himself with the
shortness of his own breath. He took the first step downward.
(19:27):
A commotion began below. A confusion of cries came drifting
up to him. Above all he could hear the single
voice of the girl, who had so far kept quiet.
Flegg thinking that these cries were to warn him of
some new danger, apparent only from the ground, he gripped
himself into the ladder and looked down again. He glanced
(19:50):
down for a fractional second, but in that time, sorry enough,
he saw that the girl was screaming and pointing to
the base of the iron ladder. He saw the others
crowding around her, gesticulating. He saw that she really had
been crying. Put it back, and he realized now what
the words meant. Someone had removed the painter's ladder. It
(20:13):
lay clearly on the ground, outlined white, like a child's
drawing of the ladder. The boys must have seen his
first step downward, and then from fun or from spite,
they had removed his only means of retreat. He remembered
that from the base of the ladder to the ground,
the drop fell twenty feet. He considered quickly descending and
appealing from the bottom of the ladder, but he foresaw
(20:34):
that for precious minutes they would jeer and argue, refusing
to replace the ladder, and he felt then that he
could never risk these minutes, unnerved with his strength failing. Besides,
it already noticed that the whole group of them were
wandering off. The boys were driving the quiet girl away,
now more concerned with her than with flag. The quiet
(20:54):
girl's sense of guilt had been brought to a head
by the removal of the ladder. Now hysterically terrified, she
was yelling to them to put the ladder back. She
only she, the passive one, sensed the terror that awaited
them all. But her screams defeated their own purpose. They
had altogether distracted the attention of the others. Now it
(21:16):
was fun to provoke more screams to encourage this new distraction,
and they forgot about flag far up and beyond them.
They were wandering away. They were abandoning him casually, unconcerned
that he was alone and helpless up in his wide
prison of rust. They were wandering away. There was no retreat.
(21:38):
They did not even know he was in difficulty. So
Flegg had no option but to climb. Here desperately tried
to shake off his fear. He actually shook his head.
Then he stared hard at the rungs immediately facing his eyes,
and tried to imagine that he was not high up
at all. He lifted himself tentatively by one rung and
by another, and in this way dragged himself higher and higher,
(22:00):
until he must have been some ten rungs from the
top over the fifth story of a house. But now
perhaps only one more story to climb. He imagined that
he might then be approaching the summit platform, and to
measure this last distance he looked up. He looked up,
and he felt for the first time, panicked beyond desperation.
(22:22):
He almost let go. His senses screamed to let go,
yet his hands refused to open. The nerves left his
hand so that they might have been dried, bones of
fingers gripped around the rungs. He shivered, grew giddy, and
flung himself fog like unto the ladder. The sight of
(22:43):
the top of the gasometer had proved endemically more frightful
than the appearance of the drop beneath. There lay about
it a sense of material danger, not of the risk
of falling, but of something we moved in unhuman, a
sense of appalling isolation. It echoed its elemental iron aloofness,
(23:05):
a wind around it that had never known the warmth
of flesh nor the softness of green flibers. Its blind
eyes were raised above the world. It was like the
eyeless iron visor of an ancient god. It touched against
the sky, having risen an awful perpendicular to this isolation,
solitary as the gray Gannet cliffs that marked the end
(23:29):
of the northern world. It was immeasurably old, outside the
connotation of time It was nothing human, only washed by
the high weather, echoing with wind, visited, never alone, and
in this summit. Flag measured clearly the full distance of
(23:53):
his climb. This close skyline emphasized the whirling space beneath him.
He clearly saw a man fall through this space, spread
eagling the smash with the sickening force of a locomotive
on the stone beneath. The man turned slowly in the air,
yet his thoughts raced faster, and he fell. Flag clutching
(24:16):
his body close to the rust, made small weeping sounds
through his mouth, Shivering, shuddering. He began to tread up again,
working his knees and elbows outward like a frog, so
that with a hot roaring he hurried himself. He began
to scramble up, wrenching at his last strength, whispering urgent,
meaningless words to himself, like the swift whispers that close
(24:39):
in on a nightmare. A huge weight pulled at him,
dragging him to drop. He climbed higher. He reached the
top rung and found his face staring still at a
wall of red dust. He looked wild with terror. It
was the top rung had ended, yet no platform the
(25:04):
real top rungs were missing the platform shotted five impassable
feet above flags. Stared dumbly and circling his head like
a lost animal. Then he channed his legs in the
lower rungs, and his arms to the armpits in through
the top rungs, and there he hung, shivering past, knowing
(25:28):
what more he could ever do. You've heard the Vertical
(25:59):
Ladder from the Stories of William Sanson, copyright nineteen sixty.
I'm Michael Hanson. Technical production for this program by Rich
Grody mind webs is produced at WHA Radio
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