Damn him! He snapped himself into one of the little lifts when I was within six yards of him. I saw his ugly face sink out of sight behind the glass panels. I remembered that these small hydraulic lifts worked, though the big ones below didn't. But I remembered something else ... there was a stairway.
I found it by instinct, a great broad stair with tiled walls like the subway of some railway terminus.
I didn't bother about the stairs. I leapt down--preserving my balance by a miracle--six or seven at a time. Pounding out into the great empty City at the foot, I swirled round and was just in time to see my gentleman bolt out of his lift like a rabbit from its hole and run to where I knew was the outside stairway which fell, in its corkscrew path, barred by many gates, right down to safety and the normal world.
It was the way by which dear old Pu-Yi had hoped to descend and raise the alarm. It was the perilous eyrie upon which this same bull-like assassin had picked him off like a sitting pigeon and boasted of it not half an hour before.
As he dodged and ran I fired at him, but never a bullet touched the brute and I flung the Colt away with an oath.
"Much better kill him with my own hands," I said in my mind, "much better tear his head off, break him up--"
I tell you this as it happened. For the moment I was a wild beast, in pursuit of another, but still, I think, a super-beast.
Well, never mind that. I saw him fumbling at a sort of fence, clearly outlined against an immense space of morning sky, and thundered after him--thundered, I say, because I was now running along an open steel grating, which seemed to sway....
Then I vaulted over where Zorilla had vaulted, and my heart leapt into my mouth as I fell--fell some eight feet on to a tiny platform, protected from space by a rail not more than three feet high.
I reeled, and caught hold of a stanchion and saved myself. Far, far below, London--London in color was unrolling itself like a map--and immediately below my feet, already a considerable distance down, was the slithering black spider that I had sworn to kill.
I could see him through the grid, and then I flung myself upon the corkscrew ladder, grasping the rails with my hands until the skin was burnt from them, disdaining the steps and spinning round and ever downwards like a great top.