The Ascent Page 17

  The harness secured, I grabbed Hollinger by his coat and tried to sit him upright. A ghostly moan escaped him. It was futile; he was deadweight.

  “Come on …”

  Sweat stinging my eyes, I tugged at the rope affixed to the harness. A second after that, the slack in the rope went taut. Hollinger’s body slid up against the ice wall, his head lolling like a spring-loaded toy on his neck. I could see the gash at his left temple and the black blood already freezing in ribbons down the side of his face and neck. There was blood on the ledge where he’d struck it, too.

  The shaft creaked like a flight of ancient stairs. I held my breath as Hollinger ascended the shaft, his hip brushing my face in the confined space. He dangled like a rag doll, his limbs limp as streamers. His body blocked out the light.

  I pulled my gloves on, flexing the feeling back into my fingers, and gripped the rope in two hands. Just as I planted one spiked sole against the ice wall, the ledge beneath me broke away. The sound was like a tree keeling over. Gravity forced me down with it, my vision blurring and the rope burning through my palms. I could feel the heat of friction through the wool gloves.

  I plummeted maybe ten feet before the rope jerked me like a yo-yo. As I twisted at the end of my rope over the narrow abyss, I glanced over my shoulder, my breath harsh and arid. I saw nothing except darkness. Directly above my head, I could see the gaping wound in the ice wall where the ledge had been just seconds before.

  Above, one of the guys shouted my name.

  “I’m all right,” I called.

  Once again, I planted my boot against the wall and proceeded to climb until the shaft grew too narrow for my legs to bend and the others had to pull me up.

  I noticed the cracks in the ice wall were climbing steadily with me.

  Jesus…

  “Faster!” I shouted. “The shaft’s gonna split!”

  But they were pulling me as fast as they could. I shifted enough to see them haul Hollinger’s lifeless body out of the shaft. Silver daylight spilled down into the hole. I winced and tried to grab the rope, but the shaft was too narrow. It was like being bound by rope at the shoulders.

  The circle of light grew bigger and bigger. The silhouettes of heads appeared. For one terrifying moment, I thought I was going to get stuck coming up through the hole.

  “Hurry!” I yelled, my voice cracking.

  Spears of ice peeled away from the shaft walls and spiraled into the abyss. Chunks of ice fell in my face.

  “Here, here, here.” Chad’s voice was suddenly in my ear. The burst of daylight stung my eyes as the guys hoisted me out of the shaft. I was weightless when they carried me across the glacier, my heart hammering, my lungs aching to breathe.

  “Go,” I wheezed. “Get away. It’s … it’s going to …”

  There came a thunderous clap. I was dropped, my spine absorbing the shock of the fall. I managed to sit up in time to see a channel tear across the surface of the glacier from the shaft’s opening, swallowing the snow that covered it. Crazily, I thought of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and the way Bugs would tunnel underground, creating a channel of disturbed earth in his wake.

  “Get up.” Curtis grabbed the hood of my anorak and nearly strangled me.

  I gathered my legs under me and sprinted across the face of the glacier toward the mountainside, tears freezing in rivulets down the swells of my cheeks. The earth roared at my back. There was a niche in the mountainside—a den hidden beneath a brow of black rock—that we were racing toward. We slammed against the mountainside and rolled into the opening in the face of the rock just as the tensile stresses spread over our wake, separating our trail of footprints on either side of the impromptu canyon.

  Everything grew silent. In anticipation of further stresses, we huddled together like foxes in a den and listened for the splitting bark crunch of widening crevasses. But all remained quiet. The world was once again frozen in stasis.

  Chad broke the silence. “Jesus Christ, we almost bought the farm on that one.” He uttered a pathetic little laugh.

  I slung my pack against the wall of the cave, then unbuckled my helmet and set it down beside me. “How’s Hollinger?”

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “He’s awake,” Petras said.

  “What happened?” He sounded groggy. “Christ, my head hurts …”

  “Took a spill, Holly,” Chad said. “Dropped down five stories like an elevator with its cables cut.”

  Hollinger groaned. “My gear.”

  “It’s gone,” said Petras. “Swallowed up in the crevasse.”

  “My goddamn gear. My fucking helmet. What the fuck am I … am I gonna do?”

  As my eyes acclimated to the dark, I could make out Hollinger sitting against the opposite wall between Petras and Curtis. He cradled his wounded, bloodied head in his hands.

  “I’ve got an extra helmet,” Curtis told him.

  A flicker of light filled the cave. Andrew stood, holding his electric lantern in front of him. He walked past the entrance of the cave, his silhouette like that of a lawn jockey, and stood in the center of us. The roof of the cave yawned into eternity. It looked as if half the mountain had been hollowed out.

  “Where do we go from here?” Chad said after a moment.

  Like someone telling ghost stories around a campfire, Andrew raised the lantern to his face and said, “We go up.”

  4

  BLIND RS BATS, WE SCALED THE WALL OF THE

  cave. A difficult and tedious feat, the ascent required faith solely on our sense of touch—feeling for specific grooves in the rock, fumbling for lines with our hands, threading the ropes through the pitons merely by touch. And the higher we climbed the darker it grew, the only light down below at the entrance of the cave. But even that would be gone soon as darkness reclaimed the land.

  Time meant nothing; I had no idea how long it took us to reach the plateau. Winded and muscle weary, half of us nearly dropped to our knees and shed our gear as if we’d just returned to Earth after a year of space travel.

  Hollinger had the most trouble, what with his head wound and his overall spirit shaken. The wound itself wasn’t too troubling—Petras and Curtis had examined it in the light of Andrew’s electric lamp before we began the climb and noted it was nothing more than a flesh wound—but the flame within Michael Hollinger’s soul had been extinguished.

  His superstitions appeared to be manifesting before his eyes. The disappearance of half the food had already rattled him; his plummet through a covered trap in the glacier only reinforced his superstitions. (Of course, he did not take into consideration the luck involved in having that ice ledge intercept him, preventing his death.)

  As I passed him while climbing the cave wall, I could hear him muttering to himself—something about trespassing on the hidden land.

  Andrew lifted his lantern and studied our location. Curtis and Chad followed suit, their own electric lanterns coming alive. A grand chamber, immense and sprawling, opened before us. Stalactites corkscrewed down from the ceiling perhaps a hundred feet above our heads, dripping calcareous water into russet pools. The air was stale and warm, underscored by a nonspecific mineral smell.

  “It cuts through,” Andrew said, the light from his lantern diminishing as he moved farther down the chamber. He followed a trickling stream of water that snaked through a gouge in the stone floor. Running water meant there was a place where that water originated, and that typically meant a way out.

  Gathering our gear again, we trailed Andrew through the chamber. It narrowed slightly, forming a tunnel all around us, the ceiling of which resembled the gullet of a whale. I tried to remember the story of Jonah and the whale but found that childhood memory was difficult to summon. In fact, for the past hour or so, my entire train of thought had been jumbled and muddy. At first, I thought it had something to do with the incident at the sinkhole—perhaps my body was still percolating mind-numbing adrenaline—but when it didn’t wear off, I began to wonder about our altit
ude.

  “How high up are we?” I whispered to Petras.

  Petras deliberately lagged behind and said, “Don’t really know. We must have climbed forty or fifty yards back there. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure. My head’s funny.”

  “Dehydrated?”

  “I’ve been drinking water like it’s going out of style.”

  “You think it’s altitude sickness?”

  I didn’t respond.

  Daylight, purplish in its old age, filtered in from an opening in the ceiling farther down the tunnel. Motes as big as tennis balls danced in the beam. It wasn’t until we drew closer did I realize they were giant snowflakes spiraling lazily in the air. Above us a fissure in the rock framed a panel of pink sky. The walls curled upward, forming natural staircases in the rock. One staircase led directly toward the opening.

  Chad laughed dryly. “It’s the fucking Stairway to Heaven.”

  Andrew doused his lantern and led the way up the backbone of rock toward the opening. We climbed out one by one, Petras and mebringing up the rear. As I poked my head into the fresh, frigid air, I noticed my hands were shaking badly. It wasn’t alcohol withdrawal, not this time. Petras’s voice still rang clear as a bell inside my head: altitude sickness.

  Beyond, the horizon was blistering with a spectacular sunset. There were colors in it I had never seen before. The shadows created by the jagged outcrop of rocks caused something to stir inside me. It was the same feeling I used to get when looking at a raw chunk of stone, a hammer and chisel in my hands.

  We hiked the outskirts of the ridge until nightfall, then set up camp within a basin that overlooked a snow-covered valley.

  After everyone had fallen asleep, I crept out of our communal tent, pulling my coat tight about my goose-pimpled frame. A piton and hammer in tow, I negotiated down the rocky slope until one particular slab of stone caught my eye. It loomed in the moonlight, jutting sideways from the earth like one of the toppled smokestacks from the Titanic.

  I walked two complete circles around it, admiring how it glowed in the tallow light of the moon, before lifting the piton and placing its spiked tip against the rock. Then I raised the hammer and struck the head of the piton. The sound seemed to echo over the mountain pass, into the atmosphere, and out like a comet into the unending depths of space.

  Chapter 13

  1

  “THIS.” SAID ANDREW. “IS THE SANCTUARY OF

  the Gods.”

  We stood atop the third and final pinnacle of the Godesh Ridge, surrounded on every side by the rising gray caps of the Himalayas. Towers of stone, stacked like risers in a high school gymnasium, loomed all around us. At the center was a pyramid of stone, glossy with black ice, perhaps forty or fifty feet high. Directly below, an immense icefall ran like a frozen river, the sound of its movement like the shhhhh of static. Boulders of ice the size of automobiles crumbled sporadically from the glacier and tumbled into the icefall. Seracs—enormous pillars of ice—rose like skyscrapers out of the white. They looked solid and immobile, but they could collapse under the slightest weight without predictability.

  The gateway to the Canyon of Souls stood across from us at the next plateau, separated by an insurmountable distance of air, a canyon in and of itself whose floor was the vicious, unforgiving icefall. It was like a medieval castle surrounded by a moat. Other than a snow-covered arch of stone that curved like a rainbow and connected to the other side of the canyon, the opposite plateau was as remote as an uncharted desert island.

  “This is the farthest point along the Godesh Ridge that any group of climbers has ever been,” Andrew continued. “I want you all to take a deep breath and taste how clean the air is. You’ll never breathe air this clean again in your lives.”

  Curtis appeared beside me, looking ashen.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  He gnawed at his lower lip. “Friend of mine died at the Khumbu Icefall on his way to the top of Everest three years ago. I was there; I saw it happen.” He shook his head. “Forget it. I’m cool.”

  I clapped him on the back but said nothing. My head was becoming increasingly achy, and I’d developed a dry cough over the past two days that I couldn’t shake. When I was able to find sleep, my dreams were fitful and frightening, though I couldn’t remember anything of significance about them upon waking.

  Chad studied the icefall. Even Chad, who was typically unshaken, looked wary. “So how the hell do we get across?”

  “That’s the tricky part,” said Andrew. He acknowledged the stone arch with a jut of his chin. “We use it as a bridge.”

  Chad scowled. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

  “We can’t climb that thing,” Curtis added. “The sides and top are pure ice against rock. The ice will shatter the second we drive an anchor into it.”

  “You’re right. That’s been the fatal mistake of every other group that came before us,” Andrew said. “They try to scale the arch and walk across its top.”

  “And we’re not going to do that,” Curtis responded.

  “No, we’re not.” Andrew grinned, and I was once again reminded of that look he gave me all those years ago in San Juan just before he threw himself off the cliff and into space. “We’re going to climb under it.”

  2

  THEN NIGHT FELL. WE ERECTED OUR TENT AT THE

  site of the stone arch, intent on crossing it early the next morning. The wind was fierce, hardly blocked by the looming spires of stone and the pyramid-shaped monolith, and the temperature was unforgiving. Weakened from the cold and the continual treks through the mountainous passes, we huddled inside the tent.

  A hot meal was prepared, and we ate heartily. Only Hollinger didn’t touch the food. Between helpings, I sidled up next to Hollinger and knocked my shoulder against his. That seemed to snap him briefly from his daze. He offered me a meager smile, then pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged them.

  “Here,” I said, handing him a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s your head?”

  He fingered the bandage at his temple. “It’s okay.”

  “How’d that helmet come off so easy?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t recall much about the fall.” He spoke with the detachment of a car crash victim.

  “You doing all right?”

  “I have a bad feeling.”

  “About the climb tomorrow?”

  “About the whole thing, mate.” Hollinger turned and stared at me. His eyes were full and black, moist like the eyes of a deer. “I’ve been seeing things. Things that play with my head. Ever since you and Andrew left to take Shotsky back to base camp.”

  A shiver traced down my spine. “What things?”

  “My head’s playing funny games. I can’t think straight.”

  “It’s the altitude,” I said, trying to comfort him. “It’s messing with my head, too.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s … I don’t know … Something’s not right …”

  I squeezed his shoulder and told him everything would be fine.

  But later that night, with everyone asleep in the tent, I found it impossible to shut my eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking of Hollinger’s words—My head’s playing funny games. I can’t think straight—and I wondered how much longer it would be until we reached the Canyon of Souls. Andrew seemed so confident we would make it there, despite all the other teams that had attempted to do so in the past and failed.

  Unable to sleep, I gathered my piton and hammer, and just as I’d been doing the past two nights, I crawled out of the tent, located the perfect stone, and began to sculpt it. Throughout the past few nights of our journey, I’d left a trail of partially finished statues lining the path to this very spot, each of them a reproduction of the woman I’d lost in a flaming car wreck in Italy with a man—a linguistics professor—named David Moore.

  The night air froze the marrow in my bones. I chipped away at my chosen stone with numb hands, a fair
distance from our camp so as not to disturb the others while they slept. The moon hung fat and yellow behind the nearest peak, illuminating the snow and causing it to radiate with a dull luminescence.

  —Turn back.

  I couldn’t tell if I’d actually heard her voice or if it had been only in my head. Nonetheless, I spun around and stared at the passage between the jagged rocks, the snow flooded with shadow. No one was there.

  “Hannah?”

  —Turn back, Tim. Please.

  Of all the things I could do—I uttered a weak, little laugh. Surely I was hallucinating. “My head’s playing funny games,” Hollinger had said. “I can’t think straight.” Sure enough, sure enough …

  —Tim. She stepped out into the moonlight, her body naked and pale and glistening with condensation, so real she left footprints in the snow.

  “Jesus, Hannah …”

  It felt as though my heart had stopped pumping. My blood ran cold as ice water. As I watched, she seemed to flicker from existence like bad reception on a television set.

  “Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Hannah, please …”

  —Turn back, she said, her voice ringing in the center of my brain.

  Something cold and wet trickled over my lips. I touched two fingers to the wetness. They came away black with blood. A nosebleed.

  Hannah turned and walked away from me down the sloping, snowy pass.

  I begged her to stop, but she didn’t. So I pursued, dropping my piton and hammer in the snow, the nylon hood of my flimsy anorak flapping in the freezing wind. She disappeared around a bend in the pass, hidden by giant fingers of rock, but I followed her footprints like a bloodhound on the scent. On the other side of the bend, I saw her silvery form climbing one of the stone towers. She climbed with ease, as if her body had been specifically designed to do so. I called to her, but she didn’t stop or look back at me.

  My desire to touch her—to reach out and feel her—was suddenly overwhelming. The next thing I knew, I was scaling the stone tower after her, my movements much less steady, my speed no match for hers. Each time I looked up, she was farther and farther ahead of me.