The Ascent Read online

  Loose rocks broke free under my footing and tumbled in a small avalanche down the face of the tower. One hand lost its grip on the ledge, and I swung outward, my feet flailing briefly in the air, while I held tight to the handhold with one hand. My fingernails digging into the stone, I swung my other hand around and grabbed the ledge as my legs pedaled for a foothold. My heart restarted in my chest. Glancing up, I saw Hannah’s fish white body already mounting the summit.

  “Hannah, please… ” I continued to climb, the muscles in my arms quaking, my ankles swelling with sprains inside my boots. I was nearly forty feet in the air when I reached the summit, my muscles destroyed and my lungs straining like old car tires pumped up with toomuch air. The summit was a slanted platform that overlooked the snowy pass and the rush of the icefall farther below. The icefall glittered like a bed of diamonds in the moonlight.

  Hannah stood at the far end of the platform, facing me.

  “What is it? What do you want?” It burned my throat to talk.

  —I’ve told you, Tim. I want you to turn back. You shouldn’t be here. None of you should be here.

  “I’m dreaming this. Either that or I’m hallucinating.”

  —It doesn’t matter.

  “Let me touch you. If you’re real, let me touch you.”

  —It doesn’t matter, she repeated.

  “It does. It matters to me.”

  She turned and lifted her arms like wings. She brought one foot over the edge of the platform—

  “Hannah, no!”

  —and let herself drop off the edge. Her silvery hair trailing her, the twin hubs of her small buttocks … there and then gone.

  I rushed to the edge, skidding to a halt just inches from sealing my own fate in the icy rush of the icefall a million miles below. Looking down, I could see no evidence of Hannah. She should have been in midair, those ghostly arms still splayed like birds’ wings … but she had vanished. Or had never existed in the first place.

  When I called out her name, the sound of my voice jerked me awake. I was no longer atop one of the forty-foot spires. Nor was I in the tent. I sat up in the snow, my thermal underwear soaked and stiffening in the cold, my teeth rattling like maracas in my head. Disoriented, I looked around. Farther up the incline, wedged at the base of the towering stone spires, I could discern the black Quonset shape of our tent.

  I stood, my knees weak and my hands shaking and numb. There was an inky smear on the palm of my right hand. I touched clean fingers to my nose, and they came away bloody. It felt like someone had been using my head as a steel drum. A wave of spasms shookmy bones, and an instant later, having temporarily lost control of certain bodily functions, I urinated in my thermals, the heat blessed and welcome as it spilled down my thighs.

  There were no footprints in the snow anywhere. None leading to the spot where I now stood. There were no footprints coming down the slope from camp and none from any other direction. Directly above my head was a rocky gangplank; it was possible I’d been sleepwalking and had walked the plank, for lack of a better term, only to wake up in this very spot. But that didn’t explain what the hell I’d been doing sleepwalking in the first place. As far as I knew, I’d never walked in my sleep in all my life.

  One step into the snow and I was instantly aware that I could no longer feel my feet. They were wrapped in two thick layers of socks, but both layers had soaked all the way through, and their soles had begun to freeze. How long had I been out here, anyway?

  Back in the tent, I was careful to not wake the others as I changed into my day clothes. My hands and feet would not get warm, and there was a painful, needling ball of ice in the center of my stomach, as if all my digestive juices had turned to icy slush. I cleaned my bloody nose with my wet socks, my exhalations stuttering while my inhalations were equally as hesitant. Fumbling in the dark, I located the canteen with the remaining bourbon and took two healthy swallows. I clenched the canteen against my chest and felt the alcohol burn a magma path down my gullet and into the saddle of my guts. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  “I was wondering what happened to you.”

  The voice jarred me, freezing my insides all over again. It was Hollinger, propped up in the dark beside me.

  “Christ,” I whispered. “Trying to give me a goddamn heart attack?”

  “Can’t sleep.” His tone was noncommittal.

  A million responses ran through my head at that moment. In the end, however, I said nothing. I tucked the canteen of bourbon in mypack and slipped beneath the warmth of my sleeping bag. My limbs hadn’t fully thawed, and my stomach still felt tied in a not, but I forced myself to close my eyes and hunt down an hour of sleep before morning.

  3

  ANDREW STOOD AT THE BASE OF THE GIANT STONE

  arch, a look of deep concentration on his face. His normally pale skin had been burned by the sun and was beginning to flake away by the dry wind. Over the past couple of weeks, a fine coppery beard had fallen into place, somehow making him look younger.

  In fact, the only things that hadn’t changed throughout the course of our journey were Andrew’s eyes. They remained alert, startling, clear, and blue as Caribbean waters. He still had that way of looking at someone and captivating him, holding him prisoner in his stare … until he laughed his loud, obnoxious laugh, and all prior sins were instantly forgiven.

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said, addressing the rest of us as we packed our gear. “We’ve all played on playgrounds when we were kids, right? Well, we’re gonna re-create the monkey bars using this arch.”

  He slapped the underside of the arch as if testing its solidity. “We’ll start off with a rope-and-pulley system. I’ll climb out and insert cams every two and a half feet along the underside of the arch. We’ll use the cams as handholds, one hand over the other, just like the monkey bars. Of course, I want everyone harnessed with a fixed line. And I’ll run a second empty line with me so we can slide our gear across on it. This way we won’t have to carry our packs.” He clapped. “Sound good?”

  In truth, it sounded insane. Even if he was able to insert the spring-loaded camming devices, it was still quite a distance to the other side. Hand over hand was a slow, tedious process, and my body wasstill run-down from the night before. God only knew how long I’d been out in the snow, but it was long enough for me to develop a slight fever that was currently working its way through my system.

  Earlier this morning, I’d gone down the pass and climbed the ridge where I’d woken, expecting to find my footprints. But there were no prints in the snow atop the rocks just like there hadn’t been prints in the pass. It was as if I’d been dropped there from the sky.

  “Hey,” Petras said, “you look like shit.”

  “That explains why I feel like shit,” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke. It only managed to come across bitter.

  “You ready to do this?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “It’s crazy,” Petras went on. “You know that, right? Andrew’s plan, I mean.”

  “Andrew’s out of his mind,” I said and nearly added, And I think I’m beginning to follow.

  “It’s a good idea, though,” Petras said. “Sliding the packs down to him on a second line so we don’t have to carry them.”

  “I just want to get this all over with.”

  “This climb?”

  “The whole trip.”

  Petras nodded. That nod said, I know the feeling. “I’m worried about Hollinger.”

  “He’ll be okay,” I said, not quite sure why I said it. I recalled the way he’d been sitting in the tent across from me last night, his disembodied voice calling to me in the darkness. I was wondering what happened to you. It suddenly occurred to me that Hollinger had probably been awake when I’d left the tent. I would ask him about it, but I’d wait until we were safely on the other side of the icefall. The last thing I wanted to do was spook him before the climb.

  Twenty minutes later, Andrew had rigge
d a pretty decent rope-and-pulley system at the base of the arch and was prepared to begin his climbalong the belly of the arch. While his plan had sounded ridiculous, watching him execute it only reconfirmed it. Several times he nearly lost his grip, flailing one-handed by a single cam, suspended from the bottom of the arch as his legs dangled over the abyss. A fall from this height would ensure death, and it didn’t matter if it was the icefall beneath us or a cushion of mattresses; the sudden stop upon landing would be enough to reconfigure someone’s internal organs.

  Andrew had also clipped the second safety line to his belt, and Curtis tied it to an anchor on our side of the arch. This would be the line we’d use to send our gear so we wouldn’t have to cross with any extra weight on our shoulders.

  “Holy shit,” Chad commented as Andrew finally touched down on the other side of the canyon. The entire commute had taken him three full minutes. “I can’t believe the dickhead pulled it off.” He cupped his hands to the sides of his mouth and shouted, “You’re a fucking nutcase—you know that, Trumbauer? A fucking nutcase!”

  “He’s also the first person to ever set foot on that side of the canyon,” Curtis said, not without some awe in his voice.

  Petras began applauding, and we all quickly followed suit. Only Hollinger didn’t join in. He remained perched at the base of one of the stone towers, a haunted look in his eyes. The wound at his temple had scabbed over but looked stark and severe against the sudden paleness of his face. His own beard—like mine—had materialized in mangy patches, like miniature crop circles. The frigid Himalayan wind had chapped and split his lips. They were the lips of a leper.

  Yet Andrew’s success had reinvigorated the rest of us. Petras and Curtis rigged our gear to the second line and shoved the packs over the abyss. On Andrew’s end, he’d angled the line so that it stood at a gradual decline. The packs rolled across the line toward Andrew as if on a zip line. After he’d finished collecting our gear, he waved both arms as if signaling an aircraft to land.

  Chad was anxious to climb next. He popped in the earbuds tohis iPod and allowed Curtis to boost him up using Andrew’s rope-and-pulley system until he was able to grasp the first of the cams. Curtis secured the safety line and fed it out to him as Chad loped like an ape, hand over hand, going twice as fast as Andrew had.

  “Let’s keep the train moving,” Curtis said.

  Petras motioned to Hollinger. “Come on, bro. You and me. We’re up.”

  Like a zombie, Hollinger stood and strapped on his helmet. With the enthusiasm of someone walking to the electric chair, he unzipped his parka and stomped his feet in the snow. Petras secured himself to Hollinger with a tertiary line and told Hollinger to go ahead. Without a word, Hollinger mounted the stone parapet that preceded the arch. Curtis clapped his back and told him everything would be cool, man.

  “Yeah,” Hollinger said, offering Curtis a half smile. “Cool, man.” He swung out and gripped the camming device on the first try.

  Meanwhile, Chad was nearly all the way across and on the other side of the canyon. He was already shouting praise to himself.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Petras assured Hollinger as he continued to climb.

  “You’re up,” Curtis said and helped Petras across to the first cam. The moment Petras’s feet left the platform and swung out into open space, my stomach cramped and I buckled over.

  Curtis must have heard me groan. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re next, Shakes.” Over the past two weeks, Chad’s pet name for me had caught on.

  “Shit,” I moaned. “You go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  “Quite. I gotta make a pit stop.”

  Curtis laughed, running the safety line through his own karabiners. He genuflected and stepped out onto the parapet. Before reaching forthe first camming device, he turned back to me and said, “Can you imagine old Shotsky doing this? Lucky bastard is probably sipping hot chocolate and flipping through girlie magazines back at camp.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lucky bastard …”

  I scurried around the other side of the pass and ducked behind a stand of stone pylons. Unbuckling my trousers and squatting, I groaned as I squirted out a ribbon of hot, brown fluid onto the snow. My stomach growled and felt like a fist clenching and unclenching.

  Back at the arch, Curtis was halfway across and moving fast. I untied the safe line at my end and ran Andrew’s secondary line through the karabiners at my waist. Then I climbed to the edge of the platform and reached out for the first cam. For a moment, I was hypnotized at the rise and swell of the icefall below. Looking at it too long was like looking into a pocket watch swinging like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Tearing my eyes away, I gripped the cam and kicked off the platform. My legs swung over the abyss.

  The trick was to not think about it. Hand over hand, I swung from cam to cam, finding it easier as I progressed, fueled by the sheer exhilaration of it. In fact, I was moving so fast I was closing in on Curtis, who was only two or three cams ahead of me.

  “Catchin’ up to you, big man,” I called, laughing.

  “No chance, white boy!”

  “Shake your ass, Booker—I’m on your tail.”

  On the other side of the canyon, Chad pumped a hand in the air, egging us on.

  “You on vacation up here, Booker?” I chided. “You planning to hang around here all day?”

  “Yeah … sure …” He was running out of breath.

  “Yeah …” I was running out of breath now, too.

  “If you think—,” Curtis began. Then there sounded a metallic thunk, and one of Curtis’s hands fell away from the camming device. A second after that, gravity pulled him straight down. He did notmake a sound; the only sound was the whir of the safety line gathering slack as Curtis dropped.

  “Curtis!”

  When the slack ran out, Curtis’s falling body jerked at the end of the line, his arms still flailing. He should have stopped right there, dangling like bait at the end of the line, but then there was a second sound—twink!—as the safety line snapped. The release sent Curtis into a spiral, cartwheeling down, down, down.

  Mesmerized, I watched him plummet, his arms and legs suddenly still. He shuttled down until he was a tiny smear in midair, no different than an imperfection on a photograph. A moment later, he was swallowed up by the icefall.

  And he was gone …

  “Curtis!” someone shouted from the other side of the canyon. “Curtis! Curtis, you—”

  The only remnant of Curtis was the small, wallet-sized photograph of his daughter that had somehow come loose during the fall and now fluttered like a butterfly out over the abyss until that, too, disappeared.

  For a moment, I felt as though I’d blinked out of existence. One minute I was dangling from beneath the stone arch, and the next I was floating in some cottony, colorless orbit. Sound was nonexistent. I could see nothing, nothing at all. Everything was white; everything was black. The only feeling was the needling prick of heat shooting up through my body.

  Curtis was dead. Curtis was—

  “Shut up!” Petras shouted from across the reach. “We’ve still got a man out there!”

  I clung with both hands to the single cam above my head, staring at the roiling channels of ice at the bottom of the canyon. Curtis was gone, completely disappeared …

  Petras called out to me, “You’ve got to get your head back in the game, man! Come on! Forget what you just saw! Climb to me, Tim!

  Climb to me!”

  I managed to pull my gaze from the spot where I’d last seen Curtis Booker and to the opposite side of the canyon. The others were there, their bodies smeared as my vision refused to clear. But I hardly saw them. What I saw was the loose end of the safety line that had snapped and now whipped in the wind.

  Which meant I had no safety line …

  “Come on, Tim!” Petras hollered. The others joined him. “Come on, man! Get your fucking head in the game!”

 
Head in the game, head in the game, head in the game …

  I blinked several times, trying to focus not on the dangling section of rope but on Petras, Andrew, Chad, and Hollinger. Holding my breath, I reached for the next cam. I crossed without difficulty. But when I reached for the next one, I found it wasn’t fully there: the spiked base was still fixed to the rock but the head was missing, the titanium having snapped off in Curtis’s hand. There was no way for me to grab hold of it; it was just a mere glint of metal jutting from the underside of the arch. And the cam beyond that was four feet away.

  “Come on!” Petras urged.

  “I can’t!” I shouted. “The cam’s gone!”

  “Grab the next one!”

  “It’s too far!”

  “Tim,” Andrew interrupted, “swing out and grab the next cam. You can do it. It’s not too far.”

  “It’s too far!” I cried. My feet suddenly felt like they weighed fifty pounds each.

  “It’s not!” Petras added. “You can do it! It’s just an arm’s length away.”

  I strained, trying to reach past the broken cam to the next one in line. It was too damn far. An impossibility. The only possible way would be to start a momentum, to swing out and grab it. But if I missed, the strain on my other arm would be too much. I’d surely suffer the same fate as Curtis.

  “Stop! Wait! Don’t fucking move, Shakes! Don’t fucking move!” Chad hooked himself up to a fresh line, intent on climbing out toward me with a safe line he had looped around his shoulder. “I’m coming! Hang on!”

  “Too … dangerous,” I called, but I doubt anyone heard me. My voice was no louder than a child’s sob. And my goddamn feet were weighing me down. I closed my eyes and thought of the comic books I used to read as a kid, the ones with Plastic Man who could stretch to preternatural lengths.

  “Tim—”

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Chad hanging from beneath the stone arch facing me, no more than four feet away. He hung from one camming device while harnessed to a series of ropes. He shook the wound safe line off his shoulder, down his arm, and into his hand.