The Ascent Page 21

  “It’s done,” Andrew said, climbing out of the tent. “Let’s go.”

  We packed the gear and headed north along the pass. In no time we came to a flattened wall of rock that rose into the heavens, its peak obscured by cumulus clouds. No less than one hundred yards above us, visible like an eye socket in the face of the mountain, a cave yawned black against the whitish gray stone. Icicles the length of jousting poles hung from the ceiling of the cave, and a grayish tongue of ice lolled out from the floor of the opening.

  “That’s it,” Andrew said. “The entrance to the Hall of Mirrors.”

  Beside me, Hollinger’s teeth chattered. I asked him if he was okay, but he didn’t answer. He’d been in his own world since Curtis’s death.

  “Come on.” Andrew began scaling the face of the mountain.

  It was more difficult than it looked. It was a sheer vertical climb, dependent on anchors and lines rather than hands and feet. Cleared of my fever, I was overcome by newfound strength, but it was still a strenuous, tedious task.

  Surprisingly, Chad struggled. Halfway up the face, he dangled by one hand and gaped at me as I passed him. I saw a mixture of fear and defeat in his eyes.

  “I’m beat,” he said simply, his voice impossibly small. “I can’t keep doing this.”

  “We’re almost there. Follow me.”

  He groaned but swung his free hand back against the rock. “Okay,” he said, shuddering. “Lead the way, Shakes.”

  Together we climbed through the mouth of the cave, our final anchors planted firmly in the tongue of ice spilling from the opening. Dragging myself up, I felt Chad clasp my ankle. “Shakes,” he croaked. I reached down and grabbed his wrist, then hoisted him up. I’d never seen his face so empty before.

  It was only a cave—dark, narrow, full of echo. We got out our electric lanterns, but only Hollinger’s worked. He was hesitant to lead the way, so Andrew intercepted the lantern from him and movedfarther down the throat of the cave. The opening had been fairly wide—a truck could probably drive through it with little difficulty—but just a few yards in, the walls seemed to come in and suffocate us. After a dozen or so steps, I could touch the ceiling. It was covered in ice; snow fell into my face.

  “I can’t see a damn thing,” Andrew said, which was bad because he was the one with the lantern.

  It was true; all I could see was the yellow glow of the lantern in Andrew’s hands, but beyond that, the walls were virtually invisible. Yet I could feel them closing closer and closer around us like a great bear hug choking the life out of us all …

  “Keep the lantern close to the ground, Andrew,” Petras said from somewhere behind me. “Let’s not fall down any cracks in the rock.”

  Andrew lowered the light. “Good idea.”

  “This can’t be right,” Chad whispered. I hadn’t realized he was so close to me until he spoke. “Stop.” He gripped the waistband of my pants. “Let’s tie on together.”

  We ran a line between the two of us. When Petras passed, I asked if he wanted in.

  “I’m bigger’n the two of you put together and multiplied by three,” he grumbled, moving past us in the dark, barely visible. “I’ll do you more harm tying on if I happen to fall down a hole. I’m good on my own, guys. But thanks.”

  “This is fucked up,” Chad said, expelling breath in my face. He couldn’t have been more than three inches from me, but I couldn’t see him. His hands snaked around my waist, clipping his line to the clasps at my belt. Up ahead, Andrew’s lantern was diminishing.

  “Let’s keep up,” I suggested.

  We walked until the opening of the cave was nothing more than a pinpoint of gray daylight behind us. Our footfalls echoed loudly, and our voices were even louder. I didn’t even have to fully extend my arms to touch the walls on either side. They had narrowed considerably.

  “I see light,” Andrew said. It was a whisper, but in the confines of the cave, it boomed back to us. “Up ahead.”

  A moment later, I could see it, too: a pale aquamarine light seeming to emanate from the opposite end of the cave. As we drew closer, the light appeared to be funneling down, like a balcony spotlight shining down on a stage.

  Andrew dimmed the electric lantern. “Careful crossing over.” He paused, and his legs hinged with exaggerated pantomime over a jagged ridge of stalagmites. “It’s sharp.”

  Blind, I stepped in a pool of cold water, which immediately soaked through my boot and layers of socks. “Shit.” My toes went numb instantly.

  Chad’s fingers pressed into my forearm, but he didn’t say anything. I could just barely make out a ghostly blue hint of his profile as we neared the mysterious light issuing from above.

  We crossed into the antechamber and stopped.

  “Holy Christ,” Chad marveled.

  I, on the other hand, was speechless.

  It was a banquet hall–sized antechamber, the ceiling mostly comprised of crystalline spires and illuminated stalactites, except for the very center that appeared to be a perfect circle cut through the stone to the outside world, but on closer review, it was covered by several inches of solid ice. The result was a sort of ice-paned moonroof in the ceiling of the cave, the moonlight segregated into variously colored beams of light. The rainbow-colored light cast independent spheres of colored light on the frozen cave floor.

  Only in the center of the floor, where a section of each circle of light overlapped all the others and focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass, a perfect beam of white light melted the frozen snow from the cave floor, creating a star-shaped opening in the ice that revealed the blackened rock beneath.

  It was this display that initially captivated our attention. Together,we all walked slow circles around the shaft of light. Andrew doused the lantern and set it down, his gaze trained on the spotlight of white light in the center of the floor.

  Chad gripped my forearm and stopped walking. “Look around,” he said, his voice filled with awe. “Jesus Christ, Shakes, look around.”

  I looked.

  It was called the Hall of Mirrors because that was exactly what it was: an antechamber whose walls were existent only in the form of pure ice, perhaps fifteen inches thick, like great blocks of glass encapsulating the entire room. Light refracted off every wall of ice, a constant lamp, keeping the ice from being coated with frost and causing it to melt and refreeze, melt and refreeze, creating a mirrorlike finish to the walls of ice.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered, stepping into the center of the antechamber. I walked toward one of the walls, my reflection facing me, as perfect as it would be in a bathroom mirror. I reached out to my image’s hand. Our fingers touched.

  I looked up at my reflection and into my own eyes. Fear shook me. Cadaverous, sunken eyes, lipless mouth, a dark, patchy beard corrupting the lower half of my face—I was a ghost of the man I’d once been, a hint of the soul I’d once carried within me.

  Andrew’s reflection floated up behind mine. I felt his hand on my shoulder while watching his reflection place it there. “It’s who we really are,” his reflection said. “We may not like what we see, but the mirrors don’t lie. It’s who we are. And we have to accept that.”

  I dropped my hand away from the mirrored ice.

  “Can you believe this place?” Chad howled, a skeletal grin etched across his face. He scanned his own reflection in every wall, every mirror. “It’s like something out of a goddamn fairy tale. It’s amazing!”

  Before me, my reflection briefly blurred. I turned and tugged on the rope at my hip. I was still attached to Chad; he felt the tug and paused, staring down at the line, then in my direction. He looked at

  me with wide eyes and a creased brow.

  “Keep your voice down,” I warned him.

  “I’m just saying,” he went on, ignoring me. “This place is fucking outstanding!”

  I wound the rope around my hand, pulling him a few inches in my direction. When I spoke, it was no louder than a whisper. “I said keep your voice do
wn. In case you haven’t noticed, the fucking walls are vibrating with every sound that comes out of your big mouth.”

  “The spires in the ceiling, too,” Petras added, looking up. His voice was hardly louder than my own.

  Unbuckling Chad’s line from my karabiners, I tossed it at his feet and said, “Admire the place in silence.”

  He called me a dickhead, then wound his rope and slid it to his shoulder. “Place is as solid as a Diebold safe.” He tapped one of the glasslike walls.

  “It’s not a safe. It’s a tank,” Hollinger said quietly, walking around the circumference of the room. “I used to keep piranha in a ten-gallon tank when I was a kid. Real piranha. Used to feed ‘em goldfish once a day, and those buggers would tear them apart in seconds. Less than a minute after I’d drop the goldfish into the tank, there’d be nothing but a jagged little backbone at the bottom of the tank.” He paused to examine one of the walls up close, grazing the icy surface with his fingers. A plume of vapor blossomed from his chapped lips. “That’s what we’re in right now. A tank. A fish tank.”

  “But are we the piranha or the goldfish?” Petras asked, his question holding more weight than perhaps he intended.

  “Well,” Chad said, unsnapping his helmet and tossing it on the ground, “it’s a badass place, but it’s also a dead end.” He ran two fingers along the reflective surface of one of the glass walls. “We must have missed something.”

  “No.” Petras pointed across the antechamber to the farthest panel of ice. “Look above it.”

  The ice wall itself was maybe twenty feet high, the snow-encrusted ceiling coming down low to meet it, enormous icicles hanging over the upper part of the ice wall like fangs. However, it was possible to make out an opening between the ice walls and the ceiling of the cave, wider and more obvious in some places, crisscrossed by a network of interlocking spires of ice. The place Petras had pointed out appeared to be the widest opening along the shelf beyond which a natural ice cave recessed into the wall.

  “I see it,” I said.

  “It’s the only doorway out of this room,” Petras said. “That’s got to be it.”

  “It goes up,” Hollinger said.

  I turned to Andrew, but he was no longer standing behind me. He’d migrated to the center of the room and sat cross-legged in the snow directly beneath the skylight of ice. His eyes closed, his hands on his knees, he meditated. His entire body seemed to glow in the magnified light.

  “I feel like Neil fucking Armstrong.” Chad dropped to his knees and rifled through his backpack. “We should have brought a goddamn American flag.”

  “There’s this,” Hollinger said, pulling his Australian flag from his backpack like a magician pulling scarves from his sleeve. “Same colors.”

  Chad stood, a pickax in his hand, and grimaced at Hollinger. “That’s blasphemy. Put the goddamn thing away.”

  A meager grin broke out across Michael Hollinger’s bearded face. It was the first semblance of a smile he’d sported in days. “‘Australians all let us rejoice,’“ he sang in a low voice, “‘for we are young and free! We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea!’“

  Chad groaned and said, “The hell is ‘girt’?”

  As he sang, Hollinger flapped the flag like a matador would flap his cape and set it down unfurled on the ground. He saluted it and continued singing, while Petras and I chuckled.

  Then Petras joined Hollinger, both of them grinning like fiends, and I sidled up between them, saluting. Not knowing the words to the Australian national anthem, Petras and I hummed quietly along to Hollinger’s off-key, low-pitched singing.

  “Yeah, sure, you guys play your games while I make history.” Chad hefted the pickax and dragged it across the snow to the ice wall, staring up at the ledge and the partially hidden ice cave above it. “Guess we’ll see how easy these walls are to climb,” he said, raising the pickax over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. You fools keep singing.”

  He swung the pickax into the mirrored wall of ice. The sound was like a gunshot going off in close quarters, reverberating throughout the antechamber.

  From his spot on the ground, Andrew opened his eyes.

  A sound like splitting wood came from above.

  The three of us stopped singing and gaped upward in time to see a jagged boulder of packed snow and ice roughly the size of a love seat drop from the ceiling. It whistled like a missile as it fell.

  Chad screamed, bringing his hands up, not quick enough to jump out of its path. It pounded him to the ground in a spray of ice particles, the sound like two automobiles colliding on the highway. The entire antechamber vibrated—the vibrations raced up my legs and rattled my lungs—and Chad bucked once beneath the weight of the boulder. A gout of blood erupted from his mouth and instantly sprayed the snow around him. His head slammed against the ground as the boulder, driven vertical into the ground, leaned back with a deafening creak and slammed against the ice wall, coming to rest at an angle.

  The force of it hitting the ice wall caused a minor avalanche of smaller boulders, and spears of ice planted themselves all around us, upright in the snow.

  I tripped over my feet rushing to Chad’s side. Unbelievably, he was still alive. His eyes had a distant look to them, and his lips were frothed with blood. He tried to raise his head and speak as I knelt over him.

  “Don’t talk,” I said.

  The boulder had landed on his pelvis, no doubt shattering the bone and driving him straight into the frozen ground. There was surprisingly little blood … but as I sat there gripping his hand, a deepening red stain spread from beneath him and soaked into the snow.

  Petras appeared at Chad’s other side. He placed one hand against the boulder. We’d never be able to move it in a million years. And even if we could …

  “Jesus,” Hollinger muttered from across the cave. He was still standing beside his flag. “Jesus, oh, Jesus … Jesus …”

  “Hurts,” Chad managed. A fresh gout of blood burped from his mouth, dribbled down his neck, and pooled at the base of his throat.

  “Shhh,” I told him. “Don’t fucking talk, Chad. Don’t talk.”

  “ … urrrr …,” he gurgled.

  Petras’s eyes locked with mine. There was no denying what he was thinking.

  “Jesus,” Hollinger whimpered. “Oh … oh … Christ …”

  “ … urrrrrr …”

  I could hear the wet gurgle of blood at the back of Chad’s throat—

  Andrew stood and negotiated around the fallen chunks of ice to arrive behind me. He said nothing as he stared at Chad. One of his hands rested on my shoulder in a gesture I initially mistook as camaraderie. But then he pushed me aside.

  I scrambled backward on my ass, the seat of my pants soaking in Chad’s blood. I glanced down at my hands and saw my palms were sticky and red.

  “ … urrrrrr …”

  Without expression, Andrew grabbed the pickax Chad had dropped only two seconds before the boulder pinned him to the ground. He raised it above his head—

  “No!” Hollinger shouted.

  —and drove the spiked end into Chad’s head.

  Chad’s fingers dug into the snow, and one of his legs kicked. Blood sprayed across Petras’s face, but he looked too stunned to flinch.

  Coming to one knee, Andrew steadied what remained of Chad’s skull with one hand and pried out the pickax with the other. There was a wet, sucking sound as the spike pulled free of Chad’s head. It was a sound I feared would haunt me until my dying day.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” Hollinger screamed. “Are you a fucking animal?”

  Andrew stood and tossed the dripping pickax into the snow. He was frighteningly calm. There was a faint constellation of blood across the front of his coat.

  “What did you do?”

  Andrew slowly turned his head in Hollinger’s direction. “Keep your voice down.”

  “You’re fucking mad!” Hollinger cried. “You hear me, Trumbauer? You’re
fucking mad!”

  “I said keep your voice down. The last thing we want is more shit to fall from the ceiling.”

  “Jesus!” Hollinger bellowed, throwing his hands into the air. His eyes locked on Andrew, he backed against the wall, hugging himself.

  Andrew went to his backpack and unsnapped the roll of tarpaulin from a set of straps. He unraveled the tarpaulin and carried it to what remained of Chad Nando and draped it over the corpse. Only Chad’s legs and boots protruded from the other side of the boulder, twisted at awkward, unnatural angles. It reminded me of Dorothy’s house falling on the witch in The Wizard of Oz. I half expected Chad’s feet to curl up like deflated party favors at any moment.

  Sick to my stomach, I rolled over and spat into the snow. I wanted to vomit but couldn’t; there was nothing of substance in my stomach. A frothy string of mucus drooled from my lower lip and froze on the ice.

  “You killed him,” Petras said. He’d scooted back against one of the ice walls after being sprayed in the face with Chad’s blood.

  “It had to be done,” Andrew responded calmly. “You think he was going to walk out of here? You think he would have lasted more than ten minutes like that? And let’s not forget the pain—”

  “It’s murder,” Petras said.

  “And I’d hope any of you would do the same for me if it came down to it.”

  Righting myself against a mound of snow, I grabbed fistfuls of snow and rubbed my hands together, desperate to get Chad’s blood off me.

  Andrew threw his pack down at the mouth of the cave, mostly hidden in shadows, and unrolled his sleeping bag. He spoke to no one the rest of the night, which was fine by us.

  6

  “WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?” HOLLINGER WAIS-

  pered in the dark. The only suggestion of light spilled from the window of ice above our heads—the milky, dreamlike glow of moonlight.

  I hadn’t been asleep, but Hollinger’s voice startled me nonetheless. Staring at the disc of translucent ice above my head, I said, “We’re all going mad. Slowly but surely. All of us.”

  Andrew was asleep on the other side of the antechamber; his snores echoed off the walls. Petras, Hollinger, and I had bedded down as far away from him as we could get. We huddled together like three rabbits caught in a snare.