The Ascent Read online

  Two red splotches of blood fell on the back of my left hand. I touched my nose and found it was bleeding again. My headache was back, too, and my respiration had grown increasingly labored.

  “The Canyon of Souls,” I whispered. Even under my breath, my voice carried over the arroyo and hung there suspended like a cadre of angels taking flight.

  11

  BACK IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS, PETRAS’S SNORING

  was like the idling of a pickup truck. I clambered down the icy pylon and strode across the chamber, my spirits still lifted from the sight of the canyon. Andrew’s intention was to cross it. Crossing it, I knew, was impossible. But moreover, something like that was not meant to be crossed, was not meant to be overcome. It was just what Petras had said—some hidden lands, some beyuls, were not meant to be found and conquered. Quite often they only revealed themselves to those pure enough to see them.

  I crawled into my sleeping bag, my eyes slamming shut, my body racked with exhaustion. Then I realized something and sat bolt upright, my eyes flipping open.

  Hollinger was still gone.

  I leaned over and poked Petras on the shoulder. “Wake up.”

  “Hmm …”

  “Hollinger never came back from taking a leak.”

  Petras’s eyes fluttered open. He coughed into one fist, clearing his throat, and sat up against a large stone. We exchanged a glance; the look in his eyes did not make me feel any better.

  “How long has it been since he left?”

  “Maybe forty minutes,” I guessed.

  “Come on,” Petras said, standing.

  We crossed the chamber toward the mouth of the tunnel, passingbeneath the pastel light sliding down through the eyelet above our heads. We passed the massive finger of packed snow that sat at an angle against one of the mirrored walls, the crinkly blue tarpaulin spread out at its base. Chad’s blood had spread and frozen into the cracks in the ice.

  Together we paused before the mouth of the tunnel. Midway through, it banked at an angle so it was impossible to see the opening at the other end. Petras cupped his hands about his mouth and shouted Hollinger’s name into the tunnel. The echo seemed to go on forever.

  Hollinger did not answer.

  Entering the tunnel, I extended both hands to feel my way along the wall. My shins barked against calcified spires of stone rising in various angles from the ground. Petras followed close behind me, the sound of his respiration like sandpaper against concrete. Only a dozen steps into the tunnel and we were in absolute darkness. I held my hand just an inch in front of my face and wiggled my fingers. I couldn’t see a damn thing.

  “He could have—,” I began but cut myself off as my right foot struck something loose and metallic. I froze.

  “The hell was that?” Petras whispered.

  Crouching, I patted the ground like a blind man. Whatever it was I’d kicked it somewhere ahead of me. I crawled, hearing the knees of my cargo pants chafe against the stone and the distant sound of cave water dripping from rocky overhangs. Finally my hands fell upon the object, causing my breath to catch in my throat. I knew what it was without picking it up. “It’s Hollinger’s lantern.”

  Petras said nothing.

  “Hollinger!” I yelled. “Michael Hollinger!”

  “He’s not in here.”

  “He could have fallen, knocked himself out.” I cranked the switch on the lantern, but the light wouldn’t come on. “He could

  have struck his head on something and—” “He’s not in here.” “And—”

  “Tim, he’s not here.”

  I knew he was right. I stood, leaving the broken lantern on the ground, and continued down the tunnel. As I turned the corner, I could see the fading light of day spilling in through the opening of the cave. The tongue of ice glittered on the floor of the cave as I approached. “Mike? Hollinger?” My voice was insignificant. “Tim,” Petras said, far behind me. “Careful …” I crept to the edge of the cave, heedful not to slip on the icy tongue. Gripping a protruding rock from the wall of the cave, I peered down the hundred-yard drop to the valley below. “Oh, Jesus, fuck,” I groaned. “What is it?”

  “Hollinger,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Petras shuffled toward me through the darkness. He stopped behind me, and I could feel his breath along the sweaty nape of my neck.

  Hollinger’s body was shattered on the rocks below. He’d taken his helmet off, and his head had split open like a cantaloupe. “Christ,” I stammered. “Jesus Christ, man …” Petras dug his fingers into my shoulder. “Come on.” “He’s dead. He’s fuckin’ dead.” Those fingers pressed harder. “Let’s go.”

  12

  I MUST HAVE DOZED OFF. BECAUSE WHEN I OPENED

  my eyes, the quality of the light coming through the hole in the ceiling had changed. I felt groggy and dry mouthed, and a chill rippled through my body. My eyes stung so I closed them again, shivering.

  13

  PETRAS SHOOK MY SHOULDER. “WAKE UP.”

  My eyes fluttered. My head was stuffed with cotton. “What happened?”

  “We found Hollinger at the bottom of the cliff,” he said, and it all came rushing back. “You threw up, then passed out.”

  Shakily, I sat up. We were still in the Hall of Mirrors, my body sweating beneath a stack of sleeping bags.

  “He didn’t fall,” I said. “Hollinger didn’t fall, man.”

  Petras sighed and said, “I want to show you something.” He withdrew a bundle of black rope from his backpack, cinched in a bow by a metal clasp. “It’s the line that snapped when Curtis died.” He held up the frayed end. It was the first I’d seen of it. I could see that not all of it was frayed—just a bit. Petras must have noticed the realization in my eyes. “You see it, right?”

  I sat up farther on my elbows. “It’s—”

  “It’s been cut,” Petras said. “It’s a kernmantle line made of nylon and polyethylene. These lines don’t break.” He paused. “Just like titanium camming devices don’t break.”

  “I know what you’re getting at,” I muttered.

  “It’s awfully suspicious.”

  Again I turned my gaze on the tarpaulin. The snow had soaked up much of Chad’s blood.

  “Maybe it’s a game,” Petras went on. “Maybe it’s for some other reason. You said Andrew was going to give Shotsky twenty thousand dollars to come here, that he wanted to help him be a better man or some such shit. But what does that really mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What better way to get rid of six people without suspicion than to bring them out here?”

  I stared at the rope in Petras’s hands. The partially frayed end appeared to have been cut too perfectly, halfway through the line, just to weaken it enough …

  “But there are easier ways to do it,” I suggested. “It’s tedious and dangerous cutting ropes and breaking cams. Why not take a gun out here and blow our brains out? Or poison our food, for Christ’s sake?”

  Petras’s eyebrows arched. “The missing food. The food we were convinced we left back in the valley, remember?”

  “Yes …”

  “Maybe he’d planned to do just that. He gets up in the middle of the night and collects our food, poisons it, puts it back. Only he didn’t get a chance to put it back—”

  “Because Shotsky interrupted him. Shotsky woke up early that morning, wanted to go back to base camp.”

  “So maybe Andrew ditches the food, tosses it down a ravine or something. Pretends we left it in the valley.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Something had just occurred to me. A tacky sweat broke out along my forehead.

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe he only had enough time to put something in just some of the food.” I added, “Shotsky died of a heart attack.”

  “Yeah …?”

  “What happened to me the other day—my heart racing, sweating and delirious …”

  “What about it?”

  Swallowing a hard lump in my throat
, I said, “After Shotsky died, we went through his gear, and I took some of his food. I’ve been eating his food.”

  Petras exhaled sour breath. His lips were peeling, and his cheeks were flaking with dried skin. He wound the rope back up and stowed it inside his backpack. “Given all this,” he said after a moment, “the question is—why would Andrew do it?”

  “I know why,” I said. I thought of what Andrew had said to me last night when I’d gone to take a piss and he’d startled me by sneaking up on me in the tunnel. Because I want you to blame yourself, Tim, he’d said. I want you to blame yourself.

  “Tell me,” Petras said.

  “Because we’ve all done something to hurt him,” I said. “We’ve all done something he feels we need to be punished for.”

  Petras could only stare at me. Looking at him for too long, I got dizzy.

  “You ready for more bad news?” Petras said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The rest of our food,” he said. “It’s gone.” “Shit.”

  “Could have happened while we slept, could have happened when we were stumbling through the cave looking for Hollinger.” He rolled his big shoulders. “Doesn’t much matter when it happened. Outcome’s the same.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Your nose is bleeding.”

  “It’s okay.” I kicked the sleeping bags off me. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Your fever’s back.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re going to have to sound more convincing than that.”

  I managed a weak, spiritless smile … which quickly faded as the reality of our predicament settled around me. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. What the hell are we gonna do, man?”

  Chapter 15

  1

  BEFORE LEAVING THE HALL OF MIRRORS, I REMEM-

  bered Chad’s Zippo lighter and went over to the display of blue tarp at the base of the frozen pillar.

  Dropping to one knee, I lifted a corner of the tarp to reveal a rigid paw, fingers curled like the petals of some exotic plant, the tips of each finger an unnatural purple gray. I rummaged through the pockets of his coat for the lighter. I could feel the frozen solidness of his body within his clothes.

  Twice, I closed my eyes and counted backward from ten until the rolling wave of nausea subsided. Then I leaned over to dig through his other pockets. In the process, I accidentally brushed the tarpaulin from his face. What was revealed was a darkening, bloodless scowl, the eyes already dried to crystals, the lips split and receded from the bloodstained teeth. The gash at the top of Chad’s head was ringed with frozen red crystals, the bone dusted in a frosty film.

  In one pocket, my fingers closed around the lighter. I pulled it out, jostling Chad’s body which rocked like a hollow log, and scuttled backward in the snow.

  I flicked the flint and watched the kick of blue flame leap from

  the wick. “We’re going to have to make it last,” I told Petras.

  Like ancient explorers guided solely by the stars, Petras and I descended the hundred-yard drop to the snow-covered quarry below, leaving the Hall of Mirrors and the Canyon of Souls behind. While we’d packed our gear in preparation for our escape, I’d briefly considered mentioning to Petras about how I’d found the Canyon of Souls. But at the last minute, I decided against it. To speak of it, I thought, would be to cheapen it. If there was one thing of beauty I would remember from this trip, I wanted it to be that and to keep it selfishly to myself.

  We hooked ourselves together by a double helix of lines, then looped the lines through friction brakes, which were metal rings in the shape of figure eights. After a simultaneous intake of breath, we descended the face quickly but with caution, our boot nails scraping along the frozen mountainside. The wind was arctic and biting, seeking out and attacking every exposed inch of flesh. My eyes began to tear in a matter of seconds.

  I paused only once to glance down at the concavity of frozen earth pocked by snow-crusted boulders. The ice glowed in the dark, the flecks of mica in the exposed stone reflecting the moonlight in a dazzling spectacle. And, of course, there was Michael Hollinger’s body, itself a shimmering assemblage of crooked arms and legs, a phosphorescent trail of blood, black like crude oil in the night, snaking from the split in his skull …

  “Don’t look,” Petras said. “Keep moving.”

  At the bottom, our heavy boots crunched through the frozen crust of ice on the snow. Again I peered over at Hollinger’s body. There didn’t appear to be any footprints in the snow around him.

  “I’m guessing he was pushed,” I said.

  Petras wound his rope around one shoulder. He looked about to say something when he froze, his arms stopping in some semblance of a boxing stance.

  “What is it?” I said, following Petras’s gaze up the wall we’d just descended toward the mouth of the cave.

  “I thought I saw someone.”

  “Someone?”

  “I think he’s watching us,” he said, his voice lower.

  It was too dark to see anything.

  At my feet, Hollinger’s dead eyes, frozen in their sockets, were white, pupil-less stones.

  Petras blew briskly into his palms, flexed his fingers, and tugged his gloves back on. When he turned to me, there were frozen bullets of ice clinging to his beard and eyelashes. His eyes looked as if two steel-colored pitons had been driven deep into the sockets.

  “Forget it. Trick of the light,” he said, though he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

  Beneath the cover of night, we hiked along the ridge, the snow a glittering carpet of diamonds, until exhaustion and the freezing temperature caused my muscles to seize.

  “Petras—” I keeled over against a pillar of stone, clutching my body with stiffening arms.

  Petras looked equally exhausted. He slumped beside me, his immense weight pressing me flat against the rock, though I was grateful for his warmth.

  “No more,” I uttered. “Not tonight.”

  “Your nose is bleeding again.”

  I pulled off my glove and attempted to wipe the blood away, but it had frozen in a streak down my lips.

  We bivouacked beside the stone pillar, which kept most of the freezing wind from attacking us, and took turns keeping watch. Most of our gear was soaking wet, so it took forever to get a small fire going, which died out halfway through the night. But it was probably for the best: we didn’t want to bring any further attention on us.

  While Petras slept, I sat wrapped in my sleeping bag with thepickax in my lap. With the fire out, there was nothing but our sleeping bags and our own body heat to keep us warm. The tent was only about ten degrees warmer than outside. The wind screamed down the canyons, rattling like a runaway locomotive. I listened, forcing my eyes wide just to keep them open. They didn’t want to stay open. If I drifted too far into my own thoughts, I’d fall asleep, lulled by the numbing calm of dreams and the painlessness of frozen nerve endings. I set the timer on my watch for every three minutes—loud enough to jar me from an unplanned doze yet quiet enough not to disturb Petras.

  I was just nodding off when the alarm on my watch made my head jerk up, my eyes blinking repeatedly. Lightning flashed, causing the tent to glow and the plastic windows to fill with brilliant blue light.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  Backlit by the lightning, stark against the canvas of the tent, a figure briefly appeared.

  An electric dread coursed through my body. Gripping the handle of the pickax, I leaned toward the tent flaps. I thrust my head and shoulders out into the freezing night, blindly stabbing the pickax into the darkness in front of me. It had started to sleet, and it was impossible to see beyond the far corner of the tent. A second finger of lightning threw the valley into a wash of pale blue snow and bleak, shapeless shadows.

  There was no one out there.

  —Tim …

  I shook my
head, closed my eyes. “No. Not now, Hannah. Please.”

  —Come with me, Tim …

  “I can’t. You need to go away and let me keep my head straight.” Just hearing my own voice out loud caused a tremulous, self-indulgent laugh to rumble in my throat. “Jesus, I’m cracking up.”

  Retracting the pickax into the tent, I took one final glimpse of the surrounding gully before withdrawing my head and shoulders through the canvas flaps.

  In the morning, we continued along the outer ridge on empty stomachs. Beyond the peaks of the Himalayas, the sky looked scratchy and sepia toned, like an old filmstrip. Low-hanging cumulus clouds drew together like brooding eyebrows against the horizon. The sun was thumb smeared and pink. I began to convince myself that Petras and I were the only two men alive on the planet.

  At lunchtime, Petras discovered oyster crackers at the bottom of his pack, which we shared while sucking down mouthfuls of snow.

  “Andrew’s just as dead as we are,” Petras said after half a day of silence. His beard was fuller and white with freezing snow. Bits of ice dropped off as he spoke. “There’s no hope for him, either.”

  But he has our food, I thought. He has the stove to make heat and the means to make a fire that can last through the night. He has the advantage of knowing where the hell we are, while we don’t know where he is. I thought all these things but didn’t say them. It hurt my throat to talk, and my nose had started bleeding again: the mound of melting snow in my hand was streaked red.

  “It’ll take over a week to get back down the way we came.” Petras chewed the oyster crackers like a cow chewing cud—working his jaw in a slow rotation. “And that’s if we can even manage getting back just the two of us. Of course, that’s if we had food, a better source of heat, fire …”

  “This is all stuff I know,” I informed him bitterly. “What are you suggesting? We just lie down in the snow, let it cover us up? Stick a few plastic flags around and hope maybe years from now someone will find us?”