The Ascent Read online

  Andrew stood above me, eyes gleaming, blood drooling from his mouth. He said something incomprehensible and raised the pickax above his head.

  Without thinking, I lifted one leg and drove my spike-soled boot into Andrew’s left knee.

  He issued a strangled gah sound, and the pickax fell from his hands and clattered down the slope behind him. Eyes widening, he locked me in his stare. Then he keeled backward, tumbling down the incline. At the bottom, he slid clear across the frozen earth. One of his legs got tangled in the straps of his backpack, preventing him from pitching straight off the cliff.

  I leaned against the rocks and stood, wincing at the pain in my gut. It felt like someone holding a hot iron against the lining of my stomach. Trailing one hand along the stone wall for support, I inched my way down the incline. The sleet had started to let up, but what had already fallen had frozen on the embankment. It was a tedious trek to the bottom.

  I kept my eyes on Andrew. He didn’t move.

  —bloodblood—

  My stomach cramped. I groaned and bent forward, tears spilling from my eyes. The world turned me on my side; I crashed to the ground and slid a few inches on the ice, the brass buckles on my boots scraping the surface.

  In a flash, Andrew’s face was directly above mine. I tried to breathe but found my throat had closed—he was strangling me with one of the rappel lines from his backpack. I coughed, sputtered, kicked. Spit frothed from his lips; his teeth were clenched so hard they could have shattered under the pressure.

  My vision grew spotty and pixilated. Andrew’s face broke apart like someone dropping a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. I was aware of my

  fingers struggling to work their way between the line and my throat …

  Hannah stood behind Andrew. While Andrew faded from my field of vision, Hannah shone bright like an angel—a dakini. “Ehhh…”

  I couldn’t form words, couldn’t breathe.

  —Stay with me, Tim, Hannah said. She looked down, and I followed her gaze. I spotted the kernmantle rope looped around Andrew’s leg, the other end of the rope still fixed to his backpack. As I looked at the pack, it disintegrated into fragments of light, dispersed into darkness. Andrew’s face was a flash of disjoined images—a set of teeth, a single eyeball, a dripping strand of hair.

  Almost on reflex, I kicked my left leg. My boot struck Andrew’s backpack with enough force to send it sliding across the frozen plateau. I could see it as if in slowmotion.

  —bloodblind—

  The backpack slowed as it reached the edge of the cliff and nearly stopped—did stop—then went over the side, dropping like the anchor of a steamship. The rope trailed it, eating up slack by the millisecond, also vanishing over the side. Then I saw the rope go taut, watched Andrew’s leg jerk out from under him, and felt my throat open up.

  “Over—,” he began—an attempt at shouting my last name or an attempt at proclaiming his sudden fate, I did not know which—but was cut off after the weight of his pack pulled him over the cliff. One second he was glaring at me with the yellow eyes of a feral cat, and the next he was gone, gone.

  Silence fell on me. I sucked in a lungful of air and choked. Bleary eyed, I blinked repeatedly and waited for the pixels of my vision to fully reassemble themselves. Once I caught my breath, I eased myself onto my elbows. The pain in my gut was no less severe, and I couldn’t tell if the bleeding had let up any.

  I crawled to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the black abyss. I couldn’t see the bottom. It was no different than gazing into space.

  Exhausted, I rolled over onto my back and turned toward the stars. There were millions of them. Billions. The moon, hooked like a sharp finger curling out of a wisp of gray clouds, glowed above me. As my vision cleared, I could make out the swirled blue craters in its surface. They were like the charcoal-colored veins in an uncut slab of marble.

  8

  ONCE MY HEART SLOWED. I ROSE. THE PUNCTURE

  wound in my abdomen throbbed dully. The blood on my hands had dried, my shirt and pants blackened and frozen with it.

  A shapeless hump rose out of the snow across the ridge. It was my backpack. I hobbled toward it, wincing with each step. The shiny foil packages of the freeze-dried food that had escaped Andrew’s pack before it sailed over the cliff were scattered about the ice. With much effort, I bent and gathered all the packages I could find, which weren’t many. I stuffed them into my own pack and shouldered my gear.

  It took me several minutes to remember which direction I had come. Finally I found my old footprints, filled now with ice, and followed them to the ridge on my way back to John Petras. There just might be enough food to sustain him until I was able to get help. If, of course, he was still alive.

  9

  MIDNIGHT.

  Racked by fever, I collapsed in the snow. It took several minutes to worm my way out from under my backpack. Lifting my face, I saw the moonlit curl of the ridge as it wound in gradual ascent around the mountain. I reached out with one hand, pausing to examine how the fabric of my gloves had worn through at thefingertips and in the center of the palm, exposing my raw, pink flesh. I clenched and unclenched my hands over and over but couldn’t feel a single thing. Frostbitten.

  I rolled over, struggling to breathe. There was blood in the snow; the puncture wound in my navel had opened again as I trekked along the ridge.

  I don’t know where I am, I thought. Am I even going in the right direction?

  Pain coursed like adrenaline through my system. Soon my breaths started coming in sizable, whooping gasps. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feed enough oxygen into my lungs.

  —You can’t stay here, said Hannah.

  It was the sound of her voice that made me realize I had been drifting off into a painless sleep. My eyes opened and the pain returned, roiling like a tropical storm in my guts. “Where are you?”

  —You must get up, Tim. You can’t stay here. You’ll die here.

  “I’m … already dead …”

  Then—somehow—I was standing and halfway up the ridge. At one point, I paused and rested against a pylon of ice, shivering in the cold. The familiar bulge of my gear against my back was no longer there. I felt for the pack’s straps around my shoulders, but they were gone. I’d left my backpack somewhere.

  Shit …

  “No … no … no … no …”

  Hugging myself, I stumbled out across the plateau and scanned the moonlit passage that wound through the mountainous terrain below. Every stone could have been my backpack. It was everywhere I looked.

  —Up here, Tim.

  Turning around, I saw Hannah standing at the pinnacle of the ridge, her body glowing with a fine, angelic aura. She wore the same white, billowy nightgown she wore that night I followed her from the caves, through the trees, and out to the highway, where I collapsed

  and was eventually discovered and rescued. “Hannah …”

  She descended the opposite side of the pinnacle. I cast one last glance at the passage before giving up on my gear and following her. I climbed the pinnacle and saw her shimmering visage float around the far side of the ridge. She was not heading back to Petras; even in my unreliable mental state I was able to understand that. Nevertheless, I descended the pinnacle and pursued her around the ridge.

  10

  “CAN’T.” I CRIED. I COLLAPSED IN THE SNOW FACE-

  first and felt nothing

  —Tim…

  “No more.”

  I was standing on the balcony of my Annapolis apartment overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. It was midday, and I could see a fleet of white sailboats motoring beneath the Bay Bridge. I was—I was—

  —Just a bit farther, Hannah said. Come up to the ridge. “Can’t,” I insisted, grinding my teeth from the numbing pain. I curled into a fetal position in the snow. I was determined to stay in Annapolis, to watch the sailboats cut through the slate-colored waters of the bay …

  —Come, she said, and you can touch me.

&n
bsp; My eyelids fluttered. For a second, I thought I could actually see the sailboats, their masts rising like cavalry flags. But it was just snowcaps, countless snowcaps.

  Above me, Hannah smiled, her skin radiating a tallow glow, her features pure and clean.

  “Your hair … is short …” I grinned and it pained me to do it. “I … like it.”

  —Come, she said and reached for me.

  I touched her hand—her hand!— and felt her lift me off the ground. I dragged myself farther up the incline until my knees popped and my legs finally surrendered. In a jumble of skin and bones, I collapsed to the snow, panting. My body was freezing but soaked in sweat. I couldn’t breathe. With numb fingers, I located the zipper on my jacket, pulled it down. I popped open my shirt, buttons soaring through the black night, and exposed my chest. Beads of sweat coursed down my ribs, my forehead, freezing at the corners of my eyes.

  “Can’t,” I mused. “Hannah … can’t… “

  11

  NO TIME. EARLY MORNING OR TWILIGHT—IT DIDN’T

  matter. My eyelids gummy and nearly frozen, I pried them open to see a blurry figure advancing toward me. My vision was kaleidoscopic with snow blindness.

  “Hannah …,” I rasped. My throat burned and I couldn’t focus.

  The figure doubled, trebled, refused to center itself.

  “Hannah …” I struggled. Then started coughing.

  But it wasn’t Hannah. The figure was much bigger and darker than Hannah and walked with a noticeable limp.

  Again, my heart began to race. My fingers tried to close into fists, but their tips had frozen to the ground, and I couldn’t get them loose.

  The figure paused over me. I could smell old camphor and mothballs and stewed meats. I could smell the unmistakable scent of blood, too.

  There were a series of tiny pops as I pulled my fingertips, now bleeding, from the ice. My hand shaking, I reached up to touch the bearded face. I tried to speak, although no words came out, and I had no idea what I was trying to say, anyway. It must have hadsomething to do with Hannah because it was Hannah I was thinking about. But I would never know for sure.

  “Shhh,” the man said, gently taking my quaking hand by the wrist. He placed it on my chest, then reached slowly down toward my face. He had ten, twenty fingers on that one giant hand. My vision refused to clear up.

  He covered my eyes and eased my lids down. I didn’t bother to fight him.

  A moment later, I was unconscious and sailing like Münchhausen between the stars.

  Chapter 17

  1

  I WASN’T THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED. BUT I CAN SEE

  it nonetheless: the Italian countryside, cool in the stirrings of an early summer that promises not to be too overbearing.

  The vehicle appears as a glinting beacon over the farthest hill. David is behind the wheel, donning ridiculous driving goggles, racing gloves, and a worn bomber jacket. Hannah is in the passenger seat, wearing a lambskin jacket and a cream-colored jacquard pantsuit.

  She laughs, though I cannot hear her. It as if I am watching all this on television with the sound turned all the way down. Her hair is short, curling just at her jaw, and appears the color of new copper in midday.

  There is a sound like a clap of thunder as the motorcar’s undercarriage collides with a mound of dirt in the road. David looks startled, and Hannah grips the dashboard, turning to David to examine his expression. David senses her unease and turns to her, offers a complacent smile, and perhaps even places a hand on her thigh. “It’s okay, love,” he says. “It’s not a—” “David!” she shrieks. David jerks his head back to the front. But it is already too late.

  2

  I OPENED MY EYES TO FIND MYSELF IN A SMALL.

  ill-lit room in what appeared to be a clapboard hut. I lay on a bed of straw covered with a blanket of cheesecloth. My goose-down pillow was soft to the point of near nonexistence. Candles flickered from every corner of the small room, and a fetid, moldering smell—curdling goat cheese, perhaps—permeated the air. At the opposite end of the room facing my bed, there was a doorway with no door, but aside from a straw mat halfway down the hallway and walls the color of sawdust, I could see nothing.

  Above my head and tacked to the exposed wooden rafters hung various thangkas painted in bright colors. The one directly above me depicted one centralized, bronze-skinned figure whose black hair was wrapped in a bun and surrounded by a halo. The figure was flanked on either side by smaller figures, one of them white as a ghost and wielding a flaming sword, the other pale blue and multiarmed.

  An attempt to sit up sent a red-hot burning sensation through my torso. I pushed aside the cheesecloth blanket and found I’d been dressed in white linens. A tiny red star—blood—stood in the center of the linen shirt. I lifted the shirt to find the puncture wound below my belly button had been sewn shut with stiff-looking black thread. Gingerly I fingered the wound. I felt nothing; it was numb.

  Footsteps approached from the hallway. I dropped my shirt as a great looming shadow fell on the wall of the hallway just outside my room. It grew larger as the figure approached. A large man dressed in black robes ducked beneath the low doorway and entered the room. He paused, his surprise at my consciousness immediately evident, then continued over to a small table laden with various vials and instruments spread out on a velvet cloth.

  “You’re awake,” said the man, his back to me.

  “I know you,” I said. “Your name’s Shomas. You were outside my cabin that night before we left for the Godesh Ridge.”

  Without turning to face me, Shomas said, “Lie back down. You are still healing.”

  I eased myself down onto the pillow. My eyelids felt heavy, but I refused to fall asleep. Instead, I trained my gaze on the thangka above my head.

  When Shomas appeared at my bedside holding a vial of amber fluid and a syringe, he followed my gaze to the tapestry. “That is Shakyamuni in the center. He is flanked by two bodhisattva. The one with the sword is Manjusri, and the one with many arms is Chenrezig, also called AvalokiteŘvara, the redeemer of samsara.”

  “What’s samsara?”

  “Reincarnation.” Shomas plunged the syringe into the vial of amber fluid. Once he’d withdrawn a sufficient amount, he withdrew the syringe and gripped my left wrist with his free hand.

  “Hey,” I stammered, “what’s that?”

  “This is medicine to help you heal.” He jabbed the needle into my arm. “You have suffered the mountain sickness, dehydration, and hypothermia. Also, curiously enough, you were poisoned.”

  “Poisoned,” I echoed, my eyes growing distant.

  “Some sort of heart accelerant, apparently. Rather unusual.” He steadied my arm, his grip tightening on my wrist. “The cat may have nine lives, but man has only three. Three is the magical number. You have used up one of yours on this trip, my friend.”

  “Two, actually,” I corrected him, thinking of the cave in the Midwest. “I’ve used up two.”

  He did not look at me.

  “Where am I?”

  “Safe,” Shomas said. He emptied the syringe into my arm, then pulled the needle out. “You are in the village in the valley of the Churia Hills.”

  “How … how did I get here?”

  “We rescued you from the Godesh Ridge.”

  “But … how?”

  Shomas shuffled over to the table and set the vial and syringe on the velvet mat. From within the folds of his dark robe, Shomas produced what appeared to be a small silver button that he held between his thumb and index finger. It pulsed once with a strobe of white light.

  “This,” he said, “is the tracking device I put inside your coat. I had just come from your room when you returned that evening.”

  “A tracking device,” I muttered. “Why would you do that?”

  “It isn’t the first time.” He dropped the silver button into one of his many pockets. “Occasionally we get people who wish to traverse the Godesh Ridge in search of the Canyon of Souls. If
we fail to sufficiently warn them away, we always take … alternative measures.”

  A young girl dressed all in white with straight black hair appeared in the doorway, holding what appeared to be a bowl of soup. She paused, her head down, and waited for Shomas to address her. I understood none of what they said. The girl nodded and entered the room, her footfalls silent on the wooden floor, and set the bowl on a hand-carved table beside my bed. She stole a glimpse of me from the corner of her eyes. When I smiled, she spun away, her long hair twirling, and disappeared out the door.

  Shomas pointed to the steaming ceramic bowl. “You should eat that, even if you are not hungry.”

  “I’m starving,” I said.

  “It is hot.”

  The ceramic bowl was on a cloth. I sat up and leaned against the wall, then used the cloth to transfer the bowl into my lap. The soup was colorless. Barley leaves and cubes of what must have been tofu floated in the broth. I brought it to my mouth and sipped. It was excruciatingly hot and as tasteless as boiling water.

  “The Godesh Ridge is a sacred place.” Shomas stood at the footof the bed, his hands folded behind his back. “Many years ago, our measures for ensuring it remained untouched by mankind were much more final than our current methods.” He raised one eyebrow to make sure I understood him correctly.

  I nodded to express that I did.

  “For various reasons, we have adapted to current conditions and now operate in the fashion you see now.” He spread his hands to indicate the room as well as the implements on the table with the velvet cloth. “Crossing the Godesh Ridge in search of the Canyon of Souls is no different than a foreigner setting foot in the Vatican only to relieve himself in the entranceway. It is a sign of disrespect for our culture and our beliefs.”

  “I had no idea. It was never our intention to—”

  “Intentions aside, our hidden lands have a way of protecting themselves. They do not show themselves to those they deem unworthy. Also, many are killed in such foolish pursuits—they become injured, stranded, lost, and without communication with the outside world. So we have developed a way to rescue these doomed souls and bring them back from the mountain. Despite our efforts, however, our success rate is quite slim. It is a difficult mountain to cross, and the rescue of individuals from the ridge poses innumerable difficulties. Still, you are among the lucky few.”