The Ascent (16 page)

“Go to bed, Tim.”

“Answer me.”

“I said—”

“Who do you think you are?” I growled. “Don’t tell me what to do. I swear to God I’ll flatten you right here.”

“This was a mistake.” Andrew threw his hands up. “I thought you were ready for this. It’s my fault. The whole goddamn thing was a mistake. When the rest of us take off for the first pinnacle, you can go back to the valley with the Sherpas. They’ll take you to the roads that lead back into town. You can get a bus from—”

I hit him in the face. It was a poor, clumsy punch, but it hit with solidity, and I could feel Andrew’s jawbone through his cheek and against my knuckles.

Andrew stumbled backward seemingly more shocked than hurt, a hand up to his jaw. His eyebrows knitted together, creating a vertical divot between them, and he didn’t take his eyes off me.

“I told you not to tell me what to do,” I said quietly.

Andrew’s gaze shifted to the fist that had struck him, which was still balled at my side. His face was expressionless. “Okay, Tim. Okay. Maybe I deserve it. Maybe I’ve been distant and aloof and removed from the whole damn thing, keeping all you guys in the dark. So, yeah, maybe I deserve it. I’m sorry.”

I wanted to tell him to shut the hell up, but my body refused to cooperate. I sat on a large white stone and pulled my legs under me.

I kept my eyes locked on Andrew for fear that if I looked away he might vanish into the night.

“You said you’d left us in the dark,” I said finally. “What haven’t you told us? And no more games.”

Andrew took a deep breath and sat down beside me. “That maybe we shouldn’t be here.” He chuckled. “All right, you caught me. I wasn’t just taking a piss tonight.”

I stared at him.

“I was praying,” he said. “Meditating. Trying to lock into the power of the land. The power of the gods.”

“Meditating,” I repeated. “You don’t believe in that stuff.”

“That doesn’t matter here.”

“Why shouldn’t we be here?”

“Because there are a lot of people who think no one should climb the Godesh Ridge,” he said. “You can forget about the folklore, the campy stories, or even the facts—the men who’ve died trying. You can’t deny those things, but that’s not all of it. Fact is, we’re some big-time violators for coming here. The Godesh Ridge is sacred, a holy land, a temple not to be pursued, not even by the monks, the Yogis. No one. And the same holds true for the Canyon of Souls.”

I thought about Shomas, the hulking man who’d been waiting for me that night outside my cabin and whom I’d chased—or imagined I’d chased—through the streets of a rural village days later.

“A
beyul
,” I said, which seemed to catch Andrew’s interest.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Petras. You’re familiar with the term?”

“Sure.”

“Is that what this canyon is? A
beyul?
A hidden land not meant to be found?”

“I suppose.”

“That’s why the guides turned back after the bridge,” I said. “That’s why they wouldn’t lead us into the Valley of Walls.”

“The Valley of Walls is considered a gateway to the ridge and the first in many stops along the way to the Canyon of Souls. There are others, too—the Sanctuary of the Gods, the Hall of Mirrors—and many of the indigenous people of this area will not corrupt the land with their presence. Simultaneously they believe we’re corrupting it by being here. To them, we’re no different than a band of grave robbers.”

He gripped my shoulder and squeezed it. It was a gesture very unlike him. “I meditate to maintain a connection with the land and to show my respect. Please don’t let that weaken your trust in me to lead this mission. I haven’t lost my mind, and I haven’t dragged you all into something I can’t handle.”

“We shouldn’t be here.” I cast a wary glance at the sky. It was as clear as lucid thought. The moon hung fat and yellow, larger than I had ever seen it.

“You never struck me as the superstitious type, Overleigh.” He was back to using my last name, and I was helpless to remember the day we first met in San Juan. This caused me to think once again of Hannah …

“Has nothing to do with superstition,” I corrected him. “I know for a fact that we’ve pissed off at least one of the locals from Churia. I met him, and he didn’t seem too happy with our little crew.”

“Don’t let that bother you.”

“And then there’s Donald Shotsky.”

“What about him?”

“For one,” I said, “the fact that he’ll never make it. He’s been struggling already, and we haven’t even started to climb. The man’s never climbed anything more strenuous than a flight of stairs in his life.”

“We’ve already discussed Shotsky. I’ve explained it to you.”

“You’ve explained your deranged reason for wanting him out here, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Andrew chuckled and repeated the word
deranged
, as if it were the punch line to a joke.

“Make me a promise.”

“Yeah? What’s that?” Andrew said.

“Promise me you won’t break him. Promise me that if he can’t make it to the end, you’ll cut him loose.”

“I’m not holding a gun to the man’s—”

“So then promise me you’ll let him off the hook if he feels he can’t finish this.”

Andrew’s fingers drummed on his knees. “All right, if
he
feels he can’t finish …”

“And that you’ll give him the money.”

His eyebrows froze in twin arches above his eyes. He said nothing.

“The twenty grand,” I went on. “Promise me.”

His eyes narrowed, and he clasped his hands in his lap, staring at the blackened heap of carbon that had been our bonfire earlier this evening. “And if I don’t promise?” he said, not looking at me.

“Then I walk. Right here, right now—tonight. I’ll pack my shit and head back to the valley. You flexed your muscles a few minutes ago and told me to do just that, but I know that’s not what you want. You’re here to make us all better, to fix what you think is broken in us, just like you said. Despite what you said, you don’t want me to leave. You very much want me to stay.”

I was working off a hunch, not quite sure
what
Andrew wanted. For one moment, I thought he might actually tell me to pack my stuff and leave. But when he faced me, his eyes somber and ancient, I knew I had called his bluff. Relief washed through me.

“Twenty grand’s a lot of money,” he said offhandedly.

“Not for you. Won’t put a dent in your wallet.” I knew this was true; after all, he’d paid for the whole goddamn trip.

“Why do you care, anyway?”

“I guess I don’t want another death on my conscience.”

Andrew’s expression softened. “Been thinking about her tonight?”

“You mean Hannah,” I said. It was not a question. And he didn’t need to ask it. “I guess so. She’s been on my mind a lot lately.”

“Mine, too.” He smiled wearily. He looked like he could close his eyes and fall asleep right here. “She was something else.”

“Yes, she was.” I laughed nervously. My vision was starting to blur.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve got a deal on this Shotsky thing. Against my better judgment, you’ve got a deal.”

“Good.” I shook my hair down in my eyes and pawed at my mouth with one hand. “Christ, I could use a fucking drink.”

“Then take one,” Andrew said and stood. He stretched his spine, the tendons popping in his neck and back. “Don’t stay out here too late, bro. Get some sleep.”

I said nothing more to him. He didn’t seem to care or even notice. He strutted back to the tent, pausing to urinate over the side of the ridge for what seemed like twenty minutes. For someone so concerned about being in touch with the land, it seemed a rather vulgar gesture.

4

ANDREW’S COMMENT DIDN’T REGISTER WITH ME

until I awoke maybe an hour later back in the tent, the tendrils of a passing dream still tickling my chest. I rolled over and blindly groped for my pack until I found what I was looking for.

It was the canteen Andrew had placed inside my cabin before departing on this trek. Sitting up on one arm, I unscrewed the cap and brought the canteen to my nose and inhaled.

Bourbon.

What the hell is going on here?

I was still pondering the meaning of it before I had time to consider what I was doing. Two swigs from the canteen and the bourbon seared my throat and exploded in the pit of my stomach like a car bomb, its warmth spreading through me like the serpentine tentacles of some nonspecific cancer.

1

THE ONES THAT WERE FOUND WERE PRACTlCALLY

unidentifiable. Hardly human, they were fragile, blue-skinned husks whose eyes had frozen to custard smears in their sockets, whose mouths were textured with colorless sores and frozen in a grimace of torment and pain.

Typically they were wrapped in layers of clothes, tattered and faded and solid as planks of wood. Others were found nude, fooled by the onset of hypothermia where their skin burned and sweat dimpled their flesh even in the freezing temperatures. There was one story about a man frozen solid to the wall of an ice cave, glazed like a donut by a two-inch sheen of ice. His hands were sheared clear of the wrists as rescuers attempted to hammer the corpse from the ice, the blood within frozen to a dark purple slush.

Others returned defeated. Frostbitten, starving, anemic, and delirious from high altitudes and snow blindness, they staggered back into base camp like petrified zombies, their tendons hardened to broomsticks, their hands hooked into claws or molded into flippers. These were the lucky ones.

Lastly there were the ones who were never seen again. Thedisappeared. Separated from their groups or foolish soloists with no perception of mortality, these poor bastards were fated to slip down mile-deep crevasses, tumble off a shaky precipice, or become swallowed up by a sudden avalanche. Occasionally search parties would locate articles of their clothing or uncover evidence of what had presumably befallen them—a broken anchor halfway up the face of a cliff or a length of rope with a frayed end swaying in the cool wind over an abyss—but their bodies were never found.

What gear that was eventually recovered told a tale of frantic last moments: utensils scattered about rocky formations; pots and pans half filled with glacier water purified with iodine tablets; boots tossed in snowdrifts; vinyl flags staked in erratic patterns in the mountainside. Some left behind claw marks in the ice.

These were the stories that fueled the myth of the Godesh Ridge. I did not doubt them—I had heard similar ones about much of the Himalayas that I knew to be true—but I did not pay them much mind, either. I’d done my fair share of research in Annapolis while I was still debating whether or not to join Andrew and his crew in Nepal. These stories circulated the Internet like high school rumors. Despite the myth that surrounded the Godesh Ridge—the fact that it was a Nepalese hidden land or John Petras’s
beyul
and quite possibly haunted—the stories were no different than any other mountaineering story found in a book or in a copy of
National Geographic
. I paid them little mind.

However, as we began the ascent up the southern face of the mountain, the stories returned to me in all their gory detail. In my mind’s eye, I could see the frozen bodies with white, rubbery skin coated in a slick mat of ice, the scattered assortment of hiking gear melting impressions in the snow, the random boot jutting footless from a bank of powder.

It wasn’t fear that brought these thoughts back to me. It was the bourbon from last night finally filtering out of my system. I’ddowned half the canteen before screwing the cap back on and rolling over, my stomach burning with the calming roil of booze. My hands had stopped shaking, and my vision, even in the darkness of the tent, seemed to clear. Outside, I could hear the powerful wind barrel down the chasms and stir the trees along the edge of our camp.

Now in the light of a new day, I was going through withdrawal all over again.

The brown earth and whitish reeds graduated to snow midway through the afternoon. An hour after that, the snow was already several inches deep. I paused at one point and cupped a handful of snow, which I brought up to my face, wiping away the sweat and dampening my hair. Our group had paired off in twos, except for Petras and me who’d taken up the rear of the line to keep Shotsky company; in the lead, Andrew and Curtis appeared to be about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. They looked like small, colorless stones poking out from the snow.

“Good idea.” Shotsky dropped to his knees and massaged handfuls of snow against his face. “God, that feels good!”

“You hanging in there?”

“Yeah,” he said, planting both hands into the snow and resting on all fours. I could see vapor billowing from his mouth with each exhalation.

“Don’t leave your hands in the snow too long,” I cautioned him. “Or your knees.”

He was in shorts, as were Petras and I. When he stood, which required some assistance, I could see his thick knees were fire engine red and dripping with melted snow.

“Jesus,” Shotsky said, running the back of one hand along his forehead. “I’m sweatin’ like a whore on Judgment Day.”

“Come on,” I urged him and was immediately tossed a glare from Petras.

We continued up the incline. To our right, huge black rocks rose out of the snow like smokestacks of a sunken ship on the floor of theocean. By late afternoon, the sky had opened. The winding, serpentine backbone of the Himalayas was visible straight through to the horizon, great blue vestiges whose arrangement appeared to be preordained.

“Look there,” Petras said at one point. He shook my arm lightly, while Shotsky staggered close behind us. “That’s Everest.”

Even from this distance it was tremendous, dwarfing the other mountains that surrounded it. Clouds encircled its midsection like the frozen rings of Saturn.

“You trying to beat some record, Tim?” Petras said.

I glanced over my shoulder. “Huh?”

“You’re walking too fast. You’re going to burn yourself out before nightfall.”