The Ascent (22 page)

The gateway to the Canyon of Souls stood across from us at the next plateau, separated by an insurmountable distance of air, a canyon in and of itself whose floor was the vicious, unforgiving icefall. It was like a medieval castle surrounded by a moat. Other than a snow-covered arch of stone that curved like a rainbow and connected to the other side of the canyon, the opposite plateau was as remote as an uncharted desert island.

“This is the farthest point along the Godesh Ridge that any group of climbers has ever been,” Andrew continued. “I want you all to take a deep breath and taste how clean the air is. You’ll never breathe air this clean again in your lives.”

Curtis appeared beside me, looking ashen.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

He gnawed at his lower lip. “Friend of mine died at the Khumbu Icefall on his way to the top of Everest three years ago. I was there; I saw it happen.” He shook his head. “Forget it. I’m cool.”

I clapped him on the back but said nothing. My head was becoming increasingly achy, and I’d developed a dry cough over the past two days that I couldn’t shake. When I was able to find sleep, my dreams were fitful and frightening, though I couldn’t remember anything of significance about them upon waking.

Chad studied the icefall. Even Chad, who was typically unshaken, looked wary. “So how the hell do we get across?”

“That’s the tricky part,” said Andrew. He acknowledged the stone arch with a jut of his chin. “We use it as a bridge.”

Chad scowled. “You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

“We can’t climb that thing,” Curtis added. “The sides and top are pure ice against rock. The ice will shatter the second we drive an anchor into it.”

“You’re right. That’s been the fatal mistake of every other group that came before us,” Andrew said. “They try to scale the arch and walk across its top.”

“And we’re not going to do that,” Curtis responded.

“No, we’re not.” Andrew grinned, and I was once again reminded of that look he gave me all those years ago in San Juan just before he threw himself off the cliff and into space. “We’re going to climb
under
it.”

2

THEN NIGHT FELL. WE ERECTED OUR TENT AT THE

site of the stone arch, intent on crossing it early the next morning. The wind was fierce, hardly blocked by the looming spires of stone and the pyramid-shaped monolith, and the temperature was unforgiving. Weakened from the cold and the continual treks through the mountainous passes, we huddled inside the tent.

A hot meal was prepared, and we ate heartily. Only Hollinger didn’t touch the food. Between helpings, I sidled up next to Hollinger and knocked my shoulder against his. That seemed to snap him briefly from his daze. He offered me a meager smile, then pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged them.

“Here,” I said, handing him a cup of coffee.

“Thanks.”

“How’s your head?”

He fingered the bandage at his temple. “It’s okay.”

“How’d that helmet come off so easy?”

“Don’t know. Don’t recall much about the fall.” He spoke with the detachment of a car crash victim.

“You doing all right?”

“I have a bad feeling.”

“About the climb tomorrow?”

“About the whole thing, mate.” Hollinger turned and stared at me. His eyes were full and black, moist like the eyes of a deer. “I’ve been seeing things. Things that play with my head. Ever since you and Andrew left to take Shotsky back to base camp.”

A shiver traced down my spine. “What things?”

“My head’s playing funny games. I can’t think straight.”

“It’s the altitude,” I said, trying to comfort him. “It’s messing with my head, too.”

“No, it’s not. It’s … I don’t know … Something’s not right …”

I squeezed his shoulder and told him everything would be fine.

But later that night, with everyone asleep in the tent, I found it impossible to shut my eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking of Hollinger’s words—
My head’s playing funny games. I can’t think straight
—and I wondered how much longer it would be until we reached the Canyon of Souls. Andrew seemed so confident we would make it there, despite all the other teams that had attempted to do so in the past and failed.

Unable to sleep, I gathered my piton and hammer, and just as I’d been doing the past two nights, I crawled out of the tent, located the perfect stone, and began to sculpt it. Throughout the past few nights of our journey, I’d left a trail of partially finished statues lining the path to this very spot, each of them a reproduction of the woman I’d lost in a flaming car wreck in Italy with a man—a linguistics professor—named David Moore.

The night air froze the marrow in my bones. I chipped away at my chosen stone with numb hands, a fair distance from our camp so as not to disturb the others while they slept. The moon hung fat and yellow behind the nearest peak, illuminating the snow and causing it to radiate with a dull luminescence.

—Turn back.

I couldn’t tell if I’d actually heard her voice or if it had been only in my head. Nonetheless, I spun around and stared at the passage between the jagged rocks, the snow flooded with shadow. No one was there.

“Hannah?”

—Turn back, Tim. Please.

Of all the things I could do—I uttered a weak, little laugh. Surely I was hallucinating. “My head’s playing funny games,” Hollinger had said. “I can’t think straight.” Sure enough, sure enough …

—Tim
. She stepped out into the moonlight, her body naked and pale and glistening with condensation, so real she left footprints in the snow.

“Jesus, Hannah …”

It felt as though my heart had stopped pumping. My blood ran cold as ice water. As I watched, she seemed to flicker from existence like bad reception on a television set.

“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Hannah, please …”

—Turn back
, she said, her voice ringing in the center of my brain.

Something cold and wet trickled over my lips. I touched two fingers to the wetness. They came away black with blood. A nosebleed.

Hannah turned and walked away from me down the sloping, snowy pass.

I begged her to stop, but she didn’t. So I pursued, dropping my piton and hammer in the snow, the nylon hood of my flimsy anorak flapping in the freezing wind. She disappeared around a bend in the pass, hidden by giant fingers of rock, but I followed her footprints like a bloodhound on the scent. On the other side of the bend, I saw her silvery form climbing one of the stone towers. She climbed with ease, as if her body had been specifically designed to do so. I called to her, but she didn’t stop or look back at me.

My desire to touch her—to reach out and
feel
her—was suddenly overwhelming. The next thing I knew, I was scaling the stone tower after her, my movements much less steady, my speed no match for hers. Each time I looked up, she was farther and farther ahead of me.

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.”