The Ascent (26 page)

He took a step backward into the kitchen, holding up the telephone

to prove he was serious about calling the cops.

“Fuck you, dude,” I said. I turned to Hannah and my soul softened. “One last time. Please come home with me.”

“No,” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I can’t.”

“All right.” I went to the door, paused with my hand on the knob, then pulled it open and stomped onto the concrete porch. I left the door open behind me, but the second I stepped out, Hannah slammed it. A moment later, I heard the lock click into place.

My head was filled with butterflies. My vision was as clear as it had ever been—I felt I could see for miles without restriction—and my veins were pumping full of lighter fluid.

I climbed into the driver’s seat of my car and sat for what could have been an hour, watching traffic slide up and down the block and tourists dip in and out of bars. Parked in front of me was an old 1928 Mercedes motorcar convertible, with running floorboards and a spare tire on the trunk. It had a vanity license plate—
4N WORDS
.

“Son of a bitch,” I uttered and twisted the door handle. I popped the trunk and grabbed my tire iron, feeling its heft in my hands. A malicious grin spread across my face. I marched over to the motorcar and stared down at the front grille.

“Fucking bastard,” I murmured and smashed out one of the headlamps. It exploded in a shower of powdered glass. “Asshole.” And I smashed the second headlamp, swinging like Babe fucking Ruth, taking the son of a bitch over the wall. “Home run,” I said, grinning. “That one’s outta here.”

“Tim!” Hannah shouted from one of David’s upstairs windows. “Goddamn it. We’re calling the police!”

“This one’s out of the park,” I informed her and swung the tire iron into the motorcar’s windshield, shattering it. I brought it down again and again until the interior upholstery was blanketed in triangular shards of glass. Exhausted, I dropped the tire iron in the street and held my hands up in mock surrender.

Hannah poked her head through the window, and I could see David pacing behind her.

“Go home!” Hannah yelled. “Go home!”

“You
go home,” I told her. It wasn’t about me; it was about her, all about her. “You go home.”

The window slammed shut and the light went off.

A car full of college kids cruised by, hollering at me from the windows.

I kicked the tire iron at them—it rebounded off the car’s rear bumper, a good kick—and got back into my car. I cranked the ignition, and as luck would have it, the goddamn car wouldn’t start. I tried it again to no avail. A third time, though, and it kicked over, the engine just as angry with me as my wife.

What the hell happened here tonight? I wondered. Car horns blared at me as I pulled out into the street and cut drivers off.
Will someone tell me what the hell just happened?

I sped home, the steering wheel greasy with my sweat. In fact, I ran my hands along the steering wheel, surprised at the amount of perspiration. It wasn’t until I stopped at a traffic light that I realized it wasn’t perspiration but blood. I held my hand up in the glow of the traffic light. It was covered in blood, the bandage completely gone, having unraveled at some point during the evening’s events.

Behind me, car horns honked. I looked up and saw the light had turned green. Gunning the engine, the tires squealing, I raced home, caught somewhere between an agonized laugh and a child’s lost cry.

5

“FIVE.” SAID ANDREW. “FOUR … THREE … TWO … ONE.”

Amazingly, the hail stopped. Not exactly at one but within thirty seconds of it. It was a curious enough feat for Chad and Hollinger to glance over at Andrew.

“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 down. 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.”