The Eidolon (2 page)

Danny stops and drops his pack, breathless. We take a break, panting like we’ve run uphill, and sip hot sweet coffee from the flask. White peaks stretch out in all directions, like crested waves on a frozen sea, and the water in the lakes below glistens in the sunlight. Above, a buzzard calls, circling between tatters of inky cloud.

“This is what it’s all about,” says Danny. He draws a slow, deep breath and closes his eyes, savouring the freedom. “This is real.”

I nod, but say nothing as the wind slinks round us. My head’s thumping.

“To life.” Danny gulps from the flask and hands it to me.

“To life.” I down the remnants, then wipe my lips with the back of my glove. The wind has picked up, drawing in a mist that shrouds the distant peaks. “The weather’s turning,” I say, eyeing the changing sky. Wisps of snow billow in the icy air.

“Yeah. We’d better get moving.” He stuffs the flask into his pack. “It’s not far now.”

I frown at the sky, where fragmented clouds are coalescing, churning out from a grisly horizon. “Maybe we should head down and try again tomorrow.”

Danny slings his pack over his shoulder. “It’s not too bad. Where’s your sense of adventure?” He grins and sets off again, in the lead.

T
HE WIND’S PICKING
up in bursts, moaning, whipping, splintering the snowdrifts into puffs of white mist that rise into the air and settle on our footprints, concealing them. When I turn to look back, it’s like we were never there. A fierce gust whips up from the lower slopes, and I stagger against it. It’s making me uneasy, this wind. I glance down the slope, but it’s all veiled in white. There’s no sign of the lakes. Turning into the wind, through the flurry of snowflakes, I peer up at the faceless ascent and it stares back at me – cold, unmerciful. The fear grips me for a moment. The kind of fear I’ve read about, when men who undertake this pilgrimage – anticipated it, planned for it, made friends with it – realise that they’re nobody to the mountain; that it doesn’t care if they live or die. It would be so easy to give in to it, but there’s no way back from that.
Get a grip, Robert. Just keep your mind on your feet.
Danny toils ahead, his head bent.

Those clouds are moving in too fast. The sky blackens, pressing down on the white, squeezing the brightness from it. Snow gusts about in thick, fat flakes and dark clouds weigh heavily on the horizon, obscuring the peak. The wind is wailing like a tortured cat and it won’t let up, not for a moment. You could go mad with this wind. It’s almost as if it’s become personal, buffeting our steps into staggers. Mountain weather, like its mood, changes swiftly and with little warning. I know what she’d say.
Can’t you read the signs? The mountain doesn’t want you here.

Another blast knocks me sideways, shaking my balance and my confidence. Alright. Enough. There’s a point when pride needs to step aside for instinct, and it’s right here. “Danny! We won’t make it in this! We need to turn back!”

He stops and turns towards me, from his place further up the slope, then looks up to the summit, or where it should be somewhere behind the thick, grey mist. “But we’re nearly there!” The wind keens and wheezes and he stumbles back a few steps. It’s making a point.

“No, Danny, we won’t make it. We need to get down!”

He stares through the cloud towards the peak, then turns his face to the sky. He drops his head and stands looking at his feet as the snow whips around him. I know how much this means to him. Eighteen months in a kitchen with an arsehole of a chef and a daily barrage of verbal abuse just to raise the cash for the flights. He held down the job because he knew it was a means to an end. The weather reports said it’s due to get worse, so it may be that we don’t get the break tomorrow or the next day, or at all. But it’s all relative.
Let it go, Danny. Don’t be a fool.
When he lifts his head again, he nods. He turns and tramps down the mountainside, passing me without meeting my eye.

The descent is clumsy against the rising wind, and our footing uncertain; the snow has devoured the tracks and there’s nothing left. I catch glimpses of the plain below between the shifting white curtains, but there’s still no sign of the lakes. There should be lakes, below. This isn’t the way we came up.

“Wait, Danny, we’re off track!”

I catch his voice in a break between gusts. “No, this’ll take us down!” He ploughs on down the slope, head bent, undeterred. He’s so bloody pigheaded.

I stop dead. Ahead, just beyond Danny, the cliff face disappears into a crevasse, white emptiness. He hasn’t seen it. “Stop! Danny, Stop!”

He looks back up at me from under his thick, fur hood, then turns, glancing down the slope. The mountain mist closes the door on its secret, but not before he sees the drop. He stumbles onto his back. “Shit!” His voice is muffled through the scissoring snow as he scrambles to his feet and back up the slope, ungainly like a toddler wrapped in too many puffy winter clothes. I wade towards him and catch his arm, steadying him.

“We’ll not make it down in this!” I yell, hoping he can hear over the din. It’s getting dark, beyond the clouds. Nightfall in the wings. “We’ll have to shelter till it blows over!”

He nods and casts around, then points higher up the face to a place where the edge of the mountain rises steeply beside a level bank of snow. It might offer some shelter from the wind. Crouching into the storm, we tramp towards the bank, take the snow shovel from my pack, sink to our knees and begin to dig.

I can’t feel my hands. I glance up at Danny. His lips are cracked, the colour of slate, and his cheeks are scorched red beneath his hood. He screws up his eyes inside his goggles. This fucking wind, it won’t stop. It just blows harder. “Keep digging,” he shouts.

Slowly, he disappears inside the snow hole, his boots still visible between the sprays of snow he flicks out. We take turns. When it’s done, I sit back on my heels, dizzy, hot in my core, cold in my limbs, as Danny wriggles inside. I glance up at the sky. The clouds have leaked away with the light. I’ve never seen the sky like this. Millions of tiny, distant suns riddling the black in great trailing swathes. Tibet must be higher than I thought; closer to the heavens.

Inside the cramped, dark hole, the sound of the wind dies a little. Thank God for small mercies. We loosen our laces, letting the blood back into our feet. A ski pole pokes through a small hole in the roof, enough to let some air inside. I struggle to light the small candle, my fingers frozen and clumsy, but finally it catches. Such a small thing – a tiny, yellow, flickering flame, a symbol of hope.

Danny fumbles with his wrist and pulls off his watch. “We’ll take turns to sleep. Keep an eye on the candle.” If it starts to sputter, we’re running out of air.

I’m dying for a drink, but we’ve nothing left, so I stuff some snow into my mouth.

“No,” says Danny, catching my arm. “It’ll just make you colder. Get some sleep. I’ll wake you in an hour. God willing.”

I’ve never heard him say anything like that before. He’s not religious. Like me, he’s an unabashed atheist. Damn right he’ll wake me in an hour. I’m not dying in some snow pit in the middle of nowhere. “Make sure you do.” I reach for Cora’s ring, still in my pocket. I wish I hadn’t been such an arsehole.

M
Y INSIDES ARE
cold now that I’m lying still. It feels like my limbs are only vaguely attached to the rest of me, like they’ve all been to the dentist for a jag then left in the deep freeze. Even my guts feel cold, and my lungs when I breathe in, and my headache’s changed from thumping to that feeling you get when you bite into ice-cream. Brainfreeze. Maybe there’s a neural pathway connecting ice-cream to the lining of the brain. An ice-cream-neuron, waiting to be discovered. The shivering hurts, but at least it’s a sign that I’m still here.

Sometime after that, I don’t know how long, I give in to sleep.

I
WAKE TO
a sound. I hush my breathing, as much as I can in the thin air. The candle’s still yellow, it’s not sputtering, so we must be alive. So much for waking me in an hour. Danny’s lying, eyes closed, shivering. From the candlelight I can see his lips flubbering in a soft snore. What was that sound? The wind? Through the vent in the roof I can see it’s still dark.

I check my watch. It takes a while to focus on the numbers and even longer to work out what they mean. 3.14.

There it is again. Am I imagining it? It sounds like a voice. If the wind had a voice, it would sound like this, resonant and commanding. No, I was wrong; it’s not a voice, because there aren’t any words. So why do I know what it means?

GET UP.

God, Robert. You must be hypothermic. Voices in the head can’t be a good sign. A voice with no words. Like a thought, but coming from somewhere outside of me.

GET UP NOW.

I need to get up. Irrational or not, there’s no disputing it. I don’t know why but every fibre in me knows it’s right. From some reserve I didn’t know I had, I find the will. It takes over, becoming an urgency, an edge. I kick the wall of snow at my feet, toppling the candle and snuffing it out, then wriggle from the hole. It’s snowing again, the clouds inking out the stars.

Something makes me turn, something over my right shoulder. A little higher up the mountain there’s something in the darkness, just visible through the blizzard. It’s insubstantial, like the shadow of steam on a wall, but something else is there. I rub my eyes, and when I look again, there’s nothing. But it feels like...

Sudden certainty seizes me. I’ve got to get Danny out. I reach into the remains of the hole and grasp his ankles, tugging, dragging him into the open. “Wake up, Danny! Get up!”

He mumbles, eyes still closed, and turns his face from the driving snow. “Danny!” I kneel over him and slap him hard across the cheek. “Come on, come on! Get up, dammit!”

A low groaning sound issues from the mountain, as though something that lies beneath is awakening. Something enormous. We sink, suddenly a few inches lower, jolting downwards as though...

“
Move!”
I’m on my feet, grasping Danny by the hood. His feet flail under him as I try to pull him away, but he’s fighting me, trying to free himself from my grip. “What the hell are you...”

The ground creaks and groans and shifts. The shelter breaks apart and disappears, leaving nothing but frozen gusts of air as we scramble back from the collapsing edge, kicking furiously, the ground crumbling and falling away in great chunks that tumble into emptiness. It gains on us, ripping at more of the mountain until it reaches the snow under Danny’s feet.

He slides away from me, his arms flapping wildly, groping for a hold. I catch his hood again with one hand and with the other, grasp his wrist. The groaning stops and the ground steadies as he hangs there, suspended, the wind gusting up from below, teasing. A block of ice breaks away and bounces into the darkness and Danny’s gaze follows it as he sways from the precipice. He looks up at me and for a moment our eyes meet.

“You know what I’d do,” he says.

Should I? My arms are beginning to quiver. I can hold on for a bit, but then... I’m not sure how long until... what am I thinking? “No. Hold on!” I dig my heels into the snow, jerking with his weight beneath me, and lean back. Nothing happens; he’s still dangling from the end of my arms, a dead weight. My legs are shaking now. I don’t know if it’s the shivering or the strain they’re under.

“Robert...” Danny holds my eye. “You can’t... Just let go!”

He slips a little, only a few inches, but each of them closing the gap to death. My limbs are on fire. It would be so easy to let go, just relax, release the grip and the pain will stop...

And then what? From somewhere, I don’t know where, the certainty grips me again. It’s like when you look through the lens of a camera and adjust the focus until everything comes into sharp relief. A clarity, or absence of doubt. Something so obvious you wonder why you didn’t see it before. “No!” I clench my teeth, my eyes squeezed shut, my arms trembling with the effort, and with one last painful heave I haul Danny onto the ledge.

He’s face down in the snow, gasping, quivering, hugging the mountain. A shard of moonlight slices through the snowflakes, the mountain quietens and the snow is still. We lie there, panting, staring through the blizzard at the abyss.

“Thanks,” begins Danny. “I don’t know how you...”

“Come on,” I get to my feet, facing into the wind. “We need to get down.” It still has me, that unwavering certainty.

“Wait, Robert!” He sways to his knees. “There’s not enough light. We can’t walk in this!”

“We can’t stay here.” I grasp his arm, hauling him upright.

“Look what just happened! We could go over the edge!”

“We won’t. We have to go down.”

Danny flaps his arms like a toddler having a tantrum. “What makes you so sure?”

I glance over my right shoulder, towards the place where I saw... I don’t hear any anything and I don’t see anything, but I don’t have to. It’s a feeling, more than a sound or an image, the memory of a shadow. Something else announces it, something undefined. It is like walking into a dark room and knowing, in that inexplicable visceral sense, that someone else is there with you, before you see them. I’m not frightened, I’m calm. Calmer than I’ve ever been. It’s watching.

But there’s no point in telling Danny, he won’t get it. I turn back to him. “I just know.” I lead the way down the mountain, surefooted and confident in the descent, Danny stumbling behind, and something else, almost beyond sight, but not beyond perception. It follows us into the white noise.

A
S THE STEEP
slopes surrender to a gentler gradient, the wind begins to die away and my steps slow. I turn back to Danny, waiting for him to wade closer, watching him sink into the powdery snow, bluish now in the fading night. Each step is laboured, like his boots are filled with lead. As he draws level, his harsh breaths score the air with steamy puffs and blend with the thick mist. I point ahead. The mist parts and moonlight glimmers on the shores of a vast lake. I put a hand on Danny’s shoulder, my lips cracking as I try to smile. I turn back, over my shoulder, eyes narrowing as I peer into the nothingness.