The Wall (17 page)

From the ground,
Cyclops Eye had always looked to him like a cutthroat’s den or a cave. It had a dark, overhanging trench marked at its crest by a daggerlike watercourse. But now that he was on the inside of it, Hugh found less a cave than a great, yawning, open socket, thirty feet deep and possibly a hundred feet high. Over the eons, brittle, black diorite had sheeted away from beneath the beetling brow, leaving this giant, raw divot.

The three women—and now Hugh—had entered halfway up a dihedral that formed the left corner of the Eye’s lid. The dihedral rose into the swirling smoke, growing darker and thicker as it curved overhead. On another route, in cleaner stone, the roof might have formed a soaring sculpture. Here, rotted and bottomless, the Eye just seemed to brood.

Below, Hugh spied an indistinct ledge in the depths. It was part of an older route, the classic North America Wall. Conceivably the women could have descended to use the ledge as a bivvy site. But it looked too small to hold three people. Besides, they had been embarked on a route all their own, and had proudly refused to borrow from their ancestors. Their camp was tucked somewhere against the arch above, though the smoke obscured it.

Hugh could have set an anchor where he was, and dutifully waited for Augustine to join him and take the lead. He was still shaky from his desperate entrance, and he knew Augustine wanted to be the first to reach the women’s final camp. But then again, Augustine had made him the rope gun. He’d earned the right to finish what he’d started.

In effect, the camp was going to be Hugh’s summit. From there, he and Augustine would be evacuated to the top along with whomever they found, and El Cap would be over for him. Finishing the Eye was all he had left for a grand finale.

He followed the dihedral up and right, under the roof. The diorite was sharp enough to gut you if you fell, and the holds shifted in their sockets. But the woman’s white fingerprints were clearer than ever on the black rock, and Hugh set his mind to the task.

After a few minutes, he caught sight of the remains of their camp. From below and to the side, it looked like a shipwreck in the sky. Hugh edged closer, traversing beneath the roof.

There were no natural shelves under here, nothing like the Archipelago’s ledges to sit or stand on. Instead the women had constructed a small, vertical shantytown out of portaledges. There were three platforms hanging one below the other.

The place was in a shambles. Slings hung without motion. One platform was partly upended. The bright red flooring of the lowest had ripped through and hung like a flag of no quarter.

It was no wonder Augustine had been unable to see who was left, much less gain access to the camp. Dangling at the edge of the roof thirty feet out, he would have faced just a huddle of shadows and this mobile of aluminum tubing and bright, cheery nylon.

It looked deserted. If there was a body, it had to be lying on the highest platform. Hugh crept right on holds that grated like loose teeth.

Only now did he notice a long loop of Tibetan prayer flags hanging from the ceiling. Even sun faded and stained by the smoke, their red and blue and yellow and green colors were vivid. There were dozens of them in a bowed laundry line. Hugh knew from his Asia trips that the flags were primitive prayer factories. Each square of cloth was printed with script and the image of a Pegasus creature, a winged horse called a
lung ta,
that carried the prayers to heaven each time it flapped in the breeze.

Hugh tried to imagine their happy little camp with the gay flags. Now the flags hung limp. He eyed the torn floor and tipped platform. Their blessings had stopped. Abruptly.

He traversed underneath their silent ghetto on pockmarks and shallow scoops in the stone. The scoops held bits of rubble and decades of bird droppings and the bones of small animals, slippery as ball bearings. He grew more wary.

Now he angled up, passing by the torn flooring. A body, or possibly one of their haul bags, must have punched right through the platform. The haul bags were missing, he realized, all their life support. In one catastrophic moment, the place had been emptied of life.

A little higher, he leveled the second platform, and started to pull himself onto its flat surface. But his weight set the whole colony of portaledges swaying, each rocking like a cradle. Slings creaked. Aluminum tubing scraped against the rock. Hugh came to a halt.

It was in the nature of knots to loosen when they weren’t tended, and this place had been deserted for how long? The wreckage could suddenly unravel and sail off into the depths with him on it. Hugh backed off the platform and onto the stone.

Now he saw that the uppermost platform was not empty. From below, the impression of a body was very plain against the floor. She was lying sprawled on top.

“Andie?” he called. It was a reflex, a courtesy. This was her home. Of course there was no reply. They were too late. Probably they’d been too late even before he found the girl in the forest.

He crouched below and to one side of the top platform, bracing himself for the sight to come. He’d done this before. He’d looked on death, most recently the girl in the forest. But she’d been fresh, and he could not for the life of him remember how many days had passed since then. The forest fire had burned away time. It felt as if weeks had passed.

He slotted a nut into the stone, then more protection, fashioning his own anchor. Something in the women’s system had failed, and he dared not attach himself to their wreckage. Best to start from scratch. The carabiner gates clacked like rifle bolts in the close space.

Enough, he decided. He’d brought them to the source. It was not his duty to face the horror alone. Let Augustine have his wish. Let him look first.

Pulling the gauze from his mouth, Hugh yelled, “Off,” even though he was as deep inside the beast as you could get and Augustine could never hear him. He gave several long, strong tugs on the rope, a secondary signal. A minute later, the ropes loaded tight. Augustine was on the way.

Hugh pulled in their haul bag and stowed it neatly against the wall, and waited. He looked at the prayer flags. He glanced up at the platform, mere inches overhead. His curiosity mounted. He waited some more. The hell with it. He couldn’t resist.

It was going to be ugly, he could smell her now. B movies flickered in his head. What if she was lying by the edge, her head right there? He gave himself enough slack to stand and peer over the edge, but only enough. If the shock felled him, he would be on a short leash.

He stood.

There was not one corpse, but two.

One woman sat against the wall, strapped into a spiderweb of slings and ropes lashed across her chest and shoulder. Her eyes were shut, her mouth hung open. The other woman lay across her lap, a rope still attached to her harness. She would be Andie. Hugh recognized her long, white-blond hair from Augustine’s photograph and the braids of his wrist braid. She had stones woven into her hair, like the girl he’d found in the forest.

It looked as if someone had arranged them in this harrowing pietà, one draped across the other’s lap, piled with loose rope. Death had spared their faces so far, or at least the face of that seated woman. No rictus, no corruption. He was just as glad that Andie’s face was hidden against her friend’s chest. Something smelled awful.

Hugh’s dread eased. Except for the stench, they could have been a pair of wax figures. He observed them, trying to read backward from their ending.

He traced their attempted exit from Cyclops Eye. The roof jutted out from here. The ceiling was honeycombed with pockets and cells, an upside-down battlefield of finger-and-hand-sized cavities. One of the women had crept toward the rim. Her chalk marks disappeared at the edge. Maybe she’d fallen there. Maybe she’d made it out onto the face above.

The accident had triggered a pandemonium of falling bodies and haul bags. He could translate their last moments from the frayed ends of exploded ropes and scattered gear. And yet there were peculiarities.

To begin with, there was this strange anchor. It defied his mountain logic, his sense of economy. For some reason, they had wildly overprotected the site. A half dozen silvery bolt hangers glittered on the diorite, with twice that many pitons driven into the seams, and that didn’t count the nuts and cams wedged behind flakes. Slings and spare rope had been knotted together and woven back and forth like a cargo net.

He ran his eyes over the scene, and found nothing leftover. They’d used every spare piece of gear to sew themselves to the stone. It went beyond caution. “Paranoia” was the word. It was as if they had been forewarned of their destruction.

He turned his attention to the seated woman. Cuba, he remembered. Her face reminded him of smoked meat. It was the color of dark tea. Tangled in slings, she must have strangled.

Oddly, tears tracked down her death mask, cutting through the soot and grime. At least they looked like tears, which was outright impossible. Joshua hadn’t started the fire until two days
after
Augustine had spied her in here, lashed in place just as she was now. Maybe the heat of the burning forest had caused juice to leak from her eyes.

But the greatest mystery was Andie. Somehow she had returned over a hundred and fifty feet from the tip of the rope to this sanctuary. With his own eyes, Hugh had seen her dangling in the spotlight. How had she gotten here?

Could Augustine have been right? Could she really have been alive all those days? Had she hauled herself up the rope when the fire began, fallen across the lap of her dead companion, and then expired? It defied belief, and yet Hugh could think of no other explanation. Just as Augustine had said all along, she had apparently been alive and waiting for someone to come along. If Augustine could have reached her that first day from above, or if the kid, Joe, had kept climbing through the night, they could have saved her.

A thought crept in. What if she was still alive?

“Andie?”

First the fall, then her ascension. Days on end without water or food. She could be in deep sleep, in a coma. A real life Sleeping Beauty, why not?

Hugh pulled closer. He started to reach for her, then held back. Old dreads. “Andie?” She lay still with her long hair like a curtain, and her head pillowed on the other woman’s lap.

Hugh stretched to touch her wrist. It was cold. Everything was cold in here. He couldn’t feel a pulse. But if she was in a coma, her metabolism would have slowed to a near flat line. He climbed higher, and brushed the hair away from her face.

He jerked his hand back.

Her neck was stretched the length of a sausage. Those Jim Crow photos of lynched men…it was like that. Dark welts on her throat showed where she’d tangled in the rope on her plunge.

Hugh stared at the pair of women. The mystery deepened. Andie couldn’t possibly have towed herself up from the depths. And there was no chance in the world that her eyes had opened when Augustine descended and called her name. Beyond a doubt, she had died—instantly—when the line snapped taut. But then how was she here? The strangeness of it almost offended him.

“Do you have her?”

Augustine’s voice bounced off the stone ceiling. Hugh glanced between his feet at the climber charging up through the smoke. His face was so open, so full of expectation, that Hugh groaned.

He did not feel sorrow. These were all strangers to him. And death was not always tragic. When Annie had disappeared in the Empty Quarter, it was as if the Holy Spirit had reached down and taken her away, putting an end to her humiliation and confusion and suffering. That’s how Hugh had come to view it, as a divine act.

Hugh opened his hand. He started to say, Slow down. Steel yourself. But something stopped him from softening the bad news. Augustine needed to smash against the reality. Hugh’s pause was not mean-spirited, or voyeuristic. He didn’t crave the grief about to come. At the same time, he didn’t intervene. This was a sort of just desserts. Because driven by Augustine’s nobility, and his guilt and raw imagination, Hugh had almost destroyed himself reaching this dead end in the sky.

Augustine wouldn’t have stopped anyway. The rope jerked and shivered with his jumar thrusts. “Andie?”

Like a sailor reaching up from the depths, he grabbed for the edge of the platform, which set everything wobbling and rocking. A shipwreck, Hugh thought again, surveying the mad rigging of ropes and the bobbing debris.

Hugh looked at the wax statues. Their dream was over. Their quiet would shatter. The litter would descend. These final sisters would be pulled apart once and for all.

Then he saw something. “Wait,” he said. Her head was different.

Augustine grappled his way past. “Andie?”

Her head had been bent down. Now it was lifted. That tea-brown face with streaks like tears.

“Andie?” Augustine’s voice warped. He saw the awful, elastic neck now.

Her head must have been lifted already, thought Hugh. He’d memorized it wrong, that was all. Or the motion of the platforms had shifted her limbs.

“God, oh God,” said Augustine.

The platforms rocked and scraped. Slings creaked. The clues bullied Hugh. He tried to think. Someone had taken the rope from around that boneless throat…after her return from the pit. There was only one possible explanation.