Angels of Light
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Tucker was doing today, though. The Kresinskis and Bullseyes and Johns of the world, possessed of talents and desires each believed were special, would never come close to doing the Visor ceiling. Tucker was separate. Out there. In a sense, once he completed the ceiling, he would have exiled himself from the rest of them. Then halfway across, something happened. The roof began to expel him.
The crack was the same crack. The ceiling didn't take a deeper slant or change the texture of its stone. Nothing was different. But suddenly, fifteen feet across with fifteen more to go, Tucker slowed. He lost his smoothness. One foot slipped from the crack. He replaced it with a short, strong kick. Hoisting himself up, he shoved his hands in tighter. He moved his head between and on the outsides of his arms, for the first time taking notice of the height and gauging the pitfalls of continuing and the possibilities of retreat. What had seemed so casual suddenly seemed desperate.
Clearly Tucker was going to fall. Worse, he knew he was going to fall. Other priorities were crowding out his concentration, priorities such as self-defense. Because if he fell now, he was going to be hurt badly. Tucker saw his danger. John saw his fear.
"...pumped..." Tucker groaned.
John stayed calm. "Try some pro," he called up. If Tucker could just get a nut into the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (118
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light crack, falling would lose its teeth.
"...don't know..." Tucker grunted. He looked down at the rack of pro hanging earthward, looked back up at the crack, then down again, estimating which piece to try where. By the movements of Tucker's head, John could tell the crack was oddly shaped. Freeing one hand from the crack, Tucker rapidly pawed through the clinking hardware, spreading the bunched metal and slings with a small slap to see what there was. That innocuous slap, its impatience, further confirmed what John had guessed:
Tucker was too wiped to waste muscle on anything but a sure fit, and the crack wasn't going to allow a sure fit. Tucker powered himself farther on, running the rope out another three feet in search of some crack that would take his protection. He pawed at the rack and fished a piece loose, one of the large tubes. He undipped it and tried to stuff it into the crack. The movement of his hands was slightly too fast, a bad sign. Nerves. A moment later his right knee twitched, no more than a hint of sewing machine leg, but still a hint. He was getting scared.
John spared a glance at the belay anchor. Three solid nuts, one slotted to take an upward pull.
If—when—Tucker fell, John was going to get yanked up into the wall.
The anchor would hold. John saw that he could catch the fall. But Tucker was going to smash Page 100
against the wall like a watermelon on a cord. John moved tight against the anchor, bracing for the pull. He was spellbound.
Tucker kept trying, all his effort devoted to inserting the tube and covering his ass.
When nothing worked, he did something John had never seen in all his days as a climber: Instead of clipping the piece back on the rack, he simply tossed the useless tube over his shoulder, just cast it away. The tube dropped through the air. Not once did it skip off the lower wall. The overhang was profound and the metal disappeared without a sound. Tucker thrust his hand into the rack again, undipped the largest spring cam, tried it once, twice, then tossed it, too, into the void. Forty dollars.
"No," wailed Tucker, and he tried to scoot his hands deeper into the crack. He was too tired to rest, and if he rested he'd only get more tired. His hands started slipping.
John expelled all his air, clamped his hands tight on the ropes.
Tucker fell.
Tucker's torso dropped and swung. The rack of gear slipped over his head and, clattering like a metal spider, scurried off into the windy depths. The Ray Charles-Oklahoma Sooners sunglasses sprang from his face, following after the rack. A large puff of white chalk emptied from his chalk bag and swirled past John on the wind.
But Tucker. Tucker went no farther. His feet stayed wedged in the crack. Upside down, he just hung there, belly naked. Katie's T-shirt draped around his big, rangy rib cage. He shouldn't have been, but he was saved.
"Oh, man," said Tucker, looking up at his feet stuck in the crack. John couldn't believe his eyes, either. "John, look it!"
John couldn't think of any words to say. Tucker had gained a second life. True, the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (119
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light gear had fallen, but now, maybe, Tucker wouldn't need it. With his hand and bicep strength replenished, he could finish. He would finish. He had no choice.
"You okay?" John shouted up. Tucker arched backward and looked at John.
"Yeah." He grinned. His fear was gone. He shook his arms, opened and clenched his hands. His arms were like vampires. A little fresh blood and it was a whole new day.
The wind hit them. It was about to be cold, John knew. That didn't matter now. You lived between storms. And they'd made it off. Tucker quit shaking his arms.
Carefully, so as not to uproot his feet, he twisted to the left and then right, loosening his back, psyching up again. There wasn't much chalk left in his bag, but what remained he dumped out into his palm and rubbed over both hands, from fingertips to the tape ending at his wrists.
"Okay," he said aloud. It was go-for-broke time. No protection. No more chalk. No more adrenaline. One way or the other, all the way up or slam-arcing down, this was the end. He went still. Then he started. Cautiously, slowly, he jackknifed his lower body up beside his zebra-striped legs and met the crack with his fingers.
The rest was anticlimax. Hanging by his hands and feet, Tucker crawled to the outer edge of the ceiling as if there had been no interruption in the climb. He reached around to the front edge of the ceiling and locked his fingers into the crack running vertically along the front of the Visor to the summit. John relaxed his shoulders and thawed his grip on the two lead ropes. His bare toes loosened in the white sand.
Tucker located another hold on the front of the Visor for his other hand, and a huge grin crossed his face. Bomber holds. Jugs. And to prove it, he pulled his feet from the crack in the ceiling and let go of one handhold and hung two thousand feet above the earth by his right hand.
He was liberated.
"Wooo, woooo," Tucker yelled at the sky and the wall and the abyss. It was a moment of pure Page 101
ego. He hung at the center of it all. Watching him, John shivered. So primitive. So triumphant.
He looked small way up there on the tip of nowhere, and his war cry sounded minute.
"Go plant the flag," John shouted up. The wind tore his words into oblivion, but Tucker heard his voice and looked down. John saluted him with a fist. Tucker nodded his head yes. Yes, me. Then he set to exiting on to the summit. He pulled his feet up, placed them on the front of the Visor, stood high, and hand-jammed the crack. He flowed up the remainder of the crack as fast as John could pay out rope. At the top he flipped a hand over the edge, kicked slightly with one toe, and disappeared onto the summit. For a moment after that there was no tugging on the ropes, and
John guessed that Tucker was lying on his back atop the Visor, beaming at God. Then there was some movement in the ropes; Tucker was walking around, looking for a big enough rock to use for an anchor. John listened in vain for the off-belay signal, then gave up for the wind and simply paid out the last ten feet of rope. He busied himself with the haul bag, readying it for Tucker to pull up. It was over.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
A few minutes later the haul line came taut. Tucker was ready. John unsnapped the haul bag from the anchor. The rope tightened from above, and suddenly the bag jumped into space. It flew off the ledge and arced fifty feet out, then arced in, then
out. In small hops and bounds, it sank upward toward the summit. With all the water gone, the haul bag was much lighter now, and Tucker had it up and out of sight before John had even finished pulling out the anchor pieces.
He tried to swallow.
Water soon. An hour. Less if the spring was still running. Didn't matter, there was a brook farther downtrail. He was bent over, thinking these thoughts, when a body went streaking past.
John didn't see it, not directly. The flash of color raced down the corner of his vision, followed by a sinuous thread of another color, and then it was gone. John froze. His lungs stopped.
Tucker? he thought.
"No," he murmured. He looked over the edge, but it was already night down below, all black and empty.
"Tucker?" he shouted. But it wasn't Tucker. He pulled from his mind's eye the colors of the body. Red. And the trailing thread, yellow. The haul bag. Tucker had dropped the haul bag and their yellow haul line both. Among other things, the haul bag had their sleeping bags. With that gone, it meant a night in the open with no bags unless they could make it the four hours down to Camp Four in the dark. Luckily John's pack held their headlamps. And his topo. The topo was more important than even their sleeping bags. The topo was history. Irretrievable. It was a dumb mistake, dropping the haul bag, but not really costly. In fact it was a blessing of sorts. It left them sixty pounds lighter, and that meant the descent to the valley floor could be accomplished at jogging speed.
John straightened from his ledge and prepared to "jug" one of the nine-mil ropes. He gave a hard yank on the line, judged it to be anchored, and clipped on both jumars. A set of stirrups hung from each jumar handle. All he had to do was place his feet in the stirrups and "climb" the rope. He set the pack on his back, draped the second heavier rack of gear over his head, and smacked his dry lips. He looked up at the summit rim.
And at that moment Tucker reappeared.
Somehow, horribly, Tucker slipped. He slipped headfirst. His black hair flashed, then shivered.
Violently, superhumanly, Tucker managed to twist himself around so that he was clinging to the very lip of the Visor. Slightly to the left was the crack he'd just climbed up, and farther over hung the lead ropes, one of which John was clipped onto. He had untied himself from the ropes.
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And then, to John's amazement, he saw that Tucker was talking to someone on the summit. He couldn't hear the words, but something about the motions of Tucker's head looked angry.
Instinctively, as if the danger were his, John backed away from the edge. He tripped in the sand, and the pack spun him hard, nose first, against the wall. His skull slapped against the granite, and he lay still for a moment, face to the
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light rock, not looking up. He let the ringing subside and tried to think.
There was a logic to what was going on up there. He just couldn't figure it out.
Still lying in the sand and hampered by the pack, he looked again. Tucker was hanging to the edge of the summit and he was arguing, the body language left no doubt about that. From this distance, miniaturized as he was, Tucker looked like one of the camp chipmunks scolding an intruder. It wasn't funny, though. It was insane and deadly. Who was he talking to? And why weren't they helping him?
John freed his arms from the pack straps and the extra rack and scooted himself farther away from the edge. Against his will, his eyes darted down at the yawning pit of the floor. A wild, penetrating vertigo punched him. He looked up. Tucker was still holding on, still arguing. Still in need. The thought stabilized him. Tucker needed rescue. He looked around. White sand. The pack. The ropes. The gear. First things first. He considered jumaring up the rope and talking Tucker up and over the summit edge. He didn't dare go up the rope, though. Somehow Tucker's danger had its source at the far end of these ropes.
No, John decided, his place was down here on the ledge, and so he put his mind to securing the area. He remembered taking out the lower anchor, and without it he was dependent on the summit anchor. John mobilized himself. He turned around and knelt facing the wall with the extra rack of gear in his lap. There wasn't time to find the very same nuts he'd pulled from the crack only a few minutes before, not even time to unsnap individual pieces and form a tidy anchor. He just slotted and jammed the first half-dozen nuts that stuck and tied the ends of the ropes and himself in. Immediately the vertigo slackened. His safety was tangible now. Nothing could pull him off the wall with this anchor.
He stood and faced outward to judge Tucker's progress. There was none. From this angle, the summit was barren. A gust of wind nudged John. Tucker kept hanging there.
Because there was nothing else he could do, John vainly tried to whip the one free rope over and across to Tucker. But the line was too tight and the distance was too far. "The rope," he shouted up. He tried again. His voice was a tiny scratch on a record. The rope wouldn't reach. Not even close.
Something got communicated, though, or else Tucker had the same thought himself, for he suddenly scurried hand over hand toward the ropes. John breathed a small prayer of thanks. At least the boy could descend on the ropes and come down to the soft sand, and they could straighten this nightmare out. Whatever it was, they could sort it out and survive.
But the ropes came alive and began trembling in John's hands, then jerking violently, and suddenly they went slack. Tucker howled a fierce, incoherent curse.
The ropes slithered through blank air, disembodied. The first line whipped down and across, pulled by the wind, and sliced into the abyss. It came tight at John's waist file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (122
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light with a heavy jerk. The other line, still running through the protection at the start of the ceiling, lashed John's arm, then tamed itself and meekly unthreaded from the Page 103
pieces above. The two ropes hung from John's hands. He was stunned.
Someone was up there.
Someone had untied the ropes.
Tucker's only hope now was to lift himself over the edge. It was an easy mantle. John had watched him do it only a few minutes before. Instead Tucker started to climb back down the crack, down the front of the Visor.
"Goddamn," spat John. It was too crazy. He looked again; the summit was empty.
There was nobody up there. The wind rushed at the wall again, frightening him with its hard, scaly, cold tide.
"Go up," he croaked. But Tucker continued down, plugging his feet and fists into the crack while scouting overhead for whatever it was, his demon, ogre, or dragon. Every motion was supremely sane and controlled; it was his direction that confounded John.
"Up," John yelled again. Half-healed scabs on his hands and around his fingernails ruptured as he clenched the ropes. A thin rivulet of blood ran across the tape on his right hand. The nausea stormed through him, and his knees buckled. His head was drumming. But his vision was crystal clear.
Tucker was frenzied and yet calm. Not once did he glance down at John, only up over and over again. He descended to the front corner of the Visor's ceiling and, to John's greater horror, actually began trying to locate a foothold underneath in the crack. It was completely unthinkable.
He found the two handholds that had served him on exiting the ceiling, lowered his legs down into the cold wind, and felt for the crack with the toes of his Spanish shoes. The crack was there, of course, but he'd lost his memory for its precise shape. There was no possible way to reenter the ceiling blindly. It took him only a minute of effort to realize that his bridge was gone. John couldn't see his face, but when Tucker's legs went slack for an instant, he knew the boy had surrendered.
"My arms," John heard him groan. He knew Tucker had to be exhausted. His muscles would be on fire. His lungs would be dragging at the air. He couldn't last.
&n
bsp; "Up," John yelled. But Tucker was already on his way up. This time Tucker's ascent wasn't a nonchalant scamper to the sky. He labored for holds and had to push with his feet to get any pull from his arms. Several times he had to stop and, one by one, shake out his arms. Near the top he slowed further. Hands wedged in the final top inches of the crack, he peeked over the summit lip, then ducked down in a tight ball as if hiding again. At last he turned his eyes toward John. They were far away, but
John saw his terror.
Tucker opened his mouth wide and John saw, rather than heard, his name called out.
It was Tucker's last rite. With that, the boy straightened from his crouch, grabbed the file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (123
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light summit rim, and rose almost to a complete exit. He started to disappear from John's field of view. Then, suddenly, definitely, he exploded backward from the Visor.
Someone had kicked or struck him. There was no other explanation. And yet John saw nothing, only Tucker and how he grabbed for the crack—now five feet away—and started his inevitable plunge to earth. His T-shirt fluttered. As he passed John's ledge, Tucker stared at the last human being on earth. He reached for that fraternity with open hands. John saw his own hands open and reaching. And then Tucker was gone.
A flock of white birds leapt from the void, but by that time John was lying in the sand, face to the wall, clutching the ropes. Later still, as an icy drizzle sprayed the benighted wall, John put on Page 104
a headlamp. He donned his pack and the extra rack of gear and started back down the wall. It was after all Tucker's choice. Up. Or down.