The Ascent: A Novel of Survival (Thriller Suspense)

by Ronald Malfi

  Andrew was asleep on the other side of the antechamber; his snores echoed off the walls. Petras, Hollinger, and I had bedded down as far away from him as we could get. We huddled together like three rabbits caught in a snare.

  “I keep seeing him bring it down into Chad’s head,” Hollinger went on. “I keep hearing the sound it made when he pulled it out. It was like that last bit of water gurgling down a tub drain.”

  I closed my eyes. “Stop it.”

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Cut it out.”

  “He’s lost his mind. Things are all fucked up.”

  “Go to sleep,” I told him.

  “All fucked up.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “Go to hell.”

  I grabbed Hollinger’s electric lantern and headed for the mouth of the tunnel. Andrew was sleeping at the foot of the entrance. I stepped over him and continued down the corridor, the lantern casting very little light beyond the small halo around itself. After a gradual bend in the tunnel, I could see the moonlight cast along the frozen tongue of ice that clung to the bottom lip of the cave’s opening. I set the lantern down and sighed, unzipping my fly and urinating into the wind. My stream seemed to freeze midway down the mountainside; I heard it shatter like glass on the rocks below.

  Shaking off, I zipped up my pants and grabbed the lantern. I nearly ran into Andrew when I turned around, his face ghost white, his eyes colorless and void of feeling. I skidded on the tongue of ice and almost dropped the lantern.

  “Boo,” he said quietly.

  “Jesus Christ.” I brushed past him, knocking his shoulder with mine (though this wasn’t on purpose) and holding the lantern up to guide my way. “Tim.”

  I paused, unsure if I wanted to turn around and look at him again.

  “It had to be done,” he said to the back of my head.

  “We’re through. Doesn’t matter how close we are, doesn’t matter what you want. We’re turning back tomorrow. With or without you.”

  Andrew didn’t respond. We both stood there in the shimmer of a pale moon, half hidden in the darkness of the cave for several seconds without moving, without speaking another word.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Andrew said, “Do you blame yourself?”

  I turned around, holding the lantern in his direction. His face was a mask of shadows. “Chad’s death was an accident, a horrible accident.

  You were right—he was going to die anyway. I don’t blame anyone. Not even you.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Chad,” he said.

  I stared at him. There was a hot rumble in my guts. I knew what he was talking about. I knew it wasn’t Chad.

  “Because I want you to blame yourself, Tim,” he said. “I want you to blame yourself.”

  “You’re a sick bastard,” I told him. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never know how a woman like Hannah befriended a creep like you.”

  The hint of a grin seemed to play across Andrew’s face.

  I lowered the lantern and receded into the dark cover of the tunnel, walking backward and staring at Andrew Trumbauer’s silhouette poised at the mouth of the cave. He looked like the fleeting remnants of a nightmare.

  7

  IN THE MORNING. ANDREW WAS GONE. HE’D LEFT

  behind Hollinger’s electric lantern but took his gear as well as our petrol stove. I used the lantern to search the cave, but I found no sign of him. There didn’t appear to be any fresh footprints in the snow outside the cave, down along the pass beyond the hundred-yard drop. He’d simply vanished. As if he’d never existed.

  Back in the Hall of Mirrors, Petras and Hollinger tried to force down a light breakfast. I had attempted the same moments ago, but my stomach refused to cooperate. I hadn’t kicked the fever like I thought I had, either; I could feel it asleep in the center of my body, hibernating but still very much alive.

  Petras looked at me. “Anything?”

  “He disappeared.”

  Across the chamber, the bright blue tarpaulin was a constant reminder of all that had happened and what still lay beneath. It wasimpossible for my gaze not to drift in that direction every couple of minutes. Too much longer in this reflective chamber and I’d lose my mind. Glancing around, my beaten, filthy reflection stared at me from every wall.

  “Have some cold tea,” Petras offered. “It tastes horrible but it’s something.“

  I sat with them and held the tin cup of cold green tea between my hands but didn’t drink any. My stomach was incapable of keeping anything down. I looked at the panel of ice in the ceiling. Warmed by daylight, it dripped constant streams of water against the exposed rock until nighttime when it would freeze all over again.

  “Do we wait around for him, or do we just leave?” Hollinger said finally.

  Petras’s eyes briefly met mine.

  “We wait until dark to leave,” I suggested. “If Andrew hasn’t returned by then, we go without him.”

  Hollinger looked incredulous. “In the dark?”

  “We’ve got nothing to make a fire, to make heat. Andrew’s got the lighter fluid, the petrol stove, the goddamn matches. We need to keep moving at night to keep our blood pumping and our bodies warm; otherwise we’ll freeze. We’ll rest during the day.”

  Hollinger stared at the black maw of the cave. “Where do you think he went? Did he climb back down the fucking rock?”

  Neither of us answered.

  Hollinger turned his gaze on the sheet of tarpaulin. “Christ, I can still see him in my head, you know? And the way Andrew brought the goddamn ax down into his … into his head …” He shivered. “Any of you guys know much about him?”

  “Chad? No,” I said.

  “No,” echoed Petras.

  “Like if the bloke had a family or someone waiting for him back home,” Hollinger went on.

  “I have no fucking idea, Holly,” I said. It wasn’t his fault, but I was growing irritated by the sound of his voice. “What’s it matter?”

  “Maybe we should go through his gear,” Hollinger said. “Maybe he’s got stuff in there that he wouldn’t want left behind in this place.”

  “And where would we take it?” I barked. “We’re not exactly on the red-eye out of this place, either, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Petras placed a steadying hand on my knee. Cool it, his glare said.

  “Fuck it.” Hollinger slid up the wall until he was standing and dusted the snow off his pants. “I need to piss.”

  Without a word I handed him the electric lantern—the only one that still worked—and he switched it on. His head down, his feet dragging tracks in the snow, he shuffled across the antechamber until he crossed into the tunnel and vanished in the dark.

  I eased my head down against my pack and folded my hands across my chest. I tried to shut my eyes, but they refused to cooperate. Instead, they focused on the blue tarpaulin at the other end of the chamber.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said quietly. “It’s sick, but Andrew was right. Chad wasn’t going to make it.”

  “I know.”

  “Anyone else could have done it, and it wouldn’t have been as bad. It’s worse that Andrew did it. Somehow that makes it worse.”

  “We need to keep watch,” Petras said. “We need to take turns watching for him. We shouldn’t all fall asleep at the same time.”

  I looked at him. “You think it’s … that serious?”

  “Let’s just stay on the safer side of chance.”

  “All right.”

  He nodded. “All right.”

  My gaze turned back to the blue slab of tarpaulin and trailed up the snow-packed boulder that leaned at an angle against the nearest ice wall. My eyelids felt stiff and heavy, my body sore from head to toe.

  Beside me, Petras began snoring like a lumberjack, his nostrils flaring with each powerful exhalation.

  I caught a glimpse of Hannah’s reflection in one of the mirrored walls of ice and sat up. Her image glided alo
ng the wall, undulating with the imperfections in the ice, and disappeared behind the solid white pylon of snow and ice that had crushed Chad.

  I stood and walked across the chamber, passing under that circular spotlight of light, and over to the finger-shaped pylon that had shattered Chad Nando’s pelvis. I stopped walking when I heard an unnatural crumpling sound beneath my boots and realized, with sickening lucidity, that I’d stepped onto the tarpaulin.

  Taking a step back, I walked around the tarpaulin to the other side of the massive pillar that canted against the ice wall. I ran one bare hand across it. It was solid ice underneath, coated in just a fine powder of snow, and the thing must have weighed as much as a Volkswagen. Jesus Christ. Toward the bottom it was splattered with blood.

  Across the floor, Petras snorted and rolled over in his sleep, startling me.

  I continued running my hand along the surface of the pylon, pausing only when I noticed what appeared to be the faint impression of a boot heel in the thin crust of snow. Above, the icicle-fanged ledge looked dangerous and foreboding, the narrow little ice cave against the wall hardly negotiable. But still …

  Like a gymnast preparing to mount a pommel horse, I placed my hands against the bulk of the pylon and, lifting one leg over, pulled myself up. I didn’t budge, didn’t make a sound … although my overactive imagination heard the snapping of Chad’s bones, grinding them into powder. Don’t think about it, I told myself. Stop thinking about it.

  I lifted my other leg and planted both feet flat against the pylon’s surface. I attempted to dig my fingernails into the ice, but it was no good. I slid one boot up the length of the incline, but the moment I put all my weight down on it in order to raise my other leg, I started to slide back down.

  “Shit.”

  I hopped down, rubbing my cold palms together. Pulverized stones and gravel lined the mouth of the cave. I collected two handfuls and carried them back to the pylon, showering the surface with grit for traction.

  A second attempt at climbing the pylon proved successful; I managed to crawl all the way to the top, where the jagged teeth of broken ice protruded from its base and where the pylon lay against the ledge of the ice wall. Using the crisscrossing spires of ice as handholds, I lifted myself onto the ledge and noticed a number of the icicles had been busted away from the opening of the ice cave. There were more boot prints in the snow here as well.

  Crouching, I peered into the narrow opening in the chamber wall. It was a tight squeeze for a man of average girth. Petras, I surmised, would have much difficulty crawling through. But I was much slimmer than John Petras. On my hands and knees, I crawled forward and poked my head into the ice cave.

  I expected to find a womblike niche punched in the snow … but what it turned out to be was a winding wormhole that gradually went up through the center of the mountain. The snow inside was ribbed and made for easy handholds. I climbed through the throat of the snow tunnel, pausing in the crook of its turn to see just how far up it went. It was impossible to tell due to a second bend farther in the tunnel, but I thought I saw faint daylight reflected along the wall.

  I continued climbing while the wormhole continued to tighten around me. The impossibility of this tunnel’s existence was not lost on me: this was a man-made structure, as things this perfectly symmetrical do not exist in the natural world—and a recently man-made structure at that. Where had it come from? Who’d been here before us to dig it?

  Halfway up, I got stuck. Arms pinned in front of my face like those of a praying mantis, I found I couldn’t budge, couldn’t struggle and work myself free. My breath made the air stale. Suddenly I was dying in the dark, lost and alone in a cave somewhere in the Midwest.

  If I closed my eyes, I was certain I’d smell the moss and dampness of rank soil and stagnant pools of fungal cave water. If I closed my eyes—

  8

  — I COULD CONVINCE MYSELF IT WAS ALL A NIGHT-

  mare. But when I opened them again, I was alone in our bed, the achy shades of twilight blues and purples filtering through the bedroom windows.

  Downstairs, I heard the front door squeal open.

  “Hey,” I said, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Jesus, Tim,” Hannah said. “You scared the hell out of me. Why aren’t you at the studio?”

  It had been three days since the incident at David Moore’s house and three days since I’d last seen or spoken to my wife. Standing before me now, she looked better than I thought she had any right to look.

  “You cut your hair,” I said. “It’s so short. I like it.”

  She turned away from me, a hand going to her mouth. “I didn’t want to do this with you here.”

  “Do what? You said we’d talk.”

  “I know what I said.”

  “So let’s talk.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We never talk, Hannah.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “So why’d you come back?”

  She had her floral suitcase with her; the reason was apparent.

  “We had our time to talk,” she said. “We had our time to try and fix things. But some things can’t be fixed.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not true.”

  “You’re a good man and a talented artist. You care about what you do. I love that about you, but I need someone who puts me first.

  You don’t do that. I’ve never felt like you’ve put me first.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s not true. You’ve always been first. Always.”

  “You say it, but you don’t show it. You say it, but then you get drunk, and you forget about me and what’s important to me. Your art makes you drink, and your drinking makes you put me in second place.” She shook her head, tears rolling down her face. Her hair did look beautiful. “I’m tired of being second place.”

  “Hannah—”

  “No.” She carried her suitcase toward the front door. “Never mind. I don’t need to pack anything. I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “Let’s have dinner tonight.” It sounded petty, but it was the first thing that came to my mind.

  “No—”

  “Then tomorrow night.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “I’m leaving tonight,” she said. The way she said it was like a confession, and I knew that it hadn’t been her initial intention to tell me. “I’m going to Europe. There’s a collector there who’s interested in a few pieces from the gallery. I thought it would be good to take some time to myself away from this place.”

  “Are you going with him?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Just answer the question. Are you?”

  “It doesn’t change what’s happened between you and me.”

  “Do you love him?” I asked.

  “Tim—”

  “Do you love me? Did you ever?”

  Her tears had stopped, and there was a look of disappointment on her face now. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “You’re doing it to me.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “It’s true.”

  “No, it’s not. That’s just more proof of how you don’t understand me. You don’t understand any of this.”

  “Then explain it to me,” I said calmly. I felt myself going numb right there in front of her.

  “There’s nothing to explain,” Hannah said, “and I don’t have the patience anymore.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Can I see you when you get back?”

  She closed her eyes. I could almost hear her thinking from across the room. Finally she said, “Yes. Okay. When I get back.”

  I stepped aside and leaned against the wall. “You can get some of your things. I’ll stay out of your way.”

  “No. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I love you, Hannah.”

  “I know y
ou do.”

  “Be careful.”

  She left without a response. And since her funeral was closed casket, it was technically the last time I saw her.

  9

  I WAS JARRED BACK TO REALITY WHEN THE TUN-

  nel loosened and I slid down several inches. The heat from my body had widened the opening while I hung there, daydreaming. Reaching above my head, I worked my fingers around one of the ribbed corrugations in the snow. My feet pushed off the ribs below me, and I continued ascending the tunnel.

  When I reached the bend, I climbed around it and froze when the tunnel opened to dazzling daylight no more than five feet in front of me.

  “Here we go,” I said, my breath whistling through my restrictivethroat, and began crawling toward the opening.

  10

  THE TUNNEL OPENED UP IN THE WALL OF A CAN-

  yon—the Canyon of Souls. I crawled from the opening onto a narrow ledge of black stone. Above me, the walls of the canyon yawned to a gunmetal sky. Below, they ran on forever, the canyon’s bottom nonexistent, my eyes surrendering to the optical illusion. The other side of the canyon was a tremendous distance away. I’d hiked the Grand Canyon a number of times, and this was no less impressive.

  Pebbles pushed against my fingertips. I flicked a few over the edge. They fell but seemed to float, never landing, as if gravity had no authority here. It seemed to take whole minutes before they disappeared into the abyss below.

  The ledge I was on ran the length of the canyon, both to my right and my left. It went on farther than my eyes could follow, and the ledge never seemed to get any wider. An attempt to walk its length on foot would be nothing short of suicide, as foolish as walking along the windowsills of a skyscraper.

  Something shimmered behind the ice along the opposite wall. I winced, staring hard at it, and saw colors swirling behind the ice like oil on water. They moved as if alive, spiraling and intertwining with one another, these living snakes of uncataloged hues, commingling and bleeding together only to separate again.

  It was then that I realized the entire canyon wall was alive with these streaks of color, pulsing like blood through veins and arteries, colors that went straight to the heart of this sacred land. The colors themselves were nostalgic, like they were solely associated with specific events from my past. Looking at one would cause me to weep; looking at another would cause me to laugh; yet another projected a soul-rattling melancholia I associated with childhood …