The Ascent

by Ronald Malfi

  That evening I went to the Filibuster. It was the first time I’d been back since my return from Nepal. The first thing that struck me was how someone had removed all the newspaper clippings and photos of corrupt politicians from the walls. Ricky was tending bar; his eyes nearly dropped out of their sockets upon seeing me.

  I grinned and offered a two-fingered salute as I entered and claimed a barstool.

  “Holy crap, Tim,” Ricky said.

  “Guess you’re still working here, huh, kid?”

  “What’s it been?” he said. “A year?”

  “At least,” I said.

  “Where you been?”

  “Nepal. Climbing mountains. And chasing ghosts.”

  “No shit? Wow. That’s badass.” He flipped a dish towel over one shoulder. “Can I get you the usual? I still remember how you like it …”

  “Actually, make it a Diet Coke.”

  “Seriously?”

  “And a menu. I’m hungry.”

  “Man, that mountain climbing stuff must have rattled your brains around, if you don’t mind me saying.” Ricky slipped me a menu and a Diet Coke.

  I glanced around the place and said, “What’s with the empty walls?”

  “Yeah,” Ricky said. “Guess you wouldn’t know. Brom’s selling the place.”

  “No shit? How come?”

  “Never really came out and said. My guess is he’s getting old and doesn’t want the hassle anymore.” He jerked a thumb toward the back room. “He keeps a picture of some beach in Pensacola on his desk in his office. Been looking at it more and more whenever he’s in here. I bet he’s itching to retire while he’s still got a few good years left, maybe get a house on the beach in Florida. Just relax, you know?”

  I was still staring at the barren walls. This is what it’s like for a building to get Alzheimer’s, I thought. Taking pictures off the walls and leaving those inky, dark-colored rectangles in the wood is how a building loses its memories, loses what makes it what it used to be.

  “You okay, Tim?”

  “Fine.” I ordered a crab cake and ate it in silence, while Ricky attended to the other patrons. Behind me, the sound of darts striking the dartboard punctuated each bite of my crab cake. At one point, I heard someone slip coins into the jukebox. An old Creedence

  Clearwater Revival song came on.

  Something caused me to shiver. I turned around on my stool and looked toward the rear of the bar, straight at the booth where, roughly two and a half years ago now, I’d run into Andrew Trumbauer. What I’d written off as nothing more than a serendipitous meeting was now overshadowed by everything I’d come to know about Andrew. How long had it taken him to find me? How many days had he followed me? Had he been following me straight to the Filibuster? The notion caused my hands to go numb; I set my glass of Diet Coke on the bar before I dropped it.

  The booth was currently empty, but if I concentrated hard enough, I could visualize what Andrew had looked like that evening when he’d locked eyes with me from across the room. The way he’d lit a cigarette and grinned at the corner of his mouth, that sly, knowing grin, that perfect Andrew grin …

  Then, for no longer than a heartbeat, Hannah appeared in the corner of the bar. She was nude and glistening as if covered by tiny beads of ice, her skin nearly blue, her lips colorless. She was half shaded in gloom, so I couldn’t make out her expression, yet I could see the gleam of her eyes through the shadows. They were wide, staring, heartbreaking eyes.

  A hand fell on my shoulder. My heart seized; instantly, I was back on Godesh Ridge, trying to plug up a weeping wound in my abdomen before I bled out into the snow.

  “You sure you’re all right?” It was Ricky. “You look like you’re ready to pass out, man.”

  I waved him off. “No, no—I’m okay.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” It had been a year since I’d last seen Hannah’s ghost in Nepal on the Godesh Ridge.

  “It’s just, I mean, you look spooked.”

  “Forget it, Ricky. Just gimme the check, huh?”

  I paid the bill and shoved out into the cool night, positive young Ricky’s eyes followed me all the way out the door.

  5

  PUSHING OPEN THE DOOR TO MY APARTMENT. I

  was immediately overcome by a cold breeze. I closed the door behind me and groped for the light switch. I flicked the switch, but the light didn’t turn on. Across the room, the curtains over the balcony doors billowed out. The doors were open.

  “Marta?” I called. She was supposed to be at her place tonight, but maybe she’d changed her mind.

  I took a step into the room toward the lamp on the end table when movement caught my eye. I froze. Someone was standing in a darkened corner, partially obscured by the billowing curtain. “Who’s there?” My voice was nothing more than a whisper. “Hello, Tim.” It was Andrew. He stepped out from the corner, briefly silhouetted before the panel of light coming through the open balcony doors.

  “Jesus—Andrew?” I couldn’t fathom it. “How did you …? What are you …?”

  “Been a while, Overleigh. Been about a year since we last … tangoed.” “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “So are you,” he said and took a step forward. Moonlight washed across a distorted, lumpy face, tracked by numerous scars and dents. He shuffled forward with a limp.

  “You went over the edge,” I breathed. “I saw you.” “Yes.” His voice was gravelly, injured. “It was quite a drop. I’ll probably never know exactly how long I was unconscious, but when I woke up, the pain … oh, the pain was exquisite. I wished death upon me countless times, but it never came. And soon I realized I had to take things into my own hands.” His hideous, broken face grinned.

  His teeth were chiseled pickets filed to points. “Just like always, I had to take things into my own hands.”

  I backed up against the door. I could taste bile at the rear of my throat.

  “They did the best they could, but what can you expect from a bunch of Tibetan monks?” He laughed. It sounded like a box of glass shaken, shaken, shaken.

  “Petras,” I uttered. “You killed John Petras.”

  “Shhh.” He brought one crooked finger up to his disfigured lips. Another step closer and I could see one of his eyes was partially swollen, his forehead a mountainous terrain of peaks and valleys.

  “Why Petras?” I wanted to know. “I’ve already figured much of it out but not Petras. He was a good man. What’d he ever do to you?”

  Andrew’s lower lip dropped—a grotesque expression of awe, which slowly curled into his hideous trademark grin. “You mean you two imbeciles never figured it out?”

  “Figured what out?”

  “You never recognized each other?” He snickered, a ticking time-bomb sound.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “John Petras is the reason you were on that mountain. If it wasn’t for Petras, you would have died in the desert after crawling out of that cave, and none of this would have ever happened to you. Driver finds unidentified injured man unconscious by the side of the road. Something like that, anyway. Forgive me, but I don’t remember the newspaper article verbatim.”

  “Petras … Petras was the one who … who found me …?”

  “I guess I can understand how you two never put it together. After all, it was quite a while ago. You were going through your longhair stage, too, if I remember correctly.”

  I couldn’t respond. My mind was reeling.

  “See, it was John Petras’s own fault for stepping in and redirecting

  fate. Set all the other wheels into motion.”

  “You son of—”

  “Save it,” Andrew growled. “So now he’s dead—just one more person you’re responsible for killing. You’re a dangerous man, Timothy Overleigh. You need to be stopped. For good.”

  Moonlight gleamed to my right. I glanced over and saw Petras’s pearl-handled hunting knife on the credenza.

  Andrew took one final s
tep toward me. I heard the click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back. “I’ve waited a long time for this. Good-bye, motherfucker.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good-bye.”

  I grabbed the knife off the credenza and, like a bull in a ring, charged Andrew. I heard a deafening, bone-quaking pop ring out, saw the fiery muzzle flash … Then, an instant later, I collided with Andrew, driving the blade of Petras’s hunting knife straight into his chest.

  Andrew cried out and dropped the gun. My momentum propelled us clear across the room. Andrew scrambled to grab hold of the curtains; he pulled one from its rod as we shot out onto the balcony. My hand still wrapped around the hilt of the knife, I drove us across the balcony where we broke through the railing and fell over the edge.

  The fall lasted only a second, but the blackness that followed could have been an eternity.

  Chapter 19

  1

  —TIM. SHE SAID. OH. TIM…

  2

  AND THE WORLD SWAM BACK INTO TEMPORARY

  focus: sodium lights … corkboard ceiling tiles … the droning beep-beep-beep of electrical heartbeats.

  Above me, Marta’s face, swimming out of the black. A warm hand against my cold cheek.

  “Oh, Tim,” she said, her voice like a thousand vibrations. “Where—?” I began, but my throat burst into flames and I cut myself off.

  “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “You’re alive, Tim. You’re alive.” Then: blackness.

  3

  THE BULLET FROM ANDREW’S 9MM ENTERED MY

  left leg only to ricochet out, embedding itself in the ceiling ofmy apartment. According to the doctors who spent several days fawning over me in the hospital, it was the metal plate screwed into my fibula that caused the bullet’s redirection and prevented it from bursting through the other side of my leg. There was no question—I was lucky.

  Andrew Trumbauer was not as lucky. He died that night, a combination of severe trauma to the back of his head sustained in the three-story fall from my balcony and the five-inch, pearl-handled hunting knife I’d planted in his chest. Which one was listed as the actual cause of death, I did not know. I’d been apprised of too many coroner reports in my lifetime and did not feel I needed to add another notch to my walking stick.

  Once my leg healed, I took to running across Eastport and along the breakwater that overlooked the bay. I timed myself, pushed myself, and checked the rate of my pulse as the miles added up. I lost what weight I’d put on while confined to the wheelchair. My left leg never felt stronger.

  The police asked questions, of course. After very little consideration, I came clean about all that had happened in Nepal. The two young officers who took notes during my interrogation stared at me in disbelief. It made me look bad, coming clean a year after it had happened. Why had I lied? My reasons were poor but truthful.

  And perhaps they wouldn’t have believed me had an insightful detective in Wisconsin not uncovered a curious bit of information. On the night of the mysterious fire that had killed John Petras, a man matching Andrew’s description rented a vehicle under the name Victor Rios from the airport. The clerk at the rental car agency described the person with ease, relating how he’d been spooked by Victor’s busted, scarred face and limp. The clerk said Victor Rios reminded her of Quasimodo. After that, the police accepted my story and never called on me again. Whether they actually believed all that I had told them, I had no idea …

  Marta and I continued our relationship for a good eight monthsafter my recovery, although we never truly fell in love. We both knew it, but because we cared for each other, we let things drag out longer than they should, each of us not wanting to hurt the other’s feelings. But in the end, after a night of smiles and hugs and tears, Marta packed her stuff and left. We remained friends, but things were never quite the same between us again.

  And it seemed all was back to normal, including my inability to sculpt. The passion had left me, the drive had gone out of me—

  4

  —UNTIL MIDNIGHT OF SOME RANDOM NIGHT.

  I opened my eyes to the soft moonlight coming in through my bedroom windows. I felt a chill wash over my body, which was covered in a film of sweat. Panting, my heartbeat increasing, I sat up stiffly in bed. Across from me was the bedroom doorway and beyond that the deeper darkness of the hall. As I stared, I thought I saw a whitish shape drift down the hall and disappear.

  I flipped the sheets off me and climbed into a pair of running shorts. The soles of my feet, tacky with sweat, peeled off the hardwood floor with each step.

  Out in the foyer the door to my apartment stood open. Dull, greenish light spilled in from the communal hallway. My breath catching in my throat, I glimpsed a slight shadow easing along the wall outside.

  I followed the shape into the hallway, but the hallway was empty.

  I hurried down the flights of steps to the lobby in time to see the lobby door closing. Beyond the doors, a smoky mist had overtaken the parking lot. It was impossible to see anything beyond the apartment building’s black canvas awning.

  My palms left twin imprints on the glass as I pushed the lobby door open and staggered out into the fog. The air was thick, humid.

  Breathing in was like inhaling ghostly vapors. I could hear the tide coming in at the beach but could see nothing until I went around the side of the building, the wet grass turning to sand beneath my feet.

  At the foot of the bay, the fog seemed to sail over the water, where it slowly dissipated. Revealed by the clearing of the fog and aglow in moonlight, Hannah’s ghost stood on the beach. The foaming surf lapped at her bare feet. She was once again in her willowy, flowing white gown—the gown of an angel—and her hair was the short, sculpted hair she’d had the last time I saw her at our Georgetown home before she ran off to Italy.

  “Hannah,” I whispered, my voice seeming to carry forever over the dark water.

  She smiled warmly and turned. I watched her walk along the surf and down the moonlit beach.

  After a moment, I began to follow. My heels dug divots in the wet sand, my feet quickly growing numb.

  Hannah disappeared around a bend in the coast, briefly masked by a dark veil of trees swaying in the wind.

  I rounded the trees, crossing through the freezing bay water to do so, and materialized on the other side of the beach. It was a stretch of beach I’d been on hundreds of times before, but suddenly it was all completely new to me. The way the moonlight played off the contours of the black stones that rose like giant glossy fingers from the sand, glistening like living creatures, reflecting the countless dazzle of diamond stars …

  It was breathtaking. Helpless, I collapsed in the sand, my arms quivering. My breath was coming in steady gasps now. My face was beginning to burn.

  “It’s … beautiful,” I managed, my voice hitching. To my own amazement, I felt a laugh threaten my throat.

  Hannah continued walking down the beach, one hand running along the shimmering, glossy stones along the breakwater, never oncepausing to look back. Somewhere farther up the beach, her image began to fade. By the time she reached the next outcrop of shuddering trees, she had vanished completely.

  5

  WHETHER IT WAS A DREAM. A HALLUCINATION. OR

  something else, I may never know for sure. But in the morning I awoke in a fetal position in the sand, the surf lapping at my legs, dressed in nothing but running shorts. Peering over my shoulder, I could discern my footprints in the sand from the night before—only my footprints, though, and no one else’s.

  Later that day, I carried a hammer and a chisel to the black stones along the beach, I started sculpting again. I sculpted for myself. Beneath the burn of a midday sun, I sculpted the rocks that lined the breakwater of the Chesapeake Bay. I carved, leaving in my wake things of sudden and unmistakable awe, of spiritual beauty. I sculpted for John Petras who was so close but never got to see the Canyon of Souls. I sculpted for Hannah, my Hannah, who had returned to me my ability to create artistic paradise, to
bring Shangri-la to the world.

  And I would show it to the world. I would do it for Hannah, my dakini, and I would do it for myself—finally, myself, letting go, forgiving myself—because it was what she wanted and what she had been trying to tell me all along. It was a gift of forgiveness.

  Finished, hours or days or weeks or years later, I dropped my tools in the surf and wiped the tears from my eyes with shaking, gritty hands. Numb, my body trembling, I began to climb up the beach, pausing at the summit of the embankment to glance over my shoulder at the carved black stones, the white band of beach, and the glistening shimmer of the endless bay.

  The view from the top was nothing short of breathtaking.

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