The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories

by Roger Zelazny

  By day's end, we'd made it across, to the place where we could hold on and feel something--granted, not much--beneath our boots. It was inclined to be a trifle scant, however, to warrant less than a full daylight assault. So we returned once more to the gap.

  In the morning, we crossed.

  The way kept its winding angle. We headed west and up. We traveled a mile and made five hundred feet. We traveled another mile and made perhaps three hundred.

  Then a ledge occurred, about forty feet overhead.

  Stan went up the hard way, using the gun, to see what he could see.

  He gestured, and we followed; and the view that broke upon us was good.

  Down right, irregular but wide enough, was our new camp.

  The way above it, ice cream and whiskey sours and morning coffee and a cigarette after dinner. It was beautiful and delicious: a seventy-degree slope full of ledges and projections and good clean stone.

  "Hot damn!" said Kelly.

  We all tended to agree.

  We ate and we drank and we decided to rest our bruised selves that afternoon.

  We were in the twilight world now, walking where no man had ever walked before, and we felt ourselves to be golden. It was good to stretch out and try to unache.

  I slept away the day, and when I awakened the sky was a bed of glowing embers. I lay there too lazy to move, too full of sight to go back to sleep. A meteor burnt its way bluewhite across the heavens. After a time, there was another. I thought upon my position and decided that reaching it was worth the price. The cold, hard happiness of the heights filled me. I wiggled my toes.

  After a few minutes, I stretched and sat up. I regarded the sleeping forms of my companions. I looked out across the night as far as I could see. Then I looked up at the mountain, then dropped my eyes slowly among tomorrow's trail.

  There was movement within shadow.

  Something was standing about fifty feet away and ten feet above.

  I picked up my pick and stood.

  I crossed the fifty and stared up.

  She was smiling, not burning.

  A woman, an impossible woman.

  Absolutely impossible. For one thing, she would just have to freeze to death in a mini-skirt and a sleeveless shell-top. No alternative. For another, she had very little to breath. Like, nothing.

  But it didn't seem to bother her. She waved. Her hair was dark and long, and I couldn't see her eyes. The planes of her pale, high cheeks, wide forehead, small chin corresponded in an unsettling fashion with certain simple theorems which comprise the geometry of my heart. If all angles, planes, curves be correct, it skips a beat, then hurries to make up for it.

  I worked it out, felt it do so, said, "Hello."

  "Hello, Whitey," she replied.

  "Come down," I said.

  "No, you come up."

  I swung my pick. When I reached the ledge she wasn't there. I looked around, then I saw her.

  She was seated on a rock twelve feet above me.

  "How is it that you know my name?" I asked.

  "Anyone can see what your name must be."

  "All right," I agreed. "What's yours?"

  "..." Her lips seemed to move, but I heard nothing.

  "Come again?"

  "I don't want a name," she said.

  "Okay. I'll call you 'girl,' then."

  She laughed, sort of.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "Watching you."

  "Why?"

  "To see whether you'll fall."

  "I can save you the trouble," I said. "I won't."

  "Perhaps," she said.

  "Come down here."

  "No, you come up here."

  I climbed, but when I got there she was twenty feet higher.

  "Girl, you climb well," I said, and she laughed and turned away.

  I pursued her for five minutes and couldn't catch her. There was something unnatural about the way she moved.

  I stopped climbing when she turned again. We were still about twenty feet apart.

  "I take it you do not really wish me to join you," I said.

  "Of course I do, but you must catch me first." And she turned once more, and I felt a certain fury within me.

  It was written that no one could outclimb Mad Jack. I had written it.

  I swung my pick and moved like a lizard.

  I was near to her a couple of times, but never near enough.

  The day's aches began again in my muscles, but I pulled my way up without slackening my pace. I realized, faintly, that the camp was far below me now, and that I was climbing alone through the dark up a strange slope. But I did not stop. Rather, I hurried, and my breath began to come hard in my lungs. I heard her laughter, and it was a goad. Then I came upon a two-inch ledge, and she was moving along it. I followed, around a big bulge of rock to where it ended. Then she was ninety feet above me, at the top of a smooth pinnacle. It was like a tapering, branchless tree. How she'd accomplished it, I didn't know. I was gasping by then, but I looped my line around it and began to climb. As I did this, she spoke:

  "Don't you ever tire, Whitey? I thought you would have collapsed by now."

  I hitched up the line and climbed further.

  "You can't make it up here, you know."

  "I don't know," I grunted.

  "Why do you want so badly to climb here? There are other nice mountains."

  "This is the biggest, girl. That's why."

  "It can't be done."

  "Then why all this bother to discourage me? Why not just let the mountain do it?"

  As I neared her, she vanished. I made it to the top, where she had been standing, and I collapsed there.

  Then I heard her voice again and turned my head. She was on a ledge, perhaps eighty feet away.

  "I didn't think you'd make it this far," she said. "You are a fool. Good-by, Whitey." She was gone.

  I sat there on the pinnacle's tiny top--perhaps four square feet of top--and I know that I couldn't sleep there, because I'd fall. And I was tired.

  I recalled my favorite curses and I said them all, but I didn't feel any better. I couldn't let myself go to sleep. I looked down. I knew the way was long. I knew she didn't think I could make it.

  I began the descent.

  The following morning when they shook me, I was still tired. I told them the last night's tale, and they didn't believe me. Not until later in the day, that is, when I detoured us around the bulge and showed them the pinnacle, standing there like a tapering, branchless tree, ninety feet in the middle of the air.

  V

  We went steadily upward for the next two days. We made slightly under ten thousand feet. Then we spent a day hammering and hacking our way up a great flat face. Six hundred feet of it. Then our way was to the right and upward. Before long we were ascending the western side of the mountain. When we broke ninety thousand feet, we stopped to congratulate ourselves that we had just surpassed the Kasla climb and to remind ourselves that we had not hit the halfway mark. It took us another two and a half days to do that, and by then the land lay like a map beneath us.

  And then, that night, we all saw the creature with the sword.

  He came and stood near our camp, and he raised his sword above his head, and it blazed with such a terrible intensity that I slipped on my goggles. His voice was all thunder and lightning this time:

  "_Get off this mountain!_" he said. "_Now! Turn back! Go down! Depart!_"

  And then a shower of stones came down from above and rattled about us. Doc tossed his slim, shiny, case, causing it to skim along the ground toward the creature.

  The light went out, and we were alone.

  Doc retrieved his case, took tests, met with the same success as before--_i.e._, none. But now at least he didn't think I was some kind of balmy, unless of course he thought we all were.

  "Not a very effective guardian," Henry suggested.

  "We've a long way to go yet," said Vince, shying a stone through the space the cre
ature had occupied. "I don't like it if the thing can cause a slide."

  "That was just a few pebbles," said Stan.

  "Yeah, but what if he decided to start them fifty thousand feet higher?"

  "Shut up!" said Kelly. "Don't give him any idea. He might be listening."

  For some reason, we drew closer together. Doc made each of us describe what we had seen, and it appeared that we all had seen the same thing.

  "All right," I said, after we'd finished. "Now you've all seen it, who wants to go back?"

  There was silence.

  After perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, Henry said, "I want the whole story. It looks like a good one. I'm willing to take my chances with angry energy creatures to get it."

  "I don't know what the thing is," said Kelly. "Maybe it's no energy creature. Maybe it's something--supernatural--I know what you'll say, Doc. I'm just telling you how it struck me. If there are such things, this seems a good place for them. Point is--whatever it is, I don't care. I want this mountain. If it could have stopped us, I think it would've done it already. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it can. Maybe it's laid some trap for us higher up. But I want this mountain. Right now, it means more to me than anything. If I don't go up, I'll spend all my time wondering about it--and then I'll probably come back and try it again some day, when it gets so I can't stand thinking about it any more. Only then, maybe the rest of you won't be available. Let's face it, we're a good climbing team. Maybe the best in the business. Probably. If it can be done, I think we can do it."

  "I'll second that," said Stan.

  "What you said, Kelly," said Mallardi, "about it being supernatural--it's funny, because I felt the same thing for a minute when I was looking at it. It reminds me of something out of the _Divine Comedy_. If you recall, Purgatory was a mountain. And then I thought of the angel who guarded the eastern way to Eden. Eden had gotten moved to the top of Purgatory by Dante--and there was this angel....Anyhow, I felt almost like I was committing some sin I didn't know about by being here. But now that I think it over, a man can't be guilty of something he doesn't know is wrong, can he? And I didn't see that thing flashing any angel ID card. So I'm willing to go up and see what's on top, unless he comes back with the Tablets of the Law, with a new one written in at the bottom."

  "In Hebrew or Italian?" asked Doc.

  "To satisfy you, I suppose they'd have to be drawn up in the form of equations."

  "No," he said. "Kidding aside, I felt something funny too, when I saw and heard it. And we didn't really hear it, you know. It skipped over the senses and got its message right into our brains. If you think back over our descriptions of what we experienced, we each 'heard' different words telling us to go away. If it can communicate a meaning as well as a pyschtranslator, I wonder if it can communicate an emotion, also....You thought of an angel too, didn't you, Whitey?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "That makes it almost unanimous then, doesn't it?"

  Then we all turned to Vince, because he had no Christian background at all, having been raised as a Buddhist on Ceylon.

  "What were your feelings concerning the thing?" Doc asked him.

  "It was a Deva," he said, "which is sort of like an angel, I guess. I had the impression that every step I took up this mountain gave me enough bad karma to fill a lifetime. Except I haven't believed in it that way since I was a kid. I want to go ahead, up. Even if that feeling was correct, I want to see the top of this mountain."

  "So do I," said Doc.

  "That makes it unanimous," I said.

  "Well, everyone hang onto his angelsbane," said Stan, "and let's sack out."

  "Good idea."

  "Only let's spread out a bit," said Doc, "so that anything falling won't get all of us together."

  We did that cheerful thing and slept untroubled by heaven.

  Our way kept winding right, until we were at a hundred forty-four thousand feet and were mounting the southern slopes. Then it jogged back, and by a hundred fifty we were mounting to the west once more.

  Then, during a devilish, dark and tricky piece of scaling, up a smooth, concave bulge ending in an overhang, the bird came down once again.

  If we hadn't been roped together, Stan would have died. As it was, we almost all died.

  Stan was lead man, as its wings splashed sudden flames against the violet sky. It came down from the overhang as though someone had kicked a bonfire over its edge, headed straight toward him and faded out at a distance of about twelve feet. He fell then, almost taking the rest of us with him.

  We tensed our muscles and took the shock.

  He was battered a bit, but unbroken. We made it up to the overhang, but went no further that day.

  Rocks did fall, but we found another overhang and made camp beneath it.

  The bird did not return that day, but the snakes came.

  Big, shimmering scarlet serpents coiled about the crags, wound in and out of jagged fields of ice and gray stone. Sparks shot along their sinuous lengths. They coiled and unwound, stretched and turned, spat fires at us. It seemed they were trying to drive us from beneath the sheltering place to where the rocks could come down upon us.

  Doc advanced upon the nearest one, and it vanished as it came within the field of his projector. He studied the place where it had lain, then hurried back.

  "The frost is still on the punkin," he said.

  "Huh?" said I.

  "Not a bit of ice was melted beneath it."

  "Indicating?"

  "Illusion," said Vince, and he threw a stone at another and it passed through the thing.

  "But you saw what happened to my pick," I said to Doc, "when I took a cut at that bird. The thing had to have been carrying some sort of charge."

  "Maybe whatever has been sending them has cut that part out, as a waste of energy," he replied, "since the things can't get through to us anyhow."

  We sat around and watched the snakes and falling rocks, until Stan produced a deck of cards and suggested a better game.

  The snakes stayed on through the night and followed us the next day. Rocks still fell periodically, but the boss seemed to be running low on them. The bird appeared, circled us and swooped on four different occasions. But this time we ignored it, and finally it went home to roost.

  We made three thousand feet, could have gone more, but didn't want to press it past a cozy little ledge with a cave big enough for the whole party. Everything let up on us then. Everything visible, that is.

  A before-the-storm feeling, a still, electrical tension, seemed to occur around us then, and we waited for whatever was going to happen to happen.

  The worst possible thing happened: nothing.

  This keyed-up feeling, this expectancy, stayed with us, was unsatisfied. I think it would actually have been a relief if some invisible orchestra had begun playing Wagner, or if the heavens had rolled aside like curtains and revealed a movie screen, and from the backward lettering we knew we were on the other side, or if we saw a high-flying dragon eating low-flying weather satellites....

  As it was, we just kept feeling that something was imminent, and it gave me insomnia.

  During the night, she came again. The pinnacle girl.

  She stood at the mouth of the cave, and when I advanced the retreated.

  I stopped just inside and stood there myself, where she had been standing.

  She said, "Hello, Whitey."

  "No, I'm not going to follow you again," I said.

  "I didn't ask you to."

  "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

  "Watching," she said.

  "I told you I won't fall."

  "Your friend almost did."

  "'Almost' isn't good enough."

  "You are the leader, aren't you?"

  "That's right."

  "If you were to die, the others would go back?"

  "No," I said, "they'd go on without me."

  I hit my camera then.

  "What did you just do?" she asked.
<
br />   "I took your picture--if you're really there."

  "Why?"

  "To look at after you go away. I like to look at pretty things."

  "..." She seemed to say something.

  "What?"

  "Nothing."

  "Why not?"

  "...die."

  "Please speak up."

  "She dies..." she said.

  "Why? How?"

  "....on mountain."

  "I don't understand."

  "...too."

  "What's wrong?"

  I took a step forward, and she retreated a step.

  "Follow me?" she asked.

  "No."

  "Go back," she said.

  "What's on the other side of that record?"

  "You will continue to climb?"

  "Yes."

  Then, "Good!" she said suddenly. "I--," and her voice stopped again.

  "Go back," she finally said, without emotion.

  "Sorry."

  And she was gone.

  VI

  Our trail took us slowly to the left once more. We crawled and sprawled and cut holes in the stone. Snakes sizzled in the distance. They were with us constantly now. The bird came again at crucial moments, to try to make us fall. A raging bull stood on a crag and bellowed down at us. Phantom archers loosed shafts of fire, which always faded right before they struck. Blazing blizzards swept at us, around us, were gone. We were back on the northern slopes and still heading west by the time we broke a hundred sixty thousand. The sky was deep and blue, and there were always stars. Why did the mountain hate us? I wondered. What was there about us to provoke this thing? I looked at the picture of the girl for the dozenth time and I wondered what she really was. Had she been picked from our minds and composed into girlform to lure us, to lead us, sirenlike, harpylike, to the place of the final fall? It was such a long way down....

  I thought back over my life. How does a man come to climb mountains? Is he drawn by the heights because he is afraid of the level land? Is he such a misfit in the society of men that he must flee and try to place himself above it? The way up is long and difficult, but if he succeeds they must grant him a garland of sorts. And if he falls, this too is a kind of glory. To end, hurled from the heights to the depths in hideous ruin and combustion down, is a fitting climax for the loser--for it, too, shakes mountains and minds, stirs things like thoughts below both, is a kind of blasted garland of victory in defeat, and cold, so cold that final action, that the movement is somewhere frozen forever into a statuelike rigidity of ultimate intent and purpose thwarted only by the universal malevolence we all fear exists. An aspirant saint or hero who lacks some necessary virtue may still qualify as a martyr, for the only thing that people will really remember in the end is the end. I had known that I'd had to climb Kasla, as I had climbed all the others, and I had known what the price would me. It had cost me my only home. But Kasla was there, and my boots cried out for my feet. I knew as I did so that somewhere I set them upon her summit, and below me a world was ending. What's a world if the moment of victory is at hand? And if truth, beauty and goodness be one, why is there always this conflict among them?