The Wall

by Jeff Long

  His shoes skidded on the dry soot. He started to push back, then he gave up on the print. El Cap had always reminded him of the bottom of the ocean. From a distance, it looked sterile and lifeless, but when you got up close and it became tangible, the place abounded with energy and life forces, from night mice and swifts to hailstones falling from clear, hot skies. The unnatural was perfectly natural up here.

  He slid his jumar up, suddenly eager for company. A whisper halted him.

  “Hugh.” It seemed to breathe from the abyss. He whipped around in his stirrups, searching behind him and under his feet.

  “Hello?” His voice boomed against the stone. The smoke was empty. Enough, he thought. Enough with your mind games. Then his name came again.

  “Glass,” the air peeped. It came from far away, this time from above. “Glass.”

  With more relief than seemed proper, he realized it was Augustine calling to him.

  American climbers never yodel. But Hugh had gotten the habit from Austrians on a side trip to the sea cliffs in southern Thailand. Done properly, you could signal for miles. He undid the wraps and gauze over his mouth and cast his voice, nothing musical, no real signature to it, just the stock “old lady who.”

  Then he piled into the ascent. Get your buns out of here. The rope quivered under his jumar thrusts.

  At last, he found Augustine waiting at the high point. A thin, miserly crack seeped up from the anchor and dissolved in the tea-brown smog. This was as far as Augustine and the boy had managed to get before Joshua went apocalyptic.

  “Good, you’re here,” Augustine said. His face was polished black as a coal miner’s. A torn shirt covered his mouth. It sucked in and out like a bellows. He was careful not to show his impatience, but it was there in his readiness, in the rack of gear draped across his chest.

  To his annoyance, Hugh couldn’t quit coughing. It made him sound unfit. But then Augustine started his own hacking, and that gave Hugh some comfort. They were both afflicted by El Cap, equally vulnerable, equally dependent.

  “It took longer than it should have,” Hugh said. “The knots were loose. I had to redo some of the anchors. Pieces were hanging from the rope.”

  It was nothing he’d intended to bring up. But he felt challenged by Augustine’s momentum, or by his own slowness, and it was still early in the game, too soon to show his age or weakness. So he put some grievance in his tone.

  To this point, he and Augustine had been on the same page. The two of them might even turn out to be friends. But one thing Hugh had learned from his life among the roughnecks, soldiers, contractors, and Arabs—and especially from other climbers—was to always maintain his autonomy.

  He was tied in to a partner he didn’t know on a route without a map. If push came to shove somewhere above, and it could with Augustine’s sleep deprivation and the death they were about to find and the grinding oppression of this smoke, then Hugh meant to make his own decisions and go his own way. That meant, right from the outset, not giving one inch of himself away.

  Augustine didn’t bridle at the complaint. “Good,” he said, “good. I saw the same things.”

  “What did you see?” Hugh didn’t make it specific. He didn’t ask if Augustine had encountered some hominid-shaped creature scuttling around upside down on the walls, an animal with hands and feet. He didn’t expose his wild imaginings.

  “Chewed ropes,” Augustine said. “Bad anchors. Loose knots. It’s all in the details. We’ve got to watch ourselves.”

  Hugh relaxed a little, even as he tensed. Augustine was conceding the need for caution. But on the other hand, if he’d come across problems, why hadn’t he tightened the knots and restored the pieces? Was he so sloppy? Or had he fixed the glitches, only to have them work loose as Hugh was climbing?

  Augustine held up a hank of haul line, and it was gnawed to the core. “The crack monsters are getting hungry. Joshua’s fire bankrupted the whole ecosystem up here. The place is an open wound.”

  That pretty much answered the mystery. They were voyaging among starving beasts. Infiltrating a wound. They had to watch themselves.

  Hugh looked back along the curved rope leading to the Archipelago, and could almost feel the knots untying themselves and the anchors easing from the stone and the animals tracking them for the slightest morsel. Even as they hung in their stirrups, the bridge back to Anasazi was coming apart, turning to smoke.

  “How many more pitches to the Eye?” Hugh asked.

  “A few. Not many.” Hugh could tell he didn’t know, and that it didn’t matter to him. Augustine looked up at the crack. “Do you have me?”

  Hugh took the rope and ran a swift eye through the belay setup. He planted his feet against the wall. “You’re on.”

  Augustine stretched overhead and probed the crack. It resisted him. The crack was sized for smaller fingers, a woman’s fingers. Augustine tried stuffing his fingertips into the fissure, and failing that, unable to free the crack, he turned to aid. “This is going to slow us down,” he groused, slotting in a nut.

  That was when Hugh noticed what Augustine was wearing around his outstretched wrist. Now he understood Lewis’s warning. In ordinary circumstances, he would have passed off the bracelet as braided threads or twine. Climbers wore all kinds of fetishes brought back from their expeditions. But this was different.

  The bracelet was made of human hair, a long lock of it lovingly braided, blond, bleached nearly white by a sun that seemed just a memory now. Instantly Hugh knew whose hair it was. His only question was when Augustine had harvested it from her, awake or asleep, with or without her knowing.

  EIGHTEEN

  They came to a crazed spray of fractures. Each crack led off into the smoke, and there was no telling which led in the correct direction. More precious hours scaled away.

  Hugh had depended on Augustine to be the superior climber, but the younger man’s urgency and exhaustion made him clumsy. Holds snapped off in his hands. His feet pawed at the rock. For all his reputation as a rescue climber, he had no gift for route finding, and what few clues the women had left were covered with grime. When one crack proved false, he tried a second, and a third, and each time Augustine went up, he had to come down, laboriously undoing his own protection.

  “It’s almost like they won’t let me inside,” he said.

  They did seem unwelcome. Augustine had tried the back door from the summit, and now this massive front door stood locked against them, too. The closer they got to the women, the more complicated their maze became.

  “We’ll crack it,” Hugh told him. He had out his leather notebook, still logging details of the last pitch. “These things take time.”

  “Andie doesn’t have time,” Augustine said, and without another moment’s rest attacked a different crack.

  By the time he lowered off the fourth false crack, they’d wasted five hours, and Augustine was fuming. Above all, he was frustrated by his lover’s risk taking. “What was she thinking?” he said. “This was so totally over their heads. They must have known they didn’t belong here.”

  “They’d come so far,” said Hugh. “And the summit was right there.”

  “The summit,” spat Augustine.

  “We get the sun in our eyes, and sometimes it blinds us,” Hugh said, all too aware of their present sunless circumstances. “You know how it goes.”

  He was baffled by the general resentment, first Lewis’s, now Augustine’s. The hard men, the big-wall mavericks, begrudged these three women their bodacious nerve. It was a way for the two men to regret their various losses, of course, and no doubt to vent some envy. But also the resentment was visceral, as if the women had trespassed beyond some border.

  “She had no business being with them.”

  “It’s a free country,” said Hugh.

  “There was nothing free about it. They had her brainwashed.”

  Hugh didn’t respond. Augustine was the one who didn’t belong, at least not in his depleted condition.


  “They were witches,” Augustine said. “Cuba and Cassie. Cuba especially.”

  “Isn’t that what climbers do?” Hugh asked. “We’re in the magic business. Houdini had nothing on us. Escape artists, that’s our part in the greater scheme.”

  “Real witches,” Augustine said. “The kind that brew potions. They were always stirring something in the pot, or fermenting mash, or picking mushrooms. Always hatching conspiracies, always pushing it. Cuba, especially. She told people her mother was a cuarandera. And maybe it was true, she wasn’t born here. They did the El Norte thing when she was a baby.”

  At one level, it didn’t matter a bit as Hugh perched in stirrups with nothing beneath his feet. And yet this cuarandera business seemed oddly crucial, not just to Augustine but to their quest, like a missing handhold, one more link. “A shaman?”

  “A granny woman, that’s what we called them in Arkansas. The old conjure ladies and midwives. They handled snakes and talked in tongues, some of them.”

  A Southern boy, thought Hugh, finally getting a handle on Augustine’s hatchet-and-honey accent. He imagined Andy of Mayberry, and sultry summers, and a kid with a slingshot. Maybe none of it was so, but he still couldn’t help wondering how Opie had ended up in the Valley of giants.

  “This Cuba girl,” Hugh said, “it sounds like she talked a lot of tall shit. Climbers do that. They come into the hills and invent themselves fresh.”

  “She did more than invent. She messed with their heads. She wanted a following.”

  “Like a cult or something?”

  “Not a cult, there were only a couple of them,” Augustine said. “But she had something they wanted, some riddle of the Sphinx thing. Like you couldn’t get past her without becoming part of her. She got Andie with it, hook, line, and sinker. They drank tea made of poison ivy to immunize themselves. They fasted for their cramps. They did yoga in the dirt, and chanted mantras at dawn. Stuff like that.”

  “The mystical-mountain thing,” Hugh said. At some point, serious climbers all dabbled in it. As a teenager, he’d practiced tying knots with one hand, in pitch blackness, in a cold shower, over and over. That was what the great British and German climbers did, he’d heard. He and Lewis used to walk around carrying snowballs in their bare hands to toughen them for winter ascents, and loaded backpacks with their body weight in bricks for training sessions. They’d talked Zen versus Tantric at the bouldering sites, and made blood oaths, and held séances with Rachel and Annie before their big climbs. And, yeah, bayed at the moon. It was wacky nonsense, but innocent, a phase.

  “Cuba got an infected tooth,” Augustine went on. “She made Andie pull it with a pair of pliers in the parking lot at Camp Four.”

  Hugh frowned. “A pair of pliers?”

  “Like a rite of passage. A blood rite. Think about it. She got Andie to inflict pain in order to relieve it. She gave her power.” Augustine went on. “Cassie got pregnant. Cuba gave her an abortion with herbs and mushrooms. They buried whatever came out on top of a mountain. You mean mystical like that?”

  Hugh paused. “They did that?”

  “Andie was vulnerable. Fragile. Ready to break. You’ve heard what happened with her brother and me.”

  Hugh was careful. “Just about nothing. It’s not my business.”

  “You’re tied in to me, aren’t you? It’s your business.”

  “I’m tied in to you. That ought to say it all.”

  But it didn’t. Augustine was no longer used to trust. The tragedy was eating him up from the inside out. Patagonia was his cancer. His eyes met Hugh’s and it was plain that, guilty or not, he was haunted. “After I got back from Cerro Torre, Andie was a wreck,” he said. “She didn’t know what to think, who to turn to, who to believe. I was in bad shape myself. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I ditched your big bro in a storm, still alive, bummer? And there were all these other rumors. Have you heard the cannibal one?”

  Walking wounded, thought Hugh. He wondered if the Patagonia disaster had marked the beginning of Augustine’s rescue work. Penance would explain him. Lewis was right. The rot of guilt. “Screw the rumors. There are always rumors,” he said. “That’s how people are. They say the worst things when you’re down. I know. It’s crap.”

  Augustine darted a look at him, almost hopefully. Then the gleam in his eyes dimmed. He squinted and gestured up into the smoke. “I don’t blame her. Andie was hearing all this…stuff. She needed help sorting it out, and Cuba came along to heal her. All I could do was watch Andie fall into this, like, weird orbit. I reached out to her, but she just drifted further away. It wasn’t out of hate. She never hated me, that was the worst part. She’d just get sad seeing me around. I was this unfinished business, like I’d died along with the others on Cerro Torre, and come back, and she couldn’t decide how to get rid of me. Sometimes I wonder.”

  “What, if you’re a ghost?” Hugh snorted. “You look real enough to me.”

  “Dumb, I know.” Augustine dipped his head. “Anyway, this happened.”

  “Trojan Women?”

  “They wanted to be ahead of their time.” Augustine jerked a nut from the false crack. “What they really wanted was to show the world how big their balls were. I told her, Andie, the Captain’s not a finishing school. It’s real life. A new route like this, it takes no prisoners. But Cuba was always right there whispering in her other ear.”

  Hugh suddenly felt weighed down by the history. It was getting them nowhere. Augustine had issues, who didn’t? He was an adult, and, like he said, this was real life. Above all, Hugh was no priest. He had no wisdom to offer, no forgiveness to dispense. “You want me to give it a try?” he quietly asked.

  Augustine screwed his face up, as if he’d caught himself begging for pity. He lifted the rack of gear from his shoulders and handed it across. “I’m climbing like puke,” he said. “Get us straightened out.”

  NINETEEN

  Hugh took the rack, and turned his thoughts to the rock. For the last five hours, while Augustine had stolen into the smoke and returned empty-handed, Hugh had been trying to sort out the mess of cracks.

  The smoke hampered their sight, of course. But he had a feeling that even on a clear day, the route demanded more than mere craft and muscle. The three women had been playing vertical chess up here, inventing gambits, creating moves, foxing their way up the cracks. Never giving in. Bit by bit they’d tiptoed through the labyrinth. A female labyrinth. Somehow that was key.

  Hugh tried one crack, and quickly decided against it. He couldn’t explain why. It felt vacant somehow, discarded and unused. Minus any obvious signs, he was searching for some wordless sense of a woman’s exploration. One of them—he didn’t know which—had found the way through here. She was the one he needed to dance with in his head.

  He tried a few moves up yet another crack, and discarded that, too. The cracks were a false start. Forget normal sight, he told himself. Feel for the way.

  On an impulse, he worked left around a bulge, away from anything obvious. And there it lay. On the far side of the swell, tucked from plain view, rose a sequence of knobs, or chickenheads. They were sloped and eroded and minimal, little more than the backs of horseshoe crabs clinging to the stone. But they marched upward. And something about them spoke of a separate awareness. They would require tenacity and counterlogic and grace. It matched his image of a ballerina with steel fingers.

  Hugh shaped his fingers over the first chickenhead, and got a toe settled. He reached for the next, and the next, following them into the concealed heights. His focus turned tubular. The sprawling stone with its false offerings and colliding angles folded into blankness. He was left with a single tunnel through the smoke.

  The knobs and bumps weren’t so hard to climb. They formed a virtual ladder. The problem was protection. He tried cinching a green sling over one knob, but it squirreled loose and fluttered into the void without a sound. After that, he didn’t waste any more slings and carabiners on illusions of security. He just clim
bed.

  With each move, he committed that much more deeply to his choice. If he’d guessed wrong, it was going to be nearly impossible to reverse course and down-climb. He glanced between his feet, and the chickenheads—so obvious at eye level—had vanished from sight. His trail was disappearing behind him.

  His knee trembled. “Tetanus” was the technical term. Climbers called it sewing-machine leg. Uncontrolled, you could shake yourself right off your holds. Get still, he thought. Not just the knee. The mind. Smooth it out. He breathed, in, out. The ripples in his pond grew glassy still. The trembling stopped.

  He got on with the waltz, more and more out of options. He had climbed a hundred feet out, and there wasn’t a hint of pro between him and Augustine. That meant a two-hundred-foot whipper if he lost a hold, and that would mean a free fall you could measure in tons. There was no way Augustine could catch such a thing. Hugh had entered the suicide zone. He was dancing with a dead woman. He had no choice but to follow where she led.

  As a reward for his good faith, almost, a crack appeared in the stone.

  Hugh slotted in a nut, clipped to it, and rested his nerves. While he clung there, he stuck another piece into the crack for good measure. Then he continued higher. A little higher, he came upon handprints beneath the tawny soot, and this time they were real, the traces left by gymnastic chalk. His doubts fell away. Here was her path.

  The prints were like shadows in a photograph negative, white instead of black. He placed his hand beside her ghost hand, and his long fingers and taped paw dwarfed the pale vestiges of her.

  There was no way to repeat her moves exactly. She had a shorter reach, but greater range and more flexibility, which translated into a completely different style using different holds. By this stage of the women’s climb, after seven or eight or nine days, however long they’d been at it, she’d probably starved down to half his hundred and seventy pounds. And judging by the girl’s body he’d found in the forest, this phantom climber would have been less than half his age…Annie’s age when he’d first met her.