by Jeff Long
The abyss dragged at his bowels and the saddle of his pelvis and the root of his spine. It pulled at his organs, and hung on his fingers. It filled him with loneliness and mass and fear. But she didn’t give up on him. She offered her ghostly prints, and urged his grace. She beckoned.
Every motion was deliberate, right down to his choosing how much to bend his knuckles when he crimped a hold, and where to place which part of his toe and how much to cant it and when to let go. From one instant to the next, he exerted maximum control, and yet he felt completely out of control. It was so easy. He had only to give in to her.
He tried to imagine which of the three women she had been. He’d met one in the forest with silver along her ear, and turquoise in her hair. Was it her, or one of the others? Probably he’d never know. For some reason, in his mind that made her more beautiful.
The rich green stone felt like chunks of treasure in his hands. It didn’t belong. Olivine was an orphan rock. It had floated out from some deep, plasmic interior, defying all the chemical and physical processes around it. Yet here it was, a passport through the territory.
After eighty or ninety feet, the olivine receded. The green chunks melted back into the speckled granite. Hugh clung to the last of the holds, a polished jug, searching for her next move.
There were no cracks in sight, no flakes to hook. Her chalk marks vanished. That gave him a start. He’d been so sure this was the way. Had the olivine been a false lead, then? Had she tricked him and backtracked, and now left him stranded? One thing he knew, his strength was running out. He took turns shaking his hands below his waist, pumping fresh blood into each forearm for whatever came next.
His knee wagged. Tetanus. Lock it off. He set his foot again, changed hands, craned back his head, scouring the rock for holds. It seemed impossible that she’d brought him so high on such promising holds only to abandon him at the tip of nowhere. He searched for the slightest detail, a fingerprint, anything. What he finally came to see was so immense it eluded him at first.
Ever so faintly, lurking in the smoke, a dark, nebulous crescent loomed above and to his right. It yawned like the mouth of a whale. It was a roof, he comprehended, a gigantic, arcing brow. Without knowing it, he’d reached Cyclops Eye, or nearly reached it. So close, so faraway. Clutching at his final hold, he could see no way to enter the monstrous feature.
He leaned out, trying to see around a squared, blind corner to his side. In the distance, there was nothing but smog. The wall had ceased to exist beyond his reach. While he was busy flirting with his dancer, the abyss had closed in all around him, above, below, on every side. For a fleeting moment, dizzied by the smoke, there was no up or down.
He gripped the olivine for dear life, squandering his arm strength. The greatest lesson a climber learns is when enough is enough. On a grand scale, you judge the rock or ice and weigh the outer mountain against your vision of it. You learn when to push and when to back away, and the limits of your body, how far your legs will spread, how much your arms will hold, how hard your heart can pump. You learn not to overdrive the piton with your hammer, nor shove the cam too deep, nor overpower your holds.
Hugh forced himself to slacken his grasp. He prized one hand loose and shook it out. He traded hands. There had to be a next hold. But like the best of magicians, his anonymous sprite had left not a clue to her trick.
Hugh edged to the right. Holding the olivine lump with one hand, he hooked the heel of his opposite foot along the corner, and peered around.
There was another world in there.
Cupped within a great, empty cavity, the brown smoke looked almost blue. It wasn’t the blue of sky, but of deeper places. A slight breeze exhaled against his face. It felt even cooler than the stone he clung to. New territory. His excitement built.
He returned to the olivine hold and rested, and then tried again. Hooking his heel, he ran his hands up and down the corner, feeling for any folds or flakes. But the stone was blank.
It baffled him. His ape index had to be a full foot wider than hers, giving him far more range, and still he kept coming up empty. What was he missing? How had she done it? He retreated to his olivine jug and rested. His knee trembled. He switched feet. The other knee quivered. He willed it to stop. It trembled again.
He was running out of gas. There was only so long he could swap hands and feet before the law of diminishing returns axed him from the holds. He would have called down to Augustine, but there was nothing to ask for. Augustine couldn’t help him. The rope hung from his waist, a lifeless thing, useless for a fall, no comfort at all. He was alone up here.
Hugh stared at the corner. She had mastered it somehow. He looked for pockets of soot that might indicate the tops of flakes, but the rock was smooth.
Again he tried, hooking his heel on the edge and finding nothing. There was nothing there.
His heel hook started to slip, and Hugh grappled his foot higher. Unexpectedly, at shin level, where he would never have thought to look, the butt end of his heel caught on something. He carefully turned his foot, trading his heel for the top of his toe, feeling for the target.
Climbers are used to seeing with their fingers. Shorter, but more agile, his ballerina had gone one better, fishing with her toes. There it lay, hidden away, a slight shelf carved on the far side. Shaking, he retreated to his olivine jug.
The sequence was clear to him now. He knew what had to be done. As a guy, he was naturally inclined to muscling moves. But there was no move to muscle here. Everything depended on finesse. He eyed the edge of the corner, and it was dead vertical. His forearms were practically shot. His nerves were next to fried. She was giving him one last chance. Testing his commitment. Or mocking him.
He went for it, delicately.
He reached across with his right foot. One hand squeezing the olivine, the other gripping the bare right angle of the edge, he spread-eagled flat against the face.
Now. In one fluid motion, he released the olivine, pulled at the corner, and came upright against the edge. His foot rolled flat. The toe seated on the hold.
There he balanced, embracing the intersection of two planes, taking a sip of air, just enough. Breathe too deeply, and his rib cage would topple him backward. A cough would send him flying. He couldn’t even lift the side of his face from the rock to look around the corner.
Perched on one toe, staring back at the chain of olivine holds he could not possibly return to, Hugh stroked the far wall. There had to be something in here. Up, nothing. Down, nothing.
His left hand was slipping. His knee chattered against the rock. Deeper. He reached deeper. He emptied his lungs. The hold was waiting for him.
But gravity, its slender thread, was towing him backward. There was nothing forceful about it. Very simply, he was going to fall.
Two choices flashed through his mind. He could keep hugging this corner until he fell. Or he could fall, but on his terms.
He fell.
He let go with his hands and fingers and the edge of his one shoe on that little shelf…all in that order. Toe last. That was crucial. It gave him the suggestion of a trajectory. Eyes wide, he tipped sideways.
The handhold flashed before him, almost an afterthought. Quick as a pickpocket, he snatched at it. His legs swung out. There was a crack farther on. With the last of his strength, he jammed every piece of shoe and tape and human meat into the breach.
Maybe a little part of him died by casting loose. All the fear he’d kept at bay came rushing at him now. Shouting and cursing, he grubbed deeper at the crack, not gaining an inch. If he could have clawed his way inside the rock, he would have, anything to hide from the monstrous suck against his back.
At last his terror ebbed. He was safe. And now he saw, he had reached their destination. He was inside the fabled Eye.
TWENTY-TWO
From the ground, Cyclops Eye had always looked to him like a cutthroat’s den or a cave. It had a dark, overhanging trench marked at its crest by a daggerlike watercourse.
But now that he was on the inside of it, Hugh found less a cave than a great, yawning, open socket, thirty feet deep and possibly a hundred feet high. Over the eons, brittle, black diorite had sheeted away from beneath the beetling brow, leaving this giant, raw divot.
The three women—and now Hugh—had entered halfway up a dihedral that formed the left corner of the Eye’s lid. The dihedral rose into the swirling smoke, growing darker and thicker as it curved overhead. On another route, in cleaner stone, the roof might have formed a soaring sculpture. Here, rotted and bottomless, the Eye just seemed to brood.
Below, Hugh spied an indistinct ledge in the depths. It was part of an older route, the classic North America Wall. Conceivably the women could have descended to use the ledge as a bivvy site. But it looked too small to hold three people. Besides, they had been embarked on a route all their own, and had proudly refused to borrow from their ancestors. Their camp was tucked somewhere against the arch above, though the smoke obscured it.
Hugh could have set an anchor where he was, and dutifully waited for Augustine to join him and take the lead. He was still shaky from his desperate entrance, and he knew Augustine wanted to be the first to reach the women’s final camp. But then again, Augustine had made him the rope gun. He’d earned the right to finish what he’d started.
In effect, the camp was going to be Hugh’s summit. From there, he and Augustine would be evacuated to the top along with whomever they found, and El Cap would be over for him. Finishing the Eye was all he had left for a grand finale.
He followed the dihedral up and right, under the roof. The diorite was sharp enough to gut you if you fell, and the holds shifted in their sockets. But the woman’s white fingerprints were clearer than ever on the black rock, and Hugh set his mind to the task.
After a few minutes, he caught sight of the remains of their camp. From below and to the side, it looked like a shipwreck in the sky. Hugh edged closer, traversing beneath the roof.
There were no natural shelves under here, nothing like the Archipelago’s ledges to sit or stand on. Instead the women had constructed a small, vertical shantytown out of portaledges. There were three platforms hanging one below the other.
The place was in a shambles. Slings hung without motion. One platform was partly upended. The bright red flooring of the lowest had ripped through and hung like a flag of no quarter.
It was no wonder Augustine had been unable to see who was left, much less gain access to the camp. Dangling at the edge of the roof thirty feet out, he would have faced just a huddle of shadows and this mobile of aluminum tubing and bright, cheery nylon.
It looked deserted. If there was a body, it had to be lying on the highest platform. Hugh crept right on holds that grated like loose teeth.
Only now did he notice a long loop of Tibetan prayer flags hanging from the ceiling. Even sun faded and stained by the smoke, their red and blue and yellow and green colors were vivid. There were dozens of them in a bowed laundry line. Hugh knew from his Asia trips that the flags were primitive prayer factories. Each square of cloth was printed with script and the image of a Pegasus creature, a winged horse called a lung ta, that carried the prayers to heaven each time it flapped in the breeze.
Hugh tried to imagine their happy little camp with the gay flags. Now the flags hung limp. He eyed the torn floor and tipped platform. Their blessings had stopped. Abruptly.
He traversed underneath their silent ghetto on pockmarks and shallow scoops in the stone. The scoops held bits of rubble and decades of bird droppings and the bones of small animals, slippery as ball bearings. He grew more wary.
Now he angled up, passing by the torn flooring. A body, or possibly one of their haul bags, must have punched right through the platform. The haul bags were missing, he realized, all their life support. In one catastrophic moment, the place had been emptied of life.
A little higher, he leveled the second platform, and started to pull himself onto its flat surface. But his weight set the whole colony of portaledges swaying, each rocking like a cradle. Slings creaked. Aluminum tubing scraped against the rock. Hugh came to a halt.
It was in the nature of knots to loosen when they weren’t tended, and this place had been deserted for how long? The wreckage could suddenly unravel and sail off into the depths with him on it. Hugh backed off the platform and onto the stone.
Now he saw that the uppermost platform was not empty. From below, the impression of a body was very plain against the floor. She was lying sprawled on top.
“Andie?” he called. It was a reflex, a courtesy. This was her home. Of course there was no reply. They were too late. Probably they’d been too late even before he found the girl in the forest.
He crouched below and to one side of the top platform, bracing himself for the sight to come. He’d done this before. He’d looked on death, most recently the girl in the forest. But she’d been fresh, and he could not for the life of him remember how many days had passed since then. The forest fire had burned away time. It felt as if weeks had passed.
He slotted a nut into the stone, then more protection, fashioning his own anchor. Something in the women’s system had failed, and he dared not attach himself to their wreckage. Best to start from scratch. The carabiner gates clacked like rifle bolts in the close space.
Enough, he decided. He’d brought them to the source. It was not his duty to face the horror alone. Let Augustine have his wish. Let him look first.
Pulling the gauze from his mouth, Hugh yelled, “Off,” even though he was as deep inside the beast as you could get and Augustine could never hear him. He gave several long, strong tugs on the rope, a secondary signal. A minute later, the ropes loaded tight. Augustine was on the way.
Hugh pulled in their haul bag and stowed it neatly against the wall, and waited. He looked at the prayer flags. He glanced up at the platform, mere inches overhead. His curiosity mounted. He waited some more. The hell with it. He couldn’t resist.
It was going to be ugly, he could smell her now. B movies flickered in his head. What if she was lying by the edge, her head right there? He gave himself enough slack to stand and peer over the edge, but only enough. If the shock felled him, he would be on a short leash.
He stood.
There was not one corpse, but two.
One woman sat against the wall, strapped into a spiderweb of slings and ropes lashed across her chest and shoulder. Her eyes were shut, her mouth hung open. The other woman lay across her lap, a rope still attached to her harness. She would be Andie. Hugh recognized her long, white-blond hair from Augustine’s photograph and the braids of his wrist braid. She had stones woven into her hair, like the girl he’d found in the forest.
It looked as if someone had arranged them in this harrowing pietà, one draped across the other’s lap, piled with loose rope. Death had spared their faces so far, or at least the face of that seated woman. No rictus, no corruption. He was just as glad that Andie’s face was hidden against her friend’s chest. Something smelled awful.
Hugh’s dread eased. Except for the stench, they could have been a pair of wax figures. He observed them, trying to read backward from their ending.
He traced their attempted exit from Cyclops Eye. The roof jutted out from here. The ceiling was honeycombed with pockets and cells, an upside-down battlefield of finger-and-hand-sized cavities. One of the women had crept toward the rim. Her chalk marks disappeared at the edge. Maybe she’d fallen there. Maybe she’d made it out onto the face above.
The accident had triggered a pandemonium of falling bodies and haul bags. He could translate their last moments from the frayed ends of exploded ropes and scattered gear. And yet there were peculiarities.
To begin with, there was this strange anchor. It defied his mountain logic, his sense of economy. For some reason, they had wildly overprotected the site. A half dozen silvery bolt hangers glittered on the diorite, with twice that many pitons driven into the seams, and that didn’t count the nuts and cams wedged behind flakes. S
lings and spare rope had been knotted together and woven back and forth like a cargo net.
He ran his eyes over the scene, and found nothing leftover. They’d used every spare piece of gear to sew themselves to the stone. It went beyond caution. “Paranoia” was the word. It was as if they had been forewarned of their destruction.
He turned his attention to the seated woman. Cuba, he remembered. Her face reminded him of smoked meat. It was the color of dark tea. Tangled in slings, she must have strangled.
Oddly, tears tracked down her death mask, cutting through the soot and grime. At least they looked like tears, which was outright impossible. Joshua hadn’t started the fire until two days after Augustine had spied her in here, lashed in place just as she was now. Maybe the heat of the burning forest had caused juice to leak from her eyes.
But the greatest mystery was Andie. Somehow she had returned over a hundred and fifty feet from the tip of the rope to this sanctuary. With his own eyes, Hugh had seen her dangling in the spotlight. How had she gotten here?
Could Augustine have been right? Could she really have been alive all those days? Had she hauled herself up the rope when the fire began, fallen across the lap of her dead companion, and then expired? It defied belief, and yet Hugh could think of no other explanation. Just as Augustine had said all along, she had apparently been alive and waiting for someone to come along. If Augustine could have reached her that first day from above, or if the kid, Joe, had kept climbing through the night, they could have saved her.
A thought crept in. What if she was still alive?
“Andie?”
First the fall, then her ascension. Days on end without water or food. She could be in deep sleep, in a coma. A real life Sleeping Beauty, why not?
Hugh pulled closer. He started to reach for her, then held back. Old dreads. “Andie?” She lay still with her long hair like a curtain, and her head pillowed on the other woman’s lap.