by Jeff Long
“It would make sense that she was the one. That she’d want to finish business. Do I sound whacked out or what?”
They were in psychological overload, himself included. Yes. “No.”
He let her talk. Except for the events of the fall, there was little chronology to her tale. The forest fire blended into her long isolation and the birds and cloud formations she had found magical. She matter-of-factly told of hauling Andie from the depths.
“You thought she was still alive?”
“God, no. After all those days, I knew.”
Then why? “You did the right thing,” he told her, even though in Cuba’s place he would have left the body hanging as far from view as possible. Indeed, he would have cut the rope to get rid of the reminder.
“It wasn’t that,” she said. “It wasn’t for Andie.”
“Were you lonely?” He asked it without accusation, the question of her sanity.
“I wish,” she said. “By then I just wanted to be left alone.”
“But you brought her up.”
“She was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Cuba said. “So I pulled up what was left. Like bait, you know. She said it would bring you in.”
They lay there. Hugh didn’t move a muscle, barely breathing. Bait?
Her fairy tale about a meandering companion spirit was one thing. This whispering ghoul was something else, like some kind of vertical plague. Cuba was sick with it, her eye for an eye. She was so certain, the way she said it. And the thing was, they’d taken the bait. Augustine had come, with Hugh in tow.
“Why do you hate him so much?” Hugh asked.
“Who?”
“Augustine.”
“Hate him?” All innocence.
“Come on.”
“There’s only so long you can lick your wounds,” she said. “And it was probably for the best.”
Her wounds, she meant. Hugh frowned. “How do you mean?”
“He’s intense. I’m more intense. We were never going to last forever. I couldn’t see it at the time. But once he dumped me, things got clear.”
Hugh lay there, trying to connect the dots. The stars of frost. “You and Augustine were involved?”
“That sounds so antique.”
“You know what I mean.”
“We were hot. You wouldn’t believe, hot as fire. But then Andie came wandering in, this sweet lost thing, always lost, and that was the end of us.”
It made him dizzy. “He left you for her?”
“Don’t worry, Hugh. I got over it a long time ago. Because we would have burned each other to a crisp. I finally decided Andie had saved us, him and me both. But then her brother died and she was lost again.”
“So you took her in.”
“The Valley’s small, and mostly guys. Us girls stick together.”
Hugh stared straight ahead. He emptied the neat boxes in his mind, each article of this climb, from his discovery of Cass to the slaughter of Lewis. No more boxes. He shoveled the events into a jumble and tried to arrange them in some order. Somewhere lay the thread out of this maze.
Cuba patted his shoulder. She whispered in his ear. “It’s almost over.”
The sun stayed hidden. The tent wall did not light up. The frost did not scale away. He could have lain there all day, captivated by her warmth and his futile puzzling.
“I should check on things,” Hugh finally said. He eased from the sleeping bag and neatly tucked it around her. Her green eyes followed him, like Diesel watching Annie.
“Hugh Glass,” she said, as if naming him anew.
The icy parka stood in one corner like a giant insect shell. He beat the verglas from its sides and drew it on, zipping it to the throat and pulling up the hood. He shivered until his body heated the fiberfill and the parka became part of his armor once again.
The laces holding the sidewall had frozen tight. His pocketknife could have picked them apart easily, but he’d dropped it while freeing Cuba last night. His fingernails were ground to the quick. He resorted to gnawing the cord, like an animal. One knot opened, and that was enough to give him a peephole. He peered through.
A crystal world waited outside. The stone, the ropes, their metal protection, everything was glazed with ice. The Eye—probably the entire valley—was socked in by clouds. The misty light was cold and blue. Nothing moved out there. After last night’s tempest, the silence made Hugh nervous.
There are moments in the mountains and the desert when things quietly, invisibly reach a state of critical mass. Snow layers a slope just so, waiting for a noise or a footstep to unleash the avalanche. Sand builds at the crest of a dune until that instant it exceeds the angle of repose, and crumples, and the whole dune shifts forward, burying your footsteps and whatever else lies before it. Accidents don’t happen, he’d learned. Nature isn’t unnatural. Mechanisms get triggered, that’s all. Understand the cause and you could master, or at least try to escape, the effects.
Hugh struggled to decipher the stillness. He could feel something primed and waiting out there. But what? They’d traded smoke for mist, fire for ice. The storm had layered their hiding place in glass. The saturated blue light told him that the clouds weren’t burning off today. Everything was at peace. But it was the peace of the bell jar, artificial and enclosed. And watched. He could feel it. Something.
“What do you see?” Cuba asked.
“The Ice Age. We’re locked down for the day.”
“Come back with me.”
“Not yet.” They were in greater danger than ever. He couldn’t put a name to it, whatever inhabited the void.
“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere, Cuba. I’m just looking.”
He forced the hole wider and scooted his upper body from the cocoon. Half in, half out, holding on to loose straps, he surveyed their station. The pit plunged into infinite blue.
Remarkably, the storm had not swept Augustine away. He still hung beside Andie, fused in a crystal spiderweb. Her shroud of a sleeping bag had loosened, or Augustine had reached inside. Or the ghost of her had tried to worm loose. Her golden white hair was plastered to the stone in a long glassy stream. The red hammocks hung in tatters.
“Augustine?”
Augustine’s eyes opened. He stared up at Hugh from the hollow of his helmet. His face was mottled blue. His hands, clothed in socks, had a death grip on the ropes.
Cuba’s voice came from inside the tent. “She let him live?”
Augustine’s eyes moved, nothing else. He blinked. For the moment, neither man spoke to the other.
Hugh turned his attention to the mist. Thirty feet out, past the motionless prayer flags, at the brink of the ceiling hung with icicles, Lewis dangled in midair, welded to the litter.
The ropes slowly spun him. Bent backward, he twisted to face Hugh upside down. His mouth hung open. It was filled with loose snow. Flakes spilled from his lips, his poet lips, and fluttered into the depths.
“Christ, Lewis,” Hugh whispered. The great heart, all for one, one for all. For nothing.
The wind had ransacked him. Lewis was naked from the waist up. His flesh was dark red, his veins bright blue. They had left him in place. With his big weight-room muscles, he looked like a side of beef.
Hugh glanced down to where Augustine was turning to stone and ice, dissolving into mist. It was like a myth where humans petrified or turned into trees or animals. El Cap was consuming them.
“We can’t stay here,” Hugh said.
No one moved or answered. The very air was paralyzed. He felt suffocated.
“They’ve written us off, postponed us, whatever.” He didn’t blame them. Preserve thyself. “They’ll fetch us once it clears. By then, we’ll all be dead. That’s where this is heading.”
Cuba whispered from the sleeping bag. “Make me warm, Hugh. It’s too cold to be alone.”
“We have to leave,” Hugh declared. The mist flattened his words. “Do you hear me?”
After a minute, Augustine st
irred. He wrenched his helmet and Tarzan hair from the wall. Ice fractured around his shoulders. His jaw moved. It broke his walrus tusks of snot and rime. A puff of frost came out, but no words. He tried again. “How?”
Hugh didn’t know yet. He was trying to strike a spark among them, little more. No good would come of their waiting and listening to their bones knock and their stomachs growl. But were any of them capable? Were any of them really sane? He was just as crazy as the other two now. But did that matter, so long as they shared the same dementia?
Inside the tent, Cuba had begun droning om mane padme hum—the Buddhist chant every mountaineer carries home from the High Himal—over and over. But the prayer flags were frozen. The wind horses stood still. Time had stopped.
Hugh considered lowering off, but that could take days. And Cuba had told him that they’d spied the summit above. They were close.
If only they could lift this lid of stone from their heads. The roof was a dead end. What had protected them last night was killing them now. It blunted their imagination. It killed their hope.
The answer came to Hugh slowly. Their salvation hung in plain sight.
“Lewis,” he said.
Augustine’s helmet turned to the distant figure. He settled back against the stone. “No use.” His teeth chattered. “Too far. All wrong.”
Augustine was thinking of a throw line, Hugh knew. And by that measure, he was right. Even if they could throw a line and somehow snag the litter or lasso Lewis’s body, they would still have to tow it close enough to grab. But the arc would never work. Lewis was parallel to their camp, and the roof was thirty feet deep, meaning never the twain shall meet.
“We don’t bring Lewis to us,” Hugh said. “We go to Lewis.”
“What, we fly?”
“Climb,” said Hugh. “If we can reach where his ropes run along the outer wall, then we just climb the ropes.”
Augustine traced the idea, his eyes following the roof to its edge. “The ropes are iced. The jumars will clog. It could take hours. It could go into the night.”
“Stay here then?”
Augustine muttered.
“We can do this thing,” Hugh said. Break the curse. Sneak from the underworld. Reach the sun.
“What about Andie?”
That again. Hugh wanted to argue. They would be leaving Lewis’s body behind, why not hers? They could bind the two victims side by side in the litter and leave them for the rescue crew to draw up later. But he knew Augustine would never agree to such a bed, and Hugh needed Augustine’s help.
“Andie goes with us,” Hugh decided.
Augustine patted her woodenly. “It could work,” he said.
It would not be easy, Hugh knew. The ceiling looked deadly with its poxlike holes and black horns and daggers of ice. Even if he managed to exit the roof and gain the headwall and grab one of Lewis’s ropes, there was the small matter of five hundred vertical feet separating them from the summit. As Augustine had pointed out, the jumars would clog with ice and that would cost more time. And they were weak. Cuba was chanting. Augustine was haunted. On top of that, they would be burdened the whole way by Andie’s corpse.
But it would be worse to stay. Far worse. Cuba was exhibit A, in and out of reality. Too much time among the ruins. Inertia kills.
“We’ve got to move,” Hugh said.
“Move,” Augustine repeated. Hugh could see the struggle in his face. The temptation was so strong. Lie back. Wait.
“It’s up to us.”
“Yes.” But the cold hurt. Augustine didn’t move.
“We came to save the day, remember?”
Augustine’s face grappled with the noble thought.
Abruptly Cuba’s drone halted. She was listening, but not to them. To the mountain.
A vast hum descended from the heavens.
Hugh stared into the mist.
All but invisible to them, a huge spectral presence swept by, like a glass ship in deep fog. As it passed, slowly, much too slowly for a falling object, the air pushed at them.
Hugh knew the sound. It was ice from the summit rim, a giant sheet pried loose. It sailed by on translucent wings, probably a half acre wide and several tons heavy.
The monstrous hum grew smaller. It seemed a full minute went by. Then one edge of the ice hull touched the lower wall. A sharp explosion snapped far below.
It was like a prehistoric Fourth of July celebration. Hugh listened to the crackle of shrapnel strafing the stone. It ended with a roaring finale as the main mass of ice struck the ground.
It would go on like this all day, until the summit finished shedding its casing, or night locked the remnants in place. It would mean climbing in fear, through fear, through a fog besieged by giants with wings. But Hugh knew from his desert ordeal that it took a stone heart sometimes. You had to resist temptation and second thoughts and the voices of weakness, even to the point of ruthlessness. You had to slay all doubts. You had to execute the plan.
Augustine was protecting Andie’s body from the ice, even though the ice could not reach them in here.
“There’s no hiding from it,” Hugh said. “The Captain knows we’re here.”
That did the trick. Augustine nodded his head. Clots of hair jingled against his helmet. Blinking and twitching, he broke apart his sheath of ice.
Hugh glanced inside the tent, and Cuba was watching him. “It’s almost over,” he said to her.
She didn’t answer. She just watched him.
THIRTY
Everything hurt.
Nothing was easy.
First they had to break the ice and reclaim their gear from the stone. It took an hour or more to ransack the anchors, and assemble a proper rack of hardware, and pull free enough rope to climb with.
The cold plagued them. They were clumsy as astronauts. Bundled and gloved, they had to monitor each move. Twice they fumbled handing pieces to one another. A Z-shaped leeper piton went ringing into the mist. A chain of carabiners snaked from their fingers. Luckily—hopefully—they only needed to go a little more than the thirty feet of the roof before reaching Lewis’s ropes. From there, the climbing would shift. Beyond the roof, the only tools necessary would be jumars and stirrups and muscle.
Hugh kept wishing his joints would loosen up. His knees creaked. His fingers were half crippled with arthritis. Tendonitis hitched his elbows and shoulders. It was as if he’d aged fifty years in a night.
After his night in the open, Augustine was in even worse shape. He moved like the tin man, rusty, ungainly, and in pieces. He kept kicking the stone, trying to get sensation back in his feet. But he never complained.
“We should take a look at your feet,” Hugh said.
“And then what?” said Augustine. Hugh was glad for his stoicism. Now was not the time to be treating cold wounds. If his feet were frostbitten, it would only make matters worse to thaw and refreeze the tissue.
“A few hours more,” Hugh promised him.
But even the slightest act required an effort. The carabiners snagged on bulky clothing and nipped at the tips of their gloves. They flexed ice from the sheath, but the rope remained stiff and unwieldy. It was like trying to tie knots with steel cable.
“Are we ready?” Hugh said.
“Wait.” Augustine took off his helmet. “Here.”
It was an excellent day for helmets, especially on the outside of the Eye. “Keep it,” said Hugh. “You’ll need it.”
Augustine shoved it at Hugh. The giving was important to him, more than a mere shell of protection. It was tribute. He was grateful.
“You’ll get this back,” said Hugh.
He peeked in the tent and Cuba was sound asleep. Soon enough, she’d need all her strength. For now, at least, she wasn’t whispering spells at Augustine. A sense of normalcy returned, as much normalcy as you could ask from a world struck dumb with ice.
Hugh didn’t fool around trying to free-climb. Where it wasn’t wet or sealed with verglas, the rock was loose and
iffy. His climbing slippers would have been useless on the few holds, and baring his fingers would have been suicide. Besides, he wasn’t here to dance with Trojan Women. This was a getaway, pure and simple.
He selected a half-inch baby angle from the rack, nosed it against a seam, and hammered it neck deep. Clip in…gate down and out…step up in the stirrups. His helmet knocked against the ceiling.
He craned back beneath the ceiling, searching for his next placement. There were no tidy cracks to follow, nothing but a wasteland of junk rock to nail and nut and tie onto, one Hail Mary move after another. No running allowed.
Out past the roof, another sheet of ice sang by. The air sucked at the skin of his face. A half mile down, the calved ice roared. Hugh screwed his attention on to the wilderness above.
As he moved across the ceiling, he was essentially walking in the sky, held by nails and small wires and tidbits of airplane metal. It was awkward going. Stretching backward, balancing with one hand or foot against the ceiling, he probed for any flaw to exploit, and sorted through his rack to find the most likely fit. Sometimes he had to try two, three, or four different pieces.
Mistakes were made. He dropped a number two copperhead, then a pink one-inch Camelot. Then a lost arrow bounced loose on his first tap with the hammer. The next one he overdrove, and the flake split away and he lost that piton, too.
More ice fluttered through the blue soup. More explosions. Fire and ice, he thought. You’ve paid your dues on this one, Glass. Take it home.
He was acutely aware of time passing, and just as aware that he had slipped into a separate reality. Up here, time got measured in quarter-million-year increments and in miles per hour and vertical feet. In the back of his mind, he tried counting how long it took the ice to strike earth, and it was always different, relative to the aerodynamic shape of El Cap’s summit stone, in reverse, the shape of the ice.
It had been like this in the desert as he trekked out from Annie, gauging the sun, consulting his GPS, following his map, step by step calculating his exit from madness. There are degrees of being lost. Understanding that was the key to any labyrinth. Your sense of self was everything.