by Jeff Long
He looked back at where he’d come from. His rope ran through a crooked row of carabiners dangling from the stone. Like his steady march of footprints out of the dunes. The row grew longer. The edge drew closer.
Hints of an exterior appeared. The subterranean gloom changed. The mist took on a different, lighter blue. Out and above, he knew, the headwall towered. Laid hard against it, braided together and glazed over by the storm, Lewis’s ropes were waiting for him.
Stretching with his hammer, he slashed at the icicles fencing the rim. Sticks of chandelier ice tinkled against the metal litter that now hung almost directly below Hugh. He glanced down and saw the row of fine black hairs running from Lewis’s stomach up to the plates of his pecs.
He didn’t like the wide-eyed surprise on Lewis’s face. It made him look foolish. And the snow packing his mouth brought back Hugh’s nightmare of Annie with the sand pouring from her throat. He put his back to the abyss. They were gone. He was almost out of here.
His progress slowed. Before freezing, the sleet had run under the roof and filled every cavity along the rim. Hugh had to chisel out the ice with the tip of a piton. Fragments flew in his eyes. His face dripped with melt, which ran down his neck and spine. It took forever to get the next piece in.
Seven more feet, he estimated. Two more moves. Nothing could go wrong from there. The ropes were their freeway to the sun. Never again, Hugh swore. After this, El Cap could sink to the bottom of the ocean. They’d made it.
But then, with what voice he had left, Augustine cried a warning. It was more a bark than a word. Hugh flinched, thinking a rock was falling, or a piece was pulling, or the rope had snarled.
Beaded with sweat and dew and ice melt, he looked back at Augustine. From out here, their little camp with its red tent and the entrails of its wreckage looked far away in the mist, like a dream in decay. Augustine was stabbing at the air, pointing wildly. Hugh wheeled around to see.
Lewis was in motion.
The summit crew had returned. They were drawing the litter and its dead guardian to the top. Smoothly, in utter silence, Lewis glided up from the depths. He was rising into the heavens. His body was going to pass almost within Hugh’s reach.
“Wait,” Hugh shouted.
Another section of ice fluttered past. The air pressed at Hugh. It carried a scent of trees, live trees, on the summit. They were close.
“Stop,” Hugh yelled at them. The roof blocked his voice. The mist muffled it. Occupied with their own commands, and enveloped by glacial clatter, they would never hear him. He could barely hear himself under here.
He shouted in bursts. “Stop. Hello. Help.”
Even as the litter slid through the air, a tiny electric voice spoke. “Come in, Litter One. Do you read me, Lewis?” The radio—everything they needed—lay on the bed of the metal basket.
Hugh lunged for it, and went exactly nowhere. “Slack,” Hugh yelled down, and Augustine fed him slack, too late. Lewis had already moved higher.
Think. Hugh yanked off his helmet with Augustine’s name inked across the back. He took aim and tossed it at the litter with a flick of his wrist. They would figure it out up there, a message in a bottle. They would lower down for the castaways.
But the helmet hit the rim with a hollow clunk, gave a hop, and disappeared into the mist. Hugh started unclipping pitons and nuts, chucking them at the litter, landing some, mostly missing. He quit wasting pieces. The summit team would never read the survivors’ presence from a few anonymous odds and ends. Even if they did, the falling ice made conditions far too dangerous. No way would they risk another life today.
Lewis and the litter kept on rising. Desperate, Hugh pitched his hammer at the litter. It had a five-foot keeper sling that connected to his harness. He missed. He tried again. It caught. Handle up, the hammer head snared a corner of the basket.
There was no time for delicacy. The litter was sliding into the heights. Hugh pulled. It would work, or it would fail. The hammer held. Still in motion, the litter sidled toward him.
“Slack,” he yelled to Augustine.
One more pull, a few more inches. Time his dive. Grab the radio. Eyes on the prize, Hugh pulled the basket closer.
A breeze kissed him, the backdraft from another wing of ice. More scent of summit pines.
The litter rocked. The breeze banged it hard against the rim of the roof. One of Lewis’s arms jerked at the bump. His dead hand flung up and across. As if ridding himself of Hugh, the corpse brushed away the hammer.
Hugh’s last link tumbled free.
“Lewis,” he whispered.
Lewis’s head hinged around. Snow guttered from that crystal mouth. His marble eyes froze Hugh. Thunderstruck. Hugh couldn’t move. Suddenly it was so hard to breathe.
He could only stare as Lewis rounded the rim, making the journey out. The litter and ropes and body vanished.
Cuba’s words returned to him. I died. I know everything. Hugh clung to his stirrups and thought, Everything? It terrified him.
Then with a gasp, his lungs filled again. He blew out and drew in, starting his clock all over again. The lost souls were lost. He was not. The world was nowhere to be seen in this fog, but he could taste it in the air. It was waiting for him.
Suddenly he knew what to do. With or without his bible of maps, or Lewis’s rope, he would find his way out of this purgatory. Pulling up the keeper sling, he took the hammer in his fist. Out there, beyond the shield of this roof, where the ice roamed like dragons, lay his deliverance.
THIRTY-ONE
“I saw it,” he lied.
He leaned forward in the tent. He shined his light on their faces. In the fading beam, speckled with mist, Augustine and Cuba looked waxy and yellow and entombed. He was stranded among the damned. Hugh fought his stab of dread. Damned, yes. Stranded, no.
“Tomorrow’s the day,” he said.
Hugh was exhausted. He should have been hungry and thirsty. But all day he’d been eating icicles and lichen picked from the rock. He had El Cap in his belly and veins and lungs and head.
It was deep night. Sleep was impossible. The three of them sat like peas in a pod, jammed side by side. He had bullied Augustine into the tent. Their backs were against the wall. They shared the one sleeping bag across their legs.
Andie’s body hung beneath the platform. She might as well have been lying on their laps. They were possessed by her.
After Lewis and the litter were drawn off, Hugh had kept climbing. He had finished the roof and exited onto the headwall, reaching a crack that ran like a shot up the soaring stone. The blue fog barred any view of the summit, of course. But if Cass had seen it, as Cuba claimed, then it was there.
He had shouted himself hoarse, in vain. By the time he’d worked out from the roof, the summit crew was probably long gone. They had simply been retrieving Lewis and their equipment during what was possibly, Hugh feared, just a break between storms. He was coming to believe Cuba. They were being stalked. The abyss was trying to claim them.
Standing on the outer wall, freed of the Eye for even a few minutes, his sense of hunched slavery had vanished. He’d felt liberated, or nearly so. Now, back among these broken spirits, he realized how lethal this hollow of black stone had become. Tied to the rock, they were getting picked to pieces by their vultures.
“I got a hundred feet up,” he related for the tenth time. “The rope is fixed. The crack will go. All the way to the top. It’s a good crack. A great crack. Fingers to fists. Cuba, you could do it in your sleep.”
“I just don’t know,” Augustine said yet again. He sat hunched at the far end. Maybe it had been like this in his ice cave on Cerro Torre. All night, he’d been somber and addled. He knew he was going to lose part of both feet. He had diagnosed the extent of the frostbite himself. “They know we’re here.”
“After the lightning last night,” Hugh said, “they probably think we’re dead.”
“Sooner or later, they’ve got to come for us.”
“That’s the cru
x of it,” Hugh said. “Sooner? Or later? You need a hospital. All you have to do is hike the rope tomorrow.”
“But we can last.”
“Can we? Look at us. We’re out of food. Our water’s gone.” While he was climbing and Augustine was belaying, Cuba had polished off their rations. At this point, she was probably the best rested and strongest of the three of them.
“They’ll come,” said Augustine.
“What about Andie?”
Augustine’s eyes glowed like round yellow moons. “I know what to do with her,” he said.
This didn’t sound good. “Yeah?”
“I think I should stay.”
“And do what?”
“Just stay. With her.”
Until death do us part. “Bullshit,” Hugh said.
“I’m serious,” Augustine said. “Go without me. It’s your only way out.”
Hugh needed Augustine to mind the rope tomorrow. They had another five hundred feet to climb, and even grief stricken and harrowed by guilt, Augustine was saner than Cuba. “This is Andie’s wall,” Hugh said to him. “It’s not yours to waste.”
“She wants me to stay.”
“What about resurrection?” Hugh said.
“What?”
“That’s what this is all about. You have the power,” said Hugh. “Think about it. You can make life out of death. With you for her wings, she can finish the climb. You can make her immortal.”
Augustine didn’t answer.
Hugh kept the headlamp turned on. They were down to the last battery. It violated his normal moderation, but the darkness was too deep tonight. They were a bubble of light in the void.
Between them, Cuba spoke up. “Don’t deceive us, Hugh.” Her hair hung in greasy strings. “Don’t deceive yourself.”
“The summit’s there,” he repeated to them.
With every heartbeat, a hammer hit his skull. The veins of his neck were so engorged, they stood out on his throat. His cheeks tingled. His tongue felt like a chunk of rubber. He had to work not to slur his words. It was hard to think clearly. He’d experienced these symptoms before, but never below twenty thousand feet.
He felt ready to explode. Every breath was strangled. He had high-altitude sickness, plain and simple. But on El Cap? Maybe there was some freak pressure cell in the storm system. None of the others seemed to be suffering, though. It was just him, the old man.
He wanted to curl into a ball and hold his head. But he had to rally them. He had to occupy them so that the night could not.
“Trojan Women,” he said. “It belongs to you, Cuba. All you have to do is cross the finish line.”
The notion was outrageous on one level. Augustine’s feet were dead white to the arch. Cuba had bound herself among the anchor ropes again. Hugh could barely see through his migraine. They were trapped.
But they could escape. One behind the other, they could cheat the abyss. Augustine could emerge with his lover. Cuba could become a legend. Hugh could return to the desert where he belonged.
“It won’t work,” she said.
Her omens and fatalism beat at him. He held up one taped fist. “I had my hand in the crack. I could feel the summit in it.”
“There’s no walking away from this one,” she said.
“Terrible things have happened here,” Hugh said.
“I’m not talking about here,” she said.
Augustine squirmed.
“This isn’t a haunted house,” Hugh said. “We’re going out the door tomorrow morning, and nothing’s going to happen to us.”
She looked at him as if he were a curious bug. “Then why are you so afraid?”
He was afraid. “I’m not. The dead can’t touch us. You have to quit acting like a human sacrifice. We’re survivors. We’re free from all that.”
“Like in the desert?”
He tried to remember telling her about that. His head pounded. Maybe he had. Or Augustine had talked to her. “Yes,” said Hugh.
She turned to Augustine. “You’re a survivor. Tell us. Is it free?”
Augustine hunched into himself.
“There are consequences,” she said. “That’s the deal.”
Augustine groaned. “I know that,” he said.
“You don’t just leave the weak.”
“I know.”
“Let him be,” Hugh said. She was ruthless. “Forgive. Forget.”
“Apples and oranges,” she said.
“What?”
“Forgive. Forget. They’re not the same.”
“What more do you want from him?” Hugh said. “Bury the past. We’re all on the same side now.”
“Are we?” she asked.
Augustine may have fallen prey to her, but it wasn’t going to work on him. She only knew what you gave away to her.
“The choice is yours,” he said. No one could force her to climb, and they didn’t have the strength to be pulling two bodies, one living, one dead.
It boiled down to one question. Augustine he could trust, even in his morbid state. Cuba was the wild card. At first light, did he dare share a rope with this woman?
“Are you with us, Cuba?”
“Can I trust you, Hugh?”
He turned the light on his own face so she could see him. “I’m not leaving you,” he said. Though he would, and never look back. If she didn’t come around, he would have no alternative.
“Promise?” she said.
“Cross my heart.”
A soft breeze luffed the tent wall. Hoarfrost sparkled in the light. It was their own breath—their own words—frozen on the nylon and falling back on them. They looked feverish with melt. It ran down his face.
“Your eyes,” Augustine said to Hugh. He was frowning, pointing with a sock hand.
“What about them?” Hugh touched the trickle along his nose. He’d thought it was sweat or tears. He looked at his fingertip. He was bleeding from his eyes.
“Can’t you feel her out there?” Cuba said.
Augustine lifted his head. “Andie?”
“Andie goes with us,” Hugh told him again.
The tent walls pressed in on them. They were diseased with one another. The stillness cloyed. Hugh pulled in a breath. He pushed it out. Under the sleeping bag, Augustine’s white feet were dying. The Captain was eating them alive.
“This is what we do.” Hugh had gone through it with them. He went through it again. “Augustine goes first on the rope. He trails a separate line to bring up Andie. Cuba goes next. I’ll bring up the rear. Then we climb.”
He wanted it to sound easy and inevitable. In fact, they would be taking a terrible gamble. The crack could turn mean or seal shut. Even if all went well, their exhaustion and hunger were bound to slow the climbing. If they failed to top out tomorrow, if they got trapped in the open, El Cap would exterminate them.
But they had to try.
“I just don’t know,” said Augustine.
“It’s out of our control,” said Cuba. “This is where it comes together.”
“Yes, you’ve said,” Hugh said. “Her pound of flesh.”
“There’s a balance to things,” she said.
“We’re done giving, Cuba. All of us. We beat her. We made it alive, you’ll see.”
“There’s still tomorrow.”
“It’s after midnight. This is tomorrow.” His stomach cramped. It was the lichen and ice he’d eaten. And the runoff he’d drunk, most likely fouled with climbers’ sewage.
“Not yet, Hugh.”
“Enough,” he said. She was tearing them apart. “No more scapegoats. No more wrath of God. Listen to me. Her ghost doesn’t exist.”
“I never said ghosts.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
He put one fingertip in the center of her forehead. “She’s up here.”
Very gently, she put her fingertip on his forehead. “What about you, Hugh?”
She didn’t have a clue, sticking voodoo needles
into him, fiddling for a nerve, trying to get inside his head the way she’d done with Augustine. But she was as ignorant of his desert journey as the rest of the world. Not a clue, he told himself.
The breeze went on. The weather was changing yet again, though Hugh couldn’t tell if it was for better or for worse. The wind might be returning, and with it a new assault. Or it could be the cusp of a warm front.
The air stunk of the three of them piled against each other. He wanted to open the tent flap at his shoulder for a clean breath. But Cuba had him spooked.
When the headlamp finally died, it was like falling from his body. Their string of voices unraveled. Stray words eroded into grunts and peeps.
And then another sound came to them. A sleeping bag rustled, and it was not this bag across their legs. Something was struggling out there. Beneath them.
They fell silent.
The thrashing quit. Hugh heard the sleeping bag unzipping. Ropes slipped against nylon. Hugh fought the image. She’s escaping.
Then Cuba reached for his hand with her carpenter’s grip, and that scared him more than the sounds. Because she knew.
Slings creaked. It was climbing.
“Not me,” Cuba murmured in the darkness. “Not again.”
“It’s the wind,” Hugh whispered.
“What wind?”
“Cuba.” Shut up.
Rocks shifted in their sockets.
The pressure mounted in Hugh’s head. His eyes were leaking. Blood trickled through his whiskers. He felt a hundred years old.
A twig—that dry, that delicate—began to scratch beneath their platform floor. It traced sideways against the nylon, sketching the evidence of them sitting there. Hugh felt it crossing his rump, and grazing the tip of his spine. It poised beneath his anus, and he felt open, gaping open, utterly vulnerable to whatever was down there. He gnawed his lip, tasting the blood in his mustache. Hold still. It moved on.
Cuba stiffened beside him.
A minute later, Augustine jerked.
She was making up her mind.
No one moved. Hugh took tiny bird breaths. Not a sound.
Without warning, the platform reared up. Cuba squeezed his hand. Hugh grabbed for the anchor. They crashed down on the guy lines.