The Ascent(3)

I stood in a room of darkness as a figure approached. How I was able to discern the figure’s shape I did not know, but as it drew nearer, I sensed a radiance from it, and there was an anticipation in my chest.

Then my eyes opened to the blackness of the real world.

Here, I thought. I’m going to die down here.

The pain had ushered me into blessed unconsciousness. Upon awaking, I felt the numbness of my left leg—the frightening absence of it—but it was no longer that drilling, incomprehensible pain.

I was on the ground, icy water all around me. I knew I was awake and lucid, but I refused to move. The flashlight was dead, probably destroyed when I’d landed on it, and I didn’t care. This was it. I was watching the motorcar launch over the hillside, and I no longer thought about broken legs or my Jeep Cherokee.

There was someone else here with me.

The feeling was unmistakable. When I was a child, my mother used to gather me in her lap and rake her long fingernails down my bare back. She would carve designs, designs I was required to guess—a turtle, a lion, a skyscraper. Seconds before her fingernails ever grazed my flesh, I could sense their approach, could feel them coming like a twinge in my spine, a tickle in my tailbone. This feeling was like that: a sense of impending certainty of the presence of another.

“I’m dying,” I said. Although I could not be certain if I spoke these words aloud or not …

—You’re not, Hannah said.

I felt my heart leap in my chest. I wished for light by which to see her, but there was no light here. This was a tomb below the surface of the earth.

—Get up, she said.

“I can’t,” I managed, certain this time of the words forming in my throat and hearing the way they croaked forth and came back to me. “Can’t … move …”

—You can’t die down here, she said.

There were other words, too—words that made no verbal sense, no vocal sense—but they were dedicated to forcing me up from the frigid water.

I didn’t see the hand come out of the blackness above; instead I felt it. Again, it was similar to my mother’s fingernails on my back, causing goose bumps and sending shivers down my spine. I knew the hand wasn’t actually there—that I was feeling it only in my mind—but the sense of it was enough to cause in me a surge of power, of strength, of celebration.

My arms were over my head this time, a smarter approach. My fingers fumbled and grasped a set of niches in the wall. Using my renewed strength, I hauled myself off the stone ground and out of the freezing pool of water in which I’d been sitting. This movement caused fresh agony to bullet up through my left leg. I could feel it everywherethroughout my body, igniting every single nerve ending and causing my teeth to gnash. Still, I continued to raise myself into the hole above my head, using only my arms and my one good leg.

The narrowness of the hole permitted my elbows to bend to a maximum of perhaps thirty degrees, merely bowing out and not truly bending at all. There was nothing more I could do about this; the walls of the channel pressed hard against the points of my elbows, and I was once again breathing in the heavy dust.

It took all my strength and concentration to release my grip on one of the handholds I’d secured and to swing momentarily like the pendulum of a clock. My free hand shot straight up, providing more room in the tunnel in its wake.

Then I was able to bend my other elbow just a bit more, drawing my face closer to where one hand still gripped the handhold. I could feel the tendons in my body, as tense as violin strings, quaking in unison. Yet I was able to raise my free hand higher into the darkness above. It slapped against the stone far above my head with numb satisfaction. The fingers immediately slipped into another groove.

Overzealous, I pulled myself up too quickly and was instantly rewarded with a blinding, delirious pain as my exposed shinbone, rising into the hole, cracked against the lip of the crevasse. The blackness was overcome by a dazzling display of fireworks—explosions of all color—and I thought maybe I had died and was boiling in a vat of molten lava in the deepest depths of hell.

—Up. Hannah beckoned. Up.

I could have let the pain engulf and destroy me, but I allowed it to fuel my aggression and will to survive. I didn’t care if I ground the exposed bone to yellow powder against the walls of the shaft. I was going to climb out. The pain made me determined.

I continued to climb to the wan light. I didn’t know how long it took me to reach the chamber above and to let the fading daylight course down on me fully through a rent in the ceiling of the cavern—it could have been minutes or hours. When I finally climbed out of the crevasse onto stable ground, I passed out.

3



FLASHES OF CONSCIOUSNESS FLITTED BY LIKE

dragonflies. Whether or not I was actually dreaming, I could not be certain because when my eyes unstuck, I was somehow out of the cave itself and in the open desert, watching lizards lap water from kiss tanks with vibrating black tongues and feeling the pre-evening heat clinging wetly to my body.

I crawled in the dirt toward an immense outcropping of stone, suggestive of the undulating, skeletonized backbone of some prehistoric animal. Again, I fell into unconsciousness.

This time when I awoke it was night. The moon was a fat pearl shimmering behind a stretch of clouds like pulls of dirty wool. The air was frigid against my skin. I blinked several times, trying to remember where I was and how I’d gotten here.