The Ascent(55)

The circle of light grew bigger and bigger. The silhouettes of heads appeared. For one terrifying moment, I thought I was going to get stuck coming up through the hole.

“Hurry!” I yelled, my voice cracking.

Spears of ice peeled away from the shaft walls and spiraled into the abyss. Chunks of ice fell in my face.

“Here, here, here.” Chad’s voice was suddenly in my ear. The burst of daylight stung my eyes as the guys hoisted me out of the shaft. I was weightless when they carried me across the glacier, my heart hammering, my lungs aching to breathe.

“Go,” I wheezed. “Get away. It’s … it’s going to …”

There came a thunderous clap. I was dropped, my spine absorbing the shock of the fall. I managed to sit up in time to see a channel tear across the surface of the glacier from the shaft’s opening, swallowing the snow that covered it. Crazily, I thought of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and the way Bugs would tunnel underground, creating a channel of disturbed earth in his wake.

“Get up.” Curtis grabbed the hood of my anorak and nearly strangled me.

I gathered my legs under me and sprinted across the face of the glacier toward the mountainside, tears freezing in rivulets down the swells of my cheeks. The earth roared at my back. There was a niche in the mountainside—a den hidden beneath a brow of black rock—that we were racing toward. We slammed against the mountainside and rolled into the opening in the face of the rock just as the tensile stresses spread over our wake, separating our trail of footprints on either side of the impromptu canyon.

Everything grew silent. In anticipation of further stresses, we huddled together like foxes in a den and listened for the splitting bark crunch of widening crevasses. But all remained quiet. The world was once again frozen in stasis.

Chad broke the silence. “Jesus Christ, we almost bought the farm on that one.” He uttered a pathetic little laugh.

I slung my pack against the wall of the cave, then unbuckled my helmet and set it down beside me. “How’s Hollinger?”

“I’m here,” he said.

“He’s awake,” Petras said.

“What happened?” He sounded groggy. “Christ, my head hurts …”

“Took a spill, Holly,” Chad said. “Dropped down five stories like an elevator with its cables cut.”

Hollinger groaned. “My gear.”

“It’s gone,” said Petras. “Swallowed up in the crevasse.”

“My goddamn gear. My f*cking helmet. What the f*ck am I … am I gonna do?”

As my eyes acclimated to the dark, I could make out Hollinger sitting against the opposite wall between Petras and Curtis. He cradled his wounded, bloodied head in his hands.

“I’ve got an extra helmet,” Curtis told him.

A flicker of light filled the cave. Andrew stood, holding his electric lantern in front of him. He walked past the entrance of the cave, his silhouette like that of a lawn jockey, and stood in the center of us. The roof of the cave yawned into eternity. It looked as if half the mountain had been hollowed out.

“Where do we go from here?” Chad said after a moment.

Like someone telling ghost stories around a campfire, Andrew raised the lantern to his face and said, “We go up.”

4



BLIND RS BATS, WE SCALED THE WALL OF THE

cave. A difficult and tedious feat, the ascent required faith solely on our sense of touch—feeling for specific grooves in the rock, fumbling for lines with our hands, threading the ropes through the pitons merely by touch. And the higher we climbed the darker it grew, the only light down below at the entrance of the cave. But even that would be gone soon as darkness reclaimed the land.

Time meant nothing; I had no idea how long it took us to reach the plateau. Winded and muscle weary, half of us nearly dropped to our knees and shed our gear as if we’d just returned to Earth after a year of space travel.

Hollinger had the most trouble, what with his head wound and his overall spirit shaken. The wound itself wasn’t too troubling—Petras and Curtis had examined it in the light of Andrew’s electric lamp before we began the climb and noted it was nothing more than a flesh wound—but the flame within Michael Hollinger’s soul had been extinguished.

His superstitions appeared to be manifesting before his eyes. The disappearance of half the food had already rattled him; his plummet through a covered trap in the glacier only reinforced his superstitions. (Of course, he did not take into consideration the luck involved in having that ice ledge intercept him, preventing his death.) As I passed him while climbing the cave wall, I could hear him muttering to himself—something about trespassing on the hidden land.

Andrew lifted his lantern and studied our location. Curtis and Chad followed suit, their own electric lanterns coming alive. A grand chamber, immense and sprawling, opened before us. Stalactites corkscrewed down from the ceiling perhaps a hundred feet above our heads, dripping calcareous water into russet pools. The air was stale and warm, underscored by a nonspecific mineral smell.

“It cuts through,” Andrew said, the light from his lantern diminishing as he moved farther down the chamber. He followed a trickling stream of water that snaked through a gouge in the stone floor. Running water meant there was a place where that water originated, and that typically meant a way out.

Gathering our gear again, we trailed Andrew through the chamber. It narrowed slightly, forming a tunnel all around us, the ceiling of which resembled the gullet of a whale. I tried to remember the story of Jonah and the whale but found that childhood memory was difficult to summon. In fact, for the past hour or so, my entire train of thought had been jumbled and muddy. At first, I thought it had something to do with the incident at the sinkhole—perhaps my body was still percolating mind-numbing adrenaline—but when it didn’t wear off, I began to wonder about our altitude.