The Ascent(58)

“Hannah, please… ” I continued to climb, the muscles in my arms quaking, my ankles swelling with sprains inside my boots. I was nearly forty feet in the air when I reached the summit, my muscles destroyed and my lungs straining like old car tires pumped up with toomuch air. The summit was a slanted platform that overlooked the snowy pass and the rush of the icefall farther below. The icefall glittered like a bed of diamonds in the moonlight.

Hannah stood at the far end of the platform, facing me.

“What is it? What do you want?” It burned my throat to talk.

—I’ve told you, Tim. I want you to turn back. You shouldn’t be here. None of you should be here.

“I’m dreaming this. Either that or I’m hallucinating.”

—It doesn’t matter.

“Let me touch you. If you’re real, let me touch you.”

—It doesn’t matter, she repeated.

“It does. It matters to me.”

She turned and lifted her arms like wings. She brought one foot over the edge of the platform—

“Hannah, no!”

—and let herself drop off the edge. Her silvery hair trailing her, the twin hubs of her small buttocks … there and then gone.

I rushed to the edge, skidding to a halt just inches from sealing my own fate in the icy rush of the icefall a million miles below. Looking down, I could see no evidence of Hannah. She should have been in midair, those ghostly arms still splayed like birds’ wings … but she had vanished. Or had never existed in the first place.

When I called out her name, the sound of my voice jerked me awake. I was no longer atop one of the forty-foot spires. Nor was I in the tent. I sat up in the snow, my thermal underwear soaked and stiffening in the cold, my teeth rattling like maracas in my head. Disoriented, I looked around. Farther up the incline, wedged at the base of the towering stone spires, I could discern the black Quonset shape of our tent.

I stood, my knees weak and my hands shaking and numb. There was an inky smear on the palm of my right hand. I touched clean fingers to my nose, and they came away bloody. It felt like someone had been using my head as a steel drum. A wave of spasms shookmy bones, and an instant later, having temporarily lost control of certain bodily functions, I urinated in my thermals, the heat blessed and welcome as it spilled down my thighs.

There were no footprints in the snow anywhere. None leading to the spot where I now stood. There were no footprints coming down the slope from camp and none from any other direction. Directly above my head was a rocky gangplank; it was possible I’d been sleepwalking and had walked the plank, for lack of a better term, only to wake up in this very spot. But that didn’t explain what the hell I’d been doing sleepwalking in the first place. As far as I knew, I’d never walked in my sleep in all my life.

One step into the snow and I was instantly aware that I could no longer feel my feet. They were wrapped in two thick layers of socks, but both layers had soaked all the way through, and their soles had begun to freeze. How long had I been out here, anyway?

Back in the tent, I was careful to not wake the others as I changed into my day clothes. My hands and feet would not get warm, and there was a painful, needling ball of ice in the center of my stomach, as if all my digestive juices had turned to icy slush. I cleaned my bloody nose with my wet socks, my exhalations stuttering while my inhalations were equally as hesitant. Fumbling in the dark, I located the canteen with the remaining bourbon and took two healthy swallows. I clenched the canteen against my chest and felt the alcohol burn a magma path down my gullet and into the saddle of my guts. I couldn’t stop shaking.

“I was wondering what happened to you.”

The voice jarred me, freezing my insides all over again. It was Hollinger, propped up in the dark beside me.

“Christ,” I whispered. “Trying to give me a goddamn heart attack?”

“Can’t sleep.” His tone was noncommittal.

A million responses ran through my head at that moment. In the end, however, I said nothing. I tucked the canteen of bourbon in mypack and slipped beneath the warmth of my sleeping bag. My limbs hadn’t fully thawed, and my stomach still felt tied in a not, but I forced myself to close my eyes and hunt down an hour of sleep before morning.

3



ANDREW STOOD AT THE BASE OF THE GIANT STONE

arch, a look of deep concentration on his face. His normally pale skin had been burned by the sun and was beginning to flake away by the dry wind. Over the past couple of weeks, a fine coppery beard had fallen into place, somehow making him look younger.

In fact, the only things that hadn’t changed throughout the course of our journey were Andrew’s eyes. They remained alert, startling, clear, and blue as Caribbean waters. He still had that way of looking at someone and captivating him, holding him prisoner in his stare … until he laughed his loud, obnoxious laugh, and all prior sins were instantly forgiven.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” he said, addressing the rest of us as we packed our gear. “We’ve all played on playgrounds when we were kids, right? Well, we’re gonna re-create the monkey bars using this arch.”

He slapped the underside of the arch as if testing its solidity. “We’ll start off with a rope-and-pulley system. I’ll climb out and insert cams every two and a half feet along the underside of the arch. We’ll use the cams as handholds, one hand over the other, just like the monkey bars. Of course, I want everyone harnessed with a fixed line. And I’ll run a second empty line with me so we can slide our gear across on it. This way we won’t have to carry our packs.” He clapped. “Sound good?”