The Ascent(77)

We hooked ourselves together by a double helix of lines, then looped the lines through friction brakes, which were metal rings in the shape of figure eights. After a simultaneous intake of breath, we descended the face quickly but with caution, our boot nails scraping along the frozen mountainside. The wind was arctic and biting, seeking out and attacking every exposed inch of flesh. My eyes began to tear in a matter of seconds.

I paused only once to glance down at the concavity of frozen earth pocked by snow-crusted boulders. The ice glowed in the dark, the flecks of mica in the exposed stone reflecting the moonlight in a dazzling spectacle. And, of course, there was Michael Hollinger’s body, itself a shimmering assemblage of crooked arms and legs, a phosphorescent trail of blood, black like crude oil in the night, snaking from the split in his skull …

“Don’t look,” Petras said. “Keep moving.”

At the bottom, our heavy boots crunched through the frozen crust of ice on the snow. Again I peered over at Hollinger’s body. There didn’t appear to be any footprints in the snow around him.

“I’m guessing he was pushed,” I said.

Petras wound his rope around one shoulder. He looked about to say something when he froze, his arms stopping in some semblance of a boxing stance.

“What is it?” I said, following Petras’s gaze up the wall we’d just descended toward the mouth of the cave.

“I thought I saw someone.”

“Someone?”

“I think he’s watching us,” he said, his voice lower.

It was too dark to see anything.

At my feet, Hollinger’s dead eyes, frozen in their sockets, were white, pupil-less stones.

Petras blew briskly into his palms, flexed his fingers, and tugged his gloves back on. When he turned to me, there were frozen bullets of ice clinging to his beard and eyelashes. His eyes looked as if two steel-colored pitons had been driven deep into the sockets.

“Forget it. Trick of the light,” he said, though he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.

Beneath the cover of night, we hiked along the ridge, the snow a glittering carpet of diamonds, until exhaustion and the freezing temperature caused my muscles to seize.

“Petras—” I keeled over against a pillar of stone, clutching my body with stiffening arms.

Petras looked equally exhausted. He slumped beside me, his immense weight pressing me flat against the rock, though I was grateful for his warmth.

“No more,” I uttered. “Not tonight.”

“Your nose is bleeding again.”

I pulled off my glove and attempted to wipe the blood away, but it had frozen in a streak down my lips.

We bivouacked beside the stone pillar, which kept most of the freezing wind from attacking us, and took turns keeping watch. Most of our gear was soaking wet, so it took forever to get a small fire going, which died out halfway through the night. But it was probably for the best: we didn’t want to bring any further attention on us.

While Petras slept, I sat wrapped in my sleeping bag with thepickax in my lap. With the fire out, there was nothing but our sleeping bags and our own body heat to keep us warm. The tent was only about ten degrees warmer than outside. The wind screamed down the canyons, rattling like a runaway locomotive. I listened, forcing my eyes wide just to keep them open. They didn’t want to stay open. If I drifted too far into my own thoughts, I’d fall asleep, lulled by the numbing calm of dreams and the painlessness of frozen nerve endings. I set the timer on my watch for every three minutes—loud enough to jar me from an unplanned doze yet quiet enough not to disturb Petras.

I was just nodding off when the alarm on my watch made my head jerk up, my eyes blinking repeatedly. Lightning flashed, causing the tent to glow and the plastic windows to fill with brilliant blue light.

My breath caught in my throat.

Backlit by the lightning, stark against the canvas of the tent, a figure briefly appeared.

An electric dread coursed through my body. Gripping the handle of the pickax, I leaned toward the tent flaps. I thrust my head and shoulders out into the freezing night, blindly stabbing the pickax into the darkness in front of me. It had started to sleet, and it was impossible to see beyond the far corner of the tent. A second finger of lightning threw the valley into a wash of pale blue snow and bleak, shapeless shadows.

There was no one out there.

—Tim …

I shook my head, closed my eyes. “No. Not now, Hannah. Please.”

—Come with me, Tim …

“I can’t. You need to go away and let me keep my head straight.” Just hearing my own voice out loud caused a tremulous, self-indulgent laugh to rumble in my throat. “Jesus, I’m cracking up.”

Retracting the pickax into the tent, I took one final glimpse of the surrounding gully before withdrawing my head and shoulders through the canvas flaps.

In the morning, we continued along the outer ridge on empty stomachs. Beyond the peaks of the Himalayas, the sky looked scratchy and sepia toned, like an old filmstrip. Low-hanging cumulus clouds drew together like brooding eyebrows against the horizon. The sun was thumb smeared and pink. I began to convince myself that Petras and I were the only two men alive on the planet.

At lunchtime, Petras discovered oyster crackers at the bottom of his pack, which we shared while sucking down mouthfuls of snow.

“Andrew’s just as dead as we are,” Petras said after half a day of silence. His beard was fuller and white with freezing snow. Bits of ice dropped off as he spoke. “There’s no hope for him, either.”