Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

My injured leg refused to straighten out. It would be impossible to climb the shaft without straightening the leg. Trying not to think about it, I attempted to slide my hand back down, but it wouldn’t budge. I was stuck.

Jesus …

I started thinking about my SUV, and that was always a bad sign. My metallic green Jeep Cherokee was parked maybe thirty yards from the main road, visible only to those who might actively been searching for it. Not that anyone would be searching for it. I’dheard enough stories from spelunkers to know that when you started wondering if your car was visible from the highway, you were already in too deep. You’d bought the farm, as the saying went.

But I was panicking. I wasn’t thinking.

Five years old, I thought. Swimming lessons. Dad kept telling you to put your head underwater, put your head underwater, put your head underwater. Deep breath and put your head—

“Underwater,” I whispered. I said it not to hear the word but to release the last bit of air in my lungs, narrowing my chest in the process.

The rock loosened around me, and I was again able to move my hand. I thrust it upward and slapped a numb palm against the wall of the shaft, groping for one of those handholds I’d spotted. My fingers slipped into a groove and gripped it. Something caught in my throat. I thought of skeletons blanketed in cobwebs. I was able to rise on the tips of my toes and snake my other hand through the maw, spilling white light from the flashlight straight up through the narrow tunnel. Everything smelled of sulfur.

It’s not sulfur. It’s chlorine, I kept hearing in my head. This is no different than swimming. You’re swimming. This is swimming in a pool; can’t you tell?

I could tell. I could tell, all right.

The flashlight fell from my hand. I heard it clatter against the rocks as it dropped, pulling the light with it. It struck the water with a hollow, plastic sound. An instant later, I was awash in blackness again.

This is swimming. This is swimming—

I realized I hadn’t taken a breath in quite a while. I took one now, my lungs aching and my chest expanding, pressing hard against the stone all around me. The constriction was too great. I couldn’t catch a full breath.

It was the fear of dying alone in the dark that set my body in motion. I proceeded to scale the wall, my fingers seeking out niches in the wall to hold on to, the muscles in my arms and shoulders straining as I hoisted myself off the ground without the assistance of my legs. The tunnel was too narrow to bring a knee up; my legs hung uselesslybelow. My broken left leg felt as if it were rigged with coat hangers and packed with broken glass.

I gripped a ledge above and felt space open up behind my shoulders. The tunnel was widening. This is swimming. This is swimming . I managed to raise myself up farther—

My hands slipped, and I anticipated the fall before it actually happened. But when I crashed to the bottom, the pain in my injured leg was potent enough to send my mind whirling …

I stood at the end of a long pier watching a Ferris wheel pull slow rotations in the oncoming dusk. Something tickled my throat, and I coughed into my hands. People shouted from the boardwalk, and when I looked in their direction, I was shocked to see many of them pointing at me . I cupped my hands to my mouth and coughed into them again. This time, however, I coughed up the head of a daffodil, glistening with spittle in my palm, and I stared at it with wonder—

And then I’m there once again, standing off in the distance, admiring the green, sloping lawns of the Italian countryside. As soon as I realize where I am, I see the motorcar speeding around a curve in the road. I wave my arms as it approaches, pleading for the driver to slow down.

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.