Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

The night air froze the marrow in my bones. I chipped away at my chosen stone with numb hands, a fair distance from our camp so as not to disturb the others while they slept. The moon hung fat and yellow behind the nearest peak, illuminating the snow and causing it to radiate with a dull luminescence.

—Turn back.

I couldn’t tell if I’d actually heard her voice or if it had been only in my head. Nonetheless, I spun around and stared at the passage between the jagged rocks, the snow flooded with shadow. No one was there.

“Hannah?”

—Turn back, Tim. Please.

Of all the things I could do—I uttered a weak, little laugh. Surely I was hallucinating. “My head’s playing funny games,” Hollinger had said. “I can’t think straight.” Sure enough, sure enough …

—Tim . She stepped out into the moonlight, her body naked and pale and glistening with condensation, so real she left footprints in the snow.

“Jesus, Hannah …”

It felt as though my heart had stopped pumping. My blood ran cold as ice water. As I watched, she seemed to flicker from existence like bad reception on a television set.

“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Hannah, please …”

—Turn back , she said, her voice ringing in the center of my brain.

Something cold and wet trickled over my lips. I touched two fingers to the wetness. They came away black with blood. A nosebleed.

Hannah turned and walked away from me down the sloping, snowy pass.

I begged her to stop, but she didn’t. So I pursued, dropping my piton and hammer in the snow, the nylon hood of my flimsy anorak flapping in the freezing wind. She disappeared around a bend in the pass, hidden by giant fingers of rock, but I followed her footprints like a bloodhound on the scent. On the other side of the bend, I saw her silvery form climbing one of the stone towers. She climbed with ease, as if her body had been specifically designed to do so. I called to her, but she didn’t stop or look back at me.

My desire to touch her—to reach out and feel her—was suddenly overwhelming. The next thing I knew, I was scaling the stone tower after her, my movements much less steady, my speed no match for hers. Each time I looked up, she was farther and farther ahead of me.

Loose rocks broke free under my footing and tumbled in a small avalanche down the face of the tower. One hand lost its grip on the ledge, and I swung outward, my feet flailing briefly in the air, while I held tight to the handhold with one hand. My fingernails digging into the stone, I swung my other hand around and grabbed the ledge as my legs pedaled for a foothold. My heart restarted in my chest. Glancing up, I saw Hannah’s fish white body already mounting the summit.

“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.