Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

“Well?” Petras said. “What’d you guys find?”

Andrew sat on a roll of tarpaulin near the fire and unfolded a map in his lap. “The entrance to the Hall of Mirrors is just where the Sherpas predicted it to be. It’s a cave—a mouth—right in the center of the mountain. Maybe fifty yards up the pass.”

“The opening’s maybe a hundred yards from the ground,” Chad added. “We’ll have to do a short climb to reach it, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Do we know what to expect once we’re inside the cave?” I asked.

“Legend says it’s just a straight tunnel that empties into an antechamber called the Hall of Mirrors,” Andrew said.

I asked him why it was called the Hall of Mirrors.

Andrew snickered and rubbed two fingers across his creased forehead. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Then from there?”

Andrew continued to rub his brow. “There’s supposed to be an opening, a doorway of sorts, somewhere in the Hall of Mirrors. It leads directly to the Canyon of Souls.”

“But no one’s ever seen the canyon,” I said. “Right?”

“Well, no … but so far everything has been verified—the Valley of Walls, the Sanctuary of the Gods, the stone arch and the icefall, and now the opening to the Hall of Mirrors.”

“How wide is this canyon supposed to be?” Petras asked.

Andrew shrugged. “No clue. Two feet wide … or two thousand. No one knows for sure.”

“Someone must have been there,” I suggested, “to know it exists.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Andrew agreed, “but it’s never been officially documented. Could be stories passed down from bands of monks or Sherpas or Yogis. Could be campfire tales told by ancient yak herders who once lived in the valleys around these mountains. Christ, for all we know, it could be the equivalent of the stories from the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth, water into wine, and all that. How do any of these talessurvive from one generation to the next? I don’t know.”

It didn’t comfort me any to hear Andrew relate the Canyon of Souls to the stories of the Bible. To think Donald Shotsky and Curtis Booker died chasing some fairy tale did not sit well with me.

Andrew looked at me. His eyes gleamed in the firelight. His face was gaunt, nearly skeletal. “Will you be ready to climb tomorrow morning?” I said I would.

2

THERE WERE NO DREAMS AT THIS ALTITUDE.

3

IN THE MORNING. BLADES OF ICE SLASHED INTO THE

canvas tent and stuck like spears into the smoldering remains of our campfire. Hail came down like bullets, boring tunnels several inches deep into the packed snow.

We drank cold coffee, and I ate the rest of the stale bread I’d rationed from Shotsky’s pack after he died while we watched the hail through the opening in the tent. Chad and Hollinger busied themselves with a deck of cards, and Petras thumbed through the remaining pages of the George Mallory book.

Andrew sat by the tent’s open flaps watching the hailstones. “Looks like it’s letting up. I’ll give it ten seconds. Ten … nine … eight …”

I sat at the rear of the tent, my legs resting on my pack, dragging the blade of Petras’s hunting knife across a softball-sized stone. “Seven … six …”

I slipped and drove the edge of the knife into the soft mound of flesh just below my thumb. It didn’t hurt, but blood surfaced almost instantaneously, running in a single stream down my wrist and soaking the cuff of my flannel shirt. I grabbed one of my socks and—

1

—WRAPPED MY INJURED HAND IN A BANDAGE.

Splotches of blood lay like asterisks on the linoleum floor of my studio, and there were two drops on the half-finished sculpture. Out along M Street, the lampposts radiated an incandescent blue, and the traffic was becoming heavy.

At the sink, I washed the blood off my chisel, which had carelessly jumped from the stone and bit into the tender flesh of my palm. However, the chisel might not have been as careless if its handler hadn’t had so many scotch and sodas throughout the afternoon. Tightening the bandage around my hand, I removed my smock and turned the lights off in the studio before locking up for the evening.

Thirty minutes later, I arrived home to our split-level along the waterfront, the house dark in the deepening twilight. I kicked my shoes off in the front hallway and called Hannah’s name up the stairs. In the kitchen, I prepared a pot of coffee and set it on the stove, then climbed the creaking stairwell to the second floor.

The house was empty. The bed in the master bedroom hadn’t been made this morning, which was unusual, and the towel from my morning shower was still draped over the shower curtain rod. My dirty underwear was still in a ball next to the toilet. “Hannah?”

I stood inside the bedroom doorway while my mind strummed. The closet doors stood open, and after a second or two, I noticed Hannah’s large floral suitcase—the one she took on our honeymoon to Puerto Rico—was missing.

Frantic, I drove back into the city and cruised past Hannah’s gallery. There was a Closed sign in the window, but there were lights on inside. I double-parked the car, bounded to the door, and knocked.

Kristy Lynn, Hannah’s twenty-two-year-old assistant, answered

the door. “Hey, Mr. Overleigh. What’s up?”

“I’m looking for my wife.”

“Oh. Well, she isn’t here.”

“No?”

“Nope. Sorry.” Kristy Lynn curled a length of her dyed black hair. Her dark blue fingernail polish made the tips of her fingers look like those of a corpse. “Hasn’t been in all day.”

I looked over Kristy Lynn’s shoulder as if expecting to find Hannah hidden behind a desk or a chair or something. “And you didn’t hear from her?”

“Not all day.” Kristy Lynn sounded instantly bored. “What happened to your hand?”

“Huh?” I’d forgotten about it. Blood had soaked through the gauze bandage.

“You need a clean bandage.”

“All right. Good night.”

“Later, skater,” she intoned and shut the door in my face.

I drove to the houses of our mutual friends, but no one was home.

It was nearly nine when I arrived back home. The house was still dark; there was no indication Hannah had returned in my absence. An acrid, burning smell filled my nose as I crossed the foyer. Swearing under my breath, I realized I’d left the fucking coffeepot on the fucking stove. It had boiled over, coughing up brown sludge from the spout and onto the stove. Thankful the whole house hadn’t gone up in flames, I shut off the burner and wrapped my hand in a dish towel, then lifted the pot off the stove, and dumped the whole damn thing in the kitchen sink.

The phone rang. I sprinted to it and gathered it up in my wounded, bandaged hand. “Hannah?”

“I’m leaving you, Tim,” she said. Her voice sounded distant. I could tell she had been crying.

“Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. Did you hear what I said? I’m leaving. I have to leave you.”

“Hannah, please—”

“I’ll talk to you in a couple of days. I just need some time to myself, some time to cool off. You need that time, too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Where are you? I’ll come get you. We should talk.”

“Not tonight.” It sounded like she was struggling very hard to stay calm. “Give it a couple of days.”

“Like hell.” My face was burning, my hands shaking. My toes were curling in my shoes. “Tell me where you are. This is bullshit. What’s going on?”

Her defenses fell. She started sobbing. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this.”