Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

Only in the center of the floor, where a section of each circle of light overlapped all the others and focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass, a perfect beam of white light melted the frozen snow from the cave floor, creating a star-shaped opening in the ice that revealed the blackened rock beneath.

It was this display that initially captivated our attention. Together,we all walked slow circles around the shaft of light. Andrew doused the lantern and set it down, his gaze trained on the spotlight of white light in the center of the floor.

Chad gripped my forearm and stopped walking. “Look around,” he said, his voice filled with awe. “Jesus Christ, Shakes, look around.”

I looked.

It was called the Hall of Mirrors because that was exactly what it was: an antechamber whose walls were existent only in the form of pure ice, perhaps fifteen inches thick, like great blocks of glass encapsulating the entire room. Light refracted off every wall of ice, a constant lamp, keeping the ice from being coated with frost and causing it to melt and refreeze, melt and refreeze, creating a mirrorlike finish to the walls of ice.

“Holy crap,” I muttered, stepping into the center of the antechamber. I walked toward one of the walls, my reflection facing me, as perfect as it would be in a bathroom mirror. I reached out to my image’s hand. Our fingers touched.

I looked up at my reflection and into my own eyes. Fear shook me. Cadaverous, sunken eyes, lipless mouth, a dark, patchy beard corrupting the lower half of my face—I was a ghost of the man I’d once been, a hint of the soul I’d once carried within me.

Andrew’s reflection floated up behind mine. I felt his hand on my shoulder while watching his reflection place it there. “It’s who we really are,” his reflection said. “We may not like what we see, but the mirrors don’t lie. It’s who we are. And we have to accept that.”

I dropped my hand away from the mirrored ice.

“Can you believe this place?” Chad howled, a skeletal grin etched across his face. He scanned his own reflection in every wall, every mirror. “It’s like something out of a goddamn fairy tale. It’s amazing!”

Before me, my reflection briefly blurred. I turned and tugged on the rope at my hip. I was still attached to Chad; he felt the tug and paused, staring down at the line, then in my direction. He looked at

me with wide eyes and a creased brow.

“Keep your voice down,” I warned him.

“I’m just saying,” he went on, ignoring me. “This place is fucking outstanding!”

I wound the rope around my hand, pulling him a few inches in my direction. When I spoke, it was no louder than a whisper. “I said keep your voice down. In case you haven’t noticed, the fucking walls are vibrating with every sound that comes out of your big mouth.”

“The spires in the ceiling, too,” Petras added, looking up. His voice was hardly louder than my own.

Unbuckling Chad’s line from my karabiners, I tossed it at his feet and said, “Admire the place in silence.”

He called me a dickhead, then wound his rope and slid it to his shoulder. “Place is as solid as a Diebold safe.” He tapped one of the glasslike walls.

“It’s not a safe. It’s a tank,” Hollinger said quietly, walking around the circumference of the room. “I used to keep piranha in a ten-gallon tank when I was a kid. Real piranha. Used to feed ‘em goldfish once a day, and those buggers would tear them apart in seconds. Less than a minute after I’d drop the goldfish into the tank, there’d be nothing but a jagged little backbone at the bottom of the tank.” He paused to examine one of the walls up close, grazing the icy surface with his fingers. A plume of vapor blossomed from his chapped lips. “That’s what we’re in right now. A tank. A fish tank.”

“But are we the piranha or the goldfish?” Petras asked, his question holding more weight than perhaps he intended.

“Well,” Chad said, unsnapping his helmet and tossing it on the ground, “it’s a badass place, but it’s also a dead end.” He ran two fingers along the reflective surface of one of the glass walls. “We must have missed something.”

“No.” Petras pointed across the antechamber to the farthest panel of ice. “Look above it.”

The ice wall itself was maybe twenty feet high, the snow-encrusted ceiling coming down low to meet it, enormous icicles hanging over the upper part of the ice wall like fangs. However, it was possible to make out an opening between the ice walls and the ceiling of the cave, wider and more obvious in some places, crisscrossed by a network of interlocking spires of ice. The place Petras had pointed out appeared to be the widest opening along the shelf beyond which a natural ice cave recessed into the wall.

“I see it,” I said.

“It’s the only doorway out of this room,” Petras said. “That’s got to be it.”

“It goes up,” Hollinger said.

I turned to Andrew, but he was no longer standing behind me. He’d migrated to the center of the room and sat cross-legged in the snow directly beneath the skylight of ice. His eyes closed, his hands on his knees, he meditated. His entire body seemed to glow in the magnified light.

“I feel like Neil fucking Armstrong.” Chad dropped to his knees and rifled through his backpack. “We should have brought a goddamn American flag.”

“There’s this,” Hollinger said, pulling his Australian flag from his backpack like a magician pulling scarves from his sleeve. “Same colors.”

Chad stood, a pickax in his hand, and grimaced at Hollinger. “That’s blasphemy. Put the goddamn thing away.”

A meager grin broke out across Michael Hollinger’s bearded face. It was the first semblance of a smile he’d sported in days. “‘Australians all let us rejoice,’“ he sang in a low voice, “‘for we are young and free! We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea!’“

Chad groaned and said, “The hell is ‘girt’?”

As he sang, Hollinger flapped the flag like a matador would flap his cape and set it down unfurled on the ground. He saluted it and continued singing, while Petras and I chuckled.

Then Petras joined Hollinger, both of them grinning like fiends, and I sidled up between them, saluting. Not knowing the words to the Australian national anthem, Petras and I hummed quietly along to Hollinger’s off-key, low-pitched singing.

“Yeah, sure, you guys play your games while I make history.” Chad hefted the pickax and dragged it across the snow to the ice wall, staring up at the ledge and the partially hidden ice cave above it. “Guess we’ll see how easy these walls are to climb,” he said, raising the pickax over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. You fools keep singing.”

He swung the pickax into the mirrored wall of ice. The sound was like a gunshot going off in close quarters, reverberating throughout the antechamber.

From his spot on the ground, Andrew opened his eyes.

A sound like splitting wood came from above.

The three of us stopped singing and gaped upward in time to see a jagged boulder of packed snow and ice roughly the size of a love seat drop from the ceiling. It whistled like a missile as it fell.

Chad screamed, bringing his hands up, not quick enough to jump out of its path. It pounded him to the ground in a spray of ice particles, the sound like two automobiles colliding on the highway. The entire antechamber vibrated—the vibrations raced up my legs and rattled my lungs—and Chad bucked once beneath the weight of the boulder. A gout of blood erupted from his mouth and instantly sprayed the snow around him. His head slammed against the ground as the boulder, driven vertical into the ground, leaned back with a deafening creak and slammed against the ice wall, coming to rest at an angle.