Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

A deep, angry wind picked up in the north and barreled through the valley. On either side I was enclosed in tar-colored rocks, glossy with a coating of ice. My fever had returned full force, my forehead steaming and bursting with sweat. I stopped and bit down on my gloves, yanking them off with my teeth. Holding my hands to my eyes, I had twenty fingers. My vision would not clear up. I flexed my fingers and could hear the tendons creaking like an old rocking chair, the fingers themselves like hollowed tubing knotted at the joints and knuckles.

Suddenly a low, motorized growl sounded in the distance. I looked around, but, being at the bottom of a valley, I could see nothing except the rising black walls around me. Yet the sound grew closer, closer …

I jerked my head to the right just in time to see an old motorcar leap over one side of the embankment in a cloud of snow. Its tires spinning, its tailpipe flagging a contrail of exhaust, it gleamed in the sun like a chrome missile.

Breathlessly I watched it careen over the embankment and descend in an arc toward the floor of the ravine. It hadn’t been going fast enough to make it to the other side. Nose-first, it slammed into the snow in an expulsion of white powder and crystalline confetti, folding up on itself like an accordion. For a second, it balanced on its front grille, standing perfectly vertical; then the rear end tipped toward the ground.

With a shatter of glass, the vehicle exploded in a bright orange ball of flame. It billowed into the sky, roiling smoke atop a stalk of flame, until it dissipated into streamers of smoke. As the vehicle burned, the snow around it melted until the black rock was exposed.

I dropped my pack and was about to sprint toward the wreckage when it vanished before my eyes.

Sobbing, I collapsed to the ground and pulled my knees up to my chest.

3

SLEET FELL AS THE DAY COOLED TO EVENING AND

the warm pastels of the setting sun crouched behind the distant mountains. Shadows elongated and spilled across the valley. I’d spent the day winding through the valley, keeping to the base of the mountain. I walked now to the edge of the cliff and peered over the side. A great distance below was an icefall—perhaps the continuation of the one we’d crossed earlier in the trip, the one that had swallowed Curtis Booker. Seracs split and sluiced through the river of ice to the bottom of the valley. The path they carved instantly altered the geography of the fall.

There was no safe way to cross the icefall, but if I continuedwinding around the base of the mountain, I would eventually reach the valley floor. Then—

“Hello, Tim.”

Andrew stood behind me, backlit by the sunset. Scarecrow , I immediately thought. He appeared detached, flimsy, emaciated, skeletal. His clothes hung from him like drapes, his shirt unbuttoned to midchest, exposing the pink, sun-ruined lines of his abdomen. The wind blew his hair across his face, obscuring his eyes … but I could make out a partial smirk at the corner of his mouth.

He carried the ax. As he unshouldered his pack, he tossed the ax down at his feet. His too-big clothes flapped in the wind.

“Stay there,” I told him, dropping my own pack but grappling with the pickax from the pack’s restraint. “Don’t move.”

Andrew raised his hands, palms up. “We need to share a few words …”

I pulled the pickax from the restraint and hefted it like a baseball bat over one shoulder. “You’re sick, Trumbauer. You’ve lost your goddamn mind.”

“What I’ve lost, I’ve lost long ago. Let’s talk.” He took a step in my direction.

I swung the pickax to show I meant business. “I said to stay the fuck where you are. You take another step, and I’ll come at you swinging.”

The rush of sleet increased, pelting my head, my shoulders, my back.

Andrew shivered, his clothes soaked and beginning to freeze in the unforgiving night wind. He ran his hands through his hair. For the first time, I saw his eyes—soulless, remote, vacant. The eye of a needle held more emotion.

“I’m not the monster, Tim.”

“Stop playing the game. You brought us all here to kill us.”

“I’m just here to make things right,” he said. “I’ve very nearly succeeded.”

“Step away from your pack.”

Andrew cocked his head at me. “What?”

“I’m taking your pack,” I told him. “I’m taking your food.”

Andrew laughed … or appeared to laugh: he brought his head back on his neck, exposing his enormous Adam’s apple, and opened his mouth wide, but no sound came out. When he leveled his gaze on me, there was a gleam of hatred in his eyes.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said and took three giant strides away from his pack. Away from his ax, too. “It’s too late.”

With my eyes locked on him, I traversed the sleet-slick ridge until I reached his backpack. Dropping to one knee, holding the pickax out in front of me, I unzipped his pack with one hand. Packets of freeze-dried food spilled out in a tidal wave. A can of mushrooms rolled out and dropped on my boot.

“They each had their reason,” Andrew said. He had to shout now above the sleet. Lightning lit the horizon, and I could see the countless purple peaks at his back. “Hell, I flat-out told you about Shotsky!” This time he did laugh—a stuttering, mechanical sound. “Everyone’s committed an injustice, and everyone must pay for their mistakes.” He held his arms out above his head. “Christ, look around! Look where we are! You think a place like this—a sacred, spiritual land as this—exists without divinity? There’s divinity all around us. It courses through me, it courses through you, and it pumps life into every living, breathing thing on this miraculous planet.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m the corrector of things,” he practically hissed. “I’m the man who fixes your mistakes. Goddamn it, you should be grateful! Because out of everyone on this trip, your mistake was the biggest .“

My grip tightened on the handle of the pickax. I rose off my knee, wiping the icy water from my eyes. A second flash of lightning illuminated the sky, this one closer than the first.

“I fucking loved her, you son of a bitch. But she didn’t love me.

And that was okay. It was okay because she loved you , and you made her happy. Well, for a little while at least …”

“Shut your goddamn mouth,” I growled, spewing water from my lips. My hands were numb, my heart strumming furiously in my chest. I could taste acidic bile at the back of my throat.

“You weren’t man enough for her. You weren’t the man she needed you to be. So she left. And because she left, she died. And that’s your fault. I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone and she’s dead and you killed her.”

The head of the pickax, suddenly too heavy for me to hold, swung like a pendulum down into the snow.

“Thing is,” Andrew said, “you almost did the honorable thing. Couple years ago, back in that cave, you went there with the intention of never coming out, didn’t you? Would have been a noble way to go. But in typical Timothy Overleigh fashion, you chickened out, lost your nerve, and climbed out—the first in a series of events that delivered you from the clutches of death and back to the land of the living.”

I tried to lift the pickax but couldn’t. I watched Andrew take a step toward me, then another, but I was only partially seeing him; I was seeing the motorcar drift off the road and launch over the cliff. I saw it explode at the bottom of a stone quarry. I saw Hannah’s palms slamming against the window while the smoke suffocated her and the flames blackened her skin and peeled it from her body …