The Wall (23 page)

The storm passed.
The world lay still. Hugh opened his eyes. Their raft had beached.

All night he had held Cuba. Now she was holding him. Hoar frost—their collective breath—coated the interior.

He tried not to think about Lewis. They needed one of them functional. Unbroken. He was it.

He tried to get free without waking her, but she gave a start. “Wait a little,” she murmured. “It’s so cold. The sun will come.” Sensible enough, if only she possessed her senses. It was him in command now. He had to take the bull by the horns.

“What sun?” he said. Between the fire and the storm, how many days had slipped away in gloom? They had lost their way back to the surface.

She let go of him. No pleading or clutching. No seduction. She had returned to herself, it seemed, the mortal girl, not the Weird Sister.

He surrendered. It was too soon to be cold, and they had nowhere to go. He felt groggy with her warmth and smell. “A few minutes more,” he said. She pressed against his back.

“You must be hungry,” he said. His stomach growled. Time to tighten their belts.

“We were going to celebrate with shrimp and Beaujolais,” she spoke in his ear.

It was climber chat, freewheeling through the rewards for your self-inflicted punishments. She was mending fast. It gave him hope.

“Lewis and I were going for T-bones and Coronas,” Hugh said.

“That was his name?”

His chest tightened. “He was my best friend.” The last of them.

She put death away from them. “We were planning expeditions,” she said. “Have you ever seen pictures of Nanda Devi?”

“I climbed it once.”

“For real?” she said.

“She’s a beauty. You should go.”

She got quiet. Counting her dead, he figured.

“Where else do you think about?” he asked.

“Places. The planet. Far away. The mountains are just an excuse.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to the headwaters of the Yangtze,” Hugh said. More climbers’ games, inflicting grand ambitions on one another. “Start in Shanghai and go by boat, and then by car, and then by foot. You’d end up with yaks.”

“Baffin Island,” she nominated, “walls twice the size of El Cap.”

“The Transantarctic Mountains,” he said. “Seashells at nineteen thousand feet. Meteorites from Mars.”

They traded dreams. He liked her voice, husky and tinged with her mother’s Spanish. Soon enough they returned to where they were.

“It was only another four pitches,” she said. “Cass climbed the roof and yelled down to us. She could see the summit. It was ours.”

There was much he wanted to ask about the fall, but he didn’t go there. They might be stranded here for another day or two, and she was too volatile. And the camp was so fragile.

It had been like this during his final months with the stranger who had once been Annie. Too much stimulation, the wrong music, even a wrong word, and their peace would shatter. He’d lived becalmed until it seemed he’d lose his own mind.

Cuba wanted to talk about her disaster, though. While he lay staring at crystals of white frost on the tent wall, she gave a blow-by-blow account of the fall and her exile among the dead and disembodied.

“At first, I thought it was Cass coming up to me from the woods.” Her ghost again, thought Hugh. “I mean, she landed right below us, a half mile down, right?”

“Probably.” He didn’t tell her that he’d found her.

“It would make sense that she was the one. That she’d want to finish business. Do I sound whacked out or what?”

They were in psychological overload, himself included. Yes. “No.”

He let her talk. Except for the events of the fall, there was little chronology to her tale. The forest fire blended into her long isolation and the birds and cloud formations she had found magical. She matter-of-factly told of hauling Andie from the depths.

“You thought she was still alive?”

“God, no. After all those days, I knew.”

Then why?
“You did the right thing,” he told her, even though in Cuba’s place he would have left the body hanging as far from view as possible. Indeed, he would have cut the rope to get rid of the reminder.

“It wasn’t that,” she said. “It wasn’t for Andie.”

“Were you lonely?” He asked it without accusation, the question of her sanity.

“I wish,” she said. “By then I just wanted to be left alone.”

“But you brought her up.”

“She was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Cuba said. “So I pulled up what was left. Like bait, you know. She said it would bring you in.”

They lay there. Hugh didn’t move a muscle, barely breathing.
Bait?

Her fairy tale about a meandering companion spirit was one thing. This whispering ghoul was something else, like some kind of vertical plague. Cuba was sick with it, her eye for an eye. She was so certain, the way she said it. And the thing was, they’d taken the bait. Augustine had come, with Hugh in tow.

“Why do you hate him so much?” Hugh asked.

“Who?”

“Augustine.”

“Hate him?” All innocence.

“Come on.”

“There’s only so long you can lick your wounds,” she said. “And it was probably for the best.”

Her
wounds, she meant. Hugh frowned. “How do you mean?”

“He’s intense. I’m more intense. We were never going to last forever. I couldn’t see it at the time. But once he dumped me, things got clear.”

Hugh lay there, trying to connect the dots. The stars of frost. “You and Augustine were involved?”

“That sounds so antique.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We were hot. You wouldn’t believe, hot as fire. But then Andie came wandering in, this sweet lost thing, always lost, and that was the end of us.”

It made him dizzy. “He left you for her?”

“Don’t worry, Hugh. I got over it a long time ago. Because we would have burned each other to a crisp. I finally decided Andie had saved us, him and me both. But then her brother died and she was lost again.”

“So you took her in.”

“The Valley’s small, and mostly guys. Us girls stick together.”

Hugh stared straight ahead. He emptied the neat boxes in his mind, each article of this climb, from his discovery of Cass to the slaughter of Lewis. No more boxes. He shoveled the events into a jumble and tried to arrange them in some order. Somewhere lay the thread out of this maze.

Cuba patted his shoulder. She whispered in his ear. “It’s almost over.”

The sun stayed hidden. The tent wall did not light up. The frost did not scale away. He could have lain there all day, captivated by her warmth and his futile puzzling.

“I should check on things,” Hugh finally said. He eased from the sleeping bag and neatly tucked it around her. Her green eyes followed him, like Diesel watching Annie.

“Hugh Glass,” she said, as if naming him anew.

The icy parka stood in one corner like a giant insect shell. He beat the verglas from its sides and drew it on, zipping it to the throat and pulling up the hood. He shivered until his body heated the fiberfill and the parka became part of his armor once again.

The laces holding the sidewall had frozen tight. His pocketknife could have picked them apart easily, but he’d dropped it while freeing Cuba last night. His fingernails were ground to the quick. He resorted to gnawing the cord, like an animal. One knot opened, and that was enough to give him a peephole. He peered through.

A crystal world waited outside. The stone, the ropes, their metal protection, everything was glazed with ice. The Eye—probably the entire valley—was socked in by clouds. The misty light was cold and blue. Nothing moved out there. After last night’s tempest, the silence made Hugh nervous.

There are moments in the mountains and the desert when things quietly, invisibly reach a state of critical mass. Snow layers a slope just so, waiting for a noise or a footstep to unleash the avalanche. Sand builds at the crest of a dune until that instant it exceeds the angle of repose, and crumples, and the whole dune shifts forward, burying your footsteps and whatever else lies before it. Accidents don’t happen, he’d learned. Nature isn’t unnatural. Mechanisms get triggered, that’s all. Understand the cause and you could master, or at least try to escape, the effects.

Hugh struggled to decipher the stillness. He could feel something primed and waiting out there. But what? They’d traded smoke for mist, fire for ice. The storm had layered their hiding place in glass. The saturated blue light told him that the clouds weren’t burning off today. Everything was at peace. But it was the peace of the bell jar, artificial and enclosed. And watched. He could feel it. Something.

“What do you see?” Cuba asked.

“The Ice Age. We’re locked down for the day.”

“Come back with me.”

“Not yet.” They were in greater danger than ever. He couldn’t put a name to it, whatever inhabited the void.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere, Cuba. I’m just looking.”

He forced the hole wider and scooted his upper body from the cocoon. Half in, half out, holding on to loose straps, he surveyed their station. The pit plunged into infinite blue.

Remarkably, the storm had not swept Augustine away. He still hung beside Andie, fused in a crystal spiderweb. Her shroud of a sleeping bag had loosened, or Augustine had reached inside. Or the ghost of her had tried to worm loose. Her golden white hair was plastered to the stone in a long glassy stream. The red hammocks hung in tatters.

“Augustine?”

Augustine’s eyes opened. He stared up at Hugh from the hollow of his helmet. His face was mottled blue. His hands, clothed in socks, had a death grip on the ropes.

Cuba’s voice came from inside the tent. “She let him live?”

Augustine’s eyes moved, nothing else. He blinked. For the moment, neither man spoke to the other.

Hugh turned his attention to the mist. Thirty feet out, past the motionless prayer flags, at the brink of the ceiling hung with icicles, Lewis dangled in midair, welded to the litter.

The ropes slowly spun him. Bent backward, he twisted to face Hugh upside down. His mouth hung open. It was filled with loose snow. Flakes spilled from his lips, his poet lips, and fluttered into the depths.

“Christ, Lewis,” Hugh whispered. The great heart, all for one, one for all. For nothing.

The wind had ransacked him. Lewis was naked from the waist up. His flesh was dark red, his veins bright blue. They had left him in place. With his big weight-room muscles, he looked like a side of beef.

Hugh glanced down to where Augustine was turning to stone and ice, dissolving into mist. It was like a myth where humans petrified or turned into trees or animals. El Cap was consuming them.

“We can’t stay here,” Hugh said.

No one moved or answered. The very air was paralyzed. He felt suffocated.

“They’ve written us off, postponed us, whatever.” He didn’t blame them.
Preserve thyself.
“They’ll fetch us once it clears. By then, we’ll all be dead. That’s where this is heading.”

Cuba whispered from the sleeping bag. “Make me warm, Hugh. It’s too cold to be alone.”

“We have to leave,” Hugh declared. The mist flattened his words. “Do you hear me?”

After a minute, Augustine stirred. He wrenched his helmet and Tarzan hair from the wall. Ice fractured around his shoulders. His jaw moved. It broke his walrus tusks of snot and rime. A puff of frost came out, but no words. He tried again. “How?”

Hugh didn’t know yet. He was trying to strike a spark among them, little more. No good would come of their waiting and listening to their bones knock and their stomachs growl. But were any of them capable? Were any of them really sane? He was just as crazy as the other two now. But did that matter, so long as they shared the same dementia?

Inside the tent, Cuba had begun droning
om mane padme hum
—the Buddhist chant every mountaineer carries home from the High Himal—over and over. But the prayer flags were frozen. The wind horses stood still. Time had stopped.

Hugh considered lowering off, but that could take days. And Cuba had told him that they’d spied the summit above. They were close.

If only they could lift this lid of stone from their heads. The roof was a dead end. What had protected them last night was killing them now. It blunted their imagination. It killed their hope.

The answer came to Hugh slowly. Their salvation hung in plain sight.

“Lewis,” he said.

Augustine’s helmet turned to the distant figure. He settled back against the stone. “No use.” His teeth chattered. “Too far. All wrong.”

Augustine was thinking of a throw line, Hugh knew. And by that measure, he was right. Even if they could throw a line and somehow snag the litter or lasso Lewis’s body, they would still have to tow it close enough to grab. But the arc would never work. Lewis was parallel to their camp, and the roof was thirty feet deep, meaning never the twain shall meet.