by John Darnton
10
Matt was crossing a small plateau of scree scattered about like chunks of plaster when he noticed the first snowflake. It struck him that it was unusually large as it gently rode the air currents to the ground. It hit a rock at his feet and clung there like a tuft of cotton candy. Then he saw another.
He tried not to succumb to fear, but he had to push it consciously away into a corner of his mind. Maybe the snowflakes were just a random occurrence. It was unlikely, he had to admit, but perhaps it would be a brief, passing flurry; snow dusting must happen often at this altitude. But his common sense and the low leaden sky above told him otherwise.
At first after crossing the bridge they had felt a strange lightheaded exhilaration. They were both giddy and frightened and trod warily, as if they had crossed onto an alien planet, staying close together and darting looks around. Who knew what could be lurking behind those boulders? But after an hour passed and then another in the drab and lifeless landscape, eventually the nervousness gave way to a monotonous fatigue.
“Kellicut never told us about this part, did he?” said Susan, when they stopped to rest. “Of course I wouldn’t know,” she went on, “since I haven’t had the opportunity to read his letter.” She looked at Van playfully.
Then Van did a strange thing: He smiled. “Hey, hold on,” he said, almost pleasantly. “I’ve already apologized for that.”
Soon enough the good mood was gone. They stopped for lunch but spent a miserable time because of the cold. Rudy’s fingers were so chilled he could barely light the wood. The fire was pathetically small, and they huddled together to conserve warmth. Even the beef broth was only lukewarm.
The wind, picking up, whipped through a nearby gorge and whistled eerily, like a pipe organ. They decided to carry on; at least movement would temper the cold somewhat.
More flakes fell. Odd, Matt thought; if you looked straight up they seemed to be concentrating on you. How’s that for being egocentric? he mused. They came down individually, like parachutists. He looked into the sky for the hundredth time that day; it was the same as before, a low-hanging gray-whiteness that spread in all directions like a gigantic frozen steam bath.
His mind raced through scenarios. The shovel they had left behind—clearly a mistake. Same for the tents, which were too heavy. So much for shelter. He still had the knife, but it wasn’t much good for digging. Van had the gun—no help there. Maybe the sleeping bags could be zipped together, at least two of them and maybe more, to serve as shelter. But they would need to keep them separate for warmth, and in any case the corners wouldn’t hold in place if the wind kept up.
Matt stopped and waited for the others to catch up. They were moving sluggishly, and it took some time for them to gather. “What do you think?” he asked, when they were all together. He found he was making his voice loud, as if the wind were already roaring.
“Going to be a bad one,” said Van. “I don’t like the look of it. We’re fucked.”
“Look at that sky,” said Rudy. “Not a single hole anywhere.”
Only Susan understood that Matt was asking what they should do. “I can’t think of anything else except what we’re doing,” she said. “We just have to keep going. There’s got to be some refuge someplace.”
“Trouble is,” Matt answered, “we’re on a kind of plateau. We haven’t passed anything for hours, not even a hole.”
Van said, “Well, we sure as shit can’t stop here. Too damn exposed. Nothing to do but go on.”
Matt took a quick consensus. “Everyone agree?” They all nodded. “Then we’ve got to stick together. We also have to make time. That means you, Van. You’ve got to keep up somehow.”
Van started to speak, then looked away.
This time, when they set out, the parachutists had multiplied; a whole swirling airborne invasion was under way. As high and far as Matt could see, flakes were diving down in force. They took up the whole sky. A sense of dread rose from his stomach.
The snow settled first in the recesses of the rock, in furrows and cavities, and began forming little cornices on the undersides of ledges.
The wind was getting stronger too, sometimes driving the snow in circular frenzies that roiled around boulders and cliffs. Matt pulled his hood tighter. He reached into his pocket and put on a pair of goggles, then turned to look at Susan, some twenty feet behind. She was walking with the delicate, constrained motions of someone battling off pain. Around her was a swirling black and white moonscape. The sight touched him on a level he had not known for years. He waved, turned, and walked on, his steps muffled by the snow.
Early on in his study of paleontology, Matt had been smitten. On his first trip he loved all of it, but especially the beginning, the digging, the going down layer by layer through all the periods. What were the glacial episodes? He could hear the drone of schooldays returning: Würm, Riss, Mindel, Günz. The pluvials? Gamblian, Kanjeran, Kamasian, Kageran. Digging down through the eons until they were laid bare on the surface of a vertical wall. He had felt like a deep-sea diver descending through the levels so that the earth might yield up her sunken treasure. Was it the going down? Or was it the thrill of the find, a scattering of bones, the brown fragment of a skull? Even the word for it was right, he thought—not “excavation” but “dig.” Primitive and basic. He had lost himself in the details, searching with a magnifying glass on his hands and knees like some Sherlock of the desert. He loved lying on his belly on a board and twisting a scalpel to scrape a bit of entombed dirt or using a toothbrush to clean tiny knucklebones. But most of all he had loved the beginning—the first swing of the ax, the digging down. An indescribable, comforting, frightening feeling, like a return to a sanctified place of long-ago childhood.
Now, against the howling of the wind, he barely heard the others call to him. It sounded like cries through sheets of glass. The three were almost invisible in the total whiteness. As he turned and made his way back, he saw that his tracks were already almost covered.
“It’s too thick. We can’t see each other,” said Rudy.
“We’re getting separated,” said Susan. “Van was going in the wrong direction and we had to search for him.”
“Okay. Get your ropes and we’ll tie ourselves together.”
The snowflakes had grown into small hard pellets, which hit their cheeks like biting insects. The noise alone was overwhelming, and it took forever to get the ropes attached.
Van spoke for the first time.
“Matt”—Matt thought his name sounded unreal in the middle of all this whiteness—“this blizzard isn’t going to quit. We’re fucked. I mean it. We’re really fucked.” His voice had a trace of panic.
Susan cut in. “Our only hope is to find someplace fast. We can’t keep going much longer.”
“I think the plateau ends up ahead,” Matt said. “I can’t be sure, but I thought I saw the shape of something. Could be a rock face.”
“We’d better hurry.”
“We’ve got to get there. It’s our only hope.”
“I’m going to sing,” said Rudy.
As Matt struggled on, he heard Rudy’s voice behind him:
You can’t always get what you want.
You can’t always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes
You just might find,
You get what you need.
A few minutes later, Matt came upon a craggy rock rising up out of nowhere. It stood out in the blizzard, a dark and ghostly promontory; he gave the rope a tug to hurry the others and lurched toward it.
He dove at the base, shoveling out snow in heaping armfuls. Soon they were at his side, helping him. The snow was so light that it was like heaving baskets of air.
They hit rock and brushed it. A crack appeared. They followed it, digging out more snow as it widened and deepened. Now it was hard work; Malt was sweating and the snow was suddenly dense and heavy. The crevice widened to a foot and a half across. They pushed away more sno
w, and then the crack ended.
No one spoke.
Matt tried to lower himself into the crevice, but he struck the bottom after only two feet. He tried dislodging a boulder, which rocked and fell against his arm, bruising it. He rolled up his sleeve and stared; a few drops of blood stood out against the snow, bright red dots in a whirl of white.
Susan held a fistful of snow against the wound and the bleeding stopped. Matt felt no pain. “Nothing to do but go on,” she said.
They sat and rested a bit in the little crater they had created, but they began falling asleep. Alarmed, they stood up and went on. The snow was above their knees here, so the going was ponderous, and they staggered more than they walked.
Matt felt a potent thirst deep in the back of his throat but he didn’t want to stop to hunt for his canteen, hanging somewhere in the frozen white armor that encased his body. Even on his feet he was beginning to feel sleepy.
* * *
Matt didn’t realize that he had stopped. So had the others. Susan and Rudy were sitting in the snow up to their waists and Van was crawling about, swaying gently on his hands and knees. They didn’t feel cold anymore, not really, just disconnected, vague, and pleasantly sleepy. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, it came to Matt that they were going to die. But even that certainty seemed muffled, outside him, softened by the whiteness all around. It was not alarming.
But he did feel thirst. He felt for his canteen and raised it to his lips. A swig of water squeezed past a block of ice, and he shuddered, then straightened and began to feel his limbs again. He staggered over to Susan, who was half reclining, dazed. Her pupils were large and she had the trace of a smile on her lips. Van was nodding, almost asleep.
Matt unfastened their ropes and tied them together to make one long rope. One end he wound through their three belts. The other he tied to his own belt. “Stay here,” he yelled needlessly, and struck out on his own, straight ahead. Behind him he could hear Rudy’s voice, high-pitched and a bit off key.
The voice trailed off, and he couldn’t tell whether Rudy had stopped or the wind had obliterated it.
Now the drifts were up to his waist in places. Twice he stumbled, and when he pitched forward, he dove into a cocoon so white and warm and pure he was tempted to rest for a bit, but he got up and went on. The top of his vision was lost to darkness, cut off somehow, like a rip across a photograph.
Abruptly the wind shifted direction so he could see for a moment. Just ahead in the snow was a dark form that looked like Susan, except that as he got closer he could see she wasn’t wearing her windbreaker; in fact she was dressed in a summer dress as she had been when he first saw her many years ago. How could she survive up here like that? And her hair was full and flowing in the breeze, just as in those corny old movies. She was beckoning him onward, and when he got there he reached out and touched her and began to draw her to him, except that she didn’t yield.
Matt found he was leaning against a wall of rock. The gusts behind him helped to push him along, and he followed the wall until finally he sensed darkness above him, and the wind died down suddenly. Consciousness returned. He realized he was inside the mouth of a cave.
He unfastened the rope but kept it looped through his belt and wound it around a rock and tied it. Then he turned around and followed the rope out of the cave and into the blizzard, pulling it up through the snow like a fishing line until he reached the others.
The light reappeared at the end of a long tunnel. Susan saw it coming closer and closer, almost like a train, except that it was a different kind of light, and she was the one who was moving. She got closer and closer, and just as she burst into the blinding daylight she heard voices around her. “Come on, come on! Get up!” Matt was yelling. He lifted her to her feet and half walked, half carried her to the opening. He was surprised that it seemed so close. Then he went back for Rudy and finally for Van, and they all collapsed deep inside the cave.
When Susan awoke she had no inkling of how long she had been asleep. She felt an agreeable sensation of warmth and sustenance, and when she opened her eyes she saw a fire. Rudy was puttering around it, fixing a meal. The flames flickered off rock walls, throwing shadows. He smiled, brought her a cup of coffee, and stroked her hair.
Next to her, Matt began to stir. “Ah, the hero awakes,” Rudy said. Matt looked uncomprehending for a second, blinking. It was a moment before he could speak. “You’re the hero. It was your singing that drove me away.”
“That was my plan.”
Susan leaned over, put her hand behind Matt’s neck, and smiled down at him. “I don’t know how you did it but you did,” she said.
He thought of his vision of her hair in the breeze; then he looked over at Van.
“He’s fine,” said Rudy. “He’s already been up. You’re the only one sleeping late. Now soup’s on.”
Matt rose and walked to the mouth of the cave. The edges were lined with snow but the blizzard had stopped. Outside the white-rimmed portal, he saw a pristine landscape shimmering white, extending as far as he could see. It was so peaceful and beautiful that it was hard to imagine it had almost been their grave.
The four of them ate heartily—strips of beef with beans and hot coffee. Afterward Van’s color revived, and he said he felt much better. He kept patting his left leg. “I thought for sure it was frostbitten,” he said.
They were sitting quietly around the fire when Rudy said, “Don’t you wonder where I got the wood?” They looked up. “Right here,” he replied to his own question, pointing to a corner of the cave.
“Strange,” said Matt. “And the smoke goes right up. It must be a natural chimney.”
“That’s not all,” said Rudy. “You ready for this? This fire is not the first one here. When I made it I found ashes.”
Matt went to his backpack and took out a flashlight. Van did the same, and they checked the sides of the cave, careful to avoid stalactites and stalagmites.
Something caught Matt’s eye and he moved closer. “Holy shit.”
Van ran over and shone the beam of his light next to Matt’s.
In the center of the beams were crude paintings, smears in ocher, brown, and red. At first it was hard to make them out, but then they took on shape: some seemed to be depictions of humans, others of animals; some of hunts, others of battles.
“My God,” said Van finally. “These paintings ... they’re prehistoric. Just like the caves of Lascaux.”
“Look,” said Matt. “Those figures there. They’re hunting. See that one? He’s holding a club.” He held the torch closer. “Do you see what I see? Look at the forehead.” The figure had a massive ridge along the brow. So did all the others.
Van touched the paint, then looked at his finger. It was streaked in red. “It’s fresh,” he said softly.
Just at that moment they heard a barely suppressed scream behind them, the kind of sound that escapes involuntarily when something unimaginable is happening.
Susan and Rudy were huddled at the mouth of the cave. They looked outside, and there in the snow they saw dark forms, humanoid but not human, rising up Out of the whiteness. They were coming toward the cave.
Eagleton shifted his wheelchair over to the window and with a dainty forefinger lifted the blind. It was dusk, always an unsettling time in the suburbs of Washington. Streetlamps were going on with a jolt, the lights in the campus buildings were darkening quickly, and cars pulled out of the parking lot, carrying the tired breadwinners home. These employees are not ones to linger at their desks, he thought. They all had families to go to. He had none.
In fact, he had no one. This was the thought he had been trying to avoid. He knew it was stalking him; it usually did at this time of day. As a young man, still enthusiastic about fighting the Cold War as if it were some gigantic football game, he assumed that everyone was as engaged as he was. They had seemed to be, but somewhere along the line they accumulated wives, children, vacation houses, station wagons, and golden
retrievers to lick their hands when they came home. He had not, and he felt duped. No one had told him the rules, that there was more going on than the football game right in front of his eyes that so engrossed him.
How odd that he should have given his whole life over to the Company. He had been legendary, whipping the horses for twenty-five years as assistant deputy director in charge of counterintelligence. But the end of the Cold War had intervened, he had made too many enemies, his career was spent. What did this new crew know about the Berlin airlift, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam? What did they care about honor? So they had pushed him into this backwater outfit, this odd business of investigating paranormal phenomena. But he would have the last laugh. He had stumbled on to something so big it would knock their teeth out. It would make bugging the Kremlin look like child’s play.
He took another drag. Of course a normal life wouldn’t have been easy. There was his infirmity; he still dreaded meeting new people, especially women. He felt humiliated whenever he encountered a stairway at the opera or a curbstone that was too high. Half a lifetime of it, and he had never adjusted. He was not like this new generation, the activists who demanded elevators, special ramps, and equal treatment. They had such confidence. He both hated them and envied them.
Sex was difficult, given his hang-ups. He was not totally inexperienced. He had paid prostitutes, but only when his desperation outweighed his shame. With them he felt a rush of insecurities: the knowledge that they felt nothing for him, that awkward moment heaving himself out of his chair and onto the bed, the sense that he was being pitied, never feared—all of these made an erection problematic. And of course that became a fear in itself, overriding other worries and casting a pall of horror over everything.
Then came Sarah. At first she had appeared like an angel of mercy. She had been his secretary; the day she walked in, her perfume filled his office and he forgot his dread of microbes. The progression of intimacy had seemed so natural. That late-summer afternoon she walked over, put her hand in the crook of his elbow, and then leaned down to kiss him gently on the cheek still burned in his being, still had the capacity to make his pulse quicken. The nights at her apartment, the leering grin of his chauffeur as he dropped him off. Why, she had even cooked meals for him! Then came the doubts, those satanic whispers whistling through his brain, which came, she said, from his own self-loathing. Whatever, the doubts grew, then turned into certainties. She did not care for him after all; it had all been an ugly charade, a career move. He had put a junior officer on her tail to spy on her. He had not turned up much, really—a careless phrase on a wiretap, a letter of questionable interpretation—but it was enough for Eagleton. Pride had always been his downfall.
