by Jeff Long
Hugh stretched to touch her wrist. It was cold. Everything was cold in here. He couldn’t feel a pulse. But if she was in a coma, her metabolism would have slowed to a near flat line. He climbed higher, and brushed the hair away from her face.
He jerked his hand back.
Her neck was stretched the length of a sausage. Those Jim Crow photos of lynched men…it was like that. Dark welts on her throat showed where she’d tangled in the rope on her plunge.
Hugh stared at the pair of women. The mystery deepened. Andie couldn’t possibly have towed herself up from the depths. And there was no chance in the world that her eyes had opened when Augustine descended and called her name. Beyond a doubt, she had died—instantly—when the line snapped taut. But then how was she here? The strangeness of it almost offended him.
“Do you have her?”
Augustine’s voice bounced off the stone ceiling. Hugh glanced between his feet at the climber charging up through the smoke. His face was so open, so full of expectation, that Hugh groaned.
He did not feel sorrow. These were all strangers to him. And death was not always tragic. When Annie had disappeared in the Empty Quarter, it was as if the Holy Spirit had reached down and taken her away, putting an end to her humiliation and confusion and suffering. That’s how Hugh had come to view it, as a divine act.
Hugh opened his hand. He started to say, Slow down. Steel yourself. But something stopped him from softening the bad news. Augustine needed to smash against the reality. Hugh’s pause was not mean-spirited, or voyeuristic. He didn’t crave the grief about to come. At the same time, he didn’t intervene. This was a sort of just desserts. Because driven by Augustine’s nobility, and his guilt and raw imagination, Hugh had almost destroyed himself reaching this dead end in the sky.
Augustine wouldn’t have stopped anyway. The rope jerked and shivered with his jumar thrusts. “Andie?”
Like a sailor reaching up from the depths, he grabbed for the edge of the platform, which set everything wobbling and rocking. A shipwreck, Hugh thought again, surveying the mad rigging of ropes and the bobbing debris.
Hugh looked at the wax statues. Their dream was over. Their quiet would shatter. The litter would descend. These final sisters would be pulled apart once and for all.
Then he saw something. “Wait,” he said. Her head was different.
Augustine grappled his way past. “Andie?”
Her head had been bent down. Now it was lifted. That tea-brown face with streaks like tears.
“Andie?” Augustine’s voice warped. He saw the awful, elastic neck now.
Her head must have been lifted already, thought Hugh. He’d memorized it wrong, that was all. Or the motion of the platforms had shifted her limbs.
“God, oh God,” said Augustine.
The platforms rocked and scraped. Slings creaked. The clues bullied Hugh. He tried to think. Someone had taken the rope from around that boneless throat…after her return from the pit. There was only one possible explanation.
In the same instant, the woman’s eyes flicked open.
“Jesus,” Hugh shouted.
Blood red, the same as theirs.
Augustine was oblivious, fixated on the corpse. “Andie.” He leaned to kiss her.
Above him, the woman blinked. Her eyes traveled across Augustine’s matted hair to Hugh, and widened in horror. With his black-and-blue eyes and the dried blood in his beard, he must have looked like the living dead himself.
“She’s not dead,” Hugh whispered.
And still Augustine didn’t comprehend. He cast a glance at him, stunned by Hugh’s cruelty. Because his lover was very dead.
The woman stared down at Augustine, astonished by her awakening. Or their trespass.
“Let go.” Hugh pulled at Augustine. “Leave her alone.”
Augustine had an arm under Andie’s body. He was trying to pry her loose.
The woman’s mouth came unsealed.
Augustine tugged at the corpse.
Her teeth parted. Tea-brown teeth, everything the color of smoke. Except for her red eyes.
Hugh saw the hard, dark tip of her tongue working. He didn’t know what to expect, a scream, a curse, or a plea for help. When the air finally came up from her lungs, what escaped was the hoarse cry of a carrion bird.
TWENTY-THREE
At the woman’s screech, Augustine straightened in his stirrups and came face-to-face with the survivor. “Not you,” he said.
Why not? Hugh wondered. Then he realized this was Cuba, his witch.
Augustine didn’t hesitate. He grabbed for the body. Where he meant to take it, Hugh didn’t know.
More dead than alive, the woman clutched the body tighter. With what strength? Hugh stared. A shrill keening poured from that dried-up purse of a mouth.
For a minute, Hugh was too shocked to move. She had returned from the dead. They were fighting. A nightmare image surfaced of the wild dogs that spirited through the dunes. And of Annie wandering mindlessly into their midst like some rare gazelle. Of them finding her feast of bones.
She clawed at Augustine. His arm was trapped. “Let loose,” he said. He pulled. The body shifted. She clutched at it.
Their tug of war was grotesque, a custody battle for a corpse. Hugh watched, appalled. At the same time, there was a sort of terrible majesty to it. At the edge of the world, on the brink of human existence, they were fighting for a dead soul, a hero’s body.
“Please.” It was all Hugh could manage, one feeble word.
They began falling to pieces. The upper platform tilted, and almost capsized. The lower platforms bucked wildly, rocking more violently with each swing.
Chunks of diorite scabbed off and dropped into the smoke, rattling on the lower slabs. The raw powder smell of freshly mined rock sparked from the wall. Grabbing at the center of the slings crossing Augustine’s wide back, Hugh tried to yank him away from the struggle.
Augustine bellowed. Cuba hissed. Noise everywhere. Lewis had been right in the beginning, the climb was cursed.
The tug-of-war lasted only a few seconds longer. Then the corpse itself intervened. Held by little more than that cylinder of flesh, her head rolled up. Her face appeared.
The birds had taken her eyes while she hung on the rope. Her tongue was fat, extruded meat. Augustine barked his surprise. Her beauty was gone. His love had become hideous.
He reared away from the head, and plowed into Hugh, who lost his grip. A rope slipped, rock popped, something gave way. The two men tumbled from their stirrups and holds.
The middle platform broke their fall, even as they broke the platform. Hugh landed hard on top of Augustine. The floor’s taut membrane held, but the poles did not. Like trap jaws closing, the platform buckled, and the sides clapped shut around them. Pinned together, Hugh snarled in Augustine’s rope.
The pandemonium went on. The coupled platforms beat at the wall, rocking and jerking back and forth. Metal screamed on stone. Hugh thrashed to get free, sure the whole camp was about to tear loose, and the flimsy rafts would plunge into the gulf. Not like this, he thought, not tangled in junk and madness. This had nothing to do with him. Nothing.
“My shoulder,” Augustine yelled. “Jesus, make her stop.”
Hugh wrestled partway from the wreckage. Overhead the woman was shrieking like a banshee. He snatched at straps, rope, their haul bag, anything.
The haul bag came loose in his hand. It plunged from sight. No time for that now. Hugh reached for the wall. Holds ripped from his hands. He drove at the stone with his feet.
The bedlam slowed. His broken platform lost momentum. The upper ledge trembled to a halt. The whole contraption of shelves came to rest.
With a yelp, Augustine’s shoulder popped back into joint.
In the stillness that followed, the only sound was the woman’s birdlike screeches. A side pole unfastened and arrowed down, whistling like a castaway flute. Abruptly she stopped. She had exorcised her devils. Them.
Augustin
e lay below him in the belly of the ruined platform. They were both panting. Hugh started coughing. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. He was scared and angry. “What were you doing?”
“She’s dead,” said Augustine.
“One dead, one still alive.” Hugh spoke it starkly. He stripped out the emotion, even the names. They needed discipline. Deep in the desert or high above the earth, self-control was your lifeline.
But Augustine had been filled with such hope. His shock was real. “It’s all wrong,” he said.
“Wrong?”
“She’s the one who dragged Andie into this.”
And now Cuba was the one who had survived. Hugh understood. “Andie dragged herself into it,” Hugh said. “No one forced her. She reached high, and fell. And you almost killed us just now.”
Augustine bared his teeth.
Hugh kept his feet planted and the ledges braced. He held them steady. The frenzy receded. “Like wild animals,” he said.
The woman, the survivor—the impossible survivor—had the excuse of trauma and solitude. There was no excuse for Augustine. Unless, Hugh conceded, one counted his tireless days-long siege of El Cap, and now his shattered faith and the sight of his lover turned into that horror on the platform above them.
“It’s over,” said Augustine.
“It’s not,” said Hugh. “We have a job to do.”
Augustine groaned.
“You’ve done this before,” Hugh said. “We’ll take care of them both.”
“I need the med kit,” Augustine said.
Hugh looked down at him. “How bad are you hurt?”
Augustine stayed lying in the pouch of nylon and snapped poles. “There are drugs in the med kit,” he said.
That bad, thought Hugh. Now the rescuer needed rescuing. It was all backward and upside down. Hugh had no business here. This wasn’t his climb. It wasn’t his rescue. Yet here he was at the mercy of foreign violence. From the moment he’d found the girl in the woods, El Cap had been like quicksand, dragging him deeper and darker the higher he went.
“The haul bag fell,” he said. “That had all our water and food. And the med kit.”
Augustine said, “And the radio.”
Hugh got quiet. “No, you were carrying the radio.”
“I put it in the bag.”
Hugh wrestled up from the wreckage. He stood and held the anchor. His head brushed the upper platform. The floor sagged where Cuba sat with the corpse. Augustine had still not uttered her name.
Hugh took stock. Augustine was injured. A dead woman had come alive. All three of them needed evacuation, and their radio was possibly gone.
Hugh snatched at the haul line. To his relief, it felt tight and heavy. There was still a hope. He started reeling in the rope, hand over hand, smoothly so the bag wouldn’t snag on knobs or in some crack.
While he pulled their cargo from the depths, the woman on the shelf above did not move or make a peep, or so Hugh thought. He was too busy with the rope, and figured the hissing sound was the haul bag sliding against the distant stone. Then he detected words, and decided it must be Augustine talking to himself. But when he looked around, Augustine was lying in the wreckage, staring at the red floor stretched above them, listening.
Hugh stopped hauling. Now he heard. It was Cuba whispering through the floor at them.
“…couldn’t stay away,” she was saying. “We knew you’d come.”
We? She was raving. Roped to phantoms.
Then he saw that Augustine was listening to her. He looked positively tormented. His lips moved in silent response.
“She told me everything,” the voice went on. “How you did it. Left behind. Still alive.”
Augustine didn’t move a muscle. This was between him and his sorceress. Even bound in place with just a scrap of a voice, starved and crazy, she still had a power over him.
How long had these two been brawling over the poor, star-crossed girl? How old was their hate? It felt ancient to Hugh. And useless, now. For all their care and watchfulness, El Cap had lynched their Andie. Neither of them had managed to save her.
“It was an accident,” Augustine answered her. “I told you. The wind never stopped. He wouldn’t move. I couldn’t stay.”
Cerro Torre was his Achilles’ heel. Obviously Andie’s sisters of the forest had been helping her get things straightened out, damning Augustine with every breath. He’d never stood a chance with her.
Cuba went on punishing him. “Augustine,” she said, “keep away. Go down. She doesn’t want you.”
“How would you know?” Augustine said.
“I died,” she told him, “I know everything.”
Hugh listened to their clash of whispers. Augustine sank deeper into the wreckage. He was freaked, stricken, an untouchable.
Hugh looked back on Augustine’s superhuman drive, and remembered Joe’s first words when they had retreated to the ledges. Keep him away from me.
It was suddenly obvious. Ever since the tragedy in Patagonia, Augustine had been shadowing his ex-lover. He was a ghost, at least to her. Trojan Women had been her attempt to break free. But even in death, he haunted her. Now he had her cornered and eyeless. Not quite cornered, thought Hugh. Not with this half-dead banshee to defend her.
“Get away,” she repeated. “You’re not the one she wants.”
“It was him or me. I wished it was me. What more can I say?”
“Leave.”
“Enough,” Hugh said to him. “Why let her inside your head?”
The whispering quit. Augustine glanced at Hugh. Eyes red. Damned, damned twice now. First the brother, now the lover. A serial killer in his own mind.
Hugh went after the haul line with new urgency. Get me out of here. They were hanging by threads, physically, mentally, every which way.
The bag appeared in the murky soup. “We’re going to be okay,” he announced. He secured the bag and opened it up. The gallon jugs hadn’t burst in the fall, a good sign. If your water balloons could take the beating, the rest of your gear was usually okay.
He found the radio nested in a sleeping bag. He examined the outer casing. “It looks okay,” he said.
Augustine roused. “Let me see,” he said. Hugh handed it to him. He didn’t switch it on. “The battery light’s green. It will work.”
Hugh’s spirits lifted. They were back on track. They had provisions. They had communication. The road was clear. “You want me to make the call?”
Augustine laid the radio between his legs. “First things first. You see the med kit?”
Hugh could have insisted. He didn’t want to put off the evacuation one minute more. But Augustine was in command of himself again, full of his old purpose. He began dragging himself out of the sagging wreckage. He stood upright in his stirrups.
“Maybe you should stay still,” Hugh said.
“We’re copasetic. No problem.”
Hugh rooted for the med kit. He held it with both hands.
“Open it up,” Augustine said. He looked pale and grim in his stirrups. “There should be a bundle of syringes.”
“I have them.” Several were preloaded with various liquids, ready to use.
“There’s one marked Haldol. That’s the one I need.”
Hugh found the syringe with “Haldol” written on the plastic barrel. “I don’t know this one.” He wanted Augustine lucid and able to see the evacuation through. But if that wasn’t possible, if Hugh needed to take control, he wanted to know before Augustine doped himself. And he wanted that radio.
“I do,” Augustine stated.
Hugh had injected an orange for practice once. He’d never done it with a human. “You want me to inject you?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Hugh handed him the syringe. Augustine took it in his fist, needle down, thumb on the plunger. He pulled the plastic cap off with his teeth, and spit it out. “Hold me steady.”
Hugh held him by his harness. Without hesitation
or real aim, Augustine slugged the side of his fist at the nylon bulge overhead.
If Cuba felt the needle, she didn’t move or complain.
“What have you done?” Hugh said. “What the hell was that?” Who was this guy?
Augustine opened his fist. The syringe stayed stuck in the ceiling. “A little site management.”
Hugh pulled the syringe from her. “What is this stuff?”
“A silver bullet,” Augustine said. “Haloperidol, a major tranquilizer. The docs use it for schizophrenics. Out in the field, we use it for a quick knockdown.”
Hugh tossed the syringe away. “A tranquilizer, in her condition? She’s in shock. She hasn’t eaten in a week. You could kill her.” Hugh had no idea if that was true, but he couldn’t let the stunt just pass.
“We use it all the time. Give them a poke and back off. They get all settled down. She’ll be out for four to six hours.”
“I thought it was for you.”
“Me? I’m driving the bus.”
Unbelievable, thought Hugh. And he was tied into this man? Where have you brought yourself? He turned away, caging his anger.
The light was dimming rapidly. Despite everything else, that surprised him. It couldn’t be dusk already. Where had the time gone? “Dial it in,” he told Augustine. “Bring the litter down. Let’s get this over with.”
Augustine lowered himself back into the wreckage. “Andie first,” he said.
“Andie?”
“We have to get her decent. She’s not decent.” Augustine’s paleness made the filth appear to be floating above his skin.
Decent? She was dead. One crazier than the other, thought Hugh. Beam me the hell up. He wanted off. Down. Away from this aerie with its stink and its strangled dreams. What was it about this place? Maybe Joshua had it right. Maybe the devil did live here.
“We’re running out of day,” Hugh said. “The light’s fading.”
Augustine was barely listening. “I’ll take her up,” he said. “We’ll go together, her and me.”
He couldn’t guide his lover out alive, so he was going to guide her out dead. Cuba had possessed her for a week. Now Augustine would possess her forever.
