Jason noticed Dave, still scaling the easy lower cliff formation to join him at the narrow ledge, which was going to be their base camp. He was puffing, carrying most of the tent equipment, including porta-ledge devices enabling the three to sleep in their tents in safety. Jason laughed, as Dave—strong as an ox and nearly as large—always ended up with Sherpa duties. Dave wasn’t overweight—far from it. The tall, ginger-cropped South Australian was stout and didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. He would have made a great AFL ruckman. They usually climbed together during the warmer months, and ‘fitness freak’ Dave would supplement his winter training with some serious rowing on the River Torrens.
Becky was thirty metres behind Dave, taking it easy and enjoying the warm-up climb. She was very capable, probably the most technically skilled climber of the three, and fastidious with safety procedures. When climbing, she always had an intense, professional look about her, with her long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, popping from under her helmet, and brows creased in concentration above her expressive, brown eyes.
Dave finally pulled himself onto the ledge and carefully placed his large bundle on the widest possible location.
Jason swung his arm around, grasping Dave’s hand with his own. “Thanks, mate. That was a big haul.”
Dave wiped sweat from his forehead, despite the cooling winds. “Someone had to do it.” He took a small swig of water from his Nalgene flask, and his countenance turned serious. “Mate. While Bec’s still climbing—haven’t had a single moment alone with you, ’specially with you two moving to Sydney—I wanted to tell you there’s no hard feelings. I know I said it over the phone a few months back, but I want you to really, really know how I feel. When Bec broke up with me I was gutted, especially since—you know, my best friend and all.”
Jason grasped Dave’s shoulder with his right hand. “Hey, I didn’t—”
“You don’t need to say it. It took a while, but I realized that it wasn’t meant to be.” A small tear formed in one of his eyes, and a gust of wind sent it streaking along his cheekbone into nothingness. “Jeez, I look at you two and all I can see is joy. Someone out there will do it for me, but Bec and I didn’t have that chemistry.”
They hugged, as they had always done since primary school when something important had been resolved or achieved.
“Whoa, am I meant to see this?” Becky asked over the whining wind.
“Just a tender moment,” Jason said. “You can join us, if you want.”
“Pass. Maybe we should get these portas set up. Haven’t used one for years.”
Dave moved toward his pack when out of a crevice a fat, black chitinous creature scuttled near his foot.
“Shit!” he yelped, and without thinking, crushed the creature under his climbing boot. It was an insect, larger than a human hand, with six legs and a bulbous, pitch-black exoskeleton. Yellowy-grey liquid oozed from the mangled body, which even with the wind smelled acrid, like vomit.
“Christ!” Becky cried. “Do you know what you just did?”
“Ah. Not exactly.”
“One of the reasons why this lump of vertical rock is a protected environment is because there might be twenty or so of these stick insects living here. And that’s it. They used to crawl all over Lord Howe Island, but they were wiped out by rats introduced by a shipwreck. These are the most endangered insects in the world. You probably wiped out five percent of the existing population in the wild, dickhead!”
“Shit, I forgot. I just hate insects and spiders. What are we going to do?”
Jason crouched near the insect’s corpse and squeamishly nudged it. “It’s sure big. If a scientist or another climber finds the remains, they might ask questions. It was an accident, but I don’t want trouble. I say hide it in the crevices—if we try to fling it out to sea, the wind might blow it back onto the rocks.”
Dave was visibly relieved. “Thanks. It was an accident.”
“Dumbfuck,” Becky said, and slapped him playfully on the back. “But it was a mistake.”
Jason used his boot to slide the creature into a small crack in the cliff wall. Some dirt and mould had accumulated in a small natural recess a metre above it. He scraped the material onto the ledge. Dave and Becky helped.
“What’s this?” Jason asked, staring at his palms.
A layer of fine orange-yellow powder caked both his gloves. The others had the same, and they could see its source—a small area where the powder was thickly clinging to the wall of the recess.
Becky wiped her hands on her front shirt. “It looks almost like turmeric powder. You know, for curries.”
“And as clingy,” Jason replied. He sniffed it carefully. “Almost smells like turmeric too.” He kept rubbing his hands together, but little of the material was loosened from his Cordex gloves, nor the exposed areas of his lower arms. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a mould, or some kind of spore. Never seen anything like it.”
Becky nodded. “Yeah, but that’s weird. I read pretty much everything I could find about Ball’s Pyramid, and I didn’t get any reference to this. There’s precious little that grows here, and these ugly buggers only survive because of a few solitary bushes near a tiny water source. I reckon this mould, or whatever it is, should have been in the literature.”
“No one’s climbed this rock at this time of year,” Jason replied. “Maybe this stuff only comes out for a few days a year, set around some special time.”
“Solstice,” Dave stated, trying to wipe off the powder onto his trousers, and managing to get a smear on his face and onto his helmet. “I remember reading in the paper this morning that today is the Winter Solstice. Just saying.”
“Could be,” Becky said. She suddenly cried and jumped back, too close to the hundred metres precipice for comfort.
The insect, half covered in the material that was scraped from above, moved.
The three climbers stepped further away, unable to speak. Dave lightly whimpered, barely audible over the swirling winds.
The insect made a few loud scraping sounds, and walked off. Nearly walked. One leg was missing, several others were broken. Its body still had glistening flesh and yellow pus hanging out of its thorax. And yet it managed to crawl on its assembly of uneven legs. It grew in confidence and managed to actually scuttle along the ridge. Becky screamed and leapt over the creature as it waddled by.
“It was dead,” Jason stated with urgency. “It was as dead as you can fuckin’ get!”
* * *
The next day was perfect for climbing. The wind had died down to almost a sigh and it was mild, a few degrees above the average for the year. The insect episode had been a topic of interest into the early night, but the climbers had chores to do and needed a good night’s sleep for the day’s long, tough climb. The collective view was that the insect was hardy and had successfully scampered elsewhere, ultimately to die. If there was time, they agreed to look for the body after their climb, to make sure it could not be found by anyone else.
They set off early in the morning with Jason at lead. It was, as expected, slow going as he took minimum risks and spent much of his time setting bolts and anchors for clipping in belay ropes. This was a high-grade climb, and it didn’t take long for the three climbers to have their skills stretched to the limits and for the pleasure of the challenge to seep in.
At one of the belay points they took a break, hanging from their ropes, drawing in the view of the ocean, from over three hundred metres above sea level.
“Sublime,” Dave said.
“Completely,” Becky agreed.
“By the way, guys,” Jason said, inspecting his hands and arms. “That turmeric stuff hasn’t come off yet. It’s gone through my gloves onto my hands, and it’s also stained my lower arms.”
“Tell me about it,” Becky replied, with a tone of annoyance. “It went through my shirt and I’ve now got yellow boobs.”
The two men exploded into laughter, and Becky couldn’t help but join in.
They soon set off again, climbing the rock face of the island. At times they scaled small, protruding outcrops, but much of the climb was up sheer cliffs, dependent on fixing pitons, bolts, and other anchors into narrow cracks and gaps, none of which were ever climbed before.
Dave was in last position along the route, one he was happy to have. Jason knew his friend was a good, reliable climber, but he was the weakest with respect to technique.
“I thought The Totem Pole was a tough climb,” Dave said, approaching the next belay point for clipping. He was referring to a nearly two hundred foot high rectangular rock in Tasmania that looked more like Cleopatra’s Needle than a sea- and wind-eroded rock, and was considered one of the hardest graded climbs there was.
“Yeah,” Jason shouted back. “It’s like this face has five or six of them.”
“More like—” Dave’s feet slipped and there wasn’t sufficient hold with his hands. He didn’t cry out. He was experienced. Instead, he focused on bracing himself for the jarring of the fall when his rope extended to its length from the last belay point. As if the gods had frowned on the group, Dave’s rope hooked over a small pimple of rock close to his descent path. When the climber reached the full length of his fall, stopping relatively gently due to the elastic nature of the rope, the portion that was hugging the rock formation pinged back to its straight position, catching Dave by surprise. Dave started twisting and swinging several metres to his right, failing to control himself as he was unable to catch hold of any part of the cliff.
“Rope!” cried Becky, which signified a problem with Dave’s safety line.
He grabbed hold of a narrow crack in the cliff face with both hands, forming fists and jamming them in. He glanced up and saw that his belay rope had shredded when it ground over the rock it had hooked onto. He heard the rope snap as it was severed, and gritted his teeth when the full weight of his body concentrated on one of his fists. He separated his left hand from the gap, hoping to find another purchase to grab onto, while his legs raced about, also seeking the sanctuary of a hold.
“Christ!” Dave breathed in and out quickly to build up his oxygen levels for the struggle ahead. “Not sure if I can do this myself, guys! Would sure like some help!”
Becky was the logical rescuer. She was thirty metres diagonally above, while Jason was much higher.
Becky quickly readjusted her equipment, and carefully rappelled down until she got to the belay point where Dave fell prior to clipping. In seconds, she connected a figure-eight device and repelled from her new anchor point.
Dave started to lose it, screaming, “Shit! Shit! Shit! I can’t get any holds! I can’t keep this up for much longer!” His face had turned a bright red and Jason could see, despite the distance, a look of mortal terror in Dave’s eyes.
“I’m coming!” Becky cried, stopping her descent several metres above Dave’s altitude, but five metres to his left. She quickly scanned the vertical terrain and shook her head, having made the sober assessment. “I can’t dyno across, Dave. The same kind of crazy rock that cut your rope will do the same with mine. I’ve got to set up a new anchor point.”
“Quickly!” Dave grunted, hardly able to muster the strength to speak.
Becky expertly constructed an anchor by inserting a hex into a narrow space, attaching two cams. She completed the device with a sling and carabiner, and a spare, short belay rope. She unhooked herself from her original belay rope and grabbed hold of her new protection.
Inexplicably, the upper rock formation that held the hex disintegrated.
With the instinct of a seasoned climber, Becky grabbed for purchase with both her hands, but it wasn’t good enough. There was a quick intake of breath as reality coldly encompassed her. She silently slipped down the sheer rock face.
“Becky!” Jason cried, stunned that another accident could have happened so suddenly, and then horrified when he saw that she had no protection.
Becky managed twice to slam her hands onto outcrops, hoping against hope to stop her fall. Instead, it barely slowed her descent, and it caused her body to tumble.
With tears flowing down his cheeks, and despair screeching from his mouth, Jason saw his fiancée smash into a large outcrop one hundred and fifty metres below, followed by Dave falling, screaming, and trailing a useless umbilical cord.
Amazingly, she didn’t bounce off the rock and careen into the ocean. She was dead, unmistakably. The moment her head hit the rock, there was a six foot red wash glistening on the surface. Her body and limbs were misshapen, at odd angles, like a discarded marionette. Her helmet was nowhere to be seen.
Dave fell almost the entire distance to sea level, and with dignity totally ignored, shattered on the sea-washed rocks. The only saving grace was that it was too far to see the details. But it was hard for Jason to take his eyes away from Becky.
Jason hung there, not even remembering to secure himself, crying, swaying, and cursing God.
* * *
His eyes kept returning to Becky’s body. He wasn’t looking for something, nor hoping for the impossible. He just had to see her. It wouldn’t be long before he would never see her again.
His gaze turned to the Osprey, wondering if they noticed the catastrophe, and saw no signs of activity. His eyes tracked back to the outcrop.
She wasn’t there. Just a fan-shaped smear of drying blood and gore.
Where . . . ?
There was a shadowy movement slightly to the right of the outcrop.
He shifted his body and focused.
It was a climber. Another climber, his brain kept hammering at him. He swallowed and realized how dry his throat was. It was Becky. She had landed with her body in a sideways position, shattering her head. Her face—what was left of it—was distorted but unmistakably hers. A single eye stared upward as she climbed by grasping onto the smallest of ridges and gaps with her fingertips. Sometimes her boots would fail to find a ledge, but her fingertips—becoming ragged as she progressed—held her weight.
He was washed with a fleeting moment of insanity when he welcomed the idea of being with his Becky, but as she got closer he saw her state in more detail. The sheer horror of the thought of being close to such fresh ruin was overwhelming. He panicked. He unhooked his belay rope and climbed. For his sanity, for his life.
* * *
The adrenaline had worn off. His body was aching, bleeding, after several desperate lunges to get away from Becky. And yet she closed the gap, easily. She was very close now, only ten metres below him, and that single brown eye, which was fixed on her climbing, was now targeting him. She was dead, she had to be dead, but her eye was alive. As she knowingly gazed on him, a ragged, bloody smile formed on her tattered face.
“Jase, why are you leaving me?” Her voice was distorted, hollow like the grave.
He couldn’t climb anymore. He was spent, and the universe collapsed around him, his sanity imploded into a singularity of hell. “Y—you’re dead,” he whimpered.
“No, you’re wrong,” said the fractured voice. She hadn’t slowed her movement at all. In fact, she had picked up her pace.
“Y—your face, your body . . . broken.”
“My heart beats, Jason. I want to hold you, to make the nightmare go away.”
The thought of her being so close, to be centimetres away from her gaping skull and fragmented bones, caused him to almost faint with overwhelming horror. To kiss her lips, blue and cold . . .
Becky was only a few metres away, her blood-crusted, shattered smile inviting doom. “Embrace me. Stay with me forever.”
Jason fumbled in his jacket pocket and pulled out the single shot plastic flare gun, something that had escaped his thoughts in his despair. He pointed it at the gap between Becky’s chest and the cliff wall, firing at point blank range. He closed his eyes as the intense heat of the burning
magnesium enveloped her breast, flinging her off the cliff.
To his dismay, while Becky fell, lighting up like a bonfire, her hands whipped out and finally, successfully grabbed hold of a protruding rock. The rest of her body slammed into the cliff, breaking more bones, and yet she held on. While grasping onto the cliff with one hand, she expertly fastened her body by rope to an anchor. She flapped incessantly at the fire encompassing her, trying to put it out, not once crying out in pain.
Jason thought she would come for him again, but she slowed down. The flapping became a few feeble swipes, and as the acrid smell of burnt flesh and hair rose up to him, she collapsed, hanging limply on her belay rope, still burning.
Jason set up a harness and sat in it, trying to recover. He ignored the smell of the smouldering corpse. It was now, it seemed, a real corpse.
Another movement came from below.
Oh no, sweet Jesus, no!
Dave’s corpse was climbing the cliff face. He was some distance down, but he was a worse mess than Becky had been. His limbs and body were so broken he climbed in fits and starts, bones grinding against each other each time he moved. There was an odd whooshing sound that seemed to emanate from the body, and when it got closer it became apparent why—Dave’s head had been completely shattered, and while remnants of both it and his helmet girdled his neck and shoulders, the sound was coming from his exposed windpipe.
Jason prepared himself for oblivion. He hadn’t the strength left to climb, and he was certain his sanity was going to give way completely. Either way, or both, there was total darkness.
Dave moved—he had no eyes. He could not see. As the corpse was climbing higher, it also made wide horizontal detours, almost as if it needed to fully cover the area of the cliff face, to make sure it wouldn’t miss anything. His ragged hands would reach out and feel for whatever it might find.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2014 (Volume 5) Page 26
