©2018 by Usman Malik.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer of strange stories resident in Florida. His work has appeared in several Year’s Best collections, won the British Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, and been nominated for the Nebula. He likes running and occasional long hikes. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm.
Better You Believe
Carole Johnstone | 8324 words
Maybe true
Maybe not true
Better you believe
—Old Sherpa Saying
It’s all downhill on a descent. The oldest climbing joke of the lot, but only because it’s true. If I like any bit of it at all, it could never be that slow, painful climb down from the highs of before and the bone-deep exhaustion of after. People make mistakes on a descent because everything’s against them: altitude, time, their bodies. And always their mind. No one gets excited about survival—not like they do about standing on the top of the world. And no one gets a good write-up in Nat Geo or Time for managing to get back down a bloody mountain in one piece. Unless they’re Jean-Christophe Lafaille, I guess.
The air is raw, thin, dry. Acke Holmberg’s cough is worse; when ice walls throw up rare shelter, I can hear it rattle up from his lungs hard enough to start doing damage. Nick likes to tell me about the gross stuff when we’re in bed, warm and lazy, blissed out. One guy he climbed with ruptured his esophagus on Nanga Parbat, a few thousand feet above base camp. The blood spray froze in mid-air, Nick said with a grin, before pulling me back under the covers and him.
The wind is a demented banshee. Only fifty k, Nick said maybe twelve hours ago; on the summit it beat around our heads so hard, we had to crouch. Some of the Swedes were convinced they were going to be yanked off into the swirling white void. As if they’d be fuckin’ wheeched off, Nick said with usual scorn. As if it had never happened, when I know just how many dozens of times it has on this peak alone. But he’s earned the right to be scathing, I guess. Until today, Annapurna was the only eight-thousander he hadn’t summited.
But things are different now—I know that without being able to either see or hear him, somewhere further down the Lafaille line and attached to the same fixed rope. It’s dark and growing darker. It’s too late—much too late—I can barely see the low sun beyond Gangapurna’s peak, some 7,000 meters above the Marsyangdi River. The weather is moving. And the mountain is getting jittery; I feel its hackles under my frozen feet, like we’re ticks that just won’t quit. We’ve been inside the Death Zone for too long, but we’re too slow, too tired, and have too far to go.
Bad Things, I think, in Nick’s lesser spotted concerned voice, as I battle on down through the white and the wind, putting one boot in front of the other in the kind of trance that’s both helpful and dangerous. Bad Things are about to happen.
• • • •
By the time they do, I’ve managed to convince myself they won’t. The wind has died again; the flag cloud west of the summit tilts up and sharp against the dying sun. Up is good, flat is bad, down is fucked. I remember the big poster tacked alongside prayer flags in the med tent, and Nick laughing with one of the American doctors that it was a far more reliable indicator than any other base camp forecast. The mountains make their own weather, and it’s rarely kind.
Even though I’m still descending through the French Couloirs, the snowpack is harder, the incline less steep. I’m surprisingly warm, but I know much of that is a cocktail of O and illusion—I last felt my feet at Camp IV. I don’t feel bad, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel much of anything at all. Not even afraid.
There’s a subtle but sudden shift in the air around me, like a hush, a breath too close to my ear; my heart stutters a little to feel it through my hood and balaclava. And then Jakub Hornik appears from the gloom behind and above—maybe ten feet east, no more—face-first and flat on his belly, anchored to nothing. He doesn’t flail or shout as he slides down the snowfield; he makes no sound at all save the fast friction of his suit against ice. And he makes no attempt at self-arrest either, even though he’s holding his ice axe up like any moment he’s going to let it fall. His eyes are wild. They find my light and grow wilder, wider—holding onto it right up to the moment that the gloom swallows him back down and I’m left alone, literally frozen, the dropping wind washing out my mouth.
There’s a tug on the rope from below. Nick. Are you alright?
Not really, not at all, but what use is there in saying so; in being either one or the other up here? I’ll still be up here. I’ll still be needing to get down fucking there. A big shudder goes through me, it cricks my neck and finds a home in my belly. It’s never a good idea to puke more than halfway up a mountain. I think of Jakub’s eyes, his silent slide. I remember Kate renaming him The Horn, after he spent the whole first month at base camp trying to hit on her. My belly squeezes hard again.
Bad Things.
Because they’re never ever singular.
• • • •
The last Bad Thing was Felix Garcia. There are always deaths on a climb. Climbing seasons are short, summit windows shorter; at any one time, there can be dozens of teams within a few hundred meters of each other. But the threat of actually seeing someone die is surprisingly low, as easily dismissed as the threat of dying yourself. You hear about them, on the short wave or the satellite phone, or when you reach a camp: falls, accidents, strokes, disappearances. People go crazy. People get the shitty end of the stick. People just die. There are lots of ways to do it. And pretty soon those muttered summations become nearly routine, like all the frozen landmarks and trig points that used to be people. Red Legs. Green Boots. North Col.
Felix was different. Mountains attract arseholes; eight-thousanders attract Olympic-level arseholes. He and Nick clashed before we even left Everest base camp. Felix was a solo-climber, and that’s pretty hard to do on a mountain as rammed as Everest. Nick doesn’t like taking them on because they’re glory hounds and crappy team players, but he’s had to get a lot less picky now that he’s competing with Nepali companies for business. It was to be my third summit, Nick’s seventh, but we didn’t even get close before the weather doubled down and Pasang advised Nick to turn us all back and fast. Felix suffered the final indignity of being geared up with me and three Koreans on the snow fields at the foot of the Lhotse Face as we scrambled over crevasses on shrieking ladders, a snow storm blinding us, deafening us, making us stupid.
By the time I heard his scream, I was already being dragged so fast along the ice I couldn’t get my axe free. Our belaying had been too clumsy, the Koreans behind too quick, the rope too slack—Felix plummeted so hard and so fast down the hidden crevasse that by the time anyone managed to arrest our screaming progress along the glacier, I was flying over its edge too. The pain I didn’t feel. The horror of all that silent blue dark after howling white space, I did. I looked down at a still screaming Felix and didn’t see him, only the hard tight swing of the rope between us vanishing into black. The air prickled against my skin like blunted pins. I looked up at the shouting beyond the ice-rimmed circle of white, and I thought, they can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both.
And they didn’t.
I feel another yank on my harness. I’ve been standing still for too long; the fixed rope is taut, impatient. The wind has grown high again. The darkening sky looks heavy with snow, and when I squint west, I can’t see the flag cloud any more. I start moving.
Nick won’t have told the other Slovaks about Jakub. They were last to leave the summit, despite Nick and Pasang’s warnings about the time. They’re far too far behind us to attempt any kind of rescue, but they’d want us to try because the four of them were tight: Jakub and Hasan were as close as brothers. They wouldn’t accept that there’s no point; that at the edge of this snowfield is a short rock buttress and then a drop of over a thousand feet. I don’t want to think about that: about Jakub’s wild eyes staring at my light as he slid away from me toward the plummet o
f black, empty space that he must have known was coming.
Jakub’s silence; Felix’s high screams. Dark, cold yawns of nothing. What it feels like to fall, to be alone, to feel it coming, to know. I can’t think about shit like that. We’re still nearly a thousand feet inside the Death Zone—thinking about shit like that is for messy Khukri rum nights in Pokhara or Kathmandu. Or if you’re Nick, never. Easier just to pretend things didn’t happen at all.
• • • •
The snow starts heavy and doesn’t stop. It slows my efforts to catch up to Nick. Even though I know he’s already got his hands full with the Chinese couple who arrived at The Sanctuary with no equipment at all, and the always determined Tomie Nà from Hong Kong, who started showing signs of altitude sickness as low as Camp II. And Kate, of course. Following him around like a bad smell. Nick always does the babysitting, while Pasang rounds up the stragglers, the hardcore just-another-five-minuters. It’s always been this way, even though Pasang is the tolerant one, and Nick couldn’t be patient if he tried. But Pasang is the better climber too; certainly, he’s the better guide. Nick is the guy in charge, the guy people write the checks to, and even if that’s the kind of responsibility he’d sooner shirk than have to suffer, it lets him climb mountains. For that, he’d babysit an entire busload of Sunday hikers and Olympic-level arseholes.
I wonder what he’ll tell Jakub’s family. I remember an evening in The Sanctuary, one of those rare pre-climb nights of excitement and camaraderie not yet spoiled by the reality of weeks of acclimatizing in close, cold quarters. Pavol and Hasan were drunk and red-cheeked, laughing about Jakub’s wife, and how pissed off she’d be when she found out how much their trip was costing. That Nick will be the one to tell her what has happened, I have no doubt, but he won’t say how it really was: how long Jakub suffered knowing he was going to die on that hard, fast slide; that we were all still on that mountain, but he was already lost, already gone before he was gone.
Climbers have their own rules, their own language, their own religion. And these take years to earn, to learn, to understand. Climbers believe in dreams, as long as those dreams have a purpose, a summit. They believe in God, if God is a mountain, because they worship nothing but the climb—the endless, soulless, merciless demand of it. They believe in trying to help, in trying to save, until they can’t. Until they don’t. They believe in the individual: in their own strength, their own will, their own survival. And they also believe that mountains can hate, that the weather can be cajoled, that the spirits of those long dead can provide comfort to the dying and lead the living to safety. Even Nick believes—scornful, pragmatic, ever practical Nick—like a liar crossing his fingers, or a fisherman never setting sail on a Friday, or like Pasang leaving offerings to the mountain at the end of every day, while muttering low to the friends whom he has lost.
I trip on a rock under growing drifts of snow and stumble against the fixed line. It’s too much snow too fast. Anything over an inch an hour is bad news, and this is much, much more. Visibility is getting worse: I can no longer see the setting sun at all, and my headlight shines through a kaleidoscope of dense monochrome. I’m starting to wonder if we’ll make it back down to Camp IV today at all, and that is bad—worse than bad. Bivouacking in the Death Zone is never a good idea, but on the South Face of Annapurna, it’s pretty much suicide. I try not to think of all the stats that Nick—and so many other climbers—take such solemn glee in. The summit-to-death ratio on Everest is one in twenty-six. On Annapurna, he said, sliding a cool palm down my naked back and along my flank, making me shiver even though then I was warm, it’s one in three.
The first stirrings of real fear find me then, and it’s followed by a strange, slow sense of unreality. I should already be frightened. I should have been frightened when the Slovaks weren’t ready to leave Camp IV at midnight, or when we finally summited at five p.m. instead of three. I should have been frightened when Nick started moving folk back down the mountain so fast there was barely any time to celebrate our victory; when Acke started sounding like he was coughing up a lung; when the wind, then the night, then the snow started closing in, the mountain began trying to buck us off, and our descent became a disordered, scattered scramble. And I should have been shitting myself when Jakub slid past me on the way to his silent death.
Denial. A mountain climber’s best and worst friend.
Acke, I think. Acke should be behind me, higher up, but not so far that I can’t hear him. Only I can’t remember the last time I did hear him; the last time I remembered that I should be able to hear him.
“Acke?”
The wind screams back at me.
“Acke! Are you there?”
Maybe I hear him, I don’t know. Something hits my face: a stone or some ice carried on the rising wind, and when I press a glove against my cheek, it hurts; the balaclava sticks warm and wet to my skin. “Acke!”
Though I don’t want to, I start back up. Not far, I won’t go far. Just far enough to ascertain that he’s still there, still alive, still descending. In this direction, the wind batters at me hard enough to nearly drop me to my knees.
“Acke!”
There are different kinds of numb in the Death Zone, and denial is only one. Is my heart rate and breathing fast because of altitude or fear? Or because of cerebral oedema? Are my actions, my responses still rational? Do I think they are? Climbing above 7,500 meters is the same slow asphyxiation suffered in the Nightmare-Age of heavy-curtained four-poster beds. When we climb, we have night terrors, paranoia, depression. When we descend, the euphoria of returning oxygen levels can just as quickly cause psychosis. We’re not supposed to function up here; we’re not designed to function up here. Nick once saw a man launch himself off the Hillary Step like he was dive-bombing the deep end of a swimming pool.
I nearly stumble over Acke before I see him. He’s sitting in the snow, legs splayed out, trying to take off his gloves.
“Don’t!”
He stills, lifts up his face, winces against the wind and flying debris, but what he says is in Swedish; the only word I recognize is allena. Alone.
“You can’t stop. You have to get up. Where’s Bosse? Is he still behind you? Acke!” I’m shouting hard enough to hurt my throat now. “We can’t stay here.”
He shakes his head, resumes the removal of his gloves, and once he’s done that, his frostbitten fingers move to the carabiner connecting him to the fixed line.
“Acke, no!”
He pays me no mind. There’s a ring of blood around his mouth like old lipstick, and a brighter slash of it running into his frozen beard. And if he already has pulmonary oedema, then he’s probably not too far behind dive-bombing the deep end of a swimming pool either. Because disengaging from the line in a snowstorm is what you do if you’re crazy. It’s what you do if you want to die.
He grins and his teeth are bloody. “Stay with me,” he says. Shouts. But he’s not looking at me, he’s looking all around me—at the stone, the snow, the nearly night sky.
And then I hear it. The worst Bad Thing. The thing I’ve been trying the hardest not to think about on our painfully slow descent down this 2,500 meter gulley in a snowstorm; this funnel for spindrift and debris and worse.
By the time Acke hears it, I’m already turned around and running. Trying to run. The noise is terrific. My heart thunders in my ears, as I try to seek out somewhere—anywhere—to hide. But there’s nothing, nowhere. Because there never is. You’re fucked or you’re lucky, and that’s it.
I know when it’s about to hit me because Acke screams high and short, and I feel a cold wall of air rushing against my back, shoving me forward with invisible hands. An impossibly high shadow that eclipses even my own light. I think of Jakub. Dark, cold yawns of nothing. I think of Nick.
And then the avalanche steals away any sense I have left.
• • • •
Climbing is lonely. You think it won’t be. You imagine that the endeavor will be mutually achieved, an orde
al always shared, but the truth is, on some sections, particularly on a disorganized descent, you can go a whole day without setting eyes on another soul. I’ve learned if not to love, then to appreciate the stark, stripped isolation of those days. The very opposite of the long, crowded intimacy of lower camp life, or the breath-stealing wonder of the summit—whether your vista is the golden curve of Earth and low, white mountain peaks in a sea of clouds, or a whiteout of raging wind and snow. But that other isolation—that other allena—is what you dread while never allowing yourself to think of it. It’s the realization that you’re fucked. Like Jakub. That you’re still alive, still on the mountain, but suddenly you’re on the other side of a two-way mirror and you won’t ever be coming back. That is the worst Bad Thing. The only one. Whichever way it happens.
When I open my eyes, I think I’m inside that terrible crevasse again; the horror of all that silent blue dark after howling white space. Blunted pins and the hard tight swing of the rope vanishing into black. An echo of they can’t hold us both. They can’t save us both.
The cold is too cold to feel. I’m not in the crevasse because I can’t move. My limbs are folded tight and trapped; my lungs struggle to find space enough to breathe. Too much weight presses down on me. Panic starts crushing me from the inside out. Not this. Not this.
The circle of my arms around my head has allowed for a small air pocket, but it won’t last long. My wrist strap has snapped; my ice axe has gone. I think of Nick’s face: the dimple in his left cheek, the chip in his right incisor, the always paler circles of skin around his eyes. I think of his weight on me, pressing me down, filling me up, and it calms me a little. It calms me enough.
I breathe. I breathe. And then I spit. It dribbles down my cheek along the length of my right eyebrow. Upside down. Maybe 160, 170 degrees. I don’t know how deep I am, and the small space I have left isn’t enough to find out. Slowly, slowly, I burrow my hands down toward my torso. The snow is like cement. By the time my knuckles bump against the axe, I’m already hyperventilating again. I have cobalt blue boots, I think. The legs of my suit are black with red stripes.
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74 (November 2018) Page 5
