The Abominable: A Novel

21.

I knew the instant I started free-climbing the impossible Second Step that whether I lived another three minutes—including the time I’d still be conscious while falling a mile and a half—or lived another seventy years, this would be the climbing effort I would be most proud of.

I couldn’t breathe well because of the ragged constriction in my throat, but to hell with that. I’d taken in one deep but unsatisfying gulp of the frigid open air here above 28,140 feet, and now I would complete this climb on that single gulp of oxygen. Or not.

Conventional wisdom and climbing experience suggested that I should try to stay to the far left of the 25-foot face, using the off-width crack for something.

To hell with that. Staying close to that off-width crack, I felt in my aching gut, meant death. I took a narrow branch of one of the smaller rising cracks to the right instead.

The largest of the vertical cracks on the right was all but filled with small, loose stones. Again—death to get one’s boot or hand in there. Forget that as well.

Hand-jams and fingers on nonexistent holds—and speed, as much speed as I could muster—got me up the first two-thirds of the flat face. Looking down would have just made me laugh out loud—the curve of the earth had been visible since we’d reached the foot of the First Step; here on the Second Step, the tops of mountains 200 miles away were peering over the haze of that impossible curve, and the summit of every 8,000-meter peak in the Himalayas was below me now—so I just refrained from sightseeing and kept moving upward like a lizard on hot rock.

Only this rock wasn’t hot; it was freezing with the deep cold of outer space. This damned slab faced mostly north and rarely got the sun’s rays to warm it. My hands and every part of my body coming in contact with it, and I wanted all my body in contact with it, were absorbing that numbing cold faster than I could scramble.

I put my freezing hands where I somehow knew invisible fingerholds would be. The steel tips of my crampons shot sparks from limestone and granite.

I was nearing the top now—which was a fucking overhang, of course, and one unclimbable even in Wales on a summer day unless you had Prusik knots galore, a stout rope to hang from, and one of Jean-Claude’s dog-name jumar doohickeys to cam-slide up and over it with—so I kept clawing my way upward, one crampon point finding a hold, then slip-sliding to my left toward that hitherto useless goddamned off-width crack.

Okay. Just because the crack was still too large up here for my hand or forearm to jam in, and still too narrow to hold my body, that didn’t mean I couldn’t jam my elbow into the crack with an angled arm lock, then, a fraction of a second later, cram my left foot and leg in below. That, I realized, was my plan.

Some plan.

There were no solid footholds or handholds anywhere near that crack, of course—God wasn’t going to make it that easy—but friction and speed are God in such a free climb, and I prayed to, and used, both to get a few feet higher.

Lungs burning now, vision tunneling, ignoring the pain as the sharp rock of the crack ripped at my leg, I knee-barred a couple of yards more up toward the top of the Second Step and encountered…another overhang.

Once again I had to stop myself from laughing. It would have used up the last oxygen in my lungs, not that my lungs had any oxygen left in them.

The overhang petered out about six feet to my right, so I extended my right leg as far as I could, crampons scraping, until my boot found a ledge there that was about the width of a broken pencil. I shifted all my weight to it, couldn’t find a hold for my sliding, questing right hand, and just used a friction grip against a slightly less than vertical part of the slab.

One more ledge, three feet higher, for my left boot, a few more seconds of teetering above absolutely nothing, and then I was up, the top half of my body over the lip of the overhang, my right hand finding ridges and rocks and holds galore. I was on top of the Second Step.

I pulled myself all the way up and rolled a few more inches away from the edge so that the 8,000-foot drop wasn’t directly under my head and shoulders or feet or butt any longer.

I still couldn’t get a breath, but I could stand, and I did so. Just a couple of feet beyond the cliff face of the Second Step up there was a nice four-foot-long-by-three-foot-wide limestone bench, with plenty of rock ripples, ridges, and even a few stunted bollards behind it for tying off belay ropes.

Thank you, God.

My breath rasping so painfully in and out of my sore throat that I thought I might scream, instead I called down—in a steady and calm voice, I was told later by Dr. Pasang—for everyone to start coming up as I belayed them. I’d brought 120 feet of Miracle Rope with me; with the tie-offs around the rock bench and bollards, I used 97 feet of it.

The Deacon took his time, trying to free-climb major parts of the route himself but saving himself by falling back on the tension of the rope two or three times. I didn’t care and would never mention it to him. We weren’t in a contest here.

Everyone else—except Jean-Claude—fully used the tension of the tied-off rope, belayed by two of us now, then three, then four, to make the impossible climb possible.

No one could resist looking around from the summit of the Second Step. There was a Third Step beyond this one, further up the North East Ridge and just before Everest’s snowy Summit Pyramid, but that last step was a marshmallow compared to this crag. It was immediately obvious that we could traverse around it on the snowfield there if we didn’t want to scramble up and over the boulders.

Beyond the Third Step—which it seemed we could throw a stone and hit—a snow slope led, first gradually and then very steeply, to the Summit Pyramid. That would be careful climbing, but nowhere near as technical as this Second Step.

And then there was only the snowy summit with its treacherous cornices, all perfectly visible in the crystal air and pure sunshine. A little raggedy remnant of the former lenticular cloud trailed westward from that summit, but it wasn’t a change-of-weather-to-a-storm sort of lenticular. The wind here atop the Second Step was very strong, blowing, as always, from the northwest, but we leaned into it and screamed our joy aloud.

At least some of the others did.

I finally realized that I was not breathing at all. As my four friends took several steps further west atop the Second Step, I fell to my knees and then to all fours just beyond the limestone bench.

I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t even cough. No air was moving in or out of my aching, battered lungs. The sharp lobster claw in my lower throat—feeling more like a jagged mass of cold metal now—was blocking all breathing. I was dying. I knew I was dying. My four friends were shouting and clapping each other on the back and looking up at the summit of Everest in the noon sunlight and I was dying, my vision already changing from dancing black spots to a quickly closing tunnel of blackness.

Dr. Pasang turned around and took three quick strides to my side. He went to one knee, and I was distantly—irrelevantly, with real death this close—aware of the other three also surrounding me now, the men looking down at me in confusion, Reggie kneeling next to me but obviously not knowing what to do. It’s true, I thought and learned forever in that second. We do all die completely alone, no matter who’s nearby.

“Help me prop him up,” came Pasang’s voice down an infinitely receding passage to sight and sound. I distantly felt someone’s hands roughly hauling me up off the rock, steadying me on my knees.

It didn’t matter. It had been a minute and a half or two minutes now when I could draw no breath, expel no breath. The broken thing in my throat was cutting my throat open from the inside. I was drowning. Had already drowned. But without even the false gift of water rather than air filling my lungs. I made a few final gagging sounds and tried to topple forward, but someone’s hands still held my shoulders, insisting on making me die in a kneeling position. I was only vaguely sorry I was dying—I would have liked to have helped my four friends a little more.

But I got them up the Second Step. This was my last conscious thought.

Pasang’s palm—I believe it was Pasang’s broad hand—pressed so firmly against my chest that I was sure he was breaking ribs and my breastbone with the terrible pressure. It didn’t matter.

At the same second, he slapped me so sharply on the back that my spine almost snapped.

In one mighty, bloody push—as if some terrible sharp-edged creature were being born through my throat and mouth—the obstruction came up and flew free.

Reggie finally allowed me to fall forward over the thing I’d coughed up—it looked like a bloody part of my spine, a crimson-covered super-trilobite that must have crawled down my throat while I slept at Camp V some nights earlier—but I didn’t care what the monster was, I was nearly weeping with the joy of being able to breathe again. Breathe painfully, it was true, but breathe. Air moved in and out. The tunnel of vision blackout widened and went away. I squinted in the bright light until Reggie gently pulled my goggles back into place. I’d climbed the Second Step without the goggles on so I could see my feet, see everything, but I didn’t want Colonel Norton’s agony of snow blindness.

I’m going to live after all, I thought giddily. I retched a little, spat a lot, and spattered some more blood onto the spiny thing I’d coughed up onto the rock.

“What is it, Dr. Pasang?” asked Jean-Claude.

“It is…was…the mucous membrane surrounding his larynx,” said Pasang.

“But it’s as solid and spiky as a crab,” said the Deacon.

“It’s been frostbitten for days,” said Dr. Pasang. “Frozen solid. Filling his throat and esophagus more and more as it expanded until it completely blocked his airway.”

“Can he live without it?” asked the Deacon. To my ear, he sounded only mildly curious. I made a mental note to ask him about that later.

“Of course,” said Pasang, smiling. “It will be painful breathing for some days for Mr. Perry, and we’ll have to get him down to thicker air soon, but he should be fine.”

It bothered me that they were talking about me as if I weren’t even there; as if I’d died after all. With only a little help, I struggled to my feet. God Almighty, my friends’ goggled faces and the amazing Summit Pyramid and deep, deep blue sky behind them and the white peaks and amazing curve of the earth beyond that were beautiful. I almost wept with joy.

“Do not move,” said Bruno Sigl from just six or eight feet behind us. I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see the black pistol aimed at us, the Luger held steady in his right hand and the Lee-Enfield rifle slung over his left shoulder. He stood atop the limestone bench where I’d tied off the climbing ropes, his legs apart, his body perfectly balanced, too far away for us to try rushing him, towering over us with the Luger held steady. Victorious.

“If anyone moves the slightest bit,” said Sigl, “I will at once shoot all of you. I do not need any of you alive any longer. And thank you, Herr Perry, for the helpful fixed rope up this interesting Second Step.”