“Fuck,” I groaned.
“Shotsky’s dead?”
I sighed. “Yes. The end of the first day taking him back to base camp. Heart attack. We tried to revive him, but it was quick.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Andrew and I agreed it would be best not to tell anyone. Morale reasons or whatever. I don’t know. It made sense at the time, but now … well, shit, everything’s fucked up now.”
Petras’s eyes bored into me, heavy on my soul. I told him I was sorry for deceiving him and the others.
“I guess it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t bring Shotsky back.”
“No,” I admitted, “it doesn’t.”
“And there’s no good reason to tell Mike and Chad now. Especially after what happened with Curtis. This whole thing’s turned into a fuck-a-row.” He handed me one of the fresh bottles. The snow inside had already melted. “Here. Drink this. Stay hydrated.”
I gulped down half the bottle, wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my sweatshirt once I’d finished. Out in the snow, I refilled the bottle, while Petras, in contemplative silence, rearranged some of the items in his pack. When he swiveled in my direction, his expression was telling.
“What’s the matter?” I said after the silence had become overwhelmingly obvious. “What are you thinking?”
Petras chewed at his lower lip. “Not quite sure yet. Working over some things in my head but nothing that’s—”
He stopped as voices floated down to us from the top of the pass. A moment later, three darkened figures sauntered toward the lean-to.
“I’ll tell you later,” Petras promised and zipped up his backpack.
“Look who’s decided to join us again,” Chad said, his heavy boots kicking up clouds of snow dust as he approached the fire. “You were babbling like Linda Blair for a while there, Shakes. Was waiting for your head to spin around and pea soup to come spewing out of your mouth.”
“Lousy company will make people do strange things,” I retorted, although since the incident on the arch where he’d saved my life, I no longer felt any genuine disdain for Chad Nando. It was all playful shtick now.
“Well?” Petras said. “What’d you guys find?”
Andrew sat on a roll of tarpaulin near the fire and unfolded a map in his lap. “The entrance to the Hall of Mirrors is just where the Sherpas predicted it to be. It’s a cave—a mouth—right in the center of the mountain. Maybe fifty yards up the pass.”
“The opening’s maybe a hundred yards from the ground,” Chad added. “We’ll have to do a short climb to reach it, but it shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Do we know what to expect once we’re inside the cave?” I asked.
“Legend says it’s just a straight tunnel that empties into an antechamber called the Hall of Mirrors,” Andrew said.
I asked him why it was called the Hall of Mirrors.
Andrew snickered and rubbed two fingers across his creased forehead. “Honestly, I have no idea.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Then from there?”
Andrew continued to rub his brow. “There’s supposed to be an opening, a doorway of sorts, somewhere in the Hall of Mirrors. It leads directly to the Canyon of Souls.”
“But no one’s ever seen the canyon,” I said. “Right?”
“Well, no … but so far everything has been verified—the Valley of Walls, the Sanctuary of the Gods, the stone arch and the icefall, and now the opening to the Hall of Mirrors.”
“How wide is this canyon supposed to be?” Petras asked.
Andrew shrugged. “No clue. Two feet wide … or two thousand. No one knows for sure.”
“Someone must have been there,” I suggested, “to know it exists.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Andrew agreed, “but it’s never been officially documented. Could be stories passed down from bands of monks or Sherpas or Yogis. Could be campfire tales told by ancient yak herders who once lived in the valleys around these mountains. Christ, for all we know, it could be the equivalent of the stories from the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth, water into wine, and all that. How do any of these talessurvive from one generation to the next? I don’t know.”
It didn’t comfort me any to hear Andrew relate the Canyon of Souls to the stories of the Bible. To think Donald Shotsky and Curtis Booker died chasing some fairy tale did not sit well with me.
Andrew looked at me. His eyes gleamed in the firelight. His face was gaunt, nearly skeletal. “Will you be ready to climb tomorrow morning?” I said I would.
2
THERE WERE NO DREAMS AT THIS ALTITUDE.
3
IN THE MORNING. BLADES OF ICE SLASHED INTO THE
canvas tent and stuck like spears into the smoldering remains of our campfire. Hail came down like bullets, boring tunnels several inches deep into the packed snow.
We drank cold coffee, and I ate the rest of the stale bread I’d rationed from Shotsky’s pack after he died while we watched the hail through the opening in the tent. Chad and Hollinger busied themselves with a deck of cards, and Petras thumbed through the remaining pages of the George Mallory book.
Andrew sat by the tent’s open flaps watching the hailstones. “Looks like it’s letting up. I’ll give it ten seconds. Ten … nine … eight …”
I sat at the rear of the tent, my legs resting on my pack, dragging the blade of Petras’s hunting knife across a softball-sized stone. “Seven … six …”
I slipped and drove the edge of the knife into the soft mound of flesh just below my thumb. It didn’t hurt, but blood surfaced almost instantaneously, running in a single stream down my wrist and soaking the cuff of my flannel shirt. I grabbed one of my socks and—
1
—WRAPPED MY INJURED HAND IN A BANDAGE.
Splotches of blood lay like asterisks on the linoleum floor of my studio, and there were two drops on the half-finished sculpture. Out along M Street, the lampposts radiated an incandescent blue, and the traffic was becoming heavy.
At the sink, I washed the blood off my chisel, which had carelessly jumped from the stone and bit into the tender flesh of my palm. However, the chisel might not have been as careless if its handler hadn’t had so many scotch and sodas throughout the afternoon. Tightening the bandage around my hand, I removed my smock and turned the lights off in the studio before locking up for the evening.
Thirty minutes later, I arrived home to our split-level along the waterfront, the house dark in the deepening twilight. I kicked my shoes off in the front hallway and called Hannah’s name up the stairs. In the kitchen, I prepared a pot of coffee and set it on the stove, then climbed the creaking stairwell to the second floor.
The house was empty. The bed in the master bedroom hadn’t been made this morning, which was unusual, and the towel from my morning shower was still draped over the shower curtain rod. My dirty underwear was still in a ball next to the toilet. “Hannah?”
I stood inside the bedroom doorway while my mind strummed. The closet doors stood open, and after a second or two, I noticed Hannah’s large floral suitcase—the one she took on our honeymoon to Puerto Rico—was missing.
Frantic, I drove back into the city and cruised past Hannah’s gallery. There was a Closed sign in the window, but there were lights on inside. I double-parked the car, bounded to the door, and knocked.
Kristy Lynn, Hannah’s twenty-two-year-old assistant, answered
the door. “Hey, Mr. Overleigh. What’s up?”
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“Oh. Well, she isn’t here.”
“No?”
“Nope. Sorry.” Kristy Lynn curled a length of her dyed black hair. Her dark blue fingernail polish made the tips of her fingers look like those of a corpse. “Hasn’t been in all day.”