“He’s lost his mind. Things are all fucked up.”
“Go to sleep,” I told him.
“All fucked up.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Go to hell.”
I grabbed Hollinger’s electric lantern and headed for the mouth of the tunnel. Andrew was sleeping at the foot of the entrance. I stepped over him and continued down the corridor, the lantern casting very little light beyond the small halo around itself. After a gradual bend in the tunnel, I could see the moonlight cast along the frozen tongue of ice that clung to the bottom lip of the cave’s opening. I set the lantern down and sighed, unzipping my fly and urinating into the wind. My stream seemed to freeze midway down the mountainside; I heard it shatter like glass on the rocks below.
Shaking off, I zipped up my pants and grabbed the lantern. I nearly ran into Andrew when I turned around, his face ghost white, his eyes colorless and void of feeling. I skidded on the tongue of ice and almost dropped the lantern.
“Boo,” he said quietly.
“Jesus Christ.” I brushed past him, knocking his shoulder with mine (though this wasn’t on purpose) and holding the lantern up to guide my way. “Tim.”
I paused, unsure if I wanted to turn around and look at him again.
“It had to be done,” he said to the back of my head.
“We’re through. Doesn’t matter how close we are, doesn’t matter what you want. We’re turning back tomorrow. With or without you.”
Andrew didn’t respond. We both stood there in the shimmer of a pale moon, half hidden in the darkness of the cave for several seconds without moving, without speaking another word.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Andrew said, “Do you blame yourself?”
I turned around, holding the lantern in his direction. His face was a mask of shadows. “Chad’s death was an accident, a horrible accident.
You were right—he was going to die anyway. I don’t blame anyone. Not even you.”
“I wasn’t talking about Chad,” he said.
I stared at him. There was a hot rumble in my guts. I knew what he was talking about. I knew it wasn’t Chad.
“Because I want you to blame yourself, Tim,” he said. “I want you to blame yourself.”
“You’re a sick bastard,” I told him. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never know how a woman like Hannah befriended a creep like you.”
The hint of a grin seemed to play across Andrew’s face.
I lowered the lantern and receded into the dark cover of the tunnel, walking backward and staring at Andrew Trumbauer’s silhouette poised at the mouth of the cave. He looked like the fleeting remnants of a nightmare.
7
IN THE MORNING. ANDREW WAS GONE. HE’D LEFT
behind Hollinger’s electric lantern but took his gear as well as our petrol stove. I used the lantern to search the cave, but I found no sign of him. There didn’t appear to be any fresh footprints in the snow outside the cave, down along the pass beyond the hundred-yard drop. He’d simply vanished. As if he’d never existed.
Back in the Hall of Mirrors, Petras and Hollinger tried to force down a light breakfast. I had attempted the same moments ago, but my stomach refused to cooperate. I hadn’t kicked the fever like I thought I had, either; I could feel it asleep in the center of my body, hibernating but still very much alive.
Petras looked at me. “Anything?”
“He disappeared.”
Across the chamber, the bright blue tarpaulin was a constant reminder of all that had happened and what still lay beneath. It wasimpossible for my gaze not to drift in that direction every couple of minutes. Too much longer in this reflective chamber and I’d lose my mind. Glancing around, my beaten, filthy reflection stared at me from every wall.
“Have some cold tea,” Petras offered. “It tastes horrible but it’s something.“
I sat with them and held the tin cup of cold green tea between my hands but didn’t drink any. My stomach was incapable of keeping anything down. I looked at the panel of ice in the ceiling. Warmed by daylight, it dripped constant streams of water against the exposed rock until nighttime when it would freeze all over again.
“Do we wait around for him, or do we just leave?” Hollinger said finally.
Petras’s eyes briefly met mine.
“We wait until dark to leave,” I suggested. “If Andrew hasn’t returned by then, we go without him.”
Hollinger looked incredulous. “In the dark?”
“We’ve got nothing to make a fire, to make heat. Andrew’s got the lighter fluid, the petrol stove, the goddamn matches. We need to keep moving at night to keep our blood pumping and our bodies warm; otherwise we’ll freeze. We’ll rest during the day.”
Hollinger stared at the black maw of the cave. “Where do you think he went? Did he climb back down the fucking rock?”
Neither of us answered.
Hollinger turned his gaze on the sheet of tarpaulin. “Christ, I can still see him in my head, you know? And the way Andrew brought the goddamn ax down into his … into his head …” He shivered. “Any of you guys know much about him?”
“Chad? No,” I said.
“No,” echoed Petras.
“Like if the bloke had a family or someone waiting for him back home,” Hollinger went on.
“I have no fucking idea, Holly,” I said. It wasn’t his fault, but I was growing irritated by the sound of his voice. “What’s it matter?”
“Maybe we should go through his gear,” Hollinger said. “Maybe he’s got stuff in there that he wouldn’t want left behind in this place.”
“And where would we take it?” I barked. “We’re not exactly on the red-eye out of this place, either, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Petras placed a steadying hand on my knee. Cool it, his glare said.
“Fuck it.” Hollinger slid up the wall until he was standing and dusted the snow off his pants. “I need to piss.”
Without a word I handed him the electric lantern—the only one that still worked—and he switched it on. His head down, his feet dragging tracks in the snow, he shuffled across the antechamber until he crossed into the tunnel and vanished in the dark.
I eased my head down against my pack and folded my hands across my chest. I tried to shut my eyes, but they refused to cooperate. Instead, they focused on the blue tarpaulin at the other end of the chamber.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said quietly. “It’s sick, but Andrew was right. Chad wasn’t going to make it.”
“I know.”
“Anyone else could have done it, and it wouldn’t have been as bad. It’s worse that Andrew did it. Somehow that makes it worse.”
“We need to keep watch,” Petras said. “We need to take turns watching for him. We shouldn’t all fall asleep at the same time.”
I looked at him. “You think it’s … that serious?”
“Let’s just stay on the safer side of chance.”
“All right.”
He nodded. “All right.”
My gaze turned back to the blue slab of tarpaulin and trailed up the snow-packed boulder that leaned at an angle against the nearest ice wall. My eyelids felt stiff and heavy, my body sore from head to toe.
Beside me, Petras began snoring like a lumberjack, his nostrils flaring with each powerful exhalation.
I caught a glimpse of Hannah’s reflection in one of the mirrored walls of ice and sat up. Her image glided along the wall, undulating with the imperfections in the ice, and disappeared behind the solid white pylon of snow and ice that had crushed Chad.
I stood and walked across the chamber, passing under that circular spotlight of light, and over to the finger-shaped pylon that had shattered Chad Nando’s pelvis. I stopped walking when I heard an unnatural crumpling sound beneath my boots and realized, with sickening lucidity, that I’d stepped onto the tarpaulin.