The Wall by Jeff Long

Author:Jeff Long [Long, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
ISBN: 0743266161
Amazon: B000FCKO4A
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2006-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

At dawn, the two teams set off from the Archipelago, one up, one down. Lewis gave Hugh a fierce bear hug. “Preserve thyself,” he said.

“I always do,” Hugh said.

“I’m serious, watch out. There’s something in the air. You can almost hear it, I don’t know. Bad jazz.”

“Just the wings of angels,” said Hugh. Another of their chestnuts.

“Be careful.” Lewis paused. “With him.”

“Augustine?” said Hugh. “He’s obsessed, not crazy.”

“Have you seen what he’s wearing on his wrist? You haven’t. You’ll see. Ask him what it is. Because I think I know.”

“Yeah?”

“It could be nothing.” Lewis frowned at his own fretting. “You’ll probably say to yourself, so what’s new? How’s Augustine any different from old Lewis, you know, our thing for women we thought belonged to us. You’ll probably think that.”

“You worry too much,” Hugh said. What Lewis did was talk too much. He flashed his mysteries and premonitions like card tricks, rarely the same one twice, and normally Hugh found it entertaining. But now was not the time.

There was a tug on the doubled rappel line from below. Joe was waiting. “Train’s leaving,” Lewis said.

“Chin up,” said Hugh, “knots tight. Into the stone. The breach. All that.”

“Vaya con Dios.” Lewis gripped Hugh’s shoulder. “For real, man.”

Lewis backed into the maw. As he melted into the smoke with his head shrouded in strips of cloth, he reminded Hugh of the old goatherder who had plucked him from the desert, a figment of a mirage inside a dream. Or a nightmare.

For one barren instant, Hugh wondered if he was making a mistake, and whether or not he should go after Lewis and get away. So far, events had only gotten stranger by the vertical foot. And Lewis was spot on about sharing with Augustine an obsession with women who left them empty. In that sense, Hugh was simply swapping one man’s loss for another’s.

It was worse than that. Step by step, by coming to Yosemite and going up El Cap, and now by crossing into the unknown with a stranger, he was climbing back into his own loss. Descend now, and he could wash off the smoke, drive away, and be clean of it all. But again he felt it, even more powerfully this morning. Something was waiting for him over there.

Hugh scanned the Archipelago’s ledges a final time. Nothing remained of them except for a few footprints, and their buried thermos of mementoes. Even the dead insects and birds were disappearing into the sand, slowly being consumed by El Cap.

He lifted the slack of Augustine’s rope, feeling for its pulse. When the trembling finally stopped, he knew Augustine had reached the far end of the first rope, and it was his turn. He clamped on his jumars, stepped into the stirrups, and began climbing away from the Ark.

Through the first few hours, Hugh was essentially alone on the ropes. Visibility was ten feet at best, and Augustine stayed a full pitch ahead of him. At each anchor, Hugh found the haul bag waiting to be lowered across so Augustine could pull it into the heights.

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