Echo

by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Break the dynamics between two people and you’re both left alone, staring wide-eyed out into your own darkness.

There is always a moment when the descent starts to feel more like an escape. The solitude, pleasant at first, becomes brooding. Conversations become measured. Beauty becomes a somber threat. The mountain’s spell is gone; you want to get down as quickly as possible. Fatigue starts to take its toll, but it’s essential to remain fully concentrated, because the grim reality is that most accidents happen on the way down.

A haunted mountain, a descent routed by birds. We all tell stories when we can’t face the truth.

It’s like I never left that place. Sometimes I can still hear the wind wail. In the distance, just beyond the real world. I know that wind. It’s the wind that blasted over the glacier, high above the crevasse we fell in. And above the wind I can hear Augustin laughing, only, after a while he isn’t laughing anymore but screaming. Wherever I go. Here. The cellar. The AMC. It follows me. I can’t shake it.

That mountain, I thought. It’s got into you. You are the mountain now, only not like you think. That’s the exact definition of obsession.

you can’t laugh, you either cry or go stark raving mad.

Still, everything that was so logical before we’d left now seemed deranged. And the disquieting feeling crept over me that the line between chasing shadows and fighting lunacy had become so fine, so unclear and fluid, that you could hardly call it a line anymore.

“Don’t you know the stories? Death birds are said to guide the souls of fallen climbers out of this world. If you believe what the old guides and mountain folk say, at least.” “And do you?” He smiles. “Did you know mountain rescuers often find fallen climbers without their eyes? By the time they find the bodies, the birds have already gotten to them. Ravens, jackdaws, crows; they pick out the eyes and swallow them up.” “Jeez, really?” “Ask one of those guides. They say the birds do it so the soul is free to escape. Otherwise it’s doomed to stay and haunt the place it was found in. But sometimes the soul doesn’t want to leave and it lingers inside the bird for a while. They say that if you listen, you can hear their screams coming from the mountains at night.”

As I look at the Maudit, I realize this mountain’s soul is old and dangerous. I see it as an evil, dark blot. A cancer spreading over the valley. I suddenly become dead scared. We are unwelcome here. I can feel it all over.

That’s how horror stories work: they dull reality’s sharper edges. Made the face hiding behind the bandages a little less frightening. Cuz it could always be worse.

Time erodes even the highest, sharpest mountain peaks down to rolling horizons. But the mountains had a prospect of millions of years. I only had my life. And there was something else. A good horror story didn’t end with death. It resonated with the echo of something worse. Something buried underneath, a layer worse than all the others.

This is how mountains are born. You take two tectonic plates and twirl them into one. They twist, they crack, they raise each other up and release explosions of energy that manifest as quakes and eruptions. But they push each other higher up than ever before, higher than they could have reached on their own, even in their wildest dreams. Their snow and their rock, their hearts and their bones—they never come undone.