The Abominable: A Novel

left and sliding toward a part of the face that curves in enough below to be called a drop-off. I go off that, I go all the way down to where the Deacon is napping. Dragging J.C. with me if he’s not smart enough to cut the rope with the knife. I think I should scream at him to do just that—he’s only about 40 feet away and shifting in his impossible position to put more weight on his right arm along the thin ridge—but I’m too busy to scream. If he cuts it, he cuts. If he doesn’t, he dies with me. It’ll be decided in seconds.

The slide is cartwheeling to my left and within seconds I’m head down, still spread-eagled, upside down, my face and upper body being scraped bloody across suddenly rougher rock.

Rougher rock.

My bloody fingers become claws, trying to find a ridge big enough to grab and stop this quickening fall and swing me around. My claws lose a fingernail or two but don’t stop or slow me—the upside-down position doesn’t help matters.

I’m already about 20 meters below the face I’d been traversing and I’m picking up speed—the rope hasn’t gone taut yet, the remnant is flying off my shoulder still slack for Jean-Claude, and when it gets to the extra 40 feet or so of tied-on rope in my rucksack, I’ll be over the edge only a few meters ahead of me and in freefall.

Suddenly the toe of my right sneaker finds a deep part of one of these rough wrinkles in the stone just above the drop-off and I slam to a stop. “Ummphh!”

The rucksack tries to keep going over my head but doesn’t pull me off.

For long seconds—hours, maybe—I hang there upside down, still spread-eagled, blood from my hands and torn cheek rivuleting down the rock just below me, and then I begin the slow process of figuring out how to get right side up from that one tennis shoe toehold above me and then what to do next.

The first part offers one real option, and I don’t like it much. Somehow keeping the one toehold, I have to bend the rest of my body into as tight a U as I can, arms and bloody fingers fully extended vertically, and before that ridiculous posture pulls my sneaker out of the fault line and J.C. and me off the face, I have to get a hand jammed in there. It will be a curved-body flailing lunge as my foot comes out and I start sliding again.

Not good alpine form, by anyone’s standards. I’m suddenly happy that the Deacon, still 200 feet below, isn’t watching what very well might be my last seconds.

The upside-down position is just going to sap my energy, blur my thinking with blood rushing to my head, and make me weaker every second I think about this. The toe of the right sneaker may not continue its jammed hold for many more seconds.

I twist myself as hard right across the rock as I can, using the roughness for fingerholds as I bend myself into the tight U. The toe of my sneaker comes out before I want it to and my legs slide free again, nothing to stop me now before the drop-off, but I’ve gained inertia in the U-turn and I scrabble and lunge upward toward the ridge my foot has found.

Thanks be to God it’s not just one narrow ridge but an actual fissure, deep enough to accommodate both hands jammed into it, and as I hang head-up vertical again, my hands deep in the fissure, even my sneakers finding some toeholds on the rough rock below where my head had been a few seconds earlier, I see that this fissure—about six inches from top to bottom and eighteen inches or more deep—keeps running to the left all the way to a spot about 25 feet beneath the pipe ledge. The horizontal crack even accommodatingly climbs a bit toward the end, getting me closer to the pipe ledge.

I hear Jean-Claude shouting down—the curve of the face is hiding me from him: “Jake! Jake?”

“I’m fine!” I shout back as loudly as I can. An echo returns from surrounding crags.

Am I fine? I can shinny my way left using my hands in this crack, but there’s a better alpine way.

I carefully study the rock and find the ridges above the crack that could be sufficient for fingerholds. Keeping one hand in the crack for emergency arrest, I lunge at one of the wrinkles with my right hand. It’s more than arm’s length, so I have to push up toward it with knees and sneakers scrambling like a character in one of those new short Disney features from America where a live-action “Alice in Wonderland” interacts with clumsily drawn cartoon characters. In this instanceI am the clumsy cartoon character, all rubbery legs and wildly pedaling feet.

I find the handhold wrinkle, it’s adequate, I lunge up to my left—this one is less secure but it holds me as I pull and scramble my weight up above the fissure, using speed and friction again to temporarily defy gravity.

It works. My feet are now in the fissure below, and moving to my left is just a matter of shuffling slowly. Even when there’s no fully secure cleft or ridge for either of my hands, upper-body contact with the curved stone works. I’m on a shuffle-fast highway now, and within a few minutes I’m at the high point of the crack, still about 15 bare-rock feet beneath the beginning of that goddamned pipe ridge.

I look up at it. I don’t want to take my feet out of this life-saving fissure. I don’t want to go back to spread- eagle friction and a prayer. To my right, the long rope to Jean-Claude curves up and out of sight. There’s just enough bulge to the rock to hide my climbing partner from sight.

Slowly confidence flows back into me. I learned to climb on rock scrambles—in Massachusetts and other climbing spots in New England, and then twice in the Rocky Mountains, and once on a summer expedition to Alaska. After two years with my climbing friends from Harvard, I was the rock man of our group.

And this is a lousy 15 feet of smooth rock ascent. Come on, Jake, sheer vertical inertia, teeth, knees, sneaker toes, and then teeth again—if need be—can find enough three-second-type holds to get you up 15 feet.

I lunge up, arms wide, fingers clawing, pull my feet from the safety of the wonderful fissure, and crawl and clamber and climb.

I’m so tired when I reach the pipe ledge ridge that I have to pause, dangling a moment, before lifting myself up and over, onto grass.

God damn the Deacon. He risked both Jean-Claude’s and my life for—what?

His damned pipe is lying in the grass about ten feet to my right as I stand looking out at the truly impressive view that the Deacon enjoyed just by rappelling down here at my expense. There’s also a thin boulder curving up and back that will make a wonderful rappel anchor. I loop some of the rope around that, step back to my left, and wave at Jean-Claude, who has moved back to the vertical crack, my ice axe jammed in beneath his feet now. His new belay position, one arm deep in the crack, teetering atop the curved steel of the ice axe, might have stopped me if I’d gone over the edge.

Maybe.

Probably not.

I catch my breath for another moment and shout, “Ready! On belay!” The echoes return.

Jean-Claude waves his positive response. I’ve tightened the 60 or so feet of rope connecting us.

J.C. has a very complicated moment getting off the skinny shelf of my ice axe, using the vertical crack to climb below it, retrieving the axe, and sliding it into the loop on his own rucksack.

Then he waves again from that strangely great distance, shouts “Climbing!” and moves out onto the face.

He falls after this third traverse pitch. He just begins sliding as I had, but at least the rope between us keeps Jean-Claude head up as he hurtles down toward the overhang and freefall.

He’s not going to get there. There’s less than 40 feet of rope between us now, and I plant one foot on a boulder for extra leverage and easily hold him on the belay I’d worked around the short spire rock behind me. That will fray the rope as we pull Jean-Claude higher, but there’s nothing to be done about that. We’ll inspect it and use shorter rope on the rappels if we must.

Jean-Claude gives up on trying to self-arrest—saving his fingers and nails and knees from much damage— and just swings beneath me in a wide arc, easily held by my belay, until he swings back directly beneath me.

Then I do brace myself, even with the spire rock for backup, as J.C. pulls himself upright while holding the rope until his boot soles are on the rock face. He begins climbing that way—the tense and fraying rope his only hold—and I belay him up as quickly as I can, not wanting that rope to fray against the rock longer than it has to. It’s good Manila rope, the most expensive the Deacon could find, but it’s only a half-inch-thick lifeline.

Then he’s up, pulling himself over the final ledge, and collapsing onto the grass.

I coil the rope, inspecting it carefully.

“Fuck the Deacon,” J.C. says in French, gasping out the words.

I nod. That phrase is the second half of my tiny French vocabulary. And I agree with the sentiment.