It was only then that he heard singing. The song was eerie and distant and sounded
like nothing human, and Abe guessed the wind was playing through the high towers.
That or some animal had been driven up from the forest. Or spirits were on the loose.
Abe listened harder. Between the howl of wind and the hiss of corn snow guttering
off his tent wall, he found a rhythm and a tune and a sunniness to it. It was a Beach
Boys song.
Even as he listened, Abe felt the storm layering him with snow all over again. He
shook the tent hard but carefully, for after all his shaking around there was no telling
where the crevasse lay now. Rooting through the folds of the tent, Abe found a
flashlight and shined it outside. He was horrified and at the same time enchanted by
how the falling snow actually devoured his light. The beam reached a few feet beyond
his little nylon cave, then vanished.
It took him several minutes to locate the crevasse. The hole had closed to a small
circle, as if stealing its catch away from the world for good. Still lying inside his
sleeping bag and tent, Abe edged closer. The singing became more distinct, but that
only made it more alien because Diana wasn't singing real words, only jibberish.
Now Abe found the ice axe they had left him. In thrashing around, he'd landed on
top of the axe. The pick had slashed his sleeping bag and down feathers had spilled
everywhere. There was blood on the metal head, and for a bad moment Abe thought
he'd cut himself and was too cold to feel the wound. Then he realized this was Daniel's
axe and Daniel's blood.
Reaching his arm outside, Abe poked at the edges of the hole to widen it. He began
chopping, methodically cutting away at the snow even though the debris poured down
the crevasse, adding to Diana's misery. 'I'm sorry,' he shouted to her, 'I'm sorry.' It
was for himself that Abe cut at the snow. He needed to keep open this doorway to the
underworld. He was afraid to lose contact, quite certain that without Diana's company,
he would never make it through this ordeal.
When Abe had finally cut down to the blue rope and gained proof of his companion,
he rested. He slept. When his eyes opened again, it was day, but it might as well have
been night still. The storm was raging more fiercely than before. Abe couldn't see
anything outside the tent and he couldn't see anything inside it, either, without the
flashlight.
Abe turned to rebuilding his tent. Section by section, he propped the walls up with
the broken poles and taught himself to rustle the fabric every few minutes to shed the
snow. And all the while, he listened to Diana's mindless singing.
'You're going to make it,' Abe shouted down the crevasse. He found some cheese and
a chunk of wet bread and a plastic bottle of mostly frozen water. 'You want some
food?' he yelled.
Diana made no answer. She just sang on and on.
While Abe ate and drank, he listened. It was essentially the same tune over and
over. The words weren't real words. They were sounds to mark a path. Locked in
place, Diana was circling around and around. Soon the vortex would suck her into its
deepest part. Abe knew he was listening to the sound of death.
Finally Abe joined in the singing. He'd heard this song many times before, but he
couldn't remember what the words were either. With the woman's same abandon,
Abe threw his voice out into the void all around them.
After a while Diana seemed to notice the extra voice. Somewhere in her benighted
skull, Abe's singing freed Diana to depart from the song and actually talk. She began to
emit bursts of story. Abe labored to hear what she had to say. It was a freewheeling
autobiography, woven together from memories and fictions and pleas for her mother's
comfort. It made Abe weep sometimes, and other times just bored him.
The stormy day passed. Night moved in again.
As the darkness stretched out and Abe drifted into delirious catnaps, it was hard to
tell what was real anymore. He grew colder and a little crazy himself, and it was hard
to know what was even spoken. Much of what Abe heard he may have imagined.
Diana may or may not have been a college student with a bad job and a drafty
trailer-home and allegiance to some crazy woman. She seemed to have three brothers
named John and Wes and Blake, which Abe began to suspect because those were his
own uncles' names. Her talk about mountains was probably real, because she
described spring wildflowers Abe had never heard of. She wanted to climb Everest
someday, though that might as easily have been Abe's overlay. Abe gave up trying to
keep the woman – or himself – lucid with questions or dialogue.
Abe finally concluded that the name of her dogged savior was completely lost to her,
for she'd quit saying his name altogether. He accepted that she had ceased to
understand he was lying on the surface above or even that she was caged inside the
mountain. Abe's presence had not loaned one ounce of dignity to her long and ugly
dying, and he resigned himself to anonymity. It was then, during a lull in the gale, that
she cried out.
'I love you,' she yelled.
Abe knew she meant someone else, yet all he could think to reply was the same. 'I
love you,' he shouted into the crevasse, and so she wouldn't think it was just her own
echo, he added, 'Diana.' Her name sank down the hole, a pebble dropped into the
ocean.
But something happened. A single word came drifting back up the hole. 'Abe,' she
spoke.
The storm and the waiting went on for a very long time. Abe's watch had come off in
his struggles, so he had no idea how much time passed, only that he and his invisible
lover were both losing their faculties and blurring their memories and mixing in the
same dream.
At one point Abe turned his palms up and noticed that he'd rope-burned the pads
down to the white gristle. He didn't remember doing that, but the snow was pink with
blood around the blue rope, and the pink was fresh.
In the end, there was silence.
Dawn never broke, but an exhausted light did finally seep into the sky. Overnight,
Abe had taken ill from the water or maybe from the storm itself and the cold and the
sounds, and his tent had collapsed again. He was very cold and thirsty and tired. But
the storm had passed. The wind had quit. He flapped open the tent door. The
crevasse had pinched nearly shut. Nothing more could be done.
'Hello,' he called into the crevasse. The word emerged as blue frost.
There was no answer. No more song, no more jibberish. Maybe she was still alive,
just mute now, eyes wide, a zombie pinned in its crypt for the rest of time.
Abe shook loose from the snow and wormed out of the tent. The night and day and
night had bled him of his strength. It took his full concentration just to stand up. His
parka was soaked and frozen. His feet were dead blocks.
He faced the crevasse, which had puckered shut again. The hole was only a few
inches across now. The blue rope was buried deep again. The earth was sealing over.
'Good-bye,' Abe croaked. He said it to a memory, to the place itself. He said it to deep
part of himself.
Without another thought, Abe abandoned the tent and the torn sleeping bag and his
pack, which had blown away anyway. The water bottle was frozen solid and useless.
The thought of food turned his stomach. He simply backed away from the hole and