With a wave of despair colder than the wind, Josephine realized that she might not be able to survive the descent even with the spiritual strengthening she’d get from having killed Crawford … but that she certainly wouldn’t survive without it.
I can’t, she thought; I can’t make it down without having spilled his blood on the rocks and snow.
The stone spur in her hand pulled at her insistently.
It’s you, she thought at it; you can’t go any higher. Well, I can.
The effort leached the color from her face and outlined her teeth starkly against her bloodless lips, but she managed to brace herself, flex her arm until she thought her sleeve would burst, and then actually pull her hand up off the stone claw.
Blood sprayed brightly in all directions as if she’d been shot, and for a moment the redly glistening stone hung suspended in the air—and then, with a scream that she heard only in her mind, it sprang away downward in the shadow of the mountain.
Her strength was going with the blood that was now jetting out of her and steaming in spatters on the ledge. Josephine clutched her ruined hand to herself and pressed her face against the rock wall, and her sobs were as grating and patient as the natural noises of the mountain.
Then she pulled the ribbons from her hair and knotted them tightly around her wrist—and, much more slowly now that she was unassisted, she resumed creeping up the side of the mountain.
Byron had glanced sharply across the sunlit rock face at Crawford, who now nodded to let him know that he had heard the psychic scream too—though Hobhouse and the guide, on a ledge below them, didn’t seem to have sensed anything.
“A lot of people hereabouts seem to find high altitudes uncongenial,” Byron remarked tightly, shaking sweaty hair out of his face.
Crawford was aware, with a sense that was neither quite hearing nor touch, of the minds of Hobhouse and the others below; and he would have given in to the increasing reluctance and depression if he had not constantly been reminded of his dead wife Julia; it almost seemed that he sensed her mind, too, on the mountain.
At last he pulled himself up over the last rock outcrop onto the rounded summit, even though every atom of his body seemed to be screaming at him to go back down—and then suddenly he was standing up on the wind-scoured irregular plateau, and the discomfort was gone, and the breeze was invigoratingly cold in his open, sweat-drenched shirt. He was tempted to scratch a line into the rock to mark the level at which the venom could finally be left behind.
The air seemed to be vibrating, at a frequency so high that it was scarcely discernible. He felt safe for now in ignoring it.
The summit was about a quarter the size of a cricket field, looking particularly tiny under the dominating, empty sky; he took several wobbly strides across it to look at the valleys and peaks spread out vastly distant below him—and at the Jungfrau that, miles away, still towered above. It seemed to him that he felt lighter for all the immense volume of air that he was now on top of, and he thought he must be able to jump much higher here than he could on the ground.
“I don’t think people have any problem at all,” he called back to Byron.
Then Byron, who had been looking more sick with every upward yard, dragged himself up over the last lip of stone onto the roughly level expanse, and suddenly his dark eyes glittered with renewed vitality.
“You’re right,” he said, some cheer back in his voice. He stood up, shaky as a newborn colt, and took a few steps toward Crawford. “If only we could live up here, and so be sure that the people we met were in fact people!”
Crawford sniffed the cold air uncertainly. He could no longer sense the vibration in the air, but he was sure it was still there, undetectable now because of being horribly higher in pitch. “I’m not sure …” he began.
Then abruptly his initial exhilaration was gone. There was something ominous about the atmosphere on the summit, a frigid vastness that both diminished him and made him seem perishable, in fact actively decaying, in his own eyes; glancing at Byron, he guessed the young lord was feeling it too, for his momentary cheer was gone—now his mouth was pinched and his eyes were bleak.
The sky was darkening and taking on an orange tint, and though it made him dizzy to do it Crawford glanced up at the sun, wondering if the climb could have taken a lot more time than he had thought; the sun, though, was still high in the firmament, indicating that the afternoon was still fresh—but now Crawford was distracted by something else.
There were lines in the sky, faint luminous streaks spanning the heavens from the northern horizon to the Italian peaks in the south; and though it was such a weird phenomenon that he could feel the hairs at the back of his neck stirring, it was at the same time distantly familiar. He had the feeling that he had seen this effect before, unthinkably long ago … and that the effect had been more pronounced then, the lines brighter … and despite the depression that had been increasing in the last several seconds and now sat on his shoulders almost like a physical weight, he was obscurely glad, for the sake of the rest of humanity, at least—for the sake of the infants being born now—to see that the lines had faded since.
Irrationally, he was reminded of the compass-cards shaking in the shop windows by the London Docks, and his whimsical idea that they were fluttering in some magnetic wind.
He tried to trace the memory of the sight of these sky-bands—something about particles from the sun—the particles could come down to the earth’s surface when the bands were weak, and they were poisonous to the … the other sentient race on Earth, the …
He let the thought go; suddenly it seemed presumptuous for a creature as insignificant and despicable as himself to attempt cogitation.
Byron was talking, in an oddly muffled voice. Crawford’s face was buffeted by a momentary puff of wind when he looked across at him, but he noticed that Byron’s voice was not quite in synchronization with the movement of his lips.
And even through the muffling effect of the air Crawford could hear the leaden fear in Byron’s voice. “Behind you,” Byron was saying. “Do you see a person there?”
Crawford turned, ignoring another abrupt punch of wind, and his shoulders slumped in despair when he recognized the figure that stood a few yards farther up the slope.
It was Julia, his wife—but she was as translucent as tinted glass. He couldn’t tell whether the trouble he was having in getting a breath into his lungs was a consequence of the altered air or his own shock.
“It’s a ghost,” said Byron hoarsely. “It’s the ghost of my sister Augusta. God, when can she have died? I’ve gotten letters from her within the month!”
Josephine peered over a shoulder of rock at Michael Crawford and pulled the pistol out of her skirt. She had pushed her goggles up onto her forehead when the light began to dim and redden, and now she could see perfectly—though breathing was getting difficult.
She had lived in the shadow of self-loathing all her life, and so the summit’s psychic field made no changes in her.
And the climb had actually become easier shortly after she had got rid of her flinty guide—toward the end she had seemed almost able to swim up the side of the mountain—and she now had the strength, even with her ruined left hand, to cock the gun. She raised it and aimed it at the center of Crawford’s torso.
He and Byron were standing slightly below her and no more than eight yards away—it was an easy shot, but she braced the gun barrel on a rock to make it certain. Finally she sighed and pulled the trigger.