“Come on, goddamn you,” he told her. “Swim!”
But her goggles were gone, leaving her completely blind except when holding still, so he had to drag her through the air. They were losing their buoyancy, and several times Crawford had to kick off from the ground as they floundered over to where Byron stood. Her empty eye socket left a trail of little globes of blood in their wake, all of them settling toward the ground as quickly as drops of vinegar through oil.
The air was loosening, and the sky was brightening back through orange toward the remembered blue, and when Crawford saw the translucent figure of Julia forming again, ahead of them, it occurred to him that he should have expected this. This phantom and the sphinx evidently each existed at specific intensities of the time-slowing they’d been experiencing—each of the apparitions only became visible or invisible as a viewer approached or receded from its characteristic point on the time spectrum.
It’s like looking through a telescope, he thought—nearby things blur out to invisibility as you focus farther away, then reappear when the scale gets back closer to normal. And this phantom lives only a few degrees outside of normal focus … unlike the sphinx, which was only barely visible even when time had slowed so extremely that the light was deep red and I could hardly drag air into my lungs.
The phantom’s eyes were bitter with hatred. It stood between them and the way down from the summit—they would have to step through it to climb down.
The self-loathing that he had been trying to hold at arm’s length increased in weight, but he knew it was being induced in him, and he tried to fight it.
“Augusta’s ghost,” said Byron, faltering and settling to the stone surface.
“No it’s not,” said Crawford wearily. His lungs were exhausted with the work of breathing, and felt ready to stop altogether. “I’m seeing it as … my dead wife, and God knows who our … lunatic friend here is seeing. Those weren’t real ghosts back there, either—the one pretending to be my wife said that I’d killed her, which"—he turned to speak directly into Josephine’s blood-streaked face—"my wife’s genuine ghost would know was not true.”
Byron looked back at him, desperately hopeful. “Really? Then might Augusta still be alive? If this isn’t—”
Crawford nodded, and reluctantly inhaled. “This thing, and those wormy phantoms that almost got this damned girl, are simply reflecting us, our … guilts and fears. And magnifying them, horribly. The sphinx’s castle is …” He paused, groping for a phrase. “… is guarded by distorting mirrors.”
Byron seemed to be almost convinced—and then the phantom woman spoke.
“I’m glad to be dead and rid of you at last,” said the thing that seemed to Crawford to be Julia. “You only diminished me, just cut me down like a tapestry you could trim into a momentarily pleasing garment, and then discard. You never knew me. You’ve never known anyone. You’ve always been alone.” And then her face changed, and Crawford saw his own features smiling coldly out of the insubstantial face. “This is the only one you were ever concerned about.”
Then abruptly it was Julia again, but Julia as he had seen her last, bloody and shapeless and jagged with broken bones, somehow still standing upright and staring at him with her ruptured and protruding eyes.
“Was this enough?” asked the horribly extended mouth. “Or do you require even more, from the people you tell yourself you love?” Behind the figure Crawford sensed waves crashing on rocks, and flames roaring out from under eaves.
Byron was apparently being shown something similar, for his face had gone ashen. “If this is even possible,” he whispered, perhaps to Crawford, “there can be no God—and no punishments but those we choose to take.” He waded through the thinning air away from the figure, away from the safe way down, to a lip of stone over a sheer drop.
He turned an unreadable look on Crawford. “It’s not so difficult to die,” he said, and then leaped out into space.
The next thing Crawford realized was that he was swimming after Byron, and he knew vaguely that he was giving in to the mountain’s psychically goading field, but also that he was fleeing from overwhelming exhaustion and horror and failure. He had reached the close limits of his self-regard, and now unquestioningly accepted what the phantom had said.
If I’m the only one I love, he thought dimly, then I’ll require it of myself, too—and when my body is a smashed, sun-dried framework of leather and bones wedged in the bottom of some Alpine ravine, I’ll be free of Michael Crawford, and everyone … and maybe, too, I’ll have paid off at least the bulk of my debts to my brother and wives.
He gave a wordless shout of renunciation and then leaped right after Byron.
The suicide impulse disappeared the moment he was in the air.
Through fear-squinted eyes he saw the whole Lutschen Valley spread out below him in the orange light, the rugged peak of Kleine Scheidegg to his right, and the Schilthorn far away ahead across the valley, and Byron’s back mercifully blocking the view of the sea of cloud directly below; he was falling perceptibly … but then someone had grabbed him from behind and was swimming back up against the weakening air.
Instinctively he reached out below him and grabbed Byron’s collar with one hand and began flailing at the air with the other; then Byron was swimming back upward himself, and Crawford was more being pulled than pulling.
Looking up, he saw a figure in a dress silhouetted against the sky, and he realized that it was Josephine who had grabbed him and hauled him back. She was swimming strongly upward with her legs and her free hand, but the air was thinning fast; all their struggling was only holding them in place, and the light was brightening to yellow.
“Never make it back up,” Crawford panted to his companions above him. “Slant in toward the slope—at least be against stone when gravity comes back full on.”
The other two nodded, and then they had all let go of each other and were swimming furiously toward a snow-piled stone shoulder slightly below them and to their left.
“Aim high!” Byron yelled.
They were still a good four yards out away from the ledge when the sky turned blue and they were suddenly flying through unresisting air … but the force of their previous swimming had left them with some forward momentum, and so instead of plummeting straight down, they tumbled forward in a parabola that slammed them onto the ledge they’d been aiming at.
Crawford’s head collided sickeningly hard with the rock wall, but through the shimmer of near unconsciousness he saw Josephine sliding toward the edge, and he managed to grab her wet hair—he couldn’t nearly have held on to her full weight, but he did halt her slide for a moment, and she got her legs under herself and was able to scramble back up onto the rough surface.
Byron was sitting up at Crawford’s left, massaging his knee and grimacing. “You can see I was ready to meet my maker,” he said. “I landed on my knees.” But in spite of his jocular tone, his face was as pale as dirty snow, and he didn’t look squarely at either of the others.
Crawford peered nervously over the edge, wincing to see the vast volumes of empty air and cloud that the three of them had nearly fallen through, and then he looked at Josephine.
She looked horrible in the bright, restored sunlight—her left eye was just a gory hole, and blood was streaked all over her face and matted in her hair, and her hand seemed to have been shot through. He wondered if she could survive.
“Thank you,” he told her hoarsely. “You saved … him and me both.”