Reid hastened his steps. Then his foot struck
something, and the pain shot up his broken leg,
causing him to topple forward, kicking up a wave of
ice water as he fell. He splashed face-first at the foot of
the rock, drenching himself in glacial melt.
When he finally broke out into the light of day, the
ice sluiced down about him as needles of sunlight
stabbed his eyes. The fresh air stung his lips and lungs.
Snow sloughed off the mountainside in white puffs.
The women were retreating from view now, vanishing deeper into the cave with their keening song.
The town below was less than a mile away, the
buildings reduced to black bricks in the autumn’s
rocky hues. He was so close.
He wanted to join them, but the pain in his leg was
so great he couldn’t rise.
Pain?
The dead could feel no pain, could they? Had he
died, the synapses in his brain would’ve stopped
processing physical sensation.
So this was not some sort of mythical apparition,
but his own flawed brain taunting him. It had to be.
Which meant that if he still wanted to live, he
needed to follow the right fork of the stream away
from the cave’s depths and into the open air so he
could see how to get down the mountain.
Reid stared to his left. He could just barely see the
women’s silhouettes vanishing down a passage in the
ice and rock, the wight-words of their siren song fading
with them into the cold and dark.
His breath smoked as he sighed.
He watched it roll into the valley below him.
Yet he could never reach the bottom. Not with his leg.
And then he heard another sound. Human voices.
Not singing.
Shouting.
He looked about before spotting the source of the
noise. Below him on the slope, small black silhouettes
moved like ants crawling up the mountainside. They
were still a ways away, maybe half a mile below him,
but they’d spotted the snow sliding down the mountain and by the sound of it they were hailing him to
see if he was okay.
“Hey! Hello!” one of them shouted, speaking
English with only a slight Norwegian accent.
“Hello!” he shouted back, and then “Help! Help me!”
“Are you okay?” they shouted.
“No! I need help!” he called back.
He pushed himself to his feet, and his cry of pain
was not enough to drown out the song swimming
through his thoughts. He took his first step—with the
bad foot. Agony jolted up him from ankle to crown,
and he staggered onto his good foot for support,
splashing into the stream on his right.
The party shifted their course, turning away from
the marked trail to climb toward him. As they neared,
he recognized the man in the lead. It was Magnus,
apparently just setting out on his guided tour—the one
Reid had lied and said he’d join.
Reid followed the stream until it pushed out
through a hole in the ice wall to drip down the mountain. The hole was too small for him to crawl through,
but he still had his ice axe and put it to use.
Magnus and the others helped carry him the rest of
the way down the mountain. With a broken leg, there
weren’t really any other options. They also gave him
some food and water, since he was so dehydrated that
he babbled incoherently, something he wasn’t aware of
until they told him later.
At the hostel, Magnus got him his own private
room and phoned for a doctor to come by, not
wanting to move him anymore.
Magnus paid him a visit before the doctor arrived,
finding him sitting up in bed staring at an old wellloved photograph.
“So, were you trying to get yourself killed?” the
Norwegian asked.
Reid didn’t bother denying it, and shrugged by way
of confession.
“Ok, well then, what now?” Magnus asked.
Reid sat up in the bed, and gave the man a long
look before answering.
“I’ve got another mountain to get over,” Reid said.
“I think you’re climbing days are over.”
Again, Reid didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he
stared at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand.
Cassie stared back up at him. Behind her rose the huge
Alaskan glacier where he’d proposed.
Reid looked from the picture of his wife to the
window where the rising slopes filled his site, and then
to the man in front of him who had only a few days
before indicated the worst thing possible was to have
just half a brain.
He didn’t answer for a long moment, but just as
Magnus was about to go, Reid spoke, and despite all
he’d been through, a feeling of hope swelled in his
chest.
“You know,” Reid said,
“There’s more than one kind of mountain.”