The Stress of Her Regard (22 page)

She had seen only one party of tourists—a dozen men standing around a tent that seemed to conceal a big wagon—and they seemed to have pitched camp for the day. Clearly they wouldn't be interfering with her plans.

Her pistol was loaded and tucked into the waistband of her skirt; her friend had told her of another way to get Crawford, but the mere description of the procedure had made her sick—with a weak, horrified attempt at humor she had told him that she didn't have eyes for it—and she was resolved to make the gun serve.

Scuff marks in the snow told her that her quarry was still ahead of her, but all at once the stone imbedded in her hand began pulling upward. Startled, she glanced up.

The face of the mountain directly above her
was
somewhat sloping and bumpy, but surely not enough so that she could climb it, she thought—especially with a gored hand! Her arm was stretched out above her head now, and she tried to pull it down. The stone only grated between the bones of her palm, making her nearly faint with the pain, and then it pulled upward harder.

The only way she could lessen the agony was to fit her free hand and the toes of her boots into irregularities in the rock wall and pull herself up; she did, and was permitted several seconds of relief, but the stone soon resumed its tugging, and she had to do it again.

The stone seemed to want her to get above Crawford quickly. And though she was in such pain that the world had gone dim, and terrified that she might slip and find all her weight hanging on her maimed hand, it never occurred to her to pull the guiding, torturing stone out of her palm.

By noon Byron's party had reached a valley only a few hundred feet short of the Wengern's summit, and they dismounted to tie up the horses and mules and proceed on foot to the top.

Crawford's legs were uncomfortably quivery after the hours in the saddle, and he kept shaking them and stamping around to get rid of the feeling . . . and he noticed that the odd tingling went away when he was walking downhill. Just for the relief of it he took several long strides back down the road, and then it occurred to him that Byron had done the same thing only moments before.

He looked across at Byron, and found himself intercepting his stare. Byron walked across the slanting, snow-dusted rock surface to him, and when he was standing beside Crawford he spread his hand in a gesture that took in Hobhouse and the guides and the servants, none of whom seemed a bit impelled to walk downhill.

"They're not sweating the way you and I are, either," he told Crawford quietly, his breath wisping away as visibly as smoke.

"It's not an effect of riding, or scanty air. I believe that, like hydrophobia, it's a consequence of having been
bitten
." He smiled tightly and waved up at the snowy summit. "There's a cure up there, but the venom in us doesn't want us to get it."

They heard the rolling thunder of an avalanche, but there wasn't even a mist of powder snow to be seen over the mountain when they looked up—it must have been on the south side.

Crawford wanted nothing so much as to be off this mountain—to be at sea level or, better, below sea level, living in the Dutch low countries, no, living in a deep, sunless cave . . . that would be best of all. Even with the blue-tinted goggles on, the sun glare on the steep snow slopes was blinding, and he kept having to push them up to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. "The venom," he told Byron hoarsely, "is persuasive."

Byron took off his coat as they walked back toward Hobhouse and the assembled servants and beasts. "Only a few hundred feet left to go," he said. "We can be back here within the hour, and back at the curate's house before dark."

Josephine had heard the avalanche too, and her flinty guide seemed to take it as an excuse to let her rest for a little while on the foot-wide diagonal ledge she'd been hobbling along for the last quarter of an hour. She was a hundred yards west of Byron's party and a bit above it, and she had missed the sunlit valley and was shivering in a wind that spun across the shadowed face of the mountain like the bow-wave cast up by a ship; but the momentary cessation of the agony in her hand made her mid-cliff crouching place seem luxurious.

For several minutes she basked in the rest, and then the bone-grating tug started up again, and with a whispered sob she straightened her knees and looked up at the nearly vertical slope that still loomed above her—and then she realized that the stone was pulling downward.

What is it, she thought wildly, suddenly terrified at the notion of climbing backward—has Crawford started down again already?

No
, came a voice in her head,
but we can't go any farther up. Wait for him below—get him when he descends.

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.

Through the blinding flare of the detonation she saw her target spin away—but then she noticed the figure standing farther up the slope, and she recognized
it
as Crawford. Had she shot the wrong person?

But the person up the slope, she now saw, wasn't solid—the light was glowing right through its substance. Why, she thought with relief,
that
isn't Crawford; that's just his ghost.

Crawford heard the bang, and turned—and then he sprang away to the side, for he had seen a shiny ball rushing through the air toward him as fast as an angry bee.

And all at once he felt as if he had jumped into an invisible haystack. He heard the pistol ball buzz past him, and felt the shock wave of its passage ripple across his body like a caress, but he was too stunned to do anything more than stare down at his feet, which were suspended a yard above the rock surface. He was floating, supported only by the gelatinous air.

It took several long seconds for him to settle to the ground; and only when he had landed did it occur to him to look back in the direction the bullet had come from.

By the reddening light he saw a figure standing behind a bulge of rock eight yards away. Crawford couldn't guess who it might be, but he assumed the person would have as much trouble moving as he was having, and that he would be safe in ignoring him or her for a little while.

And if the person had another pistol, and shot at him more successfully in the meantime, wouldn't that actually be a good thing?

He turned back to Julia. She was walking down the slope toward him and Byron, and somehow
she
was able to walk in this thickened air . . . though it seemed to Crawford that she was getting more transparent. He wondered if his nausea and light-headedness were indications of near panic.