The Stress of Her Regard (24 page)

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 Lutschin 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."

Her right eye was wide and staring at him, and she looked like a wild animal broken but alive in a trap—he leaned away from her and gripped the rock more tightly, wondering if he would be able to kick her off into the abyss if she were to attack him—but then something seemed to click inside her head, and she bared her blood-flecked teeth in what might, under dramatically different circumstances, have been a warm smile.

"Michael!" she said. "You rogue, I've been looking for you all over Europe! And here I find you on top of an
Alp
, for Heaven's sake!" The eye swivelled past him toward Byron. "
Hello
, I'm Mr. Crawford's wife, Julia."

Byron shook his head weakly. "Pleased to meet you," he said in a barely audible whisper. "Who's Mr. Crawford?"

"That's me, my real name," said Crawford. He got his feet under him, though it chilled his belly to do it and, crouching and gripping the wall, he looked left and right along their ledge. "We've got to get down off this mountain—her eye needs medical attention right away . . . and you and I aren't at our best, either."

At the right limit of their ledge the rock wall wasn't impossibly steep, and seemed bumpy enough to provide hand and foot holds, but he had no idea where climbing it would lead them, and in any case he was pretty sure none of them had enough strength left for a real climb. To the left the ledge became narrower and more outwardly slanted, though it did seem to continue around the mountain for some distance. Neither way looked attractive.

"Let's try yelling," he said. "Maybe Hobhouse can get a rope down to us."

Crawford and Byron took turns shouting, and after only a few minutes their shouts were answered from above; soon a rope came hitching and snaking down the slope from above, finally coming to a stop when its end had passed them, and though it hung a few yards to the right of the ledge, climbing across to it looked like it wouldn't be difficult. And then hanging on, Crawford thought, won't be any problem at all—they'll have to
break
my fingers off of it.

He turned to Byron, who had been watching over his shoulder. "The girl first, I think. We can tie it around her. I don't know how she's stayed conscious this long, and there's certainly—" He stopped, for he had looked past Byron, and Josephine was gone. "My God, did she fall?"

Byron's head whipped around to the left. "No," he said, after a moment. "Look, there's blood and scuff marks way out along that end. She's gone that way."

"Josephine!"
Crawford yelled. Then, after a fearful glance toward the summit,
"Julia!"
There was no answer.

Byron joined in, and they called several more times, with no results except to alarm Hobhouse, who kept shouting down advice about breathing deeply and avoiding looking down.

Finally they abandoned the effort and let themselves be roped up to where the others waited. Hobhouse was pompous with worry, and insisted on knowing what the hell had happened, and Byron rolled together a snowball and threw it at him as a prelude to explaining.

Byron told them only that Aickman's wife had fallen from the summit with them and was injured and alone on a ledge somewhere below, but the guide didn't even believe that. He insisted that on the high mountains it was a common thing for tourists—or even seasoned mountaineers—to imagine that they saw people who weren't really there, frequently people from their pasts; and that often the sufferers of this delusion sat down and waited interminably for the imaginary others to catch up.

In support of his opinion he pointed out how visibly distraught Byron and Crawford both were, and noted the bad knock Crawford's head had taken and, most telling of all, he observed that only a few minutes had passed between the time Byron and Crawford had disappeared onto the summit and when the party had heard the two of them calling from the ledge below. This one-eyed wife would have had to appear the moment Byron and Crawford had climbed out of sight of the others—just in time to slide with them down to the ledge they'd been roped up from—and then disappear instantly afterward.

And by the time the touring party had descended the mountain without having seen any sign of Josephine or her passage, even Crawford was willing to admit that the guide might be correct. After all, he told himself at one point as he looked back at the peak, you
have
been feverish lately, and lots of people have been to the top of the Wengern without having encountered thickened air and slowed time, or suicide promptings, or phantoms, or the sphinx.

Byron had retracted the story entirely, and asked Hobhouse and his servants to forget about it—and when his horse and Crawford's mule both sank up to their shins in the clayey mud of a morass which everyone else had passed over safety, he only laughed. "
Don't
try," he called across to Crawford as they both were floundering in the mud, and the servants were tugging on the reins, "to tell me that the mountain doesn't want us to leave."

Crawford kicked his legs to keep from sinking farther into the chilly, clinging mud, and he tremblingly shrugged. "When I'm sure of anything," he answered, "I'll let you know."

The sun was low when Josephine clambered up onto the path and started back toward the village of Wengern.

She was hardly anyone now.

When she had walked all the way back down to where the road widened out and the trees were crowded and aromatic in the darkness on either side, she began to hear faint songs on the branch-combed air, and she knew that things were awakening with the passing of the day.

She was dimly aware that her night-visiting friend had lost his power over her and would need a new invitation to have access to her again.

She wondered if he would get one and, if he did, who would extend it.

She had tied a cloth around her empty eye socket, and her hand was only seeping blood now—they might very well become mortified, but her injuries didn't seem likely to kill her tonight.

For the moment free of all the hatreds and fears and constrictions that had defined her personalities, she actually sniffed the pine and snow scented air with enjoyment, and her bloodstained cheeks kinked into a battered version of the small smile of a contented, sleeping child.

Byron's party continued eastward the next day, crossing the Kleine Scheidegg Mountain and moving on through the green valley between the Schwarzhorn and the Wetterhorn to the Reichenbach Fall, where they halted to rest the horses and mules, and then looping back west to the town of Brienz on the north shore of Lake Brienz.

They stayed at an inn, and though there was fiddling and singing and waltzing downstairs, Byron and Crawford retired early to their rooms. Crawford recognized in them both the signs of recovery from long fever. Crawford didn't dream at all.

Everybody slept later than usual, but by nine the next morning Hobhouse and Byron and Crawford and a couple of servants were aboard a boat crossing the lake of Brienz, while the horses were being brought around along the north shore. The boat Byron had hired was rowed entirely by women, which struck Byron as so novel that he insisted on taking an oar himself next to the prettiest of the rowers, up in the front.

Crawford was perched in the bow of the long, narrow boat, watching the patterns of early Autumn leaves on the flat water sweep past on either side; from time to time he looked up, but always to starboard, where the slate roofs of the village of Oberried serrated the north shore and, far more distantly, the white peaks of the Hohgant and the Gemmenalp dented the blue sky. He avoided looking out over the portside, for the view in that direction was dominated by the towering, broad-shouldered bulk of the Jungfrau, and the glitter of the sun on its snows was uncomfortably like the glitter of watchful eyes.