Mannetti: The Everest Hauntings (Excerpt)

The Everest Hauntings

PROLOGUE

Mt. Everest: May 4^th, 2008. Camp III 24,000 Ft.

Is this how it happens?

Maxie Breedlove sat alone in the flimsy yellow nylon tent hugging her knees and bracing the poles with her back while the wind roared and screamed around her. At times she could feel gusts that actually lifted the tent floor underneath her and threatened to push her hurtling down the Lhotse face. It wouldn’t be the first time, she knew.

The late afternoon storm had come up suddenly; typical for Everest and likely to go on all night, driving icy pellets of snow in a furious white out and battering the tent walls till she thought she’d go mad from the sounds. But the eerie, babbling voices she heard under the wind were worst of all. They frightened Maxie because the higher she climbed the more often she heard them during the long gauzy nights she drifted in and out of sleep. The voices upset her because she knew that even if David were here she’d have to shout in his ear to make herself heard.

But David was not here. Everything had changed in an instant with one radio call around noon, and now the murderous weather had pinned him somewhere higher on the mountain and isolated her—a prisoner to the wind, the freezing night and the voices.

Now for the first time, she thought she could make out the words spoken in a drawn out gravelly voice between the blasts of the gale. “Come up.” Was that David calling her, she wondered? But then the voice went on and she knew it was not David. “Come up,” it said, “come up and be dead.”

***

The day had started normally enough, she recalled, with no hint of the grim situation that might scuttle the expedition or kill one or both of them:

“ ‘Good morning! This is David Amstead speaking, we’ve just spent our first night at Camp II to acclimatize for our summit attempt. Maxie is just waking up, but she hates the camera first thing and not only has she avoided the dreaded Paparazzi glare of my camcorder, but she’s successfully wormed her way to the bottom of her sleeping bag. [Sound of a man’s throat clearing theatrically Ahm, Ahem ]…So we’ll leave Maxie and show you the view outside our tent window, yes? [Wolf Whistle] Gorgeous. The snowfall has given way to what promises to be brilliant sunshine here in the Western Cwm at 21,300 feet….’”

“Turn it off for Christ’s sake.”

Maxie emerged part way, and then clapped a hand over her eyes to shield her face. She sat up slowly, peeking through her fingers. David had stopped recording-- momentarily at least. Pemba Sherpa, the kitchen boy, would be there soon, steaming mug of milk tea in hand, so that she could greet the day feeling more like herself. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was the weird otherworldly voices she thought she heard shrieking under the wind again last night, but right now she felt like someone who’d downed a triple martini.

“Headache?”

“No,” she shook her head. He was staring at her and even though she knew he was sizing her up for altitude sickness which could kill a climber, she was attuned enough to her body to know she wasn’t about to pass out.

Still, Maxie began to cough with a sharp barking sound. She pressed her hands flat against her chest—cracked ribs were all too common at high altitude.

“Khumbu cough. I don’t like that,” David said. He moved quickly, pushing Maxie more upright, and laid his ear against her back listening, she knew, for sounds of fluid in her lungs that could signal the deadly onset of high altitude pulmonary edema—HAPE.

She willed her body to be still, silently touching her thumb and forefinger together. “I’m all right, really,” she said. Anyhow, they would be heading back down this afternoon after they moved up the Lhotse face because you had to get used to thin air and it took several weeks of climbing higher then retreating to a lower altitude so your body would make more red blood cells. If a person was suddenly taken to the top of Everest—where there was approximately only one third of the oxygen at sea level--she would pass out and die within moments. Acclimatizing was a critical part of scaling the mountain, and Maxie was climbing under very unusual circumstances—she was using self-hypnosis to push herself towards the summit.

She took two deep breaths—as deep as the thin air would allow—and touched her thumb and forefinger together again which was the pre-programmed trigger that could put her instantly into a hypnotic state. The cough quieted. And then Pemba was there with the steaming mugs of Sherpa tea, and David let her be and busied himself with the morning drink.

***

“You okay?” David had said.

Maxie nodded. They were climbing the fixed ropes that had been run up the steep Lhotse face—which was nearly 4,000 vertical feet. It was rough going in the bitter cold, taking a few slow steps, then stopping to draw ragged breaths before plodding upwards again. As part of David’s plan, they would climb to Camp III—a small platform hacked sideways into the ice—then retreat back down to Advance Base Camp to rest. His strategy was based on an old maxim to keep climbers healthy as they rose higher and higher up the mountain: Climb high, sleep low. The theory went that your body—forced to labor in the thin air—began to make the subtle shifts necessary to survive with so little oxygen. And Maxie had to admit it was working—she already knew that in a couple of days when they went back down as low as Camp 1 at 19,500 feet (which was higher before she came to Everest than she’d ever been in her life outside the pressurized cabin of an airplane), the air would feel rich and thick: breathable. At the moment, though, she was fighting to fill her lungs every time she inhaled. She was trying not to cough again or to gag and bring up the watery gruel in her stomach—the higher you went, the less appetite you had and eating was as much a chore as hanging on the ropes and moving up one clunky lead-footed step at a time. Her right crampon—a set of sharp metal spikes clipped onto the soles of her boots which enabled her to move on ice--caught her left pants leg and she faltered.

“Maxie! Watch out—Jesus!”

His voice--like those of the dead climbers she’d been hearing--faded out almost immediately. She lost what he said next; but she remembered what she’d read about scaling Everest and what David had told her about what it would be like before they even left the States: It’s grueling, but you’ve got to place each step carefully. And the higher you go the more important that is…there’s no room for even the smallest error when you get to the Death Zone.

“I know,” she said, her voice as thin as the screak on a distant chalkboard. Above 26,000 feet in the Death Zone, David had told her, you lose millions of brain cells and your body consumes itself. People typically lost a fifth of their body weight over the weeks they spent on the mountain; and without oxygen, your ability to think was hugely impaired. Something as simple as dressing yourself took an hour because you were forced to move so slowly. Every second spent there, you were dying. You were more vulnerable to HAPE or cerebral edema. You were more liable to severe dehydration. Christ, you needed to drink nearly a gallon of water a day just to maintain yourself because you used nearly that much just exhaling. And dehydration was practically an engraved invitation to court frostbite. It wasn’t hard to imagine the ruined dead-black flesh of cheeks and nose or hands and feet in a place where the temperature could dip to 100 degrees below 0. All of this in a hypoxic state, and hypoxia–oxygen deprivation—was like functioning with the mentation of a slug—a misstep on the knife-edge ridges that led to the summit could send you hurtling 15,000 feet into Tibet on one side and 7,000 feet down into Nepal on the other. “I’m okay, now,” she said. “Really.”

“Let’s stop for a break, anyhow.” David leaned against his harness, trusting that both mechanical devices—the carabiner and the locked jumar which clipped him to the ropes and enabled him to ascend --would hold his weight. He unzipped his red down parka and brought out a thermos with hot lemonade he’d kept next to his body—instead of in his backpack--so it wouldn’t freeze. He swigged, then passed the bottle to Maxie.

It was barely lukewarm now. “Thanks,” she said. One good thing about climbing was that conversation was not only unnecessary, it was superfluous. The cold and the altitude and the lack of oxygen made talking a huge effort, and that was fine, because she recognized that part of her hated David—hated him for this enforced march, hated him for being solicitous and concerned about her.

So what if he was the mountaineering expert and had climbed this goddamn terrain from hell four times already, so what? It was her expedition, he was the paid guide and he stood to gain after they came down—same as she did. That was the deal. And as much as he knew—and it was a lot, she had to admit—knowing what to do wasn’t everything. Ten years ago some of the most experienced guides had been wiped out on the mountain. In fact there were close to 200 dead bodies on Everest and she’d already climbed over the blue-clad legs of a man who had died the year before on this very route. He lay on his side. His head and shoulders, partially buried in the snow, formed a pathetic comma. One hand—bare of mittens or gloves—protruded; the fingers and palm were as white as marble. That was the real marvel, the true horror—not the dead man—but his exposed flesh. Maxie had seen the shocking pictures of the legendary explorer, George Mallory, too. His naked back and buttocks looked like some nightmare Michaelangelo might have sculpted. Whether you were giddy from the lack of oxygen or completely in your right mind at sea level, it was nearly impossible to look and truly comprehend that an abandoned corpse on Everest was a person and not a statue.

“Why do they leave them up here, anyhow?” Maxie said, speaking her thought aloud. “The bodies—why doesn’t someone bring them home to their loved ones?”

“Too dangerous,” David said. “There’s only a few weeks a year you can climb the mountain—and even then the weather can turn treacherous. Most people are lucky to manage 20 pounds or so in a back-pack. Imagine carrying a 180 pound body that’s frozen solid. You’d need 6 to 12 people just to carry him down to the Icefall and from there, the cost of a helicopter would run about $10,000 to ferry him to Katmandu.”

That made sense. The Khumbu Icefall had been the worst part of the trip. It was littered with huge towering blocks of turquoise ice called seracs—some as large as a detached garage—that could totter and crush you at any moment.

And if that wasn’t enough, the icefall was laced with dark crevasses—some of them hundreds of feet deep—and the only way to negotiate these portals to hell was across rickety aluminum ladders that had been attached to the surrounding ice with metal screws.

Every day, the path through the Icefall had to be checked. Some days it had to be reconfigured because the anchors melted out; when you thought about it, the need to maintain the route so carefully meant the ladders were nearly as unstable as the blocks of ice that went crashing down the mountain.

Some years, she knew, they used 6,000 feet of rope to create the twisting maze that only brought you 2,000 feet higher. Often they lashed as many as seven ladders together. The bounce and sway under her feet in these crossings had been nauseating—and terrifying. More people had died in this one treacherous section than anywhere else on Everest. If it weren’t for her hypnotic state, Maxie might have crawled across the ladders on her hands and knees—or she might have given up scant yards past Base Camp as she took her first frightening steps inside the Icefall.

But this was no yak trail either, she thought, handing David the cooling silver thermos. Plenty of people died on the Lhotse face. One young Taiwanese climber had left his tent in Camp III for a nature call and forgotten to clip into the ropes strung from tent to tent—seconds later he was skidding down the mountain out of control, hurtling in the pre-dawn light to his death.

There were a thousand ways to die on Everest.

But there was glory if you made it to the top, and money to be made from your motivation, from your suffering, from your achievement.

“Ready?” David asked.

“Yeah.” Maxie touched her thumb and forefinger together and tapped them lightly inside her yellow arctic mittens. Then she followed David higher, her footsteps carefully and slowly placed atop each faint grayish impression he had already made.

***

The plan--to ascend the four hours up to Camp III then rest awhile and rehydrate before heading back down to relative comforts like decent food and sleeping on level terrain in Camp II—went to hell almost immediately.

Ironically, Maxie had been glad and relieved on seeing the small bright orange tent with the vivid yellow liner that she wasn’t spending the night here—at least not yet. Their acclimatization schedule didn’t call for sleeping at 24,000 feet for another week, before they pushed upwards for the final assault on the summit.

Climb high, sleep low

And that was hunky-dory with her, because this place scared the shit out of her and she figured she needed at least a week to get her mind around the fact that “Camp” --their one fucking tent--was a mere nub on a ledge hacked sideways into the 40 degree slope.

But all it had taken was one brief call on David’s radio and now she was alone, waiting...savoring the irony while the lengthening shadows gathered around her.

David had chopped ice and got the Brunton butane stove going while Maxie sprawled in the tent, out of the wind. She’d watched dreamily as he fed the bubbling meltwater in the aluminum pot with more chips and chunks so they’d have enough to drink here and enough to carry with them for the descent.

“Looks like you’re doing all the work,” she said. His energy was both indefatigable and depressing. Only a few men had this kind of stamina on Everest, and he was one of them.

“Well, you can see what it’s like here—there’s no room for the Sherpa. All the expeditions do the same; nobody has much appetite—you melt water, maybe drink a little soup—that’s dinner. When we sleep here—right before the Summit bid, I recommend you start the oxygen.”

“It’s thin up here, that’s for sure.” She knew he had climbed three out of four times without supplemental oxygen; but he would be using it, too, once in the Death Zone since he was guiding her up the peak.

“You’ll sleep better with it—and when we climb to Camp IV we’ll only be resting there a few hours before we head up—and it’s some of the most strenuous climbing. By the time we get back from the summit to the South Col you’ll have been awake more than 48 hours. You won’t sleep all that hot at Camp IV up there, either—but the next morning, we’re back down here, or Camp II if you can make it down that far in one day.” He grinned and said, “The time to celebrate, really, is after you’ve gone through the Icefall for the last time and you’re back at Base Camp—when you get there you can say, ‘I climbed Everest.’”

“Yeah, I know: ‘Getting to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory.’”

“Right.” He stirred a few frozen chunks swirling them around in the pot to melt them more quickly. “Assuming we do get down in one piece, what’s the order of events? You gonna write the book first?”

“No, we’ll be showing slides, photos, and the digital camcorder journals to lots of corporate types, getting them motivated, geared up. We’ll be scheduling hypnotic sessions to eliminate fears, to program them for success…the book gets written while all that’s happening.”

“And how many of these shindigs do I have to attend?”

“As many as your climbing schedule permits,” Maxie said. That had been the hook for him, she knew. Climbing where he wanted, when he wanted in exchange for the reduced rate Maxie had paid him. She had a few sponsors and that had taken care of some of the costs—but what he didn’t know was that she had borrowed almost the entire value of her house to finance the trip. She was counting on getting to the top, on being the first person to climb Everest using self-hypnosis. He would share the profits afterward, 50-50 same as her. Hell, the top ten and--plenty of other big businesses and universities-- paid thousands to kids who’d climbed the highest mountain in the world, showed a few slides and gave an “I can do it, so can you” pep talk to jaded employees. So why not her—especially since she had a new wrinkle. She was offering a lot more than just a motivational lecture. “We have an agreement, I’m not going to reneg,” she said.

“Yeah, but hearing you say it up here makes it all more real,” he said, winking.

“Sure. So chef, when’s the appetizer being served? I can’t tell you how much I adore boiled water.” And on Everest, as she had learned, you better adore boiled water because there was plenty of yellow snow lying around.

“Couple more minutes.”

“In that case, maybe I could use a nature call…”

“Okay.” David backed out of the tent and attached his crampons. She heard him clip into the fixed lines.

There were times you had no choice but to perform bodily functions in front of others on the route or your climbing partners, but in the tent you got to be a lady again and got a little dignity and privacy. You didn’t have to threaten shotgun death if so much as one sliver of a camera lens showed itself. She groaned inwardly; bathroom functions were both funny and grim on Everest. She fiddled in her pack for her urine bottle (which she would empty outside) and unscrewed the lid reminding herself to take her time—for a woman it was all too easy to miss the narrow opening. A man designed this, she decided; a man who hadn’t given a thought to female anatomy. She would have killed at that moment for a wide-mouth jar, but she got it underneath her and hoped she wasn’t about to baptize her legs—or worse yet, her bunched up climbing suit--with warm pee.

Outside, she could hear David on the radio, and she suddenly realized his voice was growing more clipped, more alarmed.

“What’s going on?” she shouted through the tent walls. But he didn’t answer, and the wind blew away at least half of what he was saying. The Col. He was talking to Nuri Sherpa, their climbing sirdar, who, as Maxie knew, had gone with three of their Sherpa to establish Camp IV and to fix ropes leading higher into the Death Zone. That was how expeditions were staged on Everest, the Sherpa stocked a succession of camps higher and higher—Camp 3 was the only exception because there wasn’t enough room for them on the tiny ledge. She tried to listen in again, but she couldn’t tell what had happened. Then, she heard David sign off; a moment or two later, he popped back inside the tent.

“Nuri says that Ang Tendi collapsed just above the Col. They’ve given him hot tea and oxygen, but he’s not really responding.”

She said nothing, merely waited for him to go on.

“He’s not coughing any blood, it sounds like high altitude cerebral edema to me.”

“I thought he’d climbed many times before.”

David shrugged, “It can happen to anyone, anytime… he’s got to come down now--right away if there’s any chance of saving him.”

“Can’t they use—what did you call it-- a Gamow bag?” This was a coffin-shaped bright red body bag that simulated being at a lower altitude. If you didn’t know what it was for, it looked some kind of fancy cat tunnel from an upscale place like Hammacher-Schlemmer or a beguiling yuppie toy from Brookstone. But it could mean the difference between life and death to a stricken climber. “Don’t they have one up there?”

He shook his head and Maxie caught the pity and anger in his look. For the first time she realized the true measure of his politeness and how her lack of experience, her idiocy about Everest had frustrated him. She could see him fighting for control and his voice was even: “Listen, people cut a toothbrush in half to save weight when they climb from here to the Col.”

“What will happen?”

“He needs to be brought down, and there aren’t enough people to help—unless I go. I’m not like those bastards who left that guy to die alone and walked right by him. And they weren’t the first to leave a climber—it’s happened plenty of times. But it’s not going to happen to Ang.” He paused. “You’ll stay here. Use the oxygen. Keep the flow on the lowest setting. There’s some candy bars in my pack. I’ll send up a Sherpa to stay with you and take you down in the morning. It’s just noon now—someone will be here by 5, maybe 6 pm, at the latest. We’ll be traveling as fast as we can, but I’ll stop and check on you during the night before we take him down to Advanced Base Camp.”

“You mean I’m going to spend the night here?”

“Climbing up in the dark is hard enough—Maxie, there’s no way you can descend till daylight.”

And that had been it, he filled his water bottle, turned off the stove to save the fuel. Then he was gone, and she sat with her knees huddled up to her chest, waiting.

***

The afternoon wore on. She was growing colder. No Sherpa came. At last the sun tipped Everest’s peak, then slowly began to fade till even the highest point on earth was spelled into darkness. She had a headlamp, but David had not been able to spare the radio. There was nothing to do, really, but sleep.

She squirmed inside the down bag; the warmth of her body—her rear end and her legs--had already created depressions in the ice underneath and now, stretched out, it was hard to get comfortable.

It had been such a great idea—a woman climbing Everest hypnotized. A professional hypnotist who could share the struggle and convince others they too could persevere and succeed. She had planned to tell them—show them--their dreams lay within their grasp, lay dormant waiting to be activated. She had envisioned it all, the flat plain of the stage, the speech and applause, the slides and digitized journals unraveling mysteries. The key was hypnosis, the clockmaker was Maxie.

Now she wasn’t sure that her own hopes and dreams hadn’t disappeared up on the South Col with the collapse of Ang Tendi. Rescues were dangerous; what if there had been an accident? One of the other Sherpa might have fallen. They could have lost the route. Even David might be gone, she thought.

Maxie touched her thumb and forefinger together. There were many uses for self-hypnosis, and now she needed to relax. She took two deep breaths—the deepest the thin air would allow. She felt more peaceful immediately, as she always did. It was like someone had delivered a whole body massage in a flash just by waving a hand over her. She was calm and relaxed, but aware.

The wind had begun to scream. It wasn’t just her tent being pummeled and shaken till she feared it would fly down the mountain with her in it. She could hear the wind rising on the heights, shrieking as it clipped around the towers of the surrounding peaks--like the voices of all those frozen ghosts. Some immobilized as they fell, some buried under tons of avalanche and some broken into pieces like shattered china as the glacier dragged them down then spit them up.

What would it be like, she wondered, to come to the point where you could no longer stand and walk, when you lay down to embrace the last sleep, when the ghosts murmured and cajoled and their spirits drew near to wait with you….to count the moments till the blood thickened like rime in your veins?

Was there really so much difference between being out there or in here? Part of her did not understand how a sleeping bag or a few millimeters of nylon saved her from dying each night. It was often below 0 inside the tent, and in the mornings the ceiling and upper walls were coated with frosty condensation from their mingled breathing during the night. When you touched this coating it fell, drifting and shimmering; so cold it burned the bare skin of your hands or cheeks.

Her mind wandered and she felt a shift—as if she’d dreamed of falling—and it jolted her out of the trance. Underneath the sound of the wind, she was sure she heard voices now: a sound like the hiss a lump of snow makes when it falls on the stove. She heard sobbing and soft whispers, incessant as the hum of bees.

Maxie sat up.

“What do you want?” she called.

There was no answer this time but she remembered the words:

Come up and be dead.

Maxie unzipped the fly on the tent and put her head outside, craning her neck to look higher up the mountain. There was a lull in the snow storm. Or maybe it had stopped, she thought.

The moon was a jagged crescent, there were no lights, no sounds except the wind and the imploring voices.

Imaginary companions were legend on Everest. A man named Smythe had shared biscuits with a climbing partner who didn’t exist. Reinhold Messner had soloed the mountain from the North side back in 1980 and during the descent was convinced someone followed him, the taunting ghost tracing Messner’s footprints with a series of tiny slithering sounds.

“No, it’s real,” Maxie said. Her gaze fell on the oxygen apparatus picked out in the moonlight. She groped for the headlamp and switched it on, but left it where it lay. Now she could see the lightweight digital camcorder, too. Proof, she thought.

She aimed it, panning up and down and the slopes.

“There!” she said.

In the moonlight, misty shapes sparkled and danced across the viewfinder… now billowing, now collapsing like whirling dust devils, they rose and fell.

Her crampons were just a hand’s breadth away.

It would only take a few moments to clip them on, to move out onto the slope and get closer to film these restless spirits and to capture their voices, to prove beyond question what she heard and saw was real. David would believe her and they would continue their climb. I’m not like the bastards who let some of them die or left some of them for dead, either.

She slipped into her down outer suit thinking perhaps they were stirred up because of Ang Tendi’s brush with death. Or could they be drawn to her because the self-hypnosis left her more open to them?

She wasn’t losing sight of her objective, she could decide later whether to use this footage during the lectures.

I’m not going far, she told herself, I won’t even need to use the oxygen.

Just a little higher.

A little nearer to speak with the dead.

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