Viktor awoke in a remote mountain refuge to find a blizzard outside. He eyed the storm warily from inside the hut.
“Not good.” he said to himself. “Not good at all.”
Inside the hut, despite the primitive living conditions, he felt surprisingly content. The problem was, he had to make up time. He was already behind.
He made himself a coffee on the little camping stove and drank it slowly, warming his hands, wrapped in a blanket, watching the storm outside.
In his stomach, a knife twisted gently. What was it? Nostalgia? Memories of friends and lovers long receded into the night? Never mind; he could not afford to fall into melancholy.
Gradually, the blizzard diminished. Around noon he ate some bread and said to himself, “It’s time.”
He put on his boots and his backpack and made his way outside into the forest.
The trail led gradually upwards, sun filtering between dark tree branches. He felt a marvellous lightness of mood and limb. Now that he had finally dared to emerge from the hut, the trail seemed easier and the weather better than he had anticipated.
He hadn’t been walking more than a few minutes when he came upon an old man, lying at the side of the trail, apparently in pain.
Something about the appearance of the old man unsettled him, and for a moment he was irrationally afraid, and hung back. Then he thought to himself, “Don’t be stupid; the man needs help.” and he rushed forwards to offer assistance.
“It’s nothing.” said the old man, gasping in pain and shivering in the cold. “I dislocated my knee cap. I’ve done it before. It’s already gone back into place of its own accord. I just need a stick to walk with, then I can get back to the hut.”
“You can lean on me.” said Viktor. “I could even carry you.”
The old man smiled in spite of his pain.
“No, I will go there alone. Otherwise, if it happens again, I won’t have faith in my own strength. I just need you to find me a stick. A long stout stick that I can put my weight on.”
Viktor began to look around and soon found an ash sapling. He broke it off at the base. “Sorry, my little tree friend.” he said. “But you can still be planted again.”
He took the stick to the old man.
“It’s perfect.” he said. “You can go now.”
“I can’t leave you here!” said Viktor.
“I’d really rather you did. Five minutes and I’ll hoist myself up and I’ll soon be at the hut. I’m not quite ready to move just yet.”
“I’ll wait with you.”
“I’m perfectly fine without you. Thank you for the stick. Be off with you!”
These last words were uttered with some asperity. Viktor shrugged and turned to continue on his way.
“Unnecessarily irritable.” he said to himself.
“Wait!” said the old man, suddenly.
Viktor turned back to him.
“I know where you’re going. This path only leads to one place. I’ve trodden it myself. I have to tell you something. I have some advice for you.”
“What?”
“You won’t make it. Not to the summit. The path is far harder than you think it is. Your whole journey will be a disaster, believe me. Many times you will despair, but you’ll keep going anyway, always thinking of the peak. Take what you can from the journey, my friend.”
Then the strange old man lapsed into wheezing laughter.
“I really don’t think it’s going to be that hard.” said Viktor.
“Of course you don’t.” said the old man. “At least break off another of these little trees and use that for a stick. You’ll need it.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” said Viktor, “but thanks for the advice anyway, old man.”
“Take the main route, straight ahead!” the old man shouted after him. “It’s the only way you’ll stand any chance at all!”
Irritated, Viktor once again turned back to the trail, and soon left the old man behind.
He found his mood had darkened a little. The encounter with the strange old man had taken the edge off his exuberance. There was something else too: some mostly-forgotten memory that he preferred not think about. Something bad had happened. Better not to remember, he thought, and he forced himself to focus instead on the trail and the trees.
After three hours of moderate effort he arrived at a signpost. All of the signs were illegible, destroyed by endless years of ice and rain, but he wasn’t perturbed. He had expected this. He sat down to eat some nuts and bread.
The path that led straight ahead was the one the old man had recommended. It led to the peak, slowly but surely ascending via endless twists and turns. The path to the left was far shorter, but riskier and more exhausting. The path to the right was considered nearly impassable by many, but more varied and informative, and offered the greatest views.
After a short break, he strode off along the right-hand path.
The path soon became extremely rocky. Narrow slippery trails skirted vast precipitous cliffs.
By nightfall he was exhausted. He made camp in a patch of forest clinging to the hillside, building a primitive shelter from tree branches and ferns.
He awoke sometime in the early hours of the morning, a stone digging into his back under the fern fronds. Even inside the sleeping bag he was cold, but nothing he wasn’t used to.
Out of curiosity, he crawled out of the shelter to look at the night sky.
The sky was a rich tapestry of stars, a brilliant quarter-moon forming the centrepiece, the Milky Way a vivid translucent white stripe to the east.
In the darkness, the trees and mountains were nothing but silhouettes.
He jumped suddenly, startled. Someone had called his name.
Of course it couldn’t be. There was no-one else out here, and certainly no-one who knew him.
As he listened, straining his ears, he though he heard the voice again, fainter this time.
He shook himself. Of course it was nothing but the hallucination of a tired brain; an after-image cast by a dream, perhaps.
In spite of this rationalisation, the experience left him nervous, and wishing for light. He stood for a while, clapping his arms around his body for warmth, trying to shake the feeling off.
Among the blackness of the trees he thought he saw the twinkle of a faint light. It could only be one thing: the eye of some animal, reflecting the light of the moon. He could see it only by looking slightly to one side of it, allowing light to fall on the sensitive edges of his retinas.
His heart began to pound. He had heard terrible stories of the animals in these parts, and worse stories of people who had fallen prey to them. But still, most people traversed the path unscathed. The risk was acceptable and unavoidable.
He remained absolutely still, watching the dark trees, seeing nothing. Eventually he returned to his sleeping bag and his primitive shelter, where he lay awake for some time, his eyes searching for light in the near-complete darkness, before falling into a restless sleep.
The next day he awoke in the grip of a terrible sensation. Something very, very bad had happened. He quickly got out of the shelter and into the open air and shook the feeling off determinedly. Nothing bad had happened. Nothing. The feeling was surely only some awful amalgam of half-forgotten bad memories from his youth.
Then the memory of the eye in the forest came to him, and he gazed into the trees, so innocent in the grey sunlight of the morning, and laughed.
“I’m winding myself up into a state of absurd paranoia.” he said out loud to himself.
He made a little fire, edged with stones. He had bacon in his backpack. First he made coffee, then after rinsing the pan a little, he fried bacon in it, and ate it with bread. After that, even though he was shivering and the fire wasn’t big enough to properly warm him, his optimism returned.
He resumed walking with renewed vigour.
Around noon, having walked many hours without a break, a certain nervousness once again began to grow upon him.
The memory of the single eye among the trees—if it was an eye—preyed upon his mind. He recalled stories of forest animals stalking unwary hikers over many days, eventually leaping on them and consuming them whenever they appeared the most vulnerable.
A man could be sleeping or eating or emptying his bowels when suddenly his world would change into one of pain and terror. These animals rarely killed instantly; they were known to torment their food, sometimes over a period of days.
He glanced repeatedly over his shoulder, searching for signs that he was being pursued, but saw nothing, and heard nothing.
The sky had darkened again and the landscape had a grey, cold tone to it.
He decided to stop and at least have a snack, on the grounds that his blood sugar was probably low.
It was while sitting on a mound chewing a piece of bread that he heard an unusual sound, some way off. A rhythmic snapping of branches quite suggestive of footsteps. He froze. The sound ceased.
He had the eerie sense that something was watching him, searching for weakness.
He hurriedly packed his things and departed at a brisk pace. As far as he was able to tell, the sounds did not resume. He heard only typical woodland sounds: the rustling of leaves, the sound of the wind among the pine needles, and the occasional falling of dead branches weighed down by ice.
Even so, after an hour he was still in a heightened state of vigilance, strung taut like the high string on a violin, as he emerged onto a small rocky plateau. When he again heard a sound incredibly reminiscent of a woman calling his name, he almost jumped out of his skin.
Again he stopped and scanned the dark trees behind him.
Viktor reasoned that there were two possibilities. The first and most likely was that some damned bird or animal had a call that happened to sound vaguely like a woman’s voice, and his overwrought imagination had turned it into his actual name. The second, rather unlikely possibility, was that some sort of corvid had learned the name “Viktor” somewhere and now took a capricious delight in alarming hikers with it.
That there were no other human hikers on the trail, he was sure. At certain points, sections of the trail he had already traversed were visible further down the mountainside, and he had seen no other human being since he had left the old man behind, nor any trace of any.
Behind all of his nervousness, and perhaps responsible for it, was the nagging feeling that something awful had happened, something he didn’t want to remember. He refused to search his memory. Of course awful things had happened; awful things always happen, but to pollute his mind with them at such a time simply wouldn’t do.
He spoke out loud in an attempt to reassure himself with the sound of his own voice.
“Hitler and Stalin could condemn millions to death and not lose a night’s sleep over it, yet here am I, worrying about unpaid tax bills or stupid things I’ve said after too many beers.”
He turned back to the path and resumed a brisk pace.
“Still, it wouldn’t do to be Hitler or Stalin.” he said to himself.
Via a combination of talking and whistling he had almost managed to largely calm his jangly nerves when he heard the sound yet again: a woman softly calling his name.
He began to whistle loudly, as loudly as possible, his face almost crumpling with fear.
Perhaps it was schizophrenia. His cousin had developed it. Paranoia, hallucinatory voices; delusions, even.
He’d been fine before he started this accursed hike, hadn’t he? He almost began to think of the life he’d been leading just a week or two earlier, but he was brought up short by the beginnings of an ominous recollection that he really didn’t want to face. After all, there must have been a reason he’d started out on this journey. Had he not sought to put all mundane worries behind himself? To live a life more rooted in nature and the day-to-day necessities of a simplified existence?
The hallucinations, if that’s what they were, would cease once he got back to ordinary life. No; they would cease even before that, when he stood upon the peak, and the hardest part was behind him.
A hike like this, he told himself, is a kind of test of character. Can I be alone with my thoughts, with the forest and the mountains, or am I reliant on endless pointless chatter to maintain equilibrium?
As he walked, the path began to narrow, with a steep drop to one side. His paced slowed out of necessity.
Paradoxically, he began to feel calmer. Surely no one-eyed forest creature could follow him here.
By the end of the day he was exhausted beyond measure. The trail, such as it was, required constant vigilance to avoid losing footing, and continual clambering over icy rocks and around fallen trees.
In the distance he could see the peak, blue-grey and wreathed in mist. Few had taken the time to go there. Many had returned broken men, dying young, but Viktor was certain that only represented a failure of personality, or a lack of proper social adjustment. He would not make their mistake.
At least, having come this far, he had to believe in his mission.
That night he slept badly. In the early hours of the morning, when the sky was beginning to lighten in the east but still no trace of the sun could yet be seen over the horizon, he awoke suddenly, shivering.
Again someone had called his name, but perhaps the voice was only a dream. He listened, suppressing his breathing, lying absolutely still. He could hear odd noises, like footsteps around his shelter. He peaked out through the branches and fern fronds, and saw nothing. There was no-one out there.
He lay back again, and again heard the voice, this time imbued with a tone of pity and despair.
It was faint, but it seemed absolutely real.
It had to be a hallucination. Perhaps it wasn’t schizophrenia; perhaps it was only brought about by exhaustion or lack of some vitamin. He could ignore hallucinatory voices if that was the price of success.
He breathed with deliberate slowness, his heart pounding unpleasantly.
It would be light soon. He would get up and make a fire; chase away the spirits.
“What if the demon-believers are right?” he thought to himself. “What if this world really is roamed by disembodied spirits?” Goosebumps formed on his arms and the hairs on his neck stood up. What a thought.
He could still hear other odd sounds from outside. Pacing, and sounds reminiscent of muttering. Perhaps there was some animal out there. Maybe the thing from the forest had tracked him here after all. If it attacked it would surely come at him from the direction of his feet, at the flimsy entrance of the shelter. He might not know anything until it sank its teeth into his feet and began to drag him out, screaming in pain.
He tried to feel for his knife in the dark. He used the large sheath-knife for everything: cutting wood and food; eating, even.
Then he felt a sensation that half scared him out of his wits. Something clutched at his hand, like the grasp of a human hand, except there were no people out here.
He drew his hand back in terror and rushed out of the shelter, pushing the entrance cover made of leaves and tree branches carelessly out of the way. He could see nothing moving in the twilight darkness round him.
He swore and hurriedly put his boots on, then proceeded to make a fire as best he could in the darkness.
By the time the sun rose, he had eaten and drunk hot coffee, and was feeling somewhat calmer, but hardly calm.
He was losing his mind. It was the only possible explanation. But still he felt that he could think more or less clearly. His thought were not running, bubbling or tripping over themselves. They were ordered, regimented, for the most part.
He could see no sign of animals in the surrounding trees, and nothing visibly lurked among the rocky outcrops.
He swore out loud again. The journey was supposed to be challenging, but enjoyable. There was nothing enjoyable about this. He was passing his days somewhere between anxiety and terror.
All the while, at the back of his mind, was the memory of something awful. At least, he told himself, worrying about animals and insanity was better than confronting whatever that was. Fragments of an awful recollection made their way unbidden into his mind nonetheless. A car. A rainstorm. A woman with long brown hair. A dark miserable road. And …
He stopped himself before anything worse emerged, and forced himself to focus on the glowing embers of the fire. Occasional flames still flickered out of them. This was his reality now. This was all that he had to worry about. Walking, eating, staying warm.
What had he done? Surely nothing terrible. He wasn’t a bad person. There was no need to think about it.
He breathed in shakily and slowly, and then forced himself to inhale deeply twice more.
Then he packed up his things and stamped the fire out.
Today he would come close to his goal. Then tomorrow he would stand on the peak. After that, everything would be easy. He would take only the easiest routes, at the most sedate of paces.
As he resumed his journey, the aches and pains acquired during the previous day quickly reasserted themselves. The pain made him sloppy; he wanted only to move forwards and he was less careful about his footing.
The accident occurred shortly before he planned to stop for lunch. He slipped and plummeted down a steep scree, a small avalanche of sharp stones cascading down after him.
Near the bottom his foot caught a rock, twisting his leg and spinning him, and he landed painfully on his shoulder. Another metre and he would have landed on his head.
He grimaced and groaned in pain, and forced himself to feel his leg and shoulder for injuries. As far as he could tell, no serious damage had been done. Apart from a few small cuts he wasn’t bleeding, and nothing seemed to have been twisted out of position.
Only when he tried to stand did he discover that something had gone wrong in his leg. At first he thought he wouldn’t be able to walk, but after limping back and forth for a while, he decided that the pain was bearable. With a stick, he’d be fine. Likely it would get better with walking, as long as he took it easy.
Had the fall been his fault? Had he done something wrong? He couldn’t decide. His technique could have been better, but he was exhausted and his muscles aching.
He scrambled painfully back up the scree, then retraced his steps a short distance to an area where the ground was almost level and trees were sprouting hopefully upwards out of the thin soil. He hacked through a sapling to use as a stick.
Remembering the old man’s advice to take a stick, he said out loud, “Perhaps you were right, old man.”
Then he made a small fire.
He sat eating and warming his hands on the fire for two hours, before putting it out and hobbling along on his way. It would take longer to reach the peak now. He wouldn’t reach it tomorrow, but he would still get there. He had to.
On the plateau at the top, the trail forked into two directions, and one of these would take him home, and with much less effort than he had expended in getting there. How stupid he had been not to take the easy route, as the old man had recommended. But no, soon all the pain would be behind him, and he would enjoy the pleasure of remembering the struggle and the spectacular views; a pleasure that would have been denied to him on the easy route. The easy route held no glory.
As he walked, the pain worsened. His ankle and knee began to swell up. Clambering over rocks became a torture.
At the same time he became convinced that something was watching him, stalking him. Some kind of animal. At times he though he heard its footsteps behind him. Sometimes he even thought he could smell it.
He considered turning around, but the way back was now longer and harder than the way forwards.
“I can make it.” he told himself. “Even if it takes longer, I can make it.”
After making his way with agonising slowness along a rocky icebound ledge above a startling drop, he sat down on the cold ground and hung his head in pain and despair. There was no pleasure in this. Not anymore. He was forced to admit to himself that the journey was no longer about the challenge of making it to the peak; it was about survival.
He considered making camp and waiting for a few days until his leg perhaps improved. The problem was, he didn’t have enough food. He would have to pass several days without anything to eat, or else eat half-rations. Without proper nutrition, would his leg even heal?
In the end he rejected the idea as unworkable. He would have to grit his teeth and endure the pain.
If only he had thought to bring painkillers. Not once, in all his elaborate preparations, had the idea even crossed his mind.
Viktor pulled himself painfully to a standing position, leaning heavily on his stick. He decided to cut another stick. Perhaps with two sticks he could take some of the weight off his injured leg.
The creature seemed to come out of nowhere. It sprang at him, snarling. For a fraction of a second he saw only teeth, eyes and claws. He lashed out at it with the top end of the stick. It prepared to pounce, emitting an impossibly low, ominous growl. He swung the stick at it. It jumped back and ran off into the trees.
He began to hobble off down the path as quickly as he could manage, keeping his gaze turned backwards as much as possible.
After some minutes he realised his face was wet. He dabbed at his cheek with his hand. His hand came away covered in blood and tears. A sob emerged from his lips. This wouldn’t do. He stopped and shifted his knife from his right side to his left, so that he could grasp the knife with his free hand. Then he pulled himself up to his full height and, resting his left hand on the sheathed knife, he shouted at the tree line, “Next time I’ll kill you!”
His voice came out weak and uncertain, not strong and defiant as he had expected.
“I’m deteriorating.” he muttered to himself, as he resumed his slow limping hike.
He looked for another sapling to use as a stick, or a long low straight branch, but he found nothing that would adequately serve his purpose.
For mile after mile he progressed towards the peak, gradually ascending, every minute seeming like an hour. He focused on just putting one foot in front of another, using the stick to keep as much weight off his damaged leg as possible.
The end of his endeavour came quite suddenly. He lost his footing on an icebound slope and slid fifty metres downwards. At a certain point he lost consciousness as a rock hit his head. When he awoke, he was bitterly cold, his head and legs were on fire with pain, and his vision blurred.
He shifted his head fractionally and saw blood-spattered snow on the slope above him. Then he looked down, and saw that his leg—his good leg—was broken. There could be no doubt. The lower part projected outward at an impossible angle to the upper part.
He lay back and closed his eyes. If he could crawl to the nearest trees, perhaps he could make a fire, or a shelter. But the will wasn’t in him anymore. It was easier to close his eyes, to sleep.
He was jolted back to consciousness by the voice again. It called his name, this time quite clearly.
“What’s that?” he said, looking around. “Who’s there?”
Then he heard it a second time.
There was no-one there.
Probably hallucinations are normal when you’re dying, he thought. He was dying. He was too exhausted, too cold, and had lost too much blood. His leg was soaked with it.
A new fear flickered in his mind. He had done something bad; something very wrong. It was time to remember. No harm could come of it now. It had to be faced.
He closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye he saw a road. It was dark. He was driving in pouring rain. Incredible rain. There were no street lights and no cat’s eyes. Every slight turn the road made, he had to guess where the edge of the road lay.
He turned his head slightly. Sat by his side, in the passenger seat, was his wife, Rebecca. She was smiling, but nervous.
He said something to her.
“Hey, keep your eyes on the road.” she said to him in reply.
Suddenly there was nothing but the sound of squealing brakes and metal hitting metal. The world turned upside down. Very briefly, white chevrons indicating a sharp turn flashed past his field of vision, then there was another enormous crash of metal and glass and that was that.
Now he knew what he had done. He had killed Rebecca. He had killed his wife. That was why he had gone away; to forget.
One brief moment of inattention on his part and her fate had been sealed. They shouldn’t have been driving in those conditions. They should have stopped at a hotel. Everything could be different.
He began to cry. Now there was nothing left; no pride, no desire, only pain and the prospect of death.
The voice called his name again. He knew who it was now. It was her. Or rather, her spirit. Better yet, a hallucination: that was the truth of it. Dead people don’t have voices.
He felt a human hand clasp his. He wasn’t scared anymore. He knew it was her hand. He smiled.
A white light seemed to grow from a point until it took over his entire field of vision, almost blinding. The pain seemed to recede into the far distance. He felt that he was floating, flying.
In the middle of the whiteness, faint distant shapes seemed to emerge. As he approached them, they grew more distinct. He recognised one of the shapes; it was Rebecca, waiting to welcome him into the afterlife. But there was another also, whom he didn’t recognise.
Was it … God?
She uttered his name again, as if pleading or imploring.
He tried to say, “I’m coming to you, my love.” but he was only able to make a faint groaning sound.
Then, suddenly, he was there. There was Rebecca smiling down at him, while God looked down on him with an expression of concern. God took out a pen light and flashed it into one eye after the other.
It wasn’t God. Not unless God dressed like a doctor.
He squeezed her hand.
“He’s awake!” she almost shouted. “Viktor, you’re awake!”
He smiled slowly, to the fullest extent that he was able to manage, and said, in slurred, slow words, “You’re not dead.”
“You’ve been in a coma for two weeks, Viktor.” said the doctor, with a faint serious-looking smile. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“I was on a mountain.” said Viktor, a tear rolling from his eye.
“No, Viktor.” said the doctor. “You were in a car accident.”
Viktor’s eyes fixed on Rebecca, filling with tears.
He laughed.
