Natalie Morrison, June 12th, 2012

You are Dr. Gerard Knolty; you were about to become the first man to climb Mount Everest. The year is 1913. You are a father of two bright boys, the widower of the most wonderful woman you’ve ever met, and a self-made man. You have hit rock bottom before, and lived there for years. But here you are, about to be at the actual top of the world.

This is your third trip to Tibet. You have been called here twice before on archaeological digs. You can't stay away. You thought it might be the mountains, so you climbed others. But still you return.

The mountain calls to you, and you are here to listen.

The tales of your travels through Tibet have made you a very wealthy man, and allowed you to put your boys through college. You worry that they will not be grateful for the privilege you have afforded to them, in contrast to the nights you spent grinding away at ungainful employment just to keep yourself enrolled in your archaeology coursework.

You believe your suffering has made you into the man you are today, and that is what you tell yourself as you remember the corpse of your best friend and expedition teammate, Dr. Theodore Cotton. More than a friend, you both admitted to each other since a few years after your wife’s passing. But you could not tell the world the nature of your relationship. “Colleagues.” Was all you could manage to get away with. And now he’s gone, too.

But here you are, near the top, the cold violence of the earth attacking at every front of your being just for daring to meet it. The world would take your wife, and your lover after her, but it would not take your summit. You will climb this damned mountain, you feel it in your cold-burning furnace of a rib-cage. You feel it in the grief sculpted icicles carving salty streaks in your face underneath the thermal wrappings. You feel it in every throbbing frozen limb as you swing them with all your might to make the climb through this dark white hell.

This world has taken everything from you, but you would have this. You will take this victory. You signal to your teammate to raise you on the pulley, you both know the peak is near. You will reach it within the next few hours. You work together, the seven of your remaining team, to make the next checkpoint, the highest point climbed so far. You succeed.

The slope had calmed, you were not scaling a wall as much as a brutal incline now, only needing to swing forward with handheld hooks to keep yourself moving, You quickly rose from your place in the back of the party to the front, taking point so that you can be sure it’s your name they put in the books. You financed this team, anyway, but you know how pedantic academics can get. There would be no second guessing. Too much has been lost. Teddy is gone. You will return home alone, if you even do return, but you will return home indisputably victorious.

Another long while passes as you and your team scale the incline until, without warning or natural indicator, you hit a clean edge. A flat corner at the top of the incline, like a plateau, but neater, cut like a block of marble. You use your hand to double check, and yes, it’s there. It’s flat.

No matter. All the better to plant your flag. Maybe you would have enough room for Victor to bring out the specially prepared photography equipment. You take a deep breath from your respirator, and with a full bodied heave, you bring yourself over the unnatural edge.

Warm. Sun. Windless. You are aware of silence for the first time in your life. You look back and see a field of clouds surrounding you, underneath your vantage point, like a fine sheet. Other peaks in the distance. You have felt awkward silences before, but this wasn’t awkward, it was wrong. The howling of the wind had bit through your earmuffs so hard for so long that you had stopped hearing it, but now you heard it’s absence, painfully, like the moment after removing a fish hook from your thumb.

The warmth burns. You know it’s not hot, but it’s not cold, and you have been slogging through a refrigerator for the last few days of your life, so it might as well be an oven, temperature be damned. Nineteen degrees Celsius, your strap-on thermometer reads. Impossible. You took a while to see it, but you wish you had taken longer. You forget about the still air, you forget about your planting of the first feet atop this jagged knife of a mountain, you forget about nineteen degrees Celsius. You only see the…the hole.

You cry. Warm tears. Tears that nearly split your cold skin. Tears that break your heart, what’s left of it, as you stand tall atop mount Everest, looking into the largest, deepest hole you have ever seen. The surface you stand on is perfectly flat, and about 100 meters in diameter. About 50 meters in, there’s a hole. A smooth hole. One that, you can tell with one painful glance, goes all the way down. You feel the edgewalker's whisper, for the first time in years.

You approach the hole. You hear your teammates begin to scale the edge, with various surprised gasps and you suspect a stumble, but you don’t turn back. You don’t turn back to look at the sounds you shouldn’t hear, to remark about how wrong it all is, to study, to make observations.

You approach the hole, and you feel that whisper, that primal fear of falling, for the first time in years. You remember the first time you felt it, holding onto the top tree branch of your father’s old oak tree… That phantom tugging at you as you look down from a great, fragile height. You remember feeling it at the balcony of your wedding reception. You knew it was survival instinct, an imagined weight to tell you to be careful, so you explained it away until it went away from years of climbing. You remembered the moment you stopped feeling it, half way up Kilimanjaro, and you remember forgetting it.

But here it was again: that whisper, that little faerie tugging at your leg, reminding you that you could fall, convincing you that a part of you wants to jump. That little mental itch is big now. Gargantuan. And it is all you feel as you approach the hole.

For a moment you remember that you came here to win. That you came here with Teddy, and lost him along the way. You needed to make his sacrifice mean something.

You only remember those things for a moment, until all you hear in the uncanny silence is that edgewalker’s whisper. You hear it louder, and then you feel it, everywhere. Like a magnet, you are pulled by your very substance. 

It wasn’t some imagined tension to keep you steady. It wasn’t in your head. That pull you felt was real. It was this place, speaking to you. It was this hole, calling you, from every peak, from every edge, to here. 

It was the feeling of the prey animal confronted with an inescapable, alluring predator, and you felt it in every fiber of your being until it was the only feeling left. You were a fruit fly, drawn by instincts your insectile mind cannot comprehend to land on the venus fly trap.

You fell in.

The last thing you heard was the members of your team falling in with you.