When she was close enough to the top, her father reached down one hand to help her up. She brushed herself off as she stood up. Nick came up next, already pressing his glove against the cut on his eyebrow as Jake took out his first aid kit. Quentin came up last, breathing harder than all of them.
The air was so cold up here, the wind bracing their faces, and it was so high. They were approaching two miles above sea level. No wonder they were moving so slowly. Their lungs were starving for oxygen.
“Time for the tanks,” Jake said. They had each packed a one-liter canister of 95 percent pure oxygen, and now they all took this moment to put them to their mouths and inhale.
“How much farther?” Kate asked between long breaths.
Her father nodded his head in the direction behind her. She turned and looked up. There was one more tower above them, then above that, the abandoned Furggen Monastery.
“The last leg is always the hardest,” Jake reminded them. “You’re tired, you’re sloppy. The thin air is making you loopy. Just stay focused for a few more minutes.”
They stopped to rest one more time when they reached the last tower. A bulge in the mountain was hiding the monastery from them, but they knew it was there, waiting in frozen silence. God knew how long it had been since anyone else had been up here.
Jake set the course for the last section, including one last wall of ice that seemed to tilt back past vertical. He waited at the crest, helped each of the rest of them climb over those last scary few feet when it felt like one slip would mean a fall into an endless void. As Kate stood up, she looked at her father. He had done most of the hard work on this climb and now his face was drained of color.
“You need to take the rest of my air,” Kate said to him.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Almost there.” He turned to look up at the monastery, in plain view now that they had cleared this last wall.
Kate looked in the same direction, transfixed by the sight of the empty building. It was covered by a thick sheet of ice, even thicker than the photographs had suggested, and in some spots the roof had given way beneath the weight.
Nick came to stand next to her, then Quentin. Finally, Jake. The cold air whipped past them. They all stared at the half-ruined monastery, framed against the western sky by the sharp peak of the Matterhorn.
“Welcome to Switzerland,” Jake said. “I think we crossed the border a few minutes ago.”
“Looks like a good place to film a horror movie,” Nick said.
“At least it’s empty,” Quentin said. “We had to climb a mountain to do it, but we won’t have company this time.” He was still breathing hard. The mountain had been tougher on him than anyone else. He took out his oxygen canister and put it to his mouth.
“Let’s go find this thing,” Kate said.
“I’m going to stay here with Quentin for a minute,” Jake said. “You guys go ahead.”
Nick and Kate left them there and walked up the last hundred feet to the monastery. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind and the crunch of their boots on the hard crust of snow and ice.
“Something associated with fire,” Nick said. “Or with light. That’s what we’re looking for, right?”
Kate didn’t respond. She was looking up at the ice on the roof as they approached the doorway. It was at least two feet thick, and it looked ready to either slide down and crush them or else bring down the roof and collapse the old wooden walls. Nick kicked away some of the loose snow in front of the door and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Be careful,” she said.
Nick gathered himself and then rammed his shoulder into the door. Kate closed her eyes and held her breath as it crashed open, but the ice stayed on the roof.
She followed Nick inside the building, into what appeared to have been the kitchen. After all of the brilliant white snow that had surrounded them outside, it was dark here and Kate’s eyes took a moment to adjust. As they did, she saw two windows, one on either side of the room, but they were fogged with age and half-covered with ice.
“Not exactly the Ritz-Carlton,” Nick said, taking out his flashlight.
A high wooden work table stood in the center of the room. Along one wall was an ancient metal sink with no faucet. Next to that was a larder that had once kept food, now holding only dust and an old flour bag, then cupboards and a few drawers containing tarnished silverware. Along another wall was an ancient woodstove.
“Fire,” Nick said. “We may have something here.”
He shined his light on the cast iron surface of the stove, then bent down close to examine it. Kate stepped through into the next room and saw that half of the roof had caved in here. She took a few cautious steps, feeling the cold air creeping in from above her. This room was larger than the kitchen, with a great table and at least twenty chairs. It was hard to say for sure because the table itself had been destroyed by the great slab of ice and most of the chairs had been reduced to kindling.
There was a stone fireplace in the corner of the room. The hole in the roof gave her enough light to see by, but she took out her flashlight anyway so she could closely scan every inch of every stone. The cold air kept creeping in and it seemed to wrap itself around her neck. She had this strange, impossible feeling that someone was watching her.
“Kate, come see this!”
When she went into the kitchen, she saw that Nick had pulled open a large trapdoor in the wooden floor.
“This place must be built on a ledge,” Nick said, shining his flashlight down a rough wooden stairway. “It’s two stories high on the back.”
“What do you think they kept down there?” she asked.
“Just a few boxes, far as I can see,” Nick said. “They might have kept their food down here. Maybe wine, you know, for communion or big parties on the weekend.”
The cold air from the other room had seemed to follow Kate, was still wrapping itself around her neck.
“Are you getting a strange feeling?” she asked quietly.
Nick had already taken his first tentative step down the rickety stairway. “So it’s not just me?”
“No. It’s not just you.”
* * *
Quentin was sitting on a mound of hard ice, drawing in one breath after another from his oxygen canister. Jake stood next to him, one hand on one knee, the other hand holding his own canister against his mouth. With the kids gone, he didn’t have to pretend not to be feeling this through every inch of his body.
“I’ve been on mountains before,” Quentin said when he was done with his oxygen. “I don’t remember it being this hard.”
“When was the last time you were two miles up?”
“Two miles of elevation? Damn, probably twenty years ago?”
“There’s your problem,” Jake said. “They took out most of the oxygen since then.”
Both men started laughing. Quentin reached up a hand. Jake took it and helped him up. After brushing themselves off, they headed toward the building.
Nick and Kate had split off to the right side of the building’s exterior, so Jake and Quentin went left. They found another door, pushed it open, and turned on their flashlights. It was a large room with bunk beds lined up in two rows, as in an army barracks, but now most of the beds had fallen apart.