Said good-bye to Sam last night. Most awful moment of my life, because it really felt like good-bye, a definitive good-bye, and I couldn’t tell him anything! Was about to tell him about the surgery but couldn’t do it. Too big a risk. He’d want to stop me.
Oh, sweet Sam! Saying good-bye to my life, I can accept, but not to you. Never could I imagine you and me not growing old together. Sam Grevers and Nick Avery for now and forever. If only I had listened to you! If only I had never gone to the mountains!
Cried in my sleep. Just woke up. Lethargic. Sam wasn’t beside me. Maudit is close, I can feel it. There’s a haze covering the world, stretching out in all directions. I can hear the glacial wind crying on the edge of the horizon—and my horizon is getting smaller and smaller.
Went upstairs to look. Sam’s gone and so is the Focus. When he comes back, I’ll take it and go.
(later)
Where the hell is he??? Can’t wait much longer
(even later)
Now or never. Julia is taking a walk to the village. Sam still away with the Focus, but Julia’s rental is out front, and the key is on the coffee table. The coast is clear. I can make a clean escape
Can I even drive in my condition? Gonna have to
Bye Grimentz, bye Val d’Anniviers, bye Maudit
Please don’t let this be my final note in this document!
Dear Sam, if I don’t come back, know I love you. Now and forever.
At the Mountains of Madness
Nick Grevers’s manuscript (part 4)
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry—that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet.
—H. P. Lovecraft
I didn’t know if I was ever going to revisit this document again but here I am. It’s eleven p.m., and I’m in my hospital bed. The AMC is calm after all the commotion of the past few days. My MacBook’s screen is bright, the lamp next to my bed is on, the curtains are drawn, the darkness has been shut out. Yet I still feel that power, roaming around up in that valley. It bulges over the edge of the col and, here in Amsterdam, my body goes cold, as if it’s right outside my window. I hear the constant hiss in the background, like the whispering of falling snowflakes or the approaching drone of accumulating forces. I start when I hear footsteps in the hallway. I’m startled by a shadow. Since I woke up into this nightmare, I’ve been living with the unthinkable, and I need to come to terms with what happened. I know that’s impossible. At moments like this, I deem the darkness capable of anything, as if it can lash out at me from that forgotten place up in the Alps, as if it can make me go mad only by me trusting these words to paper, as if it can even affect you just by your reading them.
Because we climbed the Maudit, Sam. Despite everything.
There’s a hole in my memory, after my confrontation with Augustin on the moraine. The psychotherapist says that memory loss is normal after a traumatic experience like mine, but there’s something else going on here. It’s not simply like not remembering how you got home after a drunken night out. Something happened to me the moment Augustin’s elbow hit my cheekbone and I smashed against the embankment. And what’s most terrifying is that, after that, I seemed to have had no more control over my own will.
And that is the story in photos 8 to 16. Shapes. Jagged, screaming horizons, silhouetted black against the dark blue of the dying light. Crooked and chaotic. These are the only images I have of the Maudit, Sam, and they tell a story of madness. I don’t remember taking them, but they’re on my GoPro, and judging by the light, it must have been not long after the encounter on the moraine. The longer I look at them, the more they seem to confirm what I already know: something had taken power over us and sent us up that mountain.
??*
I remember nothing of the night in the bivouac.
Nor of the start of the climb.
There are only flashes, like fragments from a delirium.
At one point, I’m ascending through a bitterly cold tunnel of gusts and darkness, my crampons crunching on a crust of frozen glacier snow. Somewhere, from a faraway place, my mind is vaguely alarmed that the only thing I can see in my Petzl headlamp’s pencil beam is the rope, which is being pulled in by some invisible force in front of me. The numbing stream of ice particles lashing my cheeks is making me sleepy and causes my mind to drift off. I think I’m the last man on earth, but instead of filling me with dread, the thought consoles me.
At one point it’s light, and now I understand why I couldn’t see anything in the dark. We’re surrounded by clouds. And I’m not alone at all. Augustin is there too, and I feel a brief but intense stab of envy when I see him clamber up against the blizzard and through the clouds as if he reigns over the weather. The idea amazes me more than it surprises me. When, a bit later, I follow in his footsteps through the steep snow couloir, I think, How did he do that?
At one point, something shoots past me from the whiteout under my feet. I almost lose my balance. I slam my ice axes deep into the wall and a frontal wave of spindrift washes over me. As I look down, gasping for breath, it seems like the chasm is coming to life. In a suffocating panic, I trudge on, clambering in the snow.
“Augustin!” I shout, but the wind cuts me off. The jerks on the rope are the only evidence that Augustin is still there, but I’m suddenly convinced that there’s something horrifying tied to the other end, something I absolutely don’t want to see.
There also are lucid moments. In these moments, I seem to be more myself, and the madness of the situation hits me.
This happens when we reach the east ridge. Through gaps in the cloud cover, I see massive, ice-clad bulwarks of rock looming up before me, alternated with knife-edged arêtes. Cornices of unstable snow dangerously overhanging the north face block our way. Nicht empfehlenswert—that’s what the guidebook said: not recommended. That almost seems like a joke now. The wind assaults us from the invisible glacier below and howls through the notch we just reached.
This is not a normal summer storm. We’re no match for it.
Still, Augustin has gone ahead. He impatiently tugs on the rope.
“Augustin, wait! What the hell are we doing?”
He turns around and spreads his arms. I need to brace myself in a niche in the rock to remain on my feet, but he’s standing in the middle of the ridge, exposed, unyielding to the elements battering him. It’s totally surreal, but that is how I remember it. “Feel that power!” he shouts, exhilarated. “Feel the storm! Isn’t it fantastic?”
“Augustin, this is suicide!”
“Nah, we can do this! I’ve never felt this strong! Can’t you feel it?”