The Haunting of Climb B
Short story from my new ebook [very short, 1000 words 4 mins
“Nobody climbs B Climb, not any more,” Hamish said. Susan looked up at the rhyolite crag, chunky with overhangs, lovely.
“People get – feelings. Around the top of the second pitch, the groove line leading out above the overhang. Feelings, and voices. It’s – well, it’s haunted, is what they say.”
Behind them, the grey-brown moor, the peat cutters’ huts where they’d just been eating their sandwiches. Above, the rockface.
“What happens,” Susan asked. “Do they fall off?”
“As I said, they don’t climb it. But back when they still used to: yes, voices. Voices in one’s head. And as I said, feelings. Yes, there have been falls.”
“Ouch,” Susan said. “But, Hamish. Just look at it. Look at that rhyolite.”
The B Climb was around the corner from the rest of the Lost Buttress, with the view down the long glen to the sea. Darker patches of pine trees, hunched shapes of the peat cutters’ huts. But on the rock above them each patch of moss glowed so green it looked like crusts of some copper mineral. And the rock, shiny grey, the colour of sea monsters and witchcraft.
“Hamish, I want to climb this. I need to.”
Hamish scowled up at the grey rock face. “I don’t see much by way of protection up there. In fact, I don’t see any at all.”
Nonetheless he dropped the rope off his shoulder, tied the bowline loop and stepped into it. “But that looks like a stance 70 feet up. And where there’s a stance there could also be a belay.”
Susan tied on, raised her hands to the first holds, felt the crystal edges rough against her fingers. She pulled up the first small overhang and stood in balance. Small holds, sharp edged, fingers crooked over the small holds.
Lovely.
‘Haunting of Climb B’ is the shortest of 13 stories in my collection ‘Afterlives’, crammed end to end with ghosts, demons, and divinities of various sorts. Check it out on my website
One pitch up, a good ledge, nothing to anchor to. She took a waist belay, and brought Hamish up. Out at sea, the mist passing backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, faint, abstract shapes in the sea-mist.
Hamish handed back the single sling she’d managed to place as a runner, and Susan stepped sideways into an open chimney, a big crack in the back of it, lovely. She twitched a sling around a flake of rock, probably loose but better than nothing, moved up another ten feet. The chimney steepened, the sides of it spreading outwards.
And something there, some presence. Garish impossible colours, aquarium colours of turquoise and coral. And a voice in her head, a strange voice inflected all wrong in the sentences, a strange obscene voice, foul words Susan had heard now and then, never from Hamish but sometimes from her elder brothers.
Fuck fuck bleeding Mary, bastard thing, fuck fuck fuck…
A weird arm stretches towards the handhold. An arm? A tentacle? An arm it was, orange and smooth like some creature of the ocean. An arm from somewhere behind her, in front of her? Stretching up and left – yes, there it was, that was the handhold there.
Bloody hell! And another string of obscenity, the voice not in Susan's head but there in the open chimney, right in front of her or behind. Climbing. And the string of foul language; this... presence. Whatever it was. Human? Nervous, frightened. Yes, frightened: but at the same time –
At the same time loving it. Loving this climb, Climb B on the Lost Buttress.
You can do it, Susan whispers. We can do it… And as the creature, monster, whatever it is… A glimpse of fur, of hair, brown the colour of leafmould. Short cropped hair, male? Female? Impossible to say.
As it moves up the open chimney Susan lays her free hand against the its back, feels something there, some slipperiness in the air, the orange reptile skin of it. And she whispers to the creature again. It’s a lovely climb, my dear. We can do it. A hand against the small of its back.
The creature – spirit – whatever it may be. It passes on up the chimney, feet and upper limbs pressing against one side wall then the other, curses and obscenities drifting into the grey air like autumn leaves.
Susan threads rope around a chockstone, brings Hamish up the pitch.
Together they climb onwards through the fading air.
“Nice thrutchy bit back there, up through the bloody overhangs, thought I was off.”
It was Cicily's first Hard VS lead. And what a great climb!
Ems reaches towards her, puts a hand on her orange Lycra shoulder. Firm with muscle under the orange Lycra, two drops of sweat on her neck there.
“You do swear a lot, Cicily. I mean, like, a lot.”
They kiss – only their third proper kiss. But they know it now: celebration tonight. Decent meal somewhere, and no bivvybags tonight, a room in a nice little B&B.
Below them, the glen filling up with darkness, ink poured into a bowl. Tumbled stones that were once some kind of huts – peat-cutters, is what it says in the guidebook. At the valley foot, the orange glow of the power station, lights of it like some malign theology turning the sea behind to black darkness. “So strange,” Cicily says. “So fucking strange. Just at the thrutchy bit, bloody shitting myself I was. Felt a hand, just touching my back.”
Ems powers up her phone, screen light making a little glowing room as the night gathers around them. Go through the mild hassle of demanding a double rather than a twin? See if anyone’s going to make a fuss, someone got Religious Principles. Or just wing it.
Two head torches, Their flickering path down towards the orange glow of the power station. Murmur of the two voices fades into the sound of the wind.
The moon shines down on the Lost Buttress, the broken remnants of the peat-cutters’ huts.
Are there two darker shadows on the face of the crag there? The faint flicker of a nylon rope?1
The title implies this is some sort of ghost story. What did you make of it? In particular, which (if any) of the characters do you take as having been ghosts
For author’s intention see footnote2.
You can read the first two stories, or even for a mere £2.45 (or €2.95) grab the whole of it
Illustration shows the north face of Ben Nevis. Sorry, geologists: the rocks in the picture are actually andesite.
By any decent Structuralist critique, any “author’s intention” is just spurious. But my own vote goes for Option 2, Susan and Hamish are the ghosts being haunted by the real people Cicily and Ems. That was the idea, anyway.
A right spookish tale, Ronald. I'm stayin out of those rhyolite nasties.
Loved it! I had two thoughts! First was akin to Schrödinger's cat, that both couples are locked in some neither dead nor alive loop or they are both alive but there's some time plane mix up. Second, was that obviously these are after life stories so one couple must be a ghost. But I couldn't make up my mind which one!