Ghost of the Abyss

Chapter 1 - Figure on the Slope

28,500 feet. Nearly there. I wheezed through my oxygen mask as I trudged behind a member of my team. I was nearly at the First Step, and I could see other members of my team start to climb over the massive rock. My blood pumped through my veins with excitement at reaching the summit of the tallest mountain in the world for the second time. The first was last year, and with the same team.

"Careful!" Craig, the leader of our team, and a man who was an old friend of my dad's, shouted at Nathan, the youngest, at twenty years old, five years younger than myself. It was his first time climbing Everest, and it had gotten to his head that he would be known as the youngest person to ever summit the mountain. I saw him slip as he was climbing up the First Step, but he caught himself just in time. The relentless, frigidly cold wind wasn't making it easy for us, pushing us this way and that.

"I'm good!" Nathan shouted as I came up to the step. I waited for my team to make their way over it. This obstacle was a huge one, but not nearly as bad as the Second Step that jutted up fifteen feet. I took in and let out a large breath through my mask, making my lungs hurt a bit because this was just too high for any body to handle, and I looked out at the view. We had to come during the three-day window before the monsoon season hit, when the weather was the nicest and the clearest. The mountainous horizon stretched miles and miles, and clouds covered a few of the lower mountains, but none were in the early morning sky above us. We also had a clear view of the Rongbuk Glacier that stretched miles and miles through the valley between the mountains. The yesterday was a clear day as well, and that was when this area, where the three steps were before the summit, was packed with people, a conga line of maybe a few hundred. We waited at our high camp, Camp VI, until those people dispersed. We hadn't seen any other climbers, so we had the mountain to ourselves.

Before I started to climb up the First Step, I looked down at the steep slope below us and saw far down the mountain into the cloudless abyss. My eye caught sight of something, maybe a tall rock way down low on the steep slope. I squinted my eyes and held up my shiny UV sunglasses that covered half of my face for a moment so I could get a better look at what I was seeing. I noticed Craig stand next to me, his glasses on, as well as his oxygen mask. We all had them hooked to our faces. A person couldn't survive up on Everest without them. I knew the person next to me was Craig because his glasses had a shiny blue rim, and he was taller than me by half-a-foot, while the others were all a bit shorter than him.

"What are you looking at, Cass?" he asked me, his masculine voice muffled due to the mask.

"I'm not sure, actually," I said through my mask, my voice muffled as well. I pointed my thick-gloved finger at the object I was seeing. "Do you see that down there on the slope? Maybe a tall rock? It doesn't look like a rock, though. What is it?"

Craig rose his goggles and squinted. "I don't see anything. I just see a bunch of loose rocks and some snow."

"You don't see that tall object?" I gasped as the object moved, and I saw legs. "Is that a man?! Way down there?! Oh my gosh!"

Craig really squinted his eyes. "I don't see anything, Cass. I think the high altitude is getting to you."

"Hey, what are you guys yelling about?" shouted Nathan from where he was on the rock.

"Cass thinks she sees a man down there on the steep slope," said Craig with a chuckle.

"Seriously? I thought we were the only ones up here!"

"I know I saw a person!" I quipped as the cold wind beat against me, and snow particles were in it. I pointed to the man, but he wasn't there anymore. "He's gone!"

"Hopefully you're not getting hypoxia!" Nathan shouted.

Hypoxia, the illness that people get when they are too high. It causes a person loose blood cells, and it depletes the amount of oxygen to the brain. That in turn causes hallucination. At least, that was one of the lighter symptoms of it. It could be fatal in severe cases... A person could pass out and not wake up.