Brendan Stephens: HELL’S MOUNTAIN • Cleaver Magazine

Brendan Stephens
HELL’S MOUNTAIN

Long ago, after I died, I found myself alone in a vast wasteland with nothing on the horizon except a single imposing mountain gray with distance. This wasn’t paradise. I’d never been a believer, just an ordinary sinner.

Beside me lay a tightly-coiled nylon rope, a pouch full of chalk, pitons, a climbing hammer, and a rock climbing harness in the dried-out clay, the waist belt covered in carabiners. No explanation was necessary; I was supposed to make my way up the ice-capped peak, so far away. From where I stood, it had to be at least a thirty-mile hike before beginning the long, long climb. It’d take me days, maybe weeks to summit the mountain and discover what awaited me.

Either way, I had nothing else to do. I slung the harness over my shoulder and headed off, the cracked, copper-colored earth scorching my feet. I only had what I’d died wearing, which unfortunately was just pajama bottoms. I had woozily gone to sleep not realizing there’d been a carbon monoxide leak. If only I would’ve died wearing shoes.

As I walked, in the distance, a far-off figure deeper in the wasteland hustled—almost sprinting—towards the mountain until I lost sight of them in the wavy heat. Why the rush? We had plenty of time down here.

By sunset, I hadn’t even made it close to the mountain’s base. My mouth was sticky with dehydration, and my pulled muscles stung sharp. I’d never been a fit guy, and once I started streaming video games full-time, I didn’t have time for exercise. I’d been known for marathon streams where I gamed for twenty-four hours, minimum. Still, I surprised myself at how far I’d gone. I collapsed.

However, when I awoke, the mountain seemed farther away than where I’d fallen asleep the night before, as if I’d lost yesterday’s miles while retaining the aching joints and torn muscles. So once again, I pushed on and again woke up right where I’d started.

Then I understood: giving the damned an impossible goal was a joke.

I stopped trying. Lifetimes went on. Yet, when I squinted into the horizon, each morning the same figure hurried out of sight as the sun rose. Over and over, uselessly they strove. Once or twice, I tried to catch up so I could talk some sense into them, but I was never fast enough to even make it within shouting distance. I wanted to grab hold of whoever they were and shake them, saying, “Haven’t you realized that hope is our torment?”

That mountain loomed in the distance, out of reach. I wasn’t sure if God, Satan, or some other force had made this place, but whoever it was, they appreciated subtlety.

◊

Regarding Hell, it is a hundred degrees even without breeze or shade. There’s no lake of fire, just a brilliant sun in a cloudless sky baking the arid landscape. Everywhere—the faint scent of striking matches.

In this way, I spent decades shielding myself from the sun and ignoring the starving pit in my stomach. Ordinary sunburns colored my pale shoulders, and each morning my cotton-mouth built into a dizzying thirst. With the rope, pitons, and my pajamas, I often fashioned myself a narrow tent of sorts. If I made it from sunrise to sunset without moving, it was a good day.

This was a lonely place, but every couple of years you’d run into someone. The wasteland was full of ordinary people, even though there were miles of desert between us. I preferred to be alone.

Then everything changed. The figure on the horizon that always headed to the mountain approached. He was a hulking man, walking with determination. As he moved, his muscular form cast rippling shadows like when sunlight hits the ocean. His blond hair and beard hung past his shoulders. Along with his climbing gear, he wore a chain mail shirt and a wool tunic. I wasn’t a history buff, but it was clear he’d been here for a very long time.

As he approached, he removed a goat-leather waterskin and offered it to me. I couldn’t believe it. He must’ve died with the waterskin, making him the luckiest person I’d ever met here. For the first time in who knows how long, I drank deep. The water had warmed, but it didn’t matter. Instant relief, a feeling I’d forgotten.

As I finished off the water in a series of deep pulls, he introduced himself as Arwald, The Isle of Wight’s last pagan king, a Jute that held to the old ways while the Anglo-Saxons converted. He’d died battling Cædwalla’s Christian army in their campaign to slay his people.

Still seated, I handed him back the water pouch.

“Done?” he asked with an accent that sounded both a little German and Scandinavian.

I nodded.

“Then gather your things. We’re going.”

“Where?”

“The mountain.”

I chuckled, but then I realized he was serious. That made me full-belly laugh. I said, “Thanks for the water, but you’re going to have to find someone else.”

“It shall be you.” Arwald was already winding my rope around his free shoulder. “I need an anchor for my climb. As you are the nearest soul where I awaken, you shall bear my weight as I climb the peaks.”

Even though I’d never say it out loud, it felt so good to be needed, even if just to hold a rope. Still, I said, “It can’t be done, Arwald. You should know that better than anyone.”

“Yesterday, my climbing partner reached the summit and went onto whatever comes next. I’d been her anchor. Now it’s my turn. I’ll teach you how we climbed, and when I’m gone, you shall find your own anchor.”

I didn’t want to believe him because my afterlife had grown so comfortable and predictable. However, when Arwald offered out his hand, calloused and blistered from rope and stone, I took it.

◊

Here’s the thing—it’d been so long since I made an honest attempt at the mountain. More time than I’d been alive. In those decades, I had wasted away. I’d grown skeletal. My ribs looked sharp as if they could pierce my papery skin. My femurs were broom-handle thin. My eyes: sunken, revealing deep sockets. I wasn’t convinced that if I fell I wouldn’t shatter. We trudged towards the mountain as fast as my legs would carry me. Each footfall stung like glass shards severing tendons.

Arwald jogged in place beside me, telling me I had to dig deep. He was like a personal trainer, except he never said anything uplifting. No. Arwald said, “Faster! Cædwalla’s forces nip at your heels. He shall boil you in lamb fat!” Or Cædwalla would flay me alive. Or have my feet roasted. There was no shortage of torture if I didn’t keep the pace.

At the day’s end, I hadn’t ached all over like this before. Not in life or in death.

“It is as if we hadn’t journeyed at all. Look.” Arwald pointed to where we’d come from, still visible on the horizon. “Today, Cædwalla of Wessex has broken your bone cage and forced you to watch as vermin feed on your lungs. Pathetic. Tomorrow you must fare better.”

What I didn’t tell Arwald because he wouldn’t understand was that I’d been a popular video game speedrunner. I held many world records, completing games in forty-five minutes that took others months. My waking hours had been dedicated to shaving off fractions of a second on each level through memorization and repetition. Every button pressed with perfect timing. I skipped meals, received little sunlight, neglected everything until I got what I wanted. I had an audience of hate-watchers transfixed by my skill and the lengths I’d go for a little digital glory.

But here’s the thing—I would’ve done it even if it hadn’t been my job. My compulsions felt more like addictions. When I committed myself to a goal, an itch grew underneath my skull. The only relief was being the best in the world. Sometimes, even that wasn’t enough. Instead of moving onto the next game, for months I would beat my own world record over and over until finally the itch disappeared.

Now that I knew summitting was possible, I already had that itch. I had a lot of memorizing to do.

Arwald sat down beside me and watched the sunset.

“What do you think happens when you make it to the top?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If we’re lucky, we go where our loved ones await. Though my first partner always thought that would be too easy. Perhaps there’s another test. She believed we would have to explain why we should be released from this place.”

“How long did it take for you to reach the top?” I asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

After a long pause, I said I did.

Arwald looked away. “Centuries.”

◊

The next day, my shins and ankles throbbed as if I’d stricken them with a ball-peen hammer. Soreness everywhere. My mouth had gone chalky. I lay there in the dried-out clay until Arwald crossed the horizon. He grabbed the harness and lifted me like a puppy. I stood on quaking knees.

“The Wessex forces are heading this way, razing the countryside. Let’s see if you outrun them today.”

We set off. Then the next morning, again we set off. Over and over, day after day, year after year, we set off.

The distance closed between us and the mountain’s base. The soft pads of my feet hardened almost into hooves. I grew accustomed to aching muscles, almost welcoming the dull pain. At each day’s end, the mountain stood a little larger.

In all that time, I rehearsed my summit speech for when I made it to the peak. I tallied all the sins in my life, the ones that used to make falling asleep difficult and also the ones I didn’t regret that were merely human nature. I’d beg for such forgiveness.

Then we finally reached the mountain. On that day, Arwald and I let out cheers echoing throughout the ridges.

The sun had almost set. Those cliffs glinted.

“Huzzah.” Arwald slapped me on the back so hard I nearly crumpled. “Those bastards from Wessex have indeed still captured you, yet today they merely gave you twenty public lashings.” Arwald held the waterskin out to me. “Here. You shall need this.”

He explained the next step was for us both to race to the mountain alone. We wasted too much time with him walking several miles to meet me each morning.

“Won’t this canteen just return to you in the morning?” I asked. Once or twice, I’d been robbed by others, taking my pajama bottoms since it was all I had, but the next morning they were back around my waist.

“Not if given freely.”

I hadn’t known that giving was possible. In all this time, it’d never occurred to me that one might offer the little we had.

◊

With the waterskin tucked into my pajamas, I hurried across the wasteland alone. Sore all over, I pushed through as my joints and tendons ached in the usual way. To me, it was important I met Arwald at the first climbing face where we agreed. All the better, if I made it there quick enough that he spared me details about the Wessex armies. I settled into a decent stride. Alone, I didn’t have to share water, so I guzzled.

Believe it or not, I came to the rock wall even quicker than the day before. Yet Arwald wasn’t there. I called out, yet the only response was my own echo. He was never going to hear the end of this. For at least a hundred years, I’d bust his balls.

For a while, I leaned up against the rock face. Just to get a sense of what I was up against, I found crevices where the tips of my fingers and toes could fit. I held tight until my grip gave out, which didn’t take long. The muscle I’d built hiking the desert didn’t help. Sure, my calves were strong like cast-iron, but above the waist, I was gaunt. My uncalloused hands were as soft as a kitten’s ear. It’d be a long time before I could support my own weight, let alone Arwald.

Still, the sun set without Arwald in sight. Only in the cold moonlight hours later did he come trudging.

As he approached, I called out to him. “Valiant effort my friend, but the Saxons have shorn off your ears.”

He didn’t laugh. He collapsed beside me, and with a small voice he asked for water.

I hadn’t saved him any.

“The water helps more than you know.” His voice was raspy and dry.

“I’ll save some for you tomorrow.”

Eyes closed, Arwald nodded. “In time, I’ll grow accustomed. As everyone who came before me once had.”

He said nothing more. For the first time, Arwald, the berserker king, seemed frail and limited. Human, he seemed so human.

◊

Arwald approached wheezing. “How did you climb so high?”

I shrugged. I sat on a narrow ledge, legs dangling several hundred feet above what I had bouldered up before he arrived. I lowered my rope to him.

Time had passed. I continued to beat Arwald to the mountain, and to kill time I climbed unharnessed until he arrived, his lips cracked and mind dazed. I always saved him whatever I could spare in the waterskin, which he’d finish off in a single pull, whether that was a single gulp or half the skin. In what time we had left, he’d teach me how to knot the rope and belay it in such a way that I could catch him when he repeatedly lost hold.

The truth was that the physics of climbing came easier to me, even as my strength still didn’t match his. But rock climbing was more than brute force and dangling one-handed from a cliff. It’s intuiting your center-of-gravity before taking a move, using momentum to increase your reach, pushing and pulling at the same time. It’s breathing and never panicking. And when climbing Hell’s mountain, more than anything, it’s memorization. From the moment I awoke thirty miles away until I passed out exhausted on a narrow ledge, my mind obsessively went over the holds, contemplating counter-intuitive maneuvers in order to bypass logical holds and shave off time.

Yet even after showing Arwald how to cut off two valuable seconds by climbing perpendicular with the ground while using his leg as a counterweight, he could only climb in the way he’d learned centuries before I’d been born.

Once, during a short breather as we looked out across dry clay as far as our eyes could see, Arwald said, “Just as my son, you too climb like a lynx.”

“You had a son?”

“Two. Wulfric and Leofgyð.” His breathing steadied, though dehydration and exhaustion made him loopy. “Both were fierce. They would’ve made great kings.”

“What happened to them?”

“Haven’t you unearthed that by now?”

It seemed obvious. All this time, he’d been warning me. “Cædwalla. He captured your sons and killed them.”

“Aye.” Arwald sat up. “After I’d died in battle, my sons were a part of the retreat. When the Saxons caught them, they were tortured until they disavowed the old gods. Only after converting were they slain. That was Cædwalla’s idea—send my sons to Paradise, not for their sake but to punish me. Being damned alone wasn’t enough for me. No, Cædwalla needed for me to burn alone.”

I wanted to tell Arwald that he was not alone, but when I opened my mouth to speak, my words escaped me.

◊

Over the next half-century, we settled into a routine. I was memorizing my way up the mountain. Through trial and error, I’d even discovered how many strides I must take in the wasteland before wetting my lips in order to reach the mountain’s base by mid-day with half the waterskin left for when Arwald arrived. As I waited, I ran my rope its entire length for him. Then I bouldered up the mountain with no safety line if I fell, hammering wedges into crevices to help Arwald as he brought his way up behind. Then when I saw him climbing so far below, I made my way back down to be his anchor.

For a long time, Arwald’s frustration in himself built. He thought he hid it well.

Then finally the day came when Arwald said, “I’m holding you back.”

I told him that we were making progress, bit by bit. Yes, we had miles to climb, but we had eternity to close the gap.

He listened, nodding along, but there was resolve in his eyes. Resolve and sadness. The truth was we’d actually been losing progress. A long time ago, we used to make it almost halfway up the mountain. Those days were gone.

He gave me a tight hug and then, grabbing me by the shoulders at arm’s length, said, “Tomorrow I find a new anchor.”

“We need each other. This is a two-person job.”

“For me it is.” He sad-smiled. “But alone, you shall climb the peaks. With water, I’ve no doubt you’ll succeed this very year. To slow your ascent to the Great Beyond would be a sin.”

It felt odd discussing sin in this place, especially since we’d already been judged so our transgressions no longer mattered. Yet I understood. For Arwald, sin wasn’t about dogma but rather going against his own morality.

And he was right about holding me back. We’d never summit together. I was always waiting for him to catch up, and my constant help lowering the rope for him was making him lose his climbing instincts. Both of us knew this. Yet we’d gone a long time ignoring these facts because parting would hurt so much.

As the sun set, we dangled our legs over a cliff. He held me, and I felt so small.

“Can I ask you a favor,” I said.

He nodded.

“Don’t come looking for me. There’s already so much pain here. Why purposefully reopen wounds?”

“You’ve been a good friend,” Arwald said.

What I didn’t have to say was that Arwald had been my only friend.

When we settled in for the night, as he was on the verge of dozing, I attached the waterskin to his harness. For the first time ever, I prayed. I asked that when Arwald awakened, he would accept the gift.

In the morning, when I woke, the waterskin was nowhere in sight. I brushed away the copper-colored dust and walked into the desert alone. On the horizon, Arwald wandered the opposite direction.

◊

Unlike Arwald, I was unable to make it to the mountain for a long time. Without water, I spent many years back in the wasteland passing out from heat exhaustion. I had to relearn how to push my body, new ways to forget my thirst, new stride counts before collapsing, new ratios for resting days. When I finally crawled my way to the base, my softened grip made easy ledges difficult and difficult ledges impossible.

Still, I often thought of Arwald whom I hoped had found an anchor and made more progress than we’d ever made together. As the centuries passed and I finally reached the spot where we last parted, I grew convinced he’d already reached the summit.

I too was getting closer. Inch by inch.

How can I convey three thousand years? The identical trudge, the face-first stumbles into dried-out earth, the tumbles down rock ledges. The hundred-thousand times my body crumpled into the earth and I gave up in a whisper, only to wake up and crawl towards the mountain. Countless lifetimes with a swollen tongue, broken toes, fingernails torn from their beds. Centuries of near misses as I finally made it to the snow-capped region where my frostbitten body gave out with the icy peak in sight.

My mind emptied, losing track of time and miles. A detachment, if such a thing was possible here. From exertion, it was like watching someone else trudge endlessly. Even in the dark, I climbed with pure muscle memory. Sometimes without thought, I’d find myself having quickly scrambled up a ledge that had taken me months to scale.

The itch only grew as I came closer to the peak.

How can I convey three thousand years of frustrations and victories and loneliness and straining and regret and yearning?

And then one day, everything came just a little easier. My strides, a bit longer. My thirst, more successfully ignored. My hands found solid holds within reach. My only thought: This has been a good run. Maybe I’ll summit in a few more decades. That thought was with me as my aching joints, frostbitten toes, sunburnt shoulders, unimaginable thirst, and the millions of pains I’d grown accustomed to melted away.

I’d done it. I’d made it to the mountaintop.

The peak disappeared, and I stood in a void with a woman wearing a gray robe held about the middle by a simple cord.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “To tell you the truth, it was supposed to be impossible to arrive here on your own.”

That didn’t matter to me. Instead, I said, “Has a man named Arwald passed through here?”

She looked off in remembrance. “Ages ago. He asked me to deliver a message. He said, Huzzah. You’ve finally outpaced the Wessex invaders. You’re safe, my boy. You’re safe.”

For the first time in a long time, I was happy.

She said, “You may now state your case on why you deserve salvation. When you finish, a judgment will be made.”

It was strange. In all that time, the many rehearsed speeches from back when I thought I’d plead for forgiveness had fallen away. I didn’t even want forgiveness because I’d long since forgiven myself. That was enough. Everything I had once regretted was barely a memory of a child who failed without knowing any better. Children—all of us. What was a single lifetime compared against thousands?

I suddenly realized, in life, my waking hours were consumed by repetition. Whether intended or not, Hell had been tailor-made for me.

“I don’t want Paradise,” I said.

“Then why’d you come all the way here?” she asked.

“Because I need the creator of this place to know I’m going to keep climbing. Even if you make the mountain taller or give me more miles to trek. Sever my foot off at the ankle. Whatever you do, I’m going to keep striving. I’ll keep coming back. You’re going to see that I’m growing better, even down here.”

She stared deep.

“You’re serious?”

I refused to look away.

The woman nodded so small I might’ve imagined it. She said, “Your message has been received.”

◊

In the morning, I was thirty miles away. My throat was parched. My knees, stiff. Still, I forced myself to stand.

Just then, a small cloud, the first I’d seen in all that time, passed over the sun, casting beautiful shade. A gentle breeze whistled across the scorched ground. The wasteland was changing. Maybe in another millenia, a light drizzle would fall. Saplings would grow, and the heat would dampen. Perhaps after a hundred thousand years, fruit would fall freely to soft grass. In time, the wasteland would look indistinguishable from Eden, perhaps even Paradise. On that day, the walls between Heaven and Hell would be removed. Arwald would return, and we’d finally conquer the mountain together, not to escape, but for the challenge. I saw it so clearly. Hell was worth saving. Every soul, especially the damned, redeemed. I’d never felt so alive, even before I had died.

Then the cloud drifted away, and the red sun blazed as always. I set off, one footfall at a time.

Brendan Stephens is a writer hailing from western Maryland. His work has appeared in Pinch, Epoch, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, and a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award. Brendan earned his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. Currently, he serves as a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.