Thin Air (2016) by Michelle Paver is a compelling supernatural thriller. Like her 2010 novel Dark Matter, it tells the story of a young outsider who joins a group of explorers headed for a deadly zone of geographic extremity. The hauntings in both novels stem from abuses by the powerful that destroyed lives of earlier outsiders whose predicaments echo those of Paver's narrators. (Protagonists in both novels are sustained by beautifully conveyed love of dogs.)
Dark Matter has its share of early team mishaps and physical travails, but the characters at least contend with their Arctic crises at sea level. Not so the men of Thin Air, who face their specter in the cold and at 22000 feet as they try to be the first to summit Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas.
Paver provides the reader with some early action here:
The ridge is narrow, and on my right, that sudden drop to the Buttress keeps appearing and disappearing in the fog. Above me, Garrard and Kits are also doing a vanishing act. It's hard to tell them apart, both in their grey Grenfell cloth climbing suits with long tapes trailing from their hoods. They look scarcely human, their faces white with Penaten, their snow glasses turning them into blank-eyed ghouls.
Well, it would be hard to tell them apart, if it wasn't for Kits' inimitable style. It's been a few years since I climbed with him, and I'd forgotten just how good he is. He's a different man on a mountain. Gone is that puppyish boisterousness which at thirty-seven is beginning to seem a tad forced. He's utterly focused, and he has that indefinable sixth sense which climbers call 'mountain feel'. He moves differently, too, with a fluid, cat-like grace that Cotterell says reminds him of Mallory. I wouldn't know, I never had the luck to see Mallory climb. But watching Kits now, I feel an unexpected surge of family pride.
'It's not the way he moves that makes him such an amazing mountaineer,' Garrard told me quietly, after breakfast. 'It's the fact that you know, you absolutely know, that he'll never let you down.'
He spoke with startling fervour, and I cast him a curious glance. His straggly blond beard only made his great beak stand out the more, and there was a glitter in his close-set eyes that made me wonder if his feelings for Kits mightn't run deeper than friendship. If that's true, I'm sorry for him. And I wonder if Kits knows.
Above me, Garrard seems to have drifted off course. It looks as if he's on the wrong side of the flags; although in this fog it's hard to be sure.
I'm squinting up at him when the snow beneath his right boot gives way with a crump, and takes him over the edge. He falls without a sound. No time to think. I drive in my ice-axe with all my strength, twist the rope around it to make a belay, and throw myself on the axe. A crack somewhere below, I hope to God that's Cotterell jamming in his axe. Another above, is that Kits digging in?
The wait can't be more than a second, but it feels like hours. Then my axe gives a shuddering jolt as it takes Garrard's full weight – and holds.
All this happens in an instant. There's a long, startled silence. The glassy clatter of falling ice. Then Garrard is clawing his way back. 'Sorry, chaps! Sorry!'
I'm becoming aware that my ice-axe has given me a painful bruise in the abdomen, and that Cotterell has climbed up and is clapping me on the back. 'Good show, Dr Pearce, jolly good show!' Now the three of us are grinning and pawing each other with relief, and Cedric is barking and trying to lick the Penaten off our faces[....]
Soon an artifact from an earlier expedition is discovered: the moldy rucksack of a vanished climber named Ward. The current team's doctor, narrator Stephen, begins having unnerving sightings. And no matter how he acts to ensure Ward's rucksack is discarded or sent down to base camp, it accompanies the dwindling group of climbers to higher elevations.
On his final night on Kangchenjunga, sheltering alone in an ice cave, Stephen has what he thinks is a nightmare confrontation with the object:
[....]Every breath is a struggle in this thin, dead air. I can feel every thud of my labouring heart. It's an effort to keep my eyes open, but I refuse to give in. I lie watching the flame twisting in its little mica house. I clutch my talismans to my chest: match-tin, wrist watch, Nima's ribbon.
Time is elastic. The minutes stretch like hours, the hours snap by in moments. I find the little luminous dials on my watch reassuring. They show me time neatly cut into even pieces.
The ceiling of my cave isn't as close to my face as I'd thought. In fact, it's not a ceiling, I'm lying on top of the Crag, staring up at a black sky thick with fast-falling snow.
I'm still clutching Nima's ribbon, but my wrist watch is gone – and where's the match-tin?
It's here beside me. I must not let go of it again.
A few yards off, a man in old-fashioned climbing gear sits slumped on his side. His balaclava and windproofs are crusted with ice. Something is wrong with his leg.
I am that man. I am clutching the match-tin in rigid fingers. I must not let go.
My eyelids are frozen open, I can't even blink. Snow scours my eyeballs like ground glass, but I can't brush it away. A jagged point of bone juts through the leg of my climbing suit. I need to push it back in, but I can't move. I'm imprisoned in an icy carapace of frozen windproofs.
The snow rips apart, and down below, I make out a camp with tents. I see men moving in the yellow beams of lanterns. Hope glimmers. I shout for help. My lips are too stiff to shape the words, and the wind snatches away my wheezy cries.
Above me, the stars turn. The moon and the sun wheel across the sky – and always the wind and the snow attack. With an awkward, agonising jolt that grinds my shattered bone into my flesh, I bring the match-tin to my mouth, and drag it under my teeth, to mark the day. Pain stabs my brain. A tooth has snapped off. Blood pours from my mouth, freezing in a heartbeat.
Down in camp, a man's head pokes out of one of the tents. It's Tennant. I recognise his helmet.
Now he's trudging towards the foot of the Crag. He's seen me!
With his mitten, he wipes his snow glasses. He raises his field glasses. I try to shout. I thud my frozen fists together. Help me!
He has seen me. He is staring straight at me. His face doesn't move and he makes no sound. Slowly, he lowers the field glasses. He turns and trudges back to the tent and disappears inside.
He doesn't come again. He only came to look. I am not a man, I am a lump of meat. He has left me alone in the cold and the howling darkness. Forever alone. Blood seeping from my shattered thigh, snow like ground glass filling my nose and mouth, scouring my eyeballs—
I wake with a gasp.
The darkness is absolute. The candle is dead. The wind is sucking the door in and out.
I lie panting and shuddering, willing the nightmare to fade. I was trapped in that carapace of ice, but appallingly alive, appallingly aware …
Gradually, the nightmare recedes, and my breath slows. The sweater that forms my pillow is scratchy beneath my cheek. Beyond my feet, I make out a faint grey glimmer around the mouth of the cave. I lie watching the stuff-sack sucking silently in and out. With a sigh, I turn over and bury my face in my pillow …
—it isn't my sweater. My face presses into something crumpled and cold. I inhale the dank smell of mouldy canvas. With a scream I recoil, falling back against the empty bunk. The rucksack is in here with me; it's inside my sleeping bag.
And the other bunk isn't empty. Behind me I hear the stiff rustle of frozen windproofs. In the grey gloom, the darkness moves, and I make out a dim, humped form.
Terror washes my mind white: for a heartbeat, I can't see, can't hear. I scramble for the door, but the sleeping bag is twisted round my legs, and my feet are tangled in the muffler and the hot-water tubing. The thing on the bunk heaves and comes after me. I squirm on my belly towards the cave mouth, kicking free of the bindings and the sleeping bag. One foot sinks into something that rustles and wraps around my ankle. Mewing, I thrash, clawing ice, hauling myself forwards – I burst out of the cave.
The wind is a knife in my lungs as I lurch to my feet and stagger into the grey twilight. Over my shoulder, the cave mouth is utterly black, but at any moment, a dim hunched form will emerge and come after me.
Now I'm at the edge of the crevasse. How did I get here?
I'm swaying and clutching the rucksack in one hand. 'No more,' I gasp. 'No more!'
Yelling, I fling the rucksack into the crevasse.
'There now,' I pant. 'Finished. No more.'
* * *
Like Dark Matter, Thin Air is a brief novel. Paver marshals her supernatural effects with a well-judged economy. She avoids overinflation of the material, preferring the unities of pace and place. She excels at deftly portraying the way accident thwarts planning.
Jay
13 November 2021
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