The whole spectrum of the face was in atrocious condition, far worse than he’d expected. It was plastered with rime and loaded with unstable snow. He was now officially shit out of luck. There was nowhere left to go now, no place to— He saw the rope dangling two feet away! He lunged for it, and that’s when he made the worst mistake of his short life.
He made a single misstep in a game where that’s all it took. Both of his ice axes and the spiky crampons on his boots sheared out of the rotten ice at the same moment.
Hartz found himself airborne, the wind tearing at his clothes as he hurtled downward.
They say time slows down just before you die. That you revisit all the important scenes from your life, like a movie. It’s all bullshit. You fall off a mountaintop and three seconds later you’re a bug on the windshield of life. . . .
He only knew he was alive because his eyes popped open on the world. He pinched his mind to see if this could be real. He was numbingly cold and couldn’t feel his feet, but he tried moving his leg and succeeded. It was real. Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head from the powdery snow and surveyed his immediate surroundings. Ice, rock, sky. How in God’s name had he gotten here? Moving his arms and legs to increase circulation, he soon discovered the reason for his miraculous salvation.
Incredibly, he’d landed on a ledge he’d not known even existed. He’d fallen at least five hundred feet when the frayed rope had parted. He could almost make out the bitter end of it twisting in the wind high above him. Had rock ice or granite been below him, he would have died instantly. Instead, his landing had been cushioned by a heavy accumulation of crushed and powdery snow. The stuff must have been falling hard while he’d been struggling up there, fearing for his future.
God had saved him after all. He lay there for a long while, thanking everybody up there and thinking of his small family. Sandra, Willy, and his dog, Ludwig, waiting for him to come home to them that night. That he would see his wife and daughter again seemed a miracle. He lay there like that for a long time, exhausted, dreaming of home, and fell asleep with a smile on his face. After a while, he woke and felt himself strong enough and reasonably clear-headed enough to climb out of the snowbank and start looking for a feasible route of descent. The weather and ice prohibited going further. He snapped on the halogen light on his helmet, miraculously still there. Slowly, he made his way lower. He’d been able to walk away from the fall with no more damage than bruises and a painful crimp in his back.
The sharp back pain actually helped him keep alert. Presently, he came to a yawning crevasse he would certainly have stumbled into had it not been for the powerful headlamp. Now, carefully retracing his steps and circumventing the crevasse, his crampons gave him good traction across the treacherous ice field. He picked his way down with his ax, seeing some of the same holds he’d used on the way up.
He had been climbing downward for about a half hour when he crested a broad slab of ice. He saw something that caused him to think he really was losing his mind. He blinked his eyes, sure he was still delusional from the panic attack and the fall. Because what he saw atop a mound of snow a few feet below his feet defied all logic.
It was a head. Not a skull but a decapitated human head. With a pair of horn-rimmed sunglasses buried in the snow a few feet away.
The head was perched almost playfully atop a large snowdrift. There was a thin crust of ice on the head’s face. Christian knelt down on one knee and studied his find more carefully. He clawed some crusty ice away, trying to free the head from the ice beneath the jaw. But it had frozen. The dead man’s head was cemented in place.
He could see it was a male; the features were still discernible. Caucasian. The nose misshapen from a fall. Dark blond hair matted with dark black blood. Not an old guy, maybe early forties. The mouth, too, was frozen, opened in a permanent rictus of scream. The teeth were all shattered or missing. The blue eyes had also locked up in the open position.
The most bizarre thing of all? There was a total absence of tracks in the snow around the head. No signs of foul play, nor any footprints anywhere near the vicinity. A freak snowfall?
Yet now there was this human head, sitting on the snow. And a pair of eyeglasses.
Impossible.
But that was exactly what he saw.
The following is the missing persons report Lieutenant Hartz filed with Swiss Army Military Police at Zurich HQ immediately upon his return from his failed rescue attempt in the southern Alps:
Male, Caucasian, approximately forty years of age, close-cropped blond hair, light blue eyes, two-inch scar on the left cheek. Teeth broken or missing. Massive contusion inside the hairline at the right temple. Left ear missing. No further evidence or descriptions possible at this time.
(Signed) Lieutenant Christian Hartz 10th Mountain Div., Swiss Army