The Fifth on the Rope

I let it climb into my sleeping bag four times. The fifth night I didn’t. That’s why I think I lived. The other three, who couldn’t, didn’t.

February 2003, the Parâng massif in Romania’s Southern Carpathians. I was twenty-nine then, an amateur mountaineer out of Bucharest. By trade a land surveyor — I’d saved up my leave to do a winter traverse. There were four of us. Me, and two from my university climbing club days, Andrei and Mihai, and the woman Mihai had brought, Dana. Only Dana was short on experience; the other three of us knew winter mountains well enough.

Parâng isn’t a popular range. Same Southern Carpathians, but everybody goes to the massif next door — the Parâng ridge sits nearly empty in winter. The ridge is long and monotonous, the huts spaced far apart. That’s exactly why we went. The plan was a four-day traverse of an empty ridge. There were a few unmanned stone refuges along it, and our second night we were set to sleep in one of them, a stone hut called Comărunga.

The trouble started the second afternoon. Andrei rolled his ankle. Not badly, but our pace fell off a cliff. We lost the sun before we reached Comărunga, and decided to bivouac in the lee of a small outcrop on the ridge. Winter bivvy is never pleasant, but all four of us had the kit for it. It was twenty-some below zero. We pitched one tent in a wind-sheltered cleft in the rock and the four of us crammed in, each in our own bag. The tent was tight enough that our shoulders all touched. That night, the first time, it came.

Around midnight. I’d dropped into a shallow sleep and woke to a weight settling against my back. Someone had gotten into my bag, behind me. Tight tent, so at first I thought Andrei or Mihai had burrowed in for warmth. But my bag is a one-person bag. There’s no room in it for a second body. And yet there was one. Chest pressed flush to my back, a long arm reaching around in front of my chest, holding me. The arm was cold. Not a living person’s warmth — cold as the snow outside. I froze. I could hear all three of them breathing in sleep. All four of us were accounted for in our places, and a fifth was inside my bag.

I couldn’t move. The arm opened and closed its fingers across my chest, very slowly. A human hand, but the fingers were long. Like there was an extra knuckle in each. And it had its face buried behind my ear, against the nape of my neck, but I felt no breath there. A mouth right at my skin and no breath out of it. Instead, very low, a satisfied sort of sound. The kind of sigh a person makes settling into a warm spot. I screwed my eyes shut and played asleep. Nobody taught me to, but I knew I couldn’t let it find out I was awake. If it knew I was awake, it would move to the next stage. So I breathed long and slow, like a sleeping man, and held on. A long while later, just before the light came, the weight slid out of the bag. The bag loosened back to one person’s worth.

In the morning I said nothing. I decided it was a dream. But on the inside of the bag, the face where my chest had pressed, there was something like wet earth smeared in the shape of fingers. Five of them. Not the outside of the bag. The inside. I pretended I hadn’t seen it and rolled the bag up fast.

That day we reached Comărunga hut. Because of Andrei’s ankle we decided to lay over a day there to let it recover. A solid stone refuge. A door, wooden bunks along the walls inside. The second night — its second night — I slept with the bar drawn tight across the inside of the door. And still, at midnight, the weight settled against my back again. Inside the barred stone hut, on a wooden bunk, into my bag, it had come again. Same cold arm, same long fingers, same satisfied sigh. I held on, playing asleep again. That night, with its face buried in my neck, it murmured something, very small. Something that might have been Romanian and might not, sounds that wouldn’t quite form into words. I didn’t open my eyes until dawn.

That’s when I started to understand. It wasn’t coming only to me, of the four. The third morning, Dana asked, white-faced, whether someone had gotten into her bag and held her in the night — was that you, Mihai? Mihai said he’d slept on the far side all night. Andrei opened up that day too. It had been happening to him since the first night. All four of us had been living through the same thing. Every night, into each of our bags, a fifth on the rope had been climbing in and holding us, one at a time.

That day we tried to call for help on the radio. But reception on that ridge was bad. After a long while of trying, we got a few seconds through the static with another party traversing the next massif over. We stammered out our situation, and the man on their end was quiet a long moment, then said: “If that’s the Parâng ridge — how many in your party?” I said four. He was quiet again, a long time, then: “Count heads often at night. Before you sleep, and when you wake. If the number goes up, get down off the ridge before dawn, no matter what. Somewhere with light.” I asked him what he meant, but the static only swelled and the radio cut out.

The fourth night. That night it came into me deeper. Not just a cold arm holding me — its chest seemed to melt into my back, the boundary blurring. Until I couldn’t tell whether there was a layer of cloth between my skin and its chest or none at all. For the first time I wasn’t afraid, I was sleepy. The cold was strangely comfortable. Not playing asleep — real sleep came sliding over me. I learned only later that this was the most dangerous moment of all. Right then I heard Dana sobbing softly beside me. The sound snapped me awake. The sleep fled. I lived to see another morning that night, too.

In the morning, Andrei was gone.

His bag was still on the bunk. The bar was still drawn from the inside, the door shut. But Andrei was gone. We tore around the hut like mad. And behind it, on the snow-covered slope, we found him.

Andrei was lying on his back on the snow. Like someone had laid him out with care, arms folded neat on his chest. But his chest was open. His jacket and the clothes under it, buttoned as they’d been, but beneath that cloth the chest had split from the inside. The ribs were flung wide to both sides. Like a flower bloomed. Not cut from the outside — like something had pushed out from within, the broken ends of the ribs all curved outward. And it was empty inside. The cavity of the chest, cleanly empty. There wasn’t much blood. As if something had gotten in there and lain a while in that hollow, then pushed out from inside. Like rising from a warm bed. Andrei’s face was peaceful, like sleep. Eyes closed, even a faint smile at the mouth. Dana screamed, Mihai was sick where he stood. I couldn’t even be sick — I just looked at that empty chest and thought of the cold chest that had melted into my back the fourth night. It had been making a place to lie down inside us. Every night, holding us, hollowing out the place where it would go.

We left Andrei and ran. We couldn’t carry him. We hadn’t the mind to. Before the fifth night came, we abandoned the ridge and went down the fastest descent we could find. That man’s words on the radio were nailed into my head. Before dawn, off the ridge, somewhere with light. We got as far down the mountain as we could before dark, and met the fifth night not on the ridge but at the edge of a small village at the foot of the mountain, at a bus stop under a streetlight.

It came the fifth time there, at that stop. Around midnight, the three of us huddled shivering on a bench inside the streetlight’s reach, and just past the edge of the light, in the dark, it stood. For the first time, outside the bag, upright. Tall, a human shape, but it couldn’t bring a single foot over the line where the light fell. It stood right at that edge, long arms hanging, slowly opening and closing those long fingers. It turned its face toward us, and I couldn’t make out an expression. Only that its posture was that of a cold person standing at a warm doorway, waiting to be let in. The three of us held hands tight and didn’t move a foot from inside that light. Around five in the morning, when lights began coming on one by one in the village and the first bus’s headlights showed at the end of the road, it took a step back into the dark. And it was gone. It didn’t come closer, didn’t make a sound — just drew back as far as the light widened, and vanished.

We took that first bus down. Andrei’s death was filed as a climbing accident. Died of hypothermia during a bivouac, the body damaged by wildlife. The three of us said nothing about what we’d seen that week. Who would believe it.

Later, I went digging into the old accident records for the Parâng ridge. Obsessively. There’d been climbers who vanished there in winter, here and there, going back to the 1970s. Most were never recovered, and the ones that were, every single time, were found lying on their backs on the snow with their chests opened from inside. The records noted it briefly. All with faces peaceful as sleep. And at the end of nearly every record, where there’d been a survivor, the same statement was attached. “Someone got into my sleeping bag and held me each night.” Survivors came only when there were two or more in a party. Of those who went alone, not one ever came back.

I don’t go to winter mountains anymore. With anyone. Because it preyed on the person lying next to you, on an empty ridge, on a cold night. So in winter now I stay in the city, crowded and bright. But last winter, asleep in my apartment in Bucharest, I woke to a weight against my back. The city’s lights were bright through the window, and I was alone in the room. I counted. On the bed, besides me. One.