Bayliss stewed in the gloom like gristle in gravy.
It was getting increasingly worse, his guilt. His terrible cloying guilt.
Ever since the expedition to conquer Anakpan's towering summit, the climber felt the black burden of the survivor. Unlike his climbing partner and best friend, Rollo, Bayliss had returned to the safety and fireside of his comfortable period home.
But much more than that, Bayliss was consumed by the remorse - and fear - of the murderer.
He had killed Rollo.
He had taken his life at the top of the world, where God was watching and the devil most surely too.
Bayliss had kept his dark deceit for ten long years, guarding it like a stagnant pool in the steep ravines of his hardening soul.
In that decade he had often publicly celebrated his friend's achievements and commiserated with Rollo's newlywed widow, Hester.
More than that, Bayliss had seduced her as he had always intended to, jealous of Rollo's good fortune and his unbearably gorgeous young wife, whom Bayliss insanely desired.
Before they were married, Bayliss had long coveted his best friend's fiancee from afar, a clandestine passion growing ever stronger in the lightless recesses of his mad love.
He had been Rollo and Hester's best man at their beautiful wedding, swearing to protect his greatest friends and their promised children from the travails of the age with his very life.
He lied.
His lust for Hester burned like the coal seams of purgatory and at length he could no longer stop his thoughts turning to Rollo's sudden demise at his own hand.
His best friend had to die.
It was Pythagorean.
The future was the perfect sum of a Rollo dead and his Hester uprooted for himself.
Then, the opportunity presented it's ugly countenance and Bayliss' hateful geometry was actually drawn out on a map of Ladkam, the tiny Asian enclave pinned to the world by its mightiest peak, Anakpan, the untaken giant at the edge of the Earth.
The massive berg gripped Bayliss like a Gypsy seer. It whispered to him, caressed his mind, conjured alluring visions of Rollo's rent body and Hester's almost unspoiled charms waiting for him to ravish in her London boudoir.
Anakpan spoke of blood and of bone. It spoke of the treachery in men's souls and laughed.
Bayliss listened like a medium and the thought was flesh. Rollo would die at the summit.
Keen climbers since grammar school and all the way though medical college, the two friends, Bayliss and Rollo had tramped the great massifs of Britain, scaled the lofty Alpine fastnesses and proudly taken His Majesty's empire to the crests of the sub-continent's titanic ramparts.
Only Anakpan remained unconquered and the nation's most illustrious climbing pair were chosen by the court to usurp it's might and plant the British flag atop it's cloud-flecked towers.
Preparations for the escapade were afoot and His Majesty's stores were made available to the adventurers. Ropes, boots, crampons, lamps, supplies, maps, guides, board and passage.
The date was fixed and the grim trajectories of Rollo and Bayliss were set therein.
May first.
One month after Rollo and Hester were married in that hopeful Spring of larks and affection.
Goodbye my sweet darling. Come back to me please.
I shall. I shall. Goodbye my love. Upon my return we shall make a child.
These pleas and vows whispered softly on the winds of the Asian range.
Anakpan was reached by the end of May.
The forecast was favourable, a solar eclipse later in the summer an omen of triumph, a herald of the impossible.
With the aid of local indigenous guides, a mid-way camp was eventually established nestling in the icy hide of the grinning behemoth. In the evenings the guides muttered to one another nervously as they stared at the nearing Moon, like the terrifying Sun, positioning itself with the gears of the Gods.
By mid-June the final ascent was in sight and Bayliss and Rollo dismissed the guides, insisting that they stay and make camp and give the final glory solely to the two appointed citizens of the great Empire.
The natives appeared keen to depart from the higher slopes and left willingly for safer, less auspicious geology. The prospect of a dark Sun seemed to make them jittery.
Bayliss and Rollo reached the harsh knoll on the Wednesday, their ice axes blunting from excessive hacks into stubborn pack ice. Even the finest quality Capital ropes were fraying in the frigid air. Rollo was struggling to breath, but Bayliss felt little pity for his dear friend.
Jealousy flared when he saw Hester's image in Rollo's pendant, a so-called kamera photograph from the new toy of the well-to-do.
Such hubris. Such arrogance. To rub his face in it. Here!
Bayliss fumed and when the predicted eclipse of the great Sun occured that evening he saw his opportunity to rid himself of this entitled rival once and for all.
When it happened, as Moon wedded Sun, the guides at the camp stared in disbelief at the light-starved sky, it's shadowy curtain reaching down to cover their frightened faces as Gods and Demons from a different age flickered before them.
Bayliss embraced the darkness like a madman and as the Sun was cupped black he stared at his adversary.
Can you keep a secret Rollo, old man?
Rollo squinted as the corona burned round the moon like a melting ring.
Of course, what is it Bayliss?
I hate you! I hate you completely and fully! I always have and when you're gone I will take Hester from you!
What?
But the time for secrets was done and Bayliss pushed a dirk deep into Rollo's belly, who, bewildered by his best friend's unfathomable treachery, clasped his arm too late and with a tear in his eye, staggered over the frozen scarp clutching the dagger's hilt and dropped screaming onto the lethal bluffs below, where he broke like his wife's new bone china and perished on the blood-slicked slope.
Bayliss stared at his ragged friend in the solar murk and as the sun sloughed off the pesky moon once more, he could see clearly and gratefully that Rollo was no longer of the living.
He bellowed across the pinnacles with all his murderous glee.
Thank you Great Sun! Thank you!
Planting the British flag at the summit alone and feeling absolutely nothing, Bayliss climbed down to the ensorcelled guides with Rollo's pendant of Hester, supposed proof that his partner, confused by the total eclipse, had slipped from his grasp on the knoll and fallen accidentally to his untimely death as heaven was momentarily extinguished leaving Hell to open its sable doors.
Upon their return to London, Bayliss consoled the grieving wife, utterly bereft at the loss of her beloved man, now lying frozen on the frosted battlements of a distant rock, her lonely husband curled in the cold like an embryo and far from home.
She caressed the pendant she received, the only remnant of her Rollo gone and Bayliss mourned alongside her during those darkest of days that came, the eternal doom of the funeral and beyond, the gradual fading of the sun and Hester's journey into night.
Her dreams were of raw hands crawling across the moon, of lips whispering deep within the Sun and babies growing in frozen chambers at the top of the world. They broke free from their solid membranes and snowballed over jagged lintels, an avalanche of spilt blood flooding the valley below, their heads bobbing in the eddies, their hands waving red-stained Union Jacks.
Hester would scream and it was Bayliss who comforted her in the dead of night, sharing her bed on Rollo's cold half, sharing everything until one day, some two years later, they were married and expecting their first child.
Bayliss had won. He had taken Hester fully and like an avid cuckoo, had replaced his rival and dead best friend, Rollo, the man he put to death on Anakpan.
Life was sweet.
Bayliss had a successful doctor's surgery, his new wife enjoyed a fresh procession of high teas, sponge cakes, disgorged his children and for years the couple were the toast of the town, the grief of earlier times evaporated and the memory of Rollo largely forgotten, no sign of him ever found on the mountain and his name certainly never spoken of in polite company anymore.
But as the years flew by Bayliss grew uneasy.
His desire to confess to his best friend's murder bloomed like algae in his festering soul and his moods became tetchy, his former mellowness usurped by a burgeoning gloat. Hester and the children steadily withdrew and left Bayliss to wallow in his secret agony.
And thus, a full ten years staggered by, when the call came to retrieve the Empire's flag from Anakpan, the enclave of Ladkam now fully independent.
Bayliss leapt at the chance to be a member of the expedition and in his madness schemed to retrieve the incriminating dirk under the cover of another forecast solar eclipse. All he had to do was remember where Rollo had fallen and be there at the exact moment when the sky turned black.
The new Anakpan expedition got underway and Bayliss, once the natural leader but now deemed less experienced and older, held the lower position of team surgeon.
The climbing was arduous and the rigours of the peak proved more than Bayliss had expected. He grew increasingly manic and the team eschewed his company, leaving him last on the ropes to mumble and curse as much as he wished.
Damn you Anakpan! Damn your granite heart! I gave you blood already. You will not have mine!
As the days bled into weeks the local guides grew restless the closer the new solar eclipse drew near. Still superstitious of the coming day's darkness, a few of their company remembered Bayliss from his previous conquest and they had never forgotten the frozen blood on his mittens. They had always suspected foul play, but had kept quiet like good acquiescent citizens of the world-bestraddling British Empire.
When the moment arrived, the eclipse of the sun and the moon, the mountain's late afternoon became night's end as the air was daubed with ink.
Everyone drew in their breath and gawped at the celestial majesty edging towards its zenith.
Only Bayliss did not look. He slipped off and gingerly picked a way down the ravine to where he felt sure his former best friend lay dead and frozen.
As the two bodies came together and the sky turned early to midnight Bayliss could not believe his eyes.
The ice-dune that would have covered Rollo was there but it was empty and hollow.
Rollo had gone!
As the day retreated behind the moon, breathing heavily in the black ether of the solar event Bayliss frantically searched the nook he stood in for signs of a corpse.
Can you keep a secret?
The voice fluttered like a crow from a crack to the left and as Bayliss spun around, his heart pounding in his chest, a figure stepped from the deeper shadows and stood before him.
Rollo!
Can you keep a secret old man? I believe that was the last thing you asked me.
Rollo! How?
Well, my secret is ..... I'm not dead at all.
What?
Yes, old boy, you did murder me but my spirit lived on, preserved in an icy casket until it was released, just now, by the freeing corona around the sun and the moon.
That's preposterous!
I am the ghost of your best friend, dispatched in the flaming ring of time and brought back by it, full circle, to exact my revenge.
No Rollo!
Yes, your ten years' warming my side of the bed and seeding my Hester are over my friend. Your time is up and mine is just beginning!
No Roll.........ugh!
The razor-sharp dirk entered Bayliss below his navel and cutting upwards slit easily through canvas, fur, skin and muscle until the hard chin halted the blade's progress.
In the eclipse's dark the thawing twisted phantom, of whom was once Rollo the man but was now something else, prized open the wound and holding it wide apart stepped inside and wriggled into its form until he fitted like a glove.
Bayliss screamed in agony as the entity and it's shadow filled his body.
It sewed up the incision from the inside.
As the final stitch was pushed through his dermis Bayliss could take no more and fell to the snowy ground babbling about the sun and the moon and the Hell in between. Then his world turned to black and his eyes closed.
As daylight rekindled itself, the medic of the team found him and, guessing he had slipped on the sharp jags by the knoll, bandaged him up and roped him down the rest of the route to the base camp. Here Bayliss's injured figure was taken by yak for an early return to England and home.
Hester tended to his grisly wound with gentle dabs of disinfectant.
It was an angry red now and dreadfully infected. The family doctor had prescribed complete rest, daily cleaning of the incision and a course of laudanum.
Bayliss mumbled about the devil in his belly who had swallowed the sun and slept fitfully throughout the first week.
The injury did not get better and seeped increasing flows of putrefaction.
At the start of the second week it ripped.
Hester stared in abject horror when the tear widened and screamed uncontrollably as a corrupted hand reached out of the wound, quickly followed by a second hand and a malignant pus-smeared head.
When an entire figure pulled itself out of her husband Bayliss's convulsing body and stood before her she screamed and screamed till her lungs burst.
The form of Rollo, wholly repugnant and decayed, shambled towards the shaking woman leaving footprints of blood-soaked frost in its wake. His eyes showed the darkening of a diseased sun and as he spoke his voice cracked like a fracture.
Hester my beloved, it is I, Rollo, your lost true husband, now returned to claim you and take you away to our new home, the glorious frozen prison where I was murdered and died and where we shall live together forever where day meets darkness. Come. Come to me my love.
Hester shrieked and she fainted at the feet of the decomposing figure.
The last anyone saw of her was the family doctor, who felt sure he had glimpsed a silhouette at the end of the street, the outline of a crooked man carrying a woman's body into the deepening darkening void of the night.
