The Mountain Ate My Map

How it begins

Rosa Calder's map lost a corner while she was looking at it. Not in the wind. The paper simply softened, curled inward, and disappeared with a noise like someone enjoying a biscuit.

She held it away from her face. The mountain ahead made no comment.

'Is that normal?' Arun Senn asked.

He stood beside the trail marker in a surveyor's coat too new for this weather, carrying three rolled maps beneath one arm. Rosa had advised him to bring wool. He had brought waterproof ink. At the moment she was willing to admit his choice might prove useful.

'No,' she said. 'Usually it waits until lunch.'

It was a poor joke, but she preferred a poor joke to the alternative. Six people had taken this path four days ago. Their campfire smoke had stopped on the second morning. Yesterday the innkeeper had found their expedition permit in his stove, although he distinctly remembered giving it back.

Arun unrolled his oldest chart. The summit occupied the center, rendered in precise brown contours. As Rosa watched, a contour line drew itself tighter. Another vanished. The paper smelled briefly of warm bread.

'This was copied from a royal survey,' Arun said.

'Perhaps the mountain didn't approve it.'

He did not smile. A narrow road had appeared beneath his thumb. It led toward a pass Rosa had climbed for twenty years, and through a notch she had never seen.

From inside the rock came a distant knocking. Three taps. A pause. Three taps again. The signal guides taught people who could not shout.

Rosa set her pack down. The sound moved upward through the slope, as if someone were carrying the trapped climbers inside a closed fist.

'There,' Arun whispered.

The new road darkened. Something beneath the paper pressed outward, making the outline of a small hand.

Rosa took her knife and cut the map around it. This time, the mountain stopped chewing.