The Black Cathedral

Autumn 1954. The Mahalangur massif, deep in the Himalaya. An international expedition sets out to climb a peak no rope team has ever conquered-a pillar of black rock and ice the Western climbers have nicknamed the Black Cathedral, and that the Sherpas will not say aloud.Étienne Roux has come back to finish what his brother started and never lived to end. Two years ago, Paul died on this face. Étienne wants to understand why.
He will. At base camp, the porters won't raise their eyes to the summit. An old man recites the warning no one wants to hear: the mountain always sends one witness back down-only one-so the rest will know they were never meant to come. Then a porter vanishes in the night, without leaving a single track in the fresh snow. Whatever hunts up there shows itself only in the storm. It moves beneath the snow.
It cuts the ropes from underneath, always between two men, and never takes anyone but the one left alone. It walks in the footprints of the living and closes the trail behind it. One by one, the rope team comes apart. And when the thing understands that no rescue is coming, it starts to come down. Forty years later, an old man finally writes down what happened on the Black Cathedral. There were eleven of them.
He is the only one who came back down. It was not mercy. A vertiginous chamber-piece of survival horror in the great tradition of extreme-altitude dread-for readers and for anyone who has never quite stopped believing in the thing that leaves footprints in the snow.