The Ladder (Eamonn Colfer)

Danny Mantles was seventeen when he moved with his father and younger sister to Raven Falls – one of the remotest places in the country. His father had found work there as a chef in the canteen at the lead mine. It was the latest of a series of moves. Danny’s mother had left them three years previously. They were still struggling to recover.  

Danny’s father had always been strict and became even more so after the move, mindful that Danny had just finished school and would inevitably be entertaining notions of freedom, which his father assured him he wasn’t ready for, telling him that if he was to leave home he’d always feel like his work with him had been unfinished – his son in the world, his head still full of childishness. Danny was expected to work as a dishwasher five days a week in the canteen. And while he had a house key, a strict curfew of ten o’ clock was imposed. Danny was nothing like his father. He had none of his father’s anger. He was more like his mother. Calm. Gentle. What his father described as soft. Despite this, Danny could understand his father’s strictness. His father had already lost his wife and didn’t want to lose his son too. So he tried to pull him tighter, but in the process only pushed him away. He will lose me too, just like he lost mother, Danny thought but never said, for fear of the rebuke it would provoke.  

Danny spent his weekends roaming the local forest, the floor of which was soft with brown needles. After rain, the bark on some of the trees would become gelatinous. Wads of white foam would form at the bases of their trunks. There was an outcrop of rocks in the forest, which Danny would sometimes climb. That’s where he met Hinton Wallace, who was smoking a filterless cigarette. Hinton’s father owned the hotel where the lead miners stayed, named the Northern Palace, despite the fact that Hinton said was technically a flophouse. Hinton said that the rock outcrop was called Sexy Rock on account of the fact couples went there to have sex, although Danny never saw any evidence of this. Hinton said he found a bra there once. He also said that he was part Native American Indian – that his great grandfather had been a fur trapper who ran with the Iroquois.  

Danny and Hinton met most weekends. They talked about the lack of things to do in Raven Falls. Hinton worked the bar at the Northern Palace, a job he hated. 

His father was worse than Danny’s. Sometimes he lost his temper and whipped Hinton with the buckle end of his belt. When Danny said he was no good for doing that, Hinton said he was still his father. Danny never said he was no good again. His plan was to save enough money to move to the city. It would take him two years. Hinton had been to the city once with his father but he didn’t like it. He said that everyone there looked dead in the eyes.  

One time, the two boys kicked an abandoned anthill to pieces. Another time they stayed overnight in a derelict shack, where they lit a fire in the old stove with stolen matches, which Hinton left on the stove, where they heated up to the point that they caught fire, shooting a ball of flame into the room, momentarily terrifying both of them. They made their way home shortly afterwards, knowing that the night had reached its natural end. On the walk, it occurred to Danny that their friendship had somehow been fused by the fireball’s heat.  

Danny’s father became increasingly strict. He took Danny’s house key and made him work every other weekend. Danny and Hinton still found time to meet. They ventured deeper and deeper into the forest. Finally, they got to the edge, which was hemmed in by a sheer cliff, so high that they couldn’t see its summit. They spent many days exploring the network of paths that snaked around the base of the cliff. That’s how they found the ladder. A rusty, wrought iron ladder connected to the rock face by bolted brackets. It rose out of sight with the cliff. They climbed the lower section of the ladder, taking turns to lead, going a little higher every time, until they climbed beyond the tree line of the forest, which swayed beneath them like a lush green lake. They invented a mythology around the ladder: it led to a castle in the sky, full of naked women; it led to a floating, invisible city; it led to a cave where a wise old man lived.  

One day, on their way home, they met an old woman pushing a pram of sticks through the forest. She had shiny black teeth and wads of darkened skin on her face. Hinton called her Granny Cancer. She’d seen them climbing the ladder. She told them the ladder had an important place in the history of Raven Falls. She said the town had been founded in the 18th century by Peyton Maines – a steel magnate, who was also the leader of a strict religious sect, known as the Witnesses. Maines had the ladder constructed as a rite of passage, she told them. Its destination was a closely guarded secret within the sect. Each couple had to present their firstborn for the climb, to be attempted on an eighteenth birthday. Most climbed up and were never seen again. Some fell and were buried in unmarked graves outside the walls of Raven Falls cemetery. A small few climbed back down again and were shunned from the village to live out their days in a shantytown in the marshlands. Granny Cancer said the practice had died out when she was young but that people still talked about it openly. They met Granny Cancer a number of times. She told them that when she was a child, her aunt had climbed back down the ladder. Her mother used to visit her in the shantytown. She had climbed for three days but lost her nerve, being unable to sleep on the ladder, despite the fact that she lashed herself to the rungs with a leather belt made especially for that purpose. Granny Cancer said that the climb was only for the brave. That the only way to do it was to take one step at a time.  

Hinton became obsessed with climbing the ladder. He climbed higher than Danny, who’d wait on the ground for him to come back down. Then Hinton started to go to the ladder without him. He stole his father’s working gloves. He met with Granny Cancer alone. She told him about the Native American Indians who worked on the skyscrapers in the city. She said they were the best workers. They had no fear. They would walk out on anything that was solid, regardless of how high or low it was – it didn’t matter if it was fifteen inches or six hundred feet off the ground. Some people put it down to their warrior culture. Others put it down to physical prowess developed in the wild. Granny Cancer had her own theory. She said that the Indians had never been taught about gravity, that they were too ignorant to be afraid. She said that it was only after she learned about gravity in school that she stopped climbing trees. She said that knowledge was a dangerous thing; that what we know held us back.  

Hinton’s father found out about the gloves and gave him a black eye and an ultimatum: shape up or get out. The next time they met, Hinton told Danny that he was going to climb the ladder. He asked him to come with him. That night, as he lay in bed, Danny thought about his father and his sister and decided he couldn’t leave them. Not yet. Hinton understood. He left a note for his father explaining that he’d gone to the city to work as a hotel porter. Danny stood at the base of the ladder long after Hinton was out of sight, part of him hoping his friend would climb back down, another part of him willing him on. After several hours of waiting Danny left. He knew he’d never see Hinton again. Walking home in the dark, Danny thought about his future, and for the first time visualised his life not as a diffuse thing but as something finite, like the trajectory of a thrown stone as it arcs through the sky and falls to its inevitable landing.