Seven Demons by Aidan Truhen (best motivational books for students TXT) 📕

“…I’m giving you a raise Saul.”

“Pleasure to work with you sir.”

“And you Saul. My name is Jack.”

“Hi Jack.”

“Hi Saul. Saul Saul Saul.”

“You don’t have to keep saying Saul every time Jack.”

“I’m just getting myself over the hump I really kinda liked Kandahar.”

“Yeah well I thought I did but then I went there.”

—

So that was nice Saul is a perfectly nice person who also will shoot someone in the head for me and he starts in the morning because he has to go say goodbye to his boyfriend who comes from Chur and is a landscape designer. We say ciao to Saul and Saul says ciao to us and we finish the coffee because it is not at all bad and then we go see the mountain we are going to climb.

Figuratively. We are going to rob the bank on top of the mountain we are not climbing the actual mountain because it is huge and cold and none of us has the faintest fucking idea how you climb a mountain. Except Saul probably you look at Saul and you just know he will just bivouac all damn day and night. He probably bivouacs at home in his living room like his partner is making vegan bauernwurst on a science-fiction-looking Swiss stove top and Saul is hanging from the ceiling by two fingers singing along to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his all-spandex briefs.

I have asked Saul about this and he says that is exactly how it is so there.

No one is allowed up onto the plateau until later this week. So we take the tourist bus and look up at the black rock.

—

Swiss tour lady wears Hermès like it is just overalls.

“Welcome to the Kircheisen this is a UNESCO Heritage site we are twinned with Huascarán in Peru here you will see many remarkable wildlife opportunities including chamois and ibex. We cannot dismount from the car at the summit there are preparations in place for the art fair but we can make a round trip and the view is quite amazing. Before this we will go to the waterfall called the Teufelhammer. This is a very important natural resource here in the valley. There is here hydroelectricity for the whole region and also a tourist attraction here one may see thousands of cubic meters of water passing through the underground cavern every second down the fall pipe from the gipfel that is the peak. It will be very nice.”

“Thank you yes I am sure that will be nice.”

“So here we will please all put on the wet-weather gear although in the mountain of course the weather is always the same it is wet. You will notice there is no life jacket included do not fall in.”

“Okay.”

“There is no life jacket because no point. If you fall in you will not drown the water is very mineral heavy not so much like the Dead Sea but still you will float.”

“Okay.”

“But you will still die because you will be crushed by the force of thousands of cubic meters of falling water descending from a distance of one kilometer also because the shock of the temperature would be fatal within a few minutes if you did not already die from the crushing.”

“Yes I see.”

“So it is best to not fall. We do not include a life jacket because we do not encourage this experiment.”

“No right no.”

“Okay then we make the tour.”

We make the tour.

—

It’s true that the waterfalls are amazing. Basically the whole mountain is like a hot dog bun wrapped around a giant sausage of pressurized water but that does not tell you how it is at all. Umptybajillion gallons of it filter through cracks in the stone and form a great big gigantic flood, which drives down here with a noise that is like a skull-crushing version of one of those old recordings of water falling they used to give you on channel 7 on transatlantic flights to help you sleep, back when the headphones were just plastic tubes with air in them and the sound was literally piped into your ears through a clear plastic wishbone that looked like a stethoscope. On the tour, you stand on a steel bridge over the cauldron of water and look into it and it is the most powerful thing I have ever seen in my whole life. It is not water like water you have ever seen not even if you are a deep-sea fisherman a long liner a rig diver not any of those things. This is water like a war in the earth like a pit full of people fighting over and over for one scrap of food before dying like they would crawl and fight and die and eat the fallen and still they cannot get less hungry and more are born out of the sky and more are eaten in every passing heartbeat and it will go on forever.

So of course it is part of the security inside.

I mean you would you just would.

Part of the access corridor to the the vault is flooded. It is part of the Teufelhammer and so no, you cannot just swim through. Swim in this and the pressure would not blow out your eardrums it would smoosh you down into an easily portable jelly ball.

So sure you can wear diving armor. That is what used to be called a JIM suit yes yes of course I know what it was called because I was a kid in the ’80s and it was a thing.

Except that it will not help here unless we can hack the security system because the flooded section ALSO has an electromagnetic wall and the only release is on the inside of the vault. You walk into the flooded section all high and hard in your mecha suit of diving supervillain macho and OOPS now you are sucked through a hole by this big magnet. In the brochure it says there is a holding net but