The Beasts Of Stoneclad Mountain

by Gerry Griffiths

  “You know, insulting me’s probably not the best way to get me to agree to whatever the hell it is you’re here for.”

  “It’s not an insult. It’s the truth. You know it is. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be hiding in your condo drinking yourself into a stupor.”

  Trudy mashed a pat of butter into her mouth and sucked on it, not saying anything.

  “He didn’t send me here to offer you a business venture. He sent me here to offer you a job.”

  “I don’t need a job.”

  “Oh? So your extended leave of absence from the zoo isn’t indefinite after all?”

  Again, she said nothing, although this time it took some effort. These days, any mention of the Cooper Memorial Zoo was likely to send her into a blind rage.

  “Or maybe you’re relying on the royalties from all your books?” Axton again selected a book from her shelf, this time a large coffee-table book of photography. Trudy hadn’t taken most of the photos in the book, but she’d written the text and most of the photos featured her and her dear friends. Axton followed her into the kitchen and set the book on the counter in front of her. Hollis in the Virungas, the title said in small, subtle lettering. The title had never actually mattered, after all. All that mattered was the picture on the cover, the one that had originally appeared as a cover on National Geographic Magazine and won the photographer a Pulitzer. “I checked their rankings on Amazon before I came here, by the way. A few of them are still selling respectably, I guess.”

  Trudy winced. “Did you read any of the reviews?”

  Axton nodded. “Amazon has removed a number of the ones that are most blatantly abusive, of course. The ones containing thinly disguised wishes for your death, and things like that. But enough are still there. You should know there’s still a few people defending you in the reviews’ comments. There are still people who believe in what you’ve accomplished, regardless of what the news of you is nowadays.

  “Those royalties will only take you so far, though,” Axton continued. “And the Hollis-Nelson Foundation, well, that’s supposed to be a non-profit. You can’t be getting any money for that, am I right?”

  Trudy glared at him. “I’m pretty sure you already know the answer.”

  “I do. Or at least Mr. Irving does. All he bothered to tell me is that your lawyers are doing a spectacular job keeping the lawsuit quiet. He also tells me that he doesn’t believe you’re involved in any of the wrongdoing. And if he believes it, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “Okay, so you’ve made your point. You’re right. What little money I have left is going to run out soon. But what does Irving care? Our spheres of interest aren’t exactly anywhere close to each other.”

  “You’ll be surprised, I’m sure. There’s more overlap than you think. And something that Mr. Irving has had his eye on suddenly requires some a certain type of trained eye. An expert.”

  “An expert on what, exactly?”

  “What do you think? The one and only thing that you know more about than anyone else living in the entire world.” He tapped his finger on the cover of the book, indicating the photo’s subject. “All he wants to do at first is talk to you. If you’re not interested, he’s fine with that. He doesn’t want anyone involved that isn’t passionate about it. And, despite recent public outcry at what you did—”

  “I had no choice,” Trudy protested.

  “What you were forced to do, then. You’re still the most vocal advocate for the cause. Their cause.”

  He pointed at the picture again, and Trudy found herself staring at it for the first time in years. It was a picture of her, nearly thirty years younger than she was now, back when she’d barely been more than a raw recruit in the Peace Corps. Her dark skin was covered in sweat and dirt, the inevitable result of crawling through the African rain forest and hiding in the underbrush for three weeks. But this had been the moment where all of that effort had paid off. Because she wasn’t alone in the picture. In front of her, a young blackback mountain gorilla stared her down, his face an odd mixture between stand-offish-ness and curiosity. He had his hand out to her, and she to him, their fingers hanging in the air and close to touching, yet not, in an unintentional reenactment of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Kramer, she’d named him. Whatever name he might have had among his own kind, to her and rest of the world he’d been known as Kramer.

  “Fine,” Trudy said. “I’ll meet with him. But no promises.”

  Axton smiled. “That’s all he sent me to ask.”

  Chapter Two

  Sell Your Soul

  Trudy was not completely unaccustomed to wealth. Her notoriety, before everything had gone wrong, had been enough to ensure that she lived comfortably, even if she chose to live modestly as well. She’d spent too much time living in leaking tents mere miles away from war zones to take any enjoyment out of an extravagant lifestyle. But she’d been toasted at fine banquets and been the guest of the President himself, so blatant displays of wealth didn’t surprise her.

  What did surprise her, as she took a seat in Irving’s office, was the lack of displays of wealth. Trudy had done a little more research on the man before coming to this meeting, and she knew damned well that he could afford far better than this meager, gray-walled room with an IKEA-built desk and outdated carpet. There were a few pictures on the wall to break up the monotony, and as she waited for her host to arrive, she got up and looked at them. Several appeared to be official promo photos of the cast of Sell Your Soul, complete with the famous devil-horned logo down in the corner. Out of the eight seasons the show had been on the air, Irving had been a Buyer on six. From what little Trudy remembered, this photo seemed to be the Buyers of season five. Irving was the only black person in the group. There was one white woman, and the rest were all old white men. The white men, of course, were in front, but that did nothing to obscure Irving, whose broad shoulders seemed to push away the others even from behind. He was a presence that couldn’t be ignored, but that had nothing to do with his size. There was an air of calm dignity to him that the other Buyers didn’t seem to have. The others Buyers had a vaguely shifty feel to them. Irving looked like the kind of guy you could make a hand-shake deal with over a backyard barbeque and be sure he stuck to his side of the bargain.

  Many of the other photographs were of Irving with various celebrities. Here he stood beside super-models in Milan, there he was at an Oscar party shaking hands with that year’s Best Actor winner. Most of these had been put on the walls haphazardly. It was only the ones directly behind his desk that had been arranged with any care, and the quality of their frames added to the feel that these were the ones that truly mattered to him. These were pictures of him with various rock and rap stars. He looked younger in all of them. This had been the beginning of his career, long before he had been a billion-dollar mogul and reality television star. His only business then had been a small security company, hiring itself out for cheap to music acts that either hadn’t made it big yet or were on the downward slide from their fame. It was entirely possible that he would have still been there and only there if Irving hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time, depending on how one looked at it) in the mid-nineties.

  At the center of the picture display behind his desk was one frame larger than all the others: a gold record, Two-Time Hustlin’ Blues by rapper Magic Mustapha. Trudy had read about that on Irving’s Wikipedia page. Mustapha had given the record to Irving, saying it wouldn’t have existed without him. Quite true, considering that, during the album’s recording, Irving had taken a bullet meant for the rapper. According to urban legend, most likely untrue, the album’s number one single even featured a sample of the original gunshot along with Irving’s grunt of pain.

  And that was it. That was the entire office of one of the richest men in the city, and likely among the one hundred richest in the country. No attempt at comfort, nothing more than the obligatory attempt to i
mpress any guests. And here Trudy sat, waiting for him. She wanted to say she wasn’t intimidated, especially since the environment was practically Spartan. But it was the minimalism of this man’s main office that freaked her out the most. She’d been in the parlors of warlords and presidents and prime ministers, and all those rooms had in some way been meant to intimidate.

  The message Irving seemed to be sending with this particular room was that he didn’t need to intimidate. He knew damn well exactly how much money and power he had, and he knew how to use it.

  Axton had led her up to the office about half an hour ago. He’d wanted to do it immediately after first speaking to her, but they had both decided it might be better to wait a day so that she could wash some of the funk and alcohol smell off of her. Not that she still wouldn’t have taken a little nip before coming, except somewhere in her self-flagellating bender she had finished off all the booze in her apartment. She’d considered going out to get more, but after a great deal of mental effort, she kept herself from falling off her temporary wagon. While she didn’t expect that someone like Irving would really have anything worth listening to, she still allowed herself a little hope that this might be the opportunity to reclaim a small part of her life. She kept that hope small, though, not letting it grow beyond the tiniest seedling. And if it all turned out to be nothing but bullshit, there was still a liquor store between here and home.

  She didn’t turn around when the door opened behind her. Trudy was busy sucking on a couple of ketchup packets she had brought from home, and while she didn’t give a rat’s ass whether or not Irving saw her doing this, she wasn’t going to interrupt herself for anyone, billionaire or not.

  “Ms. Hollis,” Irving said in that gentle yet deep voice that had made him one of the most popular Buyers on the show. “I cannot tell you how much of an honor it is to finally…” He finally came around his desk and saw her nursing the ketchup packets. Trudy always found this to be telling moment when she met someone new. The most common reaction was for the person to be disproportionately scandalized, as though her habit was an unforgivable violation of the social order. Irving, however, only paused long enough to take in the detail before continuing. “…to finally meet you. I’ve long been a follower of your work.”

  While his reaction to the ketchup was uncommon, his words weren’t. Trudy couldn’t even begin to count the times in her life she’d heard that sentiment, and so often the words seemed empty. However, she hadn’t heard them in some time now, so for the first time in months, she actually felt flattered.

  “Thank you,” Trudy said around a mouth full of ketchup. “I’m confused.”

  Irving again eyed the ketchup packet in her mouth, then the small stack she’d put in front of her. “Are you, now?”

  “Your underling said something about offering me a job.”

  “I thought you might need one.”

  “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But I don’t have the slightest clue what you think I could do for you.”

  “You don’t? Tell me, in your mind, if I offered some random person on the street a job, what do you think I would have them do?”

  “Uh, I don’t have the slightest clue. Anything? Everything?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you have your hands in a little bit of everything. There’s no telling what kind of position you might need filled.”

  “I see. You think of me that way, but you can’t imagine that any of my many projects and corporations would have a use for someone like you?”

  Trudy was silent for several seconds, thinking that over. “So do you have some kind of pitch for me or something?”

  “Or something,” Irving said. He finally sat down in his chair. He was a very wide man, and the chair didn’t seem to fit him well, but none of that was because he was overweight. He was, in fact, very fit, exactly as he had been back when he first earned himself the nickname The Bouncer.

  “I have a proposition for you,” Irving said.

  “A, you would have to buy me dinner first, and B, you’re not my type.”

  He stared at her unblinkingly.

  “Uh, right. Sorry. I apologize in advance for anything and everything snarky or idiotic I might say. It’s been… rough recently.”

  He nodded, a look of genuine understanding on his face. “The way you’ve been portrayed in the media is unfair.”

  Trudy looked away and didn’t say anything.

  “Did you want to talk about it?” Irving asked. The question surprised Trudy. This was the first time since the incident happened that anyone had bothered to ask her how she felt. Everybody else, from talking head pundits on the news channels to every asshole with a YouTube channel, had been too busy screaming their own opinions to the world to listen to a thing she might have to say. And she found that she did want to talk. She just wasn’t sure if she was ready yet. Trudy had spent so much of the last couple of months in a bottle that, she suddenly realized, she hadn’t even been able to process much of it herself.

  “Not really,” she said, although something deep inside her protested the lie. “It’s done. You’ve seen the videos. They were all over the news and the internet. You’ve probably even seen the memes.”

  Irving snorted. “Yeah, people these days do like expressing themselves through memes when they don’t actually have any words worth saying. Have you seen the one of me eating a sandwich?”

  “That rings a vague bell.”

  “All I was doing was sitting at a table at an outdoor café and eating a sandwich. Some random person takes of picture of it with their smartphone, and all of a sudden it’s all about how desperately I need to get laid. Something about the look on my face, I guess. You would not believe some of the dirty messages I get from completely random people referencing that. As though that one picture means they suddenly know everything inside me.”

  “Except they don’t,” Trudy said softly. “No one truly knows was going on inside your head.”

  “Hell, I don’t even know what was going through my head at that time. I mean, I was eating a sandwich, for fuck’s sake. Who really has intimate memories of that sort of thing?”

  Trudy looked away again.

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” Irving said. “I’m sure your situation is different. Me eating a sandwich is different than you, uh, you…”

  “Go ahead. You can say it. Me shooting an endangered gorilla that I had watched over since he was a baby.”

  “Yes.”

  Trudy sighed. “Great. We’ve gone down memory lane. We’ve expressed our disappointment at the shallowness of society. Did you have anything else to say, or can I finally leave?”

  “You can leave whenever you want. No one’s forcing you to stay here. But if you do leave, you’ll miss out on an unbelievable opportunity.”

  “Is this the time where you make me a monetary offer? You try to buy my soul like you and your friends do on your show?”

  For the first time since their meeting began, Irving frowned. “Okay, a couple of points. First, I really wish the network executives had come up with some other name for the show than that. It automatically portrays me like I’m some kind of devil. No one forces those people to come on Sell Your Soul, no one pokes them with a pitchfork until they tell us their dreams and business ideas, and no one forces them to sign in blood when they accept whatever financial deal we offer them.”

  “What about that one picture that made the rounds a couple of years ago?”

  “That jackass cut open his own finger and smeared it on the contract of his own will. I was just as disgusted as anyone else. All he wanted was his fifteen minutes of fame, and he got it. The failure of his company after that was his own lazy fault.”

  “Okay, fine. No actual soul selling involved. Gotcha.”

  “Second, don’t call the other Buyers my friends. I can’t stand those fuckers.”

  This took Trudy by surprise. “Wait, really? All of you always look so buddy-buddy i
n the publicity photos.”

  “And that’s all they are. Publicity photos. I will swear right here and now on a Bible that I’m not some devil in disguise. But some of those other ones? Let’s just say, there’s rumors among us of a few bribes to pay off some rather unfortunate witnesses.”

  “Do I even want to know?”

  “Not if you don’t want to testify in front of a grand jury someday. Trust me. Most of the other Buyers are leeches on society. They wouldn’t know an altruistic act if their lives depended on it.”

  “And you would?”

  “I try.”

  “That’s not a part of your personality a lot of people hear about.”

  “That’s on purpose. If someone advertises that they’re trying to do good in the world, they’re probably not doing the good deed for its own sake.”

  “So is that what this is? You getting me off my pathetic ass is your good deed for the day?”

  “Oh no. Not at all. If all you really want to do with the rest of your life is drink yourself into a stupor, that’s your own damned business. But I think you want to get back to who you once were, don’t you? You want to make a difference again, too.”

  Trudy didn’t answer. This time, at least, she didn’t look away.

  Irving must have taken that as some kind of sign. He stood up and opened a drawer in his desk to pull out a manila folder.

  “I’ve got some things I want to show you.” He opened the folder and spread the papers inside out on the desk in front of her. “I’m not going to give you any context to start with. Tell me what you see here.”

  “Paper hard copies,” Trudy mused. “How very old school.”

  “I have some of the best digital security possible, but I’m still paranoid about this getting out before I want it to. See if you could tell me why.”

  Most of the papers in the folder were photographs, but the one on top was a map. She picked it up, instantly recognized the region, and almost put it down before giving it a second look. It showed the Virunga Mountain range, a series of volcanoes, some dead and some still very much alive. The Virungas were deep in the interior of Africa and claimed in part by three different countries: Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Trudy herself, along with her predecessors Dian Fossey and George Schaller, was a big part of the reason why Westerners even knew anything about the Virungas. They were, after all, the only place in the world where one could find the endangered mountain gorilla. A large part of Trudy’s nearly sixty years had been spent in the rain forests of these mountains.