The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  Pasang nodded, dropped a final piece of metal into the metal pan, and turned off the lantern. The relief of no longer being a lighted target…visible meal?…made me sigh audibly.

  Reggie moved closer to me along the north stone wall and whispered, “Jake, we identified everyone. It wasn’t easy. Besides Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, the dead were Nyima Tsering, Namgya Sherpa, Uchung Sherpa, Chunbi Sherpa, Da Annullu, Tshering Lhamo—he was the young Buddhist priest trainee you may remember…”

  I recalled our thin, always smiling Tiger Sherpa who’d spent so much time talking to the priests at the Rongbuk Monastery.

  “…and also Kilu Temba, Ang Tshering, and Ang Nyima. Those last two were the ones who’d run across the stream to the north.”

  “Were the two Angs brothers?” I whispered.

  It was just light enough for me to see Reggie shake her hooded head. “‘Ang’ is just a diminutive term, Jake. It can mean ‘small and beloved.’ Ang Tshering meant ‘beloved Long Life.’ Ang Nyima meant ‘beloved Sunday-born.’”

  I could only shake my head in sorrow and embarrassment. I hadn’t even understood these men’s names. To me they’d all been porters—a means to our ends, “our” being the Deacon’s, J.C.’s, and mine—and I’d never even bothered to learn more than a few words of their language, and those mostly commands.

  I vowed that if I got out of this mess alive, I’d be a better person.

  I noticed that the Deacon had taken off his Shackleton jacket and draped it over himself and Pasang as if it were a rain poncho. Then one of the little miner’s lights clicked on and I saw through the folds in their blackout mini-tent that they were looking at small, dull-colored metal objects—three of them—that were in Dr. Pasang’s metal basin.

  “Bullets,” Pasang said just loudly enough for the rest of us to hear. “Slugs. Taken from each of the dead men. With Ang Chiri, the bullet had passed through his heart—his heart was missing, you may remember—but had lodged in his spine. The bullet is deformed from impact, but I think you can make it out, Mr. Deacon. It’s similar to this one, which was in Lhakpa Yishay’s brain, had not passed through hard bone, and was not deformed.”

  “Nine-millimeter Parabellum,” whispered the Deacon, holding the larger bullet. “I saw a lot of these pulled out of British lads during the War.”

  “I did also,” said Dr. Pasang. I remembered then that Pasang had been studying and interning and working in British hospitals during the War.

  “This type was usually fired from a German Luger pistol,” said the Deacon. “Seven-round magazine. Sometimes, towards the end of the War, this kind of nine-millimeter round was fired from the Luger Parabellum M-Seventeen variant—a sort of machine gun carbine, thirty rounds, longer barrel.”

  “We didn’t hear any shots,” hissed Jean-Claude. He was crouched, flare pistol in hand, and diligently looking into the foggy darkness in his sector. He didn’t even turn his head toward us when he spoke.

  “With the wind blowing the way it’s been,” said the Deacon, “and snow falling…Acoustics get very strange on the mountain.”

  “We heard Lobsang Sherpa shouting at Camp Five last night,” whispered Reggie. “Heard him over high wind gusts.”

  “Which were blowing straight up the mountain toward us from where he lay in Camp Five,” the Deacon whispered back. “With all the seracs and penitentes between Base Camp and Camps Two and Three, with the wind gusting from the west as well as the northwest last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one, even those Sherpas still at Camp Two, heard a single shot.”

  “So we’re looking for yetis carrying German Lugers?” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. Or at least to lift my own morale.

  No one responded.

  Under their Shackleton anorak shelter, Pasang was holding up the final bullet of the three he’d retrieved. “This one is odd. Still intact, but hard for me to identify. Not nine millimeter.”

  “Eight millimeter,” whispered the Deacon. “Popular with the Austrians and Hungarians in pistols designed before the War by Karel Krnka and Georg Roth. The most common pistol—first used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, later produced by the Germans for infantry officers—was the Roth Steyr M. nineteen oh-seven semiautomatic pistol. I had one aimed at my face in a trench one day, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.”

  I had to ask—“How many rounds did the thing hold?”

  “Ten,” said the Deacon. He shut off the small lamp, tugged his Shackleton jacket back on over his head, and gestured for all of us to duckwalk closer to him.

  “I wish to God we were dealing with yeti, but we’re not,” he whispered. “We have to assume that we’re dealing with several very human killers—perhaps the seven men Nawang Bura saw from a distance—at least some of whom are armed with semiautomatic pistols and perhaps even fully automatic weapons.”

  “Machine guns?” I said stupidly.

  “Submachine guns,” corrected the Deacon. “We don’t know. But we do know that we have to get back up to Camp Three as quickly as we can—in case these man-monsters try to get at our Sherpas.”

  “But the wounds on our Tigers,” hissed Reggie. “The lopped-off limbs, the damage to the tents, the decapitations, hearts torn out…”

  “Most probably done with edged weapons or specialized tools—a very sharp garden claw could do some of what we saw here,” whispered Pasang. “They mauled and desecrated the corpses in order to cast fear into the hearts of our Sherpas.”

  “It cast fear into my heart,” whispered Jean-Claude, but he was smiling ever so slightly. How the hell can he smile? I wondered.

  “We’re not going to rope up,” said the Deacon, taking time to look each of us in the eye, “but we’re going to move in single file and as quietly as we can—stay in touching distance of the person ahead of you, just put a finger on his shoulder if you must—and those of you with Very pistols, carry them loaded, keep the extra cartridges in an outer pocket where you can get at them quickly.”

  “But our Sherpas have your Webley,” said Reggie. “We’re the ones with no real weapons. Shouldn’t the Sherpas come down and rescue us?”

  The Deacon smiled. “I’ll ask for my pistol back when we get to Camp Three. Right now, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of one armed cook against six or seven or more armed murderers. We know what those predators are capable of.” The Deacon nodded in the direction of the killing fields. I could smell the coppery stink of blood and the slight but growing stench of decomposing flesh and brains.

  “Who are they?” whispered J.C.

  The Deacon didn’t answer. He gestured for us to get ready to leave the rock-walled protection of the infirmary sanga.

  “We’re going straight up the Trough, then?” whispered Reggie as we got into single file, the Deacon leading, Reggie next, then me, then Pasang, then Nawang Bura, and finally Jean-Claude.

  “Yes,” whispered the Deacon. “But not on the path. From ice pillar to ice pillar, penitente to penitente, from one moraine ridge to the next. Move when I move; stop when I stop. If I have to fire a flare at someone, check your targets before you fire. Remember, these Very pistols weren’t built to be used as weapons. More than ten feet of distance from your target and you have sod-all chance of hitting someone. Make each shot count.”

  None of us had anything to add to that. One by one, following the Deacon, our left arms extended to touch the one in front of us, the Very pistols in our right hands, we moved into the swirling, snow-driven darkness and up the Rongbuk Glacier valley back toward Mount Everest.

  5.

  As we walked slowly up the dark Trough, moving quickly from the theoretical cover of one ice pinnacle or moraine ridge to another (but no longer crouching or duckwalking except when the Deacon held up his arm as a signal to stop), I began to wonder when this expedition had crossed the boundary from the merely fantastic into the region of the absurdly unbelievable.

  The line of the six of us slow-jogging from one 50-foot-tall penitente ice pinnacle to
the next reminded me of when I was a kid and forced my two sisters to play Cowboys and Indians with me on a small hill set in the thick groves of trees behind our family home in Boston’s old suburb of Wellesley. We’d hide, peek out, run to the next tree, and then hide again. When I could see their skirts or pinafores flash in the dappled forest light, I’d fire my carved wooden pistol at them. But my sisters, never wanting to get their frocks dirty, always refused to fall dead on the forest floor or roll down the hill when I’d clearly shot them. I, on the other hand, fell dead so violently and rolled down the hill so gracefully that eventually we’d boiled the Cowboys and Indians down to a more pure kid-activity which I thought of as “shoot Jacob and watch him die and roll.”

  Thinking of my sisters made me remember that none of us had sent any letters to friends or family since we’d sailed from England. This Everest expedition was supposed to be a secret—our secret—so there could be no letters or postcards stamped from Colombo or Port Said or Calcutta or Darjeeling. Quite a change from the British ’21, ’22, and ’24 expeditions, when runners carried mail back and forth between Everest and Darjeeling, keeping the climbers in intermittent but solid contact with the world beyond. If someone like Henry Morshead or Howard Somervell wrote home saying that they wanted some chocolate cake, chocolate cake they would receive a few weeks later.

  I knew that Jean-Claude had written a letter to his sweetheart—or was she already his fiancée?—Anne Marie, every day of this trip. Their plan, I knew, was to marry in December after J.C. received a promotion to Chamonix Guide First Class, and thus a boost of his meager pay.

  I don’t know if the Deacon wrote letters during this trip; I’d never seen him write anything except official expedition letters and notes in his leather-bound travel log. In the first weeks of the expedition I’d written a few letters to my parents, one to an old Harvard girlfriend, and even one to my favorite sister, Eleanor, but I got tired of packing the letters around with me, so I’d poured my writing talents into my detailed climbing journal.

  The upshot of my thinking those moments scurrying up the Trough was If we die on this goddamned glacier or mountain, no one will ever know.

  After an hour of this scuttling from one ice pinnacle to the next, never walking exactly on the bamboo-wanded and red-flagged center path, but never wandering that far to either side of it, we reached Camp I at 17,800 feet, 1,300 feet above the death fields that had been Base Camp.

  Camp I had looked fine on our way down; now, just hours later, it had been torn apart. The same slashed canvas, tumbled poles, broken-open crates, and general sense of total destruction we’d seen at Base Camp. But there were no bodies at Camp I. We checked the snow for tracks, but other than those of some hobnailed boots—many of our Tiger Sherpas had been wearing hobnailed boots—there was nothing to see.

  Then Jean-Claude had hissed at us, and there in a 15-foot patch of snow were three gigantic yeti tracks. Each was similar to a human footprint other than its absurd length—more than 18 inches long, I guessed—and the fact that the big toe curved inward, almost like a gorilla’s foot or other large primate’s.

  “Big fellow based on his stride,” whispered the Deacon. “Easily seven feet tall. Perhaps eight.”

  “Surely you don’t…,” began Reggie.

  “I don’t,” the Deacon whispered to her. “Not for an instant. You can see beneath each footprint where someone in boots stepped in the place where each fake footprint was to go, then pressed down this huge yeti-foot imprint when he took his next step.”

  “It seems an elaborate and rather silly ruse if the men doing this intend to kill us all anyway,” Reggie said.

  The Deacon shrugged. “I suspect that the carnage at Base Camp and this sad children’s play with the footprints was aimed at scaring off all of our Sherpas. Or perhaps they plan to kill all of us, including all our Sherpas, but sell this yeti idea to the locals. In the end, though, it’s not the Sherpas these wanton murderers want to kill; it’s the four of us. Five of us, counting Dr. Pasang.”

  I thought that this was very reassuring.

  Camp II was burning. They’d torched everything they could find, but they hadn’t found the cache of oxygen rigs which we’d hidden behind snow-covered boulders in the maze of seracs, penitentes, and moraine on the glacier side of the camp on the way down.

  “One could see this fire from Camp Three,” said Reggie. “They’ve given up all pretense of being yeti.”

  “They’re yetis with matches and cigarette lighters,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Will the fourteen men we left at Camp Three climb onto the North Col to escape, do you think?” asked Dr. Pasang.

  “I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “It would be too much like retreating into a cul-de-sac for them.”

  “They may scatter,” said Reggie. “Climb to the moraine ridges before descending. Try to make it down to Base Camp and back out onto the plains in small groups or one by one.”

  “That would be the smart thing to do,” agreed Jean-Claude.

  “Do you believe they will do that, Mr. Deacon?” asked Pasang.

  “No.”

  I was looking at the sets of oxygen tanks on their frames. Their dials showed most of them were topped off with pressure. “What do we do with these things?” I asked.

  “Bring them with us,” said the Deacon.

  “Why on earth would we do that?” I said. “Aren’t we just going to fetch the surviving Sherpas from Camp Three and make a run for Rongbuk Monastery or Chobuk or Shekar Dzong?” Of the three places I’d mentioned, only the last—Shekar Dzong—seemed large enough and far enough away to feel like a place of temporary safety, even though it was a little less than 60 miles north of Base Camp by trail, less than 40 miles north as the gorak flies.

  At the moment I wouldn’t have minded being a gorak. But even as I thought that, I thought of the hollowed-out rectum and insides of George Mallory and felt a little sick; there were seeds or something visible in the glorious climber’s opened abdominal cavity, and I thought—not for the first sickening time—that I might have been looking at the last thing Mallory had eaten on his last day alive.

  I shook my head. This sort of thinking didn’t help our current situation. We were crouched in a rough circle around the cached oxygen rigs.

  “…Sherpas probably won’t flee up the fixed ropes and ladder to Camp Four because they know these…killers…would have them trapped up there,” J.C. was saying. “But the same applies to us. The climbing part of this expedition is over—isn’t it, Ree-shard? Why on earth would we haul these heavy oxygen sets back up the glacier?”

  The Deacon sighed.

  “We have to climb again if we get the chance,” Reggie said softly.

  “Why?” I asked. “You can’t expect us to continue the search for your cousin after all this, can you? I mean…think about it, please, Lady Bromley-Montfort…fourteen of our Sherpas are dead, a dozen of them at the hands of sadistic butchers. How on earth could we even consider going back up the mountain? And for what…to summit it?”

  “No, not to summit,” Reggie insisted. “But it’s more imperative than ever that we find Bromley’s body.”

  “She’s right,” said the Deacon. Reggie blinked at him in obvious surprise at his quick agreement.

  I didn’t understand at all, but I could see that Jean-Claude was nodding. His glance moved from Reggie to the Deacon and back. “This expedition never was just about recovering Percival’s body for the family, was it, Reggie?”

  She bit her lower lip until I could see blood, black in the starlight. “No,” she said at last. “It never was.” She shifted her gaze to the Deacon. “You know why it’s so important to find Percy’s body? Or to make sure no one else can?”

  “I believe so,” whispered the Deacon.

  “My God,” said Reggie. “Do we have a mutual friend? Someone who writes a lot of cheques?”

  The Deacon smiled. “But who prefers it to be backed up by gold? Yes, my lady.”
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br />   “My God,” Reggie said again, running her fingers over her brow as if she were hot. “I never guessed that you also might…”

  “I don’t understand a word either of you has just said,” said J.C. “But perhaps I should let you know that Nawang Bura has slipped away in the darkness.”

  The Deacon nodded. “About two minutes ago. He headed north, back towards Base Camp and, perhaps, escape.”

  “He’s not a coward,” said Pasang.

  “No, none of the Sherpas have been cowards,” agreed the Deacon. “They’re some of the bravest men I’ve ever known, and that’s saying a lot after the War. But Nawang and the others are up against something extraordinary that their faith and upbringing tell them is a real threat.”

  “What do you know about their faith, Ree-shard?” Jean-Claude sounded irritated.

  It was Reggie who answered. “Didn’t you two know that Captain Deacon has been a Buddhist for years?”

  I stifled a laugh. “That’s nonsense. The Deacon didn’t even want to go for Dzatrul Rinpoche’s blessing ceremony.”

  “There are Buddhists who don’t believe in demons and who don’t venerate or worship statues of the Buddha,” the Deacon said.

  My smile went away. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Haven’t you seen your friend sitting in the lotus position, in silence, every morning during the trek in?” asked Pasang.

  “Oui,” said J.C., sounding as shocked and disbelieving as I was. “But I thought he was…thinking.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Planning the day.”

  “People thinking about the coming day don’t hum ‘Om mani padme hum’ under their breath while they’re sitting in the lotus position,” Reggie said.

  “Well, dress me up and call me Sally,” said Jean-Claude.

  I confess that I barked a quite audible laugh then. Where the hell had J.C. learned that phrase?

  “May I ask why we’re wasting time here discussing my possible philosophical peculiarities,” said the Deacon, “when we have to make a decision now whether to gather the Sherpas at Camp Three and make a run for it—or to get as many Sherpas started north as we can get going—and then the five of us head up to the Col before our Luger-carrying yeti chums get there? Or should we also make a run for it down the valley?”