The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  “Jake, Pasang, get ready,” called Reggie. “Jean-Claude is going to cut the old rope now. He has his penknife open.”

  I’d found a low boulder-ridge on which to brace my boots—I’d kept my crampons on since I didn’t know if I’d have the dexterity to strap them on again—and now I leaned back, bracing myself for the pull and dead weight to come.

  The rope grew taut…but there was very little pull and almost no sense of weight. Had goraks hollowed Bromley’s corpse out the way they’d eaten into George Mallory’s abdominal cavity through the poor corpse’s exposed rectum? Jesus Christ, for Reggie’s sake, I hoped that wasn’t the case.

  “Pull!” cried Reggie—needlessly, I thought, since both Pasang and I were pulling in our loads hand over hand. Only the Deacon remained on passive, strained belay. We’d decided before J.C. went over the cliff that we’d get the bodies up before pulling in our living friend—just to keep the various ropes free from tangling, for one reason; to keep J.C. and his belay line free of a free-falling corpse for another reason.

  Bromley reached the cornice, and naturally his corpse hung up under the overhang of ice and snow.

  “Give me a second,” said Reggie and leaned most of her weight out on the rotten, treacherous, already once-broken cornice, fishing around with her extended ice axe the way a captain’s mate would use a gaff to reach under a boat to bring in a big fish.

  She hooked the rope. Percy’s head and shoulders bobbed up into sight, and I pulled for everything I was worth.

  “Get back on the rock!” growled the Deacon, and I realized he was saying it to Reggie. She did so, creeping backward in no great hurry.

  Now Meyer’s corpse, being pulled in by Pasang, came up onto the North East Ridge with no problem, the dead man’s head and shoulders sliding up and through the crescent-shaped hole that he and Percival Bromley had broken through the cornice almost a year ago. I noticed—distantly, since all my sense impressions seemed to be coming from a great distance at that moment—that yards of the old, frayed rope, cleanly cut in the middle by Jean-Claude just minutes before, still dangled from each dead body.

  When the bodies were secure, pulled as far up toward us and Mushroom Rock as we could get them while leaving some room for ourselves, Pasang and I dropped our belay ropes and joined the Deacon on his. Reggie stayed on the rock spur, her head and shoulders hanging further out than before. She signaled down to J.C. that we were ready to bring him up.

  This, I knew, would be the real test of the Miracle Rope. I wished we’d had enough rope with us to pass two lines around Jean-Claude, but 200 feet of what we did have had been needed for the dead bodies.

  Now we pulled—slowly, constantly, the three of us in perfect rhythm, watching the frail line snake over the doubled shafts of the anchored horizontal ice axes. Reggie was calling out the distance remaining after each pull.

  “Forty feet…thirty…twenty-five…Jean-Claude’s feet can’t reach the cliff face, he’s just hanging free…”

  We knew that from the weight against our shoulders and hands. The Deacon was still bearing the brunt of that weight.

  “Fifteen feet…ten…five…careful now!” Reggie quit calling distances, reached down, grabbed our friend’s anorak, and helped pull J.C.’s shoulders into sight. The three of us on belay tugged again and he came up and over and onto his hands and knees and quickly crawled away from the cornice. Reggie had almost fallen forward when her burden popped up onto the ridge, but Pasang had shifted his large right hand to her anchor rope and pulled it hard, tugging her back onto the rock spur. She also crawled toward us on all fours. After we’d retrieved all of the ropes, undone knots, and coiled and safely stowed the ropes under Mushroom Rock, we crouched in a tight circle around both bodies.

  “This is my cousin Percival,” Reggie said just loud enough to be heard over the wind. She pulled off her mittens and gloves and set her bare hand against the worn wool and tattered Shackleton gabardine over his chest.

  There was no smell of decay. The exposed portions of both bodies’ faces and hands—and a bit of Meyer’s chest under a rip in the fabric there—were bleached almost white by ultraviolet rays, as Mallory’s back had been, and the skin of each man looked slightly mummified, and their eyes and cheeks had fallen in the way corpses’ faces do, but the goraks hadn’t been at them. I had no clue as to why not. There was a bullet wound visible in Meyer’s upper left shoulder—it shouldn’t have been an instantly fatal wound, the Deacon said—but although we rolled Bromley’s body over carefully, we found no entrance or exit wounds on him.

  “So the Germans didn’t kill Lord Percival?” I said, my voice thick with fatigue, altitude, and emotion.

  “They killed him, my friend,” said Jean-Claude. “But not by shooting him. Rather, by shooting Herr Meyer and making Lord Percy either jump or be shot the same way.”

  “Put your gloves back on, Reggie,” the Deacon said gently. I’d just watched him pull wool gloves over his now bloody silken ones.

  “Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Pasang, “we shall search Lord Percival for you.”

  Reggie shook her head. “No. Pasang, will you please help me with Percy? Then analyze Meyer’s bullet wound. The rest of you can look through Meyer’s clothing.”

  “What are we hunting for?” asked Jean-Claude.

  “I don’t know exactly,” said Reggie. “But it will be very portable. Meyer carried it for thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East, and then Persia and China.”

  We treated the bodies with a slow gentleness, although they were far beyond feeling any insult or injury. Perhaps we were just following Reggie’s tender-touch lead.

  The first thing I noticed about Meyer, despite the weathering effects of hanging in midair off Mount Everest for a year, was that he looked very, very young.

  “How old was this Austrian?” I asked no one in particular.

  “Seventeen, I believe,” said Reggie. She was absorbed with going through her cousin’s pockets.

  Neither Meyer nor Bromley had a rucksack on. We went through the many pockets of what was left of their outer anoraks, wool trousers, Norfolk jackets, and waistcoats. Meyer had multiple letters in German in his left jacket pocket—I couldn’t even decipher the Fraktur handwriting on the envelopes—and his Austrian passport, stamped at a score of border crossings.

  In Meyer’s left jacket pocket was a large wad of pound notes.

  “Good God,” I said. “Are these real?”

  The Deacon fanned through them. The clumps of bills were still banded, and the writing on those bands was still quite clear—NATIONAL PROVINCIAL BANK LTD. LONDON.

  “This is a real bank, Ree-shard?”

  “It had better be,” said the Deacon. “I have what little money I have left stored there.” He was counting the bills. “There’s fifteen thousand pounds here.”

  “So your cousin Percy was paying for this information,” J.C. said to Reggie.

  She looked up from the pockets she was searching. “Probably. It’s what he did with his sources willing to risk their lives and their families’ lives to betray their Austrian or German masters. From the little Percy told me—usually after a fine dinner and much wine—espionage is mostly about paying unsavory characters.”

  “So,” I said, pointing to the body of the dead young man we were still searching, “this Austrian was an unsavory character.”

  “I believe not,” said Reggie, her words almost lost in the gusts of wind from the west. “Look at his passport again and you’ll see why he probably did what he did, and risked everything to do it.”

  I looked at the Austrian passport and its description, but I could find nothing especially interesting. NAME: Kurt Abraham Meyer. BIRTHDATE: 4 Oct. 1907. OCCUPATION: apprentice typesetter.

  “Here,” said the Deacon and pointed to the Fraktur-labeled category: RELIGION. Under it was written, in the perfect penmanship of some bureaucrat: HEBREW.

  “He spied for your cousin because he was a Jew?” I asked Reg
gie, but she didn’t respond.

  Instead, she’d removed a thick, solid manila envelope from the Norfolk jacket breast pocket of her cousin’s corpse. She was careful not to let the increasing wind gusts grab the envelope out of her hands, shielding it with her body.

  Inside the larger envelope were five smaller ones. Each one seemed to hold the same number of photographs—seven. I couldn’t exactly see what the photographs were because Reggie was still hunched over the package, but I was thinking that for £15,000 in cash, they’d damned well better be photostats of Count von Zeppelin’s newest military airships.

  “Ahhh,” said Reggie, and the syllable combined a sense of the air being knocked out of her and the confrontation with some revelation. “Do you want to see what Percy and Meyer died for, gentlemen?”

  All of us, except for Pasang, nodded. The doctor was busy cutting away waistcoat and shirt fabric on Meyer’s corpse to inspect the bullet wound in his upper shoulder, just below the collarbone.

  “Be careful,” said Reggie. “There are five identical sets of these, but this set has the negatives. Don’t let any of the pictures blow away.” She handed one of the packets of photographs to the Deacon, who looked at all seven, nodded slowly, and carefully handed the packet to Jean-Claude.

  J.C. made up for the Deacon’s nonreaction by responding physically and vocally, his head snapping back as if he’d been confronted by a bad smell, his arms thrusting the photos further from him, and crying, “Mon Dieu, these are…this is…these are…abominable.”

  I strained to see the pictures over his shoulder but only could catch glimpses of white figures against a dark background.

  “Abominable,” J.C. rasped again, shaking his head. “Completement abominable!”

  He turned his face away and handed me the photos. I had to clutch them tightly in both hands and lower my face toward them to see them in the wind. Then I remembered that my snow goggles were still in place and roughly shoved them up as I went through the seven black-and-white photographs.

  Each photo was of a very pale, very thin man in his late twenties or early thirties having sex with what I counted as four different young men—no, with boys. The oldest boy having sex with this man must have been about thirteen. The youngest was no older than eight or nine. The photographs were very clear, the naked flesh very white against a background that was very dark save for the gray blur of tumbled sheets. The room looked to be a cheap European hotel room, perhaps Austrian, with heavy furniture and dark painted walls. The photographer must have used a flash or a long exposure, because shades were drawn on the one window visible in the snapshots. The sharpness of each photograph and the critical depth of field suggested a high-quality camera. Each print was about five by seven inches, and the negatives were in a paper sleeve at the bottom of the packet.

  For only seven photographs, an incredible variety of deviancy was on display. I confess that my expression must have shown my shock as I looked through the pictures and then looked through again. Modesty should have made me look away after seeing the first print, but I had to see—it was the same compulsion I would feel in later years when passing a serious highway accident.

  The adult male was a very thin and obviously poorly fed fellow, his ribs and hipbones rampant, some scabs visible; a man who probably looked bourgeois enough, with his hair parted on the left side as suggested in these photos and his severe, short, greased-back haircut carefully combed—but in the tumble and passion of these moments, that greasy hair stood out in wild tufts. The man had thin lips and a stern demeanor in the only photograph where his mouth was not hanging open either in the throes of passion or in the midst of some more explicit and disturbing sex act he was involved in.

  In one photograph, the man was buggering the youngest boy while simultaneously sucking the small, stiff penis of the thirteen-year-old. In another photograph, a boy no older than ten was masturbating the adult male while the man played with the genitals of two of the younger boys as the fourth boy, the oldest, perhaps fouteen years old, stood naked and looked on with a dull, almost drugged expression.

  The oldest boy’s face was strangely familiar, and then it hit me with a shock—it was Kurt Meyer! And only four years or so younger than when he’d died here on Everest.

  “Oh…God,” I whispered.

  One photograph was almost impossible to make out—a sprawl of five white, emaciated bodies on the tumbled sheets, connecting and pleasuring each other in so many disturbing ways that my innocent Protestant American mind couldn’t quite take it in. The only face fully visible in that shot was of the adult—the older man. I stared at the face, trying to ignore all the couplings and gropings in the photograph, and realized I’d also seen him before. Once. In a photograph on a poster in a Munich beer hall. The face had been somewhat older, a little fuller, the man in the Nazi poster in his mid-thirties rather than the early thirties that these photos suggested, but the intensity of the dark gaze was the same, as was the ridiculous Charlie Chaplin mustache. At that moment, I couldn’t remember his name.

  I put the photos back in the envelope and looked up at Reggie, J.C., and the Deacon. “This is what your cousin died for?” I gasped out at Reggie. “These are what we’ve been fleeing for our lives about…these…obscenities?”

  “It is abominable,” Jean-Claude repeated softly, his gaze averted.

  “Abominable?” I shouted. “It’s goddamned nuts! I’ve never seen anything like this before and never want to again. But who cares if some German does deviant things with street urchins? Who could give a damn about any of these photographs!”

  “The adult man using these children is not German,” said Reggie. “He’s Austrian, although he lost his Austrian citizenship when he moved to Germany a few years ago. And you know that he’s the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—a very dangerous group, Jake.”

  “He’s in jail!” I shouted. “The Deacon and I heard that last November when we met Sigl in that damned beer hall in Munich!”

  “He was released last December,” said the Deacon. “While we were buying boots and rope in London.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a socialist!” I shouted, standing and pacing around the Mushroom Rock in my agitation. “Who cares about goddamned socialists—we have thousands of them in New York, probably hundreds in Boston where I live. Why would Lord Percival risk his life…die?” I pointed at the corpse at my feet. I noticed the “Douglas Fairbanks mustache” now, as well as dark stubble on the dead man’s cheeks and chin. For a sickening moment that almost made me swoon, I remembered that hair kept growing after a person died.

  “…all this for nasty photos of a damned socialist?” I finished weakly.

  “He’s not a socialist, Jake,” said Reggie. “He’s a Nazi. The Nazi.” She was fumbling in her rucksack for something.

  “Who cares?” I said again. “Even I know that there are a hundred crackpot political factions in Weimar Germany. Even I know that, and I can barely tell a Democrat from a Republican. Why should we climb almost to the summit of Mount Everest…and have that climb ruined by this…and suffer all we’ve suffered just to receive filthy photographs of one sick pederast and his victims? And, for God’s sake, you can see that one of the victims—one of the kids in that room—was young Kurt Meyer. The guy who sold your cousin Percy this package of trash!” In my fury, I held the envelope up into the wind between two fingers and said, “I’m throwing this crap away.”

  “Jake!” snapped Reggie.

  I looked down at her. She had her 12-gauge flare pistol held steady in both hands and was aiming it directly at my gaping face.

  “If you let those photos go,” she said in flat tones, “I’ll kill you with this, I swear to God I will. I love you, Jake. I love all of you. But give me the photos back or I’ll shoot you in the face. You know I will. I did it with the German on the glacier.”

  In that instant and that second, I knew she was telling the truth—both about loving me, probably like a br
other, alas (or like her dead cousin), and also about being ready to kill me in a second if I threw those photos away. Then I remembered the red flare burning through the gaping mouth of Karl Bachner and the liquid from his eyes running down his cheeks like melted wax.

  I carefully handed the envelope of photos and negatives back to Reggie.

  “What I’m curious about,” the Deacon said in conversational tones, as if nothing had happened between Reggie and me, “is who took the photos. Not…Bromley?”

  “No,” said Reggie. Her voice suddenly sounded infinitely weary. “Although Percival had to frequent some of those…establishments and circles…in his guise as a dissolute pro-Austrian, pro-German British expat. It was Kurt Meyer who took those photographs. With a rather sophisticated little camera that had a time delay. Percy had given it to him for just this purpose.”

  All of us shifted our gaze to the body of the dead Austrian. He was so young. I noticed for the first time that a ginger-colored shadow under Meyer’s nose was obviously a boy’s attempt to grow a man’s mustache.

  “So Meyer was also a spy?” I said, not really expecting an answer.

  “He was on the payroll of British intelligence,” said Reggie. “And Kurt Meyer was also a Jew.” She said it as if that explained everything.

  For a moment I thought she was saying that, naturally, Jews were greedier than anybody else and would do anything for money—I’d known no Jews at Harvard or in my Boston social life, of course—but then I remembered that the Nazis weren’t overly fond of Jews, even German or Austrian Jews. But this Hitler bastard had been in bed with a bunch of Jewish boys—everyone in the photos except the adult Nazi had been circumcised. Nothing made sense. Everything was just…dirty. I shook my head.

  “Kurt Meyer was also one of the bravest men my cousin Percival ever worked with,” she said. “And Percy had worked with hundreds of brave men, most of them doomed to terrible deaths by their courage.”

  I had nothing to say to that.