by Dan Vyleta
[ 10 ]
He waits until the last of the tent lights has been extinguished before stealing into the camp. Singh has come with him: up to a point. There is no sense in them both risking detection. It might be close to midnight. The moon has risen, its light softened by wispy clouds. The wind masks all sound. It is seeded with a smell both sour and human, the urgent tang of the latrines.
Thomas slips into the camp. At first, he keeps to the periphery, hiding behind boulders, bolting from shadow to shadow in a hunched-over sprint. It is no use, though: if Thomas wants to set eyes on the canvas-wrapped thing the men brought down from the mountain, he will have to enter the circle of tents itself. Once he does so, any movement that is not natural will itself be suspicious. So he straightens and slows, convincing himself that he will be little more than an outline, a human shape, indistinguishable from any other. A man answering the call of nature. Only he is walking away from the latrines.
There is an order to the camp: the porters’ tents stand huddled together, filling three-quarters of the site. Then there is a gap of five or six yards that separates them from the Englishmen’s tents. These stand at a greater distance from each other—habit, Thomas surmises; his race’s inbred fear of proximity. It is towards them that Thomas is heading.
The wind tugs at him, now that he is erect; bulks up his jacket and tears at his hood. It carries the chill of the glacier. He wonders whether the men left their haul in a tent dedicated to storage, or if one of them took it with him, into his private quarters. The latter seems more likely: one does not leave treasure lying about unguarded. Thomas draws nearer to the tents and considers how much he will see if he sticks his head through their flaps. He steps up to the closest one and tries to calm his pulse. If the man inside is awake, he might see Thomas now, a denser darkness against the canopy of canvas. Thomas counts to five, expecting a shout.
It comes: not from inside the tent but from behind, a half-gagged exclamation launched across distance; plum of accent and annoyed.
“Miller! Where have you been? We’ve been waiting for a quarter hour. Watts has it in for you as it is.” Then, more gently, but also sounding from much closer: “Has your stomach been bothering you?”
Thomas acts by instinct. He nods acquiescence, his chin tucked into his scarf; half turns, more with the body than with the face, and from the corner of his eye catches sight of a silhouette standing at four or five paces in the dark. The head is misshapen, bulbous, droops into a bulky, tin-shaped snout. Eyes like black saucers. It’s a monster—or else…
“Now where’s your Smoke mask, man?” the muffled voice inquires, back to being annoyed. “Go get it, you lazy sod. And your doctor’s bag. What, are you drunk again?”
It gives Thomas no choice. He turns his back on the silhouette and undoes the tent flap, ducks inside.
“I’ll go tell the others that you’re on your way,” the voice outside announces. “Hurry, will you? We’ve already fetched that Ajeeba fellow. We had to gag him—he’s delirious with fever. God, what a beastly business all this is!”
Thomas, still crouching in the entrance, does not reply. Inside the spacious, man-high tent, illuminated by the wash of moonlight let in through the open flap, lies the dark bulk of a man. His left hand is wrapped around a bottle perched on his hip.
[ 11 ]
The man must be sleeping or, better yet, have drunkenly passed out. He does not twitch on Thomas’s entrance and his shallow breathing does not change. And yet Thomas has the eerie sensation that the man’s eyes are wide open in the darkness. Thomas lowers himself to his knees next to his bulk, careful not to touch him. Something rattles under his left hand and, by touch, Thomas makes out the bulky shape of a photographic camera. His right hand touches a pile of books, many of them open and stacked on top one another. Hanging from the tentpole like a discarded face droops the unmistakable shape of a Smoke mask. Thomas reaches for it carefully, but even so he cannot avoid shaking the pole a little as he takes the mask off its hook. The man’s voice erupts at once, as though triggered by the push of a button. It is quiet, slurred, resentful.
“Is that you, Greene? Tell Watts he can stuff it. I’m not coming. Had myself a little party, see. Celebrating our success.”
Thomas hears rather than sees the bottle being raised; then the urgent swallow that follows. A cough sounds, a retching; spit on the tent floor.
“Pass me the cannister. By your knee, man. Yes, there’s a darling.”
Without looking up, Thomas fumbles around himself and hands the heavy metal tin over to the prone man. It is the same design as the cannister they found in the gorge leading to the high plateau; as Thomas passes it over, his hand can feel the stencilled ridges of the letters at its bottom. COOPER. The unspoken name fuels him with anger. The question he asks slips out in lieu of Smoke.
“What’s going on, Miller?”
If the man notices the whisper is not Greene’s, he does not comment. Instead he places the little spout growing out of the side of the cannister into his mouth and fumbles with the valve on top. A hiss sounds. The stranger inhales, slowly and deeply, then moves his mouth off the spout and closes the valve.
“Don’t say you haven’t tried it,” he chuckles. “Who knew you could get drunk on air! It helps if you combine it with gin, naturally.” His fingers search his pockets, then dig underneath his sleeping bag. “Do you have any cigarettes left?”
Thomas shakes his head, No, while slipping the Smoke mask over his face. All of a sudden, a hand has snuck around his elbow, tugging him down. He falls next to the drunk man, stares at him through the thick glass of the mask’s twin lenses, the proboscis jammed between their chins.
“Stay, have a drink with me. To hell with Watts! To hell with this whole venture!” And, flicking from confidence to suspicion in the blink of a glassy eye: “Why take my mask? And this jacket—I have not seen it before. Who are you? A newbie? Some sort of reenforcement? Did Watts whistle for you?”
Thomas tries to free himself but the man holds him close, struggles with him like a wrestler.
“He will send some of us back to Bombay, is that it? Deliver the goods, while he keeps digging for more. He needs fresh hands! But how did he send for you then? Or did you grow out the dirt?”
At last the man relents and lets him go. Thomas quickly gets to his feet, stands hunched under the tent flap, breathing hard within the mask, his mouth filled with the stench of rubber.
“Go!” says the man. “Stand in for me, if you like. The good doctor. Attending the experiment—as a man of science, right?” The drunk fumbles, finds the cannister again, sucks on tinned air. “Say, you’re not the devil by any chance? Not our sort of devil, naturally—one of theirs. A proper little juju swine. Like they have in their temples, eight arms and tusks, eh? Though your English sounds proper Oxford. A ’varsity devil, who would have thought?” He coughs, splutters, digs in his pocket. “Say, man, do you have a cigarette for me?”
The man’s still talking when Thomas walks away.
[ 12 ]
He finds the other Englishmen with some difficulty. They are half a mile from the camp, in the shadow of a ten-foot wall of ice that marks the end of the glacier. Whatever it is they are doing, they have already started, having concluded perhaps that the tardy Dr. Miller would not come. There is a jerky haste to their movements; the nervous need to get done. That these men are acting in secret from their porters cannot be in doubt: Thomas watched the site before he snuck in, and even so he did not see any hint of their preparations. No light was struck, and the exit from their tents was accomplished at least as stealthily as Thomas’s own approach. They became visible only when they reached the snow, the result of an avalanche that spilled all the way into the valley.
Thomas’s boots crunch as he approaches, announcing him from afar. He stops when he has neared to thirty or so paces. He sees them mo
re clearly now, dark shapes against the snow’s faint glow. A woodcut of a scene: seven men, standing in a circle; Smoke masks robbing them of human traits. There is an eighth man lying prone within their midst; next to him, still wrapped in sheeting, is the secret fruit plucked from out the mountain at great height.
A few heads turn at Thomas’s approach, then refocus on the task at hand. The sheeting is removed, not entirely but enough so that some part of the thing lies exposed to the sky. There is a jerkiness to the movements of the Smoke-masked men that contrasts oddly with the object’s stillness. A lump of black; rock or maybe coal, absorbing the moonlight in mineral indifference.
The man who lies prone upon a stretcher alone is unmasked. He is a native, one of the expedition’s porters: his dress says so; his set-back eyes, guarded by burned watermelon cheeks. One of his legs is splintered; there’s also a bandage wound around his head. Another detail: his mouth has been gagged. Without seeing his eyes, it is impossible to know his fear—impossible, that is, until a spout of sulphur Smoke escapes his gag and groin and stains the snow. The circle almost breaks apart; not from disgust at his Smoke but from something more pressing. Heads swivel, watch the lump of black. It is as though the men are waiting for it to explode.
What happens next happens quickly, with Thomas still in slow approach. One of the Englishmen pushes the stretcher closer to the thing, then pulls the injured man into a sitting position and gives him a hand drill. Ajeeba, that’s what Greene called him. Perhaps it is Greene himself who is steadying him by the armpits. Not Watts. Watts is the man next to him, Thomas decides: the man barking orders. The expedition’s leader. Taking the lead. A short, broad-shouldered man. His stance so wide it is as though he’s modelling for his own statue.
With gestures, Greene (if it is Greene) bids the injured man to drill into the lump. When the man won’t, Greene looks to Watts (if it is Watts), who pulls a handgun from his pocket and places it to the injured man’s head. Ajeeba works the crank. The drill sinks in: an inch, two inches, three. It is soft, this rock. At last the drill has penetrated to its hilt; it gets snagged inside so that its crank won’t turn either one way or the other. The circle of men sees it and seems relieved: stand straighter, less tense. Two or three had pulled out their own pistols when Watts produced his. Now they let them dangle from their wrists.
Thomas watches all this and takes another step towards them. The ground is uneven, the snow hiding rocks.
A new experiment. While Greene continues to support Ajeeba’s back and weight, Watts puts down his pistol, ungloves his hand, and reaches carefully for the bandages at the injured man’s shin. Thomas wonders whether his task is distasteful to him, or pleasurable. For now, Watts does not smoke.
The gloveless hand has found what it is looking for. A ripple runs through Watts’s back, of muscle and weight applied to the man’s splintered wound. In reply, Ajeeba’s body jerks. He cannot scream his pain: a gag is in the way. His body screams for him: thick, treacly Smoke, wasp-jacketed yellow and black. It spreads like ground fog, covers the men’s boots, laps at the black lump from which the drill protrudes like a metal bristle. Still Watts’s hand is buried in the man’s bandages; still the weight of his squat body is pushed downwards, into the wound. The Smoke darkens, thickens, hides the man from view. Then there is the sudden jerk of violent motion, of Ajeeba’s body yanking itself from Watts’s grip and throwing itself forward. The next moment, the Smoke has stopped; it drops as Soot all around the scene, marking a circle. At its centre lies Ajeeba, his head resting, facedown, upon the hard pillow of dark rock, the drill’s handle bent aside by the force of his motion; the drill bit snapped off at the base and protruding between ear and neck.
The black snow all around him masks the flow of blood.
[ 13 ]
Greene and Watts slide the man’s body off the drill, then wrap the rock back into sheeting. Then two of the other men pick it up, somewhat gingerly, and the whole group of seven walks towards Thomas. He remains a dozen paces from the scene, rooted to the spot. His clothes, he is aware, are as though tarred from the inside and crunch when he moves. Impotent anger. A younger Thomas would have converted it to action; would have raced to Ajeeba’s rescue and no doubt gotten himself caught in the process. The older Thomas is more prudent; more practised at turning anger on himself. That and he was scared—he might as well admit it. Scared of that black lump now being tidied away, like a family heirloom in between official viewings; making its way towards him, swinging weightily between two sideways-moving men.
Watts makes sure he is in easy earshot of Thomas before issuing orders. He slips up his mask just far enough to free his mouth. None of the men seem eager to remove their masks. They are hiding their faces. Hiding their shame. As is Thomas himself.
To the two who carry the rock, Watts says: “Well, chaps, that was ugly, but we learned what we needed to learn. It’s safe to transport. You two will set off with it tomorrow. Take ten of the porters and two of the yaks and send them back to us once you reach the border. Don’t tell anyone anything until you reach Bombay and talk to our people there; I suppose they’ll have a ship waiting. Tell them there’s more on the way. They can wait for it or send this first delivery ahead, just as they please. That’s all, really. And—let’s keep it on ice for as long as we can, shall we? That’s how we found it, after all. We haven’t tested what happens to it in heat.”
To the other men, Watts adds: “The rest of us will stay until we can harvest a second, larger section. We’d be fools not to, with all the pain it was to get the blasted winch up there. Get some sleep, and at dawn send some natives ahead to restock the upper camps with provisions to get us ready for the next push. Let’s hope the weather holds, eh, chaps?”
And to him, Thomas, Watts says the following: “Thank you for joining us, Doctor. Greene here tells us you were indisposed but I think we all know what kept you. For a medical man, you really are awfully squeamish. Well, you can pull your weight now. Bury the body, will you, and make sure it cannot be found. We will have to come up with some kind of story about his disappearance. Desertion, I suppose. Though it may give some of the others ideas.”
And, stepping closer, and speaking much lower, Watts adds: “Get a grip on yourself, man. You are drunk and your clothes look like castoffs you found at the bottom of your backpack. You don’t even look like yourself! Show some pride, what! Or do you think this is easy on any of us?”
They leave him then, there in the black snow, a procession of men walking away in the moonlight. Soon they have blended in the night. Thomas looks after them, struck by the fact that, up close, Watts’s voice was hesitant and humane, and his cheeks strewn thick with boyish pimples.
[ 14 ]
Thomas leaves the body where it is, though he steps close enough to learn that Watts or Greene or someone else closed the man’s eyelids over the dead stare. He cannot afford the time for a burial. When the real Miller sobers up, Watts will learn there was an imposter in the camp, an Englishman. There will be a search. Time is running out.
Thomas returns to where he left Singh, at the camp’s western periphery. By the time he finds him in the shadow of a mighty boulder, Thomas’s mind is made up.
“We must climb,” he says. “Now. I need to see it for myself.”
Singh is incredulous. “Now? They will see us when the morning comes.”
“We can hide, wait until there are others on the mountain. From down here, it will be hard to say who is who.”
“And up there? You don’t know what you are asking. You don’t climb.”
“You said it yourself, Singh. They’ve cut a staircase into the mountain. Put ropes in all the difficult spots.”
Singh makes to argue then stops himself. The moon is setting. Even so there is some light by which to see. Starlight: the great, misty smear of the Milky Way. Up here, the sky seems to have shed its lid.
“That tent over there,” Singh says at last. “That’s where they keep all the spare equipment. I had a look before. They have some interesting innovations. Things I have not seen before. Iron spikes for the feet. Short-handled pickaxes, so you can hold one in each hand. A new kind of climbing harness.”
“They have air, too. Compressed air.” Thomas describes the cannister and Miller’s use thereof.
“Imagine the cost of all this,” Singh says, almost reverently. Then: “If we get caught…or the weather changes. If a serac breaks off, or a cornice…”
“Then I will have a lot of explaining to do to Mrs. Singh,” answers Thomas, which is his way of saying, Your blood will be on my head. Ezekiel. His school’s old vicar, Swinburne, was fond of quoting the passage. He might have been surprised that so disappointing a pupil as Thomas would find occasion to recall it, here amongst the eternal ice.
INTERNAL COMPANY MEMO ON SMOKE MASKS (CURRENT REGULATIONS & MANUFACTURE). BOMBAY HEAD OFFICE, DATED 18/1/1908, AND MARKED “TO BE DISTRIBUTED TO ALL INTERNATIONAL HEAD OFFICES.”
DEFINITIONS: A Smoke Mask (otherwise known as a György respirator) is a tightly fitting full-facial mask, made of Indian rubber or leather, with inset glass goggles, that protects the face from immediate contact with Smoke, while a coal filter located in the “snout” of the mask physically binds Smoke and prevents inhalation. Its primary use is to prevent & delay infection by Smoke and maintain discipline in combat situations or when exposed to so-called Gales. The filters quickly become overwhelmed and have to be replaced after every serious exposure to Smoke. The original mask was designed by Lazlo György (1848–?), a Hungarian inventor. György was put under arrest by his own government in 1895 or 1896; he is presumed dead. The Company now holds the international patent on the Smoke Mask (Patent No. 205/D/441).