Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  At the summit they rested in the lee of an outcropping on top of which the furious wind snapped the stringy remains of multicolored prayer flags faded to a nearly uniform dirt-brown color. They made a concerted effort to stay on top of their hydration regimen, which was exceedingly important at higher altitudes. They ate jerky and herbs that tasted like grass. Julian had packed them in plastic baggies and assured them that the combination would increase their stamina and slow the rate at which they fatigued. Considering how their legs felt after so many days of sustained exertion over the rugged terrain, no one griped about the taste or the fact that the effects of Julian’s holistic remedies were undoubtedly psychosomatic.

  The descent was much more gradual and the rhododendrons that grew beside the trail shielded them from the brunt of the wind. There were even points when the sun penetrated the mist, dried their clothes, and warmed their bodies. The path widened as it led them out of the foothills and into a lush temperate forest. They all beat the bushes and weeds with their walking sticks, despite the fact that none of them had seen so much as a single leech since leaving Hanmi. Their bandages had been victimized by their sweat and the humidity and had fallen off long ago, leaving the wounds exposed. Most of them had scabbed over, but enough remained raw to darken their socks and pants, which they were forced to look at with increasing frequency due to the heaps of yak dung spotting the path.

  As the forest closed around them, the sound of the river grew from a whisper to a roar. Only it wasn’t a single river, but a series of waterfalls cascading a hundred feet down a sheer escarpment and bludgeoning the breakers, filling the air with spume. The path terminated at the mouth of a suspension bridge that had to be a quarter-mile long and made from mismatched planks warped and saturated by the constant exposure to the water.

  For as decrepit as the bridge felt, the view from it was even more magnificent. The mist sparkled all around them like millions of tiny prisms. Far below, the violent collisions of the warring streams merged into a single turquoise body that would eventually join with the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo near where they would cross into Motuo and reach their ultimate destination.

  On the far side of the bridge was a tiny lodge run by Menba villagers who peeked out at them as they passed from behind the tapestries hanging over the windows. They followed the procession with their eyes, but never made any attempt to hail them, even as they had to push through the herd of black sheep with curlicue horns blocking the narrow trail.

  “Menba and Luobo no like outsiders,” Zhang said. “They welcome you into home, as is tradition. Then they poison food. This is holy place. They no want anyone else in it.”

  “We should register a complaint with the chamber of commerce,” Adrianne said.

  Zhang laughed as though he understood the joke and prodded the sheep out of his way with what Julian called his “leech stick.”

  Brooks glanced back and caught a glimpse of a sun-leathered face before the man reached out from behind the tapestry and swing the wooden shutters closed with a loud clapping sound. There were deep gouges in the exterior of the shutters where it looked as though something had attempted to claw through them. The front door was similarly scarred.

  The structure was barely out of sight behind them when again the forest closed around the path, beside which a pyramidal cairn had been erected. It was draped with so many prayer flags that it looked like an enormous heap of dirty laundry left to rot in the elements. A single pole stood from the top of it and served as the attachment for the string of flags that stretched off into the forest. On top of it, speared through the hole in the base of the cranium, was the skull of a yak with wild, curled horns.

  A cloud of flies swirled around it, incensed by their intrusion. They were fat and bloated and buzzed lazily as they again alighted and crawled across the decomposing fabric and the mess of bones scattered around the base, to which a length of rusted chain was bolted.

  Zhang waved them away and crouched over the freshly butchered bones. There were still knots of meat and tendons at the joints and there were sections where it looked like the bones had been gnawed. They were brown with dried blood and the long bones broken, presumably in order to get to the marrow. He stood and the flies again descended upon their meal.

  “Why did you ask about tigers this morning?” Warren asked.

  Brooks blew out his breath.

  “I thought I saw a track at the point where we entered the field of leeches.”

  “And you didn’t think that was maybe worth mentioning?”

  “I saw no reason to frighten anyone. We knew there were tigers up here when we set out. And I don’t think we have anything to worry about.” He nodded to the remains of the yak. “It looks like they’re being well fed.”

  Brooks turned his back on them and started down the trail once more.

  “What else aren’t you telling us?” Warren asked.

  “Some things are worth the wait.”

  And with that Brooks struck off into the trees, which gradually transitioned from rhododendrons and azaleas to tropical figs and lychees. The air grew warmer even as the sun continued its unwitnessed descent above the canopy. The forest life again filled the trees with hoots and squeals and sounds Brooks could hardly describe, let alone attribute to any specific species. Their return was every bit as sudden as their cessation had been. He wondered if the others had noticed the same thing.

  He felt guilty keeping anything from them, especially something as earthshattering as what Brandt had shown him to convince him to launch this expedition. There was no way he could explain it to them though, not in any believable way. He would have thought Brandt senile had he attempted to merely tell him about the plaster cast. It was one of those things you had to see to believe, the kind of flight of fancy easily enough dismissed without a second thought. Even seeing it in person hadn’t been enough. Brooks had needed additional time to digest what he’d seen, to contemplate it from every possible angle, and then he’d made Brandt show him again to dispel his lingering doubts.

  Soon enough they’d see for themselves, assuming they were able to find it again after so many years. Then they’d have no choice but to believe and they’d understand why he’d been unable to tell them. If they even still cared by then.

  The ground trembled, subtly at first, but with increasing intensity as they continued to the east. The Yarlung Tsangpo beckoned louder and louder until it was all they could hear.

  Brooks’s heart raced. He turned to see the expressions of anticipation on the faces of the others. They, too, understood the implications. They were about to enter a place where only the occasional monk was permitted to tread, where even the indigenous people refused to go for any length of time for fear of spoiling its sanctity, and where few westerners had ever gone before. They were about to penetrate the hidden lotus.

  On the other side of the river lay Motuo and what Brooks was certain would be the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century.

  Nine

  Excerpt from the journal of

  Hermann G. Wolff

  Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection

  Chicago, Illinois

  (Translated from original handwritten German text)

  January 1939

  It became soon apparent that Sir Basil Heatherton, the political officer at the British Mission in Gangtok, whom we initially suspected of trying to delay our departure for mystical Lhasa while awaiting formal approval from the embassy in London, had no intention whatsoever of granting our request. Tensions between our two nations back home deteriorated by the hour and there was much legal posturing over the means by which the process of reunifying the Germanic peoples had commenced. Heatherton’s relationship with both the Sikkimese and Tibetans was already strained, and rightfully so, thanks to the history of British Imperialism in India, while across the border the Tibetans prepared to go to war, if that was what it took, to extricate the fourteenth Dalai Lama, little more than a child, from the clutches of
the Chinese, who themselves were in the midst of fighting a bloody war against the Japanese. With the training and economic support of the NSDAP, of course.

  Ultimately, it was Brandt who formulated the plan to use our frustration and impatience to our advantage. We made a grand scene of demanding to cross the border and then an even grander show of leaving Gangtok when the sanctimonious political officer rebuked us. Once we were confident Heatherton had sent word of his triumph back to England, we doubled back through Bootan [sic] and traveled several weeks out of our way into Assam to the east.

  We followed the Brahmaputra River through the Sadiya Frontier Tract and crossed into Tibet without major complication. We encountered Ngolok bandits who were easily routed by several warning shots fired at the hooves of their horses. König collected species previously only thought to be legendary, most notably the [shaggy] shapi and the ferocious dhole. Brandt examined every subject we passed with his calipers and rulers, despite slowing our progress to a maddening extent. Eberhardt and Metzger gathered rocks and every artifact they could get their hands on, and charted the geography and took magnetic readings from the soil. All the while I gathered plants and flowers and filmed everything I saw. Little did any of us suspect the trials that lay ahead of us.

  Our initial assumptions proved erroneous. We believed the passage from the Sadiya Frontier would allow us to circle around the Himalayas to the north and reach Lhasa in a roundabout approach. If there were a way of doing so, we certainly did not see it. By the time we recognized that our route was leading us straight into the mountains, it was too late to turn around, or at least not without wasting even more valuable time and running the risk of being forced to return to Gangtok with our hats in hand. König firmly believed we would eventually reach our destination by staying the course and that surely the banks of the Yarlung Tsang-po [sic] would prove no more treacherous than its Indian incarnation as the Brahmaputra to the south, which was indeed the case for the first few days, after which we learned exactly why the British had chosen to squat on the passage from Sikkim and why we had encountered an utter lack of resistance through Assam.

  The banks of the river grew first rocky, then impassible, detouring us ever eastward onto narrow paths cut by nomadic herdsmen and wild game. We were reluctant to abandon our entire mule train, but guiding so many overburdened beasts along the rugged switchbacks nearly halted progress and we knew all too well the gamble we were already taking. We had no choice but to send the majority back to Darjeeling where they would be unburdened of our collections, which would be crated and shipped back to the Fatherland. Of the five mules we kept, four survived the journey to the village of Laga [sic]. The animal carrying Eberhardt’s supplies and equipment lost its footing on the icy pass, slipped, and plummeted hundreds of feet down through the mist to its death, taking with it the Sherpa who’d been shouldering its haunches.

  We were relieved to encounter the village beneath the driving storm shortly after nightfall and were received with steaming bowls of thenthuk and blood sausages. The natives blessed us with a shelter made from raw timber and wood for a fire, for which we were more than grateful. The wind doubled its efforts and the snow turned to blowing ice that felt like needles when it struck our skin. That night we slept better than we had since arriving in Gangtok and sang the praises of our hosts for their hospitality, clear up until the moment we reached the stables where we had hitched our mules and found them gone. Our Sherpa guides had abandoned us, as well, much to König’s chagrin. He had developed a fondness for the young man with the omnipresent smile he had taken to calling Sonnig [Sunny].

  Fortunately, we had the presence of mind to bring our valuables into the shelter with us. Brandt, especially, bemoaned the loss of so large a portion of our supplies, but busied himself measuring and casting the faces of the villagers while he waited for the rest of us to ready ourselves for the journey into the Himalayan Mountains, which loomed over us like an impenetrable fortress. Penetrate them we did, though. We attacked with axes and picks and ropes and fought for every meter we ascended. The bitter wind abraded our cheeks and lanced through our parkas. Our breath turned to ice in our beards and eyebrows. Our heads ached from the altitude and the dehydration. Still, we persevered and made camp in the lee of a peak we named Mt. Sieg [Victory]. Too exhausted to even notice the falling temperatures, we bedded down and slept [like] the dead until we awakened, shivering and coughing, with the first light of dawn to filter through the storm clouds.

  The following day was one of descent. For as hazardous as the climb had been, picking our way down perilous sheets of ice and slickrock was even more so. Traction on the talus was poor at best and crossing the arrested rockslides threatened to turn ankles. When we finally reached timberline, we were spared the brunt of the wind and snow for the balance of the day until we reached the plateau where we decided to camp amid the rhododendrons and azaleas and beneath a ceiling of clouds so low we could nearly reach up and touch it. We boiled droma roots Metzger exhumed and ate the snow cocks König, who grew ever more distant, shot during one of his increasingly frequent disappearances.

  It was the next morning when he came to the realization that we were much farther from Lhasa than we had thought and that if we did not increase our pace, we risked not only being at the mercy of winter high in the Himalayas, but the British discovering our ruse—thanks to the mutinous Sherpas—and attempting to outflank us and block our road to the holy city. He drove us hard through the morning and by the time we reached the Metog Lho pass, which marked the final leg of the descent to Motuo, he had essentially abandoned us altogether. We occasionally saw him far ahead on the path or materializing uphill from the dense fog, crouching to inspect something in the snow. He had always seemed to be separate from the rest of us, and at no time was it more apparent than during the final approach to Motuo. He came from wealth rather than academia and was renowned for his skills as an explorer and hunter, rather than his potential for scientific discovery. The most noteworthy difference between us, however, was his almost religious devotion to the more esoteric beliefs of the Nazi party. The majority of us have known hardship and the daily frustration of watching the rest of the world vilify our heritage and celebrate the impoverishment it forced upon us. We were all swept up in the völkisch movement and the idea that we were better than the circumstances into which we’d been born, that ours was a bloodline that once flowed through the veins of gods. None of us more so than König.

  It is difficult to describe the distinction. Ours was an abstract belief in the nobility of our remote ancestry, while he believed that we were the direct descendants of the surviving rulers of Atlantis, the progenitors of our Nordic roots, the Aryans themselves. It is no small coincidence that he is also the lone man among us who is not a scientist. He is several years older than the rest of us and the only one to have been orphaned by the war. He has no memories of his father and knows him only through the legends we had all heard. Walther König not only amassed a fortune from his travels around the globe, but also returned with rare and unusual treasures of all kinds and tales of people we scarcely believed truly existed. Ferocious beasts he collected on his myriad expeditions featured prominently in every museum across Europe. It was in his enormous shadow that Augustus König essentially raised himself, utilizing his vast inheritance and rage for the loss of a father he deified to drive himself to conquer the world. Perhaps it was this quest to prove his personal worthiness of the König blood—the Blood of Kings, as he called it—that initially attracted him to the search for the Aryan Race, which he was obsessed with proving still survived to this day.

  For as little as the rest of us subscribed to the theory of a master race of Atlantean origin, he more than compensated for our combined lack of enthusiasm. So strong was his belief that it was he who insinuated himself into the good graces of the Ahnenerbe, organized the expedition, and provided the funds that even Himmler himself had been unable to secure for us to wait out the British in Gangtok. The
four of us—Brandt, Eberhardt, Metzger, and myself—were selected for our scientific specialties and objectivity. More precisely, we were skeptics, although none of us would have dared so say aloud, especially around König, who perhaps believed even more fervently than either Himmler or our beloved Chancellor. In his mind, König was convinced that we would find more than mere proof of the existence of the Aryan Race when we ultimately reached Lhasa, we would find the first clue as to where they had gone from there.

  The majority of the day passed without interaction with König, who flitted in and out of the fog as we descended from the blowing snow into evergreen forests where the precipitation fell as rain, and finally into temperate zones where my comrades practically undressed as we walked. Despite my initial discomfort, I alone elected to remain fully clothed, for I was raised near the swamps of the Bodensee and recognized the kind of habitat that attracted mosquitoes and other bloodsucking insects of their ilk. They mocked me when I cautioned them. I might have been a naturalist in the strictest terms, but I had been selected for my skills as a filmmaker, not my scientific specialty, a fact none of them let me forget with nicknames like blumemann [flower man] and käfersammler [bug catcher].