“Like from a fall?”
“Ooh,” Julian said. “If you do fall, will you try to make a sound like this?” He made a long, high-pitched whistling noise that culminated in a splat. Brooks had watched enough Roadrunner cartoons as a kid to recognize the sound effect.
“Funny.” He looked up at their destination, a thousand feet up, and tried to rationalize the distance, but failed to equate it to anything that lent a less intimidating perspective. That was a hell of a long way to climb and an eternity to fall. And worse, there would be times when his life would literally be in the hands of a grad student whose sole reason for being was to find new ways to get high. “Let’s get on with it.”
“We’ll be able to see everything you see on this monitor over here.” Adrianne gestured to the hard shell case where the small viewscreen showed an image of itself. “And we’ll be able to hear everything you say, but you won’t be able to hear us.”
“If we see something on the monitor you might have missed, we’ll flash up to you with this mirror.” Warren tilted what looked like a pocket compact until the light hit Brooks in the face and he had to shield his eyes. “That’ll be your cue. Verbally acknowledge you’ve seen our signal and we’ll be able to communicate with yes or no answers. Flash for yes; nothing for no. Understand?”
“He’s got it already,” Julian said. “That mountain’s not going to climb itself.”
He wore fluorescent orange climbing shoes with blinding yellow laces and black rubber soles and a pair of gray climbing shorts with a fully integrated harness system already built in. The legs in between were uncomfortably hairy, at least for the rest of them, and covered with scabs he couldn’t resist picking at. His shirt was one of those skintight, moisture-wicking spandex numbers with built-in padding on his elbows and over his shoulders where the straps of a backpack would ride. The graphic on his chest was of five fictional stages of evolution from a monkey to stooped men of varying degree to an erect man and finally to a man climbing a rock wall. He caught Brooks looking and beamed.
“I can hook you up with one just like it when we get back home, prof.”
“Don’t tease me, Julian.” Brooks tugged on his harness and the attached rope. Checked and double-checked his supply of quickdraws, hexes, and spring-loaded cams. Ensured the ice axes on either hip were secure. Looked up at the cliff and watched the vines hanging from the precipice above their destination whip sideways on a gust of wind he couldn’t even feel from the forest floor. “I’m going to hold you to it.”
Julian smiled and nodded as though Brooks had passed some crucial test in his mind. He opened the pouch hanging from his waist, dumped chalk into his palms, and produced a cloud of blue when he clapped them together. Warren coughed and Adrianne waved it away. Brooks turned to find Zhang crouching several feet away, extricating one of the hundreds of jagged fragments of petrified wood from where they’d worked their way into the earth. He fingered it as he looked up to the very top of the cliff. He felt the weight of Brooks’s gaze and hurriedly stood. The expression on his face was one Brooks couldn’t read.
“Let’s do this thing,” Julian said. He rolled his head on his shoulders, stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles, and scurried up the talus slope at the base of the mountain.
“Are you going to tell us what’s up there now?” Adrianne asked.
“You’ve come this far already, what’s a few more minutes?”
He winked at her and bounded up the slickrock after Julian. While he’d never be accused of being a great climber, Brooks could hold his own in a pinch. It was one of those skills he’d taken upon himself to learn as an undergrad after declaring his major and being exposed to the overwhelming field of competition for the few highly coveted positions. He’d needed to do anything and everything he could to distinguish himself from the countless others like himself, some of whom were undoubtedly smarter, wealthier, or willing to use their physical endowments to secure the rare spots on the more prestigious digs. A willingness to work for free and receive no credit when the findings were published was no longer enough. He’d learned rock climbing from a seventh-year senior who viewed it as a religion; skydiving and BASE jumping from a former Ranger who lost a leg in Desert Storm; and enough of about a dozen different languages from the generous proprietors of local restaurants to stumble through casual conversations, and, most importantly, fake his way through an interview.
He felt his climbing skills returning, but not nearly at the pace he would have liked. Too many years as an administrator had softened him, dulled his instincts. Or perhaps he was simply too excited by the knowledge that what he had traveled all this way to find was nearly within his reach. His stomach tingled like a teenager on a first date and his pulse throbbed in his temples. He was grateful for the gloves because he could feel the dampness on his palms beneath them. Thanks to what he fully intended to bring back down with him, he would find the world into which he descended afterward one on the brink of monumental change.
Julian scaled the limestone like a gecko, with even more grace and confidence than he exhibited on the ground. He unconsciously hummed the theme song from Spider-Man over and over. While amusing at first, it quickly lost its charm and Brooks began to wonder if sinking his ice ax into Julian’s calf might not be the most effective means of silencing him. Or at least the most satisfying, anyway.
The others fell farther and farther below as they ascended. His legs started to tremble and his muscles burned, but he savored the sensations. There was simply something about being so close to realizing his life’s goal and simultaneously one misstep from a gruesome end that made him feel alive in a way he hadn’t in a long time.
Julian paused on the larger ledges and shelves to take in the view of the mist-blanketed valley while Brooks caught up. He hammered anchors so quickly it was as though he’d been doing it all his life. He gripped crimps with just his fingertips and scurried upward to lunge for edges, all the while fixing the rope for Brooks, who struggled by comparison. They reached a point where the wind grew stronger with every vertical foot while the handholds diminished in size from buckets to crimps, and finally to finger cracks that Brooks barely had the strength to hold, let alone use to pull himself upward. For every foot they climbed, they moved half a dozen laterally, seeking anything resembling purchase.
Brooks was suddenly all too aware of his exposure and just how reliant he was becoming on the anchors seated by a grad student who was probably last fully sober a decade ago. If then. The others were mere dots far below, craning to see them.
Julian shouted something, but the wind swept his words away.
Brooks braced himself and looked up. Julian had crawled into a hollow carved into the cliff and held out his arm. Above him, the ledge loomed like a wave preparing to crash down on them both. Vegetation flowed over it and swayed on the wind. Branches and leaves and vines. Contorted trunks grew straight from crevices in the rock, their leaves sparse and withered. He could no longer see the valley through the vegetative screen, only the ground directly below them.
Another few feet and he clasped Julian’s wrist, shoved with his quivering legs, and crawled into the tiny manmade cave.
It was roughly eight feet long and three feet high and still bore the chisel marks where what had once been a mere oblong impression in the limestone created by the receding seas billions of years ago had been reshaped for the purposes of ancestors so ancient their precise reasons for doing so were lost to the annals of time. Although how they had accomplished this amazing feat defied explanation. This was where the source of the broken and nearly petrified wood half-buried below them had once resided.
Brooks removed his flashlight from his belt and shined it at the back wall. It was slanted and tapered to a crevice that reached deeper into the rock. Petroglyphs had been etched into the rock so long ago they were now indecipherable impressions. He leaned back out over the nothingness and twisted his torso in order to see upward, where a dozen more holes just like this
one were concealed from the outside world by the natural screen of plant life, only they appeared to be barricaded by large rectangular blocks of wood.
They were much more than that, though. They were entire lengths of alpine oak trunks planed smooth on the outside and hollowed on the inside to accommodate the contents sealed beneath the fitted lids. And inside of them was what had changed Brandt’s life all those years ago and what had brought Brooks halfway around the globe.
They were coffins. Right where Brandt had said they would be. And inside of each was the key to unlocking the mysteries of evolution.
He drew his legs up beneath him, braced his feet, and reached for a ledge he could use to pull himself up to the next hollow, maybe four feet up and another five to his right. His strength and energy revitalized by the prospect of looking inside with his own eyes, he scaled the distance with ease.
The coffins were part of a mysterious burial practice that flourished nearly a thousand years ago in the ages between the dawn of the Song Dynasty in 960 C.E. and the sunset of the Ming Dynasty in 1644. Although credited to an ethnic Chinese minority known as the Bo, this strange burial rite, known collectively as hanging graves, appeared not only throughout the mountains of China, but in the Philippines and Indonesia, as well. The Bo primarily utilized a method of balancing the coffins on wooden posts staked directly into the rock, while these hollows more closely resembled the practices of the Igorot of Sagada and the Torajans of Tana Toraja. Like the valley itself, they were an inexplicable anomaly. Some believed the revered were buried as high as possible to bring them closer to the heavens, while pragmatists theorized it was simply to prevent looting, and all of the various and bizarre shades of speculation in between, from cannibalism to necromancy to vampirism. These, Brooks believed, had been hidden up here for all of these centuries in the hopes that they would never be found, deep inside the most remote and isolated place on the planet.
Brooks squeezed his upper body into the gap beside the head of the coffin and braced his feet on the edge. Julian did the same thing at the other end and looked at him expectantly.
“Are you guys ready down there?” Brooks asked.
After a moment, he caught a flash of light from a thousand feet below.
He smiled at Julian.
“How about you? Ready to change the world as we know it?”
If he replied, Brooks didn’t hear it over the scraping sound of the lid as he shoved it deeper into the cave. The echo of the sound made it louder still. A haze of dust billowed out of the coffin and swirled in the beam of his flashlight as he shined it onto his destiny.
“Sweet Jesus,” Julian said. “What the hell happened to him?”
Brooks stared down at the desiccated face and realized that the camera wasn’t recording his triumph in all its glory, but rather something else entirely.
This wasn’t what he’d expected to find.
Not even close.
Part IV:
Desecration
Sixteen
Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin
Motuo County
Tibet Autonomous Region
People’s Republic of China
October 16th
Yesterday
The face of the dead man looked nothing at all like the plaster cast. In fact, there was nothing extraordinary about him, outside of the brutal manner of his death, anyway. And the smell. Dear Lord. Brooks had never encountered anything so vile. It was all he could do to close his eyes and concentrate on his breathing to keep from expunging the contents of his stomach. He was accustomed to examining remains, although not nearly this fresh. The decedent hadn’t been dead for a decade, let alone millennia.
He opened his eyes and focused on taking a clinical approach. His subject was male and appeared to be in his mid to late thirties. The bone structure of his face was decidedly Caucasian. Maybe six feet in height. Weight indeterminate. His eyes were sunken, his hair and beard as dry as straw. His teeth were bared, the front two on top broken. His right zygomatic arch and temporal bone were fractured, as though from a direct blow with a heavy object. The overlying skin had receded from the bony framework. His wool sweater was torn and crisp with black blood, his ribs exposed underneath. His hands were folded over his deflated abdomen, the fingers skeletal and articulated. The denim of his pants was brittle with the dried fluids of decomposition, which had congealed at the bottom of the hand-carved casket amid a scattering of insect carcasses. His hiking boots formed a triangle where his toes touched.
“He’s wearing Levi’s and Wolverine boots,” Julian said.
Brooks could only look at him blankly, unable to find any words. He returned his attention to the body and fingered the shredded wool. The tears were parallel and inflicted at an angle from the left shoulder, across the chest, and to the upper right abdomen. The skin underneath had decomposed, leaving no indication of the resultant superficial trauma. The anterior ribs to the left of the sternum were deeply scored and thick with congealed dissolution.
“The wounds on his chest were deep and would have caused significant loss of blood,” Brooks said. “Those on his legs appear relatively superficial, although based on the quantity of blood retained by the denim, I believe they would have required emergent medical attention.”
He caught a flash of the mirror from the corner of his eye. Whoever controlled it was going crazy trying to get his attention.
“What about his head?” Julian asked.
“The blow would have been fatal. The impact shattered his cheekbone, the lateral rim of his orbit, and depressed his temple to such an extent that the injury to the brain would undoubtedly have caused severe hemorrhaging.”
“What the hell happened to him?”
Brooks shook his head and looked out over the nothingness. They were thousands of miles away from home and hundreds from the nearest cell tower. Whoever entombed this body had fully expected it never to be found. He craned his neck and looked upward at all of the other coffins hidden in the mountainside, suddenly uncertain of what they would find inside.
He’d seen the proof that Brandt’s expedition had been here in the form of the wooden shrapnel on the ground where the coffin had fallen, as he described, but not what Brandt had told him he would find inside. Was it possible this coffin had served as an ordinary burial? If so, how had a Caucasian man of obvious western origin ended up entombed a thousand feet above the ground in one of the most remote regions on the planet?
“Help me check his pockets,” Brooks said.
“I’m not touching him. You do it.”
Brooks forced his fingers into each of the front pockets in turn. One produced a Swiss Army knife, the other a golden Sacagawea dollar. He set both down on the ledge and gripped the body by the sweater in one hand and the jeans in the other.
“What are you doing?” Julian asked.
“I’m rolling him over so you can check his back pockets.”
The corpse peeled from the bottom with a crackling sound. Brooks was surprised by how light it was. The bones with which he usually worked were fossilized to some degree and as hard as rock. These were probably so brittle they would shatter if he even looked at them too hard.
“Ohh. This is bad. This is really bad.”
“Just stick your fingers in there.”
“When has anything good ever come from that statement?”
Julian swept his fingers through one pocket, then the other, breaking apart the waxy adipocere. He jerked them back empty and wiped them frantically on his shirt.
“What were you hoping to find?”
“An ID of some kind.”
“Who gets buried with his passport? I can’t think of one good reason why we don’t just close the lid and head back down with the others.”
“How about this? This man was literally ripped apart and whoever interred him went to about the greatest lengths possible to hide his body. The way I see it, that’s the best possible reason to figure out what in the name of God is going on
here.”
“You think the Chinese could have done this?”
“Does he look like he was attacked by a military patrol?”
Julian looked away.
Brooks thought back to his initial reaction to the old man’s treasured cast. Why hadn’t Brandt come back here during the last seventy years? Why hadn’t he claimed the discovery as his own? And he thought about how he’d contemplated whether or not Brandt has sent any others like himself as he looked down at a man who couldn’t have been dead for more than eight years, judging by the date on the coin.
“Help me close this thing up,” Brooks said.
“Now we’re on the same wavelength, Dr. Brooks.”
They seated the wooden slab back in place and Julian unspooled the rope below them.
“Wrong direction,” Brooks said.
“What do you mean?”
“We need to see what’s in the rest of them.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Maybe,” Brooks said, and maneuvered himself so he could reach up over the top of the cave. He didn’t wait for Julian this time. He climbed upward on finger- and toeholds that barely qualified as such. All the while, his thoughts raced at the potential implications. The problem was that none of them made a bit of sense.
He hauled himself over the ledge on trembling arms and shoved off the lid before he even got both knees under him. Again, what he found defied explanation. The dead man wore camouflaged fatigues and was every bit as badly mangled as the first. The insignia on the patch on his right sleeve identified him as an enlisted infantryman of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. His wide, flat cheekbones and blunt nasal protuberance were undeniably Asian. Whatever skin he once possessed had dissolved into the sludge on the bottom, where insect carcasses were entombed as though in amber.
Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Page 10