Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  I wished we hadn't. For two years now I had been trying to drive the memory of Laura out of my mind, or if that was impossible, at least trap it in a cage and tame it. And now, when I felt I was so close, when on good days I could look at the pictures of her I kept buried in my closet without tears clogging my eyes, there was this reminder of how her body had looked on the black sand of Mile Six Beach. It had taken months, after we had found her there, before I could close my eyes without that sight superimposed on my eyelids.

  I forced myself to think of something else, anything else. I tried to imagine what had happened to that nameless Canadian victim. There hadn't been a struggle. He must have been ambushed from behind. Or maybe it was somebody he knew. And somebody either very strong or swinging something very heavy, from the way his skull had nearly cracked open like an egg.

  And then the victim had sat down neatly with his back to the wall, the way we had found him? That didn't seem likely. Toppling over seemed more likely. The killer must have dragged him over to the wall, arranged the body. I couldn't remember seeing any bloodstains on the ground. On the other hand I couldn't remember looking for any either. It couldn't have been far away from where he was found though. And then the knives, I was somehow convinced that they must have come last, some kind of horrifically depraved signature. Just like the knives in Laura's eyes.

  Could it be the same person? Obviously it couldn't be. Obviously it didn't make any sense that I, of all the people in the world, should just happen to follow the same killer's trail twice, two years apart, on two different continents. The very notion was ridiculous, was completely implausible, was… unscientific. But I couldn't help holding it up in my mind and turning it around. Couldn't help wondering if I would recognize any of the faces in Letdar.

  And what would I do if I did? That was the real question. What would I do?

  * * *

  Burdened by my pack and my contemplation, I didn't get to Letdar until about an hour before sunset. It wasn't a village, just a collection of a dozen lodges. Two more were under construction, a backbreaking proposition up here near the vegetation line. Every plank, every brick, every pot and pan had to be carried up here on the backs of prematurely wizened Nepali porters. I wondered if they resented the white tourists whose presence led to their toil, or whether they welcomed the work. Probably no, to both. Probably they didn't think about us at all; they just shouldered the loads and unquestioningly took them where they were told to go.

  Nearly every bed was already occupied, which explained why new lodges were under construction. Adam Smith's invisible hand at work. I got a wooden bed frame, sans mattress, in a dormitory room with five others at the Churi Lattar Lodge. The dinner hour had just begun, and I was famished, but I knew I had to get to all the lodges before night fell and all the trekkers retired to their sleeping bags. I wished, for neither the first nor the last time, that Gavin had not been overcome by the desire to explore that abandoned village.

  It had gotten cold enough that nearly everyone was in the common room, seated around low wooden tables, eating garlic noodle soup and drinking lemon tea, waiting for their dinner orders to emerge in random order from the kitchen. I put an order in for dhal baat, knowing it would be at least an hour. Then I walked to the doorway and looked around at the assembled masses. About thirty people, various groups, various languages. Usually common rooms roared with conversation, but altitude sickness and sheer exhaustion had drained a lot of the joie de vivre from this crowd. Which made my job easier. But not easy. I had always hated public speaking, always hated calling attention to myself in front of strangers. Still. A man had died, and I had a job to do, and that had to trump my stage fright.

  I took an empty teacup and a sugar spoon and banged the spoon against the teacup. It made a hollow empty sound that did not carry. I took another empty teacup and clashed the two cups together as hard as I dared, and this worked much better. A hush fell over the room and thirty pairs of confused, expectant, and irritated eyes turned towards me.

  "Listen," I said, trying to project, plowing ahead before I had a chance to get embarrassed and tongue-tied. "This is important. My friend and I found a dead body today, back in Gunsang. A trekker. We're pretty sure he's Canadian, we're pretty sure he died today, and we're pretty sure that he was murdered."

  There was a long pause during which I feared irrationally that they would laugh at me and turn away; and then a half-dozen voices asked, with varying accents, "Murdered?"

  "Murdered," I repeated. The room had fallen silent and they were staring at me with utter fascination. "His pack is gone, his ID is gone, and his watch is gone. My friend has gone back to Manang, to the police. We don't have any idea who the dead man is. What I want to know is if any of you knew him."

  "Tell us what he looks like," a burly German demanded.

  "Dark hair," I said. "He was wearing a blue jacket from a Canadian store, a green wool sweater, and jeans."

  Silence. I looked around the room, really looked, for the first time. To no avail. No faces I recognized, no guilty or shifty expressions, nothing but genuine surprise. A few expressions of sympathy, or dismay… but mostly fascination. They wanted to hear more, I could tell, but they had nothing to add.

  "All right," I told the crowd. "I'm going to go ask at the other lodges. If any of your friends are sick or sleeping, ask them when you can. I'm staying here tonight. And do me a favour, if dhal baat comes out for dormitory bed six before I get back, save it for me."

  The crowd stared at me expectantly. I searched for a pithy end to my speech and came up with "Thanks. I'll be back later."

  Exit, stage center, out through the door. And for once I hadn't felt my usual awkwardness and embarrassment when talking to a crowd. Because I knew I had them in the palm of my hand. Nobody was going to catcall a dramatic revelation of Murder On The Trail.

  For some reason I was angry with the people in the lodge, and the way they had reacted. A man was dead, a man who had walked the same trail they had for the last week, and there had been no sympathy, no grief, no cries of "that's awful!", no voices volunteering to help in any way they could. Just amazement, fascination. As if it was part of the scheduled entertainment. Another notch on their travel belt, that they had walked with a murdered man. Another story for their friends when they returned to their safe European homes. He wasn't really a dead man to them; he was another element in their life-enriching trip, just another Travel Experience, like an animatron on a Disney ride.

  And it wasn't just them. I felt some of that myself. Would I have reacted so casually, so clinically, if I had found a dead man with knives in his eyes back in California or Canada? Like hell I would have. But I was here on an adventure. Until today a safe, tame, communal adventure, but an adventure nonetheless, and I was treating the murdered man as just another episode in my journey. I felt like I had co-opted his death, that it was no longer his own.

  * * *

  It was in the seventh lodge, after I had described the dead man for the seventh time, that the silence was broken by a voice from the back. "We know someone like that," the voice said, an Australian voice, its tone alarmed. "His name is Stanley. We were expecting him here but he never showed up."

  The voice belonged to a woman named Abigail who was traveling with a German man named Christian and a younger Aussie girl named Madeleine. I sat down next to them. The rest of the room listened expectantly.

  "What happened?" Abigail asked, and she, at least, was genuinely upset. I told her most of the story, leaving out any mention of the knives.

  "Fucking hell," Madeleine said. "God. I can't believe it. I can't believe I was traveling with someone who was murdered today."

  "Can you tell me anything about him?" I asked them. "I'm going back to Manang tomorrow to talk to the police. His last name?"

  They looked at each other, tried to call it to mind. Christian nodded abruptly. "Goebel," he said. "His last name is Goebel. I saw it at the checkpoint in Chame." Every day or two on the tr
ail we had to sign in at a police or Annapurna Conservation Area checkpoint, mostly to keep track of trekkers who got lost or stumbled off cliffs. "It's a German name, that's why I remember."

  Stanley Goebel. The dead man had a name.

  "We met him in Pisang," Abigail said. "Three days ago. He was Canadian, yeah. He was traveling on his own. I don't know. He seemed like a good bloke. He worked in an auto factory somewhere near Toronto. He was only in Nepal for a month."

  "He didn't have much money," Madeleine added.

  They fell silent. They didn't have anything else to add. I grew irrationally angry again, this time at the paucity of their epitaph. He seemed like a good bloke. He didn't have much money. That was it? That was all they had to say? Abigail and Christian at least seemed upset. Madeleine watched me with that awful wide-eyed fascination.

  "All right," I said. "I'm staying at the Churi Lattar. If you think of anything else, could you come and let me know?" I sounded to myself like a detective on Homicide: Life On The Street. I should give them my card, that was what Pembleton and Bayliss did. "I'm going to go check the other lodges, to see if anyone else knows anything."

  And to get away from here, because no offense, I know we only just met, but I can't stand your company any more.

  And, maybe, to see if I recognize anyone in the other lodges.

  But I did not recognize anyone, and nobody else knew anything. I returned to my lodge famished and exhausted. Some kind soul had saved my dhal baat, and never have rice and lentils and curried vegetables tasted so good. I had a second helping, drank a pot of lemon tea, returned to the dorm room, peeled my boots off, and curled up in my sleeping bag.

  Sleep came hard that night, and it wasn't because of the hard wooden bed or my snuffling dormitory companions. I didn't want to be alone. I wanted a warm body next to me. No; more than that. For the first time in a long time I allowed myself to admit what I wanted more than anything, what I knew I would always want more than anything. I wanted Laura next to me. Laura and her quick laugh, her mane of long dark hair, her gentle touch. Laura who had been dead for two years.

  Nicole had told me, on the night the tribe of the truck disbanded, that one day I would get over it. Wise and wonderful Nicole. We had camped by the side of a dirt road, just outside Douala, a city popularly and accurately known as the armpit of Africa. It was late, the fire had burned down to ash and glowing embers, and almost everyone had retired to their tents. Only my closest mates had stayed up. Nicole, her husband Hallam, Lawrence, Steve. Thinking about it now I realized they had stayed up primarily to keep an eye on me. I was in bad shape, those first few weeks. I guess they thought I was a danger to myself.

  "It'll get better," she had said. "You'll get better. I know you probably can't believe that right now, but…Just believe that it's possible. You'll get over it. We'll all get over it. I know that sounds callous and horrible, and maybe it is. But it's true. Remember that."

  I had remembered. But I thought that for once wise and wonderful Nicole might have gotten it wrong.

  I didn't want to think about it any more. I didn't want to think about anything any more. I dug out my Walkman, put in my Prodigy tape, and blasted it into my ears as loud as I dared. All I wanted was to exterminate all rational thought, but somehow it eventually put me to sleep.

  Chapter 3 Retrace and Retreat

  I woke an hour after dawn. At home this would have been a sign that something was seriously wrong. Here on the trekking trail it meant I had slept in. All of the other dorm beds were already vacant. Where there is no electricity, I had discovered, even so-called night people fall into a dawn-to-dusk routine within a matter of days.

  I hadn't washed yesterday, but the solar showers on the trail didn't warm up until midafternoon, and I dreaded the thought of the icy downpour I would have to endure at this hour. I could probably talk the proprietor into heating a bucket of water for me, but it seemed like a selfish waste of valuable firewood. Manang, I thought. I'll shower in Manang.

  I went through my morning ritual of smearing antibiotic cream on my blisters and covering them with patches of a long bandage roll that I had bought in Chame. The bandage was made in India and the glue had an irritating habit of dissolving in the middle of the day, but it was better than nothing. At this point I was using the antibiotic cream primarily for its placebo effect; the blisters were open, nearly purple, and angry red streaks radiated from them like a child's drawing of the sun. But at least they hadn't gotten any worse today.

  A few other stragglers were hurrying to get on the trail. I had overheard in Manang that there was a bed shortage in Thorung Phedi and Thorung High Camp, the next stops after Letdar and last before the Thorung La, and the last few to leave Letdar each day would likely have to turn back and try again the next day. I was almost relieved to be going the other way. The appeal of trekking lay largely in its Zen-like contemplative pace. The idea of having to rush to beat the crowds was just fundamentally wrong.

  I ate a breakfast of tasty tsampa porridge and lemon tea, stifled a groan as I shouldered my pack, and started out back down the trail, back towards Manang. I felt wonderful. My altitude sickness had vanished. It was good to be going downhill. The air was crisp and clean, and the mountains loomed around me like glorious visions of some faraway fantasy land, like a Tolkien landscape. Yesterday's clouds had vanished, and there seemed to be more snow cover on the peaks. I wondered if the Thorung La was open. If it shut down for more than a day or two there would be a backlog of trekkers occupying every bed within miles, and it might take all season to clear the bottleneck.

  I had left my watch back in the city of Pokhara, but I guessed it was about two hours back to Gunsang, and another two to Manang. Back there by noon then, mission accomplished, Stanley Goebel's name acquired. I walked and wondered what had happened to his pack. His killer had presumably taken his passport, wallet, and watch, but his pack? That would make sense, if the killer was Nepali; he could sell the pack and many of its contents back in Pokhara or Kathmandu. But I didn't think so. I thought the killer was one of us, a fellow-trekker, and that Stanley Goebel's pack had been flung over the edge of the cliff near where he had died. It would have fallen a long way, well out of sight. I wondered if it would ever be discovered.

  If I was right, and the murderer was a Westerner, then he had probably spent last night in either Letdar or Manang. Nepali merchants clad in jeans and flip-flops took but a single day to go from Manang over the Thorung La to Muktinath, but only an extremely fit and well-acclimatized Westerner could do the same, it was at least three days' journey for most trekkers. Manang or Letdar, then. And Manang had an airstrip and regular dawn flights, weather permitting, back to Pokhara. That made sense. The killer was probably back in Pokhara's balmy climate. Hell, he could be halfway to India by now, or in Kathmandu waiting for a flight out of the country.

  I gave up on contemplation and focused on walking. It was easy to turn my mind off up here, to reduce the entire universe to the placement of one foot in front of the other. I was going downhill, but the wind was in my face, numbing my skin. I pulled my hat down low on my brow to mitigate this and trudged onwards, mind empty, happy simply to walk.

  I don't know what it was that alarmed me. Maybe I caught a sideways glimpse as I turned a corner. Maybe I heard something. Maybe it was that sixth sense that tells you when someone is watching you. Whatever it was, it made me stop and turn around and look down the trail behind me. About a thousand feet away the trail rounded a bend in the red stone slope it followed, and there I saw a single human figure, following my path.

  Nothing unusual in that. Someone with bad altitude sickness who had decided to descend in order to recover. Or one of those rare hardy souls who had gone clockwise around the Circuit, a much more difficult route because there were no lodges for a long way on the other side of the Thorung La. Or a Nepali porter heading back to Manang for another load. I kept walking.

  But after about a minute I could no longer deny the alarm b
ells ringing in my head, even though I did not know what had cued them. I turned around again and squinted at the figure. It stopped, and a moment passed when we looked at each other across a distance. Then the figure resumed its travel towards me, moving at a quick walk. And I realized that he or she was not carrying a pack.

  Everyone carries packs up on the trail. Trekkers carry their backpacks, or are joined by Nepali porters who carry them in their place. Other Nepalese either ride horses, if rich, or carry wood or stone in one direction and empty Coke bottles in the other, if poor.

  I paused for a moment. I felt very cold all of a sudden, and I wanted to turn and run. Instead I dropped my pack to the ground for a moment, spent a moment rooting through its top pocket for my binoculars, and raised them to my eyes. I'd hardly used them at all on this trip, had kicked myself a couple of times for bringing them with me. Now I was very glad of them.

  The figure was tall, male, wearing sneakers, gray slacks, a green jacket… and a ski mask. He looked big and fit, and he was moving with purpose, and he was looking right at me as he walked.

  Lots of people had ski masks, you could rent or buy them in Pokhara or Kathmandu, for the subzero temperatures and high winds on the day you crossed the Thorung La. And it was cold today, and windy. But not that cold and windy.

  And I was all alone on this remote trail, fourteen thousand feet high, in the back end of nowhere, half a world away from home, amid mountains so rugged and wild they were barely claimed by any country. The kind of place where people can vanish without a trace.

  I stared through the binoculars, the pit of my stomach beginning to tighten into a cold knot, and as I stared, he waved. A jaunty, how-ya-doing wave of his hand. He grinned at me from beneath the ski mask. I shivered. I didn't like that grin at all. He was moving even faster, now. There was something about his body language, the tilt of his head, the angle of his torso. He didn't look like he was walking aimlessly down the trail. He looked like he was very specifically walking towards me.