Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  "Welcome to Canada, bienvenue au Canada," a disembodied voice said. "For service in English, press one. Pour service en francais, appuyez sur le deux."

  I pushed nothing, having learned long ago the best way to avoid voice-mail mazes. After a little while a telephone began to ring and a real live woman answered it.

  "Hello?" she said.

  "Hello," I said. "My name is Paul Wood. I'm a Canadian citizen. I'm calling from Pokhara. I'm calling because I want to know if you've been told that a Canadian man named Stanley Goebel was found dead while trekking in the Annapurna district."

  "One moment please," she said, as if she got this kind of call all the time and was going to transfer me to an extension specifically reserved for death confirmations. I went into the limbo of hold.

  "Hello?" a man said eventually. "Can I help you?"

  I repeated my spiel and went into hold one more time.

  "Hello?" a different man said. "Are you calling about Stanley Goebel?"

  "Yes I am," I said.

  "And who are you?"

  "My name is Paul Wood, I'm a Canadian citizen."

  "And what is your interest in the matter?"

  "I found the body."

  There was a pause as the man absorbed that. Then he said "Well, thank you for calling in, but the Nepali government has already informed us about Mr. Goebel. His family has been notified and his body is on its way home."

  "What exactly did the Nepali government inform you of?" I asked.

  I think he could hear the edge in my voice, and he began to erect a bureaucratic wall to hide behind. "Their final report has not yet been filed," he said cautiously, "but they have informed us on an informal basis that Mr. Goebel regrettably committed suicide."

  "Is that so. Well, I'm calling to inform you that that is regrettably not the case. Mr. Goebel was murdered."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Murdered," I repeated. "Violently killed. Somebody smashed his head in and stuck knives in his eyes, and the Nepali police are lying through their teeth about it because they can't be bothered to deal with a murder. I have pictures that prove this."

  "Mr… what was your name again?"

  "Paul Wood."

  "Mr. Wood," he said. "I've read the Nepali report myself and it quite definitively states that Mr. Goebel obviously killed himself, and it makes no mention of any knives… "

  "I am the person who found the body," I said, speaking each word slowly and distinctly. "I'm telling you that the Nepali report is a pack of lies."

  "I see. Mr. Wood, obviously I can't accept those claims unless they are confirmed by the Nepali police."

  "The police don't want to do anything with it."

  "Mr. Wood… Obviously we appreciate that you're calling in to help us with this tragic case, but if you don't have any evidence of any of what you're saying then there's very little we can do. The only official document here is the Nepali report, and it says quite clearly that the death was a suicide."

  "The only official document?" I said incredulously. "That's what you care about? Whether or not I have official documents? I've got pictures, and they show beyond question that he was murdered."

  "Now, of course if you'd like to get in touch with the Nepali police to aid them with their investigation, I can put you in touch with some of the relevant officials who I'm sure would be very interested in whatever photographs you have. As I said, their report isn't final yet, and can still be amended -"

  "What's your name?" I demanded.

  After a long pause he said, very grudgingly, "My name is Alan Tremblay."

  "All right. Mr. Tremblay, I have just told you that a fellow Canadian citizen was murdered in cold blood up there, that the Nepali police are covering it up, and that I have photographs that prove this. Do you understand that that is what I was saying?"

  "I understand, but our policy is to accept the Nepali government's official report and investigation instead of poorly substantiated phoned-in claims of murder from random travelers."

  "You understand fine but you just don't give a shit, is that it?"

  "Mr. Wood, I think that is completely uncalled for. I am perfectly willing to connect you with some Nepali police officials if you would like to assist them in their -"

  I hung up.

  I was still fuming when I returned to the 1-Hour Photo Development shop and picked up my pictures. I stopped at a café and bought a Coke, a little surprised that my addiction to lemon tea had abruptly vanished now that the trek was over, and sipped from it as I flipped through the pictures. Monkeys, rickety bridges, towering waterfalls, tiny villages, prayer wheels, mana walls, mule trains, mountains mountains and more mountains, fellow-trekkers, me upon the Thorung La. And those three shots of the dead body, a little overexposed. And my shot of the Muktinath ledger. It had come out perfectly and I could make out the Goebel entry very clearly.

  A brainwave hit me and I paid for my Coke and went to the Pokhara office of the Annapurna Conservation Authority. We had had to sign in here to get our trekking permits. The office was quiet and the man behind the desk didn't mind if I looked through their ledger to see when my friends had begun their trek. I flipped back through two weeks of entries and began to pore over them. And found Stanley Goebel's entry, in neat handwriting, only a half-dozen places ahead of my own. He must have stood practically next to me in line that morning.

  His handwriting in this ledger was very different from that in the photo. Clearly the work of someone else.

  So: after killing Stanley Goebel, the murderer used his name, and presumably his passport and trekking permit, to check in to Muktinath. For no conceivable reason. Hell, the checkpoints were in practice optional, you could walk right by them if you wanted to and nobody would demand that you check in.

  No conceivable logical reason, that is. But then there was no conceivable logical reason to kill him in the first place. Maybe he wasn't traveling alone, maybe he started his travels out with a friend, and they had a falling out, and the friend decided to follow him and kill him? Maybe he was killed by somebody who got his kicks by killing people and pretending to be them for a while? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I thought. Clearly this was a case for the Shadow, not for me.

  I was about out of options. Nepal didn't care. Canada didn't care. I felt like at the very least I had a responsibility to write all this down, document what had happened, tell somebody about it in case it ever happened again. I thought of Interpol. I wasn't sure what they did but I knew they were some kind of international police force. But what exactly were they going to do when the Nepalis were stonewalling?

  In desperation I decided on the last refuge of the conspiracy theorist: the Internet.

  The Internet cafes that littered Pokhara had come to a communal arrangement which kept Internet access prices at seven rupees per minute, about six U.S. dollars an hour, approximately ten times the price in Kathmandu. It was unabashed OPEC-style cartel capitalism and I had to admire it, though I wondered how they kept members in line. If somebody tried to boost their business by competing on price, did the cartel take him out back and beat him with a stick?

  I sat down at one that competed on quality instead, with a relatively high-speed ISDN line instead of the slow staticky phone connections used by most. The computers were newish, probably made in India, and came with headsets used to make scratchy inaudible telephone calls over the Internet. I launched Internet Explorer and then I typed into the address bar: thorntree.lonelyplanet.com.

  * * *

  The enormous power wielded by the Lonely Planet publishing empire over backpacking tourism has to be seen to be believed. With the stroke of a pen their writers can turn hotspots into ghost towns, or draw thousands of travelers to what had been a backwater. They can determine with a single well-chosen word whether lodge owners and their families will be wealthy or bankrupt within the year. The have de facto control over all budget travel in developing nations: who goes there, when, where they go, and wha
t they do. Experienced travelers talk of "the Lonely Planet effect" when a hitherto unmentioned place or activity they recommend leads to a deluge of travelers, the sprouting of a hundred lodges and souvenir shops, and a wave of overcommercialization and traffic that almost inevitably destroys whatever quality prompted the recommendation in the first place.

  Of course this is not their fault. The fault lies with the hordes of travelers who follow their Lonely Planet bible faithfully without once venturing away from its safety blanket; and with the world, for having so many budget travelers and so few magical places which can be accessed cheaply and conveniently. All Lonely Planet does is publish guidebooks better than the competition's. As a result fully ninety per cent of travelers in developing countries rely on them for guidance.

  Since guidebooks are only updated every year or two, and destinations change more rapidly than that, Lonely Planet maintains a web site where they provide recent updates on the hundreds of countries they cover. They also provide a forum called the Thorn Tree where Lonely Planet travelers can talk to one another. The Thorn Tree seemed like the best place for me to tell the world what I had found. After all, despite my many reservations, I was a Lonely Planet traveler myself. It seemed right that I should tell my people what I had discovered. It was the best I could think of to do.

  * * *

  I logged on as "PaulWood" and created a new topic in the Indian Subcontinent area, entitled "Murder On The Annapurna Circuit." Thinking, that should get their attention. Then I wrote down what had happened as simply and shortly as I could. I didn't mention the knives — it seemed gratuitous to do so. I didn't mention being pursued on the trail. I didn't mention Cameroon. I told of finding the body, discovering his name, the stonewalling of the Nepali police, the Muktinath ledger, the unhelpful Canadian embassy. I ended with a warning to those in the region that there was a real live murderer on the loose and a plea for anyone who knew anything else to get in touch with me and/or post what they knew here.

  I wasn't concerned about Laxman's warning not to cause more trouble. For one thing I doubted too many official Nepali government sources read the Thorn Tree. For another it barely qualified as trouble. A few thousand people would read it and shake their heads in surprise and dismay, assuming the LP web editors did not censor it in the first place, and in a few weeks the topic would disappear, the Thorn Tree was a busy place. At best it might be shrunk to a one-line mention in the "Dangers and Annoyances" section of the next edition of LP's Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. And that would be the final resting place of Stanley Goebel.

  By the time it was finished it was night and I was tired. I went to bed in my comfortable double room in the Sacred Valley Inn, and another wave of longing came over me all of a sudden, a deep aching desperate wish that I lived in a parallel universe where Laura had never been murdered, that she was here with me, that I could hold her warmth in my arms and nestle my chin on her shoulder and smell the clean sweet smell of her hair. I was glad I was so tired. It made sleep much easier to achieve.

  When I woke up I showered and brushed my teeth and went straight to the nearest Internet cafe. I didn't really think there would be any responses yet, but there might be. I tapped my fingers impatiently as I listened to the screech of the dial-up protocol handshake, a sound as ubiquitous and recognizable around the world as a pop song.

  There were three responses, each one very brief.

  Anonymous 10/27 08:51

  What can I say but "holy shit"? Y'all watch out up there. Maybe The Bull changed continents… ?

  JenBelvar 10/27 11:08

  What is The Bull?

  Anonymous 10/27 14:23

  Alleged serial killer on the African trail. Read the boxed text in "Africa - The South".

  It didn't mean anything that the first and third poster were anonymous. About half the Thorn Tree posts were from users who didn't bother logging in. Maybe they were the same person, maybe not. It was a place to exchange information, not identity.

  I stared at the screen for a long time. Specifically at the phrase serial killer. I hadn't articulated it before. Then I went to the biggest bookstore in Pokhara. On a rack full of the latest LP books they had no less than two copies of Africa - the South, wrapped in plastic, which seemed bizarre to me — how many people fly from Kathmandu to Johannesburg? I talked them into letting me open the plastic and read it for a few minutes in exchange for two hundred rupees.

  Chapter 7 The Tale Of The Bull

  Boxed text, page 351, 1998 edition of Lonely Planet's Africa - The South:

  The Bull

  As this book went to press a rumour had spread like wildfire that there is a serial killer targeting backpackers in Southern Africa. It is true that there have been several murders of budget travelers in the region within the past few months, but our investigation leads us to believe that they are not connected.

  The rumour states that a man who calls himself The Bull is roaming the region, finding lone travelers, accompanying them to out-of-the-way spots, and then murdering them and mutilating their eyes. The Bull is said to be a European backpacker, not an African resident, and is alleged to have left a trail of bodies from Cape Town to Malawi and back again.

  The facts are that four independent travelers have been found murdered within the last three months: two in South Africa, one in Mozambique, and one in Malawi. In both of the South African cases the eyes of the victims were in fact mutilated. However our investigation indicates that a murder on the Mozambican coast and a murder in rural Malawi took place on consecutive days in June of this year, which is difficult to reconcile with the work of a single individual. Furthermore, the fact that there is a name associated with the rumour, particularly one as colourful as "The Bull", leads us to believe that there is some myth mixed with the grim reality of these murders.

  Lonely Planet urges all travelers to take all reasonable precautions wherever they go, to stay informed of local conditions via the Updates section on lonelyplanet.com and the word on the trail, to choose their travel companions carefully, and to avoid hitchhiking and traveling alone whenever possible. Even though we do not feel the evidence indicates that there is anything to the rumour of The Bull, Southern Africa includes politically unstable states and a significant minority of its population lives in desperate poverty. While South Africa is politically stable and relatively highly developed its crime rates in certain poverty-stricken areas are alarming. Travel safe.

  I read it three times. Then I read it again.

  Mutilating their eyes. The eyes of the victims were in fact mutilated.

  The Bull.

  * * *

  I rented a boat and went paddling about on the pretty lake that adjoins Pokhara. It helped me expend some of my nervous energy. It helped me to think rationally again, to organize my thoughts into what I knew and what I suspected and what might be.

  The undisputed facts: Laura had been killed in Cameroon. Stanley Goebel had been killed in Nepal. Two other backpackers had been killed in South Africa. All of those killings involved eye mutilations. The two South African murders were already rumoured to be the work of a serial killer. A traveler, not a local.

  LP hadn't said specifically what kind of mutilation had been performed. But I had a pretty good guess. It hadn't said that the other two African killings had not involved mutilation — and those murders had occurred in Malawi and Mozambique, countries as poor and undeveloped as they come, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if this information simply wasn't available.

  And how many had not been reported murdered at all? How many Stanley Goebels were out there, officially suicides or accidents?

  It wouldn't be the first time a madman preyed on travelers. There had been that psychopath in Australia, not so long ago, who had tortured and murdered seventeen backpackers there before one got away and reported him to the police. But this would be the first one who actually went traveling to find his victims.

  No, that's not necessarily true; he might just be the first
one who was noticed. It was so easy to commit murder in these circumstances. It was stunning how easy. Third World police who really don't care, an endless supply of victims who deliberately seek out remote locations on their own, amid a constantly shifting crowd of travelers who meet and leave each other, appear and disappear without word or notice, always en route to somewhere else. With a cool head and a cruel heart it would be the easiest thing in the world.

  Except Lonely Planet didn't believe it. Primarily because two murders had occurred on consecutive days. But was that really the case? They had occurred in Malawi and Mozambique — could the information that came out of there really be relied upon? Might one or the other in fact happened a few days earlier or later? Had someone confused the date of discovery with the date of the murder? It was possible. It was entirely possible.

  From Southern Africa to here. It occurred to me that I knew someone who had traveled from South Africa to Nepal, and had been intimately involved with this murder. Gavin. But no, that made no sense. He had the best alibi in the world; I doubted we had spent more than an hour or two apart from one another after we met and joined forces in Tal, five days before Gunsang. And he certainly couldn't have killed Stanley Goebel, he was with me all day. With an accomplice… ? The Scream solution? No. Ridiculously complicated, didn't make any sense. And besides, I knew Gavin. If he was sick in the head he sure concealed it well. He had struck me as one of the most moral people I had ever met.

  I shook my head violently as if to empty it of thoughts and tried to paddle around and around the little island in the lake without thinking. My best ideas usually came to me when I wasn't actively seeking them.

  * * *

  Cameroon, I thought. That had to be the key. Nepal and Southern Africa were stuffed full of thousands of backpackers marching lockstep down the various backpacker trails. But Cameroon was in fucking Central Africa. Lonely Planet hadn't published a book on Central Africa for ten years because there wasn't much there except blood and bullets. Cameroon was relatively civilized compared to the Central African Republic or either of the Congos. In fact until Laura's death it had been shaping up as one of my all-time favourite travel experiences. But there were no hordes of Lonely Planeteers there, that was for sure. A few particularly adventurous French tourists, a bunch of grizzled oil expats, and the odd overland truck trip like ours.