by Rick Chesler
In the distance he’d seen a human corpse, hanging like a winter coat in a hallway closet. Not just a spinal cord but the whole enchilada. Legs, pelvis, ribs, and skull. A couple of arms, a lot like the model he used years ago in his human anatomy class.
Another dead climber, he thought
But then, who had removed his clothes?
And who had perfectly positioned him on a wall in the rear of the cavern?
Get the hell out of here, Zack. Now.
But, no.
Point.
Click.
Flash.
Another dead body, this of a yak. Its carcass was spread against the backdrop of the cave like a wall hanging.
Point.
Click.
Flash.
More bodies of men in varying degrees of decay. Some not much more than skeletons, others with frozen layers of flesh. Some entirely naked, others entirely dressed.
Point. Click. Flash.
The cavern was littered with corpses, both human and animal. Not strewn about haphazardly, but placed methodically against the walls in positions befitting a museum or mausoleum.
And that wasn’t all.
Point. Click. Flash.
On the walls Zack thought he saw crude drawings, carved into the rock of the cave.
Point. Click. Flash. Click. Flash.
There were rocks set up almost like furniture, like primitive tables and chairs. Yak skin and hair were stretched out into rough-and-ready beds, padded with juniper branches, weathered rucksacks and down snow suits.
Point. Click. Flash. Click. Flash.
Point. Click. Flash. Click. Flash. Click. Flash.
Zack couldn’t breathe. He felt as though he were being held down in an ocean, unable to come up for air.
He wasn’t merely in a crevasse, Zack realized. He was in a goddamn lair.
* * *
Intellectual curiosity eventually drove Zack deeper into the cavern than he ever intended to go. Evidently his curiosity was even more powerful than his fear. Or else maybe he realized there was nothing to lose. There was simply no escape from here.
Click.
Flash.
His eyes fixed on a crude drawing on the cavern wall. It appeared to be of an altar used to cremate the dead, the body of a yeti lying atop it with flames rising out of its chest. It was similar to an altar he’d seen in one of the Sherpa villages in the Khumbu valley below.
The yeti learns from surrounding cultures, Zack thought. It was undoubtedly why no one had come across the remains of a yeti as yet. They cremate their dead.
Click.
Flash.
There was a pile of climbing gear stashed in a nook in the wall. Dozens of items from ice axes and climbing suits to glacier goggles, crampons and boots. This part of the cavern looked like a climbers’ storage facility, a locker filled with equipment never to be used again.
Click.
Flash.
More cameras on the cavern floor. Some old, some new. Digital, SLR, Polaroids, some types Zack had never even seen before.
Using the flash of the Canon, Zack carefully studied each one of them as he went along. This is evidence, he thought. The yeti steals and conceals any and all proof of its existence.
For the first time Zack wondered how many climbers had lost their lives in order for the yeti to protect its secret.
By all accounts of human history, if the yeti had killed, it had killed for good cause. Because evolution provided multiple routes to humanity, humans and human-like creatures lived simultaneously throughout time. That Homo erectus had hunted Gigantopithecus there could be little doubt. In all likelihood, Homo erectus would have been directly responsible for the great primate’s extinction.
Unless the simian could somehow remain hidden.
For a moment Zack considered the possibility that the individual yeti surviving on Everest was the last of its kind. That by killing the female and child, Dustin had destroyed any natural future for the species.
As a scientist, Zack understood that humans possessed a deep primal urge to reconnect with their ancestors. But mankind also harbored innate urges to kill what was most like them. Consider the Neanderthal.
This intelligent being, this yeti, was no doubt the result of a parallel development on the complex web of evolution that few individuals understood. Its species had lasted all these centuries by remaining isolated in the mountains, buffered from the habitat destruction that plagued so many other species in more accessible environments.
It all started to make perfect sense. No wonder it was thought to be “unlucky” to see a yeti. There was a perfectly rational scientific reason behind the Sherpas’ seemingly irrational fear. The yeti only roamed down into the valley when it absolutely needed something, such as food. Thus the yeti only appeared during the harshest of winters, when there were no doubt supply shortages and related illnesses, during seasons when the greatest number of people in the Khumbu region would likely perish from natural causes.
Click.
Flash.
The yeti indeed killed when it needed to in order to protect its territory. There was no telling how many of the two hundred-plus climbers who had perished on Everest had been killed at the hands of the so-called snowman. How many ropes had been cut like Jimmy’s? How many climbers took heavy stones to the chest on their way up the Lhotse Face? How many were thrown from the mountain or killed with their own ice axes? It was impossible to say.
For centuries the yeti had no doubt thought it was safe in the heights of the Himalayas, far out of reach of the human race.
Then came along the likes of George Mallory. Fearless explorers who would stop at nothing short of death to reach the top of the world. And not only to reach it, but to make it attainable for others to visit as well. To transform it into a regularly accessible destination.
Zack’s mind raced. He reached for the kata around his neck, suddenly shivering, not with cold or even panic. But with awe.
The Canon dropped to the ground.
Click.
Flash.
Zack lowered himself to retrieve his only source of light. As he did, he also reached for a strange looking camera he had seen during the accidental flash. This camera appeared antique, at least eighty years old. He set it on the ground in front of him and aimed the Canon directly at it. He tapped the button.
Click.
Flash.
Zack’s stomach churned. It was a Kodak. A Kodak Vestpocket camera. The same type of camera George Mallory had had on him when he climbed the north side of Everest with Andrew Irvine in 1924.
He aimed the Canon at the Vestpocket again.
Click.
Flash.
The camera had been lent to Mallory by a member of his climbing party for the summit push, Zack had read. It was the property of one Howard Somervell.
Zack turned the Kodak Vestpocket over on the ground. Again he aimed and touched the button.
Click.
Flash.
On the rear of the camera were two letters.
Zack sat back amazed, his heart again pounding in his chest.
The letters were black and bold. And they clearly read: H.S.
Chapter 38
Minutes later Zack crawled through the cavern over the thin unstable ice toward daylight. He clawed his way out of the narrow hole and emerged back onto the cold hard surface of the mountain. With the Kodak Vestpocket camera tucked away in his climbing suit, Zack dragged himself along the East Rongbuk Glacier, amazed he was alive. He tried to call out Tashi’s name but found he had no voice. No spare breaths. No strength. Although safely out of the cavern, Zack was still struggling to escape the strong determined grip of death.
After half an hour slogging his way along the glacier Zack spotted a patch of royal blue jutting out of the snow. As quickly as he could he wriggled toward it on hands and knees, aching more with every inch he moved.
The bulk of the body was buried beneath the snows, as Zack expected.
He dug furiously with his left arm like a lame dog frantically searching for a bone. Finally he reached the fingers of one of Dustin’s frozen hands. He tried to pull the hand free but it wouldn’t budge. He dug deeper still, until he reached the wrist, then checked as best he could for a pulse.
A pang of grief hit Zack hard in the gut. He sighed, buried his own face in his hands. Dustin had twice saved his life, then died himself under Zack’s avalanche.
Zack heard movement behind him. He turned, saw the snows shifting, gently. Hope rose in his throat. Hope for Tashi.
Slowly, painfully, Zack pushed himself to his feet. Agony shot up his right leg like an arrow, and he finally realized he’d broken his right ankle during the initial drop into the crevasse. Watching the snows sluggishly rise, Zack wanted to rush toward, to help, to dig and dig and pull the injured climber from his frozen grave, but as he had in Kathmandu, he hesitated. His head lifted toward the sky. He breathed in. His nostrils flared.
That smell.
All at once, a monstrous wall of white began forming before his eyes.
The shape rose slowly from the icy floor as though the glacier itself were giving birth, as though a dozen invisible hands were sculpting the soft powder into a ten foot being, a man made of snow.
A snowman.
From the top of the wall fresh powder fluttered down. For an instant a pair of large yellow eyes glowed from behind the snows, then the top of the wall shook like a wet dog. Powder flew in every direction, and then the monster revealed its titanic maw.
Still blanketed in white, the yeti looked more like the sketches Zack had seen in the States. Here in Southeast Asia, where the yeti was reality, all depictions of the beast included the dark unruly hair, which now became more and more vivid as the snow fell from its massive shoulders.
Zack spun. He saw right away that any escape was blocked by a range of colossal seracs, all higher than the one he’d encountered in the Khumbu Icefall.
When he spun back around the yeti was already charging at him, its tremendous legs carrying it at an incredible rate, its large arms extended, reaching for Zack’s throat.
Zack froze, paralyzed again with fear.
Before he could cry out, Zack was lifted at least six feet into the air, the yeti’s claws digging into the collar of his down coat.
Then Zack’s aching back struck one of the seracs with such force the wind was knocked out of him and he nearly fainted.
Revived by the rank stench of the yeti’s putrid exhalations, Zack opened his eyes. He stared into the monster’s horrific mouth, tendrils of saliva dangling from its gigantic incisors.
The yeti reared back and roared.
Suddenly, as though struck with a bolt of lightning, Zack realized he desired to live. Not since the day he’d married Nadia in that sun-kissed cove in Grand Cayman had he so wanted, so badly needed to live. After thirty-five years his life simply wasn’t complete. How many of those years had he spent cramped up in a small classroom? How many on a couch in front of the television set? How many asleep? There were so many places left to visit on the planet, so many cultures to explore, so many people to meet. Life was so much larger than Rhode Island, so much more important than career. There was so much waiting for him so long as didn’t die now, so long as he didn’t die here.
But the yeti’s claws now pierced the flesh of his throat, spilling trickles of warm blood down his neck, into the open collar of his climbing suit.
Zack stared the beast in the eyes. The yeti seemed to take great pleasure in watching the slow waterfalls of blood merge as they poured down into Zack’s collar. The beast’s large pupils sank from Zack’s face to his neck to his upper torso like the falling sun.
Zack squeezed his eyes shut, waited for his throat to be ripped open, for the blackness to come.
Instead he remained held against the serac, the yeti’s grip loosening just slightly around his throat. Zack opened his eyes and gazed again into the yeti’s. The beast’s black-yellow orbs stared down into Zack’s open red North Face coat.
At the blood-drenched kata, Zack finally realized.
Suddenly the yeti’s demeanor changed. It somehow seemed to comprehend, to understand precisely what the plain and unembroidered kata meant.
The yeti’s eyes turned up and searched Zack’s face. For a moment it seemed as though they were one. As though all their pain and rage were melting away like the ice of this centuries-old glacier.
In that moment Zack realized the yeti was more human than human.
With his peripheral vision, Zack caught movement beneath the snows to his right. The powder lifted, shed like the skin of a snake. Then a blur of royal blue rose from the ice.
Dustin’s bearded face emerged from the white mass. In his hands he raised an ice ax. Slowly he approached the yeti from behind.
Still in the yeti’s grip, Zack silently looked Dustin in his ice blue eyes.
Quietly, Dustin approached the yeti from behind. Then Dustin drew back the ice ax and swung, planting the pick between the yeti’s gargantuan shoulder blades.
The monster’s head snapped back as it cried out, howling in pain. The beast’s bay echoed up and down the glacier.
The immense hands that gripped Zack’s throat instantly fell away. Zack’s ravaged body slid to the base of the serac and landed in a heap at the yeti’s feet.
The snowman turned. It reared back with one tremendous arm and swung, slashing Dustin across the chest, sending him flying backward, the ice ax dropping from his hands.
Pushing away the pain, Zack scrambled to his feet. Tried to reach for the ice ax, but the yeti turned and swatted him away with the back of its hand. Zack’s body again struck the serac, causing the colossal ice wall to shake, appearing all but ready to tumble.
The yeti reached behind itself. It ripped the ice ax from between its shoulder blades and threw it down in the snow. With blood spewing down its back from the gaping wound, the yeti bent and dug deep into the powder. When it stood, the great mountain ape raised above its head a boulder so large the monster itself nearly caved under its weight.
Zack watched in horror as the yeti heaved the enormous stone with the full lengths of his arms.
Flat on his back and already bloodied, Dustin screamed, then attempted to roll.
But it was no use. The boulder crashed with sickening force on top of Dustin’s skull, splattering blood and brain all about the clean white snow.
Zack tried to lift himself but fell. Tried to flee before the yeti turned its attention back to him. But it was too late.
The creature started toward him.
Zack finally got to his feet. He snatched Dustin’s bloodied ice ax and hobbled toward the serac, burying the pick as high he could in the ice wall. Then he dug his right crampon into the ice, screaming out in pain as his ankle twisted beneath his weight. He pulled himself higher, kicked the left crampon into the ice and continued climbing. The massive wall of snow began to crumble under his feet.
Zack glanced down. The yeti was right behind him, climbing, reaching for Zack’s injured leg. Zack lifted it up with all his strength. Then his left hand reached for the top of the serac, struggling to gain purchase.
The yeti roared again.
Zack used all he had left to mount the top of the serac just as it began to fall. Somehow, without even thinking of it, he again rose to his feet.
Putting all of his weight onto his left leg, the professor bended at the knee and jumped.
As he hit the hard mountain Zack heard the yeti wail. He tumbled down the glacier for at least twenty feet before his body finally rolled to a stop.
Zack glanced back at the serac. Just in time to see it collapse beneath itself.
* * *
Minutes later Zack gathered himself, ready to carry on.
He was certain the yeti was dead.
But hours later in the darkness, as he descended the final few feet of the glacier into Tibet, Zack would hear the monster wail at the top of its lungs.
Tibet
At dawn the day following, the media set up like a firing squad at Everest Base Camp in Tibet. With his gloved left hand cradling his frostbitten right, an impossibly gaunt Zack Hitchens drew a painful breath and stepped up to the microphones, still dressed in what remained of his red North Face climbing suit.
“‘Everest is my Everest,’ my wife Nadia used to tell me.”
Zack’s voice was barely a rasp. The reporters stood back on their heels, confused looks washing over their faces, as no questions had yet been asked.
Zack realized that and tried to smile, his lips parting in pain. His jaw felt heavy and bruised. The dimple on his left cheek was no longer a concern, hidden as it was behind a week’s worth of growth. He ran his dry tongue over the outside of his mouth, over the coarse hairs of his unkempt beard.
A reporter stepped forward, his camera man aiming a lens at Zack’s cadaverous face. Zack figured he’d lost at least thirty pounds since arriving in Lukla. The Himalayan Diet, he told himself. Maybe I should market that...
“How did you survive while all others died?”
The reporter’s words sounded as though they had passed through a tunnel. Zack’s ears were ringing, his subconscious still alerted to far off calls from the wild.
Zack slowly said the name of each member of his climbing team, clearly enunciating every syllable, even as it pained his jaw. “Tashi. Dustin. Francesca.”
He explained in maybe too many words how Team Two was struck by fierce weather on the summit and had no choice but to descend the north side. He described as well as he could how his fellow climbers died in attempts to save Zack’s life.
“That I survived while the others died,” Zack said finally, “was sheer luck.” He pictured Francesca, not as he left her but as he saw her for the first time in that taxi in Kathmandu. He coughed violently into his shoulder, then added, “All of it bad.”
Call it survivor’s guilt.
It felt oddly warm here at Base Camp, the sun now rising over the mountains, its rays glimmering off the cameras into Zack’s eyes. He thought of Tashi, of the snowblind Sherpa’s body buried somewhere just below the North Col under thick, heavy sheets of ice.