by Jeremy Bates
I scanned the thickly shadowed room. Books and scattered sheets of foxed paper layered the dozen or so tables. Chairs lay toppled on their sides. Cabinet doors yawned open, much of their contents spilled onto the floor.
I went to a nearby workbench, each cautious footstep loud and obtrusive in the still, tomblike space. Shoebox-sized cardboard boxes crowded the counter. I lifted the dusty lid free from one and discovered a collection of microscope slides, hundreds of them, each smeared with dried blood.
Frowning, I opened another box. More slides.
At the end of the counter two jars caught my attention. They were about the size of cookie jars and filled with a putrid-yellow liquid that might have been formaldehyde. I lifted one in the air and held it toward the murky light filtering through a nearby window.
Something large floated in the liquid. I tilted the jar back and forth until I could better see the object—and flinched in disgust.
A brain.
A disembodied, pickled brain.
My pulse quickening, I set the jar back down. Not wanting to hold the second jar in my hands, I simply rubbed away the half century of grime coating the glass with a gloved finger and peered inside.
A floating eyeball peered back.
“What the fuck…?” I mumbled. Beneath my many layers of clothing, I felt a single bead of sweat drip down the hollow of my back.
Swallowing a sour taste in my mouth, I re-evaluated the room. It was large, the size of two tennis courts, with only a few windows. Consequently, it offered a lot of places for someone or something to hide. I could almost imagine a hideous laboratory abomination leaping out at me, all yellowed fangs and bloodied claws.
Get out of there. Now.
I almost obeyed that frightened voice and left when I spotted another steel door at the far end of the room.
I started toward it, emboldened by the knowledge this building had been abandoned for decades and there couldn’t possibly be anybody else here but me.
I gripped the handle and pulled, the part of me that had issued the imperative to leave hoping the door wouldn’t open.
It swung inward, quietly and easily.
Natural light flooded my gloom-shrunken pupils, though the door didn’t lead outside but to an enclosed yard. I crossed the threshold, squinting painfully against the light and snow, and was surprised to find the walls plated with iron and topped with razor wire.
My first thought was of some kind of recreation yard set aside for inmates in solitary confinement—until I saw the contraption looming in one corner. It consisted of a complicated timber pulley system suspended over a square cavity in the ground.
I crunched through the snow and peered over the edge of the hole. It appeared to be an elevator hoistway. I could see the top of the car some twenty feet down.
My eyes went back to the rusty iron plates, the coils of concertina wire, the steel door.
Deciding I had seen all I’d wanted to, I returned the way I’d come. The door had swung nearly closed again. I was about to push it open but hesitated, overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of foreboding.
Someone’s in the room. Someone, or something.
I didn’t know how I knew this, but I did, a sixth sense—
“Hello?” a gruff voice called.
I let out the breath I hadn’t been aware I’d been holding, though I still felt elastic all over.
I stepped through the door.
“You,” Fyodor said, and it was almost an accusation. “I saw wood—”
“We need to get the others,” I said.
⁂
After returning to the prisoner barracks and explaining what I’d seen to the others, I led them back to the mysterious building, where I showed them the blood films, the pickled organs, the reinforced courtyard, and the elevator hoistway. Much as I’d been, they were in turns confused, disgusted, and surprised.
In the main room once again, I asked the question no doubt on everybody’s mind, “Why’s there a pathology lab in the middle of a prisoner camp?”
“Pathology lab?” Disco said. “More like Leatherhead’s basement.”
“They were obviously conducting experiments on the prisoners,” Olivia said. She was framing the jar containing the preserved brains with her phone camera.
Click, click.
“I knew there was a lot of torture and stuff committed in these camps,” I said. “But I’ve never read about Mengele-like experiments.”
“Perhaps,” Vasily said, “we might find the answers we are searching for below our feet.”
I looked toward the side of the room where we’d discovered a ladder descending through a man-sized shaft in the floor. It presumably led to the same subterranean complex the antique elevator did.
“I ain’t going down there,” Disco said.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Olivia said, rejoining us.
“Think about it, sha. What’s so secret that a building in the middle of a prison camp ain’t secure enough they have to do the dirty deep underground?”
She grinned. “Aren’t you excited to find out?”
⁂
Olivia wouldn’t go down the shaft alone and demanded someone join her. Everyone except me had an excuse handy—Disco claimed he was too big to fit, Vasily was too old, and Fyodor didn’t like small spaces—and so I was once again conscripted against my will.
Olivia descended the ladder first, and when she disappeared a few feet below the surface of the floor, I followed.
The hole was snug, no larger than a sewer maintenance chute. My back and elbows brushed the concave wall, and the deeper I went, the more trapped I felt. Rust slewed off the iron rungs beneath my gloves, and I began to breathe faster than necessary.
I looked up and saw Disco looking down.
“You’re missing the fun,” I told him.
“That ain’t my kinda fun, neg.”
“You at the bottom yet?” I asked Olivia.
“No,” her voice floated up.
How far did the hole descend? It had been about twenty feet down the elevator hoistway to the top of the car, so providing another ten feet for the car itself, thirty feet?
“It’s opening around me,” Olivia said. “I’m in a room, I think.”
“Can you see anything?”
“Hold on.”
I heard her step off the ladder.
Her Maglite bloomed.
“Oh, wow,” she said.
Heartened by that exclamation, I slid the rest of the way down the ladder, my hands and feet riding the outside of the rails, fireman-style.
I hit the floor pretty hard and fell on my ass.
“What the hell are you doing, Corey?” Olivia said, aiming her light at me.
“Entering in style,” I said, getting to my feet and rubbing my tailbone.
“Remind me never to accompany you to a party.”
I clicked on my Maglite. “Shit,” I said, walking the beam around the subterranean space. Directly before us a pistachio-green industrial steam turbine and generator stretched the length of a four-door sedan. More steam-powered machinery I didn’t recognize squatted in the shadows, including a gray block of high-voltage circuit breakers and an electrical switchboard. Spare fan belts and connectors and other miscellaneous items filled a cage-fronted cabinet. Tinplate petrol cans from a bygone era were stacked in a corner.
“It’s some kind of electrical room,” I said. “What do you think they needed all this electricity for?”
“You’re talking to me now?” she said.
“Come on, Olivia.”
“Come on, what? We sleep together, and then this morning you pretty much tell me it only happened because you were drunk. Now you want to chat like everything’s fine?”
“This building is a pretty big deal.”
“It’s a huge deal.”
“Bigger than any personal stuff between us.”
“You know what? You’re right,” she said. “I actually don’t care what happened la
st night.”
“Cool.”
“Cool?” she said dryly.
“I mean, I’m glad we’ve worked things out.”
Scoffing at this, Olivia led the way into the adjacent room. I followed, my flashlight sweeping over desks cluttered with microscopes, test tubes, beakers, petri dishes, funnels, pipettes, and an assortment of glassware containing different chemicals.
“The actual lab,” I said.
“Frozen in time,” she said.
“Creepy.” I illuminated what appeared to be a primitive biosafety cabinet. It was the sort of thing you saw in science fiction movies in which evil scientists who’d never read Frankenstein messed with alien life forms. I said, “What if they were working with a deadly bacterium or virus or something and it got loose and killed everybody.”
Olivia shrugged. “That would suck for them.”
“The possibility doesn’t bother you?”
“If that’s what happened,” she said reasonably, “there would be bodies lying around.”
“Unless the Soviets cleaned them up.”
“No, I don’t think so. Whatever project they were working on down here simply got the axe. Money went elsewhere. The scientists moved on.”
“And left all their equipment behind?”
“What do you want me to say, Corey? I don’t know. I can’t answer for certain what happened here. But according to Vasily, this camp shuttered sixty years ago. Which means if some lethal pathogen killed everybody, it’s long decayed by now.”
She stopped to examine what looked like an old-fashioned slow cooker made from cast iron.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She lifted the lid. “A centrifuge.”
“To isolate DNA?”
“Maybe to separate cream in dairies.”
“You’re pretty blasé about all this.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said, moving on to some kind of wooden oven. She peered through the window in the square door. “Looks like an incubator.”
I spotted a shelf lined with a dozen jars similar to the two we’d seen on the main floor. I chose one at random and wiped away the skin of grit to see inside.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Olivia made a squeamish sound.
We both stared at the partly formed human fetus floating in the yellow liquid. At least I thought it was a human fetus, because with its oversized head and underdeveloped limbs, it appeared more alien than terrestrial.
I made a face. “Is that even human?”
Olivia nodded. “What else would it be?”
“You can see scars where it’s been operated on.”
“I need a photo.” A moment later she snapped a shot with her phone camera. “Hey, can you get one of me with it? Corey? Corey…?”
Although I didn’t think this trip to the underworld could get any creepier, it just did.
⁂
The morgue resembled a kitchen in a condemned restaurant. The dirty white floor tiles; the autopsy tables that might have been confused for prepping stations; the stainless steel trolleys and chairs and sink; but most of all, the big cold-storage freezer—only this one had twelve doors instead of one and was not intended for produce but cadavers.
“Can you smell that?” I said. It was the same musty locker room smell I’d detected upstairs, only much stronger.
Olivia sniffed. “I thought that was you.”
“Can you be serious?”
“Maybe it’s embalming chemicals?”
“You’re probably right—”
“Or maybe it’s a dead body?”
She started toward the freezer.
“Whoa,” I said. “You’re going to open one of those doors?”
“No, I’m going to open all of them.”
Reluctantly, I followed her toward the freezer, shards of broken glass crunching beneath my boots. Halfway there, I slipped on the wet floor and crashed into one of the stainless steel trolleys. On wheels, it shot across the room with me clutching it like an invalid. It slammed into a wall, sending a scale for weighing organs clattering to the floor.
Swearing, I pushed myself back to my feet.
Olivia said, “Still working on making that entrance?”
“I hope that’s only water I stepped in.”
At the cadaver freezer, Olivia aimed her light at one of the square doors.
“Ready?” she asked me.
“Can’t wait.”
She twisted the door’s handle and pulled.
The gasket seal popped, the door swung open.
Nothing on the stretcher.
“You really want to open all of them?” I asked.
“It won’t take long,” she said.
A short time later we had looked behind all twelve doors, and much to my relief, there wasn’t a single putrefied corpse to be found.
⁂
We came across two more rooms in the macabre basement.
The first room was the union of a maternity ward nursery and a neonatal intensive care unit, as a dozen tiny metal cribs and an equal number of plastic incubators equipped with intravenous catheters, ventilators, and blood pressure monitors crowded the unsettling space.
The second room housed sixteen prison cells, each featuring barred doors and no furnishings, not even toilets.
Against the farthest wall hunkered a bulky machine in a sad state of disrepair. Upon closer inspection, I realized what it was.
Turning back to Olivia, I said, “Now we know where the elevator leads.”
CHAPTER 18
NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959
FOUR DAYS TO LIVE
After Yuri Yudin departed with Grandpa Slava, the nine remaining members of the Dyatlov group continued north up the Lozva River. Rustem, like everyone else, regretted seeing Yudin go. He was a good friend. But there had been no other option. He had slowed them considerably the day before, and he would have continued to do so today. Moreover, his condition could have gotten worse. It could have immobilized him. Then what would they have done? They would have been forced to turn back, that’s what. Maybe carry him too, just as they had carried Lyuda out of the Eastern Sayan Mountains after she’d been accidentally shot in the leg. The expedition would have been finished. They wouldn’t have received their Grade III hiking certification. They’d have to try again for it next year. And Rustem didn’t know if that would be possible for him. It had been tough enough to get time away from his job to embark on this trip. His supervisors wouldn’t allow him such leave two years in a row.
The truth was, they were growing up, going their separate ways. Soon Zina and Igor and Yudin and everyone else would graduate from UPI too. They would get jobs. They would marry. They would see less and less of each other over the years.
How sad it was to get old.
But we have now, Rustem thought, vowing to enjoy each day with his comrades to the fullest.
Ahead, Igor stopped to confer with Zolotaryov for a few minutes. They were discussing the thickness of the ice, whether it was safe to continue on the river. Apparently they didn’t think so, because Igor started off again in a diagonal line toward the bank. How he knew the ice’s thickness without drilling a hole through it, Rustem had no idea. Yet he had learned to trust Igor’s decision-making skills.
What he didn’t trust—or, rather, who—was Semyon Zolotaryov. The soldier wasn’t one of them. He never went to school with them. How could he have? He was in his goddamn thirties. He should be settled down with a wife and children somewhere, not out hiking in the Ural Mountains with a group of students half his age. Moreover, he had a mouthful of gold teeth! Rustem had never seen anything like it. And all those tattoos—the guy was a regular degenerate, maybe even a lunatic, and Rustem would be glad when they parted ways in Sverdlovsk.
For the next while the hikers skied along solid ground, keeping the river in sight to the left of them. This proved much more difficult than skiing atop the ice. Not only were there trees to naviga
te and branches to duck, their skis sank several inches into the virgin powder.
When Igor tired of forging the path, Zolotaryov took over from him. When Zolotaryov tired, Kolya took over. And so it went all morning, each member rotating through the ranks every ten minutes or so, only resting to scrape frozen sludge from their skis. It was grueling work, and they rejoiced when they discovered the tracks of a Mansi hunter and his reindeer they could follow.
Roughly two kilometers further on they came to a strange carving in the craggy trunk of a tree. Georgy snapped a photograph of it.
“So this is Mansi artwork?” Zina asked.
“It’s a depiction of their hunts,” Zolotaryov told her. “These marks,” he added, touching several slashes in the bark, “represent the number of hunters that had been in the group, while these ones here”—he touched a different assemblage of slashes—“represent the number of dogs in the group.”
Rustem chuffed. “Those slashes could mean anything, Sasha.”
“They could,” Zolotaryov said. “But.”
“But what?” Rustem challenged.
“They don’t.”
Georgy and Kolya laughed aloud.
“He’s got you there, Rustik,” Georgy said.
“He’s full of it,” Rustem said.
“Why would I make such a thing up?” Zolotaryov asked.
“I don’t know. Why would you?”
“I didn’t.”
“So you say.”
“Guys,” Zina said, shaking her head amusedly. “What are you arguing about? This is stupid.”
Rustem was about to reply when Zolotaryov stiffened. For a crazy moment Rustem thought the lunatic was going to attack him, like he had attacked the drunk on the train, but then he realized the soldier was looking past him.
Rustem turned and saw the Mansi hunter immediately. He stood about thirty meters away, between two trees, dressed in a heavy fur-lined parka and hood, and what might have been moosehide boots. He held a rifle across his chest.
The rest of the hikers saw him too.
“Hello!” Igor called out, waving his arm over his head.