by Jeremy Bates
The Mansi hunter only stared.
“What’s he doing?” Zina whispered.
Georgy frowned. “We better not be on their burial ground or something like that.”
“Let’s just go,” Lyuda said, planting her ski poles in the ground and pushing off.
A gunshot thundered. Rustem instinctively ducked, raising his hands protectively over his head. “He’s shooting at us!”
“No, it was into the air,” Igor said, half-squatting.
“A warning shot,” Zolotaryov concurred. He was the only member in the group still standing tall, unfazed.
He really is a lunatic, Rustem thought.
Lyuda stood up again, slowly. “What’s he warning us about?”
“I don’t like this,” Zina said.
“We’re students from Sverdlovsk!” Igor said in a loud voice. “We don’t want any trouble.”
The Mansi hunter shouted something back at them.
“Doesn’t he speak Russian?” Georgy asked.
“Anybody speak Mansi?” Igor asked.
The man continued shouting at them in his language, while jabbing the air with mysterious, forceful gestures.
“He’s trying to tell us something,” Zolotaryov said.
“But what?” Zina asked.
“We really should go,” Lyuda said.
“He’ll shoot us,” Rustem said.
“Lyuda’s right,” Igor said. “We need to go. Stay calm.”
He started in the direction they had been going parallel to the river. Zolotaryov followed, then Zina. Rustem waited in tense suspense for another gunshot. Only when none came did he fall into line behind the others.
“Crazy son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself, and when he glanced over his shoulder to see if they were being followed, he was surprised to find the hunter gone.
⁂
At three o’clock that afternoon they began the arduous task of setting up camp. First they flattened the snow where they were to pitch the tent, a footprint of approximately two-by-three meters. While some of the group strung the grommet rope between two trees, others lined the skis across the ground sheet to create a solid floor, while others still assembled the stove, a laborious two-hour process. Yet the effort was always worth it because once the stove was burning brightly (the smoke safely exhausted through a ventilation pipe) the tent became so cozy everyone could take off their boots and outer clothing to lounge about in comfort.
Later, after a dinner of hot soup, everybody settled into their own activities. Kolevatov, chronicling the day’s events in the official group journal, asked, “Should I mention the Mansi hunter?”
Rustem, who was teaching Zina to play some chords on Georgy’s mandolin, said, “I can’t see how it would hurt.”
“Better not,” Igor said, looking up from the map he was studying.
“But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Rustem said.
“He fired his gun, Rustik. That’s pretty serious. The hiking commission might think we provoked him somehow. Why risk mentioning it?”
“We mentioned the drunk on the train accusing us of stealing his alcohol,” Georgy said. “That’s pretty bad too. They might think we did steal it.”
Igor shrugged. “That was a mistake. But Zina already wrote it down. We can’t rip out pages of the journal. It would look suspicious.”
“At least,” Zina said defensively, “I didn’t mention Zolotaryov beating up the drunk.”
“Which I appreciate,” Zolotaryov said. He lay on his bedroll, eyes closed, hands folded beneath his head.
“So we didn’t write that down,” Kolevatov said. “And we didn’t write down that we got drunk with the woodcutters. And now we’re not going to write about the Mansi hunter? We’re supposed to be documenting this expedition, guys, not fabricating it.”
“What are you talking about, Alex?” Igor said sharply. “We’re not fabricating anything. We’re simply omitting certain events.” He shrugged. “After all, we can’t document every single thing that happens to us every single minute, can we?”
Mansi carvings on a tree trunk
Zolotaryov, Doroshenko, and Igor resting on the Lozva River
CHAPTER 19
Climbing out of the snug hole, I flopped onto my back on the wood floor, happy as hell to be finished with that Dantean endeavour.
“You even whiter than usual, neg,” Disco said, looming above me.
“Your turn to go down there,” I told him.
“What did you find?” Vasily asked.
Olivia and I spoke in turns describing in detail the electrical room, the laboratory, the fetus in the jar, the morgue, the nursery, and the prison with the defunct elevator.
“May, it really is Leatherhead’s basement,” Disco said.
“More like his high school biology classroom,” I said.
“So what were the Soviets up to?”
“Fucking around in the name of science.’
“Making viruses?”
I shook my head. “You don’t put a deadly bug in a prison, or a morgue.”
“And while the oven incubator would be necessary to grow cell culture,” Olivia said, “you wouldn’t need the infant incubators.”
Disco frowned. “You think they were experimenting on babies?”
“Women were gang raped in these camps,” she said, “so there likely would have been a number of illegitimate newborns that the outside world had no record of.”
“Didn’t the Nazis also experiment with artificial insemination and sterilization?” I said. “To cure birth defects and prevent what they considered to be unworthy races from reproducing? If the Soviets were trying something similar here, an abundance of newborns might be a side effect of those experiments…”
“Or fetuses in jars…”
Vasily cleared his throat. “May I offer a novel hypothesis of my own?” he asked. Until then, he had been standing apart from us, listening to our discussion in silence. “What if the Soviets weren’t experimenting on humans?” he continued, looking at each of us in turn.
“They weren’t experimenting on guinea pigs,” I said.
“No, but perhaps a different animal?”
“What kind of animal?”
“Raya Anyamov’s forest giant?”
Surprised silence.
Then I said, “No way.”
Vasily held up a hand. “Hear me out. I’m not referring to a half-troll, half-demon impossibility. I’m simply suggesting an animal unknown to us—something solitary, most likely, and wary of humans—but one whose biology, frightening as it might be, can be explained by science.”
I said, “Such as?”
“I have no idea, Mr. Smith, but there are some nine million species on Earth, and nine in ten of those have yet to be discovered and catalogued.”
“Yeah, and most of those are slugs and bugs, or fungus.”
“It’s fungi, the plural, and no, large animals are still being discovered all the time.”
“So where are you going with this?”
“What if the guards at this prison camp encountered such a creature? What if they captured one? What if they tried to breed more?”
“Why would they want to breed more?”
“For science? For some sort of military application? For posterity? Who knows? I am simply working with what we know. A secret underground laboratory filled with fertility apparatus, an adjoining morgue where scientists could operate on failed specimens, and a prison block to hold the successes that developed into adolescence or adulthood.”
“All of which could be explained by human experimentation.”
“True, but let us not forget the prison yard,” he said. “What malnourished, incarcerated human prisoner requires twenty-foot-tall, iron-plated walls to hold him or her in—”
The report of a gunshot cut him off.
⁂
“Where’s Fyodor?” I asked. I hadn’t realized the guide was no longer in the room.
“He went outsid
e a while ago,” Vasily said.
“He shooting another rabbit?” Disco said.
Olivia was already moving toward the door, the rest of us right behind her.
Outside, the maelstrom of seething snow stopped us in our tracks. Olivia blew backward, smacking into me. I lost my balance and bumped into Disco. My hat whipped off my head, though I caught it before it blew away. Through the white blaze, I heard Fyodor’s dogs barking incessantly.
“Where is he?” I shouted.
“Can’t see him!” Olivia said.
“There!” Disco said, pointing.
I followed his finger and saw a splatter of blood staining the pristine snow. It continued for ten feet before disappearing around the corner of an outbuilding.
We hurried helter-skelter toward the blood, my imagination conjuring up worst-case scenarios that ran the gamut from bloodthirsty wolves to hirsute cryptids that skulked at the edge of civilization.
When we reached the trail of red, we discovered two sets of footprints, one belonging to Fyodor, the other to a hooved animal.
We followed the tracks for about fifty or sixty feet to where the guide squatted next to a large stag with a rusty-brown hide and twined antlers. Blood bubbled out of the side of its neck, alternating between a streaming rivulets and fountaining belches.
Fyodor shouldered his rifle, unsheathed a large hunting knife, and drew the blade across the animal’s throat, ending its suffering.
⁂
While Fyodor field dressed the buck, transforming the once majestic beast into a glistening lump of flesh and bone ready to be butchered and eaten, the rest of us returned to the prisoner barracks, as there was nothing more to learn from the building with the subterranean laboratory. With the firewood Viktor and I had collected from the sawmill, we got a roaring fire going in the brick fireplace.
We didn’t speak much more about the laboratory or speculate further about the experiments that might have taken place within it, but I’m sure it remained on everybody’s mind. I certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about it, though whatever private theories I came up with on my own proved frustratingly more artificial than practical.
At a little before five o’clock the gray light outside the windows faded and then retreated altogether, replaced by impenetrable night. Fyodor returned from the punishing weather with several choice cuts of venison. We cooked these over the fire and ate mostly in silence. I wasn’t very hungry—I kept seeing the buck’s black, questioning eyes staring up at me—and I only managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of meat before turning my full attention to my whiskey.
After the meal, Disco, Fyodor, and Vasily retired to the prisoner bunks, leaving me alone with Olivia by the fire.
Excusing myself, I grabbed a flashlight and went to the front room, where I lit up a cigarette. The long, dark space was uncomfortably quiet. The dusty floors and gritty windows had lent it a creepy, haunted house vibe in the daytime, and now, with the onset of night, that vibe increased tenfold.
I went to a nearby picture of Stalin hanging askew on the wall, half expecting the dead man’s eyes to track my progress. Dressed in a military uniform, his signature mustache impeccably groomed, he gazed up and past me to the right, his expression imperial.
What a dickhead, I thought. A murdering, pompous dickhead. Just like Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Hideki Tojo, Pol Pot, Aldolf Hitler, Sadamn Hussein, Bashar al-Assad.
How did any of these guys justify killing millions of innocent people simply so they could hold on to power for a little longer?
A noise made me start. Turning, I watched Olivia emerge from the sleeping quarters and close the door behind her.
“Hiding from me?” she said, coming over to stand before the picture.
“Didn’t want to smoke in there.” My cigarette, I realized, had burned to the filter. I ground it out beneath my heel and lit another.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“He’s a dickhead.”
“Who?”
“Stalin.”
“I’m talking about Vasily.”
“He’s okay.”
“Do you think you’re funny? What do you think about Vasily’s theory?”
I shrugged. “I think it’s a bit farfetched, to be honest.”
“Why?”
“Unknown beasts skulking the Siberian hinterlands? Diabolical scientists breeding them to do their evil bidding? It sounds like the plot of a bad horror story.”
“Maybe you should switch genres from true crime to horror, then you’d get away writing about it.”
I took a drag, blew the smoke away from her. “How do you know Vasily?”
“Me? I don’t know—through a friend.”
“A circus friend?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” she said. “When I was dating Sergei, he took me to some charity dinner thing. Vasily was there. We sat at the same table. He told me about the Dyatlov case. He tells anybody who will listen.”
“I can believe it. He’s obsessed with their deaths.”
“And you’re not? Anyway, I found the circumstances of the hikers’ deaths fascinating, and I told him halfheartedly if he ever went to visit Mount Ortoten, to invite me and Sergei along. Well, two weeks ago I got an email saying he was going to Kholat Syakhl with an American writer. Would I like to come? At first, hell no. But then I changed my mind.”
I looked at her. “Why?”
“I wanted to meet you.”
I blinked. “What?”
“I looked you up online. A famous New York Times bestselling author? And a sort of cute one? Why not?”
I pulled hard on the cigarette, giving it my full attention in an effort to mask my discomfort. “Knowing how cold it would be in the middle of winter?” I said.
“I’ve been in Russia for three years,” she said. “I’ve gotten used to the cold. Besides, I’m from Canada. My hair’s been freezing after I take showers for as long as I can remember.”
“What do you think of him?” I asked.
“Stalin?”
“Yeah, Stalin,” I said, thinking I should have seen that coming.
“I like Vasily,” she said.
I looked toward the door, back to her. “Do you think…?” I shook my head.
“Do I think what?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I get a vibe. Like—he’s not telling us everything.”
Olivia frowned. “What’s he not telling us?”
“He was pretty quick off the bat with that breeding theory. It seemed, I don’t know, like he didn’t pull it out of the air but had thought about it previously.”
“Impossible,” she said. “He didn’t know about the laboratory.”
“Right, and a minute after we tell him about what we’d discovered, he had it all worked out?”
“He’s a pretty smart guy.”
I shook my head unsure where I was going with this.
“Look, Corey,” Olivia said. “If Vasily knew what killed the Dyatlov group, why wouldn’t he tell us?”
“He wants us to come up with the answer on our own?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you remember the other night when Viktor mentioned he had a wife, and you said you didn’t see her at the cabin? Vasily jumped into the conversation to tell us she often stayed with her family in Ivdel. It was like—like he didn’t want Viktor to say something he wasn’t supposed to.”
“So you think Viktor is in on this conspiracy, whatever it is, too? He’s just a simple guide, Corey.”
I shook my head, dropped the cigarette, and toed it out. “All I know for certain is that Disco is the only person I can really trust right now.”
She cleared her throat. “Excuse me?”
“And you, I guess.”
“You have to trust me to be telling me this.”
“Yeah, I trust you.”
“Do you like me too?”
“You’re a bit forward—”
Olivia pressed her lips agai
nst mine. We kissed for a few seconds before I stepped back.
“What?” she said, her blue eyes probing mine.
“It’s not you,” I said.
“I’m not attractive enough?”
“It’s not that.”
“I’m not famous enough?”
“Olivia, it’s none of that, okay?”
“You’re not married.”
“No.”
“You’re seeing someone?”
“No.”
“Then what it is?”
“We should get some rest.”
⁂
Olivia went to an empty bunk while I settled in front of the fire. I stretched out on the timber floor, folded my hands behind my head, and closed my eyes. I thought about Olivia for a long while, torn between my attraction toward her and my loyalty to Denise’s memory. Gradually, as I descended the slow escalator to my subconscious, these thoughts gave way to thoughts of the mysterious noise we’d heard the night before, Vasily’s breeding theory, and terrifying images of werewolves and chupacabras and other marquee monsters that skulked in the remote corners of civilization.
Then I dreamed.
I was a spectator at a circus. It was a hot, sticky summer evening. The air was redolent with the smell of buttered popcorn and manure and hay. I sat in the bleachers beneath a big tent watching Olivia up on the trapeze, swinging upside-down from her bar, buck naked, though the rest of the raucous audience didn’t seem to notice her lack of modesty. Releasing the bar, she flew through the air, performing a double somersault, tucking and rotating, before the catcher, a muscled male in tights, snagged her hands with his. He hiked her up to his bar so they sat next to each other, both of them smiling and crossing their legs in artificial poses and waving to the hollering crowd. Then, audaciously, the guy began fondling one of Olivia’s bare breasts in front of everybody. In a fit of jealously, I leapt to my feet, wanting to shout something accusatory, when the tent went dark and a spotlight illuminated the ringmaster down on the ground. It was Vasily, wearing a bright red tailcoat with gold trim and a black top hat. He spoke Russian into a microphone as he moved about the dirt-packed ring, his unintelligible rhetoric working the audience into a frenzy. He stopped next to what appeared to be a tall cage draped in a black silk sheet. With a flourish, he yanked the sheet free, revealing an enormous sideshow freak, part alligator, part tattooed man, part tiger, with a fourteen-inch horn protruding from the back of its head.