by Jeremy Bates
Back inside, I set the billycan over the fire and said, “Who wants to come with me to look for some footprints?”
“Unfortunately that would be a fruitless endeavor, Mr. Smith,” Vasily said. He still sat on his bed, appearing chilled and fatigued in the stark morning light, all of his seventy-three years. “It only recently stopped snowing. Any evidence of the creature we heard will have been erased.”
“I think we should at least have a look before we start toward Kholat Syakhl.”
“Kholat Syakhl?” Olivia said, zeroing in on me. “You still want to continue to the mountain?”
I frowned. “Don’t you?”
“After what we heard last night? Two nights in a row?” She shook her head. “I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Are you nuts?” I said. “We’re not turning back.”
“Something’s out there, Corey. It’s following us.”
“What’s out there, Olivia?” I challenged.
“Whatever’s banging on the trees!”
“Which we have no idea what it might be.”
“Exactly!”
“It hasn’t attacked us.”
“Not yet.”
I looked at the others. “Who else wants to turn back?”
“This…creature…is not something I anticipated,” Vasily said. “If that noise we heard had only occurred once, I would be comfortable ignoring it and continuing to Kholat Syakhl. But for it to happen twice, on consecutive nights? This implies, as Miss Joosten mentioned, that whatever is making it is following us. And without knowing what it is, or even what it’s motive is, the prudent course of action would be to turn back.”
I set my jaw. “Disco?” I said.
“I’m with you, neg,” he said. “Whatever you want.”
“Fyodor?” I said.
The guide shrugged. “Vasily is boss. We go back.”
I frowned, because could Disco and I continue without his knowledge and expertise?
Without his rifle?
Suddenly the forest—and whatever it sheltered within its decrepit depths—seemed a lot more threatening than it had only moments before.
“What’s the big deal, Corey?” Olivia asked me. “Why do you want to keep going so badly? What do you expect to see up on the mountain? Boot Rock’s just a rock.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Understand what?”
“I didn’t come halfway around the world to chicken out of this. I came here for a reason, and accomplishing that means a lot to me, more than I can explain. So I’m not turning back because of some fucking noise in the woods. If you guys don’t want to finish this, fine, you turn tail. Disco and I will continue on our own.”
I wanted to say more. My blood was pumping, I was angry, and I wanted to rant, to tell them about Denise, her tragic death, how I was doing this for her, for her memory, for closure.
But none of that was any of their damn business.
It was nobody’s business but my own.
Vasily turned to Olivia and Fyodor, and they held a congress among themselves in Russian. I paced. Disco picked at his grits. Finally the huddle adjourned and Vasily said to me, “Very well, Mr. Smith, we will continue with you to Kholat Syakhl. We will reach the foothills of the mountain this afternoon, camp there for the night, then begin the ascent tomorrow morning—and return to Ivdel by nightfall. But we will not linger out here one day longer. Is this arrangement acceptable to you?”
It was.
⁂
After filling ourselves with pan-fried steak and ribs, we made our way back to the Lozva River, where we traveled north along its eastern bank toward the Mountain of the Dead.
The rough terrain made progress as slow as it had been the day before, and I was tempted to veer onto the river, where I could open up the throttle. But the risk of crashing through the ice remained ever-present, outweighing the inconvenience of navigating the rocks and trees and dips and hills.
At a little past noon we stopped for a cold lunch of tuna salad and crackers. Although the temperature must have been negative twenty, the snow held off, and the Siberian wind limited itself to the occasional gust. Patches of blue even appeared in the somber sky.
The rest of the afternoon passed in much the way the morning had, only I gradually became fatigued. My thighs burned from all the necessary standing to navigate the snowmobile around obstacles, and my shoulders and neck ached from hunching over the handlebars.
I wanted to call a break, but I knew I would be the only one struggling. Fyodor would be conditioned to driving his dogsled for hours on end. Vasily and Disco were nestled comfortably together in the sled’s toboggan bed. And Olivia was likely doing just fine behind me, as all she had to do was sit tight and hold on.
More than an hour later the dark mass of the forest finally beat a retreat around us, the birch and pine shrinking to dwarfish sizes and dwindling in numbers. In the increasingly open space, I allowed myself to sit back down with a satisfied groan.
It wasn’t long after this that Fyodor reined his sled to a stop next to a stand of firs twenty feet back from the river. Pushing his fur-lined hood from his face, he said something in Russian to Vasily, who translated for us. “This is where the Dyatlov group made camp before starting their ascent up the pass.” He pointed north. “We will do the same.”
Through the screen of windblown trees I could see nothing but a seemingly endless alabaster field. I checked my wristwatch. It was three in the afternoon.
By the time we had our tents erected and a fire blazing, the daylight was already fading to an eldritch dusk of muted halftones and harrying shadows.
Fyodor had brought one of the deer’s haunches with him, packed in snow, and after cutting some strips of meat off it for his dogs, he barbecued the rest over the hungry flames, like you might a leg of lamb. To accompany this, Disco whipped up some of his famous and very spicy grits, making for a pretty decent meal.
While we were eating, I said, “We should probably keep watch tonight.”
“That’s a good idea,” Vasily said.
“Two-hour shifts?”
He nodded. “That should bring us to dawn.”
We decided Vasily would take first watch, then me, then Disco, then Olivia, and finally Fyodor. Once this was settled, Olivia scrounged through her rucksack for a deck of playing cards—“A camper’s staple,” she told us—and we spent the next while playing Crazy Eights (which Vasily and Fyodor knew as 101), Asshole, Bourré, and a Russian favorite, Durak.
At six thirty Olivia bid us goodnight. Disco and I passed the time chatting about LA stuff, while Vasily and Fyodor exchanged a few thoughts in Russian, though for the most part remained silent.
On a couple of occasions I caught Vasily looking at me. Each time our eyes met, he would look away, usually back toward the fire. At first I didn’t think much of this. After all, there wasn’t much to hold your attention out here in the night. But the more I thought about the looks, the more they bothered me, and I began to relate them to my long-simmering suspicion that he knew something he wasn’t sharing.
Disco went to bed half an hour after Olivia, grumbling about having to wake up in a few hours’ time for his watch. I had a pretty good whiskey buzz going and decided to stick around the fire for another cigarette or two.
I closed my eyes, enjoying the heat from the flames on my face. When I opened them again, however, Fyodor was gone. Vasily was in the same spot he’d been in before, his rifle next to him. He looked up from the criminal case file he had open on his lap.
“What time is it?” I asked groggily.
“Halfway through my watch,” he replied.
I shifted to get more comfortable and lit a cigarette. No point going to bed now, as I would be taking over from him in an hour. “Haven’t you read through that thing enough times?” I asked him.
“Not in light of Sector 41, and the subterranean laboratory,” he said.
“I’ve been thinking about that,
” I said. “Especially in context of what happened to the Dyatlov group sixty years ago.”
“And?”
“To be clear, I still believe it’s much more feasible that the Soviets were experimenting on human prisoners. But I’m willing to keep an open mind, and if they were in fact experimenting on, or breeding, an unknown animal, and it somehow escaped…”
“Did it attack the Dyatlov group?”
I nodded. “The timeframe fits, and the location…”
Vasily slipped a page free from the thick dossier and held it up in the firelight. “This is the testimony of a forester the Dyatlov group visited during their stay in Vizhay.”
“The Russified German?” I asked.
“His name was Ivan Rempel, yes,” Vasily said. “He says they wanted information from him about the surrounding wilderness, and he initially warned them to turn back. In his words, ‘Everybody knows there is something mysterious up in those mountains.’ Yuri Yudin concluded this ‘something mysterious’ was the Soviet military camp where they were testing secret weapons. I’ve never had a theory of what it might have been myself—until now.”
“You think he was warning them of your unknown creature?”
“Please don’t patronize me, Mr. Smith.”
“The creature,” I amended.
“Ivan Rempel has been dead for a number of years now, so we will never know for certain. But why did Igor choose to set up the tent on the open face of a mountainside? No hiker worth his salt would do this in a blizzard.”
“He wanted to get away from something?” I said.
“That’s what it seems like. He didn’t want to camp in the woods. And remember, the cuts in the canvas were made from the inside. The largest was so the hikers could flee the tent. But there were smaller cuts too. They all faced south, toward the forest.”
“The hikers were watching it.”
“They were scared of something in it—and what could frighten nine healthy people to such an extent they flee their tent into a blizzard?”
“So how do you think things played out?” I asked.
Vasily said, “February 1, 1959, was a moonless night. Meteorological records tell us this much. Whoever was on watch would not have spotted the creature approaching until it was very close. Perhaps not until it was at the entrance to the tent.”
I glanced up at the black sky, comforted to see the nearly full moon glowing white behind a raft of clouds.
“This explains why they would cut through the side of the tent,” Vasily continued. “They then fled down the mountain slope.”
“Their footprints descended in an orderly fashion…”
“Which means the creature didn’t immediately follow them. It was more interested in the tent. Perhaps the food inside.”
“The missing chocolate…”
Vasily nodded.
“What about the missing alcohol? I doubt the creature had a taste for that.”
“I will get to that in a moment, Mr. Smith. But first let’s lay out the events of that night chronologically, shall we?”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I assume the hikers’ intention was to reach the labaz in the Lozva River valley, and their store of food and clothes. But it was pitch-black and they only had one flashlight with them.”
“They got lost?”
“And ended up in the adjacent valley. When they realized their mistake, they were already freezing, so they made a fire by the cedar. Unfortunately it was too late for Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, who both froze to death. But—and this is a very important but, Mr. Smith—why didn’t the others remain at the fire, where they had ample firewood?”
“The creature returned?”
“And the hikers scattered in panic. Igor, Zina, and Rustem fled back to the tent, a suicide mission in the blizzard. The others fled into the forest and hid in the ravine, but the creature found them there.”
“Or maybe in their haste they ran straight into the ravine? You said so yourself—it was a moonless night, pitch-black.”
“A fall into the ravine could break their ribs, yes, but when have you ever fallen from any height and not used your arms to soften the fall. If the hikers fell three meters, you would think they would also fracture their wrists or arms or collarbones. But Zolotaryov’s and Lyuda’s injuries were localized to their ribs. Did they belly flop off the precipice? And even that would likely not cause the damage they suffered, as their injuries had been symmetrical, despite their different sizes.”
I took a final pull on my cigarette, flicked the butt into the fire.
“The hikers religiously wrote in the group journal every day,” Vasily went on. “The last entry was on January 31. They did not write anything on February 1. This, along with the slits in the tent to keep watch on the forest, indicate that what scared them from the tent wasn’t something that surprised them out of the blue. They had been cognizant of it for some time—long enough, at any rate, for them to forsake the chore of writing in the journal on the final day of their lives.”
“Unless what happened to them occurred before they got a chance to write in it.”
“Not true. Based on the undigested food in their stomachs, they had died some eight hours after they ate dinner. Some had lasted as long as two hours outside the tent. This means they didn’t flee the tent until at least six hours after they ate, which would be well after midnight. They had plenty of time to write in the journal. Also, they ate a cold meal for dinner. They did not assemble the stove as they had every day before. This is another very odd departure from their routine. They carried the stove all the way up Kholat Syakhl. It was negative-twenty degrees out. There was no reason not to light it to make a decent meal and to keep warm—”
“Unless they didn’t want to advertise their location,” I said.
Vasily produced one of those bundles of photographs Disco and I had looked through back at Viktor’s cabin. He plucked free a single photo with surprisingly dexterous fingers and passed it to me. “What do you make of this?”
The photograph showed a dark figure with little or no neck, unusually long arms, and a hunched posture stepping out from behind a tree in the dense coniferous forest, as if to get a better look at whoever took the shot.
“This is legit?” I said.
“One hundred percent. It came from the film on Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles’ camera. The negative was attached to all the others negatives. I used to believe it was an out-of-focused shot of one of the hikers. But now…you have to admit it doesn’t look very human at all, does it?”
I continued to study the photograph in awe.
Was this Raya Anyamov’s forest giant? Vasily’s unknown creature?
Was this what crushed Zolotaryov’s ribs and tore out Lyuda’s tongue?
“All right,” I said, holding my growing excitement at bay. “Let’s say the Dyatlov group remained away from the tent because they feared this thing was still there, and let’s say it later slaughtered the remaining few hikers with its superhuman strength, the problem is the same with Yuri Yudin’s theory: footprints. Where were its footprints?”
“There is only one explanation,” Vasily said. “The Soviet military erased them.”
I frowned. “You told me you never believed—”
“I never believed Yudin’s theory that the Soviets killed the hikers, Mr. Smith. But it is very possible they found their bodies.”
“You want to step me through this?”
“Sometime in early February a Soviet Air Force pilot flying over the Northern Urals spots either the Dyatlov tent on Kholat Syakhl or the hikers’ bodies in the Lozva River valley. The military investigates. They discover large, unexplained footprints, and perhaps some other evidence of the creature. On orders from Moscow, they scrub the scene, erasing the creature’s footprints—one set would not be a difficult task—taking Zolotaryov’s film, altering the group’s journal and individual diaries, and most likely taking the bottle of alcohol to consume at their p
leasure. However,” he said, holding up his finger, “they overlook the photograph on Thibeaux-Brignolles’ camera, or they don’t think it definitive enough to bother removing. Then they simply leave, knowing no investigation would get to the bottom of what happened, especially if they keep strict tabs on it by inserting one of their men, Colonel Georgy Ortyukov, as head of the search party, which, incidentally—”
“Would explain the existence of a second criminal case file,” I finished.
⁂
I opened my eyes. It was late, quiet, dark.
Olivia slept next to me, her breathing deep, regular, bordering on a childlike snore. The door to the tent remained zippered shut. The portable heater glowed orange.
Everything seemed as it should be.
I checked my wristwatch. 3:45 a.m.—
Clack…clack…clack…clack…
I sat ramrod straight.
It was back.
It was here.
My heart surging, my hands trembling, I shook Olivia’s shoulder.
“What?” she mumbled, rolling over.
“It’s back—”
Clack! Clack! CLACK!
Olivia’s eyes bugged. She gripped my arm tightly, her nails digging into my flesh.
I grabbed my phone—I’d kept it within easy reach beneath my inflatable pillow—and tapped the screen until the video camera was recording. Then I yanked open the tent’s entrance, the zipper’s metallic teeth screeching, and scrambled outside.
Stumbling into the snow nearly naked (my morbid mind making a connection to the Dyatlov group’s state of undress on their final night), I scanned the campsite. Fyodor was rising from his spot by the fire, his rifle clasped across his chest, while Vasily was clambering out of his tent, his flashlight poking the darkness.
I realized that in my haste I’d forgotten mine.
“Where is it?” I hissed, now looking past the tents into the amorphous nest of tree trunks and limbs encircling us.
Olivia popped up beside me. “Where is it?” she repeated.
Disco stuck his head out of his tent. “Is it here? Is it here?”