by Jeremy Bates
I followed closely, unable to see anything now but my feet. This was quietly terrifying, and so as not to dwell on our situation, which was getting ever more perilous by the minute, I tried thinking of LA, of swaying royal palm trees and the smell of the ocean in the morning, of warm summer zephyrs and sunbaked asphalt and—
A swift and powerful gust of wind knocked me to my butt. Before I could react it swept me across the snowpack like tumbleweed caught in a dust tornado. I cried out in surprise and fear and flailed my arms, trying to ground myself. I managed to plant my feet in the snow, but the next moment I blew over in a backward somersault. I tumbled another twenty or so feet before I grabbed hold of a rock jutting up from the ground.
I didn’t think I possessed the strength to stand, and so I lay there, facedown, the gale-force wind battering my body, trying to tear me free of the rock. When the worst of this seemed to pass, I raised my head—and realized I had no idea which way I faced, which way the others were.
Did they even know I had been blown away?
Fighting the panic ballooning in my gut, I told myself it didn’t matter. If I followed the slope downhill, I would eventually reach the timberline. I had matches in my pocket. I would make a fire, I would warm up, and I would find them in the morning. I just had to get moving before I froze to—
Voices, faint, as though coming through layers of thick glass.
I strained to listen.
Olivia and Disco. They were calling my name.
I couldn’t see them through the veil of white, but they were definitely calling my name.
And coming closer?
I couldn’t tell for certain. The blizzard dampened sound, flattened it, obscuring the distance of the source, and also from which direction it originated.
“Here!” I shouted.
“A…berrrt!” Disembodied, faint, ghostly.
“Here!”
“A…berrrt!”
“Here!” I repeated, struggling to my knees.
Then, through the whiteness, Vasily appeared, then Disco and Olivia.
Vasily extended his hand. I took it, and he tugged me to my feet.
Olivia burst past him to hug me. “Corey! Are you okay?”
Nodding, I asked Vasily over her head, “How far’s the valley?” The wind was so blusterous I could barely hear my own voice.
“Two…kil…ters…” he shouted back, and I think he said “two kilometers.”
“How long to get there?”
“Hour…hour, half!”
An hour and a half? “We won’t make it!”
“Have…try!”
The balloon in my gut had risen to my chest, making it hard to breathe. This was the kind of conversation you had before you died.
Vasily took a compass reading, said something I couldn’t make out, and started down the slope. Olivia and Disco followed. Yet I couldn’t move; I couldn’t get my legs to work.
Disco came back. “Gotta go!” he said, his face inches from mine, his eyes wild behind the cylindrical orange lens of his goggles. “Go!”
I blinked at him.
“Whitey!” He gripped fistfuls of my jacket and shook me, hard. “You with me? Gotta move!”
I snapped out of it.
We got moving.
⁂
We plodded on, for how long, I didn’t know, in what direction, I didn’t know. Time had retreated to a glacial crawl. I simply concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other and not falling over. And then at some point we came to a large boulder rising out of nowhere, a dark and spectral promontory juxtaposed to the awful white that surrounded it. Vasily knelt at its nadir point, digging like a dog searching for a bone, shoveling snow to his sides as fast as he could.
What was he looking for? We had to keep going, keep walking—
A crevice, I thought. He was searching for a crevice in which we could take shelter.
I pushed past Disco and Olivia, both of whom seemed as dazed and confused as I had been. I dropped to my knees next to Vasily and dug as well. The snow weighed little, like cotton candy. I quickly reached solid rock and moved to my right, clearing more snow and discovering more solid rock.
Then, a couple of yards adjacent to where I’d started, a crack in the rock appeared.
I shoveled aside more snow, widening and deepening the crack. The snow wedged into it was dense and heavy. I was amazed to find myself sweating, and distantly, in the back-of-the-mind way, I told myself this wasn’t good, the sweat would leach the heat from my body, and that would be a certain death sentence in this blizzard.
My fingertips scraped rock. The lee in the boulder was no more than two feet across and half that deep.
Too small for any of us to fit in.
I slumped forward in exhaustion—and then hands gripped my shoulders, shaking me. Disco bent close, telling me we had to go. Alarm bells filled me as I realized I had fallen asleep.
I got to my feet and followed the others. I was a zombie, on autopilot. I wasn’t cold anymore—I was too cold to feel cold—just tired. Even on my feet I was getting sleepy.
A will, I thought, almost comically. I don’t have a will.
I’d never considered drafting one before. Did other thirty-seven year olds have wills? It felt too young. Maybe one hundred fifty years ago I would have made one by now—but then again, I would have also already picked out my tombstone, preferably one with a cherub angel on top, and had my portrait replicated in miniature so my mourners could wear them around their necks—
A sharp pain to my cheek. Vasily had slapped me. He looked funny looming above me, all bundled up in fur. He slapped my cheek again, shouted something.
Then he walked away.
Leaving us?
Yes, that’s what was happening.
He was leaving us to die.
I was somehow on my feet and following in his footprints. I kept moving, wondering where I was going, why I was bothering, moving on willpower.
Olivia appeared in the snow before me. She was on her back, a wistful, almost peaceful, expression on her face.
I continued past her. The drifts rose to my thighs in places. I was more wading than walking, the snow dragging at my legs like molasses. Twice I lost my footing and stumbled, pitching forward into a cocoon so white and warm I wanted to remain there, but somehow I got up each time and pressed on.
Abruptly the wind shifted directions, and through the frenzied snow I saw Denise. She stood a little distance in front of me, beckoning me forward, smiling beatifically. She wore the same summer dress she’d had on that day of reconciliation in Grand Park, and her black hair rustled as if in a gentle breeze. She was speaking to me, telling me it was okay, I could go to sleep, we’d be together… But then it wasn’t Denise anymore. It was Zina, and she was naked despite the weather. Dried blood marred her face, alongside ugly blisters and weeping wounds. Her eyes appeared swollen shut, her mouth parted in a forlorn sigh. Icicles depended from the underside of her nose and chin and breasts. Her nipples stood erect, and snow dusted the dark hair of her pubis. Her arms were bent at the elbows, her frostbitten hands clenched into invalid fists.
She began speaking to me too, words in Russian passing between her unmoving lips. Although I couldn’t understand their meaning, they sounded full of agony and sadness.
Dread flooded my heart, because in some way I recognized I was looking at my future self.
A moan escaped me, unrecognizable and pitiful, and I blundered past Zina—through her, I think—stumbling forward, desperate, pathetic, until I could go no further.
I slowed, then stopped completely. Staring forward into white oblivion, fighting with the last of my strength to remain on my feet, I saw something large moving toward me.
Vasily? Or another figment of my imagination?
I sank to my knees, then to my side, and this time I couldn’t bother getting back up.
PART 2
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than
are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—Hamlet
CHAPTER 24
When I opened my eyes, I thought I must be dead. Everything was dark, and I felt strangely light, as though I were floating. But then reality snapped back into focus. I was on my back on unyielding ground, my rucksack propped beneath my head, so I lay with my upper body partly raised, like when you’re sick in bed.
A light shone off to my right side, a flashlight standing on end, buttressed by a few rocks, the beam casting a spherical, expanding cone of yellow toward the ceiling of what appeared to be a cave.
In the backsplash, I could see Disco and Olivia on their backs adjacent to one another. Their eyes were closed, but their lips were parted, their chests rising and lowering with each breath they took. Vasily sat beyond them, cross-legged, staring fixedly at the ground before him.
Everything returned in a roar of images and emotions, the freezing cold and the utter exhaustion, and the spine-chilling certainty that I had taken my last step and was going to die.
I pushed myself onto my elbows. My hands and feet itched with a burning sensation: frostbite.
Seeing I was awake, Vasily snapped to his feet and came toward me—stealthily, it seemed. In one hand he carried his rifle by the barrel, in the other, his mobile phone.
“What happened?” I asked, my voice brittle.
“Shush,” he said quietly, almost a hiss.
“Are they okay?” I asked, meaning Disco and Olivia.
He knelt next to me. “They’re breathing.” His hair was crusted with snow, his breath misting before him.
“But are they okay?”
“I’m not a doctor, Mr. Smith, but I imagine so.”
“What happened?”
“Keep your damn voice down.”
“Why?” I demanded, though I nevertheless did as he’d instructed. “Is your phone recording? Where are we? What are you recording?”
“You’re going to need to stay calm.”
“I am calm,” I lied.
“Don’t panic when you see it.”
The hair on the nape of my neck tingled. When you see it.
“See what?” I asked.
“It’s not dangerous.”
Heart drumming, I looked quickly around the cave. It was a large cavernous space, riddled with nooks and impenetrable shadows, and I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
“Two o’clock,” Vasily told me.
I focused. And something dark took shape, slightly less dark than the wall behind it. Something standing on two feet, though much too large to be a person.
“What…?” I said, my throat the size of a straw. I had never taken my eyes off the monstrous silhouette, and the longer I studied it, the more defined its outline became, and then my mind was racing, and I was thinking with a kind of terrified euphoria, My Lord, that’s it, that’s IT, standing right there, just standing right fucking there.
Watching us.
“What…?” I wanted to ask what it was doing, but I couldn’t seem to get more than that single word out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe this was real. I had to actually spell out the thought in my mind:
THIS IS REAL.
I pulled my eyes away from the impossible creature, believing I shouldn’t stare.
Believing I shouldn’t stare, I thought. Don’t want to break any cross-species faux pas now. Don’t want to be impolite.
Vasily’s face was tight, emotionless, yet his eyes shone with excitement, making him appear ten years younger. He was saying something to me, but his voice was too calm, too puzzlingly normal to fit the abnormal situation, and it all went in one ear and out the other.
“What…?” I said.
“Back on the mountain slope,” he said, “I was lost—are you following me now, Mr. Smith?”
I nodded.
“I was trying to get a compass reading,” he went on, “and there it was, Mr. Brady flopped over its shoulder, Miss Joosten tucked beneath one arm, you beneath the other, as though you two were rolled carpets, as though you weighed nothing. It saw me and made a noise.” For a moment Vasily seemed as if he might try to replicate what he’d heard, then he reconsidered. “It turned away, went a few steps, and looked back, made that noise again. It wanted me to follow it. We must have continued through the blizzard for, I don’t know, at least half an hour. It went slow, for my benefit, but the way it moved…it could have walked through that snow all day. Then we came to this cave. It set the three of you down. While I checked on you, it went away, deeper into the cave, then returned later on. It’s been standing there ever since.”
I was flabbergasted and fascinated and frankly couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And if the creature hadn’t been standing right over there, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
But it was standing over there.
Raya Anyamov’s forest giant.
My gaze shifted to the creature again. It appeared to be looking back at me, though I couldn’t be certain. It still hadn’t moved. In fact, it seemed preternaturally adept at remaining motionless, and for a moment I wondered if it could be nothing but a statue, carved from the rock.
“Have you tried talking to it?” I asked, my voice cracking halfway through the question.
Vasily snorted. “I doubt it speaks English, Mr. Smith.”
“I mean, communicating?”
He shook his head.
“Maybe you should offer it some food?” I suggested.
“Me? I’m afraid not. I’m not going near it.”
“You said it’s not dangerous—”
“I don’t think it is. It saved us. But who knows.”
I made an outrageous, impromptu decision, only knowing that I had to do something, take the initiative while I could. In a slow fog I retrieved my rucksack from behind me, opened the main pocket, and searched through it until I found the Ziploc bag of dark chocolate I’d packed. I took off my overmitts and gloves and removed the chocolate from the baggie. Chocolate had been missing from the Dyatlov group’s tent, so perhaps these things had a sweet tooth.
Vasily watched me silently.
“We can’t just sit here,” I said.
“Don’t make any quick movements.”
“Don’t get trigger happy.”
I pushed myself to my feet, my legs all at once uncooperative. Before I could reconsider what I was about to do, I approached the creature. It didn’t react. But of course why should it fear me? It could squash me like a bug if it wanted to.
One step, two, three, four. The swish-swish of my snow pants seemed obtrusively loud and inappropriate for the occasion, given I had nominated myself as some sort of emissary of the human race.
The closer I got to the creature, the larger it seemed to become. It must have been close to ten feet tall. Ten feet tall. I had never felt so small and ineffectual in my life.
Its head, I could make out when I’d halved the distance between it and I, was large and squarish, and it seemed to sit directly atop its mammoth shoulders, which sloped into a powerfully muscled chest. It stood upright, and its arms were unusually long, too long, the wrists reaching almost to its knees.
It seemed to be covered with two distinct types of hair. One was dark brown and formed a tight, close fur against its body. The second was much longer, loose and soft, and had a white tinge.
Several more steps and I could detect a pungent, sour odor that was unappealing yet not overpowering. Then the shadows peeled back from the creature’s face, and I was filled with a vague, uneasy revulsion. The face appeared to be hairless, like that of a gorilla’s, though flesh-colored rather than gray, with an accretion of bone built up along the brow. The ears were the same fleshy color and close to the skull, almost pinned against it. The nose was flat and wide with over-sized nostrils. The thick-lipped mouth was its most humanlike feature, though it too was inappropriately wide and set in an absolutely massive jaw.
My anxiety and disgust at the man-beast hybrid curdled into a kind of loath
ing. It was a blasphemy, a mistake, a savage evolutionary experiment that should never have survived past the Stone Age.
And then I saw its eyes.
They were set deep in the recessed sockets, and there was nothing primitive or feral about them. They were startlingly human, probing, the color of pennies, and I was suddenly convinced that it was judging me as I was it.
Despite my carefully checked terror, scientific possibilities crowded into my mind to explain the impossibility before me.
The lack of abundant trees in the mountains would make tree climbing and dwelling redundant, producing an erect ape. Arctic adaptations could explain the white fur and gigantism. And its ability to remain so still was most likely a survival technique, perfected through generations of mutations, given it’s much more difficult to spot something remaining perfectly still than when it’s moving.
So what was the damnable thing? An ape made antisocial by self-imposed isolation? Or an ancient subspecies of man, neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens, one that had yet to be categorized? Or a completely new kind of animal altogether? An anachronism of prehistoric day?
Heart trip-hammering in my chest, bowels squirming, I forced myself to close the remaining distance. I raised the chocolate, a slow, underwater gesture.
“It’s okay,” I said absurdly. I couldn’t think of anything else. My mind had gone blank.
The huge creature simply stared at me. Not as a lion or elephant or other large mammal might. More like a concerned or puzzled person, like it knew me and was trying to place my face. I could hear a coarse, susurrate sound that I belatedly realized was its breathing. Then it moved for the first time, lifting a hand—hairless, like its face, and mammoth in comparison to mine—and plucked the chocolate from my sweat-slicked palm with a finger and thumb as thick as sausages, the whorls on the tips of the digits just like a human’s.
It sniffed the offering, its nostrils flaring once, and then with a confident loping stride, its long arms swinging at its sides, it vanished into the deeper depths of the cave.
⁂