Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

My heart continued to hammer my too-tight chest, my testicles tingled, and my entire body trembled.

  Forest giant, my ass, I thought. That thing had been a yeti. A true-to-life yeti.

  I just gave chocolate to a motherfucking yeti!

  In a daze I turned around. Vasily stood now, staring in the direction the creature had gone.

  “Tell me that was real,” I said.

  “That was real, Mr. Smith!” he said, and for the first time since I’d met him, he was smiling from ear to ear.

  “A yeti?” I said.

  “I knew they existed. I knew it.” His eyes shone with manic glee in the poor lighting. “I had been right! They had all been wrong, and I had been right!”

  I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “Everyone at the university! I was right, and they were wrong!”

  “Right about what?”

  “That these creatures exist!”

  My thoughts spun. “You’ve always believed in yetis? But why didn’t you…? If you believed in them…you didn’t make the connection to the stick-banging we heard? The footprints?”

  Something altered his triumphant expression, a calculation.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “I haven’t been completely honest with you, Mr. Smith. And I don’t know how to bring up what I suppose now needs to be said—”

  “Spit it out, man!”

  “None of it was real,” he said bluntly.

  I didn’t understand. “None of what?”

  “The stick-banging, the footprints—it was all made up.” He was looking at me sadly yet resolutely, like a doctor explaining to a schizophrenic patient that his best friend was nothing but an errant personality.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Vasily. What do you mean it was all made up?”

  “It was all Fyodor’s wife.”

  “His wife?” I said.

  “Her name is Galina. She is an extraordinary woman, a true noble savage. She makes Fyodor seem…civilized…by comparison.”

  “His wife?” I repeated. I recalled Fyodor mention he had a wife the other night by the fire—and the furtive smile he’d shared with Vasily when I’d suggested she should have joined us on the trip.

  Vasily gripped me heartily on the shoulder. “Do not dwell on this, Mr. Smith. Because what we just witnessed was not made up. What we saw was real. And that is all that matters now.”

  I flinched away from him. “Why was Fyodor’s wife trying to scare us? Why didn’t you say anything? Were you in on it?” An epiphany. “Jesus fucking Christ, you were in on it too.”

  He shrugged. “I simply wanted you to believe what I believe, Mr. Smith. That is all.”

  “Why? Because of my book?” I said, my mind making connections almost faster than I could process them. “You wanted me to write about yetis? That a yeti attacked the Dyatlov group?”

  He nodded. “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “Why not just tell me straight up this was what you believed?”

  “Because you would never have believed me.”

  “I might have,” I said, though I knew as soon as the statement left my mouth it was not true.

  “I wasn’t prepared to take that risk. I’ve spent my life attempting to solve what happened to the Dyatlov group. A number of years ago I became convinced I found the answer. Convinced. And the last wish of this dying old man—unfortunately, I am dying, Mr. Smith, that is not fiction—is to get the truth out.”

  “So write a fucking paper!” I blurted. “You were once a reputable professor, weren’t you?”

  “I did. I wrote several papers, in fact. And I became the laughing stock of academia. You see, the scientific community has never been kind to those in their flock who advocate the existence of megafauna cryptids. I was quickly branded another nutty professor and my message was lost. But then you got in touch with me, and I realized you could get my message out, because you would not be writing a scientific paper.”

  “I just write books.”

  “True-crime books that millions of people read. Not biased academics imprisoned within their own egocentric paradigms, but real people, open-minded people, who are receptive to what you say. You could get the word out. You could ignite a national, if not a global, discussion. What would ultimately come of that is anybody’s guess. However, one thing would be certain: the world would finally know the name of Igor Dyatlov and his comrades, and it would only be a matter of time until the truth of what happened to them, the full truth, came to light.”

  I let this sink in, furious at being used, though this fury proved impossible to sustain in light of what we had just witnessed. I said, “Well, you’ve certainly hit the jackpot with this cave, haven’t you?”

  Vasily’s grin returned. “It is beyond my wildest dreams.”

  “Almost too good to be true,” I said, allowing cynicism to inform my tone even though I couldn’t see how Vasily had anything to do with the creature’s serendipitous appearance.

  “I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Mr. Smith. Life is full of surprises, both small and large. Accept them when they come your way.”

  I was craving a cigarette. I tugged off my gloves and took my cigarettes and lighter from a pocket. Two smokes left. I lit one up and inhaled hard.

  “So before this gift horse landed in your lap,” I said, blowing a jet of smoke out of my nose, “what made you so positive yetis existed?”

  “In Russia, we call them almasties. And my interest in them came after my first visit to the laboratory beneath Sector 9.”

  “Your first visit?” I frowned. “You bastard—you already knew about it.”

  “Fyodor discovered it years ago during one of his hunting trips, and he showed it to me the first summer I hired him to take me to Kholat Syakhl. The few documents and private journals left behind didn’t provide many specifics as to what the Soviets were doing down there, but I was able to piece together that their military had captured something very unusual. I spent months investigating what that might have been, and I eventually discovered that in 1958 the Soviet Academy of Sciences set up a ‘Snowman Commission’ to investigate evidence of surviving Neanderthals in the Pamir Mountains. This is what they told the public anyway. Because after digging further and speaking with some of the four-thousand people they interviewed as part of their research, I learned they weren’t interested in Neanderthals in the Pamirs at all, but almasties in the Ural Mountains.”

  “Why the deception?” I asked.

  “Why indeed, Mr. Smith?” he said. “And then the following year, in 1959, the commission abruptly shut down.”

  “For what reason?”

  “None was ever given.”

  “Right after the Dyatlov group died?”

  Vasily nodded. “At the hands of an ‘unknown compelling force.’”

  “So what happened?” I asked, talking through my thoughts. “The Snowman Commission…they got wind of the deaths of the nine hikers. They suspected a yeti attack, and they took over the investigation…so they could manipulate the data? That would explain the secret second case file. And then later that same year they shut down. Why? Did they find the yeti?”

  “That I cannot answer,” Vasily said. “In fact, I’m not sure they did find it. Not right away, at any rate. Because they closed down the area around the mountain for three years, which implies they were still looking for the creature until 1962.”

  “But they must have found it,” I said. “Because Sector 9 exists.”

  “You are right, Mr. Smith. At one point they held an almasty, perhaps several, at Sector 9. The question is, was this after the Dyatlov group was attacked, or before?”

  I frowned. “Before?”

  “The Snowman Commission was created in 1958, a year before the hikers perished. Which makes me wonder—what got them interested in searching for an almasty in the first place? Were they simply chasing rumors? Or did they have more concrete evidence that almasties existed? Or did they in fa
ct already have such a creature in their possession? Did they want to find it a mate?” He paused. “Or did it go AWOL?”

  “AWOL?” I said, surprised.

  “What do you do if your dog runs away, Mr. Smith?”

  “Look around the neighborhood?”

  “And knock on doors, asking if anyone has seen it. The Soviet government obviously couldn’t go around knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen an almasty in the area. But a Snowman Commission, operating under the guise of scientific research, could. It could knock on four-thousand doors without raising a single eyebrow.”

  ⁂

  I was numb. Dumbstruck. Reeling. Ecstatic.

  Everything fit. I mean, I finally had a Dyatlov theory in which everything fit.

  And not only that, the theory wasn’t based on speculation, because yetis existed. I’d just seen one with my own eyes. I had fed the fucking thing chocolate.

  Suddenly dizzy, I placed a hand against the wall.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Smith?” Vasily asked me. “Mr. Smith…? Perhaps you need some rest—?”

  A hot flash washed over me. I turned away from Vasily and vomited onto the rocky ground. My stomach squeezed and pumped a second time, and I vomited again. Only then did I feel a measure of relief.

  On stilted legs, I moved away from the sick and slumped to the ground. I wiped sweat from my forehead and swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth.

  Vasily settled close to me. I ignored him. I was too busy going over the last two days in my head, searching for telltale signs I should have picked up on.

  Finally I said, “Raya Anyamov. That meeting was set up too?”

  “It was not scripted, if that’s what you mean. She believed everything she told us. But, yes, I brought you to see her knowing what she would say. She told me it all before when I visited her village after Fyodor showed me Sector 9. This was still before I’d learned of the Snowman Commission. I’d wanted to learn from the elders what they remembered about the camp when it had been in operation.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing helpful. They had always considered it a bad place, a forbidden place. They stayed away from it.”

  “Sector 9,” I said. “We stayed there because the weather turned on us. You can’t control weather, can you?”

  “We would have stayed there regardless. The plan was for Fyodor to become sick and take us there so he could rest. It seems he improvised.”

  “It wasn’t a coincidence he asked me to get firewood with him?”

  “No, Mr. Smith, it was not.”

  “And the next morning, when you all wanted to turn back…”

  “A little bit of reverse psychology, I admit.”

  “Like this morning?”

  He nodded. “The more you believed you were calling the shots, the more you were likely to believe everything unfolding around you.”

  “But why let me believe in some mythical forest giant? Why not simply tell me you thought it was a yeti following us?”

  “For the same reason I just mentioned. Believability. If you came to this conclusion on your own, you would be more likely to believe it—and write about it.”

  I shook my head. “Christ, Vasily.” I was overwhelmed by just how much I had been duped. It still made me nauseated, and I didn’t know if I wanted to punch the guy or kiss him. “So where is Fyodor now?” I asked. “With his wife back at camp?”

  Vasily nodded. “No doubt worried silly that we haven’t returned.”

  “Do you think he’ll come looking for us?”

  “Not in the blizzard. Perhaps when it blows over.”

  I recalled the flashlight beam I’d seen outside Fyodor’s cabin during the night. Had that been Fyodor’s wife preparing to leave bright and early so as to get a head start on us? And the noise I’d heard across the Lozva River the following night, the branch snapping in two, had that been her too? Had she been looking for the right tree to whack with her stick? I pictured her running away from our campsite last night clad in a pair of cumbersome Bigfoot boots, hearing us shouting and yelling, laughing to herself at our stupidity—at least, Disco’s and mine.

  I glanced at Olivia, her face shadowed, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling ever so slightly. “Was she in on any of this?” I asked, surprised to find just how much I hoped she wasn’t.

  Vasily nodded. “Everything.”

  ⁂

  With gentle prodding I roused Disco and was grateful to learn he had not suffered anything more worrisome than severe exhaustion and mild frostbite. I was in the middle of explaining to him how we’d been unwitting pawns in Vasily’s elaborate ruse when Olivia came around too. She seemed none the worse for wear either, and so I jumped right into what I had been building toward with Disco: what had transpired while they’d been out.

  As soon as I described the creature as a yeti, Olivia cut me off. “Did Corey put you up to this?” she demanded of Vasily. “Does he…know? Is he trying to get back at me?”

  “Know what, Olivia?” I asked coyly.

  She simply stared at me.

  “You mean, know that you’ve been lying to my face for the last two days? Yeah, I know. But no, I’m not trying to get back at you. What we saw was a real yeti.”

  “I know what you must think, Miss Joosten,” Vasily added. “But he is telling the God-honest truth.”

  “A yeti rescued us from the blizzard?”

  “Quiet down,” I told her. “It might still be around—”

  “Don’t tell me to quiet down, Corey! How gullible do you think I am?”

  “It was standing right over there.”

  “Eating chocolate?”

  “No, it took the chocolate deeper into the cave with it. There’s a tunnel back there that I assume leads into the mountain.”

  “This isn’t funny, Corey.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “In fact, the idea that you don’t believe me is rather ironic, if you think about it—”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  Disco, I noticed, was studying me with a good dose of confusion, but something else I didn’t expect: doubt. He didn’t believe me about the yeti either.

  “Show them,” I said to Vasily.

  He took out his phone. “I didn’t take a photograph,” he explained. “It was too dark, and I didn’t want to scare the almasty away with the flash. But I did record the encounter.”

  He pressed Play and turned the phone so we could all see the screen. It was black. But the audio was clear. Vasily and I were discussing what to do in hushed-frightened voices. Then there was a rustling sound as I scrounged through my rucksack for the chocolate. Vasily turned the phone toward me, because I was visible for the first time, not much more than my shadowed face and patches of my white camo jacket.

  “We can’t just sit here.”

  “Don’t make any quick movements.”

  “Don’t get trigger happy.”

  Then I was on my feet, moving away from the camera, walking slowly as if navigating a roomful of sleeping lions. Soon there was nothing to see again but a gray blur that was my backside.

  “I can’t see nothing,” Disco complained.

  “I hope this gets better,” Olivia said.

  “Shush,” I told her.

  We stared at the black screen. The only sound from the speakers came when Vasily shifted his position, pebbles scraping underfoot.

  Then movement. Something huge and dark stepping from the shadows, dwarfing me. And it was fast, faster than I remembered. Vasily swung the camera to follow its progress, but there was nothing more to see.

  It was gone as quickly as it had appeared.

  “Mon dieu!” Disco cried. “I saw it!”

  “Play that again!” Olivia said

  Vasily obeyed, and we watched once more in rapt fascination as the yeti stepped past me with its giant stride. The footage was hardly definitive proof of the creature. Two seconds, maybe three, of nebulous movement. But it nevertheless lit every nerve ending in m
y body on fire.

  We had caught the Abominable Snowman on film.

  CHAPTER 25

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  SEVEN HOURS TO LIVE

  Zolotaryov couldn’t believe his eyes. Igor had been telling the truth about what he had seen the day before. Because coming toward them, unmindful of the blizzard, loping easily through the deep snow, was something he never thought he would see, never thought existed: a snowman.

  It stood erect and impossibly tall, powerfully muscled and covered with white hair. It had no neck, and its arms, which reached almost to its knees, swung back and forth at its sides.

  He couldn’t see its face in the darkness, but he didn’t wait for it to get closer for a better look. He and Igor ducked back inside the tent at the same time.

  “Get up!” Igor shouted, grabbing the ice axe and scrambling to the back of the tent. “Everyone, get up!”

  The sleepy hikers sat up in their bedrolls, their candlelit faces etched in fear and confusion.

  Zolotaryov remained rooted to the spot. They couldn’t flee. The creature was too close. They would run right into its arms. They were trapped—

  Zina screamed.

  Zolotaryov smelled a gamey odor and turned to find the snowman’s massive head and shoulders crowding the entrance of the tent.

  Bedlam ensued. Zolotaryov crashed into the other hikers in his haste to get away from the beast lurking behind him. A flashlight beam cut through the dark, jerking about in wild arcs and right angles. He found one and snapped it on as well.

  Then, through the flailing limbs and jostling bodies, he saw Igor whacking the wall near the back of the tent with the ice axe. He created a three-foot-long vertical slash in the canvas, held it open, and shouted for everyone to run.

  Lyuda stumbled out first, then Doroshenko, then Georgy, then Rustem, then Kolevatov and Kolya, all the while Igor stood bravely by until the last of them had exited (going down with the ship, Zolotaryov thought feverishly), and right then the respect he had lost for the man over the last day returned tenfold.

  Zina was crawling around on the skis-covered floor on all fours, searching frantically for something.