Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  And shit, if our positions were reversed, and I were in her shoes, I would probably have made the same choices she had.

  Her loyalty was with cryptozoology and Vasily, not with me. Until a couple of days ago, I was a stranger, a nobody.

  “A flat face,” I told her. “The yeti’s face was flat and hairless. Huge, wide nostrils that flared when it sniffed. Big lips, wide mouth. No sabre-like fangs or anything like in popular culture depictions. Its hands were hairless too, the skin a bit darker than ours. And it had whorls on its fingers tips, like us.”

  Olivia quickly jotted this all down in her notebook. “How did it make you…feel?”

  “Scared shitless.”

  “Did it make any threatening gestures?”

  “It just stood there. Didn’t move a muscle until it took the chocolate. And the eyes were pretty humanlike. Thinking and kind.”

  More notes. “So why did you feel scared?”

  “Because it could have broken me in half had it wanted to.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “I can still move my toes.”

  “And it rescued us from the blizzard. What other animals can do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Think altruistically and help another species?”

  “Dogs. I’ve heard of them rescuing people from a house fire.”

  “I suppose, but dogs don’t really count. They’ve lived alongside us for thousands of years. We’re sort of family to them.”

  “Dolphins then. They’ve supposedly rescued drowning sailors—”

  “Jesus, all right, Corey. But what I’m getting at is… You’re the one who said its eyes were humanlike. I’m just saying its behavior seems pretty humanlike too.”

  “Do you see any animal skins lying around? Any tools? Cave paintings. Don’t make it human.”

  “Anthropomorphize.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  She smiled.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re cute when you’re not trying to be the smartest person in the room.”

  Suddenly, bizarrely, I wanted to fuck Olivia. Tear off her clothes and fuck her right there on the cave floor. The force of the desire surprised me. I’m not saying I hadn’t wanted to get intimate the other night. I did. But I had been drunk, and she’d instigated it, and my thinking had been more along the lines of, Why not?

  I’d thought about her a lot since then, of course. My attraction for her had grown daily. But what I felt right now, the immediacy and intensity of the animalistic urge, was different.

  I suspected I knew why. The last couple of days I had always considered myself to be in control of our like-hate flirting. I believed I was the pursued and she the pursuer. But that sense of superiority, if that’s the right word, had been erased when I became the duped and she the duper. The rules of the chase had been flipped upside down. Now I didn’t even know if she liked me at all.

  And that, ironically, made me want her all the more.

  Burying these feelings, I said, “You know what I still don’t get? Yetis exist. We’ve seen one. I never imagined I’d be saying that, but they exist.”

  “What don’t you get about that?” she asked.

  “Why has no one seen one before?”

  “Obviously they have excellent noses,” she said. “They can detect any type of technology—lithium ion batteries, cameras, phones, guns, you name it—from miles away, which is why they’re so adept at avoiding hikers and hunters and trail-cams and whatnot.”

  It took me a second to realize she was joking. “I’m serious,” I said. “I’m curious. Yetis exist, so why has no one aside from us ever seen one?”

  “The Russians did. They captured one too, remember?”

  “Okay, yeah, one time in history—”

  “Hardly, Corey. Sightings of large, hairy, bipedal cryptids have been reported throughout history. The Roman author Lucretius described a primitive race built up on larger and more solid bones than ours. Another Roman, a traveler called Pliny the Elder, wrote of a man-like creature that walked on two legs in the mountains of India. Alexander the Great spotted one during his conquest of the Indus Valley. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a United States president, wrote about an encounter he had with a Bigfoot in the wild.”

  “But never any evidence? No photos, videos?”

  “What are you talking about? Go on the internet. There are all sorts of photos and videos. Despite the best technology today, some can’t be debunked. The problem is, some can be. The hoaxes have made people skeptical, even if what they’re looking at is the genuine thing. It would be no different with Vasily’s video. Put it up on YouTube, you’re going to get more dislikes than likes. Nobody’s going to believe it’s authentic. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t.”

  “Where do their bodies go after they die?”

  Olivia shrugged. “It’s really not very unusual that there have never been any physical remains discovered. It’s rare to find the physical remains of any mammal. There are millions of deer in North America, but how often do you find a carcass while walking through the woods? Yetis and their variants, on the other hand, probably only number in the hundreds or thousands, and like other large mammals, they probably have a long lifespan. It would take a whole lot of luck to find the remains of one before it was devoured by scavengers or reabsorbed into the biomass.”

  “Fossil records?” I said. “If we have fossils of dinosaurs millions of years old, we should expect to have fossils of these things also.”

  “Yeah, we have fossils of dinosaurs, but not really that many—and they were the dominant species on the planet for more than a hundred fifty million years. A hundred fifty million years. The truth is, bones become fossilized or otherwise preserved only in the rarest of circumstances. Think about all the animals alive today, now think about all the animals that have ever lived. If all their bones became fossilized they would literally carpet the planet. But if you want a better example than dinosaurs, take the branch of the wood ape line called Gigantopithecus. Have you heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “A gorilla stands one hundred eighty centimeters and weighs two hundred kilograms. Gigantopithecus stood three meters and weighed eight hundred kilograms. Don’t give me that look, Corey. It’s scientific record. They lived throughout China. However, very little—and this is my point—very little fossil records remain. In fact, all the bone fragments we have of them could fit into a few shoe boxes. And we only have these because porcupines or other animals dragged them into caves, where they were preserved.”

  I frowned. “Do you think yetis could be the descendants of this wood ape?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s definitely something to now think about. Because if Gigantopithecus was bipedal, and many anthropologists believe it was, then yes, I could imagine this to be the case, or at least some offshoot of the giant wood ape line. And thousands of years of adaptation to mountainous climates would have given these large upright walking apes the ability to tolerate cold temperatures, climb through deep snow, and traverse high mountain ranges with relative ease, particularly west to the Himalayas, north to Siberia, and far east across the Bering Strait crossing.”

  “To the Pacific northwest,” I said.

  Olivia nodded. “Where they evolved into the North American sasquatch.”

  ⁂

  “You look cold,” Olivia said to me a few minutes later.

  “Freezing,” I said.

  “Come over here.” She patted the rock beside her.

  I hesitated, then got up and sat back down next to her. She stretched out on her side, her back to me. I stretched out in a similar fashion, so we were spooning. We covered ourselves with our sleeping bags.

  I was immediately warmer, blessedly so.

  “Should I switch off the flashlight?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Leave it on.”

  “Are you scared of the dark?”

  “I’m scared of what might be
in the dark.”

  “The yeti saved us from the blizzard, Corey.”

  “Let’s just leave the light on.”

  “But we might need it.”

  “For what? We’re leaving in the morning.”

  “Leaving?” She sounded surprised.

  “Hopefully the blizzard will have died down by then, and we can get back to camp.”

  Olivia half rolled over so she could look at me sideways. “Leave? We can’t leave before we get more evidence of the yeti. Weren’t you listening to what I was saying? Nobody’s going to believe Vasily’s video. We need indisputable proof.”

  “I would love to get indisputable proof just as much as you, Olivia, but we don’t have a choice in the matter. We’re lying here in subpolar temperatures. We have no wood to make a fire. We might be able to get by another day, but not another night. We’d freeze to death by then. So we have to leave tomorrow.”

  “And if the blizzard hasn’t died down by then?”

  “We’ll have to brave it.”

  “That’s suicide.”

  “It would be suicide to stay here.”

  “We can go and look for the yeti.”

  Bright alarm prickled the nape of my neck. “You want to go into the mountain?” I pictured us creeping through a twisting maze of pitch-black tunnels that had never seen sunlight.

  “We’d be moving,” she said. “We’d be warmer. Temperatures in caves are constant year round. We don’t have to go too far—” Her sentence ended in a yawn. “We could just go a little ways in…”

  I didn’t answer, because maybe she was right. We’d be moving, which would be good, and it would be warmer…

  Olivia yawned again, then lay back down, perhaps interpreting my silence as acquiesce. She rested her head on her folded arms and brought her knees closer to her chest, which pushed her rear toward me, so it pressed firmly against my groin.

  Almost immediately I got an erection. I didn’t know whether she could tell what was going on down there through our layers of clothing, and I was grateful when my libido gave up its effort and I went flaccid again.

  A short time later I slept.

  ⁂

  Dreams filled my sleep. Dreams and nightmares, they bled into each other like an unedited reel of film. In the latest one, Denise and I were hiking up Kholat Syakhl, just the two of us. The mountain was covered in a fresh layer of powder, the kind you hoped for when you went skiing, and the sky was a crystalline blue, the sun a burning yellow disc. When I spotted Boot Rock in the distance, towering like a giant tombstone, I took Denise’s hand in mine, and we ran toward it side by side, hollering in delight. This was our goal, our destination. This was why we had come to Russia, why we had come north into the mountains.

  We had made it.

  While Denise was reading the plaque affixed to the rock face, I discretely retrieved the photograph of her I’d left beneath the Stetson hat and stuck it inside my jacket. I didn’t want Denise to see it, because she would ask why there was a picture of her here, and I would have to admit that this was only a dream mimicking reality, that she was dead, and that when I woke up she would cease to exist.

  “Do you know what this says?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at me.

  “No,” I lied. Then, “Let’s go, Denny. Let’s go see the tent.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “There’s nothing more to see here.”

  I took her hand in mine again, and we crossed the barren snowfield. Boot Rock was roughly a kilometer from where the Dyatlov group had pitched their tent on January 31, 1959, and it should have taken us at least an hour to reach it in the deep snow. But we must have stepped through one of those dream wormholes because we arrived at the tent seconds later.

  The tent stood upright and undamaged, exactly as it would have been before the fateful event that occurred more than a half century before. The only incongruity was the exhaust pipe of Igor’s stove poking through the top of the entrance flaps, because the hikers hadn’t bothered to assemble the stove on the last night of their lives.

  Smoke billowed from the pipe.

  “They’re still alive!” Denise said. “They’re inside!”

  “We should turn back,” I said, fighting a bad premonition.

  “Whatever for?”

  “I don’t think we should go any closer.”

  “But they’re alive. We can actually meet them.”

  “They’re dead, Denny. They died sixty years ago.”

  “Don’t be silly. Who’s inside the tent then?”

  Releasing my hand, she dashed forward.

  “Denny!”

  She unbuttoned the toggles, stuck her head inside. A moment later she called back, “Come look! It’s so cute.”

  It?

  Reluctantly, I joined her. The interior of the tent was much larger than should have been possible—I could stand full height—and the improbable space was furnished with impossibilities on a camping trip, such as comfortable-looking sofas and chairs lavished with dozens of colorful pillows.

  Before Igor’s cast-iron stove stood a miniature yeti. It was the size of a Gremlin, and in fact it bore a passing resemblance to the little brown-and-white furball, Gizmo. It glanced our way with its big, round eyes but didn’t seem disturbed by our presence.

  “Isn’t it cute?” Denise said, producing her phone from a pocket and snapping photograph after photograph.

  The yeti remained looking right at her…and was it smiling?

  “What are you going to do with those?” I asked.

  “Post them on Facebook.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people will know about it then.’

  “So?”

  I was thinking of Sector 9, the experiments conducted there, the morgue, of what would happen to the yeti if the Russian government got its hands on it.

  “Delete them, Denny.”

  “No!”

  “Delete them!”

  “No! This is all I have left. Please let me keep them?”

  “What do you mean this is all you have left?” I asked, a pit opening in the bottom of my stomach.

  “I know I’m dead, Corey.”

  “You’re not dead,” I lied again. “You’re right here.”

  “This isn’t real. Look.” She held out her arms, and they began to crumble to dust before my eyes, fabric and flesh alike.

  “Stop that, Denny!”

  “I can’t help it!”

  Her arms were gone now, and the rest of her was following quickly.

  “Don’t go!” I said, trying to pull her against me, unable to grab hold of anything of substance.

  “I’m scared, Corey…” she said, now barely a ghost.

  “Don’t go, Denise, don’t leave me—”

  ⁂

  “It’s back.”

  I snapped awake, disorientated in the frigid dark, the nightmare fresh and vivid in my mind, tugging heavily at my heart.

  Vasily was crouched next to me.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s back,” he said.

  I looked into the depths of the cave, the way the yeti had gone after receiving the chocolate. Vasily pointed discretely in the opposite direction, toward the entrance.

  I saw the creature right away this time, a silhouette standing in the mouth of the cavern, huge and motionless.

  My heartbeat spiked. Adrenaline flooded my system, creating an instant, alert high.

  “What’s it doing over there?” I whispered, trying to pick through the mess of questions suddenly jostling to be asked.

  “Came in from outside,” Vasily replied.

  “So there’s a backdoor to this cave?”

  “Or this one’s a different almasty.”

  I glanced at Olivia and Disco. They were both sound asleep.

  Slowly, trying not to make any noise, I reached into my pocket and withdrew my phone.

  “What are you doing?” Vasily whi
spered.

  “We need a good photograph.”

  “Turn off the flash.”

  “I won’t get anything if I do.”

  “You’ll scare it.”

  “Forget it.”

  I touched the phone’s fingerprint scanner with my index finger. The screen immediately lit up, eerily bright in the gloom.

  The yeti didn’t react.

  I tapped the camera icon. The phone issued a mechanical chirrup, and in the stillness of the cave, and the magnitude of the moment, it sounded a lot louder than I’d anticipated.

  The yeti barked. I’d swear it sounded like “Huh?”

  Disco and Olivia woke up

  They saw the creature a moment later.

  Disco shrank away from it, falling onto his elbows. Olivia sprang to her feet and stared, transfixed.

  “What’s it doing?” Disco hissed. “What’s it want?”

  “More chocolate?” I said.

  “Don’t keep it waiting!”

  I set aside my phone—I didn’t want to startle the creature again with anymore unexpected noises—and went through my rucksack.

  I produced the chocolate and started toward the yeti.

  “Corey!” Olivia hissed.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  When I was about ten feet away from the creature, I stopped. It was not the same one after all. Its fur was much more reddish than white, and it was clearly a male, its testicles and penis smaller than I would have imagined in relation to its body mass, almost embarrassingly so.

  I held up the chocolate.

  The yeti sniffed, its wide nostrils flaring. Then it closed the distance to me in three loping steps, each far larger than any Fyodor’s wife could have ever created.

  It sniffed again.

  “Take it,” I said encouragingly.

  The yeti raised one muscled arm—but instead of taking the chocolate, its hand swallowed my wrist in a monstrous grip that was both cool and crushing.

  “Ow!” I cried out.

  It lifted its arm higher into the air, consequently lifting my arm higher, until I was forced onto my tiptoes.