Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  For a moment I thought I was screaming, but it wasn’t me, it was the pilot.

  “Take off!” I shouted at him.

  Bellowing a heart-wrenching sound of anguish, the female yeti dragged Olivia by her blonde hair through the missing door.

  The helicopter rocked laterally as it lifted off.

  “Wait!” I shouted, lurching off-balanced toward the door.

  The yeti held Olivia by the shoulders several feet off the ground so they could look at each other at equal height. Olivia’s face appeared white as porcelain, her blue eyes distended with fear, her mouth open in a muted scream.

  With another bellow, the creature thrust her higher into the air—straight toward the spinning rotors.

  “No!” I cried, turning my face away even as I was slapped with a splatter of hot blood.

  ⁂

  The helicopter continued to gain lift, the downwash plastering the yeti’s silky white hair to the tighter brown fur on her muscular frame. I was convinced she would attempt something superhuman such as drag the chopper back to the ground. But she only watched as it rose into the frosty air foot by foot. When she met my eyes, I felt as though I were somehow staring back in time, transported through the eons to a primeval era, only there was nothing primitive in her eyes; to the contrary, they were as human as mine, and they simmered with a scolding wisdom that would haunt me for years to come.

  EPILOGUE

  I passed the flight to Yekaterinburg in a state of shock so powerful and inclusive I didn’t remember how I arrived at the hospital, or how I ended up in a frock in a bed in a private room. The last thing I recalled was one of the doctors telling me he needed to perform surgery and attaching an anesthesia drip to my arm. I woke the following morning with four less toes, three missing from my left foot, one from my right. Thankfully both big toes remained, and a nurse told me I would be able to walk normally. My fingers had all suffered frostbite as well, though none of them had to be removed.

  Two men in suits, and a woman in a dark pantsuit, paid me a visit not long after breakfast. The men told me they were with the KDP; the woman was a psychiatrist. The KDP officers set up a video camera on a tripod and asked me to detail exactly what I was doing in Russia and what had transpired in the Ural Mountains. I had nothing to hide, and so I told them everything. That I was in Russia to research a book on the Dyatlov group. The meeting with Vasily Popov. Staying the night at Fyodor’s cabin in Ivdel, the trip up the Lozva River, Disco going through the ice. Sector 9, the laboratory. Fyodor parting ways with us on the Mountain of the Dead, Boot Rock and getting caught in the blizzard, the encounter with the female yeti in the cave. The encounter with the male, and what he did to Vasily. Fleeing through the hellish tunnels, the bat-thing that pursued us, the giant cavern, our time with the yeti family. The male killing Disco. Olivia cutting off the baby’s head. Escaping on the snowmobile, hiding in the tree, the massacre at the Mansi village, and finally, the rescue helicopter and the fates of what turned out to be the navigator and flight mechanic, and Olivia’s decapitation.

  The men questioned me intensively at nearly every point in the story, the woman took occasional notes, and I didn’t finish until well into late afternoon, as the winter sun set outside the hospital window.

  I was sure they would think I was crazy. Hearing what I was saying, I almost thought I was crazy. But they took me very seriously, and only later did I realize the KDP would have already spoken to the helicopter pilot and more than likely already returned to the Mansi village to investigate.

  I slept through the night on a cocktail of morphine and other medications. The next morning I refused any more drugs and told the doctor who kept checking in on me that I wanted to return to my hotel. He explained the decision wasn’t his to make. I tried to leave, but a police officer sitting guard outside the room’s door would not allow this.

  That evening the two men in suits returned. They gave me a typed statement to read over, which I did. It was a retelling of my testimony the day before—only everything after we reached the cave in the Mountain of the Dead was a complete fabrication. According to the statement, everyone died with Fyodor in the blizzard. I alone survived by finding the cave and waiting out the storm until I was rescued by the Mi-8 helicopter. There was no mention at all of the yetis or the slaughtered Mansi women.

  The men told me to sign and date the end of the statement. They told me if I did this, they would hand me my passport on the spot, along with an airline ticket to LA purchased under my name, and a car outside, already loaded with my belongings from the Hyatt, would drive me to the airport. If I didn’t sign it, however, I would be accused of murder, tried summarily, and transported to a maximum-security prison.

  Whether this threat was true or not, I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to find out.

  I signed the statement.

  ⁂

  I landed at LAX twenty-eight hours later. As soon as I stepped inside my home the phone rang. It was a reporter from the LA Times. I hung up. The phone rang again a minute later. A reporter from a different newspaper. The phone continued to ring almost nonstop until I disconnected it from the wall jack. News of Disco’s death was all over the internet. Condolences from fans and other actors flooded Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other social media sites. Most of the online media mentioned me as an afterthought, and Olivia and Vasily as ancillary casualties.

  After that first day home I ignored the TV and internet, as well as the media and paparazzi camped out on my front lawn. I ordered food via a delivery service and spent the next while in a state of surreal sobriety.

  ⁂

  By Monday the spotlight on me had died down and I could leave my house without getting mobbed, not that I had anywhere to go. Mostly it was either the supermarket or one of the fast-food joints in the neighborhood. I didn’t have much of an appetite, and junk food seemed to be the only thing I could stomach. A few friends stopped by. I couldn’t tell them the truth of what happened. Not because of the bogus statement I’d been coerced into signing. I didn’t give a shit about that. But because they would never believe me.

  Nightmares haunted my sleep. Sometimes I would be trapped up in the fir, or in the squeeze, or some other pitch-black tunnel. I could rarely remember what happened in the dreams when I woke bathed in sweat, only that they often featured Olivia or Disco—even Denise in a few—and that they left me feeling empty inside and sick with terror.

  I usually wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep until morning, and I would end up sleeping until midafternoon. When I finally forced myself out of bed, I would be immediately tired again. This had nothing to do with poor sleep, or jetlag; it was a mental exhaustion no amount of rest could fix.

  What did I do each day? Nothing, really. I made myself have a shower. Made myself leave the house for food. Fought my alcohol cravings. Spent an hour or two in the garden. By then it was usually dusk, and then I would wait around, dreading going to sleep, knowing the nightmares would be waiting for me.

  Roughly two weeks after I returned to LA, I sat down at my computer to write. Not the Dyatlov book. That was scrapped. Just something, anything, that might break the monotony my life had devolved into. As I’d expected, I ended up staring at my computer screen for an hour without typing a word. In a fit of frustration, I drove my fist into the monitor. Then doubly frustrated, because now I would not be able to write even if I found the motivation to do so, I tore the monitor from the wall socket and launched it across the room.

  It was about this time that I began to lose my mind.

  It started with strange noises I would hear around the house: footsteps on the stairs, tapping at the windows, doors creaking open or shut. The first couple of occurrences I attributed to someone trying to break in—unscrupulous paparazzi maybe, or a nutjob who had read about me in the news. But every time I investigated the source of the noise, I would find nobody there, and no sign of forced entry.

  And yet the sounds continued. I’d hear them when I
was flipping through old magazines, or in the shower, or lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling. Sometimes in the middle of the night. This was the only time I was more afraid than curious or concerned for my state of mental health, and I would often get up and turn on all the lights in the house, or leave it completely and go to a twenty-four-hour coffee shop where I would eat a donut and watch my coffee get cold.

  Nevertheless, it was the hallucinations that truly frightened me. They started about a week after the noises. Blood on the kitchen floor that wouldn’t be there anymore when I went to clean it up. A fleeting face at a window, or peeking around a door. A dark form behind the shower curtain, or something large in the corner of my bedroom—again, both not there when I threw back the shower curtain or snapped on the light.

  I considered moving into a hotel, but I knew this wasn’t a solution. I was experiencing some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. The auditory and visual manifestations were in my head. Instead, I went to my GP. He prescribed me antidepressants and valium.

  I tossed the prescription in the garbage.

  As the days and nights dragged on, I found myself back on the internet, only now I was researching yeti encounters, and downloading from Amazon all the books available on Bigfoots, almasties, sasquatches, whatever. I also did a lot of research on caving—specifically, on caving myths and legends of unknown creatures. There was surprisingly little on the subject. However, one creature from Wisconsin folklore called a Hodag caught my attention. It was first discovered in 1883, and according to a newspaper at the time, it had “the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, short, thick legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears on the end.”

  Although this was not the dinosaur-thing that had chased us—it was identified as a hoax three years later in 1886—I nevertheless became obsessed with it. I bought a drawing pad and a box of pencils and began sketching drawings of what it might have looked like. Soon I spent most of my waking hours creating hellish variations with frenetic urgency, rarely finishing one drawing before starting the next.

  One evening I went to tape my latest sketch to the wall, but there was no available surface space left. Looking around the living room, I discovered there wasn’t space on any wall. Until that point I hadn’t even realized I had been taping the drawings to the walls. I didn’t know how that could be, only that it was.

  And during this brief window of clarity, I realized I wasn’t going crazy.

  I was crazy.

  I tore the sketches free in a blind rage and woke the next morning on the living room floor, surrounded by ripped and scrunched paper.

  And I felt a little more like my old self.

  Not much, but a little.

  I showered and dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt—I think I had been wearing the same pair of board shorts for the last week—then called the offices of two dozen psychiatrists until one secretary told me a therapist could fit me in that afternoon.

  Her name was Dr. Cindy Matsumoto. Early fifties, Japanese-American, attractive and stately, she possessed the practiced social skills to make me feel at ease. By the end of my forty minutes we hadn’t discussed anything of substance, certainly nothing pertaining to what happened in Russia, or even my hallucinations or nightmares, but somehow I felt better. I booked myself in to see her every day for the rest of the month.

  Each afternoon I would show up to her office twenty minutes early and leave an hour later feeling ever so slightly better. Still, I never mentioned why I had decided to see her, and she never asked. Whether she had connected me to Disco or not, I didn’t know, but if she had, she hid the knowledge well.

  On our thirteenth session I trusted her enough to finally bring myself to recount what had happened in the Northern Ural Mountains—what really happened.

  I could tell she didn’t believe me. It wasn’t anything she said or did. I could just tell. Feeling betrayed, I got up to leave halfway through the session when she said, “Corey, wait.”

  I stopped at the door. “I think this will be my last visit, Dr. Matsumoto,” I told her.

  “Wait—just wait.” She stood, took a moment to compose her thoughts, then said, “We promised we would be honest with each other on our first day together, so I’m going to be honest with you now. I don’t believe in yetis or Bigfoots or almasties, as you call them.”

  “You think I’m lying?” I said tightly.

  “No, I don’t think you are.”

  “Then you think I’m crazy. Because if you don’t believe what I’m telling you, then I’m either a liar or I’m crazy.”

  “What I think, Corey,” she said in that soothing, reasonable voice I had come to appreciate so much, “what I know, is that you’re struggling with what happened to you and your friends. My job isn’t to prove whether the events you have described are perfidious or not, or whether you are crazy or sane. My job is only to help you deal with your inner turmoil. And I don’t need to believe in a yeti, or an almasty, to do this.”

  She sat back down in her chair behind her desk and waited for me to either leave or return to the sofa.

  I remained by the door, thinking. I had embarked on the trip to Russia, and to the Mountain of the Dead in particular, to uncover the “compelling unknown force” that took the lives of Igor and his comrades in such a mysterious manner. Despite my previous acceptance of Vasily’s theory, I no longer believed a yeti to be the culprit in some of their deaths. I’ve seen the female yeti’s eyes too many times in my head and in my dreams since that final encounter on the plains of the Mansi village, as I’d lifted away in the helicopter, and although they had been remarkably humanlike, they’d held none of mankind’s dark cunning.

  Her species were capable of violence, certainly, and vengeance, yes—the fates of Vasily and Disco and Olivia were proof of this—but they were not monsters. They did not kill for greed or glory, for fame or money, for dogma or jealously or pure malice.

  The only species capable of such acts stared back at me every time I looked in a mirror.

  I returned to the sofa.

  “I’m glad, Corey,” Dr. Matsumoto said, folding her hands into a bridge. “I’m glad you’ve decided to stay. I really am. Now, why don’t you tell me—”

  “If you don’t mind,” I interrupted her, “I’d like to start with a place called Sector 9.”

  A memorial erected in honor of the Dyatlov group. From left to right: Yuri Doroshenko, Lyuda Dubinina, Igor Dyatlov, Semyon Zolotaryov, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Alexander Kolevatov, Yuri Krivonischenko, Rustem Slobodin, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Thank you for taking the time to read Mountain of the Dead. If you enjoyed the story, it would be wonderful if you could leave a review on the Amazon product page. Reviews might not matter much to the big-name authors, but they can really help the small guys to grow their readership.

  Also, please check out the books in the award-winning “World’s Scariest Places” series below:

  BOOK 1: SUICIDE FOREST

  SUICIDE FOREST IS REAL - ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK

  CLICK HERE TO GET IT NOW (FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED)!

  Just outside of Tokyo lies Aokigahara, a vast forest and one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in Japan...and also the most infamous spot to commit suicide in the world. Legend has it that the spirits of those many suicides are still roaming, haunting deep in the ancient woods.

  When bad weather prevents a group of friends from climbing neighboring Mt. Fuji, they decide to spend the night camping in Aokigahara. But they get more than they bargained for when one of them is found hanged in the morning—and they realize there might be some truth to the legends after all.

  “In Bates’ (The Taste of Fear, 2012, etc.) horror novel, a simple excursion into a reputedly haunted forest turns into a nightmare when people start dying in conspicuously unnatural ways. Ethan Childs, an American teaching English in Tokyo for the last four years, plans to climb Mo
unt Fuji with girlfriend, Mel, and a few pals. But when a looming storm nixes the outing, Israeli tourists Ben and Nina convince the group to join them on a hike through nearby Aokigahara Jukai. The forest is infamous for an incredibly high number of suicides, reportedly in the hundreds per year, and some believe the ghosts of the dead haunt it. What begins as an unsettling ambience (there are no sounds of animals or any trace of wind) quickly gives way to serious, tangible threats when one of the party members dies from an apparent suicide. Ethan and company are soon lost, and the noises they hear in the woods either confirm the existence of ghosts, or perhaps worse, mean that a murderer is tracking them down. Readers may recognize a slasher-film vibe—people willingly go into the creepy woods—and familiar characters...But Bates’ approach to the story is surprisingly restrained, cultivating impressive frights in the unnerving environment...No one is sure whether the unseen villain is human or apparition or whether they are simply victims of unfortunate circumstances...Bates’ choice to avoid brazen scares makes for an understated horror story that will remind readers what chattering teeth sound like.”

  - Kirkus Reviews

  BOOK 2: THE CATACOMBS

  WELCOME TO THE EMPIRE OF THE DEAD

  CLICK HERE TO GET IT NOW (FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED)!

  Paris, France, is known as the City of Lights, a metropolis renowned for romance and beauty. Beneath the bustling streets and cafés, however, exists The Catacombs, a labyrinth of crumbling tunnels filled with six million dead.

  When a video camera containing mysterious footage is discovered deep within their depths, a group of friends venture into the tunnels to investigate. But what starts out as a lighthearted adventure takes a turn for the worse when they reach their destination--and stumble upon the evil lurking there.