by Jeff Long
His mind wouldn’t quit racing. What if the corpse itself was bait? Suddenly the text took on a grotesque clarity. I am Isaac. The son who gave himself to sacrifice. For love of the Father. In exile. In my agony of Light. But what could this all mean?
He’d done his share of hardcore rescues and knew the drill—not that there was much of a drill for this one. Ike grabbed his coil of 9-mm rope and stuffed his last four AA batteries into a pocket, then looked around. What else? Two protein bars, a Velcro ankle brace, his med kit. It seemed as if there should have been more to carry. The cupboard was pretty much bare, though.
Just before departing the main chamber, Ike cast his light across the room. Sleeping bags lay scattered on the floor like empty cocoons. He entered the right-hand tunnel. The passage snaked downward at an even pitch, left, then right, then became steeper. What a mistake, sending them off, even all together. Ike couldn’t believe he’d put his little flock at this kind of risk. For that matter, he couldn’t believe the risk they’d taken. But of course they’d taken it. They didn’t know better.
“Hello!” he called. His guilt deepened by the vertical foot. Was it his fault they’d put their faith in a counterculture buccaneer?
The going slowed. The walls and ceiling grew corrupt with long sheets of delaminating rock. Pull the wrong piece, and the whole mass might slide. Ike pendulumed from admiration to resentment. His pilgrims were brave. His pilgrims were foolhardy. And he was in danger.
If not for Kora, he would have talked himself out of further descent. In a sense, she became a scapegoat for his courage. He wanted to turn around and flee. The same foreboding that had paralyzed him in the other tunnel flared up again. His very bones seemed ready to lock in rebellion, limb by limb, joint by joint. He forced himself deeper.
At last he reached a plunging shaft and came to a halt. Like an invisible waterfall, a column of freezing air streamed past from reaches too high for his flashlight beam. He held his hand out, and the cold current poured through his fingers.
At the very edge of the precipice, Ike looked down around his feet and found one of his six-inch chemical candles. The green glow was so faint he had almost missed it.
He lifted the plastic tube by one end and turned off his headlamp, trying to judge how long ago they had activated the mixture. More than three hours, less than six. Time was racing out of his control. On the off-chance, he sniffed the plastic. Impossibly, it seemed to hold a trace of her coconut scent.
“Kora!” he bellowed into the tube of air.
Where outcrops disturbed the flow of wind, a tiny symphony of whistles and sirens and bird cries answered back, a music of stone. Ike stuffed the candle into one pocket.
The air smelled fresh, like the outside of a mountain. Ike filled his lungs with it. A rush of instincts collided in what could only be called heartache. In that instant, he wanted what he had never really missed. He wanted the sun.
He searched the sides of the shaft with his light—up and down—for signs that his group had gone this way. Here and there he spotted a possible handhold or a shelf to rest upon, though no one—not even Ike in his prime—could have climbed down into the shaft and survived.
The shaft’s difficulties exceeded even his group’s talent for blind faith. They must have turned around and gone some other way. Ike started out.
A hundred meters farther back, he found their detour.
He had walked right past the opening on his way down. On the return, the hole was practically blatant—especially the green glow ebbing from its canted throat. He had to take his pack off in order to get through the small aperture. Just inside lay the second of his chemical candles.
By comparing the two candles—this one was much brighter—Ike fixed the group’s chronology. Here indeed was their deviation. He tried to imagine which pioneer spirit had piloted the group into this side tunnel, and knew it could only have been one person.
“Kora,” he whispered. She would not have left Owen for dead any more than he. It was she who would be insisting on probing deeper and deeper into the tunnel system.
The detour led to others. Ike followed the side tunnel to one fork, then another, then another. The unfolding network horrified him. Kora had unwittingly led them—him, too—deep into an underground maze.
“Wait!” he shouted.
At first the group had taken the time to mark their choices. Some of the branches were marked with a simple arrow arranged with rocks. A few showed the right way or the left way with a big X scratched on the wall. But soon the marks ended. No doubt emboldened by their progress, the group had quit blazing its path. Ike had few clues other than a black scuff mark or a fresh patch of rock where someone had pulled loose a handhold.
Second-guessing their choices devoured the time. Ike checked his watch. Well past midnight. He’d been hunting Kora and the lost pilgrims for over nine hours now. That meant they were desperately lost.
His head hurt. He was tired. The adrenaline was long gone. The air no longer had the smell of summits or jet-stream. This was an interior scent, the inside of the mountain’s lungs, the smell of darkness. He made himself chew and swallow a protein bar. Ike wasn’t sure he could find his way out again.
Yet he kept his mountaineer’s presence of mind. Thousands of physical details clamored for his attention. Some he absorbed, most he simply passed between. The trick was to see simply.
He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.
Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of buttery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to knobs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.
The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.
Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?
He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He’d seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.
At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet—the land of clockwise circumambulation around sacred temples and mountains—he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.
Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.
Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous passage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.
“Are you hurt?” Ike asked her.
“Just my ankle,” Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn’t fooled.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
“You go ahead,” Cleo breathed with her angel voice. “I’ll stay a bit longer.”
Some people can handle s
olitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.
Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. “What about the rest of you? Where did they go?”
“Not much farther,” she said. Good news. And bad news. “They went to find you.”
“Find me?”
“You kept calling for help. We weren’t going to leave you alone.”
“But I didn’t call for help.”
She patted his leg. “All for one,” she assured him.
Ike picked up one of the coins. “Where’d you find these?”
“Everywhere,” she said. “More and more, the deeper we got. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I’m going for the others. Then we’ll all come back for you,” Ike said. He changed the fading batteries in his headlamp while he talked, replacing them with the last of his new ones. “Promise you won’t move from here.”
“I like it here very much.”
He left Cleo in a sea of alabaster radiance.
The limestone tube sped him deeper. The decline was even, the footing uncomplicated. Ike jogged, sure he could catch them. The air took on a coppery tang, nameless, yet distantly familiar. Not much farther, Cleo had said.
The blood streaks started at 3:47 A.M..
Because they first appeared as several dozen crimson handprints upon the white stone, and because the stone was so porous that it practically inhaled the liquid, Ike mistook them for primitive art. He should have known better.
Ike slowed. The effect was lovely in its playful randomness. Ike liked his image: slap-happy cavemen.
Then his foot hit a puddle not yet absorbed into the stone. The dark liquid splashed up. It sluiced in bright streaks across the wall, red on white. Blood, he realized.
“God!” he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same bloody sole landed again, skidded, torqued sideways. The momentum drove him facefirst into the wall and then sent him tumbling around the bend.
His headlamp flew off. The light blinked out. He came to a halt against cold stone.
It was like being clubbed unconscious. The blackness stopped all control, all motion, all place in the world. Ike even quit breathing. As much as he wanted to hide from consciousness, he was wide awake.
Abruptly the thought of lying still became unbearable. He rolled away from the wall and let gravity guide him onto his hands and knees. Hands bare, he felt about for the headlamp in widening circles, torn between disgust and terror at the viscous curd layering the floor. He could even taste the stuff, cold upon his teeth. He pressed his lips shut, but the smell was gamy, and there was no game in here, only his people. It was a monstrous thought.
At last he snagged the headlamp by its connecting wire, rocked back onto his heels, fumbled with the switch. There was a sound, distant or near, he couldn’t tell. “Hey?” he challenged. He paused, listened, heard nothing.
Laboring against his own panic, Ike flipped the switch on and off and on. It was like trying to spark a fire with wolves closing in. The sound again. He caught it this time. Nails scratching rock? Rats? The blood scent surged. What was going on here?
He muttered a curse at the dead light. With his fingertips he stroked the lens, searching for cracks. Gently he shook it, dreading the rattle of a shattered lightbulb. Nothing.
Was blind, but now I see.... The words drifted into his consciousness, and he was uncertain whether they were a song or his memory of it. The sound came more distinctly. ‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear. It washed in from far away, a woman’s lush voice singing “Amazing Grace.” Something about its brave syllables suggested less a hymn than an anthem. A last stand.
It was Kora’s voice. She had never sung for him. But this was she. Singing for them all, it seemed.
Her presence, even in the far depths, steadied him. “Kora,” he called. On his knees, eyes wide in the utter blackness, Ike disciplined himself. If it wasn’t the switch or the bulb... he tried the wire. Tight at the ends, no lacerations. He opened the battery case, wiped his fingers clean and dry, and carefully removed each slender battery, counting in a whisper, “One, two, three, four.” One at a time, he cleaned the tips against his T-shirt, then swabbed each contact in the case and replaced the batteries. Head up, head down, up, down. There was an order to things. He obeyed.
He snapped the plate back onto the case, drew gently at the wire, palmed the lamp. And flicked the switch.
Nothing.
The scratch-scratch noise rose louder. It seemed very close. He wanted to bolt away, any direction, any cost, just flee.
“Stick,” he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick, as in hang. As in no surrender.
Ike clenched his teeth. He slowed his lungs. Again he removed the batteries. This time he replaced them with the batch of nearly dead batteries in his pocket. He flipped the switch.
Light. Sweet light.
He breathed it in.
In an abattoir of white stone.
The image of butchery lasted one instant. Then his light flickered out.
“No!” he cried in the darkness, and shook the headlamp.
The light came on again, what little there was of it. The bulb glowed rusty orange, grew weaker, then suddenly brightened, relatively speaking. It was less than a quarter-strength. More than enough. Ike took his eyes from the little bulb and dared to look around once more.
The passageway was a horror.
In his small circle of jaundiced light, Ike stood up. He was very careful. All around, the walls were zebra-striped with crimson streaks. The bodies had been arranged in a row.
You don’t spend years in Asia without seeing a fair share of the dead. Many times, Ike had sat by the burning ghats at Pashaputanath, watching the fires peel flesh from bone. And no one climbed the South Col of Everest these days without passing a certain South African dreamer, or on the north side a French gentleman sitting silently by the trail at 28,000 feet. And then there had been that time the king’s army opened fire on Social Democrats revolting in the streets of Kathmandu and Ike had gone to Bir Hospital to identify the body of a BBC cameraman and seen the corpses hastily lined side by side on the tile floor. This reminded him of that.
It rose in him again, the silence of birds. And how, for days afterward, the dogs had limped about from bits of glass broken out of windows. And above all else, how, in being dragged, a human body gets undressed.
They lay before him, his people. He had viewed them in life as fools. In death, half-naked, they were pathetic. Not foolishly so. Just terribly. The smell of opened bowels and raw meat was nearly enough to panic him.
Their wounds... Ike could not see at first without seeing past the horrible wounds. He focused on their undress. He felt ashamed for these poor people and for himself. It seemed like sin itself to see their jumble of pubic patches and lolling thighs and randomly exposed breasts and stomachs that could no longer be held in or chests held high. In his shock, Ike stood above them, and the details swarmed up: here a faint tattoo of a rose, there a cesarean scar, the marks of surgeries and accidents, the edges of a bikini tan scribed upon a Mexican beach. Some of this was meant to be hidden, even to lovers, some to be revealed. None of it was meant to be seen this way.
Ike made himself get on with it. There were five of them, one male, Bernard. He started to identify the women, but with a rush of fatigue he suddenly forgot their names altogether. At the moment, only one of them mattered to him, and she was not here.
The snapped ends of very white bone stood from lawnmower-like gashes. Body cavities gaped empty. Some fingers were crooked, some missing at the root. Bitten off? A woman’s head had been crushed to a thick, panlike sac. Even her hair was anonymous with gore, b
ut the pubis was blond. She was, poor creature, thank God, not Kora.
That familiarity one reaches with victims began. Ike put one hand to the ache behind his eyes, then started over again. His light was failing. The massacre had no answer. Whatever had happened to them could happen to him.
“Stick, Crockett,” he commanded.
First things first. He counted on his fingers: six here, Cleo up the tunnel, Kora somewhere. That left Owen still at large.
Ike stepped among the bodies, searching for clues. He had little experience with such extremes of trauma, but there were a few things he could tell. Judging by the blood trails, it looked like an ambush. And it had been done without a gun. There were no bullet holes. Ordinary knives were out of the question, too. The lacerations were much too deep and massed so strangely, here upon the upper body, there at the backs of the legs, that Ike could only imagine a pack of men with machetes. It looked more like an attack by wild animals, especially the way a thigh had been stripped to the bone.
But what animal lived miles inside a mountain? What animal collected its prey in a neat row? What animal showed this kind of savagery, then conformity? Such frenzy, then such method. The extremes were psychotic. All too human.
Maybe one man could have done all this, but Owen? He was smaller than most of these women. And slower. Yet these poor people had all been caught and mutilated within a few meters of one another. Ike tried to imagine himself as the killer, to conceive the speed and strength necessary to commit such an act.
There were more mysteries. Only now did Ike notice the gold coins scattered like confetti around them. It looked almost like a payoff, he now recognized, an exchange for the theft of their wealth. For the dead were missing rings and bracelets and necklaces and watches. Everything was gone. Wrists, fingers, and throats were bare. Earrings had been torn from lobes. Bernard’s eyebrow ring had been plucked away.