The Abominable: A Novel

1.

Note to Mr. Dan Simmons: Up to this part, I’ve written out my story mostly in present tense because I was working from daily journal entries and climbing notes I’d made at the time in the summer and autumn of 1924 and spring of 1925. Writing in present tense helped bring things alive and immediate for me again. I know that wasn’t very professional of me, in any writing sense, but this last section of my tale has been told to only one person, and never written down at all. Not even in my notes at the time. I write this part as I remember it now, in past tense never recorded at the time, but please understand that every word that I set down here is as true and precise as I can remember and tell it, and that you will be only the second person since 1925 to hear this part of the tale.

— Jake Perry

Within five minutes of Pasang’s confirming hearing the screaming, three of us—the Deacon, Pasang, and I—were outside in the swirling snow. It had been decided that someone should remain behind to hold the tent staves; Reggie had volunteered, J.C. and I had tossed a coin, and he lost.

“Do you still hear it?” shouted the Deacon to Pasang.

“No, but I see something,” said the Sherpa. He pointed downhill toward a point about 300 feet below us near what remained of the two tents that had been our original site for Camp V.

It took me a second because of the snow blowing in the cone of light from my Welsh miner’s headlamp, but then I saw it: a hellish red glow behind large boulders 100 feet or so downhill from us.

With three of us tied onto a single rope—we hadn’t taken time to put on our crampons—I led the descent down the steep boulder slope. Not much snow was sticking to the rocks because of the wind, but there was a thick enough ice sheen to make every rock more slippery than usual. It felt strange to be walking only in hobnailed boots again. Already, I lacked the sense of secure footing that the crampon blades had been giving me in recent days.

In fifteen minutes we reached our original Camp V site, the one tent destroyed by rockfall, the other collapsed, just in time to see a red flare sputter out. It obviously hadn’t been one of the short-lived Very flares but rather one of the handheld, longer-lasting railroad flares we’d brought along in both red and white varieties.

Ten feet from the flare a man in one of the expedition’s goose down duvet jackets lay unmoving on his back. He’d collapsed very near the tumbled opening of the intact but fallen Meade tent.

We leaned over him, our headlights playing across the man’s upturned face and staring eyes.

“It’s Lobsang Sherpa,” said the Deacon. “He’s dead.”

When we’d met at Camp VI on Monday morning, the Deacon had mentioned carrying up to Camp V the day before with only a few porters and Lobsang acting as sirdar. Now, barely eighteen hours later, Lobsang Sherpa, a small but determined high-climbing Tiger Sherpa who’d earned his acting-sirdar position through unbelievably hard work and long carries, did indeed look dead, his mouth gaping open, his pupils looking to be fixed and dilated.

“No one else dies up here this day,” said Pasang and set down his rucksack. He was the only one of us to bring a pack along. I saw in the dancing headlamps and swirling snow that his leather doctor’s bag was inside his already heavy rucksack. “Mr. Perry,” he added, “if you’d be so kind as to open Lobsang Sherpa’s jacket and shirt layers so that his chest is bare.”

I went to one knee on the steep slope, shucked off my clumsy outer mittens, and did what Pasang had ordered—not expecting any sort of resuscitation technique to do any good on a man who looked so dead, his body and exposed face already coated with a thin veneer of windblown ice crystals.

But Pasang pulled out the largest syringe I’ve seen since a medical-farce sketch done by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding group. The needle must have been six inches long; the whole thing looked more like something a veterinarian would use on cattle than anything that could conceivably be applied to a human being.

“Hold his arms down,” instructed Pasang and ran his fingers across Lobsang’s bare brown chest. The Sherpa’s unblinking eyes still stared up into eternity.

Why hold his arms? I remember thinking. Is the corpse going somewhere?

Pasang was busy counting ribs and finding the poor Sherpa’s bony breastbone under the skin, and then he used both his now bare hands to lift the ridiculous syringe three feet into the air and then plunge it down through Lobsang Sherpa’s skin and breastbone directly into the man’s heart. The point of the needle made a sound as it pierced Lobsang’s breastbone, a sickening clack audible even over the last hisses of the red flare and the howling of the wind. Pasang pushed down the plunger of the huge syringe.

Lobsang Sherpa’s body arched upward—he would have thrown himself off the mountain if the Deacon and I hadn’t been holding him down—and the little man began gasping in great gulps of air.

“Jesus Christ,” the Deacon whispered to himself. I agreed. It was the damnedest medical thing I’d ever seen—and continued to be so for another six decades and more.

“Adrenaline straight to his heart,” gasped Dr. Pasang. “If anything can bring him back, that will.”

Pasang put his foot next to Lobsang Sherpa and pulled the needle from the man’s chest the way I’d heard that soldiers were taught to remove a stuck bayonet from an enemy’s carcass. Lobsang gasped, blinked wildly, and tried to sit up. After a few moments, Pasang and I worked to help Lobsang to his thick-booted feet. To me it felt like I was helping Lazarus stand.

Amazingly, Lobsang was able to support some of his own weight. If he hadn’t, we would have been forced to abandon him; at that altitude, even three men couldn’t carry dead weight 100 feet up a steep slope. With the Deacon and me half-supporting the blinking, gasping man and Dr. Pasang following close behind with his rucksack, the four of us staggered uphill to Reggie’s Big Tent. If there’d been little hope of five of us sleeping in the domed tent earlier, there was no chance now with a sixth person joining us. I had mixed feelings about that sixth person being alive.

We’d used the Unna cooker to heat water and soup hours earlier, and now Reggie gave the gasping Lobsang some cocoa. He gulped it down. When it looked as if he might be able to answer questions, Reggie asked the first one—in English and then in rapid-fire Nepalese. “Why have you come up here in the dark, Lobsang Sherpa?”

The man’s eyes widened again, and I had a flash of sickening memory of those dead eyes staring at nothing only a few minutes earlier.

He babbled in Nepalese, looked around, and repeated it in urgent English. “You must come down, Memsahib, Sahibs, Dr. Pasang. You must come down now. Yeti have killed everyone at Base Camp!”