The Abominable: A Novel

4.

It was almost dusk when we reached Base Camp.

Everything had taken too long—shepherding the six frightened Sherpas down the glacier to Camp II at 19,800 feet, checking out that the camp hadn’t been harmed and didn’t seem to be inhabited by yetis or mountain demons, helping the Sherpas break camp and then reload the tents, poles, and stakes—one big Whymper tent bound for Camp III and three smaller Meades—and finally convincing the anxious Sherpas that they’d be safe on the five-mile carry between Camps II and III. In the end, only Semchumbi’s possession of the heavy Webley pistol persuaded them to head back up the glacier; their friends and relations at Camp III would be waiting for their protection with that gun.

At Camp II the Deacon asked Nawang Bura to go down to Base Camp with us since he was the only surviving Sherpa who claimed to have seen the yeti attack. Before leaving for Camp I and Base Camp, the six of us used the big Primus in the mess tent at Camp II to cook up a hearty lunch of cocoa—hotter than anything the five of us had drunk in days—as well as pea soup, biscuits, ham, cheese, and some fresh chocolate bars for dessert.

After the mid-afternoon meal, I was sure that all of us wanted to crawl into one of the few remaining tents at Camp II and sleep around the clock. But we couldn’t.

It was two and a half miles from Camp II down to Camp I at only 17,800 feet—relatively easy going when we’d formerly hiked up and down the bamboo-wand-marked path in the center of the Trough, but this Tuesday we stayed away from the usual trail and took twice as long descending on a rough lateral moraine that ran above the Trough and abutted the glacier itself. The high moraine route across larger stones was much harder than the usual walk down the Trough, but we were anxious not to blunder into whatever might be waiting for us at Camp I or coming up from that camp. We wanted to see them before they saw us.

Nothing and no one unusual waited for us at Camp I. The tents were empty, extra oxygen rigs and food stores cached right where they’d been when we’d passed this way days ago heading up to the North Col. We studied the few snowfields around Camp I, attempting to find strange boot prints—or, I admitted only to myself, the gigantic footstep imprints of a yeti—but other than the total absence of the few Sherpas who’d been permanently stationed there, there was nothing unusual to see at our first camp above Base Camp. I admit that after days and nights at real altitude, the air at 17,800 feet felt thick enough to swim in.

It was a final three miles from Camp I down to Base Camp at a mere 16,500 feet, and once again we stayed off the beaten trail—which prolonged both the descent and my anxiety. By the time we reached a moraine ridge that looked out and across the next lower ridge to Base Camp itself, we were all, save for Nawang Bura, carrying Very pistols in our gloved or bare hands. The Deacon’s much larger Very pistol looked gigantic compared to the smaller German flare pistols carried by J.C., Reggie, Pasang, and me. Nawang had brought a large carving knife with him from Camp II.

Personally, I wished the Deacon had kept the damned revolver.

We found a place where we could all lie on our bellies along the rocky ridge that looked over the final moraine ridge between us and Base Camp, and we studied the camp through our binoculars.

“Douce Mère de Dieu,” whispered Jean-Claude.

I couldn’t speak. I just let my jaw sag and worked hard at keeping the field glasses from shaking in my hands.

There were bodies spread all around Base Camp. Every tent was torn and collapsed, including the large Whymper mess and infirmary tents, and even the canvas tarps had been ripped off the sanga-walled low stone enclosures.

The bodies were sprawled seemingly at random, and none of them looked intact. Here there was a decapitated torso, there a body with its head and limbs intact but with all of its internal organs ripped out; far out on the plain beyond the point where the glacial stream turned into a shallow river, vultures circled and swooped over two more dead bodies. We could tell through the glasses that those two farthest-flung corpses were dressed in Sherpa clothing, but we could make no identification—especially since the low clouds kept moving along the ground like a thick fog, obscuring the bodies from our view and then suddenly revealing them again in all their gore and horror. The amount of blood at Base Camp was…absurd was the only word that came to mind at the time.

So we couldn’t make out anyone’s identity in the camp area through the binoculars, only gaze at the ungainly attitudes of death, each torn body, lopped-off limb, and decapitated head in its own pool of blood.

I didn’t fully believe what I was seeing. I lowered the glasses, wiped my eyes, and looked again. The field of carnage remained the same.

Pasang stood to walk down to the camp, but the Deacon silently pulled him back low behind the moraine ridgeline. “We’ll wait awhile,” whispered the Deacon.

“There may be wounded men there who need tending,” said Pasang.

The Deacon whispered, “They’re all dead.” We all sat propped against a rock while the mists opened and then closed around us. We took turns watching with binoculars until real evening gloom began setting in.

“There might be wounded men we can’t see from here,” whispered Pasang. I’d never seen the Sherpa so worked up. “I need to go down there.”

The Deacon shook his head. “Semchumbi’s body count was right. Everyone’s there, and they’re obviously all dead. Wait.” It wasn’t a request. I’d never heard former British Army captain Richard Davis Deacon’s military command voice before.

Time passed. The clouds kept hiding bodies, revealing them, then hiding them again. It grew colder. Nothing living moved except the occasional gorak raven alighting on one of the ravaged corpses. The light was very dim when the Deacon finally said, “All right.”

The Deacon suggested—quietly commanded—that we spread out as we approached the killing ground. I noticed that he put his own flare pistol in his pocket but gestured for the other four of us to keep ours in hand. Only later did I realize that any enemy hiding in the rocks might easily mistake our 12-gauge Very pistols for actual pistols; the Deacon’s flare-barreled, military-issue blunderbuss gave away the illusion.

It was a bizarre and disturbing inspection. My instinct was to check every bloodied but intact body for any signs of life—after all, hadn’t Pasang brought Lobsang Sherpa back to life at Camp V with his absurdly large adrenaline needle? But the Deacon hurried our inspections, hushed our groans and exclamations when we recognized old friends amongst the dead, and gestured for J.C. and me to join him in converging on the large Whymper tent that had held the crates of weapons.

The large tent was torn apart, rags of canvas hanging like shreds of flesh we’d seen on some of the corpses scattered about. All of the crates had been torn open as if by a wildly swung axe (or claws, I wondered?), but the crates holding the hunting rifles and all the extra boxes of cartridges—for the Webley as well as for the rifles—had simply disappeared.

The Deacon crouched so that the rock sangas the Sherpas had erected around this former tent would give us a little cover from any armed assassins in the surrounding rocks and hills. At the moment, the constantly shifting cloud-fog was our best (and only) friend.

“Well, the yetis are armed now, if they weren’t before,” the Deacon said softly to Jean-Claude and me. Reggie, Pasang, and a visibly terrified Nawang Bura were still out in the fog moving from body to body, kneeling briefly, and then going on to the next corpse.

“Don’t cluster in tight groups,” ordered the man who again struck me as Captain Richard Davis Deacon of the Yorkshire Regiment’s 33rd/76th Foot Battalion. “It’s better that we raise our voices from a distance if we have to than group into tight target clusters.”

“Certainly no human being could do this,” said Reggie. She was standing over the corpse of a Sherpa who’d had his heart and all interior organs scooped out of his body. His face was covered with blood but still recognizable. The absolute identifiers were the shoes, specially made by our resident Sherpa cobbler for a man whose toes had just been amputated.

“Ang Chiri,” I said softly, not coming closer than ten or twelve feet from Reggie and the terrible corpse.

“I need to do a quick postmortem on one or two of these remains to find the actual cause of death,” said Pasang. “Mr. Perry, Monsieur Clairoux, Lady Bromley-Montfort, could you help me carry Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s bodies to what’s left of the infirmary tent? Some of the operating board is still intact, and I saw a workable lantern in the debris.”

To find the actual cause of death? I mumbled to myself. These men had been torn and clawed and bitten to bloody shreds and shattered bones. What could an autopsy show?

The Deacon had a different question. “You’re going to light a lantern and do postmortem examinations while these killers may still be around and waiting?” he asked from where he was crouched over the headless corpse of Lhakpa Yishay. I knew it was Lhakpa because his severed head had been propped between the exposed and shattered ribs in his hollowed-out chest. I thought of the Breakers of the Dead.

“Yes, I need the light from the lanterns,” said Pasang. “And, Mr. Deacon, would you please carry over Lhakpa Yishay’s head…yes, just the head. Once I get the bodies within the sanga rock walls of the infirmary, we can disperse again according to your wishes.”

The Deacon asked me to give Pasang some cover with my stubby Very pistol while Pasang was absorbed in his work under the cone of yellow light coming down from the lantern hanging on a tall tentpole he’d propped against the splintered operating table. I tried to keep my gaze averted—staring out into the shifting cloud-fog as it moved between us and the ice seracs and moraine ridges, every movement of fog looking to me like something huge and gray suddenly lurching out of the darkness—but sometimes I had to look back to where Pasang was digging in Ang Chiri’s emptied-out chest cavity. I realized that Pasang was using a scalpel and tongs from his doctor’s bag—most of the rest of the medical tools in the former infirmary tent here at Base Camp had been dumped and scattered but not carried away—to probe around poor Ang’s all-too-visible spinal cord.

I quickly looked away, back toward the gathering darkness all around us. In the oversized gray, waterproof Shackleton anoraks worn over their bulging goose down jackets, Reggie, the Deacon, Jean-Claude, and even Nawang Bura looked too much like yetis standing or ambling in the roiling cloud-fog. It was beginning to snow again.

I heard a “plink” of metal on metal behind me and turned in time to see Pasang using tongs to drop something small and dark into a white metal basin on the autopsy-stained operating board.

“Mr. Perry, could you please help me remove Mr. Ang Chiri’s body—we’ll set it over there on the ground just within the sanga—and perhaps help me lift Mr. Chedi onto the table?”

I did so, donning my thick overmittens so the blood wouldn’t get on my hands. That was a mistake; I never did get the blood off those mittens.

I admit that I stared when Pasang lifted Lhakpa Yishay’s disembodied head, held it close to his own face, and rotated it under the light as if he were inspecting a rare crystal. The entire left side of Lhakpa’s face had been gouged out—scooped out, actually—as if by a massive bear’s paw and claws. I could see something gray and glistening from the depths of that terrible cavity.

I turned away again and fought down nausea just as the doctor set the head down on the table, leaning it on the right side of Lhakpa’s shattered face. Then Pasang lifted a thin but wicked-looking saw. I resisted the impulse to put my hands over my ears as I heard the rasp of that saw on Lhakpa’s skull. In a minute, there was another “plink” of metal dropping into metal, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, Pasang had moved Lhakpa’s head aside and was digging around in Norbu Chedi’s disemboweled corpse.

Jesus H. Christ, I thought. Is this really necessary? Can’t we just bury what’s left of the poor bastards?

Pasang had put on long rubber gloves from the doctor’s bag he’d carried down in his rucksack, but his arms were bloody up to the elbows.

Suddenly there came a rushing, rustling noise from my right, and I raised the German Very pistol, only barely avoiding pulling the trigger as I realized that the silence was being broken by Reggie, Jean-Claude, and Nawang Bura, all huddled low and moving fast behind the Deacon. Once in the rough square of the low stone sanga, the Deacon silently pointed at each person and then toward his or her appointed post along the low wall. The sahibs still had their Very pistols in their hands. Nawang Bura now had his knife tucked in his broad belt and was carrying a meat cleaver he’d found somewhere amidst the detritus of Base Camp.

“Find anything?” I whispered.

“Twelve dead, just as Nawang Bura told us,” hissed the Deacon from his place opposite the gap in the sanga that had served as the entrance to the infirmary tent.

“What about the two out on the plain?” I whispered.

“Both dead. Heads smashed in. Hearts ripped out,” the Deacon whispered back.

“Who went out to check on them?” I asked.

“Me.”

I tried to imagine having enough courage, even with the enveloping nightfall and fog, to walk alone and exposed those hundreds of yards out to where the two bodies lay on the plain. I didn’t think that I could have done it. Then I realized that the Deacon had almost certainly done that very thing, exposing himself to enemy fire that way and worse, a hundred times or more during the four years of the War.

“Do we know who they were other than Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay?” I managed to ask.

The Deacon whispered to the others crouching around the sanga before answering me. “Keep a sharp watch out. Try looking out of the corners of your eyes—one picks up small motions better that way.” Then to Dr. Pasang, “Will you be finished and dousing that bloody lantern soon by any chance?”

Pasang nodded, dropped a final piece of metal into the metal pan, and turned off the lantern. The relief of no longer being a lighted target…visible meal?…made me sigh audibly.

Reggie moved closer to me along the north stone wall and whispered, “Jake, we identified everyone. It wasn’t easy. Besides Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, the dead were Nyima Tsering, Namgya Sherpa, Uchung Sherpa, Chunbi Sherpa, Da Annullu, Tshering Lhamo—he was the young Buddhist priest trainee you may remember…”

I recalled our thin, always smiling Tiger Sherpa who’d spent so much time talking to the priests at the Rongbuk Monastery.

“…and also Kilu Temba, Ang Tshering, and Ang Nyima. Those last two were the ones who’d run across the stream to the north.”

“Were the two Angs brothers?” I whispered.

It was just light enough for me to see Reggie shake her hooded head. “‘Ang’ is just a diminutive term, Jake. It can mean ‘small and beloved.’ Ang Tshering meant ‘beloved Long Life.’ Ang Nyima meant ‘beloved Sunday-born.’”

I could only shake my head in sorrow and embarrassment. I hadn’t even understood these men’s names. To me they’d all been porters—a means to our ends, “our” being the Deacon’s, J.C.’s, and mine—and I’d never even bothered to learn more than a few words of their language, and those mostly commands.

I vowed that if I got out of this mess alive, I’d be a better person.

I noticed that the Deacon had taken off his Shackleton jacket and draped it over himself and Pasang as if it were a rain poncho. Then one of the little miner’s lights clicked on and I saw through the folds in their blackout mini-tent that they were looking at small, dull-colored metal objects—three of them—that were in Dr. Pasang’s metal basin.

“Bullets,” Pasang said just loudly enough for the rest of us to hear. “Slugs. Taken from each of the dead men. With Ang Chiri, the bullet had passed through his heart—his heart was missing, you may remember—but had lodged in his spine. The bullet is deformed from impact, but I think you can make it out, Mr. Deacon. It’s similar to this one, which was in Lhakpa Yishay’s brain, had not passed through hard bone, and was not deformed.”

“Nine-millimeter Parabellum,” whispered the Deacon, holding the larger bullet. “I saw a lot of these pulled out of British lads during the War.”

“I did also,” said Dr. Pasang. I remembered then that Pasang had been studying and interning and working in British hospitals during the War.

“This type was usually fired from a German Luger pistol,” said the Deacon. “Seven-round magazine. Sometimes, towards the end of the War, this kind of nine-millimeter round was fired from the Luger Parabellum M-Seventeen variant—a sort of machine gun carbine, thirty rounds, longer barrel.”

“We didn’t hear any shots,” hissed Jean-Claude. He was crouched, flare pistol in hand, and diligently looking into the foggy darkness in his sector. He didn’t even turn his head toward us when he spoke.

“With the wind blowing the way it’s been,” said the Deacon, “and snow falling…Acoustics get very strange on the mountain.”

“We heard Lobsang Sherpa shouting at Camp Five last night,” whispered Reggie. “Heard him over high wind gusts.”

“Which were blowing straight up the mountain toward us from where he lay in Camp Five,” the Deacon whispered back. “With all the seracs and penitentes between Base Camp and Camps Two and Three, with the wind gusting from the west as well as the northwest last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one, even those Sherpas still at Camp Two, heard a single shot.”

“So we’re looking for yetis carrying German Lugers?” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. Or at least to lift my own morale.

No one responded.

Under their Shackleton anorak shelter, Pasang was holding up the final bullet of the three he’d retrieved. “This one is odd. Still intact, but hard for me to identify. Not nine millimeter.”

“Eight millimeter,” whispered the Deacon. “Popular with the Austrians and Hungarians in pistols designed before the War by Karel Krnka and Georg Roth. The most common pistol—first used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, later produced by the Germans for infantry officers—was the Roth Steyr M. nineteen oh-seven semiautomatic pistol. I had one aimed at my face in a trench one day, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.”

I had to ask—“How many rounds did the thing hold?”

“Ten,” said the Deacon. He shut off the small lamp, tugged his Shackleton jacket back on over his head, and gestured for all of us to duckwalk closer to him.

“I wish to God we were dealing with yeti, but we’re not,” he whispered. “We have to assume that we’re dealing with several very human killers—perhaps the seven men Nawang Bura saw from a distance—at least some of whom are armed with semiautomatic pistols and perhaps even fully automatic weapons.”

“Machine guns?” I said stupidly.

“Submachine guns,” corrected the Deacon. “We don’t know. But we do know that we have to get back up to Camp Three as quickly as we can—in case these man-monsters try to get at our Sherpas.”

“But the wounds on our Tigers,” hissed Reggie. “The lopped-off limbs, the damage to the tents, the decapitations, hearts torn out…”

“Most probably done with edged weapons or specialized tools—a very sharp garden claw could do some of what we saw here,” whispered Pasang. “They mauled and desecrated the corpses in order to cast fear into the hearts of our Sherpas.”

“It cast fear into my heart,” whispered Jean-Claude, but he was smiling ever so slightly. How the hell can he smile? I wondered.

“We’re not going to rope up,” said the Deacon, taking time to look each of us in the eye, “but we’re going to move in single file and as quietly as we can—stay in touching distance of the person ahead of you, just put a finger on his shoulder if you must—and those of you with Very pistols, carry them loaded, keep the extra cartridges in an outer pocket where you can get at them quickly.”

“But our Sherpas have your Webley,” said Reggie. “We’re the ones with no real weapons. Shouldn’t the Sherpas come down and rescue us?”

The Deacon smiled. “I’ll ask for my pistol back when we get to Camp Three. Right now, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of one armed cook against six or seven or more armed murderers. We know what those predators are capable of.” The Deacon nodded in the direction of the killing fields. I could smell the coppery stink of blood and the slight but growing stench of decomposing flesh and brains.

“Who are they?” whispered J.C.

The Deacon didn’t answer. He gestured for us to get ready to leave the rock-walled protection of the infirmary sanga.

“We’re going straight up the Trough, then?” whispered Reggie as we got into single file, the Deacon leading, Reggie next, then me, then Pasang, then Nawang Bura, and finally Jean-Claude.

“Yes,” whispered the Deacon. “But not on the path. From ice pillar to ice pillar, penitente to penitente, from one moraine ridge to the next. Move when I move; stop when I stop. If I have to fire a flare at someone, check your targets before you fire. Remember, these Very pistols weren’t built to be used as weapons. More than ten feet of distance from your target and you have sod-all chance of hitting someone. Make each shot count.”

None of us had anything to add to that. One by one, following the Deacon, our left arms extended to touch the one in front of us, the Very pistols in our right hands, we moved into the swirling, snow-driven darkness and up the Rongbuk Glacier valley back toward Mount Everest.