The Abominable: A Novel

5.

As we walked slowly up the dark Trough, moving quickly from the theoretical cover of one ice pinnacle or moraine ridge to another (but no longer crouching or duckwalking except when the Deacon held up his arm as a signal to stop), I began to wonder when this expedition had crossed the boundary from the merely fantastic into the region of the absurdly unbelievable.

The line of the six of us slow-jogging from one 50-foot-tall penitente ice pinnacle to the next reminded me of when I was a kid and forced my two sisters to play Cowboys and Indians with me on a small hill set in the thick groves of trees behind our family home in Boston’s old suburb of Wellesley. We’d hide, peek out, run to the next tree, and then hide again. When I could see their skirts or pinafores flash in the dappled forest light, I’d fire my carved wooden pistol at them. But my sisters, never wanting to get their frocks dirty, always refused to fall dead on the forest floor or roll down the hill when I’d clearly shot them. I, on the other hand, fell dead so violently and rolled down the hill so gracefully that eventually we’d boiled the Cowboys and Indians down to a more pure kid-activity which I thought of as “shoot Jacob and watch him die and roll.”

Thinking of my sisters made me remember that none of us had sent any letters to friends or family since we’d sailed from England. This Everest expedition was supposed to be a secret—our secret—so there could be no letters or postcards stamped from Colombo or Port Said or Calcutta or Darjeeling. Quite a change from the British ’21, ’22, and ’24 expeditions, when runners carried mail back and forth between Everest and Darjeeling, keeping the climbers in intermittent but solid contact with the world beyond. If someone like Henry Morshead or Howard Somervell wrote home saying that they wanted some chocolate cake, chocolate cake they would receive a few weeks later.

I knew that Jean-Claude had written a letter to his sweetheart—or was she already his fiancée?—Anne Marie, every day of this trip. Their plan, I knew, was to marry in December after J.C. received a promotion to Chamonix Guide First Class, and thus a boost of his meager pay.

I don’t know if the Deacon wrote letters during this trip; I’d never seen him write anything except official expedition letters and notes in his leather-bound travel log. In the first weeks of the expedition I’d written a few letters to my parents, one to an old Harvard girlfriend, and even one to my favorite sister, Eleanor, but I got tired of packing the letters around with me, so I’d poured my writing talents into my detailed climbing journal.

The upshot of my thinking those moments scurrying up the Trough was If we die on this goddamned glacier or mountain, no one will ever know.

After an hour of this scuttling from one ice pinnacle to the next, never walking exactly on the bamboo-wanded and red-flagged center path, but never wandering that far to either side of it, we reached Camp I at 17,800 feet, 1,300 feet above the death fields that had been Base Camp.

Camp I had looked fine on our way down; now, just hours later, it had been torn apart. The same slashed canvas, tumbled poles, broken-open crates, and general sense of total destruction we’d seen at Base Camp. But there were no bodies at Camp I. We checked the snow for tracks, but other than those of some hobnailed boots—many of our Tiger Sherpas had been wearing hobnailed boots—there was nothing to see.

Then Jean-Claude had hissed at us, and there in a 15-foot patch of snow were three gigantic yeti tracks. Each was similar to a human footprint other than its absurd length—more than 18 inches long, I guessed—and the fact that the big toe curved inward, almost like a gorilla’s foot or other large primate’s.

“Big fellow based on his stride,” whispered the Deacon. “Easily seven feet tall. Perhaps eight.”

“Surely you don’t…,” began Reggie.

“I don’t,” the Deacon whispered to her. “Not for an instant. You can see beneath each footprint where someone in boots stepped in the place where each fake footprint was to go, then pressed down this huge yeti-foot imprint when he took his next step.”

“It seems an elaborate and rather silly ruse if the men doing this intend to kill us all anyway,” Reggie said.

The Deacon shrugged. “I suspect that the carnage at Base Camp and this sad children’s play with the footprints was aimed at scaring off all of our Sherpas. Or perhaps they plan to kill all of us, including all our Sherpas, but sell this yeti idea to the locals. In the end, though, it’s not the Sherpas these wanton murderers want to kill; it’s the four of us. Five of us, counting Dr. Pasang.”

I thought that this was very reassuring.

Camp II was burning. They’d torched everything they could find, but they hadn’t found the cache of oxygen rigs which we’d hidden behind snow-covered boulders in the maze of seracs, penitentes, and moraine on the glacier side of the camp on the way down.

“One could see this fire from Camp Three,” said Reggie. “They’ve given up all pretense of being yeti.”

“They’re yetis with matches and cigarette lighters,” said Jean-Claude.

“Will the fourteen men we left at Camp Three climb onto the North Col to escape, do you think?” asked Dr. Pasang.

“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “It would be too much like retreating into a cul-de-sac for them.”

“They may scatter,” said Reggie. “Climb to the moraine ridges before descending. Try to make it down to Base Camp and back out onto the plains in small groups or one by one.”

“That would be the smart thing to do,” agreed Jean-Claude.

“Do you believe they will do that, Mr. Deacon?” asked Pasang.

“No.”

I was looking at the sets of oxygen tanks on their frames. Their dials showed most of them were topped off with pressure. “What do we do with these things?” I asked.

“Bring them with us,” said the Deacon.

“Why on earth would we do that?” I said. “Aren’t we just going to fetch the surviving Sherpas from Camp Three and make a run for Rongbuk Monastery or Chobuk or Shekar Dzong?” Of the three places I’d mentioned, only the last—Shekar Dzong—seemed large enough and far enough away to feel like a place of temporary safety, even though it was a little less than 60 miles north of Base Camp by trail, less than 40 miles north as the gorak flies.

At the moment I wouldn’t have minded being a gorak. But even as I thought that, I thought of the hollowed-out rectum and insides of George Mallory and felt a little sick; there were seeds or something visible in the glorious climber’s opened abdominal cavity, and I thought—not for the first sickening time—that I might have been looking at the last thing Mallory had eaten on his last day alive.

I shook my head. This sort of thinking didn’t help our current situation. We were crouched in a rough circle around the cached oxygen rigs.

“…Sherpas probably won’t flee up the fixed ropes and ladder to Camp Four because they know these…killers…would have them trapped up there,” J.C. was saying. “But the same applies to us. The climbing part of this expedition is over—isn’t it, Ree-shard? Why on earth would we haul these heavy oxygen sets back up the glacier?”

The Deacon sighed.

“We have to climb again if we get the chance,” Reggie said softly.

“Why?” I asked. “You can’t expect us to continue the search for your cousin after all this, can you? I mean…think about it, please, Lady Bromley-Montfort…fourteen of our Sherpas are dead, a dozen of them at the hands of sadistic butchers. How on earth could we even consider going back up the mountain? And for what…to summit it?”

“No, not to summit,” Reggie insisted. “But it’s more imperative than ever that we find Bromley’s body.”

“She’s right,” said the Deacon. Reggie blinked at him in obvious surprise at his quick agreement.

I didn’t understand at all, but I could see that Jean-Claude was nodding. His glance moved from Reggie to the Deacon and back. “This expedition never was just about recovering Percival’s body for the family, was it, Reggie?”

She bit her lower lip until I could see blood, black in the starlight. “No,” she said at last. “It never was.” She shifted her gaze to the Deacon. “You know why it’s so important to find Percy’s body? Or to make sure no one else can?”

“I believe so,” whispered the Deacon.

“My God,” said Reggie. “Do we have a mutual friend? Someone who writes a lot of cheques?”

The Deacon smiled. “But who prefers it to be backed up by gold? Yes, my lady.”

“My God,” Reggie said again, running her fingers over her brow as if she were hot. “I never guessed that you also might…”

“I don’t understand a word either of you has just said,” said J.C. “But perhaps I should let you know that Nawang Bura has slipped away in the darkness.”

The Deacon nodded. “About two minutes ago. He headed north, back towards Base Camp and, perhaps, escape.”

“He’s not a coward,” said Pasang.

“No, none of the Sherpas have been cowards,” agreed the Deacon. “They’re some of the bravest men I’ve ever known, and that’s saying a lot after the War. But Nawang and the others are up against something extraordinary that their faith and upbringing tell them is a real threat.”

“What do you know about their faith, Ree-shard?” Jean-Claude sounded irritated.

It was Reggie who answered. “Didn’t you two know that Captain Deacon has been a Buddhist for years?”

I stifled a laugh. “That’s nonsense. The Deacon didn’t even want to go for Dzatrul Rinpoche’s blessing ceremony.”

“There are Buddhists who don’t believe in demons and who don’t venerate or worship statues of the Buddha,” the Deacon said.

My smile went away. “You can’t be serious.”

“Haven’t you seen your friend sitting in the lotus position, in silence, every morning during the trek in?” asked Pasang.

“Oui,” said J.C., sounding as shocked and disbelieving as I was. “But I thought he was…thinking.”

“Me too,” I said. “Planning the day.”

“People thinking about the coming day don’t hum ‘Om mani padme hum’ under their breath while they’re sitting in the lotus position,” Reggie said.

“Well, dress me up and call me Sally,” said Jean-Claude.

I confess that I barked a quite audible laugh then. Where the hell had J.C. learned that phrase?

“May I ask why we’re wasting time here discussing my possible philosophical peculiarities,” said the Deacon, “when we have to make a decision now whether to gather the Sherpas at Camp Three and make a run for it—or to get as many Sherpas started north as we can get going—and then the five of us head up to the Col before our Luger-carrying yeti chums get there? Or should we also make a run for it down the valley?”

“One question first, Ree-shard.”

“What’s that, Jean-Claude?”

“When exactly did you become a Buddhist?”

“One July nineteen sixteen,” whispered the Deacon. “But luckily for all of us right now, I’m a poor excuse for a Buddhist. If I get a chance to kill these people who’ve murdered our Sherpa friends, I will kill them without the slightest compunction or hesitation. If I do so, you may call me a lapsed Buddhist.”

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours I felt goose bumps pop up on both arms and the hair there and on the back of my neck stand straight up. Kill all of the strangers? How could we possibly do that when they had all the guns and we had these little toy flare pistols?

“I’ll follow you anywhere,” said Jean-Claude.

“Me too,” I whispered. Did I really mean that? I did.

“I shall stay with Lady Bromley-Montfort wherever she goes,” said Pasang. “And obey commands from whomever she follows.”

The Deacon rubbed his forehead, as if he really didn’t want to assume command again in any situation where people were going to kill and be killed. But he said, “Once we go back up onto that glacier headed for Camp Three, there may be no turning back. You’ll just have to trust in our judgment…in this case, Reggie’s and mine. She’s still the overall expedition leader. I’ll be the climbing and combat leader.”

“Can you tell us why finding Bromley’s corpse is so much more important than we thought?” whispered J.C. to Reggie.

The lady bit her bloody lip again and looked to the Deacon.

“If we get to Camp Four on the North Col all right, we’ll tell you the reason,” he said. “Otherwise, if we’re going to make a run for Shekar Dzong and points east anyway, it’s better if we don’t discuss it.”

“All right,” said Jean-Claude, as if the Deacon had explained something.

I was totally confused but I didn’t argue.

Far ahead and higher than us and to the east, a red glow suddenly grew. We watched it for several cold minutes.

“It’s out on the glacier,” whispered Reggie. “Closer to us than to Camp Three. A red flare?”

“It’s lasted too long,” said the Deacon, “even to be a railway flare.”

“A horrid light,” whispered Reggie.

“As if someone’s opened the portals of Hell for us,” said Jean-Claude.

“You know it will be a trap,” Pasang said softly. “A lure.”

“Yes,” said the Deacon, “but we need to take some prisoners to see just what the hell is going on and who we’re up against. We’ll be careful, but we have to walk into their trap. Let us think of ourselves as a night patrol in no-man’s-land.”

“Did most of the men on night patrols in no-man’s-land survive their patrols?” I asked.

“No,” said the Deacon. He gestured for us to remove fifteen of the eighteen oxygen tanks and their attached valves and rubber hoses and face masks from the aluminum frames and to stick the rigs into our almost empty rucksacks. We did so with as little wasted energy and noise as possible.

Then the Deacon gestured and—the four of us still in single file behind him with J.C. bringing up the rear—moved in a half-crouching, almost running gait, crampons crunching against rock and ice, up through the maze of snow-shrouded ice pinnacles and out onto the exposed ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier.