The Abominable: A Novel

6.

The red glow was coming from a forest of penitentes and abutting vertical ice sheets on the south side of the Grand Crevasse we’d first tried bridging with a ladder and then found a descend-and-climb route a quarter of a mile east after that ladder had sagged. The ice uplifts just east of our main route were more like high, thin, razor-sharp upright sheaths of almost transparent ice rather than the stand-alone pinnacles further down in the Trough, and it was from within this labyrinth that the unearthly red glow was emanating.

Deacon silently gestured Jean-Claude to the lead, and we followed our Chamonix Guide through a spiderweb of unseen snow-covered crevasses. We knew they were there simply because we’d seen them in the daylight every time we’d gone up or down the glacier between Camps II and III. I had no idea how J.C. managed to avoid the crevasses at night; the clouds were still low, the fog from them still curled around us in gray tentacles, and there was absolutely no moonlight or starlight. The Deacon had navigated to this point partially by feel, partially by sheer memory, and partially by strapping his Welsh miner’s lamp around his right ankle and switching it on for only seconds at a time, illuminating just a few feet of ice or snow or rock ahead of him. Uncannily, almost every time he’d switched on the small light, there’d been a red-flagged wand within ten feet of him.

He didn’t use his ankle light as we approached the red-glowing ice ridges, then led us around behind them to the south. The bright red glow was diffused by the shifting ice mist and had turned the very air crimson.

The Deacon gestured to us all to get down and we did, responding as quickly as well-trained war dogs. He pointed to Jean-Claude, pointed again to a low ice pinnacle to the left of the opening in the ice ridge, touched his own chest, and pointed to the ice ridge to the right. J.C. nodded. The two men moved in the same instant, running forward seemingly on the toes of their crampons, flying ice chips glinting for a second like chips of frozen blood in the cold night air.

The two leaned against their respective ice columns as if readying themselves to crash through a door into a dangerous room. Then, at the Deacon’s almost imperceptible nod, both men surged around the ice walls with their Very pistols extended.

No flares were fired. For a few heart-pounding seconds they were out of sight, but then J.C. stepped back into the opening and gestured us forward. Pasang went first, then me, and then Reggie bringing up the rear. We moved carefully in the red-tinted darkness, trying to follow the Deacon’s and J.C.’s footprints in the snow, and when we reached the opening in the ice ridge, we could see that the red glow was coming from a modern electric torch—essentially a black box with a bright, directed bulb in it—and that there was a red lens set over the usually transparent lens. The snowy floor of the room-like space within the cluster of ice pillars was crossed and crisscrossed by boot prints.

“A trap…,” began Pasang.

A tall form came whirling around a penitente pinnacle toward Reggie. I had time to get an impression of a tall figure covered with long gray fur and a sharp-edged gray-white face like a human skull turned inside out. Only later did I register the black steel object in his right hand.

I was frozen but Reggie was not. She dropped to one knee as the hairy form lunged in her direction, its shaggy right arm rising, and she fired her Very pistol—a red flare—directly into the figure’s chest from a distance of only seven or eight feet.

The flare struck the tall man’s chest, ricocheted upward into the soft flesh under his chin, the furry overjacket he was wearing caught fire, the skull-face was violently jarred up and to the side, and then a second, human mouth under the mask opened wide, emitting sputtering red flare flames rather than a scream. The tall figure whirled around once, twice, three times—its chest fur burning, the flare illuminating the contorted double face like a giant red candle set in a broken jack-o’-lantern, and then the figure just…disappeared.

It didn’t go behind an ice ridge or pinnacle; one second it was simply whirling and on fire and hissing sparks and the next second…it was gone.

Then I saw the red glow coming up from within the glacier. I ran to Reggie’s side. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you, Jake,” she said, her visible breath glowing red in the flare light that seemed to be coming up through the ice under our feet. She was calmly loading a new flare cartridge into the breech of her Very pistol. Turning away, I started to run forward, toward that glow at our feet, but Jean-Claude stopped me with a strong hand on my chest.

“Crevasse,” he hissed. Then he handed me the end of the rope he’d lashed around himself and wormed forward across the ice on his belly. He stared down into the roughly circular hole in the snow, and I could see the fading red flicker of the dying flare reflected on Jean-Claude’s face.

“It’s firm to the lip,” he whispered over his shoulder and gestured us forward. The Deacon and I advanced on our bellies and elbows and stared down into the crevasse. The Deacon had brought along the heavy black box of his electric torch—which cast a much brighter beam of light than did the miner’s headlamps—and he held it at arm’s length down the abyss, presumably to shield it from being seen by others who might be on the glacier, and turned it on.

I almost pulled my head back and away, so shocking was the view of a white skull face that seemed to be staring up at us from 40 or 45 feet down. Then I realized that the mask the assailant had been wearing had been forced to the top of his head during the fall. Because his head was sagging forward, we couldn’t see his face from our vantage point. The long fur-covered jacket was still burning on his chest and around his neck, and the smell of burning flesh that rose with the smoke was sickening. I was glad that Reggie hadn’t scooted forward with the three of us.

The man had fallen backside first into the crevasse, which was almost seven feet across at the top and then narrowing to less than a foot and a half at the point where the assailant’s body had become stuck. It was obvious that his spine had been completely snapped; the hobnailed soles of his boots were staring at us on one side of the narrow gap, the top of his head with the crude yeti mask gave the illusion of his skull staring up from the other side, and by the flickering light of his burning fur jacket and in the flat glare of the Deacon’s electric torch, we could see that his glove-covered hands lay limp on his lap. And there on his lap was a black 9-millimeter Luger.

The compression of the fall had turned his body into an impossibly sharp V that had jammed solidly in the narrowest part of the crevasse; we could see that beneath his grotesquely misshapen body, the crevasse opened wider again into a black and seemingly bottomless abyss.

The Deacon doused his lamp and we wriggled back and away from the crevasse opening. Pasang and Reggie joined us in a crouched circle.

“We need that pistol,” whispered the Deacon.

“I’ll go down,” J.C. whispered. “I am the lightest. And I have my ice hammers. Ree-shard and Jake, you can belay me.”

“No, Jean-Claude,” said the Deacon after the briefest of pauses. “We’ll belay Jake down. I don’t want the sound of the ice hammer being used, and Jake has the longest, strongest legs of anyone here—he can deal with the crevasse as a chimney problem on the way up.”

I could see Jean-Claude blink in surprise.

“We need to try to get that pistol,” continued the Deacon, “but doing so will delay us in warning the Sherpas at Camp Three. It may already be too late. But we have to try. Jean-Claude, you’re our best glacier climber. Take Pasang to interpret, and the two of you go on ahead up to Camp Three as quickly as you can. Try not to use even the headlamps unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you get there before these fake yeti bastards do, have the Sherpas there set up a defensive perimeter…you’ll have only my Webley and your and Pasang’s twelve-gauge flare pistols. The rest of us will reinforce you as soon as we can get there with—I hope—that Luger on our side.”

Jean-Claude nodded but Reggie said, “No, please, let me go ahead with Jean-Claude, Richard. Pasang’s much stronger than I am and he can help you belay Jake. And I think the Sherpas might obey commands from me a bit more quickly.”

The Deacon took about one second to consider this suggestion and then nodded. “You’re right. Go ahead…be careful.”

Reggie and Jean-Claude looked at each other once and slipped away to the northwest toward the wand-marked trail without giving the rest of us so much as a farewell glance. One second they were still visible in the bloody light from the assailant’s red-filtered electric torch and the dying flames from the crevasse; the next they were lost in the darkness and curling cloud mist.

The Deacon removed a long coil of rope from his crowded, heavy rucksack—we were still carrying the extra oxygen tanks from Camp II—and handed the end of the line to me. Then he quickly crawled back to the round opening of the crevasse and embedded Pasang’s long ice axe adze down at the edge of the ragged hole and a few inches parallel to the lip of it. A foot further back, the Deacon drove his longest ice hammer as deep into the icy snow as he could, then used his penknife to cut off a strand of rope, knotted it quickly, and lashed the head of the shorter ice axe as an anchor to the longer one.

By the time he crawled back to where Pasang and I crouched, I’d double-wrapped the Miracle Rope around my waist and upper thighs as a passable sling harness, then tied on a second time with a carefully knotted friction hitch.

The Deacon stood about eight feet from the edge of the crevasse, drove his own ice axe deep into the ice there, looped the long rope around it twice, set it over Pasang’s shoulder in proper belay form, and then looped it over his own shoulder.

“Tug twice when you want us to stop lowering,” the Deacon said to me. “Tug once for a little more slack. Three tugs means bring you up.”

“Do you want anything other than the Luger?” I asked.

The Deacon shook his head. “I’d like the whole corpse so we could go through his pockets and figure out who and what we’re up against. But he’s wedged in there tightly, Jake, and I think we’d spend too many minutes working at hauling his corpse up after we retrieve you. But if he has any easily accessible pockets, go through them—hunt for a box of nine-millimeter cartridges and any papers or identification he might have on him. But don’t put yourself in more danger than you have to. With his spine totally snapped like that, he’s just a soft mass wedged there and could fall away into the abyss at any second.”

I nodded my understanding, set my headlamp gear on my head, clicked on the light, walked to the very edge of the circular crevasse hole, waited until the Deacon and Pasang were on full, tight belay, leaned far back, and rappelled down into the smoldering crevasse, crampons biting into the west ice wall, the beam of my headlamp showing blue ice fragments of the crevasse wall looking as sharp as protruding daggers.

Once down to the level of the corpse—I now estimated it as being closer to 50 feet from the surface—I tugged twice on the rope above the friction hitch, spun myself around, set my back against the ice wall I’d been rappelling down, and set one long leg on each side of the body, my crampon points dug deep into the opposite wall. The corpse and I were very close to one another. I could no longer see flames coming from the lambskin or fur vest or whatever layer was covering his regular jacket, but something was still smoldering there. I realized that it was the flesh on the man’s chest and neck.

I bent as low as I could toward the man’s face, doing everything in exaggerated slow motion so as not to knock the Luger into the darkness below, and carefully reached the gloved fingers of my left hand for the pistol.

Got it!

I brought it up and carefully tucked it into my shirt under my sweater inside my Finch duvet jacket and under my Shackleton jacket. I might fall to the bottom of this crevasse—my headlamp beam had shown no bottom to it, only ragged ice walls and hundreds of feet of black below—but I’d be damned if the pistol was going to fall out and be lost.

I studied the mask pushed up on the man’s head. It seemed to be carved out of some sort of light, white wood, then painted with exaggerated wrinkles. The carved teeth around the mouth opening were real teeth—possibly taken from wolves or huge dogs. I could see where they’d been glued into sockets in the mask.

I patted at his trouser pockets—his trousers were baggy and also covered with shaggy sheep’s fleece dyed gray to look like fur—but felt nothing so solid that it could be a cartridge box. I could feel papers in his trouser pockets under the fur outer layer, but I didn’t think I could get to them without dislodging the corpse from its V-shaped wedge. Damn.

Then I turned the headlamp full into the dead man’s real face and gasped. At first glance it looked as if goraks had eaten his eyes and that someone had poured melted wax down his face, but then I realized that his eyes had exploded and partially melted from the heat of the flare. It was vitreous humor from his eyes that had run down his stubbled cheeks like melted wax.

The man’s mouth was open wide—as if in a final parody of surprise at his own terrible death—and smoke from Reggie’s flare that had bounced up and through the underside of his jaw was wafting out and over me like some carrion eater’s terrible breath. I had to turn my head aside to the right for a minute and rest my cheek against the ice wall to breathe cleaner air there or be sick. I gulped in the clean air and fought down my rising gorge.

My movement and slight shifting of position, or perhaps some settling in the glacier itself, jogged the body slightly so that in mere seconds the man’s boots folded up over his shoulders and he slipped and slid and squeezed down through a gap less than a foot wide, his body with its snapped spine and collapsed ribs folding like some obscene accordion.

Then he was gone, and for a terrible few seconds the toe points of my crampons slipped out of the opposing wall—the body must have grazed me when it fell away, but it felt more like the dead man had gripped my ankles and tried to pull me down with him. My heart was pounding wildly and I couldn’t breathe in enough of the cold crevasse air to fill my lungs. Then I was suddenly hanging free on the rope, having completely lost my crampon grip on the opposite wall. I fell a foot or two before the Deacon and Pasang held me on belay. The Deacon’s Miracle Rope did not snap, but I could feel it stretch more than one of our old ropes would have.

I wasted no time resting there in midair, but whirled around, planted the crampon points of my right boot on the west ice wall, dug the points of my left boot into the east ice wall, extended both arms for leverage—and began working the crevasse as a chimney climb after tugging three times on the rope. I could feel the two strong men above me keeping the rope taut, but I dug points in while spread-eagled and worked to lift myself. Any of the killers could show up at any second on the glacier above, and I damned well didn’t want to be uselessly stuck in this crevasse if and when they did.

Then I was up and out of the bone-deep chill of the glacier’s guts and rolling out into the open. For a second as I kept rolling, I felt under me the wood of Pasang’s embedded ice axe that had kept the rope from cutting into the ice lip of the glacier. Getting to my knees, I retrieved the two anchor axes and stood, carefully backing away from the crevasse hole, still turned away from my two waiting friends. Both were panting; belaying a man who weighs a little over two hundred pounds is hard work at any altitude, but absurdly hard work there above 20,000 feet.

I let them gasp; I just bent over, put my hands on my knees, and tried to cough my guts up and out onto the glacier.

“That cough has been getting worse, Mr. Perry,” said Pasang. He moved away in the flickering red gloom and dug into his rucksack and doctor’s bag.

“We certainly aren’t going to sneak up on any more yetis if you keep hacking like that,” the Deacon said. “Did you get the pistol?”

I reached into my shirt to where the cold metal seemed to be burning me through several silk and cotton layers, removed the gun, and handed it to the Deacon.

He hefted the semiautomatic as if he knew how to handle the thing—I had little doubt that he did—and then he clicked a button near the trigger guard (which I later learned was the safety…the dead man in the crevasse had clicked it off), grabbed the little cylinder that tucks into the tops of Luger semiautomatic pistols, ratcheted it up and back until it locked in place, checked the now open breech, and then touched something that made the magazine that was in the stock drop into his palm.

“God damn it!”

The Deacon thumbed two 9-millimeter rounds out of the magazine, but that was it…two rounds.

“You couldn’t feel any extra cartridges in his pockets?” asked the Deacon.

“No. Nor under that yeti jacket. But I couldn’t reach his back pockets.”

The Deacon shook his head. “Unless they’ve used up all their ammunition shooting everyone at Base Camp, there must be more cartridges around here somewhere—perhaps in this yeti’s rucksack hidden somewhere here in the ice pinnacles or the ridges. What kind of total fool sets up an ambush for five or six people and keeps only two rounds in his magazine and none in the spout?”

I couldn’t answer that question, so I didn’t try. I wasn’t even sure where or what the “spout” of such a pistol was.

“He probably had more rounds in his rucksack. All three of us will look around this immediate area—you can use your headlamps, I’m going to use the big electric torch—but we can’t take more than five or ten minutes at the most. We don’t want to fall too far behind Jean-Claude and Reggie.”

I bent almost double as I started coughing and hacking again, straightening up eventually to feel Pasang’s big hand on my shoulder, steadying me.

“Here, drink this, Mr. Perry. All of it.”

He handed me a small bottle. I swallowed all of the fluid, which burned like liquid fire going down, sputtered but kept it down, and handed the bottle back to Dr. Pasang. Within thirty seconds I no longer had the compulsion to cough, and for the first time in almost forty-eight hours my throat didn’t feel as if it had a turkey wishbone stuck in it.

“What is that stuff?” I whispered to Pasang as we followed the Deacon out of the rough circle of red light from our yeti’s ambush torch.

“Mostly codeine,” Pasang whispered back. “I have more for you when the coughing returns.”

We turned on our lights and searched for close to fifteen minutes, but while we found boot prints behind ridges and ice pillars, there was no sign of a rucksack with ammunition in it. Finally the Deacon called us back together and we left. I could feel the Deacon’s frustration burning like a blue flame in the dark. What good was a German semiautomatic pistol with only two rounds in it?

Better than no pistol with no rounds, I told myself. I think I was trying to convince myself that my efforts down in that god-awful crevasse had been worthwhile.

Once we were back west of the crevasse and the red light and on the trail up the glacier, the Deacon turned, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Jake—I didn’t want to tell J.C.—but mostly I wanted you going down there because I thought you might recognize our chum minus his yeti face. Did you?”

“I think so. Maybe. Yes…I think.” Dead men’s faces, I’d learned, looked different from their alive faces.

“Well, who is it, for heaven’s sake?”

“Karl Bachner,” I said. “Bruno Sigl’s German climbing pal—the older, famous one, the one who was the president or founder of all those German climbing clubs—the older man who was at the table with us the night we met Sigl in Munich last autumn.”

The Deacon was close enough for me to make out his features in the dim light; he did not look surprised.