by John Darnton
“I thought you might have come in that earlier group.”
“What group?”
“The one that came last year, before Dr. Kellicut. You know, the one with Van.”
7
For the rest of the afternoon they continued to climb. The ground became gradually steeper and the going more arduous. Sharafidin was far in front of them.
By evening the green buckhorn and small poplars and birches began to thin out, and soon they left them behind altogether. Now there was small brush, scrub grass, and occasional willow shrubs amid eroded boulders. They pitched camp on a rocky shelf and prepared their bedrolls. Matt and Rudy went off to collect firewood; to find it they had to go a long way down the slope they had just negotiated. They came back with half a dozen logs and armfuls of twigs, just in time to replenish a small fire that Susan had started with meadow grass.
“Here,” she said, handing them each a cup. “Life-giving coffee.” After dinner Sharafidin performed his nightly prayers. When he was finished, Susan motioned to Rudy and they went over to him and talked. At one point, Sharafidin reached into his bundle, pulled out the object that had drawn their curiosity the night before, and handed it to Susan. She examined it carefully and, as she handed it back, said something that Rudy translated.
Matt sat down on a rock at the edge of the plateau, his muscles aching pleasantly. By the orange rays of the setting sun, he could see the treeline below zigzagging across the slopes and disappearing in valleys on both sides. Evening mist rose like steam. The land stretched into the infinite distance.
Susan sat down next to him. He was glad of her presence. The view was so sublime he needed company. They were silent until finally Matt turned to her. “I saw you looking at Sharafidin’s talisman. What is it?”
“A miniature Koran. He says it was used against Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman. Gained paradise for its owner. It’s well worn—from rubbing, I expect.”
“Did he tell you what it does?”
“He didn’t have to. It protects him. Puts him in touch with Allah and the spirits of the mountain.”
“Does he have any extras?”
When Susan spoke again, her tone was serious. She told him what Rudy had blurted out by accident about Van’s previous trip. “Who was he with and why was he here?”
“And why has he kept it a secret from us?” put in Matt.
There was little they could do. If they confronted Van directly he would just deny it. Besides, they were committed to finding Kellicut’s camp. So they simply resolved to watch Van carefully for some sort of opening to get at the truth—and both felt dissatisfied that they had no better plan.
Now it was almost dark, and as they looked out at the valley, Susan said, “You know something else that bothers me? The longer I’m here the more I believe the Neanderthal still exist. Kellicut believes it, and Van certainly does. As we were walking through the forest I kept thinking about that skull. That was real bone.”
“It’s beginning to look that way.”
“And if it’s authentic, maybe all those stories they tell to while away the long winter nights down in the villages are true.”
“Maybe,” he replied.
“And here we are up here hoping to find one. Or two. Or twenty. But what if they’re dangerous? What are we supposed to do, waltz up to them and shake hands?”
“Maybe we can observe them without being seen,” he said.
“Yeah, and maybe not.”
“Don’t forget,” Matt said, “they’re the ones who retreated way up here, so they’re more scared of us than we are of them.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Susan. “Another thing. I know it’s just my imagination but as we were walking through the forest I kept thinking they were watching us. I began by thinking, What if they’re out there? And I ended by believing it. I could practically feel their eyes on me. Did you feel it?”
“No.”
“Well, I did. I didn’t totally believe it, but I was talking myself into it.”
Matt looked out over the hills below, now almost totally black. “Don’t forget we’re pretty high up, maybe twelve thousand feet by now. Altitude can do strange things to you.”
“Like what?” she asked sarcastically. “Hallucinations? Paranoia?”
“No, I’m serious. Hyperventilation. Insomnia. Unaccountable anxiety. A sense of free-floating panic. Water in the lungs.”
“Great. Now I feel much better.”
“It doesn’t mean you’re going to crack up. It just makes scary things seem scarier. Don’t take it too seriously.”
“I’ll remember that when I’m in the cooking pot and somebody’s about to make my brain into steak tartare.”
Matt smiled to himself. Her combination of total self-reliance and unabashed vulnerability—that was part of what had drawn him to her years ago.
“I have to say,” he said, with genuine warmth, “you haven’t changed much.”
“For better or for worse?”
“Better.”
She shook her head imperceptibly, annoyed at his presumption. She had spent so many years venting her anger at Matt, an old-fashioned pure-white anger, that by now it was routine, and she wasn’t even sure she felt it anymore.
Betrayal—that was the all-encompassing sin that packed all of Matt’s misdemeanors and deceptions into a single word. By repeating the word like a mantra years ago, she could reduce their relationship to its essence. There was no question about it: Betrayal was what it was, cheating on her with her closest friend. She had no hint that it was going on, she had not known about Anne until the end, which deepened her shame and made his actions unforgivable. Knowing her, he would know how humiliated she would feel in front of everyone. Then she began to see him as contemptible, with all his little lies. That was when she truly fell out of love with him, when her respect for him had vanished.
Actually, she’d had her own secret affair. But there was a difference, she told herself, for on some level she had surely been aware of Matt’s deception—it was impossible to be so close to someone and not be aware of it—so in a sense she was protecting herself by matching his transgression. She knew that she was rationalizing her own betrayal, but this did not lessen her certainty that hers was not a dalliance. It had been real and doubly necessary to her because she had not proved to be sufficient for him. It was self-defense.
“Let’s go back now,” she said.
The next morning they rose early and climbed without talking, their legs aching and their feet throbbing. Each step brought pain. They moved like zombies, and as the sun pounded down, the monotony of their footsteps eradicated all sense of time.
But Sharafidin still climbed effortlessly, gliding like a kite from side to side in search of the best foothold. His thin legs pumped upward and moved unceasingly.
At this altitude the grass had largely disappeared, and they found themselves in a bleak landscape of dirt, pebbles, rock, and scree. By midafternoon they had reached a saddle that ran between two peaks. When it leveled off the going was easier. From here, they could look down into the valley fifty miles below.
They spotted a patch of shade under an outcropping of rock. When they got close they heard a rustling sound, and the ground shivered. Behind a boulder, hidden in the shade, was a hole. Underneath, about an arm’s length down, rushed an underground stream.
Matt reached down and felt the ice-cold water. He filled his canteen, brought it up, and passed it around.
“Might as well stop here for lunch,” said Susan.
Rudy said something to Sharafidin and he answered. His strained tone and the downward glance of his eye caught Matt’s attention. “What was that about?”
“I asked him where we are, and he said ... to put it exactly, he said, ‘We’ve reached the place where people do not go.’ ”
“Oh, yeah? Well, tell him they’re going to have to change the name of the place,” Van snarled. He went off to investigate the stream wh
ere it surfaced about forty feet away.
Suddenly they heard him yell. They found him on a bank that was sandy and extended in a semicircle where the water had cut into the rock above. Van’s canteen was toppled next to him. Apparently he had been filling it. He gave out short, sharp gasps, then a kind of wheezing. He was kneeling in an erect, unnatural way and his other hand was pointing, moving up and down like a piston.
Matt’s first thought was of a heart attack. “Are you all right?” he shouted.
“Look!” Van was pointing at the ground between his legs with that curious piston motion again as they rushed toward him.
Susan got there first. “My God.”
There in the sand next to the stream was a single footprint, deep and abnormally thick. Matt bent down and looked closer. It looked human but it was too wide at the instep.
“Okay, who’s crazy now?” Van shouted, looking about them wildly. “I told you, but you wouldn’t believe me.”
They searched the area and found other footprints and then, strangely, some boot prints with cross-hatching. They seemed to be of different sizes and were better formed, more recent.
They followed the boot prints as far as they could, but they disappeared on hard ground. It looked as if they were made by three people. Three people and, before them, one humanlike creature, a humanoid but not a human. From the way the boot prints clustered around the footprints, it was apparent that the humans were trying to track it.
“Look at this,” said Rudy. He held up a cigarette butt between his thumb and forefinger. He smelled it. “It’s Russian,” he said.
Van was falling behind. His breathing was labored and his backpack felt as if it had been weighted with stones. When he had dressed this morning, he had strapped on the gun holster. A rawhide band held it to his right thigh, and its tightness as it dug into his flesh made him feel the power of the gun. He knew he was beginning to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation. All those years of smoking and all those various substances and chemicals that he had taken were exacting their revenge now: DMT, STP, drugs whose names he could no longer even remember, like the call letters of radio stations in his childhood. He knew the symptoms of altitude sickness: the flights of wooziness, not altogether unpleasant but mingled with little stabs of paranoia, and above all that panicky sensation of gulping to fill his lungs and not getting any air. If it got much worse, it would be unbearable.
He tried to rein his mind in but that just made him feel more anxious, and he let it wander on its own. So the Russians were here after all. He might have known. He had never trusted them himself, and he had been the one to deal with them directly. Glasnost was a load of crap. This was too big for them to ignore. They gave some information, held back some, and in the end went ahead with their own expedition. Maybe the Russians want us to do the scutwork while they sit back and move in for the kill, he thought. Eagleton had had his doubts, too, Van could tell, but he was able to put them aside, basing his argument on what he called “the anarchy factor” in Moscow. Eagleton had always been good at gambling, especially with things that didn’t belong to him, like other people’s lives.
* * *
Late that afternoon Sharafidin suddenly picked up the pace, and as they rounded a bend they saw he was almost running. They shouted but he didn’t slow down or look back; he disappeared over the crest of a ridge.
They hurried along after him. Reaching the crest and looking up a long slope, they saw a field and some kind of structure. It took a while for the significance to sink in—Kellicut’s camp.
Not a bad location, thought Matt. The spot had a clear view in all directions and commanded an easy route down. For quick escape? Unlikely. Kellicut was not a man to consider flight. More probably he had been attracted by the paramount location so that in the evenings he could gaze out over the mountain he had scaled and the foothills marching off below. The vista would reconfirm his sense of omnipotence.
They reached the edge of the campsite. Inside the jumble of shapes ahead stirred a streak, a blur of movement. Van felt it register in his peripheral vision even before he was fully aware of it. He dropped to a crouch, his right hand slapping at the holster until in one swift arc he came up with the gun, then rose slowly, still aiming. Focusing, his senses suddenly relaxed and he felt relief wash through him. It was only a bird, a large brown hawk perched on the top of a pole, flapping its crooked wings.
He straightened up. “Shit,” he said. “Didn’t expect that.”
The bird was a bad omen, Susan thought. Abruptly she knew with a certainty she could not explain that they would not find Kellicut at the camp. It looked unlived in, disheveled, packed down by rain and snow.
The place looked spartan compared to the vision of a well-stocked base camp that they had conjured up during their ascent. The main structure was a lean-to about four feet high and twelve feet long, extending from the face of a shoulder-high boulder. It ran parallel to a wall of rocks about two feet high, which served as a windbreak.
Fifty feet away was a platform stuck in one of the few stunted trees growing at this altitude. It was a larder of sorts. In the other direction was all that was left of the campfire, and in still another was a makeshift well with a frayed rope attached to a metal cup lying in the dirt. Off on a side path was what looked like a latrine, a pit with two logs over it.
“It’s not much,” said Van.
Matt was thinking the same thing. “Looks like he hasn’t been here for some time.”
Susan walked over to the lean-to and bent down to step inside. “Matt, come here!” she shouted.
He hurried over, crouched, and entered. There was barely room for the two of them. It was a mess. A green air mattress was ripped down its length. Pots and pans lay on the floor, one of them bashed in. A coffee mug was shattered and a kerosene lantern broken. A pair of Kellicut’s boots, bent and stiff with mud, lay undisturbed on a makeshift wooden shelf.
Distraught, Susan squatted down to pick up some papers and look through them. They were all blank. She raised her eyes to meet Matt’s. “What do you think? What could have done this?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“But was it done deliberately? By some ... thing? Or could it have happened naturally, a storm or something.”
“A storm’s unlikely. It couldn’t have done this.” He pointed to the splintered pieces of a blue plastic cup. “Maybe an animal.” His tone was doubtful.
“But it’s not totally torn apart. Some of this could have been done by wind or a strong rain pounding down. After all, it’s probably been deserted for months.”
“Not the air mattress. Look at it. It’s in strips.” He picked it up. “These don’t look like claw marks, but it was done deliberately. This one here”—he touched a hole—“could be a tooth mark. Something ripped it.”
“If the hut was vandalized by some large creature, why wasn’t it destroyed?” Susan reached up and touched a log overhead, then shook it. “Still solid, pretty much as it was built, I’d say. But it could have been torn apart in two minutes if ... if something really wanted to.”
Matt gave her a searching look. He knew she was grasping at straws. “Let’s look outside.”
They moved out and stood up. It was a relief to be in the open air. The little lean-to was claustrophobic and had a strange, pungent odor.
They began examining the ground. Without mentioning it, they were both searching for footprints. There were none. The ground was too solid.
Van, who had been searching the edges of the campsite, came over to them. “I don’t get it,” he said, squatting on his knees to look inside the lean-to. He fit a finger between two of the logs on the roof. “This must have had some kind of cover, a tarp or something to keep out the rain. But there’s nothing around anywhere.”
The spirit of the hunt seemed to revive Van. He tilted his head and looked at each of them in turn. “Let me ask you, since you knew Kellicut better than I did.”
“What?”
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“Would you say he was reckless? You know, kind of arrogant?”
“What do you mean by that?” demanded Susan.
“I mean, would you say he would have difficulty imagining anything bad happening to him? You know the type—the kind of guy who never makes out a will.”
“I wouldn’t say so.”
“C’mon, Susan,” said Matt, “I’d say he’s one hundred percent on target.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Susan, annoyed by Van’s Scotland Yard airs.
“What he’s getting at is, Why didn’t Kellicut leave us a message?”
“Maybe he did. Just because we can’t find one doesn’t mean he didn’t. I can’t believe he would simply go away and not leave some kind of note behind.”
“Maybe he didn’t know he was going,” Van said.
Susan knew right away what he meant but she played dumb. “Meaning what?”
“What if he was attacked and killed? Or dragged off? Or ambushed?” Van gestured vaguely at the rocky ridges above them.
“There’s no sign of a struggle,” said Susan. “And I still say he would make some kind of provision for people who came up here looking for him. Don’t forget, he asked us to come.”
“Maybe he left a note, maybe not,” said Van.
“It could have been destroyed. Or taken. Or blown away,” said Matt. “Anything could have happened to it.”
“Or maybe he hid it,” suggested Susan. “That would be more like him.”
Van grunted.
“And while we’re at it,” said Matt, “you said we knew him better than you. How well did you know him? I wasn’t aware you knew him at all.”
“A little. Our paths crossed while he did some work for us, that’s all.”
Matt knew Van was holding back again and made a mental note to follow up when the time was right.
They continued looking for footprints and clues, dividing the ground into four sectors like pie pieces and radiating from the center out to the periphery, but the rocky terrain yielded nothing.
