The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  Dedication

  For our mentors.

  Epigraphs

  To every man is given the key to heaven. The same key opens the gates to hell.

  —A Buddhist proverb, approximately a.d. 700

  In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.

  —Pliny the Elder

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue: On the Shelf

  Chapter 1: Mission Improbable

  Chapter 2: Cerae

  Chapter 3: Morlocks

  Chapter 4: First Impressions

  Chapter 5: The Shape of Things to Come

  Chapter 6: Yeren

  Chapter 7: A Hitch in the Plan

  Chapter 8: Foreign Parts

  Chapter 9: The Missing

  Chapter 10: The Gathering

  Chapter 11: Things We Lock Away

  Chapter 12: Dracunculus Rising

  Chapter 13: The Taken

  Chapter 14: Strange Days

  Chapter 15: Fear of Pheromones

  Chapter 16: Adam Raised Cain

  Chapter 17: Dilemma

  Chapter 18: Nursery

  Chapter 19: Captain America

  Chapter 20: What We Do in the Shadows

  Chapter 21: Night Zero

  Chapter 22: Breaking Away

  Chapter 23: When Three Worlds Collide

  Chapter 24: The Man Who Loved Morlocks

  Epilogue: Something Wicked This Way Comes

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Also by Bill Schutt and J. R. Finch

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  On the Shelf

  1,500 feet above the East Himalayan Labyrinth

  July 9, 1946

  “I hate fog,” the helicopter pilot announced over his headset.

  “I thought it was flies you hated?” answered a woman seated behind him.

  “Yeah, I hate flies, too. But—”

  The Sikorsky R-5 gave a sudden lurch in the wind and the pilot concentrated on steadying the cyclic stick in his right hand. He could feel the 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney struggling to generate lift. “—but thin air is quickly movin’ up my shit list. You see anything like flat ground?”

  “No dice,” said Yanni Thorne. “Still lookin’.”

  Behind a pair of polarized aviator glasses, the passenger on the woman’s right side remained silent. He was also scanning the uncharted, mist-covered valley below.

  “Jerry?”

  “Bupkes, Mac.”

  “Swell,” the pilot replied. “I did mention the potential for a high-pucker-factor landing, didn’t I?”

  The passengers quickly exchanged glances and head shakes.

  “Not in the last two minutes there, Redunzle.” Yanni continued to scan the mountainous terrain for a landing site free of fog or driving snow.

  She was intense and insightful, two of Mac’s favorite qualities. She was also an indigenous Brazilian with an incongruous Brooklyn accent that she’d picked up from her late husband, Bob. Much had happened to them in and around the plateau of Hell’s Gate, most of which their passenger knew nothing about; yet the bottom line was that a lot of people died back in Brazil—including Bob.

  But Mac and Yanni did not die, and after two years it was an outcome that still haunted them both.

  The chopper’s second passenger was Lieutenant Jerry Delarosa, a polymath, currently serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces. He and MacCready had last worked together three years earlier, during a South Pacific “suicide mission” to retrieve a kid with powerful East Coast connections whose torpedo boat was missing in action. The fearlessness and drive he had shown on that mission convinced Mac he would be a real asset to this team.

  Presently, Yanni was pointing to something out the port-side window of the chopper’s cramped cabin. “Mac, I think I see a place to land but it ain’t on the valley floor. Three o’clock and down about five hundred feet.” During the space of only a few seconds, sheets of wind-driven snow had begun dissipating, in the direction Yanni was pointing.

  Mac increased the pressure on the right tail-rotor pedal and a moment later the chopper responded by swinging its nose to that side. There was something—a shelf carved into a lower section of a cliff face twice the height of the Washington Monument. He feathered the cyclic control stick forward with his right hand, adjusting the pitch angle of the rotor blades. In response the R-5 struggled forward through the high-altitude air.

  Mac swung into a satisfyingly incident-free flyby over the patch of flat, snow-covered ground. So far, so good.

  The site they had chosen for landing was not quite three hundred feet long and extended into the mountain almost half as far.

  “That’s a pinnacle approach in a confined landing zone,” Mac announced.

  “English, please,” Yanni said.

  “A double bitch of a landing in these crosswinds.”

  Yanni nodded. “Check.”

  “Plus that shelf’s not completely smooth,” Mac continued, pointing to a pattern of elongated ridges where the snow seemed to be piled up higher. “Problem’s going to be snow blowing up from the rotors and screwing up my visibility.”

  “What do you suggest?” Jerry asked.

  “Switch seats with Yanni. You’re gonna have to put on a monkey belt and hang out that door a little bit.”

  “Hang out that what?” came the headset-distorted cry.

  “Right before we land, I won’t be able to see squat, so I’ll need you to tell me when the wheels get close to the ground.”

  “You mean sit there with the door open?”

  “Well, actually more like leaning. But—”

  “I’m not switching seats with anybody,” Yanni announced, cutting into the conversation. “Where’s this so-called monkey belt?”

  “Yanni—”

  “Save it, Mac,” she said.

  MacCready knew that there was no time to argue, and that he’d never win this argument anyway. “It’s tucked in behind your seat—pretty self-explanatory. The other end attaches to that hard point.”

  Yanni shot him a look. “English.”

  “To that metal hook to the left of your seat.”

  Less than two minutes later, Yanni was strapped into the canvas harness. From the moment she slid the side door open, the safety cable and clamp would become her only firm connection to the helicopter. Jerry double-checked the monkey belt and gave her a thumbs-up. Yanni nodded.

  “It almost looks . . . man-made,” Mac said as they flew in closer to the newly designated landing site. “Like it was carved right out of the mountainside.”

  “That’s a lot of carvin’,” Yanni added, adjusting her headset. “This could be quite the find.”

  “All right then,” Mac called back, “Yanni, open that door slowly and don’t let it go. It’ll be a cold ride home if that slider comes off its track.”

  Yanni followed Mac’s instructions and slid the lightweight door toward the rear of the fuselage, taking care to guide it into a fully open position before releasing it. The effect was instantaneous—it was as if someone had opened a car door at sixty miles per hour—in the Antarctic.

  While Yanni maneuvered herself into position, MacCready slowly swung the R-5 around, bringing its nose just over the ledge at a height of only twenty feet. He nudged the craft forward and down, churning up swirls of rotor generated “whiteout.”

  Half-standing, half-crouching, Yanni braced herself on either side of the open door frame. “Fifteen feet, Mac,” she called to the pilot, though
the wind and increased engine noise made it even more difficult to hear. “Tail’s nearly clear of the edge.”

  MacCready had decided to take the chopper in facing the mountain and hopefully into a headwind.

  Unfortunately, the mountain had other ideas, summoning a massive gust that swept up the side of the ledge and slammed into the chopper’s tail rotor. The force tipped the R-5’s nose down and threw Yanni forward into the door frame. As she struggled to steady herself, vortices of snow buffeted the helicopter from below, sending a turbulence-driven blizzard into the cabin. With the rotors now spinning in their own downwash, the aircraft continued to jerk nose-downward and slip sideways. Lift all but disappeared. Mac, desperate to abort the landing, pulled hard on the collective lever with his left hand while simultaneously fighting to move the wildly bucking cyclic stick to the right. It was clearly too little and too late.

  “We’re going in. Hold on!” Mac called over the headset.

  Amid screaming engine parts, cracking rotors, and blasts of snow, and at the start of a violent clockwise roll, R. J. MacCready shot a glance back into the cabin.

  He had but one thought. Where’s Yanni?

  After what seemed like five minutes, but was in actuality all of five seconds, the R-5 rolled to a sudden stop on its right side. Mac, uninjured, quickly undid his seat belt and scrambled aft into the cabin. Jerry seemed dazed but otherwise okay, and even now he was unbuckling himself from the overturned seat.

  Turning to the open passenger door, which was now facing skyward, Mac could see the tether from the monkey belt extending out of the chopper. Giving it a tug, he felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach as the safety line streamed through the door and into the cabin. There was no one attached to it.

  “YANNI!”

  MacCready quickly hoisted himself through the open passenger door frame, barely noticing that the craft had pitched up against a nub of rock only a few paces from the edge of a thousand-foot drop. He gave a quick glance over the precipice, then felt his guts tighten another notch.

  “YANNI!” Mac called again. He clambered over the metal and Plexiglas framework of the cabin before staggering past the remnants of what had been a forty-eight-foot main rotor blade. He heard a grunt from behind, but it was only Jerry, who was making his own exit from the broken craft.

  Mac frantically searched the snow- and debris-covered ground. Almost immediately, and to his great relief, he saw a figure lying prone in a snowbank between the R-5 and the mountain. He struggled to run through the hip-deep drifts, pumping his arms as he went, then fell to his knees and began brushing the snow and long black hair away from Yanni’s face.

  “Yanni,” he cried, his voice cracking. “Yanni?”

  Amazingly, her violet-colored eyes popped open and blinked. “Nice landin’ there, Ace,” she said.

  At this moment, Yanni mocking him again was the sweetest sound MacCready had ever heard.

  Soon enough, Yanni Thorne was not only up and about, she was examining the perimeter of the oddly placed landing zone. It was, of course, surrounded by precipitous cliffs and bordered by what her late husband would have described as “a doozy of a first step.”

  Yanni, though, was far more concerned with the low line of rocks that had stopped the tumbling helicopter from rolling into the abyss. A similar bracework of block-shaped stones had shielded her body from flying debris after what they could now appreciate as an admittedly spectacular exit from the spinning chopper, this one involving a roll-generated whip snap that somehow flung her into a well-protected snowbank instead of against the rock wall that loomed just beyond it.

  “It’s a building foundation of some kind,” Yanni told Mac, who was taking a break from helping Jerry recover supplies and the cold-weather gear they were now wearing. “And if you want my two cents, it ain’t very recent and it could even be ancient.”

  Mac nodded toward the squat-looking wall adjacent to the former flying machine. “However old it is, I’d definitely call it fortuitously placed.”

  Yanni did not hear him. Instead she straightened her back as if just touched by a live wire.

  Mac heard it, too, a strange whistling sound. “What the—”

  “Shhhh,” Yanni said, cocking her head to determine direction, but by then the haunting warble of notes had ceased abruptly. What they could hear was the crunch of snow underfoot, coming from behind them, and they both turned quickly, relieved to see that it was only Jerry.

  “Hey, did you guys hear—”

  Yanni held up a hand and the Special Forces officer quickly took the hint. After a half minute, and when the sound did not return, Jerry continued.

  “Maybe it was just the wind, blowin’ through the rocks or something.”

  Mac and Yanni did not respond, their eyes methodically scanning the rock wall.

  As if on cue, the high-pitched whistling resumed again—alternating this time from several different points along the soaring cliff face.

  “Call and response,” Mac muttered.

  “What?” Jerry asked.

  “We ain’t alone,” Yanni said.

  R. J. MacCready’s eyes ticked back and forth, scrutinizing nooks and crannies in the cliffs of rock and ice. As Yanni confirmed what Mac already feared, the scientist part of his brain responded as it generally did in such situations—with a question of its own.

  How in the hell did we get here?

  Chapter 1

  Mission Improbable

  Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and unpredictable.

  —General George S. Patton

  Metropolitan Museum of Natural History

  New York City

  June 18, 1946 (Three weeks earlier)

  Like most disasters, the chain of cause and effect could be traced backward through time to an event that, to any outside observer, might seem as dry and inconsequential as an old bone, or as mundane as an elevator door sliding open. As he stepped onto the museum’s fifth floor, the tall, red-haired man had no inkling that he’d just initiated a wrong turn surpassing that of the Donner Party some hundred years earlier. He carried a four-foot-long, oilcloth-bound package in both arms, bride-across-the-threshold style. A guard downstairs had offered him the use of a cart, but even though the package was awkwardly shaped and weighed upwards of thirty pounds, he had politely declined, uneasy about anyone getting too close to the objects he was hauling around.

  Hurrying along a wide, cabinet-lined hallway, the man took a sharp right at a sign that read vertebrate zoology. He ignored a series of specimen-filled display cases, some housing mounted skeletons from animals he had no interest in identifying, and stopped finally outside a closed door. From inside he could hear a radio playing quietly—“The Gypsy,” by the Ink Spots. He tapped out an arrival announcement with the side of his foot.

  “Come in,” called a familiar voice.

  The red-haired man looked up and down the hall and, seeing no one, he gave the door a final hard rap with his shoe. “Open up, Mac,” he called, impatiently.

  From within, Captain R. J. MacCready followed the first of what would become an annoyingly lengthy list of orders issued by his longtime superior officer and friend, Major Patrick Hendry.

  From a separate wing on the fifth floor, a second figure was also converging on MacCready’s office. Charles Robert Knight was, without argument, the world’s foremost natural history artist. Over a storied, five-decade career, the bespectacled seventy-one-year-old was renowned for the murals of prehistoric life he had created for museums across the country. Secretly, the Brooklynite was most proud of the fact that, while he had never been on the staff of any particular institution, his artwork had nearly single-handedly sparked a public fascination with long-extinct creatures—dinosaurs in particular. Just as fulfilling was the fact that the public’s sense of wonder seemed to be growing stronger and more widespread with each passing year.

  Knight had begun the day looking forward to wande
ring the halls of the great museum with his six-year-old granddaughter. But those plans were scuttled after an in-house phone call from one of the research fellows.

  The old artist loved associating with the museum’s array of taxidermists, exhibition builders, and curators, but R. J. MacCready was a different kettle of fish—a war hero, but one who never spoke a word about his military accomplishments. Mac was also a top-notch field zoologist, though Knight had admired the man’s biting sense of humor most of all. He also appreciated, if only vicariously, MacCready’s refusal to suffer fools. Yet like so many young men these days, the friend who had come home from the war was not the same one who had gone off to fight nearly five years ago. Mac’s unbridled enthusiasm had been tempered, and his wit—when he chose to display it—was darker now. Knight suspected that Mac had endured some unspeakable tragedy.

  The goddamned war, Knight thought. The goddamned war.

  The artist knocked and entered MacCready’s small office without waiting. He always appreciated the unique view from just above the tree line and the cool breeze blowing in from Central Park. The office itself was nondescript, although a book lover might spend hours poring over the shelves here, which held everything from first editions of Darwin and Wallace to more recent works by “upstarts” like their museum colleague Ernst Mayr.

  Today, Knight found that two others were already present. One was a military type he’d seen on several occasions previously. The artist remembered some recent museum scuttlebutt about a carrot-topped Army officer and so he needed no field guide to identify this particular specimen. The other was a strikingly beautiful young woman with dark, waist-length hair. Knight had seen her around as well, which he considered a far more pleasant experience.

  “Afternoon, Charles,” MacCready said, gesturing toward his visitors. “You’ve already met Yanni Thorne. And that’s Major Pat Hendry, a friend.”

  Knight, an ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, acknowledged them with a nod, then noticed the room’s other new addition: a tray holding an assortment of bones. The oilcloth and packing material, which had been carefully unfolded, told him that one of Mac’s guests had likely brought the bones. Varying in size and shape, they were being illuminated by a pair of gooseneck desk lamps.