The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  “I see where they’ve gone,” the lieutenant had said, pointing to what he believed was a trail through the mountainous terrain. Po Han and his copilot had serious doubts but the officer left no room for discussion. The new supplies were dumped hastily into the already compromised site (“to lighten the ship and extend our range for the hunt”).

  This makes no sense, Po Han thought. Heading deeper into the mountains is madness. For a while he was certain they were following imaginary trails—shadows in the stone—and then the helicopter crested a ridge and the earth fell away into a wide valley, the bottom of which was completely obscured by dense mist. The officer ordered them to fly toward the center of the valley and so, reluctantly, they did.

  Within minutes, the mist was rising all around them, and as the rotors pulled down dual columns of clear air from above, the pilot was expecting to see solid ground, but there was none. “It looks bottomless,” he said, grimly.

  “Keep going,” commanded a voice behind him.

  “Sir, we need to put a man in the doorway right now. And tell him to start shouting the moment he sees the valley floor.”

  The officer shouted an order back to one of his soldiers and moments later two others wrestled open the aft cargo door.

  Po Han took the helicopter down, skillfully, a foot at a time. The rotors were no longer bringing down clear air. The world was a white blur, with nothing ahead and below except fog. “See anything?” he shouted back into the cabin.

  A moment later the officer scrambled forward. “There’s grass!” he cried excitedly. “You’ve got a spot for your landing, now take us down!”

  Po Han nudged the helicopter lower, and for a change, he thought, the craft handled smoothly. No wind at all down here.

  With the lower portion of the cockpit now hovering a mere six feet above the ground, Po Han could see that the officer had been right about the landing zone. It was a flat field, covered in frost-laden grass but otherwise unimpressive. He eased the helicopter even lower, relieved as the tricycle landing gear contacted the ground and at the near certainty that whoever the officer might have been chasing would have been long gone by now. These thoughts had barely registered when, remarkably, he saw three tall figures standing at the extreme edge of visibility. At first the pilot thought they were wearing strange costumes.

  “Do you see what I’m seeing?” he asked his copilot, even as the shadowy figures seemed to disappear before his eyes.

  There was a pause, followed by a stunned, one-word reply. “Yeren.”

  Though the word brought a deep churning in his bowels, it was a shriek from behind, louder even than the considerable engine noise, that shifted Po Han’s fight-or-flight response into overdrive. The lieutenant’s voice rose above the commotion—strangely high-pitched and frantic: “Take us up!”

  Glancing back over a shoulder, Po Han glimpsed the officer and the other five soldiers writhing in a tangled mass on the cabin floor—tearing at their own uniforms and at their own bodies.

  Forward and below, through the Plexiglas, the pilot imagined he saw (and his mind told him that he had to be imagining) frost-covered grass moving toward him in a wave. Like a school of ravenous fish.

  Reflexively, he throttled the engines up, desperate to get away from a landing spot that had become more like a descent into a hive of angry bees. But as the screams of the men in the cabin actually grew to rival any he had heard during the war, Po Han began to believe that landing in a field of hornet’s nests would have been preferable.

  The sudden throttle-up, and the rebound effect of the rotors’ downwash against the ground during an abrupt change of both thrust and direction, suddenly revealed a design flaw that had rendered the “Dogship” undesirable to Americans and Russians alike—the hull was nothing more than canvas, stiffened with dried glue. The entire starboard side tore open and as Po Han instantly corrected the tilt to his right, the port side too was suddenly all open air. The ship’s aft end bounced down hard but during the next instant, another throttle-up seemed to have them safely airborne again.

  The pilot allowed himself to believe that they might still complete this cursed excursion and escape with their lives, but this belief was shattered the moment he heard (and felt, through his controls) the shreds of his ship’s membrane being tornadoed into the rotors.

  “We’re going in!” Po Han called out, breaking radio silence. As the aft section pounded down again and the rotors began to die, and as he tried to describe his location to anyone listening at base camp, it became all too horribly clear that more and more debris from the ground was being whirled into the cabin.

  The screams behind Po Han continued to rise above the grind and whine of failing engine parts and as he glanced again over his shoulder he recoiled at what he saw. The men—all of them were covered in white grass turning red.

  But it’s not grass, he realized at last. They’re worms! And they’re everywhere!

  The pilot kept his microphone open and broadcasting till the very end, even after he looked down and realized that the monsters had begun drilling into his own arms and legs and were swarming toward his face.

  During the seconds in which Po Han broke radio silence, the helicopter windmilled out of control and slid in Yanni’s direction. It was still a vague shape in the mist when it bounced to a stop, its rotors whipping her with a fierce gust laden with soil and something else—something alive.

  It took only another moment for Yanni to fully realize what was happening.

  Grass mimics!

  Throwing both hands up to protect her face, Yanni fell backward against the corral’s fence. Alpha, seeing immediately that something had gone terribly wrong, stepped in front of her, forming an effective but incomplete wall against the flying debris and hungry predators. Yanni could smell the musk he was releasing but the inchworms were already crawling along the shoulders of her parka and becoming tangled in her hair.

  At the moment in which she was about to scream, a familiar sound came from behind and she turned toward it. Yanni’s cupped hands obscured her view but she knew there was nothing else keeping the ravenous biters away from her eyes.

  Suddenly, twin blasts of liquid struck her shoulders from separate directions, then her head and hands were similarly sprayed. When Yanni realized that she could no longer feel the grass wiggling toward her scalp and her face, she spread her fingers slightly, peeking out between them. Two of the little mammoths had come up behind her. She felt a series of tugs as some of the grass mimics were blown out of her hair while others were flicked off by the fingerlike projections that tipped the muscular bifurcated trunks.

  Get them all. Every single—

  The thought was interrupted by two more blasts in the face with the foul-smelling liquid. Yanni became aware that the last of the white blades were springboarding off her neck and fleeing. She exhaled, unaware of the breath she’d been holding.

  Saved by the mammoths, she was dismayed that two of their Morlock keepers were already herding them away, tugging on leashes attached to what appeared to be woven choke collars.

  “Thanks, guys,” she said quietly, as they disappeared back into the mist that hid the rest of the corral.

  Turning again toward the downed helicopter, Yanni was prodded forward, now surrounded closely by Alpha and two female Morlocks. Their musk was stronger than she thought possible and the inchworm grass reacted predictably, moving apart and forming a barren trail in the debris-strewn soil.

  Once the helicopter rotors stopped spinning and breaking, the machine had apparently keeled gently over to one side, its membranous outer covering in tatters. A figure tumbled out, screaming weakly and wrapped in what appeared to be a cape of inchworm grass. The man’s cries did not last much beyond the moment one of his arms broke off near the shoulder joint. The horde of now red-tinted blades seemed to vie for possession of the limb, its previous owner even making a desperate grab for it before falling face-first into the welcoming carpet.

  An eerie qui
et began to settle over the valley.

  Lifting Yanni and carrying her with them, the Morlocks approached the dead machine and its dying crew, but they clearly refrained from moving near enough for their scent—which shepherded the inchworm grass before them—to repel the predators from their prey. With nothing to interrupt their feast, Yanni heard new sounds—faint and horrible—like corn being milled with a grinding stone. And now, as a distinctly queasy feeling crept into her, the grass mimics penetrated humerus, femur, and brow and continued to gorge themselves.

  Alpha broke the spell, giving Yanni an uncharacteristically rough shaking and uttering a familiar, mispronounced exclamation in Latin, “Serr-rah.”

  “Serrah,” Yanni repeated, under her breath. “Chinese,” she whispered.

  Alpha followed with a more primal form of body language that left no room for misinterpretation. He snarled at the disintegrating men.

  Though it ranked with some of the most horrible things she had ever seen (and perhaps because of this), Yanni was unable to turn away.

  As a chill ran up her back, Yanni swept her gaze around as far as the fog allowed, searching for warning signs of a second, shadowy wave of carnivorous grass—but none appeared. The combination of Morlock and mammoth stench was evidently maintaining its repellent effect.

  But for how long? she wondered.

  Nearby, the skeletons of the Chinese intruders caved in like children’s sand castles and were swept swiftly away by the hungry blades.

  Metropolitan Museum of Natural History

  Fifth Floor

  “And how old is this Lost Codex supposed to be?” said Dr. Nora Nesbitt. She was the invertebrate zoologist Wynters and Knight had requested, now officially and freshly approved by Major Hendry. She was also one of the Metropolitan Museum’s rising stars.

  “It dates back to not very long before Vesuvius buried Pompeii,” replied Patricia Wynters. “Now is that a humdinger, or what?”

  Nesbitt, who had been examining a grainy photograph of the ancient text, peered over the top of her stylish horn-rimmed specs. “Definitely. Too bad these photos are for shit.”

  Wynters glanced at the closed office door, then flashed a wry smile. Today Charles Knight was off exploring the museum with his granddaughter, which meant that in all likelihood he would not be back until after lunch. “Want me to show you the original?” she said, with conspiratorial glee.

  Nesbitt, an attractive thirty-something brunette, returned a wide smile of her own. “Sure thing.”

  Wynters led her thoroughly amused guest to a map table. Opening the top drawer, she carefully sorted through a saga of yellowed and browned pages that had been skillfully mounted between acetate sheets. “Here we go,” she said, selecting one, then handing it to the biologist. “This work a little better for you?”

  Nesbitt studied an ancient illustration—which showed a human figure pulling what appeared to be a strand of spaghetti out of another man’s foot and winding it onto a spool. The second man seemed to be in great pain. “Is that supposed to be a nematode?” she said, at last.

  “That’s above my pay grade,” Patricia replied. “You tell me. Charles thought that maybe these guys were doing some strange knitting.”

  Nesbitt flashed a you’ve got to be kidding me expression, then saw that indeed Wynters had been. She squinted at the codex. “It looks a lot like Dracunculus.”

  “Lovely!” Patricia replied. “That’s a worm, right?”

  “Yes, a guinea worm.”

  “Well, Pliny does mention worms quite a bit.”

  Nesbitt nodded toward the ancient text. “Which is, I suppose, the reason you called me in.”

  Patricia responded with a wry smile.

  Nesbitt continued. “Europeans named these critters for the Guinea coast, where they first encountered them in the seventeenth century. You gotta like the Latin, though—‘little dragons.’”

  “That does sound pleasant. And what’s their deal?”

  “It’s more of a horror story, really. Dracunculus is a parasite. You pick it up by drinking water containing copepods—tiny crustaceans.”

  “You mean those little one-eyed critters they call Cyclops?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yum,” Wynters said, scrunching up her face. “Let me guess, the copepods carry the Dracunculus larvae?”

  “You got it,” Nesbitt replied. “And by the way, Egyptian physicians described dracunculiasis in medical papyri dated to thirty-five hundred years ago.”

  Patricia repeated the disease name to herself. “Interesting. What are the symptoms?”

  Nesbitt grimaced. “Well, here’s where things get a little grim. The larvae are released when the ingested copepod dies. Then they penetrate your stomach and intestinal wall, and mate in your abdominal cavity.”

  “And how do I feel about all this?”

  “Not so good—fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea.”

  “Oh my.”

  “But after the nematodes have their little honeymoon—that’s when the real party begins.”

  “Do tell,” Patricia said, clearly enjoying the narrative.

  “The females start to migrate, burning a path through your soft tissue, and following the long bones out to the extremities. Eventually they make their way to your feet, then up through the skin, where they form a blister—which happens to burn like hell.”

  “Ah,” Patricia exclaimed. “Hence the term ‘little dragons.’”

  “Exactly. And of course you are now looking for any relief possible, so—”

  “—so I dip my dragon-scorched piggies in a cool stream.”

  “Now you’re cookin’!” Nesbitt exclaimed. “Eggs get laid, little swimming Cyclops gulps them down—”

  “Water gets drawn by some unsuspecting human, and the whole shebang starts up again.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But what does this have to do with what a Roman expedition found two thousand years ago?” Patricia wondered aloud. She returned her attention again to the codex, sorting carefully through several mounted leaves, until she came to and withdrew a page she had been seeking. “Okay, what do you make of this one?” she said, and handed it to Nesbitt.

  The zoologist examined the figure for half a minute but remained silent. The badly damaged papyrus depicted what looked like a hair-covered and vaguely human arm, using a stick to hold a coiled mass of spaghetti above a shallow pool of water.

  “Beats me,” Nesbitt said at last.

  “It looks like whatever this creature is, it’s harvesting guinea worms, no?”

  Nesbitt looked more closely at the codex, then shook her head. “If that tangle at the end of the stick is supposed to be Dracunculus, then what we’re seeing here is the adult stage—which can get up to forty inches long.”

  “So . . . you’re saying these things wouldn’t be coming out of the water?”

  “Right,” Nesbitt agreed.

  They exchanged puzzled looks, then turned back to the ancient, humanoid figure. It was Nesbitt who spoke first. “Then why’s Mr. Fuzzy here placing parasites into a pool of water?”

  Patricia thought about the question, then shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he’s breeding them.”

  “Breeding them? Jeez, for what?”

  Wynters shrugged. “I have no idea. But Pliny does go on about shaping the substance of life. Now what if these Cerae were shaping the guinea worms?”

  “Why on earth would they do that?”

  “What if they were designing a weapon?”

  Both women gave a start at the creak of the office door opening. It was Charles Knight, with his little blond granddaughter in tow.

  “Patricia, I thought you might want to accompany us—” He stopped, realizing that she had a guest. “Ah, Nora,” he said, but with a glance at the codex she was holding, the cheer drained from his face. The pair had obviously been doing quite a bit of work without him.

  “Charles, we’d love to go to lunch with you,” Patricia chirped. Then she
bent over and gave the child a welcoming smile. “Well, hello. This is Dr. Nesbitt. She studies animals with no backbones.”

  “You mean invertebrates—like insects and worms,” the girl replied, with an assurance that belied her age.

  “Absolutely,” Nora responded, cheerfully. “Now, who’s ready for lunch?”

  “I am!” the girl cried happily. “I’m starving!”

  “Me, too,” Nora said. “Thank you for the invitation, Charles.”

  Knight turned to the trio, his demeanor apparently restored. “So, ladies, what would you like to eat?”

  “Anything but spaghetti,” Patricia replied.

  An unnamed village on the Tibetan Plateau

  July 12, 1946

  As Captain Mung left the hut that held their shortwave equipment, Wang thought he resembled someone who had just suffered a swift kick to the solar plexus. Since their arrival at the Tibetan village six days earlier, the officer had opened up to him even more, about the mission and even about his family. Aside from the haunting memories of diseased children, the unusually large and complicated expedition had been progressing quite smoothly. The relay of supplies to and from this westernmost outpost was not even an hour behind schedule. But now Mung stormed past the scientist, jaw set and silent. After clapping his hands twice, his path was quickly intercepted by two of the three junior officers who had accompanied him from Yi Chang. As Wang watched, the captain spoke quietly to the men—who, moments later, ran off in opposite directions.

  Mung stood perfectly still, arms at his sides, then turned and motioned for Wang to approach.

  Something has happened to the other helicopter, Wang thought.

  “Captain Mung, what is it? How can I help?”

  “They were ordered to drop off supplies,” the officer said quietly. “That’s all. Drop off supplies and fuel, then return.”