The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  “No,” Li Ming said, pointing to a rock near the base of the sheer wall. “I’m going to stand over there and piss.”

  During the next three minutes, and with disorienting rapidity, the air shifted from dead calm to snow-driving gusts. The copilot, meanwhile, had double-checked the straps that secured the two helicopters’ landing gear to a set of thick pegs, driven into solid bedrock. He was annoyed to find that he actually had to tighten one of them.

  “Nice job those two did on this thing!” he called out to his friend.

  There was no response, so he called again, walking through knee-deep snow to the beginning of the footprint trail left by his partner. The trail ended at a puzzling pattern of markings and fresh-frozen urine, as if he had started pissing against the base of a boulder that was no longer there.

  Perplexed, he glanced to a spot just beyond Li Ming’s trail before letting out a frighteningly childish cry that echoed along the full length of the rock wall.

  It took a fellow copilot and two other men a good five minutes to calm him down. By then they had all seen the footprints in the snow—far larger than those of any human and with an oddly placed big toe.

  Approximately three hours into their trek down the mountain pass, Captain Mung and his group came to a dead end. An enormous wall of stone and ice stood blocking their path.

  Wang stared up at the imposing formation, then took a peek over the edge of the “trail”—which fell off into clouds and vast open space. “Do we go back?”

  “No,” the officer replied, “we go up.”

  “But—”

  “Get those climbers up here,” Mung called out. “Everyone else form a defensive perimeter. Be ready for an attack at any moment.”

  Instinctively, a part of him already knew that the enemy would choose its own ground, its own striking distance, in its own good time. He also believed that a difficult cliff ascent, led by climbers burdened with coils of rope, harnesses, and an array of strange-looking gear, might bring the Yeren out. But after four hours, the twenty-five men and their supplies had made it uneventfully up the sheer wall and onto flat ground.

  Mung was able to plot another trail almost immediately, and there was even a broad “tabletop” formation along the wall, where they could pitch their tents and spend the night.

  As Wang began to unpack his one-man pup tent, the officer approached, shaking his head.

  “I want you to set yours up there,” he said, pointing to a patch of ground away from the cluster of soldiers’ tents, and slightly up a “trail” that was now mostly obscured by lengthening shadows.

  “But why?” Wang asked, clearly unnerved.

  “Some of the men think your presence here is bad luck,” he responded, though far from convincingly. “Just do as I say.”

  The scientist glanced over at the others. None of them appeared to be paying the slightest attention to him. Knowing that it would be senseless to argue, he picked up his pack and trudged away.

  “And stay in your tent, once it gets dark,” the captain called after him. “Until I tell you to come out.”

  By way of affirmation, Wang gave the officer a wave without turning around. Wonderful, he thought. And here I was planning on a midnight tour of the place.

  About twenty before midnight, and as a nearly full moon was setting, Wang Tse-lin dreamed he went again to the Shennongjia Forest.

  His dream of Shennongjia night began with the metallic clamor of insects that he could not identify, and the barely audible high-frequency calls of the bats hunting them. Then the night sounds died—as if someone had turned off a switch. For a while all that could be heard was his own breathing, until something began rustling through the brush, just outside his tent—something strangely familiar. This time, when Wang tried to sit up, he discovered that he was trapped inside a canvas-covered cage. Straining to hear what might be happening beyond the tent, he suddenly wished that he could not hear at all.

  Outside his cramped prison, the gentle rustle of stealthy movement had been transformed into the slurping and crunching of a bestial meal. Growing louder and more disturbing with each passing second, the merriment of a ghoulish feast quickly became terrible beyond words. Wang started tearing at the canvas and screaming. The sounds did pause, as if in response, but for some reason Wang found this even more disturbing than the dark banquet. Slowly, someone dragged the tarp away from his cage. The scientist could see figures huddled around a campfire now, their bodies naked, slick with grease and blood. One of them was holding a severed arm, and as the reveler stood and shambled toward the cage, his face broke into a hideous grin. The other monsters began to rise and—

  An explosion jolted Wang into semi-wakefulness and he struggled to free himself from the hungry embrace of the revelers. By the time the second blast came, the captive knew that he had been wrestling with his own sleeping bag. Freeing himself, he threw back the tent flap and stumbled outside. Beams of light alternated between his tent and the trail, one of them sweeping upward and hitting him square in the eyes.

  “I ordered you to stay in your tent until I called you out!” said Captain Mung. Then, in what had quickly become the conscious extension of his still-vivid nightmare, the voice and the light were gone, leaving Wang momentarily blind.

  Another man rushed past him without stopping.

  “But I—” Wang called after the officer. As his eyes adapted to the haphazard sweep of flashlight beams, he could see Mung and two of his men, each holding rifles and staring down at a large figure on the ground. Eventually, three separate beams converged on the kill—which glistened wetly under the flashlights. Wang squinted and stepped closer. His first impression was that someone had just shot the largest bear that he had ever seen. But he already knew that this was no bear.

  “These are not your grandmother’s Yeren,” Mung told the crowd of soldiers, as they gathered three deep around the body.

  The officer went down on one knee and used both hands to lift the creature’s head out of the spreading puddle of blood. Mung turned the fur-covered face toward his men. For a few seconds more, it continued to pulse blood through a gaping hole where the right eye had been. The left eye seemed to have been following the movements of Mung’s electric lantern.

  A trick of the light, perhaps? the scientist thought.

  But now Wang was able to see clearly (too clearly) the moment the life went out of that eye.

  “This is what we are up against!” the captain said.

  As Wang Tse-lin watched, and as the officer continued to address his men, several facts were becoming apparent. First, Mung had not hesitated to use him for bait. But, as unnerving as this was, it also made perfect sense. He needs warriors to carry out his mission. My presence here is an afterthought. Second, the officer had been expecting a visit from the Yeren. The two marksmen Mung had assigned to lie in wait were all the proof he needed of this. Despite his being set out as bait, Wang’s respect for Captain Mung’s tactical and logistical skills had actually gone up a notch. The third realization concerned the Yeren themselves, for Wang could see that while there were certainly characteristics shared by this creature and the Shennongjia specimen, it was like comparing a howler monkey to a gorilla.

  By the time the captain had finished his examination, Wang Tse-lin knew that these beasts were not the mischief makers of deep-forest lore. This species was the supremely adapted denizen of a dangerous and unfamiliar world. It was also a world in which the scenario for any meaningful contact was now completely redefined. In the eyes of the Yeren, he, Captain Mung, and all of the others had been transformed from intruders into murderers.

  In the Valley of the Morlocks

  4:00 a.m., July 15, 1946

  “He says he’s a helicopter pilot,” Mac told Yanni, as they sat across from a disheveled-looking Asian man dressed in an insulated flight suit.

  “Can you ask him what he’s doing here?”

  Mac resumed his duties as a reluctant translator, first trying to work out the
question, then listening to the rapid-fire response.

  “No dice,” Mac said with a shrug, before deciding to take another tack. “Yanni, could he have gotten out of the chopper that came down in the valley?”

  “No way, Mac,” Yanni said. “I told you what happened to those guys. All of them.”

  “Then our friend here got snatched from a separate group—Chinese army, from the looks of it.”

  Yanni gestured to the new arrival, who looked not quite thirty years old. “How ’bout we lay off him for a while? Ya gotta figure this guy’s just gone through some serious shit.”

  “Serious shit,” the man repeated.

  Two sets of eyes turned toward the pilot.

  “You understand us?” Mac asked.

  The man nodded. “I go to flight school in Hawaii,” he said, in heavily accented but perfectly understandable English. “Before war.”

  “What’s your name?” Yanni asked.

  “Li Ming,” the man replied, and gestured toward a gourd sitting on the floor. “Water, please.”

  Mac passed him the container, then watched as the man gulped down the contents. When he finished drinking, Mac held out a wad of foil, filled with the crushed remains of a chocolate bar he had been saving for a “special occasion.”

  “And how did you wind up here, Li Ming?” he asked, nonchalantly.

  Instinctively, the man reached for the candy bar, but he then hesitated and pulled back his hand. “Would you disclose your mission . . . if you are sitting here instead of me?”

  Mac smiled. “No, I wouldn’t.” Then he gestured for the man to take the chocolate anyway—which he did, unfolding the wrapper.

  “How did you . . . wind up here?” the pilot asked, between bites.

  “You’re kiddin’, right?” Yanni said, stepping forward.

  “Helicopter,” Mac responded, surprising her.

  “Not so much a good hiding job,” the Chinese pilot responded quickly—too quickly.

  “So your men landed up there as well,” Mac said, though it was clearly not a question.

  Li Ming immediately realized what had happened. Turning away, he directed his stare to a point beyond the igloo’s wall of ice.

  Mac flashed Yanni a short, knowing nod.

  She returned it with a nod of her own, then moved in to stand beside the downcast newcomer. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Li Ming,” she said. “Mac’s a professional ball-breaker.”

  Li Ming did not respond. His only concern appeared to be the three white-furred giants that had suddenly appeared out of the snowy mist, and who were now striding toward the igloo door with what seemed to Yanni to be a lot like grim determination.

  Chapter 14

  Strange Days

  I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities.

  —Jane Goodall

  We misuse language and talk about the “ascent” of man. We understand the scientific basis for the inter-relatedness of life, but our ego hasn’t caught up yet.

  —Jill Tarter

  Pliny’s chamber

  June, a.d. 67

  Long before the first rays of dawn began slanting across the floor of the Ceran dome, Severus’s language-teaching physician entered the living quarters and roused the groggy historian. As Proculus stood by, trying to assess what was happening, she forced Pliny’s mouth open and squirted the contents of a small, wine-bag-like pouch into his throat. Another Ceran entered carrying a bowl of thick, stringy soup and the physician gave Pliny a wordless prompt to consume it. Proculus noted that this time there would be no force-feeding, though the Cerae stood by anyway, as if to ensure that Pliny would finish every drop.

  Within an hour, Pliny came to realize that whatever Ceran medicines had healed Proculus’s wounds and caused the tumors to fall from his face were vastly improving his own breathing. The sinus pain and asthma that had begun troubling him before the voyage and worsened with increasing altitude were now gone seemingly beyond recall. He longed to record these amazements in ink and papyrus, but even the absence of such materials seemed no cause for despair, since his normally sharp memory had suddenly become noticeably sharper.

  After sunset, when he stepped out onto the balcony with Proculus, Pliny discovered that even his vision had improved enormously. He was now able to discern new details in the luminous vegetation—as diverse in its abundance as it was in variety.

  At dawn, on the third day of their imprisonment, three attendants brought bowls with combs and washcloths soaked in warm water. One of them began tugging at the back of Pliny’s head, and it occurred to him that she not only wanted to comb his hair but to braid patterned fur into it. She had long, agile arms and a far more slender body shape than the brutish warriors. Yet somehow he knew that she did not belong to the physician caste.

  “No!” he heard Proculus shout, and as Pliny gently pushed away the hand that held a comb near his head, the attendants apparently got the message that neither man wanted his hair pulled or braided with camouflage. The three Cerae backed off, made something vaguely like a polite bowing motion, then sat on their haunches and stared at the two Romans.

  After Pliny was handed a fresh serving of the soup and began to eat, a moan reached him from the adjoining cell.

  It sounded as if the language lessons next door had continued throughout the night again—that, and apparently much more.

  The attendants heard it too, and, aroused momentarily from their sphinxlike silence, they chittered back and forth in what could easily be interpreted as knowing, mischievous laughter.

  Pliny could not shake the imagery from his mind, so he attempted to steer his thoughts elsewhere, wondering about the fate of his medicus and the other survivors they had left along the trail. They must be in a safer place than up here, he assured himself. Another grunt sounded from the other side of the black ice wall and Pliny tried to imagine what his medicus would make of Severus’s current “entanglement.”

  “He’d think you’re possessed, Severus,” Pliny muttered to himself.

  A high-pitched scream gave the historian an involuntary start, and glancing over at a thoroughly unnerved Proculus, Pliny knew that he too was uncertain if the scream had been human or not, pleasure or pain.

  Pliny’s medicus, Chiron, was not a betting man, but if anyone had told him at the time of Pliny’s departure into the highest reaches of the snow line that his commander could still be alive, he would certainly have wagered against it.

  Chiron and nineteen of his men had settled in and waited beside the ruins of a fortified wall overlooking the city of Pandaya—what was left of it. The fragment of wall, which survived above the surge of water and boulders, was equipped on one side with a stone tower. Atop its observation platform, the medicus shared guard duty with the other survivors. The task had become an exercise in boredom, primarily because, with the exception of weeds and cottonwoods taking over the ruins, none of those on watch noticed any signs of life—human or otherwise.

  And for a short while, it remained that way.

  On the third day of Pliny’s captivity, Chiron struggled back to consciousness in the aftermath of an attack that began with silent foot soldiers and ended with a dozen elephants striding forward, two by two. Adorned in elaborate body armor, their tusks had been outfitted with swordlike blades. But even beyond this menacing sight, it was the appearance of their fearsome riders that stunned the battle-tested medicus and his men. These warriors were the last thing he saw before a blow to the back of the head flashed his world to black, and they were the first thing he saw when someone pulled him brutally to his feet. With long ebony hair streaming backward, the wild-eyed elephant riders had removed most of their body armor to display an array of tattoos and self-inflicted scars. Their forearms and hands bore grotesque wounds as well—oddly similar, he thought—until a sudden realization solved the riddle. The brutish cavalrymen were wearing gauntlets fashioned from human flesh.

  Ten of the medicus�
��s men had survived, and stood bound with him.

  He could see that the foot soldiers were creating a bed of coals that now glowed bright enough to drown out the starlight. The entire area around the fire pit was crowded with the strangely garbed invaders. They reminded Chiron more of hyperkinetic insects than soldiers—some gyrating wildly against the shadows of dead Pandaya, others simply bashing into their brethren. All appeared to be intoxicated but nothing about their actions resembled conventional drunkenness. There were guttural chants and the sounds of a strange language coming from all around. Though it hurt to look up, Chiron could see that there were figures all along the top of the wall. Several fell and smashed to the ground amid wild laughter, only to be replaced by a constant stream of revelers pouring out of the former observation platform.

  Then, in what Chiron could have sworn was a simultaneous action, the entire crowd went silent, the wild gyrations transforming into frightful whole-body vibrations that ran back and forth through the sea of human figures like a wave. The wave parted and six of the elephant riders, all of them women, advanced upon the Romans. Chiron squinted, not quite believing his own eyes. Each of the women had but a single breast. Where the one on the right side had been there was instead a hypertrophied pectoral muscle bearing the unmistakable scar of an old cautery wound.

  “They burn away their breast to make themselves better archers,” said the man next to Chiron.

  “How do you know this?” the medicus asked, under his breath.

  “They’re Scythians,” he said, and then, noticing that many of them had Far Eastern features, added, “or some strange offshoot.”

  “Scythians? I thought they were as extinct as the Babylonians.”

  The cavalryman nodded toward three of the approaching female warriors. “Maybe you can ask them about that.”