It took him an inordinate amount of time to zip his vest and outer coat. His fingers would not cooperate—the cold and the stitches making him fumble. Finally he got it. He shoved the gun down the back of his belt, secured the speed-loader, buttoned the windbreaker, and put on a stiff-billed ranger cap. He made sure he had his maps—the trail guide and the ancient overlay map that Okuda had prepared for him—easily accessible. His lucky Sherlock key chain was bulging in his pants pocket.
Starting for the door, he hesitated for a moment, pausing in the darkness. He pulled out one of the maps and looked down at it.
He went back to the desk. There was a large blotter scrawled with doodles, and a cup with pens and pencils. Grove plucked one of the felt-tip pens out of the cup and kelt down. He thought of the Iceman then as he laid Okuda’s map of Mount Cairn on the floor.
What horrors had the little shaman stumbled upon six thousand years ago on that glacier?
Grove looked at Okuda’s map. The young Asian had absently marked the corner with a doodle of his own. The familiar balloonlike shapes of the Iceman’s tattoos.
Grove lifted his right pant leg, exposing the flesh of his leg. Then he carefully drew the symbols on his skin in the exact same position as the Iceman’s markings:
When he was done, he tossed the pen away, lowered his pant leg, rose, and went over to the door. He paused one last time in the shadows.
Protect us while we protect them.
Then he slipped out of the shack.
The cold and noise and shifting lights assaulted Grove’s senses. He sniffed it away. Swallowed hard. Then hobbled quickly toward the tree line.
Nobody saw him fade into the copse of Sitkas and birch trees to the north. And nobody saw him circle back around toward the trailhead on the other side of the smoking van.
Safe in the shadows, just beyond the reach of the flashing blue lights, he found the little red flag on the end of the wire stick that marked the beginning of the summit hike.
He limped past the flag and started up the side of the mountain.
27
The Keyhole
The first leg of the Mount Cairn summit route winds through a dense forest of spruce. In the deepest pit of the night these woods are absolute black. Hiking at this time of night is strictly prohibited.
After nearly forty-five minutes, Grove was still maneuvering his way through this frigid darkness at a fairly steady gate, considering his injuries, his breath showing in delicate plumes of vapor.
The crackle of his boots against the crust of snow echoed in the silence. There was still quite a bit of snow on the ground for mid-May, and as Grove wove his way through the trees, he wished he had a flashlight. There appeared to be recent footprints in the snow ahead of him, but they’d been badly distorted by the wind, and were almost gone.
In the absence of a trail, the tiny red flags sticking out of the six-inch padding of snow were the only signposts marking the route.
Grove could hear his wheezing breaths like thunder in his ears. His side ached, and his chest throbbed. He could feel his pulse in his wounds. The altitude was working on him already. He was light-headed, and his breathing was getting labored. Think of Maura ravaged and bleeding, think of the innocent victims, think of Zorn, make the anger work for you.
He expected an arrow to leap out of the blackness behind the spruce at any moment. He reached into his windbreaker and found the beavertail grip of the .357. Without breaking stride, he unsheathed the weapon, brought it out, and held it at his side while he trudged along.
For some reason that he did not yet fully understand, he found himself thinking of Father Carrigan’s mad rant at the Hotel Nikko a few days ago. What had the old man said about the position in which all the mummies had died?
It’s a gesture of absorption . . . a summoning . . . the summoning of a spirit into one’s earthly body.
Grove felt as though he was doing just that. Alone on this godforsaken mountain. Trying to draw out a madman. Trying to summon the son of a bitch out of hiding. Following two parallel routes in the darkness—one modern, one ancient—their trajectories aligning like crosshairs, like two identical strands of DNA.
In the darkness ahead of him, another miniature red flag materialized out of the snow.
Grove went over to it and paused. The snow had deepened. It was up to Grove’s shins now, making each stride an arduous challenge. His feet had lost all feeling. The trees had thinned. The air had thinned. His breath bloomed. He looked up and saw the chaos of stars overhead, as brilliant and impassive as the dome of a planetarium.
He felt as though he were about to leave the earth’s atmosphere and emerge into deep space. He tried to catch his breath. Tried to focus. His wounds thrummed with pain. He pulled out the two maps and studied them in the ethereal silver light.
His hands trembled as he tried to focus on the concentric lines of blue and black ink on the yellowed vellum paper. Comparing the two routes—the one the Ackermans had taken, and the one the archaeologists had reconstructed for the Iceman—Grove came to the conclusion that he was nearing the point that the two paths met. The burial place of the Iceman. Grove’s leg tingled underneath his trousers where the felt-tip tattoo had dried: Protect us . . . while we protect them.
A noise made him jerk.
The map fluttered to the snow and the gun came up instinctively, like a jack-in-the-box, both his hands on it now, eyes pinned open like shiny medallions in the dark. Something had moved ten yards away. Grove pointed the barrel at it.
A flash of skin in the darkness, and Grove fired three quick blasts, the muzzle flashing three times in the darkness—bam! bam! bam!—the gun bucking hard in Grove’s ruined hands, the bullets crackling through the dwindling foliage like paper ripping.
Then silence.
Ears ringing in the ensuing calm, stars spangling his vision, Grove managed to lumber through the snow toward the clearing ahead of him with the gun still raised and scalding hot in his icy hands. He’d gotten just a glimpse of something rolling across the ground in the muzzle flash.
Something twitched in a shadow to Grove’s left. He glanced down at the scabrous white surface of the snow, and saw the animal. It took a while to even register in his mind. He stared and stared at it, his panting breaths puffing white vapor in the darkness. The thing stared back at him with empty feral shock in its beady little eyeballs.
The bird, twitching in its death throes, choking on its own blood, was enormous. The size of a ten-gallon hat, with gray mottled feathers, gouged and scorched from one of the blasts. Grove recognized it from a photo in the guide he had studied on the plane. A willow ptarmigan. The park was crawling with them. Grove felt as though his chest was about to burst. He peeled off his gloves so he could better feel the trigger.
He was aiming the gun at the poor creature’s cranium when he heard another noise.
It came from the vast ice fields above him, beyond the tree line—from the white tundra where the oxygen-starved atmosphere kills all the trees and deforms the undergrowth into twisted abominations sticking out of the snow. It came on the wind like a whisper, and Grove’s genitals shrank. The hairs on his body stiffened like metal filings in a magnetic field.
Somebody had called his name in an unearthly voice. A voice without tone or humanity—like the icy snap of a sulfur match tip.
“Ullllyssseeeeeeees.”
Grove swallowed his terror and climbed through the snow, up the steepening slope. Moonlight shone down through the thinning boughs. His boots sank with each footstep, making cracking noises like parchment tearing. He could see the threshold of the tree line just ahead of him opening like an archway into an ancient white ruin.
The park guide calls it the keyhole—a clearing of shriveled saplings and undernourished Sitka spruce. The keyhole ushers hikers into the higher, alpine elevations where the base camps are established for technical climbs. Past visitors have rhapsodized about its scenic beauty.
When Grove reached the
clearing and got his first glimpse of the vast moonlit ice field, his heart nearly stopped. The late-stage moon shone down on the glacier like a klieg light—illuminating an uncharted planet bordered by great white craters and dunes. The black granite tower of Mount Cairn’s summit rose to the north.
A delicate strand of boot prints stitched off into the distance like sutures across the snow.
Grove let out an involuntary gasp, and the gun came up with a jerk.
In the distance, something like a hundred yards away, at the point where the boot prints stopped—the precise same point that the mummy had been found one year earlier—Ackerman stood shin-deep in the snow. His face still obscured by that dark nylon hood, he was a mere silhouette: facing this way, his hunting bow at his side, an arrow clutched in his hand.
In the distance all you could see inside the hood were yellow teeth.
28
Trapdoor
C’mon, c’mon, you idiot, shoot him! For Christ’s sake, fire the gun, you got three chances, the gun’s rated for four hundred yards or more, c’mon, C’MON!
Grove aimed the gun.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!
He fired. Once. Twice.
Shit!
The flashes bloomed silver in Grove’s eyes, the booms vibrating the thin dark membrane of night air. In the distance Ackerman jerked, startled by the noise. Then he spun and hobbled away, his gangly arms working furiously as he cobbled over the snow toward a gigantic buttress of rock to the east.
Missed him! Goddamnit, missed him!
Grove lunged across the clearing, the gun still cradled in his numbed, frostbitten bare hands. Lungs heaving, brain screaming—don’t let him get away, not now, so close, SO CLOSE!—he fixed his sights on the silhouette fleeing in the distance. The wind howled through the canyon. Somewhere to the south a falcon shrieked.
As he charged across the ice field as fast as his failing legs would allow, Grove felt the vastness opening up before him like a desolate planet.
They call it the Chikilna Glacier Highway—an immense slope the length and breadth of five football fields, bordered on either side by jagged hills and buttresses of stone slathered with permafrost. The edges can be treacherous. Giant plateaus of snow loom like waves frozen in midcurl over deep crevasses. Footing can give way without warning, and deep trenches can appear out of nowhere, with the slightest shift of wind direction.
Ackerman had vanished over the edge of a stone buttress two hundred yards away.
Grove hurried toward the buttress. It was too dark to see what lay beyond those giant rocks, but the predawn glow on the snow diffused the light into a sort of dreamy, purple radiance. Grove’s brain swam with panic as he scanned the horizon for any sign of the killer. One round left in the gun, one round left and then six in the belt!
His ranger hat flipped off into the wind. His hip ached and panged as he approached the buttress, his boots sinking deeper into the snow. It felt as though his legs weighed a ton. As though a nightmare were gripping him in slow motion as he churned through the drifts.
All at once Grove’s brain flashed on the fragment of a vision, a genetic memory, another manhunter’s final assault on a mountain thousands of years ago: The wind sluices down the dark corridor of skeletal trees. It whistles past the shaman like a banshee howling in his ears. He takes one step at a time, his grass-netted boots sinking into the snow up to his knee. His feet are numb, and he can barely see his hand in front of his face as he climbs the crevasse. He’s almost there. He must keep going, he must, he must—
A noise snapped Grove out of his daze.
It sounded like a gasp or a yelp, piercing the cold darkness behind the buttress somewhere. Grove immediately dove to the ground. He landed on his hands and knees in eighteen inches of snow, eating a mouthful of ice, tearing more stitches, setting off fireworks of sparks in his field of vision.
The gun went off.
The watery blast, muffled by the snow, popped in Grove’s ears, the bullet ricocheting off a nearby boulder, chewing a chink of ice from the rock. The sonic boom echoed down ghostly chasms in the distance.
Grove’s hand, buried in the snow, completely without feeling, was still welded around the grip of the gun.
He crawled behind a boulder and brushed the snow off the icy stainless steel barrel. Heart racing, he levered the hot cylinder open. Smoke whistled out of the chamber and into the wind. He dumped the empties. The little brass casings bounced into the snow.
Grove reached inside his coat. Found the speed-loader. Pulled it out and slammed it into the cylinder. Something wrong. Jammed? No. The speed-loader was frozen. Frozen! The bullets cemented in there like ice cubes.
Another noise, and Grove jerked around. No ammo. Naked! Naked!
He rose to a crouch. Then turned. Think! Think! He circled around the back of the boulder. THINK! Pulse pounding, eyes stinging in the wind, he formulated a plan. Toss something across the front face of the buttress . . . then crawl over the top and surprise him!
Grove crept as quietly as possible around the rear end of the buttress, then paused, taking a deep breath. Then he hurled the useless gun as hard as he could at the leading edge of the plateau thirty yards to the north.
The gun made an unholy clang and clatter as it struck the jagged stone.
Moving as quickly and silently as possible, Grove scaled the buttress, then frantically searched the magenta shadows for Ackerman. Where the HELL is he? WHERE THE HELL IS HE? Grove crawling on hands and knees. Searching, searching . . . until suddenly, there was a crack, and Grove felt the buttress give way beneath him like a great trapdoor.
It happened all at once, a loud shifting snap as his right knee broke through a layer of snow, and the ledge collapsed suddenly on one side. And then Grove was sliding backward. Toward the face. Sliding out of control. Crying out. Sliding, sliding—
—clawing at the ice now—
—until he slipped off the ledge.
29
Black Eternity
At the last moment Grove’s bloody fingernails dug into a crack in the crust like grappling hooks. His body flopped and banged against the side of the crevasse, and he hung there suddenly. Hung in midair. His paralytic, frozen fingers hooked into a fissure. Don’t look down, don’t look, don’t do it, don’t!
He looked down.
The crevasse plunged into black eternity below him. A million years of glacial ebb and flow. An endless dark chasm hungry to swallow him.
The wind lashed at his back. He tried to lift himself back up over the ledge, but his wounds would not allow him to. Pain shrieked in his pelvis, his ribs, his skull. His body swayed in the mountain gusts like a deadweight.
Nobody will ever know how long he hung there, alone, in the gelid drafts over that black chasm. It might have been a single minute. Or it might have been much longer. Grove would never know.
In that icy, unforgiving wind, time had jammed like a broken clockwork.
He knew he was going to die, but he could not escape the feeling that he had one last task to perform. One last piece of unfinished business.
Hanging there by his numb, frostbitten fingers, Grove kept hearing his mom’s soft lullaby of a prayer playing over and over again in his traumatized brain like a fever dream, in rhythm with his gasping, hyperventilated breathing:
“Ndeya no mwana wandi munshila ba mpapula,
Munshila ba mpapaula
Iye, iye, iye yangu umwnaa wandi
Yangu umwana wandi mushila ba mpapula.”
(“It’s not good to be alone in this world.
Mother, carry me.
I will carry you one day
The way a crocodile carries its young on her back.”)
Tears burned his eyes, and he was about to give up, when he saw two things almost simultaneously that kept him holding on for one more terrible moment.
Dawn had come.
The first rays of brilliant, unadulterated alpine sunlight sliced through the gloom, painting the side of
the mountain in violent slashes of blood-orange. The jagged face of rock around Grove turned luminous. Ice crystals scattered the light into silver sparks.
Then, in that unheralded appearance of morning, a hooded shadow slithered across the stone surface of the east face. It was tall and rangy, and came from an outcropping above Grove. An arrow protruded from a bow, aimed directly at the back of Grove’s neck.
“It is yourrrr timmmmmmme.”
Barely audible above the gusts, the unexpected words reached Grove’s ears like sympathetic strings being plucked. The revelation vibrated through him. It is your time. Four simple words, wheezed in a mucusy, feral baritone, raveling together in Grove’s brain, making sense of everything: the beast had lured him here to this precipice, this terrible fate, just as it had lured so many man-hunters down through the millennia.
The realization nearly knocked Grove off the side of the mountain, but he held on for one last millisecond, long enough to twist his head around and look up into the face of absolute desolation leaning out over a crag of rock.
In the putrifying sunlight, Ackerman’s face was partially visible inside the hood. A pointed chin, an ulcerated beak of a nose, one visible eye luminous with demonic energy. The face looked as though it had been dead a long while—probably ravaged by stroke or cardiac arrest. It was the color of frozen black cinders. “Your timmmme,” the monster hissed as he drew the arrow back, taught against the bow.
Grove slammed his eyes shut.
A gust of wind, and then—twannnnng!—the noise followed by a sharp slashing pain just above Grove’s left shoulder blade. It was as savage as the bite of a rabid dog, and it nearly knocked Grove off the mountain. But he held on, held on with everything he had left, his frozen fingers wedged into that fissure. The pain raged down his side, penetrating his innards like a hot poker, as another sound wrenched his attention to his left.
He caught a glimpse of the arrow tumbling down the side of the glacier, tossing and turning end over end on the wind currents, then vanishing in a puff of white powder. The wind! Thank Christ, the wind had thrown the arrow off enough to only graze him!
Frozen Page 27
