Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  There was blood everywhere, but it wasn’t fresh. The cave didn’t smell like an abattoir, nor did the spatters on the walls shimmer in the light. They had dried and begun to flake away in spots, lending the appearance of brick-red lichen.

  He glanced back to see Adrianne’s pale face right behind him. Julian and Warren shadowed her, as though in an attempt to keep as many bodies between them and whatever might be in the cave. Zhang was silhouetted in the mouth of the cave. He made no effort to enter, which, considering he not only had a weapon, but the training to use it, undoubtedly spoke volumes about their situation.

  Brooks returned his attention to the cave ahead of him. He swallowed hard and willed his hands to stop shaking. He took a deep breath, blew it out slowly, then quickly stepped out into the open.

  He swung the light to his left.

  No movement.

  To his right.

  Nothing.

  He expelled such a forceful sigh of relief that he could almost feel the adrenaline fleeing his system and took in his surroundings. Another step forward and something crunched beneath his feet. The occasional fly passed through his beam, casting a magnified shadow. He stood in a cavern roughly twenty feet wide, ten feet deep, and vaguely ovular in shape. The uneven ceiling was maybe eight feet high and bristled with stalactites that formed columns to either side at the periphery of his light’s reach. The tips of the stalactites nearest him were at eye-level. Several had arches of blood that had dribbled into drops that clung to the tips, unable to succumb to gravity before they congealed. The walls were positively covered with the kind of high-velocity spatters that resulted from violence of significant force and brutality. They climbed the ancient burlap tarp, where the blood beaded in the sheer amount of dust. The upper half had fallen down to reveal an old leather locker, the copper corners and latch thick with greenish rust.

  Brooks took another step forward and felt as much as heard something snap underfoot. He shined his beam at the ground and recoiled. There were bones everywhere. Broken pieces of them, anyway. Most were old and yellowed and largely unidentifiable chunks of calcium. Others, however, were fresher, the articular ends of the long bones knotted with tendons and cartilage. They were broken and gnawed where whatever consumed them had attempted to gain access to the marrow. And hardened into the thin layer of congealed blood were long white hairs that reminded him of the ones Zhang had burnt over the campfire, the fur he thought must have come from the belly of a tiger. He was about to say as much when he shined his light farther to the left and highlighted a swatch of orange and black fur and the source of the buzzing sound.

  “Christ!” Brooks stumbled in reverse and nearly tripped over an intact portion of a deer’s ribcage. His pulse thudded in his ears. He had to force himself to breathe. “That scared the bejesus out of me.”

  “I told you there were tigers here,” Julian said.

  “’Were’ being the operative word.” Warren turned on his own flashlight and added his beam to Brooks’s. “This one hasn’t been among the living in quite some time.”

  Its remaining fur was coarse and attached to straps of greasy, desiccated skin scattered around the largely intact framework. The fur on its face was brown with dried blood, the softer tissue of its eyes and nose long since consumed. Flies crawled in and out of the holes where they’d been. It wore orange and white booties on its otherwise skeletal appendages. It rested in a significant pool of dried blood, but there was no sign of the viscera that had spilled out in it.

  “Whatever scavenged it did a first-rate job,” Julian said. “They didn’t leave a single bite of meat behind.”

  “This doesn’t look like the work of scavengers.” Brooks thought about the remains of the wildebeest in Limpopo after the vultures and hyenas were finished. “It’s too neat. Too thorough. I think whatever killed it did so inside of this cave and proceeded to eat right here.”

  “That would explain the blood all over everything,” Adrianne said.

  “It could have been shot by a poacher and somehow managed to drag itself back here to its den to die,” Warren said.

  “No…it was definitely killed here.” Brooks shined his light on the exposed bones of the tiger’s neck, from which the fur curled forward as though in an attempt to unmask the animal. “The vertebrae are visibly misaligned. And there are fracture lines right there and…there. Whatever killed it broke its neck and then consumed it.”

  “Those injuries could have been inflicted postmortem,” Adrianne said.

  “Look at the way the second vertebra is retrolisthesed in relation to the first and how the zygoapophyseal joints are out of alignment in the oblique plane. The fractures of the spinous processes all but confirm it. The tiger’s head was wrenched backward, then its neck was twisted sharply to the side.”

  “What kind of animal is strong enough to attack and overcome a full-grown tiger?” Adrianne asked.

  Brooks looked back at her in the darkness, but said nothing.

  “You guys will never believe this,” Warren said.

  Brooks turned to find Warren standing on his toes so he could see into the trunk that had formerly been covered by the tarp. He lost his balance and inadvertently pulled it down from its perch. He danced out of the way before it could land on his feet. It burst open on the ground and scattered its contents amid the bones.

  Both men swept their lights across artifacts that couldn’t have seen the light of day in decades. There were heaps of moth-eaten clothes and leather boots with rusted buckles. Brooks nudged them aside with his foot and exposed a bent aluminum scale ruler, a collection of miniature trowels and brushes, rusted pliers, a stone pick, and cardboard squares warped by the damp. He picked one up and held it under the flashlight. Most of the ink had faded, but he could still see the outlines of eyes of various shapes, sizes, and colors. These were the primitive tools of an early anthropologist.

  “Whoa,” Julian said. “Would you look at this?”

  He held a piece of plaster to his face, then turned it around so they could see the details on the inside. There was the ridge of a brow, the half-sphere of a closed eye, a cheekbone, and the upper conch of an ear.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Adriane snatched it out of his hands and ran her fingertips along the smooth inside, tracing the contours of the face. “It’s an actual plaster cast of a human face. Do you have any idea how rare this is?”

  “Or how about this?” Warren held up a metal contraption made of three rulers and several long calipers attached to what looked like a dome that could be screwed down onto a man’s head. “Did you ever think you’d get to see a real craniometer? A part of me almost didn’t believe they were real. I mean, just look at it. Who in his right mind is going to let someone clamp this thing down on his head?” He turned it over and over in his hands then scraped at the rust with his thumbnail. “Cranium size as the measure of intelligence…it’s astonishing how far we’ve come in such a short…”

  His words trailed off and his brow furrowed. He chipped even harder at the rust.

  “JGB,” he said. “It’s engraved right here.” He looked Brooks dead in the eyes. “Johann Gerhardt Brandt. This is his trunk, isn’t it?”

  There was nothing Brooks could say.

  “You know who the biggest proponents of using anthropometric tools like these was? The Germans. And these devices were all antiquated by the 1950s. Are you telling me that Brandt was a—”

  “Nazi,” Julian finished for him.

  He held up a pitted pith helmet. The tan fabric had turned brown with water and blackened with mold, but the twin insignia on the sides were unmistakable. Four slanted rectangles in an almost checkerboard-like pattern forming twin lightning bolts. Or, more accurately, the stylized Sig runes of the Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary arm of Hitler’s regime.

  “I think it’s high time you told us what we’ve all gotten ourselves into here, Jordan,” Warren said.

  Brooks nodded and carried his backpack out of the cave
. He set it down at the base of the large boulder and removed a piece of paper from one of the inner pockets. It was folded and creased and crackled when he opened it.

  Behind him, the rain continued to pour unimpeded from the ledge with a thunderous roar. Zhang stared through the curtain of water with his semiautomatic pistol drawn, all pretense of civility abandoned. He made no indication that he’d heard them. He just watched the outside world as though he could see something that none of the rest of them could.

  Brooks sighed and offered the computer printout to Adrianne, who snatched it from his hand. She glanced at it, then right back up at him, her eyes wide.

  “This wasn’t how I planned for you to learn about this. I thought you’d be able to see it for yourselves. It wasn’t my intention to mislead you.”

  Adrianne looked back down, brought the paper close to her face, then drew it farther away.

  “This can’t be real.”

  “I’ve examined it myself. I have no doubt about its authenticity whatsoever.”

  Warren grabbed the printout from Adrianne and studied the picture Brooks had printed weeks ago, one at which he’d spent countless hours staring while plotting the expedition. Julian leaned over Warren’s shoulder to better see.

  When Warren looked up at Brooks, there was no animosity in his eyes, no hint of the anger that had been there just seconds before. In its place was a crooked smirk.

  “Well,” he said. “This changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  Twenty-two

  Johann Brandt Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  Chicago, Illinois

  October 10th

  Seven Days Ago

  Brooks stood under the banks of halogen lights, watching the mask turn in its protective case. Less than twelve hours from now, he and his team would board a 28-hour international flight bound for Kathmandu, where they would catch a series of buses across Nepal and Sikkim to the southern border of Tibet. From there, he had no idea what to expect. Brandt had told him every detail he could remember about the original Ahnenerbe-sponsored expedition, from how they had been initially stonewalled by the British in Gangtok and forced to travel days out of their way to cross the Tibetan border from Bhutan to how they followed the Yarlung Tsangpo through perilous valleys and over ice-capped mountains, all the while trailing unwieldy trains of Sherpas and overburdened mules.

  But this was a different world now.

  Seventy years ago, Tibet had been a mystery to the Western world, a primitive land steeped in mysticism and superstition ruled by an almost mythological hierarchy of silk-clad regents and ministers beholden to the spiritual rule of the Dalai Lama from his majestic hilltop shrine, the Potala Palace. It was a country under constant siege by the Chinese forces of the ruthless Chiang Kai-shek and the deceptive advances of the colonial British, whose dreams of creating an entire world under the imperial rule of a small gray island in the Atlantic would soon be shattered by the sound of the skies over London filling with the roar of the Luftwaffe and the screams of the bombs.

  Back then there were few cars and even fewer paved roads. Bandits roamed the hills while merchants traveled the Ancient Tea Horse Road with hundreds of pounds of tea on their backs and a steady stream of monks made pilgrimages on dirt roads upon which they prostrated themselves in the mud and snow. It was an age of innocence, or perhaps merely naiveté, that was never destined to last, no matter how fervently the citizenry believed or how hard they prayed.

  Now it was a pseudo-autonomous Chinese territory unable to secure even third world status for its lack of sovereignty. While neighboring Bhutan’s economy boomed and American business interests blossomed in India, Tibet clung to a bygone age of spiritual enlightenment in which monks bound by tradition found themselves blinking under a steady barrage of flashes from cell phone cameras and wrenched into a world where tourists flocked to marvel at the beauty of their country, while turning a blind eye to their suffering.

  Brooks wished he could have been a member of that earlier expedition, when the globe had been riddled with blank sections just waiting to be explored by daring men and women willing to risk their lives in the name of knowledge. Nearly every nook and cranny were now mapped by satellites, from the highest peaks to the deepest oceanic trenches. There were few uncharted regions and even fewer mysteries left to be solved, one of which continued to turn as the case rose from the pedestal, no longer separating him from the mask, which a part of him had almost expected to vanish like smoke.

  Brandt pressed another button on the console and the rotation ceased. The blank eyes stared up at Brooks from another place and time. He glanced at Brandt, who smiled and gave him permission with a nod.

  Brooks reached toward the mask and stopped inches short. He rubbed his gloved fingers together. He could feel the sweat beneath his sterile gloves, the oils from this skin that would start an unstoppable process of deterioration were they to come into contact with the miraculous specimen. He turned his head and blew out a long breath, then carefully lifted the mask from the stainless steel mount that had been machined to fit its every contour.

  “Have a seat, my boy,” Brandt said. “The way your hands are shaking I fear I might have a heart attack.”

  His voice was full of playfulness and mirth. He knew what it was like to hold such an amazing piece of work in his hands. Surely it was how Moses must have felt when he first hefted the stone tablets carved by the hand of God. It was like peering through the keyhole of a door beyond which lay the secrets of the universe.

  “It was even more impressive in the flesh.” Brandt winked. “Too bad we weren’t able to get out of Tibet with any footage. Can you imagine the kind of stir that would have caused?”

  Brandt chuckled and started to cough. He doubled over and gasped into the oxygen mask in an effort to catch his breath. It almost seemed as though his condition had deteriorated significantly in the last week alone. For not the first time, Brooks wondered if the old man would still be alive when they returned from Tibet.

  “To think that this was once a living, breathing creature is almost beyond comprehension,” Brooks said. “It’s magnificent.”

  Brooks sat down at a stainless steel table, which appeared to have been recently sterilized. The mask weighed next to nothing in his hands and felt as delicate as an eggshell. It was a uniform gray in color and so detailed that it was unnerving not to be able to feel the weight of the skull underneath.

  Some anthropomorphic masks had been molded with all the care of a manikin’s head and painted with gaudy colors outside the normal palette of human coloration, while others, like this one, had been created with the utmost care and precision. The fact that they were originally cast in the field was staggering. The sheer level of artisanship made their best modern digital models look like a child’s sketchbook by comparison. Despite the controversial nature of the science and the inhumane methods by which they were known to work, what the Nazis had done for the field of anthropology was nothing short of revolutionary. If only they’d elected to follow the path to enlightenment rather than succumbing to the purest distillation of evil mankind has ever known and perpetrating the kind of atrocities beyond even the capacity of a god of fire and brimstone to forgive.

  There was another stainless steel manikin’s head on the table, this one displaying features presumably generic enough to allow for any of the masks in the room to be placed upon it for closer evaluation. The thought of Brandt down here running his fingertips over the faces of men and women who’d been subsequently gassed and incinerated made him shiver, even as he seated his mask on the holder and prepared to do the same thing to an unknown hominin that couldn’t have been dead for very long at the time of casting. To think that such an amazing specimen had survived into the twentieth century. Was it the last of its kind or were there more like it out there, hiding in the few remaining refuges man had yet to exploit? Or was it something different, an aberration or mutation of an existing bloodline isolated by time and geography
? The possibilities were seemingly infinite. If only Brandt had been able to take a sample of its genetic material…

  Brooks worked from the outside in, tracing the uneven edges. They’d been left ragged, not filed down and smoothed into ovular shapes like most of the other masks, lending it an additional air of legitimacy, as though someone had just curled their fingers underneath it and lifted it from the face of the creature. Its hairline was low on it forehead and formed a widow’s peak barely above the ridge of its brow. It similarly grew inward along the lines of the cheekbones, nearly to the nose, framing the eyes in a manner reminiscent of a gorilla. The hairs on its head and face formed individual impressions in the plaster so detailed it almost looked like he could comb them. They were much longer than those of a great ape, more like a cross between a human and an orangutan, which was why he’d initially suspected that it might be an extant species of Gigantopithecus, but the remaining features were far too humanlike for there to be any doubt as to its lineage.

  Its brow was sloped and formed a distinct ridge. Extrapolating the curves over the top of the frontal bone and around the temporal bones to the sides produced what he imaged to be a cranial vault similar to his own in both shape and size. The eyes could have come from any human being, although based on their dimensions, appeared to fall somewhere between Caucasian and Asian, as did the almost aquiline nose and the fleshy nostrils.

  The lower half of the face, however, more closely resembled that of a gorilla. The jaws were prominent and bulged outward nearly to the tip of the nose. It was the only part of the skeletal architecture that wasn’t distinctly human, as though its face had been molded while biting down on an enormous slice of orange, peel and all. The lips were nearly hidden beneath a heavy mustache; its beard covered the entirety of its cheeks and chin all the way down to the bottom of the mold.