The Abominable: A Novel

“Douce Mere de Dieu,” whispered Jean-Claude.

I couldn’t speak. I just let my jaw sag and worked hard at keeping the field glasses from shaking in my hands.

There were bodies spread all around Base Camp. Every tent was torn and collapsed, including the large Whymper mess and infirmary tents, and even the canvas tarps had been ripped off the sanga- walled low stone enclosures.

The bodies were sprawled seemingly at random, and none of them looked intact. Here there was a decapitated torso, there a body with its head and limbs intact but with all of its internal organs ripped out; far out on the plain beyond the point where the glacial stream turned into a shallow river, vultures circled and swooped over two more dead bodies. We could tell through the glasses that those two farthest-flung corpses were dressed in Sherpa clothing, but we could make no identification—especially since the low clouds kept moving along the ground like a thick fog, obscuring the bodies from our view and then suddenly revealing them again in all their gore and horror. The amount of blood at Base Camp was…absurd was the only word that came to mind at the time.

So we couldn’t make out anyone’s identity in the camp area through the binoculars, only gaze at the ungainly attitudes of death, each torn body, lopped-off limb, and decapitated head in its own pool of blood.

I didn’t fully believe what I was seeing. I lowered the glasses, wiped my eyes, and looked again. The field of carnage remained the same.

Pasang stood to walk down to the camp, but the Deacon silently pulled him back low behind the moraine ridgeline. “We’ll wait awhile,” whispered the Deacon.

“There may be wounded men there who need tending,” said Pasang.

The Deacon whispered, “They’re all dead.” We all sat propped against a rock while the mists opened and then closed around us. We took turns watching with binoculars until real evening gloom began setting in.

“There might be wounded men we can’t see from here,” whispered Pasang. I’d never seen the Sherpa so worked up. “I need to go down there.”

The Deacon shook his head. “Semchumbi’s body count was right. Everyone’s there, and they’re obviously all dead. Wait.” It wasn’t a request. I’d never heard former British Army captain Richard Davis Deacon’s military command voice before.

Time passed. The clouds kept hiding bodies, revealing them, then hiding them again. It grew colder. Nothing living moved except the occasional gorak raven alighting on one of the ravaged corpses. The light was very dim when the Deacon finally said, “All right.”

The Deacon suggested—quietly commanded—that we spread out as we approached the killing ground. I noticed that he put his own flare pistol in his pocket but gestured for the other four of us to keep ours in hand. Only later did I realize that any enemy hiding in the rocks might easily mistake our 12-gauge Very pistols for actual pistols; the Deacon’s flare-barreled, military-issue blunderbuss gave away the illusion.

It was a bizarre and disturbing inspection. My instinct was to check every bloodied but intact body for any signs of life—after all, hadn’t Pasang brought Lobsang Sherpa back to life at Camp V with his absurdly large adrenaline needle? But the Deacon hurried our inspections, hushed our groans and exclamations when we recognized old friends amongst the dead, and gestured for J.C. and me to join him in converging on the large Whymper tent that had held the crates of weapons.

The large tent was torn apart, rags of canvas hanging like shreds of flesh we’d seen on some of the corpses scattered about. All of the crates had been torn open as if by a wildly swung axe (or claws, I wondered?), but the crates holding the hunting rifles and all the extra boxes of cartridges—for the Webley as well as for the rifles—had simply disappeared.

The Deacon crouched so that the rock sangas the Sherpas had erected around this former tent would give us a little cover from any armed assassins in the surrounding rocks and hills. At the moment, the constantly shifting cloud-fog was our best (and only) friend.

“Well, the yetis are armed now, if they weren’t before,” the Deacon said softly to Jean-Claude and me. Reggie, Pasang, and a visibly terrified Nawang Bura were still out in the fog moving from body to body, kneeling briefly, and then going on to the next corpse.

“Don’t cluster in tight groups,” ordered the man who again struck me as Captain Richard Davis Deacon of the Yorkshire Regiment’s 33rd/76th Foot Battalion. “It’s better that we raise our voices from a distance if we have to than group into tight target clusters.”

“Certainly no human being could do this,” said Reggie. She was standing over the corpse of a Sherpa who’d had his heart and all interior organs scooped out of his body. His face was covered with blood but still recognizable. The absolute identifiers were the shoes, specially made by our resident Sherpa cobbler for a man whose toes had just been amputated.

“Ang Chiri,” I said softly, not coming closer than ten or twelve feet from Reggie and the terrible corpse.

“I need to do a quick postmortem on one or two of these remains to find the actual cause of death,” said Pasang. “Mr. Perry, Monsieur Clairoux, Lady Bromley-Montfort, could you help me carry Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s bodies to what’s left of the infirmary tent? Some of the operating board is still intact, and I saw a workable lantern in the debris.”

To find the actual cause of death? I mumbled to myself. These men had been torn and clawed and bitten to bloody shreds and shattered bones. What could an autopsy show?

The Deacon had a different question. “You’re going to light a lantern and do postmortem examinations while these killers may still be around and waiting?” he asked from where he was crouched over the headless corpse of Lhakpa Yishay. I knew it was Lhakpa because his severed head had been propped between the exposed and shattered ribs in his hollowed-out chest. I thought of the Breakers of the Dead.

“Yes, I need the light from the lanterns,” said Pasang. “And, Mr. Deacon, would you please carry over Lhakpa Yishay’s head…yes, just the head. Once I get the bodies within the sanga rock walls of the infirmary, we can disperse again according to your wishes.”

The Deacon asked me to give Pasang some cover with my stubby Very pistol while Pasang was absorbed in his work under the cone of yellow light coming down from the lantern hanging on a tall tentpole he’d propped against the splintered operating table. I tried to keep my gaze averted—staring out into the shifting cloud-fog as it moved between us and the ice seracs and moraine ridges, every movement of fog looking to me like something huge and gray suddenly lurching out of the darkness—but sometimes I had to look back to where Pasang was digging in Ang Chiri’s emptied-out chest cavity. I realized that Pasang was using a scalpel and tongs from his doctor’s bag—most of the rest of the medical tools in the former infirmary tent here at Base Camp had been dumped and scattered but not carried away—to probe around poor Ang’s all-too-visible spinal cord.

I quickly looked away, back toward the gathering darkness all around us. In the oversized gray, waterproof Shackleton anoraks worn over their bulging goose down jackets, Reggie, the Deacon, Jean-Claude, and even Nawang Bura looked too much like yetis standing or ambling in the roiling cloud-fog. It was beginning to snow again.

I heard a “plink” of metal on metal behind me and turned in time to see Pasang using tongs to drop something small and dark into a white metal basin on the autopsy-stained operating board.

“Mr. Perry, could you please help me remove Mr. Ang Chiri’s body—we’ll set it over there on the ground just within the sanga—and perhaps help me lift Mr. Chedi onto the table?”

I did so, donning my thick overmittens so the blood wouldn’t get on my hands. That was a mistake; I never did get the blood off those mittens.

I admit that I stared when Pasang lifted Lhakpa Yishay’s disembodied head, held it close to his own face, and rotated it under the light as if he were inspecting a rare crystal. The entire left side of Lhakpa’s face had been gouged out—scooped out, actually—as if by a massive bear’s paw and claws. I could see something gray and glistening from the depths of that terrible cavity.

I turned away again and fought down nausea just as the doctor set the head down on the table, leaning it on the right side of Lhakpa’s shattered face. Then Pasang lifted a thin but wicked-looking saw. I resisted the impulse to put my hands over my ears as I heard the rasp of that saw on Lhakpa’s skull. In a minute, there was another “plink” of metal dropping into metal, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, Pasang had moved Lhakpa’s head aside and was digging around in Norbu Chedi’s disemboweled corpse.

Jesus H. Christ, I thought. Is this really necessary? Can’t we just bury