The Abominable: A Novel

outer pocket where you can get at them quickly.”

“But our Sherpas have your Webley,” said Reggie. “We’re the ones with no real weapons. Shouldn’t the Sherpas come down and rescue us?”

The Deacon smiled. “I’ll ask for my pistol back when we get to Camp Three. Right now, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of one armed cook against six or seven or more armed murderers. We know what those predators are capable of.” The Deacon nodded in the direction of the killing fields. I could smell the coppery stink of blood and the slight but growing stench of decomposing flesh and brains.

“Who are they?” whispered J.C.

The Deacon didn’t answer. He gestured for us to get ready to leave the rock-walled protection of the infirmary sanga.

“We’re going straight up the Trough, then?” whispered Reggie as we got into single file, the Deacon leading, Reggie next, then me, then Pasang, then Nawang Bura, and finally Jean-Claude.

“Yes,” whispered the Deacon. “But not on the path. From ice pillar to ice pillar, penitente to penitente, from one moraine ridge to the next. Move when I move; stop when I stop. If I have to fire a flare at someone, check your targets before you fire. Remember, these Very pistols weren’t built to be used as weapons. More than ten feet of distance from your target and you have sod-all chance of hitting someone. Make each shot count.”

None of us had anything to add to that. One by one, following the Deacon, our left arms extended to touch the one in front of us, the Very pistols in our right hands, we moved into the swirling, snow-driven darkness and up the Rongbuk Glacier valley back toward Mount Everest.

5.

As we walked slowly up the dark Trough, moving quickly from the theoretical cover of one ice pinnacle or moraine ridge to another (but no longer crouching or duckwalking except when the Deacon held up his arm as a signal to stop), I began to wonder when this expedition had crossed the boundary from the merely fantastic into the region of the absurdly unbelievable.

The line of the six of us slow-jogging from one 50-foot-tall penitente ice pinnacle to the next reminded me of when I was a kid and forced my two sisters to play Cowboys and Indians with me on a small hill set in the thick groves of trees behind our family home in Boston’s old suburb of Wellesley. We’d hide, peek out, run to the next tree, and then hide again. When I could see their skirts or pinafores flash in the dappled forest light, I’d fire my carved wooden pistol at them. But my sisters, never wanting to get their frocks dirty, always refused to fall dead on the forest floor or roll down the hill when I’d clearly shot them. I, on the other hand, fell dead so violently and rolled down the hill so gracefully that eventually we’d boiled the Cowboys and Indians down to a more pure kid-activity which I thought of as “shoot Jacob and watch him die and roll.”

Thinking of my sisters made me remember that none of us had sent any letters to friends or family since we’d sailed from England. This Everest expedition was supposed to be a secret—our secret—so there could be no letters or postcards stamped from Colombo or Port Said or Calcutta or Darjeeling. Quite a change from the British ’21, ’22, and ’24 expeditions, when runners carried mail back and forth between Everest and Darjeeling, keeping the climbers in intermittent but solid contact with the world beyond. If someone like Henry Morshead or Howard Somervell wrote home saying that they wanted some chocolate cake, chocolate cake they would receive a few weeks later.

I knew that Jean-Claude had written a letter to his sweetheart—or was she already his fiancee?—Anne Marie, every day of this trip. Their plan, I knew, was to marry in December after J.C. received a promotion to Chamonix Guide First Class, and thus a boost of his meager pay.

I don’t know if the Deacon wrote letters during this trip; I’d never seen him write anything except official expedition letters and notes in his leather-bound travel log. In the first weeks of the expedition I’d written a few letters to my parents, one to an old Harvard girlfriend, and even one to my favorite sister, Eleanor, but I got tired of packing the letters around with me, so I’d poured my writing talents into my detailed climbing journal.

The upshot of my thinking those moments scurrying up the Trough was If we die on this goddamned glacier or mountain, no one will ever know.

After an hour of this scuttling from one ice pinnacle to the next, never walking exactly on the bamboo- wanded and red-flagged center path, but never wandering that far to either side of it, we reached Camp I at 17,800 feet, 1,300 feet above the death fields that had been Base Camp.

Camp I had looked fine on our way down; now, just hours later, it had been torn apart. The same slashed canvas, tumbled poles, broken-open crates, and general sense of total destruction we’d seen at Base Camp. But there were no bodies at Camp I. We checked the snow for tracks, but other than those of some hobnailed boots —many of our Tiger Sherpas had been wearing hobnailed boots—there was nothing to see.

Then Jean-Claude had hissed at us, and there in a 15-foot patch of snow were three gigantic yeti tracks. Each was similar to a human footprint other than its absurd length—more than 18 inches long, I guessed—and the fact that the big toe curved inward, almost like a gorilla’s foot or other large primate’s.

“Big fellow based on his stride,” whispered the Deacon. “Easily seven feet tall. Perhaps eight.”

“Surely you don’t…,” began Reggie.

“I don’t,” the Deacon whispered to her. “Not for an instant. You can see beneath each footprint where someone in boots stepped in the place where each fake footprint was to go, then pressed down this huge yeti-foot imprint when he took his next step.”

“It seems an elaborate and rather silly ruse if the men doing this intend to kill us all anyway,” Reggie said.

The Deacon shrugged. “I suspect that the carnage at Base Camp and this sad children’s play with the footprints was aimed at scaring off all of our Sherpas. Or perhaps they plan to kill all of us, including all our Sherpas, but sell this yeti idea to the locals. In the end, though, it’s not the Sherpas these wanton murderers want to kill; it’s the four of us. Five of us, counting Dr. Pasang.”

I thought that this was very reassuring.

Camp II was burning. They’d torched everything they could find, but they hadn’t found the cache of oxygen rigs which we’d hidden behind snow-covered boulders in the maze of seracs, penitentes, and moraine on the glacier side of the camp on the way down.

“One could see this fire from Camp Three,” said Reggie. “They’ve given up all pretense of being yeti.”

“They’re yetis with matches and cigarette lighters,” said Jean-Claude.

“Will the fourteen men we left at Camp Three climb onto the North Col to escape, do you think?” asked Dr. Pasang.

“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “It would be too much like retreating into a cul-de-sac for them.”

“They may scatter,” said Reggie. “Climb to the moraine ridges before descending. Try to make it down to Base Camp and back out onto the plains in small groups or one by one.”

“That would be the smart thing to do,” agreed Jean-Claude.

“Do you believe they will do that, Mr. Deacon?” asked Pasang.

“No.”

I was looking at the sets of oxygen tanks on their frames. Their dials showed most of them were topped off with pressure. “What do we do with these things?” I asked.

“Bring them with us,” said the Deacon.

“Why on earth would we do that?” I said. “Aren’t we just going to fetch the surviving Sherpas from Camp Three and make a run for Rongbuk Monastery or Chobuk or Shekar Dzong?” Of the three places I’d mentioned, only the last—Shekar Dzong—seemed large enough and far enough away to feel like a place of temporary safety, even though it was a little less than 60 miles north of Base Camp by trail, less than 40 miles north as the gorak flies.

At the moment I wouldn’t have minded being a gorak. But even as I thought that, I thought of the hollowed-out rectum and insides of George Mallory and felt a little sick; there were seeds or something visible in