The Abominable: A Novel

Two more deep thrusts, using the weight of her upper body to keep the points of the hammers buried so deep in the snow that her mittened hands weren’t visible, she slowed to a stop just yards above the drop-off to the full North Face.

The Deacon and Pasang continued hopping and crampon-bouncing perilously back down the gulley, losing in minutes countless feet in altitude that it had taken us the better part of a painful hour to gain. They arrived at Reggie’s side—she was still lying spread-eagled and facedown in the snow, her crampons raised—at almost the same instant. J.C. and I turned to join them, but the Deacon shouted at us to stay put—we’d lost enough time.

Within a minute, Reggie was sitting up—Pasang’s cramponed boot giving her a footrest to keep her from sliding as she sat on the snow—and soon she was drinking hot tea from a thermos the Deacon had produced.

The wind was still so negligible that J.C. and I could hear everything Reggie said from almost 100 feet below our site on the near-vertical slope. “Stupid, stupid,” she kept muttering. “Stupid!”

Pasang was looking her over—reaching beneath her outer layers to feel her arms, legs, and torso in ways that made me sorry that I wasn’t a doctor—and called up to us that other than some bruises and contusions, Lady Bromley-Montfort seemed all right.

“We need to know about your ankles,” the Deacon said in a worried tone. Often the impact of crampons flipping one over during a steep slide sprains or breaks ankles, or snaps the lower leg bones, as we’d seen so clearly with George Mallory’s corpse—and he hadn’t even been wearing crampons when he died. It had just been his heavy boots that had caused that compound fracture of the tibia we’d seen gleaming whitely.

With both men’s help, Reggie stood, wobbled slightly, was steadied by Pasang’s huge hand, and said, “They’re sore—my ankles, I mean—but no real sprain. Nothing broken.”

Pasang knelt in front of her right then and for a moment I thought he was praying; then I realized he was simply re-tightening the lady’s crampon straps.

“Here’s your ice axe back,” said the Deacon, handing it to her.

Reggie frowned—I could see the side of her face from where I stood leaning on my axe 100 feet up-slope —and said, “This isn’t my ice axe.”

“It has to be,” said the Deacon. “I found it where it bounced about twenty feet to the base of that gully to your right.”

Reggie pointed. “There’s my old axe up there, half buried there about halfway down the gully. I feel stupid for letting go of it. This is a new Schenk ice axe.”

“You did not let go of your own ice axe, my lady,” said Dr. Pasang. “It was ripped out of your hands. Had you tightened the wrist strap on it—as you did on the ice hammers—the wrenching torque certainly would have snapped your wrist.”

“Yes,” said Reggie in a distracted voice. “But whose axe is this? It looks brand-new, but the wood of the shaft is darker than mine. And it has three notches on it here about two-thirds of the way up the shaft.”

“Three notches?” said the Deacon in an odd-sounding voice. He took the ice axe from her and studied it carefully. Then he removed his binoculars from his pack and began scanning the narrower gully to the right of the one in which J.C. and I were still standing. Every second I was not moving made me colder, especially my feet.

“There is something up there,” said Pasang, pointing upward.

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “A man. Or a body.”

With the two tall men half-supporting Reggie for her first dozen cramponed steps or so, all three of them started climbing steadily—not back up the gully we’d almost climbed and in which J.C. and I waited, but toward the narrower, steeper one to our right. Someone or something was waiting up there for us.

15.

I was the first one to reach the man-in-the-other-gully because I cheated a bit; rather than descend our gully and re-climb the adjacent one, as Jean-Claude and the others were wisely doing, I used up most of my dwindling energy in free-climbing the nine-foot-high ridge of boulders separating our gully from the next one and dropping down into the snow there, barely arresting myself with wildly waving arms and a firmly and quickly sunk ice axe. But my idiotic and risky exertions got me to the corpse minutes before the others arrived.

And corpse it was, I saw at once. And—even with my very limited experience with dead bodies—it seemed a strange one.

The tall, muscular man looked as if he’d been sitting on a flat rock just a few yards above where his body had come to rest after it had finally tumbled over, still in a stiffened, seated position.

He was an English climber, there was no doubt of that. Like Mallory, he had no oxygen tanks or frame on his back—only a wind-tattered anorak over a Norfolk jacket and several visible layers of wool sweaters—and there were the remnants of a leather motorcycle or flying helmet strangely bunched up on the right side of his head, along with tattered and flapping remnants of a large wool overcap. He wore no goggles, and his face was bare to the elements.

What made his posture seem so strange to me, I realized, was that he was still frozen in a sitting-forward posture, his hands pressed together, fingers clasped, either in the motion of praying or trying to keep his hands warm. Those hands were pressed between his knees, which were so tightly closed against one another that they seemed a single frozen mass.

I steeled myself to crouch and look closer at his face.

It had been a handsome face and probably very young, although at least a year’s worth of Everest-altitude winds and sunlight had weathered it in odd ways. I could still see deep marks where a standard oxygen mask had been pressed down on the last day of his life near the bridge of his finely shaped nose and on both sides of what must have been a well-shaped mouth. It was disturbing to look at his mouth, actually, since either a final death scream or the tightening tendons associated with death had pulled it bizarrely open, shriveled lips pulled back and away from the white teeth, exposing a brown gum line.

His eyelids were closed—and the eyes themselves seemed deeply sunken, as if the eyeballs were missing —and frost and snow had settled in the occipital orbits. The right side of that once handsome young face appeared almost untouched except for odd, translucent strips of skin hanging from his cheeks, forehead, and chin. What I first took to be a wound from a fall, a split of flesh and skin on the left side of his face, was, I realized just before the others arrived, only an open gouge where goraks had been pecking at the frozen flesh to get at softer tissue below. This had exposed the poor man’s left cheekbone, all of his teeth on the left side of his face, and ridges of brownish ligaments and muscle tissue. It was as if that side of the corpse’s face was smiling broadly at me, and I confess that the effect disturbed me.

Half of his forehead and scalp had come free from the dislodged motorcycle helmet and wool cap, and the hair I saw there was short and so blond as to look white through my Crooke’s glass goggles. I tugged the goggles up for a moment to look more closely and realized that the short, still-combed-back hair was white—but almost certainly because it had been bleached so by a year of exposure to the ferocious ultraviolet rays at this altitude. There was white stubble on the intact right side of his face, but some of the stubble was still blond along the shaded jawline of the damaged side.

I looked around for a rucksack or other detritus from a fall, but the only pack the corpse carried was a small canvas gas mask carryall slung around his neck in front, just as George Mallory’s had been. Fighting down a sudden surge of nausea, I reattached my face mask to my leather motorcycle helmet, set the regulator valve to low flow, and gulped down some English air to get my brain cells working again.

I stepped back from the body just as my four climbing companions kicked their way up the last yards of the gully to stand beside me. There was a shared moment of silence, more to let our lungs fight for oxygen than out of any intentional respect for the dead man at our feet. That would come later…For now, I drank in the rich air set to the 15,000-foot level from my pressurized tank and blinked away black dots that had been briefly dancing in my narrowing cone of vision. That free climb over the ridge rocks, at above 28,000 feet, wasn’t the smartest thing I’d done this endless week.

I tugged my mask down. “Is this your cousin Percival, Reggie?”

Reggie shot me a glance almost as if she was unsure I was being serious. Then she saw I was and shook