The Abominable: A Novel

dead when you get the book…or books…Dan, so be as honest as you want in your critique. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

I talked to Jacob Perry in July 1991, twenty years ago as I write this foreword to his manuscript in the late summer of 2011.

In late May 1992, Mary phoned to tell us that Mr. Perry had passed away in the Delta hospital. The cancer had won.

When I asked Mary if Mr. Perry had left anything for me, she seemed surprised. Everything he’d left behind—and it wasn’t much, his books and artifacts—had been packed up and shipped to his grandniece in Baltimore. Mary hadn’t been at the hospice at the time—she’d been in a hospital in Denver. Her assistant had mailed the packages.

Then, nine weeks ago, in the late spring of 2011, almost twenty years after my trip to Delta, I received a UPS package from someone named Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland. Assuming that it was a batch of my old books that someone wanted signed—something that really irritates me when the reader hasn’t asked permission of me to send the books—I was tempted to return the package to the sender, unopened. Instead, I used a box cutter to slash the package open with more than necessary energy. Karen looked at the shipping information and made me laugh by saying that we’d never had books for signing sent from Lutherville- Timonium and she immediately went to look it up online. (Karen does love her geography.)

But they weren’t old books of mine to be signed.

In the package were twelve Moleskine notebooks. I flipped through and saw that each page, front and back, was filled with small, precise cursive handwriting in a man’s strong hand.

Even then I stupidly didn’t think of Mr. Perry until I got to the last journal at the bottom.

The leather cover was wrapped around it, still holding the stub of a #2 pencil, but the leather was now weathered and worn and darkened by the oils transmitted through the repeated touch of Mr. Perry’s hands. He’d obviously transferred the leather cover to each volume during his ten months of effort at writing this single, long tale.

There was a typed note.

Dear Mr. Simmons:

My mother, Lydia Durbage, passed away this April. She was 71 years old. In going through her things, I found this box. It had been sent to her in 1992 by the nursing home where a distant relative of hers, a Mr. Jacob Perry, had lived his last years and where he died. Not really knowing and never having met her grand-uncle, it seems that my mother only glanced at the contents of the box, chose one or two items for sale at her weekly garage sale, and left the rest untouched. I don’t believe she ever opened the notebooks I have included in this package.

On page one of the top notebook there was a note, not to my mother but evidently to a certain “Mary” who ran the assisted living facility in Delta, that asked that these notebooks and a certain Vest Pocket Kodak camera be sent to you. Your address was given, which was how I knew where to send this much-belated package.

If these items were something you anticipated receiving twenty years ago, I apologize for the delay. My mother was absent-minded, even in her middle years.

Since the notebooks were meant to be sent to you, I’ve decided not to read them. I did skim through and noticed that my mother’s relative was an accomplished artist: the maps, drawings of mountains, and other sketches seem to be of professional quality.

Again, I apologize for the inadvertent and accidental delay that kept you from receiving this package in the timely manner that I’m sure Mr. Jacob Perry had hoped for.

Sincerely yours,

Richard A. Durbage, Jr.

I carried the box to my study and lifted out the stack of notebooks and began reading that afternoon and read straight through the night, finishing about nine the next morning.

After pondering his wishes for months, I’ve decided to publish two versions of Jacob Perry’s final (and only) manuscript. In the end, I’ve decided that publication is what he would have wanted after spending the last ten months of his life laboring over the effort. I also believe it’s why he chose me as his primary reader. He knew that I could judge whether a manuscript deserved publication or not. I believe with all my heart that Jacob Perry’s manuscript—this book—does deserve that publication.

A second and very limited edition will show Mr. Perry’s own handwriting and will include the scores of sketches, portrait drawings, carefully done maps, mountain landscapes, old photographs, and other elements that Mr. Perry had added to the text. This version will be of text alone. I think it succeeds in telling the story that Jacob Perry, 1902–1992, wanted me to hear. Wanted us to hear. As his editor, I’ve made only a few spelling corrections and added a very few explanatory notes to his text. I can only trust and hope that, in allowing me to be his first reader and editor, Mr. Perry understands my own hunger to allow others to read this strange and oddly beautiful testament.

I do think this is what he wanted.

I can only hope to God that it was.

Part I

THE CLIMBERS

Chapter 1

The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.

T he three of us learn about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance on Mount Everest while we are eating lunch on the summit of the Matterhorn.

It is a perfect day in late June of 1924, and the news lies folded in a three-day-old British newspaper that someone in the kitchen at the small inn at Breuil in Italy has wrapped around our cold beef and horseradish sandwiches on thick fresh bread. I’ve unwittingly carried this still-weightless news—soon to be a heavy stone in each of our chests—to the summit of the Matterhorn in my rucksack, tucked alongside a goatskin of wine, two water bottles, three oranges, 100 feet of climbing rope, and a bulky salami. We do not immediately notice the paper or read the news that will change the day for us. We are too full of the summit and its views.

For six days we have done nothing but climb and re-climb the Matterhorn, always avoiding the summit for reasons known only to the Deacon.

On the first day up from Zermatt we explored the Hornli Ridge—Whymper’s route in 1865—while avoiding the fixed ropes and cables that ran across the mountain’s skin like so many scars. The next day we traversed to do the same on the Zmutt Ridge. On the third day, a long day, we traversed the mountain, again climbing from the Swiss side via the Hornli Ridge, crossing the friable north face just below the summit that the Deacon had forbidden to us, and then descending along the Italian Ridge, at twilight reaching our tents on the high green fields facing south toward Breuil.

I realized after the fifth day that we were following in the footsteps of those who’d made the Matterhorn so famed—the determined artist-climber 25-year-old Edward Whymper and his ad hoc party of three Englishmen: the Reverend Charles Hudson (“the clergyman from the Crimea”); Reverend Hudson’s 19-year-old protege and novice climber Douglas Hadow; and the confident 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas (who had just passed at the top of the British Army’s examination list, some 500 marks ahead of the next closest of his 118 competitors), the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry and a neophyte climber who’d been coming to the Alps for two years. Along with