The Deacon doused his lamp and we wriggled back and away from the crevasse opening. Pasang and Reggie joined us in a crouched circle.
“We need that pistol,” whispered the Deacon.
“I’ll go down,” J.C. whispered. “I am the lightest. And I have my ice hammers. Ree-shard and Jake, you can belay me.”
“No, Jean-Claude,” said the Deacon after the briefest of pauses. “We’ll belay Jake down. I don’t want the sound of the ice hammer being used, and Jake has the longest, strongest legs of anyone here—he can deal with the crevasse as a chimney problem on the way up.”
I could see Jean-Claude blink in surprise.
“We need to try to get that pistol,” continued the Deacon, “but doing so will delay us in warning the Sherpas at Camp Three. It may already be too late. But we have to try. Jean-Claude, you’re our best glacier climber. Take Pasang to interpret, and the two of you go on ahead up to Camp Three as quickly as you can. Try not to use even the headlamps unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you get there before these fake yeti bastards do, have the Sherpas there set up a defensive perimeter…you’ll have only my Webley and your and Pasang’s twelve-gauge flare pistols. The rest of us will reinforce you as soon as we can get there with—I hope—that Luger on our side.”
Jean-Claude nodded but Reggie said, “No, please, let me go ahead with Jean-Claude, Richard. Pasang’s much stronger than I am and he can help you belay Jake. And I think the Sherpas might obey commands from me a bit more quickly.”
The Deacon took about one second to consider this suggestion and then nodded. “You’re right. Go ahead…be careful.”
Reggie and Jean-Claude looked at each other once and slipped away to the northwest toward the wand-marked trail without giving the rest of us so much as a farewell glance. One second they were still visible in the bloody light from the assailant’s red-filtered electric torch and the dying flames from the crevasse; the next they were lost in the darkness and curling cloud mist.
The Deacon removed a long coil of rope from his crowded, heavy rucksack—we were still carrying the extra oxygen tanks from Camp II—and handed the end of the line to me. Then he quickly crawled back to the round opening of the crevasse and embedded Pasang’s long ice axe adze down at the edge of the ragged hole and a few inches parallel to the lip of it. A foot further back, the Deacon drove his longest ice hammer as deep into the icy snow as he could, then used his penknife to cut off a strand of rope, knotted it quickly, and lashed the head of the shorter ice axe as an anchor to the longer one.
By the time he crawled back to where Pasang and I crouched, I’d double-wrapped the Miracle Rope around my waist and upper thighs as a passable sling harness, then tied on a second time with a carefully knotted friction hitch.
The Deacon stood about eight feet from the edge of the crevasse, drove his own ice axe deep into the ice there, looped the long rope around it twice, set it over Pasang’s shoulder in proper belay form, and then looped it over his own shoulder.
“Tug twice when you want us to stop lowering,” the Deacon said to me. “Tug once for a little more slack. Three tugs means bring you up.”
“Do you want anything other than the Luger?” I asked.
The Deacon shook his head. “I’d like the whole corpse so we could go through his pockets and figure out who and what we’re up against. But he’s wedged in there tightly, Jake, and I think we’d spend too many minutes working at hauling his corpse up after we retrieve you. But if he has any easily accessible pockets, go through them—hunt for a box of nine-millimeter cartridges and any papers or identification he might have on him. But don’t put yourself in more danger than you have to. With his spine totally snapped like that, he’s just a soft mass wedged there and could fall away into the abyss at any second.”
I nodded my understanding, set my headlamp gear on my head, clicked on the light, walked to the very edge of the circular crevasse hole, waited until the Deacon and Pasang were on full, tight belay, leaned far back, and rappelled down into the smoldering crevasse, crampons biting into the west ice wall, the beam of my headlamp showing blue ice fragments of the crevasse wall looking as sharp as protruding daggers.
Once down to the level of the corpse—I now estimated it as being closer to 50 feet from the surface—I tugged twice on the rope above the friction hitch, spun myself around, set my back against the ice wall I’d been rappelling down, and set one long leg on each side of the body, my crampon points dug deep into the opposite wall. The corpse and I were very close to one another. I could no longer see flames coming from the lambskin or fur vest or whatever layer was covering his regular jacket, but something was still smoldering there. I realized that it was the flesh on the man’s chest and neck.
I bent as low as I could toward the man’s face, doing everything in exaggerated slow motion so as not to knock the Luger into the darkness below, and carefully reached the gloved fingers of my left hand for the pistol.
Got it!
I brought it up and carefully tucked it into my shirt under my sweater inside my Finch duvet jacket and under my Shackleton jacket. I might fall to the bottom of this crevasse—my headlamp beam had shown no bottom to it, only ragged ice walls and hundreds of feet of black below—but I’d be damned if the pistol was going to fall out and be lost.
I studied the mask pushed up on the man’s head. It seemed to be carved out of some sort of light, white wood, then painted with exaggerated wrinkles. The carved teeth around the mouth opening were real teeth—possibly taken from wolves or huge dogs. I could see where they’d been glued into sockets in the mask.
I patted at his trouser pockets—his trousers were baggy and also covered with shaggy sheep’s fleece dyed gray to look like fur—but felt nothing so solid that it could be a cartridge box. I could feel papers in his trouser pockets under the fur outer layer, but I didn’t think I could get to them without dislodging the corpse from its V-shaped wedge. Damn.
Then I turned the headlamp full into the dead man’s real face and gasped. At first glance it looked as if goraks had eaten his eyes and that someone had poured melted wax down his face, but then I realized that his eyes had exploded and partially melted from the heat of the flare. It was vitreous humor from his eyes that had run down his stubbled cheeks like melted wax.
The man’s mouth was open wide—as if in a final parody of surprise at his own terrible death—and smoke from Reggie’s flare that had bounced up and through the underside of his jaw was wafting out and over me like some carrion eater’s terrible breath. I had to turn my head aside to the right for a minute and rest my cheek against the ice wall to breathe cleaner air there or be sick. I gulped in the clean air and fought down my rising gorge.
My movement and slight shifting of position, or perhaps some settling in the glacier itself, jogged the body slightly so that in mere seconds the man’s boots folded up over his shoulders and he slipped and slid and squeezed down through a gap less than a foot wide, his body with its snapped spine and collapsed ribs folding like some obscene accordion.
Then he was gone, and for a terrible few seconds the toe points of my crampons slipped out of the opposing wall—the body must have grazed me when it fell away, but it felt more like the dead man had gripped my ankles and tried to pull me down with him. My heart was pounding wildly and I couldn’t breathe in enough of the cold crevasse air to fill my lungs. Then I was suddenly hanging free on the rope, having completely lost my crampon grip on the opposite wall. I fell a foot or two before the Deacon and Pasang held me on belay. The Deacon’s Miracle Rope did not snap, but I could feel it stretch more than one of our old ropes would have.