Jon Evans - Dark Places

"So I reckon there's only one thing we can do," Gavin said.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Sweet fuck-all." He raised his glass in a mock toast. "To Stanley Goebel, unlamented and unavenged. There but for the grace of God go all of us."

I clinked my lemon tea against his seabuckthorn juice and we drank to the dead man.

In the dream I was climbing Mount Everest. There was a blizzard, but I knew I was on Everest, almost at the summit, pulling myself up the vertical Hillary Step on a fixed line. It seemed remarkably easy and I felt a giddy sense of triumph. Eat your heart out, Jon Krakauer, I thought. I was almost near the top, where two figures waited for me. I recognized them, two old friends, but couldn't call their names to mind. I pulled myself up further, near to the top, where the line was anchored around a rusty iron pole, and the blizzard thinned out and I saw them clearly. Laura and Stanley Goebel. They stared down at me with knives in their eyes. I felt myself slipping and when I looked down I saw that frostbite had turned my fingers the blue of glacial ice. I tried to pull myself up to the top and slowly, one at a time, my fingers fell off my hands and tumbled down into the swirling snow. It didn't hurt at all. I tried to hold on with my thumbs, but they too snapped like icicles and fell away, and I plummeted back into the blizzard. For a moment everything went dark, then I was lying on my back in a snowbank and the sun shone brilliantly into my eyes. I made it, I thought. And then a man wearing a ski mask crouched down over me. And I couldn't move. Ice had formed around me, trapping me in the ground. Something glittered in the man's hand.

"Paul," Gavin whispered urgently, shaking me awake. "Time to go."

I made guttural noises, opened my eyes, lifted my head. I was cocooned in my sleeping bag, fully dressed, with only a razor-narrow slit open to let in the thin subzero air. Thorung High Camp, I remembered. That was where we were. Except Jim-Bair-the-American had rechristened it Thorung Death Camp.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Night time," he said. "Dawn in about half an hour. Get your kit together. I'll order you some tea."

He left. Normally I would have rolled back into the sleeping bag and gotten another hour's sleep. But today was the big day, today we crossed the much-discussed Thorung La. I pulled myself together, put my boots on and assembled my pack by Maglite. The two other occupants of the room still slept. The gravel floor crunched under my feet as I stumbled towards the door and made my way outside. I left the pack against the wall of the long low bungalow and made my way to the outhouse. My breath formed thick clouds in the air. Up above the sky was stuffed full of stars, impossibly clear and bright. Around me was the stark lunar landscape of sixteen thousand feet, lightly dusted by snow. Snow for Gavin at last, hurrah.

I swallowed down three cups of tea, bought three Snickers bars as the day's trail food, filled my water bottle from the High Camp's jerry cans, and we were on our way as dawn began to stain the eastern sky. Gavin made the first snowball of his life and threw it at me. Both his technique and his aim were terrible, and I demonstrated to him how it was done.

After that we settled down and just walked. It was a steep hike, but not as steep as yesterday's near-vertical climb from Thorung Phedi to Thorung Death Camp. And after almost two weeks of trekking my uphill muscles were things of iron. I'd had a headache last night, but now I felt terrific, vibrantly alive. Many of the Death Camp inhabitants had seemed suicidally miserable last night. I was glad to have had the benefit of an extra two days' acclimatization around Manang. Even so, I had felt the hypoxia. I had tried to play cards, but I couldn't add or remember the scores; had tried to read, but couldn't focus for more than a sentence at a time. In the end like everyone else I simply waited to grow tired enough to fall asleep while drinking loads of garlic soup and lemon tea. The HRA doctors had told us that hydration was key to minimizing altitude sickness. According to Nepalis, garlic and lots of it was the cure.

One of them seemed to have worked. I was breathing quickly, but not panting, and moving at a steady pace. Gavin, who was awesomely fit and seemed to thrive as the oxygen grew more depleted, walked faster and took fewer breaks than I, and soon disappeared into the distance. Suited me. We got along well but we were both ready to sever our week-long travel partnership. Both of us were loners at heart.

My dream had not dissipated, which was unusual. Usually I forget my dreams completely within moments of waking. This one had resonance. They had warned us at the HRA cabbage patch lecture that we might have strange and vivid dreams up here, and I guessed discovering a dead body and maybe being pursued by a killer was bound to contribute to that.

I still hadn't decided whether the masked man was a killer or not. It didn't make any sense that Joe Random Trekker would go for a walk with no pack and a ski mask, then abruptly double back just as I happened to turn a bend and see that the trail was no longer empty. But it didn't make any sense that he would return from Letdar to track me down either. So I'd found out his victim's name, so what? How did that threaten him? Why wouldn't he just keep going up the trail? He had committed the perfect crime. He didn't need to track me down, it only put him in more danger. Unless he thought I had found out something else, something that would identify him. But I couldn't imagine what that would be.

For that matter — I stopped all of a sudden, not to take a break, but because my thoughts were racing in this thin air, and a question had occurred to me for the first time. Why had we found the body at all? The killer had presumably thrown Stanley Goebel's pack, and the rock he had used to kill him, over the cliff near where the murder had taken place. Why wouldn't he have disposed of the body in the same way? What possible reason did he have to leave it there to be discovered?

Maybe somebody had come along, who would have seen him, after discarding the pack and rock, before discarding the body. Possible. It seemed unlikely, but possible. But why wouldn't he have gotten rid of the body first?

Did he want it to be discovered? Was there some sick psychological thing with the knives where he wanted the world to see what he had done? Did he want the world to see Stanley Goebel defaced? But Abigail had said he was traveling on his own. The killer was presumably either a complete stranger or a very recent acquaintance. So why this hateful mutilation?

Another trekker passed me and I resumed my slow trudge upwards, thinking. Laura's body could have been disposed of too. Or at least hidden out of sight, in the rocks and weeds. Instead it was left draped on the black sand of Mile Six Beach like a bloody flag. Why call attention to it?

What was the connection? There had to be a connection, I decided. Two murders so similarly perverse, of travelers in Third World countries; two perfect unsolvable crimes; they had to be connected by something other than my presence. But I could not even begin to think of what the connection might be. And I felt like I shouldn't even try. I shouldn't think about Laura any more. I had been thinking about her for two years. It was past time to let her go.

About an hour after leaving Death Camp we got to a teahouse which was reportedly midway to the top. I ate a frozen Snickers bar with some difficulty and paid a full U.S. dollar to wash it down with lemon tea served in a small metal cup. My hands were cold, even inside the two layers of gloves I had rented in Pokhara, and I removed my gloves and warmed my fingers on the cup, thinking uncomfortably of my dream. Water had a much lower boiling temperature at this altitude, so the metal did not feel uncomfortably hot.