Dennis Yates - Red Mountain

He’d lived a few lifetimes keeping up with what was going on. The rounds to the various places his kin now lived began to expand wider and wider. The advantage was he didn’t need to eat or sleep, although he suffered from great boredom and loneliness. There was only so much pleasure in being able to watch other people go about their lives.

Sometimes it became all too much for him, and Horn would lash out at the world. He’d cause people to hurt themselves. He’d learned how to get inside people’s heads and it scared him. He didn’t want to become another Charlie Maynard. All he wanted was to truly die and stop being a ghost.

After he’d crisscrossed the country many times he eventually returned to the farmhouse, the place he called home, and waited for Maynard to forgive him, to say something.

Panic set in when Horn’s great grandsons grew into men. Although he hadn’t heard from Maynard for decades, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t return when the time arrived. He’d tried to prepare his grandsons for the futures lying in store for them and had on every occasion almost scared the three men to death.

The worst time had been when he’d tried to speak to Robert up at his grandfather’s cabin. Afterwards, when he broke up into a fine mist and flowed down into the thick darkening woods he worried he might have hurt the boy’s heart. Thankfully Robert’s grandfather had taught him a trick or two and the boy he’d last seen clinging to a cedar tree had now grown into a man.

One day, after Horn was beginning to think there was hope his kin would be spared from having to climb the red mountain, Maynard returned to collect.

Horn was helpless and couldn’t stop it. The ghost from the ice was more powerful than ever. He ordered him to find men who could help oversee the ritual of finding the next shaman. Horn resisted, had argued that they were no longer living on Oman’s small island where the boys always know what is going to be expected of them. Those were different people back there, different times. These men—his great grandsons—were not savages.

Maynard laughed so long and hard Horn thought he heard ice crack.

“We’re all savages, Horn. With the proper motivation, that is. I expect you’ll find a man suitable for the job, someone who understands others in the very abstract.” Later he told Horn he’d be free once his kin had climbed the red mountain and given their blood to the magic.

It was then that Horn finally understood. He was nothing now but a ghost who took orders from another ghost. Maynard, he realized, had never intended to give him much power. He’d only been interested in guaranteeing that Horn’s children survived to perpetuate the family bloodline. He’d infected Horn so the power would not be lost, had used him like safe deposit box to stash the family riches.

Years jumped by, and Wrath Butte teens started coming to the run down house to party. Horn soon tired of it, and scared some of them so badly they’d taken their lives. He thought he’d put an end to the visits, until the day Marsh came and tried to tear the house down during a drunken rage.

Marsh… He was so much trouble for Horn, and yet he was the key to Horn’s freedom from purgatory...

CHAPTER 51

“You know I’m the best damn scientist you’ve got Harold. So stop riding my ass every time you call.”

Dr. Carol Unger turned off her cell phone and shoved it back into her jacket.

Stupid micromanaging prick. Why can’t he ever let me get on with my work?

Unger stood up from her chair and watched as distant hikers approached base camp. They’d been up at the glacier all morning taking measurements and core samples of ice. She would have been with them except she’d been suffering from altitude headaches again. She’d decided to stay behind unless they absolutely needed her.

Her current boyfriend had radioed her hours earlier, although she couldn’t understand him through the heavy static. The radios were crap, just another thing she should have brought up with Harold but didn’t have the energy for. Marco, who usually kept an unnervingly cool head, had sounded overly excited about something. Unger had grown worried as the hours ticked by, believing someone on the team may have been hurt. Yet when she last did a head count through her spotting scope they all appeared to be there. Four dark specks moving across a glinting snow field.

Although Marco wasn’t officially part of the scientific team, he’d proved himself invaluable. A native of Argentina, Marco had years of climbing experience under his belt. He’d taken many teams to the South Pole to study glaciers and understood what was needed to make the expeditions successful. Carol had met him by accident during a late night out drinking at a local campus pub. So impressed by his multitude of skills—including resurrecting her dormant libido—she’d hired him to go up the mountain with her team for the summer.

She chased a few aspirins down with a cup of watery tea before settling back into her chair and opening her laptop. Displayed before her were various graphs describing the deteriorating affects climate change was having on this particular glacier. In another week or two she would have enough data to take home with her to study it further. She hoped to publish a paper on her findings before the university pulled the plug on any further field projects. A paper would give her the leverage she needed to shut Harold up for awhile…

There was so much pressure involved. Developers, hungry to turn the glacier into another winter ski run and summertime sled course for the amusement park crowd, were growing increasingly nervous that she’d find something which would prevent them from pushing forward with future plans. Local environmentalists hailed the study as a positive step in the right direction.

What Dr. Unger had discovered so far was that her glacier was alarmingly smaller than it had been fifty years ago. All summer they’d heard the mountain roaring as blocks of ice, sometimes the size of townhouses, broke apart from the crevasses and crash against one another like giant dice. As the bottom end of the glacier receded, rock once blanketed by ice for hundreds of years was becoming exposed.

Dr. Unger lost herself in the data the team had already compiled. She enjoyed the rush of scientific discovery, could spend days searching for patterns and developing theories to explain them. Sometimes she felt sad by what she saw happening, days when she looked upon the glacier as if it were a terminally ill patient—a patient whose body was slowly vanishing…

“Carol! Carol!” she heard Marco yelling excitedly. He and the other hikers from the team had finally reached camp.

Dr. Unger hadn’t been aware that she’d fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes she realized her headache was gone. Marco was heading toward her.

“What is it?” Unger asked. She stood up from her chair and stretched. “I couldn’t understand a single thing you said on the radio.”

As Marco got close she began to reach out to hug him before thinking better of it. Although the team knew they were sharing sleeping bags, she had to keep reminding herself to make an attempt at being circumspect. You just never knew if one of your grad students might become disgruntled for some reason and decide to make trouble for you. She’d heard plenty of nightmares from colleagues over the years.

Marco struggled to catch his breath. Unger could see his arm was bleeding through his down jacket. The other three students had rushed over to the supply locker and began pulling flashlights and heavy equipment.

“What the hell is going on? And what did you do to your arm?” Carol asked.

Marco took another step closer, his breath almost steaming against her face.