Dark Places

5. Up, And Down Again

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.
   I climbed onwards, past a gaggle of French package-tourists wielding ski poles who were necessarily moving at the speed of their slowest member, past six-inch iron bars engraved with apparently random numbers that protruded from the thin snow cover to mark the path. The sun had risen behind us and the snow-capped peaks all around us glittered like diamonds. The only colours of the landscape were dark gray earth and white snow. It was astonishingly beautiful, like walking through a Group Of Seven painting. I tromped slowly but steadily in the thick dark gravel, moving at a constant comfortable pace. An old seabed, I remembered. Aquatic fossils are found at the summit of Mount Everest. Long ago, before India plunged into the Asian continent and forced the folds of the Himalaya high into the sky, this very earth I walked on had been deep beneath the sea.
   I passed a cairn on the left side of the trail; an American tourist, according to the headstone, who had died here not so long ago. It didn't say whether it was a blizzard or altitude sickness that got him. Or a killer.
   And then I looked up and saw a blaze of colour up ahead. Strands of triangular Buddhist prayer flags by the hundred, red and yellow and green and blue and white, festooned the apex of our trek. Anticipated, feared, spoken of in hushed tones for two weeks now; the Thorung La.
   There was a teahouse here — rebuilt every year, according to the guidebook, after being destroyed by the winter — and a crowd of triumphant trekkers milled about and took each other's picture. I wasn't really in the mood but I got a Dutch girl to take my picture against the sign that reported that I had reached the altitude of 5400 meters aka 17500 feet, the same height as Everest Base Camp. I ate another Snickers bar, and had another metal cupful of the most expensive lemon tea in Asia, and tried to work out why I felt so disappointed.
   The rocks on the other side of the pass were brown and beige and if I squinted I could make out a green patch far below. Muktinath, I presumed. An oasis in the desert Tibetan Plateau, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook, politically Nepali, but in terms of culture and ethnicity and geography, it was part of fabled and mysterious Tibet. I took one last look around at the clean stark panorama and began the long trek down.

* * *

   Downhill was hell. When I finally arrived in Muktinath I thought my knees were going to buckle and collapse. I staggered past the series of temples on the edge of town, walked up to the first lodge I saw, and asked for a bed. But they were full. I went to the next, and the next, and the next; it was the fourth which had a spare bed. I collapsed on it, surprised at the paucity of lodging, for I knew I had to be part of the leading wave. Most of those crossing today would have begun at Thorung Phedi, a good hour below Death Camp.
   I made myself get up and washed myself with a bucket bath. There was no hot water, but I was beyond caring. I shaved with a broken fragment of a mirror. I wanted to wash my clothes, but the communal tap nearest my lodge was being used by a Nepali family to fill a series of large buckets, so instead I went to the police checkpoint to sign in. The bored policeman flipped through my passport, stamped my trekking permit, and gestured to the ledger. I wrote down my name, nationality, passport number, etc. Gavin had already checked in. I flipped through the last few pages of the ledger, thinking to myself that somewhere here was the killer's name.
   And then I saw it. Eight pages and two days ago. Stanley Goebel, the entry read. Passport number and all.
   I stared at it until a pair of trekkers came up behind me and the policeman motioned me to make way. I stared at the ledger as they went through the procedure. Had Stanley Goebel's killer taken his identity? Used his passport? Or was Stanley Goebel alive and well, was the dead man someone else? Had Abigail the Australian been wrong? Or had she lied?
   I wanted a picture of that entry, and I had my camera on me, but I could easily imagine the policeman being sticky about letting me take one; so after the two trekkers had left, I took my camera out, set the flash to on, and asked the policeman if I could take his picture, idly flipping the ledger back to the appropriate page. He puffed his chest out proudly, and I snapped a shot of him — and, apparently accidentally, a shot of the ledger as I lowered the camera. I wasn't sure it would turn out but it would have to do.
   I hobbled back to my lodge, my mind churning. I ordered fried noodles with cheese and vegetables and wrote in my journal until the food arrived. I didn't realize how hungry I was until the plate was before me. After it was empty I went back to my room to give my legs a rest, intending to later track down Gavin at whatever lodge he was at and tell him the news.
   But I didn't do that. Instead I closed my eyes and opened them again well after dawn.
   My legs were fine the next day. Unless I tried to go even the slightest bit downhill, in which case bolts of agony shot through my knees and quadriceps with every step. I knew within moments of getting out of bed that I wasn't trekking out of Muktinath that day. That, and the soon-discovered fact that this side of the Thorung La was the easy half of the Annapurna Circuit and thus overpopulated with groups of twenty or thirty pudgy German package tourists, explained why it was hard to find a room in Muktinath. I wondered what happened to those who came late over the pass. I didn't envy them, finally arriving at what they thought was their destination after one of the most physically gruelling days of their life, only to find out that there was no room at the inn, and they had another hour to go before reaching the next group of lodges.
   I could walk around town, albeit slowly and stiffly, and I looked for Gavin but he was gone. And maybe that was for the best. Why rehash it? Yes, the appearance of the name Goebel in the Muktinath ledger was mysterious; and yes, in the back of my mind I'd had the idea that I could send my picture of it to the HRA doctor who had examined the body, whose name Gavin could tell me, to compare to the handwriting used when Stanley Goebel had signed in to the Manang ledger; but really, what was the point? Regardless of the name, a man had been murdered and his murderer had gotten off scot-free. There was no point in sifting through the ashes of those two cold facts.
   And yet. It was all the whys that bothered me. Why was there a murder in the first place? Why the knives? Why was the body not hidden? Why had the masked man followed me on the trail? And now why this confusion over the name? And the most fundamental question; why was it all so much like the murder of Laura Mason in Limbe, Cameroon, more than two years ago?

* * *

   It had been a typical night on the truck. No, scratch that; it had been a good night. There had been no rain. Chong and Kristin and Nicole had cooked and cleaned. There was plenty of firewood for once and we had a big bonfire, and Steven and Hallam and I had passed the guitar back and forth and sung songs. A few curious locals had squatted and stared at us, but not the huge crowds we had sometimes drawn in the desert and in Nigeria. Limbe was a pretty regular stop for overland trucks and its inhabitants fairly cosmopolitan.
   After dinner Laura and Carmel and Emma and Michael went swimming on the black-sand beach. I wasn't in the mood to swim, so I stayed with the rest. We played guitar and passed joints around and everyone got a little high. We reminisced fondly about the epic meal we had had in Nigeria, the spacecakes in Dixcove, the FanIce in Ghana. Food was always a popular topic on the truck. We talked about whether we would find a way across to Kenya by land. At that point we were still hopeful. There was talk of going through Chad.
   Eventually it got late. Carmel and Emma and Michael had returned. I assumed Laura had come back to our tent and gone to sleep. I decided to accompany Hallam and Nicole for a midnight swim before joining Laura in the tent. Hallam took his mid-sized Maglite to light our way, even though the moon was bright and it hardly seemed necessary. When I first saw her I thought it was a dead animal, a big dog or something, lying in a puddle. It wasn't until five or ten seconds of Hallam aiming the light at her that my mind finally clicked and identified her. I think it was the same for Hallam and Nicole. Whoever had killed Laura had stripped her naked and gutted her like an animal, and she had died with her hands on her belly, pathetically trying to keep her insides from spilling out. She had been gagged with a black rag. And there were knives in her eyes.

* * *

   The next day I could walk and I trekked through the Arizonian desert landscape, in the shadow of Dhaulagiri, the world's seventh highest mountain, to the medieval village of Kagbeni at the end of the remote Mustang Valley. The following day I walked along the nearly-dry bed of the Kali Gandaki River to the town of Jomsom, even bigger than Manang. I did not want to trek any more, and Jomsom had an airstrip. I bought a plane ticket with Buddha Air. The next morning I made my way through the Kafkaesque chaos of the Jomsom airport, where they had demolished the old building and not really gotten around yet to constructing another. I boarded a prop plane, overloaded with bags of the apples grown around Jomsom. The engines were so loud they gave us cotton wads to stick in our ears. The plane carried me from the Wild West desert of Jomsom, over conifer forests, and deciduous forests, and hills terraced into rice paddies, and subtropical jungle, and back to the city of Pokhara, five days' worth of trekking compressed to twenty-five minutes. My Annapurna Circuit was complete.