Mountain of the Dead Page 9

  Look what happened to the Dyatlov group.

  Ahead, Fyodor angled his dogsled toward the riverbank and reined the dogs to a halt. He stepped off the runners and headed toward a tree, presumably to relieve himself. Vasily remained in the toboggan bed, a knitted quilt pulled up to his chin.

  Disco and I eased the snowmobiles to a stop behind the panting dogs, leaving the motors idling. I pushed my Oakley goggles up to my forehead, glad to no longer be viewing the world through a yellow tint.

  A hushed breeze eddied between the crowding evergreens, while fat snowflakes fluttered to the ground like ash.

  “Check that out,” I said, pointing the top of the bank where a tree stump had been carved into the shape of a large, blockish head. Its eyes and mouth had been gouged crudely from the wood, the eyebrows upside-down smiles that terminated in parallel lines in the center of the face to form the nose. It reminded me of Native American art—raw, powerful, a glimpse into a forgotten culture and a forgone time.

  “It’s one of the Mansi’s idols,” Olivia said. “The village we’re going to shouldn’t be much farther from here.”

  “So who these Mansi exactly?” Disco asked.

  “They’re indigenous to Russia,” she explained. “They’ve lived in Western Siberia for more than a thousand years. In the 1930s the Soviets executed a lot of their tribal chiefs and shamans and abducted the children, sending them to Russian-speaking boarding schools. Their numbers have declined dramatically since then.”

  “So they speak Russian?”

  “They speak Mansi, which is similar to Hungarian. But, yeah, due to their exposure to Soviet and Russian control, they’re also fluent in Russian.”

  Fyodor returned to his sled and exchanged a few words with Vasily. Then he picked up the reins and shouted a command. The barking dogs took off down the river. Disco revved his snowmobile’s engine and followed.

  I took the opportunity to get a bit of whiskey into me.

  “Oh my God!” Olivia said, slapping me on the back.

  I spit the booze from my mouth. “Hey!”

  “You really are an alcoholic!” she said.

  “Wasn’t that obvious?”

  “I thought you were just having a bad day yesterday or something.”

  “Nope,” I said, swallowing another belt before tucking the flask away.

  “What’s wrong with you that you can’t get through a day without getting drunk?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Seriously, Corey.”

  “Give it a rest. Olivia.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Asking what?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Then why are you—”

  I gave the snowmobile gas.

  ⁂

  A few miles farther on the trees thinned to reveal a clearing populated with maybe a dozen log houses. All appeared old and weather-worn, their gabled roofs buried beneath several feet of snow.

  Fyodor parked his dogsled next to the riverbank, and this time Vasily climbed out of the toboggan bed. Disco and I stopped behind them and shut off our engines.

  Olivia hopped off the padded bench and slipped on the ice, though she regained her balance with a ta-da flourish.

  “Looks deserted,” she said.

  “Smoke’s coming from the chimneys,” I pointed out.

  “They must have heard us arrive?”

  I only shrugged. I wanted to act pleasant, or at least pretend that my earlier outburst hadn’t happened, or that I’d put it behind me. But I remained ticked off with her. Didn’t she have any tact? Didn’t she know that if I had a drinking problem, there might be some pretty nasty skeletons behind the closet door?

  Olivia looked at me. I looked away, back to the collection of log houses.

  “May, what should we do?” Disco asked.

  “What we came here for,” Vasily said gruffly. “We go say hello”

  ⁂

  Vasily led the way up the shallow bank, the rest of us following. Fyodor, it seemed, was remaining behind with his dogs.

  The undisturbed snow rose to our knees, making progress awkward, until we reached a trodden track that led toward the small settlement.

  Disco said to me, “It’s like a ghost town.”

  “They’re home,” I replied.

  “Maybe they don’t want us here.”

  I nodded. “They might know we’re here to ask about the Dyatlov group.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Bad memories, maybe.”

  “Mansi hunters were once blamed for the disappearance of the nine hikers,” Olivia chimed in. “Some were arrested and interrogated. Investigators thought the hikers might have unintentionally trespassed onto some sort of sacred territory.”

  “You’ve read up on the case,” I remarked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I do my homework. I likely know as much about it as you do.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “So the Mansi,” Disco said, “they killed the hikers for trespassing?”

  I nodded. “That was the belief at the beginning of the investigation.”

  “They forced them to take off their clothes and frogmarched them into the blizzard,” Olivia chimed in again, and I had the sense she was endeavoring to one-up me. “When they didn’t die quickly from the elements,” she added, “the soldiers went after them to finish them off, tossing some of their bodies in the ravine.”

  “Why you been keeping this secret?” Disco said to me.

  “I wasn’t keeping it a secret,” I said. “There was just never any real reason to believe it. The Mansi—”

  “Are a historically friendly people,” Olivia said. “There were no Mansi footprints near the tent, and the pathologist at the time stated the fatal injuries to the last few hikers were too great to have been caused by a fall into the ravine or another human being.”

  I glared at her. She smiled proudly.

  Disco said, “Maybe the Mansi shamans put the gree gree on them?”

  Olivia’s smile flipped upside-down.

  “A hex,” he said.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Black magic is real, sha. It’s all around us.”

  “It’s hocus-pocus. But whatever. A curse doesn’t explain their injuries.”

  “If they used a voodoo doll, it does.”

  “You believe shamans stuck pins into effigies of Igor and the others?”

  “Or beat the effigies with a stick. That’s why there weren’t no marks on their skin, but they were all busted up inside.”

  I knew Disco was serious, or at least semi-serious. Voodoo is practiced throughout Louisiana as a legitimate religion, and their rituals and beliefs—which include spiritual possession, potions, and voodoo dolls—are as real to them as the Resurrection is to Christians.

  “Voodoo dolls been used everywhere in the world, sha,” he went on, “especially Europe. To get the witches, you know.”

  We stopped before the front stoop of the closest house. The shutters on the windows were open, but chintzy drapes shielded our view inside. Vasily knocked on the heavy wood door. In the ensuing silence, I thought of the Dyatlov groups’ savaged tent, the eerily undisturbed contents inside, and suddenly I was struck by the premonition we were going to uncover the same mysterious circumstances in this village: tables set for lunch, fires burning, shoes lined up against the walls, but nobody home—

  A clack sounded. The door cracked open. A short woman in a shapeless bubblegum-pink frock peered out. A flower-embroidered wool shawl draped her head, the colorful roses contrasting with her brown face, which resembled weathered tree bark. Beneath thick eyebrows, eyes the color of obsidian scrutinized us.

  Vasily spoke to the woman in Russian. She listened stoically, then said something, what sounded like a name, then Vasily replied with a smile, then, after a long deliberation, she stepped back to let us enter her home.

  I had expected the i
nterior of the log house to resemble something along the lines of Fyodor’s sterile bachelor pad, and I was surprised by its homeliness. The raked ceiling, the azure windowsills and trim, the white walls ornamented with animal pelts, snowshoes, framed photographs, and other odds and ends. The fire that burned in a stone hearth produced much-welcomed heat. Above the flames hung a pot in which something bubbled quietly, filling the air with a rich gamey smell.

  The woman gestured for us to sit at a small table covered with a tacky plastic tablecloth.

  “Do we take off our boots?” I asked, speaking in a hushed-library voice. The hundred-year-old house felt almost like a church, hallowed, as if Time and its proclivity for change had never ventured through the front door.

  “Just sit,” Vasily replied.

  While we sat in creaking white chairs, the woman fussed with the pot over the fire. Using my teeth, I tugged off my thick woolen overmitts, then the thinner pair of Gore-Tex gloves beneath. I flexed my stiff knuckles and rubbed the palms of my hands together to generate friction and warmth. This felt good, but only made me aware of the coldness in my feet.

  The woman set bowls filled with a brown stew in front of each of us, as well as wooden spoons. She sat at the end of the table with a fifth bowl for herself and said something, gesturing for us to eat.

  Olivia yanked off her pink hat and shook out her blonde hair. “Smells delicious.”

  Disco poked at his stew with his spoon and muttered something about newt eyes and frog toes.

  I scooped out a piece of meat and said, “What is it?”

  “Boar,” Vasily told me. “With winter herbs and berries.”

  I was hungrier than I’d believed—no surprise, I suppose, given our simple instant-noodle breakfast—and I finished the meal promptly. Disco took his final bite about the same time I did and glanced at the pot over the fire.

  “I can have more, you think?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Vasily, can you ask la vielle?”

  “Her name is Raya Anyamov,” he said. “And, no, I will not.”

  Raya Anyamov spoke suddenly. She had a slow, easy cadence, as if she had all the time in the world to compose her sentences, which I figured out here you did.

  Vasily and Olivia took turns asking her questions; the old woman replied to each. This continued for a while until Olivia, as if just remembering that Disco and I didn’t speak Russian, turned to us and said, “She knows why we’re here. The only time people visit this village is to ask about the Dyatlov group. Usually everyone would have gathered at the great hall to meet us, but it’s the men’s role to receive guests, and they’re all away hunting. Her son is among them.”

  “What about the younger children?” I said. “Where are they?”

  “There are no more children here,” Vasily said. “Her people’s numbers have shrank to such an extent everyone is related to one another. Men can’t find brides. The last birth was seventeen years ago. There are other tribes about, but they don’t believe in mixed marriages.”

  I produced my digital voice recorder and held it for Raya Anyamov to see. “Okay?”

  The old woman nodded. “O-K,” she said, smiling shyly, revealing missing teeth.

  I set the device on the table and said to Vasily, “Can you ask her about the Dyatlov group?”

  Vasily and Raya Anyamov spoke at length, and although I couldn’t understand the content of the discussion, I suspected it might be important, as Olivia kept butting in with questions, clearly getting keyed up about something.

  To Disco and me she said, “Some of the hunters from this village were involved in the search-and-rescue operation for Igor and his friends in the spring. It’s all become an important part of their history and—and forget it, here’s the good stuff.” She paused dramatically, her blue eyes sparkling in the dim lighting. “They were certain they knew what killed the hikers.”

  I leaned forward, all at once edgy with anticipation.

  “They call it a forest giant,” she said.

  “What the hell’s a forest giant?” I asked.

  “According to Raya, something that is half-troll, half-demon.”

  “She says her people have known about the creatures for centuries,” Vasily explained evenly. “She says they’ve encountered them on a number of occasions. Usually it’s nothing more than a brief sighting, but in 1959 a young hunter shot one. It got away, but a few days later several reindeer belonging to the villagers were slaughtered in the middle of the night. The Mansi believe the injured creature did this.”

  “In retaliation?” I said.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Since when can you shoot a demon?”

  “Half-demon,” Olivia corrected.

  “And it was so incensed it killed the hikers when it came across them?”

  “That’s what her people believe.”

  “And do you?”

  “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  I looked at Disco. He wore his ever-present smile. “This is your book, Whitey,” he said. “Don’t get me involved.”

  “Vasily?” I asked.

  “Do I believe in demons? No, of course not. But I do believe they’ve encountered something peculiar out here. What reason would Raya Anyamov have to lie about that? Could it have also attacked the Dyatlov group? Why not?”

  “It was probably a bear,” I said dismissively. “The hunter shot a bear.”

  “What about the dead reindeer?” Olivia said. “Raya says they were simply killed, not eaten. What kills something and doesn’t take a bite of the meat?”

  “Is this a riddle?”

  Her eyes hardened.

  “Disease?” I said. “The cold?”

  “Disease didn’t kill the nine hikers, Corey, and they died that same week. The cold didn’t kill them either, not all of them, at any rate.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to be the devil’s advocate here. But I’m the one who’s going to be writing about this. My reputation’s on the line. I need rational explanations.”

  Vasily didn’t say anything. Olivia shrugged.

  I said, “Do they have any proof, any at all, of this thing? Can you ask Raya?”

  Olivia engaged the old woman in conversation and listened patiently to her ramble for nearly a minute. Then she smiled at me.

  “She’s seen one,” she asserted.

  I returned the smile. “She’s seen a forest giant?”

  Olivia recounted what she’d been told.

  A few years after the Dyatlov incident, Raya Anyamov, then a little girl, had been hunting with her parents in the forest between this village and Kholat Syakhl. In the evening, while they were eating dinner around a campfire, they heard a loud whistle echoing throughout the trees. Later, she woke in the middle of the night, and saw something huge and dark behind a tree, with glowing eyes, watching her. She screamed, waking her parents, and her father discovered large footprints in the snow where the creature had been standing. He had seven slain bears to his name, was considered one of the bravest hunters in the village, and this was the first time she’d seen him frightened. He made them leave their kill behind and hike home in the dark.

  In the heavy silence that followed this fantastic tale, I leaned back in my creaking chair, folded my arms across my chest, and studied Raya Anyamov. She continued eating her stew, using small, slow ladylike sips that bordered on slurps.

  I didn’t know what to make of her tale. It wasn’t folklore, passed on to her from a previous generation. It was memory. She claimed to have seen this troll-demon thing, whatever it was, with her own eyes.

  Vasily’s words came back to me:

  What reason would she have to lie?

  “Did she see its face?” Disco asked suddenly. “What it looked like?”

  Vasily posed the question to the old woman.

  Without looking up, she replied with a single word: “Zlo.”

  “Zlo?” Disco asked, frowning. “What does zlo mean?”

  �
��Evil,” he said soberly.

  CHAPTER 10

  NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959

  SIX DAYS TO LIVE

  At two o’clock in the afternoon the GAZ-651 shuddered to a stop in the center of Vizhay. The woodcutting settlement bustled with young men, many of them guards from the surrounding prison camps. Blinov’s group quickly found a lift to Sector 105. The Dyatlov groups’ destination, Sector 41, was in a different direction, so the young friends said their goodbyes, everyone in good humor and promising to exchange stories of their adventures once they returned to UPI in a couple weeks’ time.

  Igor and Zolotaryov then disappeared to find the director of the settlement, in the hope of securing accommodation for the night, while everyone else went to the cafeteria to warm up. Igor and Zolotaryov returned with good news: the director had insisted they spend the night in one of the guesthouses, which turned out to be a mansion, so large and posh they each procured a private room with a soft bed and clean linens.

  That evening they cooked a hearty dinner over the guesthouse’s potbellied stove, and afterward Zina convinced Lyuda to splurge on tickets to the cinema to watch Symphony in Gold, a 1956 Austrian musical. They had all seen it before, but that didn’t prevent them from wanting to see it again.

  Lyuda relented—she had a soft spot for the musical—and everybody went with the exception of Kolevatov and Doroshenko, who remained behind to clean up the dinner dishes.

  Once they were alone, Doroshenko said, “What do you think of Zolotaryov?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think of him?”

  Kolevatov shrugged. “He seems like a nice guy.”