The Descent - Couverture rigide

Long, Jeff

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0609602934 ISBN 13 : 9780609602935

Editeur : Clarkson Potter, 1999

Synopsis

Book by Long Jeff

A propos du livre

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Chapter 1: Ike

It is easy to go down into Hell . . . ; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air-there’s the rub. . . —Virgil, Aeneid
The Himalayas,
Tibet Autonomous Region
1988

In the beginning was the word.
Or words.
Whatever these were.
They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the
dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly,
dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent
pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the
distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating
against the mountainside outside.
With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak
herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved
to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was
part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He'd never heard
of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.
"Runes," gushed a knowing female voice. "Sacred runes left by a wandering monk."
The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave's cold
bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with
its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering
Dylan's anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything
to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat
did growl. . . .
"Those are no runes," said a man. "It's Bonpo." A Brooklyn beat, the accent
meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were
easy to keep straight.
"Bonpo!" one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take
collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had
been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly.
Fine with him.
"But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist," the woman expounded.
The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These
things mattered very much to them.
Their goal was-or had been-Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of
the Indian border. "A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim" was how he'd
advertised the trip. A kor-a Tibetan walkabout-to and around the holiest
mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The
problem was, somewhere along the trail he'd managed to misplace the
mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky
had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with
the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history.
The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just
an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call.
He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized
by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.
Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora,
wanting a private word. "How bad is it?" she whispered. Depending on the
hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate.
Of late, it was a challenge estimating which came first for her, the
business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their
little trekking company was no longer charming to her.
Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. "We've got a great
cave," he said.
"Gee."
"We're still in the black, head-count-wise."
"The itinerary's in ruins. We were behind as it was."
"We're fine. We'll take it out of the Siddhartha's Birthplace segment." He
kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever
it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. "Besides, getting a
little lost will give them bragging rights."
"They don't want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don't know these
people. They're not your friends. We'll get sued if they don't make their
Thai Air flight on the nineteenth."
"These are the mountains," said Ike. "They'll understand." People forgot.
Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.
"No, Ike. They won't understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations.
Families." That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted
more from her pathless Pathfinder.
"I'm doing the best I can," Ike said.
Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it
wasn't supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to
get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers,
the monsoon normally didn't spill across the mountains this far north. But
as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe
in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time.
The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was
going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via
Lhasa—and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his
head, but their quarrel overcame him.
"You do know what I mean by Bonpo," a woman said. Nineteen days into the
trip, and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in
their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green
Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was
special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening
to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here's your
cave, ladies. Slum away.
They were sure his name—Dwight David Crockett—was an invention like their
own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past
lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them
with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own
legendary death at the Alamo. He'd meant it as a joke, but only Kora got
it.
"You should know perfectly well," the woman went on, "there was no written
language in Tibet before the late fifth century."
"No written language that we know about," Owen said.
"Next you'll be saying this is Yeti language."
It had been like this for days. You'd think they'd run out of air. But the
higher they went, the more they argued.
"This is what we get for pandering to civilians," Kora muttered to Ike.
Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust
funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.
"They're not so bad," he said. "They're just looking for a way into Oz,
same as us."
"Civilians."
Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile.
Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for
choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad
who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled
brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised
him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot
leather. Ike had never considered himself God's gift to women, but he saw
no reason to trash what looks he still had. He'd lost two of his back
molars to Nepal's dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a falling rock
on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker
Black and Camels days, he'd taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with
the lethal west face of Makalu. He'd quit the smoke and booze cold when
some British nurse told him his voice sounded like a Rudyard Kipling
punchline. Makalu still needed slaying, of course. Though many mornings he
even wondered about that.
Exile went deeper than the cosmetics or even prime health, of course.
Self-doubt came with the territory, a wondering about what might have been,
had he stayed the course back in Jackson. Rig work. Stone masonry. Maybe
mountain guiding in the Tetons, or outfitting for hunters. No telling. He'd
spent the last eight years in Nepal and Tibet watching himself slowly
devolve from the Golden Boy of the Himalayas into one more forgotten
surrogate of the American empire. He'd grown old inside. Even now there
were days when Ike felt eighty. Next week was his thirty-first birthday.
"Would you look at this?" rose a cry. "What kind of mandala is that? The lines are all twisty."
Ike looked at the circle. It was hanging on the wall like a luminous moon.
Mandalas were meditation aids, blueprints for divinity's palaces. Normally
they consisted of circles within circles containing squared lines. By
visualizing it just so, a 3-D architecture was supposed to appear above the
mandala's flat surface. This one, though, looked like scrambled snakes.
Ike turned on his light. End of mystery, he congratulated himself.
ven he was stunned by the sight.
"My God," said Kora.
Where, a moment before, the fluorescent words had hung in magical suspense,
a nude corpse stood rigidly propped upon a stone shelf along the back wall.
The words weren't written on stone. They were written on him. The mandala
was separate, painted on the wall to his right side.
A set of rocks formed a crude stairway up to his stage, and various
passersby had attached katas—long white prayer scarves—to cracks in the
stone ceiling. The katas sucked back and forth in the draft like gently
disturbed ghosts.
The man's grimace was slightly bucktoothed from mummification, and his eyes
were calcified to chalky blue marbles. Otherwise the extreme cold and high
altitude had left him perfectly preserved. Under the harsh beam of Ike's
headlamp, the lettering was faint and red upon his emaciated limbs and
belly and chest.
That he was a traveler was self-evident. In these regions, everyone was a
pilgrim or a nomad or a salt trader or a refugee. But, judging from his
scars and unhealed wounds and a metal collar around his neck and a warped,
badly mended broken left arm, this particular Marco Polo had endured a
journey beyond imagination. If flesh is memory, his body cried out a whole
history of abuse and enslavement.
They stood beneath the shelf and goggled at the suffering. Three of the
women—and Owen—began weeping. Ike alone approached. Probing here and there
with his light beam, he reached out to touch one shin with his ice ax: hard
as fossil wood.
Of all the obvious insults, the one that stood out most was his partial
castration. One of the man's testicles had been yanked away, not cut, not
even bitten—the edges of the tear were too ragged—and the wound had been
cauterized with fire. The burn scars radiated out from his groin in a
hairless keloid starburst. Ike couldn't get over the raw scorn of it. Man's
tenderest part, mutilated, then doctored with a torch.
"Look," someone whimpered. "What did they do to his nose?"
Midcenter on the battered face was a ring unlike anything he'd ever seen
before. This was no silvery Gen-X body piercing. The ring, three inches
across and crusted with blood, was plugged deep in his septum, almost up
into the skull. It hung to his bottom lip, as black as his beard. It was,
thought Ike, utilitarian, large enough to control cattle.
Then he got a little closer and his repulsion altered. The ring was brutal.
Blood and smoke and filth had coated it almost black, but Ike could plainly
see the dull gleam of solid gold.
Ike turned to his people and saw nine pairs of frightened eyes beseeching
him from beneath hoods and visors. Everyone had their lights on now. No one
was arguing.
"Why?" wept one of the women.
A couple of the Buddhists had reverted to Christianity and were on their
knees, crossing themselves. Owen was rocking from side to side, murmuring
Kaddish.
Kora came close. "You beautiful bastard." She giggled. Ike started. She was
talking to the corpse.
"What did you say?"
"We're off the hook. They're not going to hit us up for refunds after all.
We don't have to provide their holy mountain anymore. They've got something
better."
"Let up, Kora. Give them some credit. They're not ghouls."
"No? Look around, Ike."
Sure enough, cameras were stealing into view in ones and twos. There was a
flash, then another. Their shock gave way to tabloid voyeurism.
In no time the entire cast was blazing away with eight-hundred-dollar
point-and-shoots. Motor drives made an insect hum. The lifeless flesh
flared in their artificial lightning. Ike moved out of frame, and welcomed
the corpse like a savior. It was unbelievable. Famished, cold, and lost,
they couldn't have been happier.
One of the women had climbed the stepping-stones and
was kneeling to one side of the nude, her head tilted sideways.
She looked down at them. "But he's one of us," she said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Us. You and me. A white man."
Someone else framed it in less vulgar terms. "A Caucasian male?"
"That's crazy," someone objected. "Here? In the middle of nowhere?"
Ike knew she was right. The white flesh, the hair on its forearms and
chest, the blue eyes, the cheekbones so obviously non-Mongoloid. But the
woman wasn't pointing to his hairy arms or blue eyes or slender cheekbones.
She was pointing at the hieroglyphics painted on his thigh. Ike aimed his
light at the other thigh. And froze.
The text was in English. Modern English. Only upside down.
It came to him. The body hadn't been written upon after death. The man had
written upon himself in life. He'd used his own body as a blank page.
Upside down. He'd inscribed his journal notes on the only parchment
guaranteed to travel with him. Now Ike saw how the lettering wasn't just
painted on, but crudely tattooed.
Wherever he could reach, the man had jotted bits of testimony. Abrasions
and filth obscured some of the writing, particularly below the knees and
around his ankles. The rest of it could easily have been dismissed as
random and lunatic. Numbers mixed with words and phrases, especially on the
outer edges of each thigh, where he'd apparently decided there was extra
room for new entries. The clearest passage lay across his lower stomach.
" 'All the world will be in love with night,' " Ike read aloud, " 'and pay
no worship to the garish sun.' "
"Gibberish," snapped Owen, badly spooked.
"Bible talk," Ike sympathized.
"No, it's not," piped up Kora. "That's not from the Bible. It's Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet."
Ike felt the group's repugnance. Indeed, why would this tortured creature choose for his obituary the most famous love story ever written? A story about opposing clans. A tale of love transcending violence. The poor stiff had been out of his gourd on thin air and
solitude. It was no coincidence that in the highest monasteries on earth,
men endlessly obsessed about delusion. Hallucinations were a given up here.
Even the Dalai Lama joked about it.
"And so," Ike said, "he's white. He knew his Shakespeare. That makes him no
older than two or three hundred years."
It was becoming a parlor game. Their fear was shifting to morbid delight.
Forensics as recreation.
"Who is this guy?" one woman asked.
"A slave?"
"An escaped prisoner?"
Ike said nothing. He went nose-to-nose with the gaunt face, hunting for
clues. Tell your journey, he thought. Speak your escape. Who shackled you
with gold? Nothing. The marble eyes ignored their curiosity. The grimace
enjoyed its voiceless riddles.
Owen had jo...

Revue de presse :

“An imaginative tour de force...equal parts Ray Bradbury and Robert Stone, Michael Crichton and T.C. Boyle. It is a rip-roaring good read. Jeff Long has written a remarkable novel...that somehow succeeds both as a sober-minded allegory and a nail-biting thriller.” Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air

“Would give Stephen King and Dean Koontz the night sweats. A flat-out, gears-grinding, bumper-car ride into the pits of hell. Jeff Long has delivered what is bound to be this summer’s really hot read.” Lorenzo Carcaterra, author of Sleepers and Apaches

“The Descent is simply the best horror novel since Ghost Story, and, on pure literary merit, it could even be called a masterpiece.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“A return to the fantastic epics readers associate with H.G. Wells or Jules Verne...[A] high-spirited tale of good versus evil, faith versus reason, and the power of the human heart to overcome even the darkest obstacles.” Chicago Tribune

“As frightening and exhilarating as anything in heaven or hell...[and] impossible to set down. Part thriller, part horror story and part mystery...an all-engulfing reading experience.” Denver Rocky Mountain News

“Perfect...right out of the stephen king mold, with a touch of Dante’s Inferno.” Denver Post

“Deeply piercing terror. A sweeping, dark epic.Entertains the senses and challenges the mind [with] new levels of visual wonder.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Horrific...takes the reader into a Dantesque world,a journey to the center of the earth for the new millennium...Long deftly blends science, myth, and a superb imagination to provide an entrancingly dark novel...a novel for the thinking reader bright and scintillating, illuminating the darkness it so smartly depicts.” Baltimore Sun

“A dizzying synthesis of supernatural horror, lost-race fantasy and military SF...Like the subterranean trail blazed by its adventurers, the narrative twists, turns, dead-ends and backtracks. Brims with energy, ideas and excitement.” Publishers Weekly

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Clarkson Potter
• Date d'édition: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0609602934
• ISBN 13: 9780609602935
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 450