Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller Read online

  Brooks traced the lips with his index finger, willing them to part, or to at least betray a hint of the size and shape of the teeth inside. He understood now exactly what Brandt had meant when he drew the parallels between the evolution of man and his teeth. If he were to wager a guess, he would have said the teeth hidden behind the lips were a carnivorous progression, although to what end he could only speculate. Assuming this evolutionary leap was triggered by environmental pressures, he had to wonder why a creature with the potential for higher thought would need to develop something that closer aligned it with predatory species than civilized man.

  He closed his eyes and tried to picture it. The head was roughly ten inches tall. The average human was approximately seven and a half heads tall, making this individual six-foot-three if traditional human proportions were applied. Shorter and heavier with the proportions of a gorilla and significantly taller if judged by orangutan standards. Without any other dimensions to help define it, there was no way of knowing for sure and Brandt seemed curiously unwilling to commit to any details beyond those physically provided by the mask.

  Brooks imagined a hominin more closely resembling a man standing knee-deep in Himalayan snow, the howling wind whipping his long hair back from his face while the snow lashed his features.

  If all myths were rooted in fact, then was it possible this was the legendary yeti of Nepalese and Tibetan lore? Was the abominable snowman in fact more than a mere anthropoid ape and instead an actual evolutionary branch of the tree of mankind?

  After all, if a species like Homo floresiensis, a hobbit-like race of miniature humans, could survive on an Indonesian island until so recently, was it so hard to believe that another branch could have arisen in one of the most remote and geographically isolated regions on the planet?

  Twenty-three

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 16th

  Yesterday

  Brooks explained everything while they catalogued the remaining trunks from the German expedition. They were reluctant to let him off the hook for his deception, but they conceded the fact that they likely wouldn’t have signed on had he broached the idea without offering the kind of proof he himself had required from Brandt. Nor did they believe they would have done anything differently if they were in his shoes. The discovery was simply too fantastic to apply the normal rules of logic and convention.

  They asked the same questions that Brooks had: Why didn’t Brandt allow all of them to inspect the mask in person? Why hadn’t he claimed the credit for his discovery and why had he waited so long to send another expedition? Or had he? Warren was certain the man in the coffin was Dr. Andreessen from the Max Planck Institute. Surely finding the prominent primatologist’s remains in a burial where Brooks had expected to find an unclassified hominin couldn’t be coincidental. And if that were the case, then surely he hadn’t traveled all this way alone. Where was the rest of his party? And were Brooks and his team even now in danger of meeting whatever fate befell them?

  Fortunately for Brooks, they didn’t believe he’d been deliberately trying to mislead them, only to reserve an unbelievable truth until they were in a position to be able to judge for themselves. The problem was that it was readily apparent to all that Brandt had either manipulated or outright lied to him. Little had been as Brandt had described, more than could be attributed to the fading memories of an old man. After all, he’d been able to provide perfect directions to a specific point halfway around the world in the middle of a foreign land where he’d only been once, and a lifetime ago at that. He’d been right about the broken coffin, the fragments of which had been right where he said they’d be. Was it so hard to believe he should have been able to recall commissioning another expedition prior to theirs or something as potentially traumatic as leaving one of his German colleagues behind with the supplies they must have fought tooth and nail to haul over the Himalayas?

  Like Brooks had held back information with the intention of leading his team to a revelation of the highest magnitude, was it possible Brandt was doing the exact same thing to him? And if so, what were they ultimately going to find in this valley, miles away from the nearest human settlement?

  If the abandoned trunks held any clues, they were unable to recognize them. There was enough ragged and tattered clothing to serve as kindling for a fire, beside which they warmed themselves and dried their drenched outerwear while they examined some of the objects they’d carried out of the cave with them.

  They’d found hand-drawn maps on paper so brittle it nearly disintegrated in their hands, a needle-compass and a lodestone, and drafting tools that appeared to be crafted from the hollow bones of some species of fowl in one trunk. Another held ammunition for a rifle they couldn’t find and individual animals that had been gutted and wrapped in burlap. They were nearly mummified and reminded Brooks of the earliest exhibits he had seen as a child; there was nothing remotely lifelike about the birds and small mammals shriveled inside that case. Another still contained an assortment of rocks and minerals and dented collection trays filled with pressed vegetation, some of which was already preserved in what felt like wax. There were small containers covered with dust and filled with crisp insects that would undoubtedly break apart with even a gentle shake. Other crates held various tools of more mundane use, from hammers and ice axes to rotted fruit leather and jerky. They even found a tin of Atikah brand cigarettes that appeared well preserved, if so stale they were like wooden dowels. But it was in the bottom trunks in the pile, the heaviest of them all, that they made the most interesting discovery.

  They were filled with photographic equipment, from box-style still-life cameras to archaic reel-to-reel motion picture cameras. There were dipping trays and handling tongs and bottles of developer chemicals that had eaten through their containers and fused the bottoms of the trunks to the stone floor. There had to be easily fifty rolls of undeveloped film and stacks of negatives that had fused together over time. The few developed pictures were stuck together in a folder. The final case had been packed with circular cans of exposed 8mm film, more than two hundred hours’ worth of footage at a guess.

  Brooks carefully peeled apart the pictures. Some of the emulsification came away on the backs of the other photos, leaving behind gaps in the pictures, while the others held up lengths of film in front of the fire. There were five men in the pictures, none of whom Brooks immediately recognized. Men in khaki shirts and socks without elastic that bunched around their ankles in what looked like the wharves of Calcutta; mugging for the camera from where they sat on crates of equipment; wearing wool hats with ice in their beards; outside a tent on the windswept Tibetan plateau; candid shots by themselves and in formal attire with foreign dignitaries ensconced in silk.

  After the first pass, Brooks turned them over and read the captions someone had written in delicate cursive. The words had largely faded, but he could tell by those that remained intact that they were German. Brooks had learned enough about the language to identify names, places, and dates and the more frequently used words. He recognized Brandt’s name immediately; the others he had only heard in passing, if at all. He knew Augustus König had led the expedition, but he was unfamiliar with the roles handled by Kurt Eberhardt, Otto Metzger, and Hermann Wolff.

  He flipped over the picture of the men seated on the crates. He recognized the word “warten,” which meant “to wait,” and presumably the “gtok” was the last for letters of Gangtok, which made sense considering what Brandt had told him. There were five names below the caption, from left to right, although when he flipped it back over, the one face he could scarcely believe belonged to the old man he had known for the past decade didn’t correspond to his name. They must have been written in an order known only to their author.

  He continued to flip through them until he found the individual pictures. The first was of a bearded man with
a pipe in his mouth and a rifle against his shoulder. He crouched over a red panda, holding its head up so the camera could better photograph it. This was undoubtedly their adventurer and zoologist Augustus König; however, the caption beneath him identified him only as “Unsere Furchtlosen Anführer.” Our something leader. Fearless, probably.

  The only picture of Brandt showed him staring across a field of snow with ice in his beard and his frosted breath blowing back over his shoulder, lost in thought. He squinted as though in need of his trademark glasses he either hadn’t brought or had yet to be prescribed. The words on the back were illegible.

  Another was of a man with startlingly light eyes and a birthmark on his temple. He wore a huge grin and had his arm around the shoulders of a native, who looked more than a little uncomfortable. There were only a few legible words, none of which Brooks recognized: Arzt, einen Weg, and Einheim Isch-something.

  The next featured a man wearing the pointed silk hat of a regent and a goofy expression on his face. The caption read simply “Der Narr.”

  The final photograph was of the fifth man and showed him slurping a black noodle from a bowl of soup, his eyes alight with mischief. His skinny face was leathered from the elements and he looked several years older than the others. Brooks read the words on the back: “Blutegel Suppe.” Brooks knew blut was blood and suppe was self-explanatory. He looked again at the black noodle and the comical expression on the man’s face.

  “Leech soup,” he said out loud.

  Adrianne leaned over his shoulder.

  “That’s disgusting. I’ve seen enough leeches to last me a dozen lifetimes.”

  “All either of these films show is the view from the window of a train,” Julian said, tossing the cans into the stack at his feet.

  “You’re lucky,” Warren said. “I have an hour of a man trying to get a mule out of some mud and another of wild asses swatting flies with their tails.”

  “They obviously filmed everything they saw with the intention of editing it down later,” Adrianne said.

  “What did you get?” Julian asked.

  “A pervy film of a couple of natives bathing in a lake. A cold lake by the looks of it.”

  “Give it here!” Julian grabbed it from her and stretched it out. “What the hell? They’re dudes!”

  “I never said they weren’t.”

  Brooks laughed for what felt like the first time in forever.

  “You’re still not off the hook, Jordan.” Adrianne shouldered him to the side and he nearly toppled from the rock they shared as a seat. “You still have a lot of making up to do.”

  He glanced over to find her blushing. She peeked at him from the corner of her eye and his heart rate accelerated. He was about to ask what she had in mind when Warren leapt to his feet.

  “I think this is what we’re looking for.”

  He crouched by the fire between Brooks and Adrianne and stretched the film in front of the fire so they could see.

  Brooks leaned closer and saw dozens of tiny 8 mm images of what he at first mistook for an ordinary rock. It took him a moment to realize that he was looking at the same cliff he and Julian had just climbed. The image was hazy, as though it were either foggy or raining. Nothing happened for frames on end until a torpedo-shaped projectile materialized and grew increasingly larger as it streaked toward the camera.

  The perspective veered wildly until the camera focused on the muddy ground. The picture drew out of focus for a moment, then zoomed in on the ground as the cameraman followed a trail of wooden pieces to where a shadowed body lay folded in the mud.

  “This is it,” Brooks said. “This is what Dr. Brandt told me…”

  His words died as the camera focused on the body. It wasn’t at all what he expected. The man was Caucasian and wore a military uniform of some kind. His face looked nothing like the mask.

  “This…this can’t be right.”

  “I think we’ve been sent on a wild goose chase,” Warren said.

  “Keep going. There has to be something more.”

  “I watched it to the end before I said anything, Jordan. Trust me. There’s nothing else there.”

  “I’m telling you there has to be.”

  Brooks grabbed the reel and brought the film nearly to the tip of his nose. There was no doubt that not only was the man Caucasian, he’d been dead for quite some time, judging by his level of decomposition.

  He unraveled the film onto the ground without the slightest concern for its preservation. Nothing made sense. Brandt had described this exact scene to him in painstaking detail, only the body had belonged to something completely different. If Brandt had lied about this, then what else had he lied about? Where had the cast of the hominin face come from?

  The last of the film unspooled onto the ground and he stared at the final series of images. The man who could be seen in the background rappelling down the cliff approached the body until he could only be seen from the waist down. The camera caught a reflection from something in his hand. No...something on his hand.

  Brooks dropped the film and flipped through the photographs until he found the picture of the bearded man with the pipe and the rifle. He looked at the man’s right hand, which he used to hold up the head of the dead panda for the camera. Right beneath its furry jaw was a silver ring engraved with a skull and crossbones.

  Twenty-four

  Excerpt from the journal of

  Hermann G. Wolff

  Courtesy of Johann Brandt, Private Collection

  Chicago, Illinois

  (Translated from original handwritten German text)

  February 1939

  Metzger is missing.

  I have no idea how long he has been gone or in which direction he went, or even if he left under his own power. Thus far our best efforts to locate him have proved ineffective and we have yet to find any sign of his passage. As the shadows now lengthen, we must consider the possibility that night will fall on Metzger alone in the wilds, and if my suspicions about the nature of his vanishing prove correct, I fear we must begin making our own preparations if we are to avoid sharing whatever cruel fate has befallen him.

  I’ve spent every moment since discovering him missing scouring my memories for some clue I might have missed, some warning we should have heeded. Surely there is some precaution we should take ourselves before the sun sets and we are again at the mercy of the creatures that stalk this strange land.

  I awakened before dawn on the floor of the cave, my knees drawn to my chest beneath my parka. Brandt had fallen asleep sitting against the cave wall, his notebook open on his lap. Eberhardt was still cocooned inside his sleeping bag. I assumed Metzger and König had already risen as I did not see their sleeping bags, but I could smell neither wood smoke nor the aroma of anything cooking. It was not until I walked outside the cave to find down feathers and tattered fabric scattered across the ground that I realized something was wrong.

  The rain continued to fall, turning footprints into puddles of ill-defined shape, some of which were reddened by what I could only conclude was blood.

  I saw no trace of König either, although his disappearances were not uncommon. Wherever he went, he had taken his rifle with him. I recalled my earlier thought that König was using us to bait whatever hunted us and roused Brandt and Eberhardt, who initially dismissed my concerns. Until they saw the down and the blood diluting into the rainwater.

  Even then, neither was willing to subscribe to the notion that Metzger had been dragged from the cave, sleeping bag and all, and set upon by some animal while König watched. If anything, they said, the blood must have belonged to whatever foolish creature dared wander within our master hunter’s range. Surely his shot had wounded the beast and sent it crashing off into the forest to die. Metzger had probably helped him track it and even now they were dressing its carcass. I reminded them that none of us had awakened to the sound of gunfire, but that detail seemed of no consequence to them. Brandt had his mind set on further examining the
unusual burials, while Eberhardt had already catalogued two unknown species of rhubarb and was intent upon naming everything he found after himself, as if the world were simply clamoring for a bitter-tasting Rheum eberhardtii or a potentially malarial Anopheles kurtii.

  They humored me in the end and together we struck off into the wilderness, following the tracks we were able to identify as König’s once we were out of the brunt of the rain. He left clear impressions where he crouched or knelt behind the various clumps of trees and shrubs he used as cover. From the same vantage points, I was able to determine he was observing a path that ran parallel to our wending course. I left the others to König’s path, while I traveled the one he had been watching.

  The tracks I found there were faint, barely appreciable indentations smoothed away by the weight of something heavy being dragged behind whatever left them. For meters at a time I found them obstructed by detritus or washed away by the elements.

  The others called for our missing colleagues, their voices echoing from the valley walls, while I grew ever more convinced that the last thing we wanted was to draw attention to ourselves. König might have ignored our shouts, but I have no doubt Metzger would have hailed us were he able.

  We lost both trails on an incline where the runoff had carved an impromptu gully into the hillside, uprooting trees and snarling them into a tangled mass where the water fell into a waiting tributary of the Yarlung Tsang-po [sic]. We traversed its abrupt banks uphill in search of a narrowing we could cross and instead encountered mud so slick it might as well have been ice. Fortunately, we also found König, standing high atop a rocky crag, shielding his eyes from the heavy rain as he stared down upon the vast, unmoving forest.