Abaddon - Chapter 13

27 February, 2016

“Who is he?”

“I dunno. Some old weird guy, actually lives down there. Quite a few cavers report him, now the Abyss is more open to tourists. He lives down beyond the Wire Curtain and the DANGER NO CAVING BEYOND THIS POINT signs.”

“Does everyone take notice of those?”

Hugh Waldrop shrugged. “I’ve no way of knowing. Sometimes you meet a spelunker in one of the cafés round the Gzel Matias Corvinus and he tells you he’s going to make a dash down through the Curtain to the deep caves, and you never hear of him again. The Abyss has a...reputation. It’s said the Soviets and Nazis sent caving expeditions into it, soldiers and geologists, which never came back. And there was that joint US-Russian expedition ten years ago. The one they said was probably wiped out by a rockfall. They sent four more expeditions in there since to recover bodies, you know. Some of them found nothing, some of them didn’t come back at all, and from one of them they only got back the team leader, Christensen, who was babbling like a crazy guy and had the blood type of three of his team geologists all over him and an empty magazine in his gun.”

“Gun???” The young man almost dropped his coffee cup.

“Well”, said Waldrop, spreading his hands expansively, “it was an American expedition.”

Outside the streets were bloated with the biotech boom. Gigantic limousines built on the Pacific Rim growled past, along with the ubiquitous plastic Africars, products of the burgeoning Lion Economies of the Dark Continent. The Africar was a copy of the Kzaer 2000, revamped to use more plastic in the bodywork and aluminium in the chassis. The Kzaer car company had bought up a Kenyan motor works in 2015, then, after discovering it could make cars in Nairobi for half the price they cost to build in Na, had promptly moved its entire factory operation south. For five or six years, the cars had been made in Kenya and put together in Na, thereby maintaining the illusion that they were a home-grown product; then the Kzaer board had been bought out by African interests, and now all Na’s subcompact car traffic was manufactured in Kinshasa. Nairobi had become too expensive. There had been terrible demonstrations by laid-off Kenyan auto workers.

Boys and girls were walking past the windows in GENE GENIE sweatshirts, each one with their own genome laserprinted on it in miniature. The gene pairings were so small no biological eye could possibly read them, but the shirts were all the rage.

Seeing the young man’s attention focussed on the street, Waldrop mistakenly assumed it was fixed on the contents of the sweaters rather than the garments themselves. “They may look big”, he said, “but it’s all silicone. Actually not silicone these days , but a sort of plastic a Ukrainian company invented - you know, the sort of plastic that retains a memory of the last shape it had before moulding? Only this stuff can have up to about ten memory levels - double A, double B, double C, double D, you get the idea. The pimps and porno directors love it. Tit size to order. Mammary Plastic, they call it.”

The young man was appalled. “They’re all whores? They look barely older than schoolgirls!”

“They are schoolgirls. Welcome to the Carpathians.”

The other man returned his expression to his espresso. “The Abyss. Why do they have a wire fence down there? What are they trying to stop?”

Waldrop frowned. “Well, they actually call it a Suicide Fence, but for it to stop any determined suicide the jumper would have to start his journey no more than ten metres or so above the wire. Any higher and the fence itself would cut him to ribbons. That or he’d just tear a hole in it. Black Cavers do just that - get hold of a couple of leather briefcases filled with bricks, link them with a security chain wrapped round the handle, and drop them down like grapeshot. Bites a damn great hole in the fence, and then the caver climbs down.”

“Why do they call them Black Cavers?”

“Because if you go more than a kilometre down, it’s illegal. Because, they say, it’d be well nigh impossible for the cave rescue teams to fish you out.”

“And you think this man, this Stylite, might be able to tell me where I need to go?”

“Stylite isn’t his name. And it's nothing to do with his effect on the In Crowd either. It's from the Greek word stylos."

“I know”, said the young man with smile that was almost pained, as if he were apologizing for his knowledge. “Stylos means column. Stylite is an old Christian word for one of the more extreme forms of hermit. They were called Stylites because they lived on the top of columns and did the whole locust and honey thing.”

“An extreme hermit.”

“A sort of snowboarding hermit, yes”, smiled the young man.

“Well, it would seem this guy’s some sort of extreme hermit to the max. He lives somewhere out on a flat stretch of cliff called the Glass Waterfall about half a mile down from ground. And he really does live in one of those old hermits’ cells cut into the rock. It seems the Abyss was once quite a popular place for hermits to settle in the Dark and Middle Ages, before the Turks and Mongols cleared the area of holy men with big beards. It was thought that since the Abyss was plainly the area of the Earth that Satan fell through into Hell, a devout man could show just how devout he was by living down the Abyss as close to Satan as he could.”

“A sort of holy test-your-strength machine.”

“It was considered the deeper you lived while keeping your vows, the more full of the love of God you were. The Stylite’s cell is actually one thought to have once been occupied by an Orthodox saint, Vladimir Nyctophagus. The name means ‘Bat Eater’. Vladimir was a wily old Russian hermit who lived down the pit at the time of the Ottoman invasion. He refused to leave the pit despite entreaties from the Turks to come up and convert to Mohammedanism. The Turks sent men down to capture him, but couldn’t catch him, and many of their men died, killed by what was described as “black genies with great eyes of flame”, which the Christian church dutifully explained away as angels. Eventually the Bey proclaimed him an official Moslem holy man, and Vlad wasn’t around up top to object. He therefore holds the uncommon honour of being a saddhu in both the Moslem and Christian religions.”

“But our Stylite isn’t a holy man.”

Waldrop shrugged. “Not as far as we know, but he does claim to be able to foretell the future. Told a climber last year exactly when and where he was going to fall. The guy was able to warn Na Cave Rescue, who took this, weirdly enough, extremely seriously and, when he didn’t check in the next day, went straight to the spot he got injured in and picked him up. Some climbers leave messages on the rock now in french chalk, and the Stylite answers them. Rarely speaks face to face.” He tapped the blurry still photograph on the table. “But I think he’ll speak to you.”

The young man frowned. “Why?”

"Because you're his reason for being on his column."

"Down his hole, surely, rather than on his column. He's a sort of stylite-in-reverse."

Waldrop ignored this and dished out another photograph from his wallet. “This is the face of one Sean Bogdanovich - not an extreme hermit, but an extreme caver. Our Sean vanished down the Na Abyss five years back as a member of the Nilsson expedition we were just discussing, the one that was wiped out by a rockfall. It was thought no-one from the expedition survived. But here’s the thing; take a look at these two photos side by side.” He put them side by side. One was of a wild, long-haired man with madly staring eyes, looking up at the camera from a position hanging on to a cliff by his fingernails, and the other was of a hermit.

“Have you ever spelunked before?” said Waldrop.

“That’s a bit of a personal question.”

Waldrop looked at the young man sourly.

“Erm, yes, I’ve been down caves. I was given the opportunity to do it in the army.”

“Well, these caves are different. They’re big enough for it to be more properly called mountaineering. Ever done any of that?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Good. We began to suspect that this man, this Stylite, might have been Sean Bogdanovich some time ago. As I said, you’re possibly the only man with any chance of telling us what might have happened to his expedition, largely due to the postscript to that letter you’ve been given. It’s just possible, if you show him the letter, that it might shock him out of his state of mind, make him realize who and where he is.”

The young man’s puzzlement mounted. He stirred his spoon in the dregs of his coffee. “Why exactly are Intelligence taking such an interest in what happened to a foreign civilian caving expedition?”

Waldrop looked into the young man’s eyes with an expression of perfect ironclad honesty. “Because we’re British. And because British Intelligence takes an interest in the fall of every Cockney Sparrow.”

The young man refused to meet Waldrop’s earnest gaze, and instead examined the grounds in his coffee cup minutely and disconsolately. Waldrop hoped he wasn’t seeing the future in them.

A car blared past, pulling a float which bore an animatronic fibreglass likeness of the Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the Russian Federation, beating the Nationalist candidate to death with a hammer and sickle in one hand and the Nationalist’s own blue-and-white cross in the other. The diorama was artfully constructed to recycle the Nationalist candidate's blood in the manner of a garden water feature. The young man watched without apparent comprehension.

"First election Na's had since readmitting themselves to the Evil Empire", said Waldrop. "It's a toss-up whether the Trotskyite or the Czarist revival guy will win."

The young man shuddered. "Things like this make me glad the cold war's over", he said.

"Ah, you're one of those naïve fools, are you? You know how many nuclear missiles the Russians have nowadays? Remember, Gorbachev offered Bush the chance to buy Russia's entire nuclear stockpile back in the Nineties, and got the cold shoulder. Yeltsin tried the same thing a few years later with the same result. Give up? The answer is 'Not far shy of the number they had in 1980.' And you know what? Because of all the wide open borders and investment freedom and interpenetration of ideas in a glorious multicultural mosaic that's been going on since 1980, these days all their missiles will work.

The young man frowned. "But nobody's stopping us sitting here talking. And people cross the borders freely to visit the West. There's no collectivization. There's no KGB."

Waldrop stirred his latte with a biscotto finger. "Well hoop-de-doop and dickory dock, bend over and take my big fat cock. They've taken away all the things about their empire that made it incapable of defeating us. And we helped them do it. I honestly have difficulty believing we could ever have been so stupid."

The biscotto broke. Waldrop swore in Russian. "Same thing in China", he said, whilst trying to coax the broken pieces out in a napkin. "We've fallen over ourselves to get contracts in their programme to put a yellow man on the Moon, which coincidentally just happens to involve developing big fuck-off ballistic missiles that can also put a yellow warhead on Reigate from Hainan. There's going to be a war soon. There has to be, mark my words. People don't build weapons without using them. Especially American people. You know the majority of American handgun deaths are accidents that happen in the home? Americans account for most of the world's handguns. They also account for most of the world's nuclear weapons. What happens if Little Jimmy finds out where Papa keeps his Polaris? It doesn't bear thinking about, I'm telling you."

"I believe", said the young man, "that human beings are better than that."

Waldrop stared out of the window through the backwards STARBUCKS sign.

"You know", he said, "I think you're wrong; but I hope you're right. I really do."