"Kathmandu runs on dal bhat, prayer flags, and gas heaters in sealed rooms"
Hyun-woo Park, Harry to his guide, is twenty-seven. Two years ago he was Warden, the starting support for the Busan Krakens, the man who stood in the bushes so other people could be heroes. Then his wrist went. His old teammate has since won Worlds and thanked him on camera, and Harry has had no idea what to do with his face. So he has come to Kathmandu to walk to Everest Base Camp on his actual legs: twelve days up, no respawns. Yeti's Rest belongs to the Gurung family. Bir is a retired Gurkha colour sergeant who is prouder of his free smart heaters than of anything else in the building. Kamala refills your dal bhat whether you want it or not. Hajurama spins her prayer wheel in front of Korean dramas. And Pasang, Harry's guide, has already googled him and found the video of him crying on stage.
Harry memorises every building like a minimap, and on his first night he wakes at 3 a.m. with a headache like a tight band and finds a yeti at the end of the fifth-floor corridor. It turns out to be the laundry. Sunny and Raj, cousins from Brampton filming a channel called Bros Do Everest, get his scream on a GoPro. Crispin Ashworth-Hale, a posh brand consciousness consultant who keeps postponing his silent retreat, claims three heaters for his undiagnosed Raynaud's. Margit, a seventy-four-year-old Hungarian climber, sleeps with her window open in January and switches heaters off with her foot. Everyone blames the headaches on altitude, rice beer or vibes, until Amara, a medical student on elective at the teaching hospital, points out that they are at fourteen hundred metres.
Then Raj is found after forty minutes in a bathroom, and Amara circles his blood result in red. Bir holds up the dashboard, which says zero in every room. Harry's reaction-time app, the one he has checked every night for eleven years, starts to lag. On the sixteenth of January the cold wave comes over the mountains, the power goes out, and the whole hostel carries its heaters up to the Summit Lounge for the party on the night before the trek. There are cushions, rugs, singing bowls, a mural of a friendly yeti, and a karaoke machine with two wireless microphones. Everyone is so warm, and so sleepy, and having such a lovely time.
Age: 27
Type: Retired pro esports player, support main
Fatal Flaw: Reads every room like a minimap, except the air
Role: Protagonist
Age: Mid-30s
Type: Posh brand consciousness consultant and podcaster
Fatal Flaw: Has claimed three heaters for his undiagnosed Raynaud's
Role: Guest
Age: 25
Type: Trekking guide and the owner's daughter
Fatal Flaw: No patience for men who are scared of towels
Role: Ally
Age: —
Type: Medical student on a global health elective, from Maryland
Fatal Flaw: Wears shower shoes everywhere, including church
Role: Medic
Age: 74
Type: Hungarian mountaineer bound for Island Peak
Fatal Flaw: Sleeps with the window open in January
Role: Ally
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Calibration"
The rounds were at three. He did them every night: up the stairs, all six floors, check the landings, check the fire doors, check that nobody was smoking in the dorms or crying in the bathrooms or trying to get to the roof to "see the Himalayas," which you could not see at three in the morning, or from Thamel in January, most days, because of the smog. Tourists always thought the mountains would just be there, like a screensaver.
The stairwell of Yeti's Rest was a narrow concrete spiral of switchbacks, painted the pale green of a government office, lit by motion-sensor bulbs that were supposed to click on as you climbed. Tonight they clicked on one landing late, so he walked into darkness each time and the light arrived behind him, like it was following instead of leading.
On the second floor, his family's floor, he heard Hajurama's prayer wheel through her door. Tik. Tik. Tik. She spun it when she couldn't sleep. She said the prayers went up the stairwell like smoke and out through the roof to the flags.
On the third floor, Room 3A: the old Hungarian lady with the rope. Her door was ajar and a wedge of freezing air came out of it, because she slept with the window wide open in January. Bishal had asked her about this, politely, the first night. She had looked at him with eyes like two blue ice screws and said, "I have slept at eight thousand metres in a tent with a dead Slovenian. I can sleep in Kathmandu with a window." He had not asked again.
On the fourth floor, snoring. A lot of snoring. The dorms at Yeti's Rest sounded, at night, like a small, badly organised brass band.
On the fifth floor, the motion light did not come on at all.
Bishal stopped on the landing. He waved his arm at the sensor. Nothing. He waved both arms, like a man flagging down a bus in a monsoon. Nothing.
He turned on his phone torch.
At the far end of the fifth-floor corridor, something tall and white was standing in the dark.
It was broad at the shoulders and shaggy all over, and it was breathing. Its whole body rose and fell. Rose. Fell. It was taller than a man, and it had no face, and it was absolutely, completely still except for that breathing.
Bishal's mouth said a word his mother would have slapped him for.
The white thing breathed out, a long rippling shudder, and one of its arms lifted, slowly, toward him.
Then the torchlight caught a clothes peg.
It was the laundry rack. It was the tall folding laundry rack from the roof, hung with a dozen white hostel bedsheets and towels, which Kamala Didi must have brought inside because of the frost. It was standing in front of the vent fan at the end of the corridor, and the fan was pushing air through the sheets in slow waves, so that the whole rack swelled and sighed and flapped one sleeve of towel at him.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Yeti's Rest, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Heaters are AMAZING, so cosy you will have the most vivid dreams of your life. Mild headache in the morning but that's the altitude I think. Would 100% come back." — Mikkel, Aarhus
☠ "thank you for wandering, mikkel. you slept well." — @HostelReaper
☠ "the top floor is lovely in january. party on the 16th. fully booked. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper