Mountain of the Dead Quotes

“acquiescing.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Yuri Doroshenko, Lyuda Dubinina, Igor Dyatlov, Semyon Zolotaryov, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Alexander Kolevatov, Yuri Krivonischenko, Rustem Slobodin, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Her species were capable of violence, certainly, and vengeance, yes—the fates of Vasily and Disco and Olivia were proof of this—but they were not monsters. They did not kill for greed or glory, for fame or money, for dogma or jealousy or pure malice. The only species capable of such acts stared back at me every time I looked in a mirror.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“My job isn’t to prove whether the events you have described are perfidious or not, or whether you are crazy or sane. My job is only to help you deal with your inner turmoil.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Turning, I saw one of the men lying facedown in the snow some ten feet from where he had been standing moments before. The second man dropped his rifle and tried to flee to the forest. The yeti seized him by the neck and drove his head into the ground with pitiless force.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Which meant I was going to have to push her out of the tree.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“I had never before felt so alone and depressed.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Death was a simple notion—now you’re here, now you’re not;”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Light glowed through the windows of all eight sturdy log houses.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Kolevatov dropped his head into his hands and wept. Lyuda was dead. Zolotaryov, dead. Kolya, dead. Georgy and Doroshenko, dead. Igor, Zina, Rustem—all likely dead.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“armchair conspiracy theorists would manipulate to suit their paradigm.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Olivia slipped her arms around my waist and hugged me tightly. I grabbed Disco and pulled him into the embrace. We were all laughing, more shaky chuckles than anything else, but laughing nonetheless. Emotions overwhelmed me: disbelief, joy, amazement, and perhaps love, for I was experiencing right then a kind of brotherhood with Disco and Olivia I had never before experienced, one forged through trial by fire. We had been tested beyond reasonable limits, we had stuck together in the face of adversity, and we had survived.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“As we circled the small lake, passing the castle-like rock formation beneath the skylight, I spotted a dark crevice in the cliff wall ahead of us.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“You just had to look at the pristine forests north of California, and at the great swaths of undeveloped land in Canada. Not to mention the endless expanses of Siberia and the impenetrable jungles of China and the ancient mountain ranges of Nepal—and beneath all of this, crisscrossing the planet like veins beneath the skin, thousands and thousands of miles of caves.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“This skull is sixty million years old?” “I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s fossilized.” She leaned closer…and then started to kiss it. “Dear God,” I said, “what are you doing?” She said, “It’s not a fossil.” “You can tell that by kissing it?” “I wasn’t kissing it, Corey. I was licking it.” “Great.” “You don’t understand. Fossils are mineral casts of the original bones. Your tongue sticks to them because they have tiny pores that suck away moisture. This bone is smooth, which means it hasn’t been fossilized.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“We crowded around it, looking down like savages hunkered over a mysterious idol.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“He was going to die on her, take the easy route out, sink into blissful unawareness while she remained in this living hell.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“The elder stiffened in surprise and slammed the phone to the ground with tremendous force. Bits of plastic and circuit board went everywhere.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“I decided to try imitating the guttural noise the mother had issued. “Guuuummmmm,” I said. The elder looked at me curiously. “That’s good,” Olivia encouraged. I wasn’t so sure, and I couldn’t help thinking about a time in secondary school when I’d accidentally propositioned a female teacher in an overtly sexual way while attempting to say something in Latin. God forbid I was doing something similar now.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“subterranean wonderland”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Superstitious terror ripped through my bowels. I didn’t know whether that thing was pursuing us or not. I didn’t know what it was. But on both points I expected the worst. Yes, it was right behind us, and God forbid, it was something straight out of hell. We were never getting out of this alive.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“A moment later, that scream. Demonic and savage, a rage-filled lamentation.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“That scream again, closer still, a glassy, pitiless caterwauling so debased it verged on the forbidden. One hundred feet away? Less? It was impossible to tell— My stomach heaved, and I nearly gagged on the stench that had suddenly infiltrated the passageway. It was the most repellent smell I have ever experienced, what Death might smell like if Death could die and rot.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“At the exit I stopped to look back, crisscrossing the light along the walls and the ceiling. “What’s up, Whitey?” Disco asked. “Nothing,” I said. I was about to continue when a high-pitched sound emerged from the way we’d come. The three of us froze. “Tell me that was the wind,” Olivia said. “That wasn’t the wind,” I said. “Bon Dieu,” Disco said. “I can’t take any more of this—” The sound echoed up through the voracious darkness again, and this time its nature could not be mistaken: some kind of hideous scream. For several moments I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t comprehend what we’d heard. A scream? But what made it?”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“The chamber split into five new passages. Two to our left, three straight ahead, and one to the right. The latter was the largest by far.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Vasily screamed. The gut-wrenching sound bounced off the walls behind us. It wasn’t a short burst of pain like the previous one. It went on and on. Warbling. The sound you would make if someone was carving out your eyeballs with a blunt knife. It climbed octave after octave to a soul-shattering soprano of prolonged agony—which, in the end, turned one-eighty into a crescendo of blistering rage.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“I produced the chocolate and started toward the yeti.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“creeping through a twisting maze of pitch-black tunnels that had never seen sunlight.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Sightings of large, hairy, bipedal cryptids have been reported throughout history. The Roman author Lucretius described a primitive race built up on larger and more solid bones than ours. Another Roman, a traveler called Pliny the Elder, wrote of a man-like creature that walked on two legs in the mountains of India. Alexander the Great spotted one during his conquest of the Indus Valley. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a United States president, wrote about an encounter he had with a Bigfoot in the wild.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead

“Doroshenko knew this was a one-way journey. They would never be able to climb back up the mountain to the tent with the headwind in their faces. Which meant even if everyone got off the exposed slope together, they were still in some seriously deep trouble—him particularly. Without a jacket, boots, or socks he wouldn’t last another twenty minutes, fire or not.”
― Jeremy Bates, Mountain of the Dead