Echo BY Thomas Olde Heuvelt
For Pieter
Because of the mountains
And for David
Because of love
The chapter titles in this book refer to classic gothic novels and stories. Each one is a masterpiece, and I recommend them all without exception.
T. O. H.
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Contents
Prologue
The Invisible Man
Misery
At the Mountains of Madness
The Turn of the Screw
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Log of the Demeter
The Haunting of Hill House
At the Mountains of Madness
The Valley of Unrest
At the Mountains of Madness
Sleepy Hollow
The Metamorphosis
Wuthering Heights
The Great God Pan
At the Mountains of Madness
In the Hills, the Cities
In a Glass Darkly
At the Mountains of Madness
The Modern Prometheus
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Something Wicked This Way Comes
What Happened to Julia Avery
But three, now, Christ, three a.m.! . . . The soul is out. The blood moves slow. . . . Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open.
—Ray Bradbury
1
Julia sees the people in the stairwell when she gets up at night to pee.
They’re standing there in the dark and staring up at her, frozen like a photograph, as if they’ve been waiting for her. Her left foot is already on the top stair and she’s about to put her right foot on the next, but her fingers clamp the handrail convulsively, and she stops. Of course she stops, because it suddenly penetrates her drowsy brain: there are people in the stairwell and they’re staring at her.
Just now, she has woken up with a start. The bedside lamp dispels the shadows in the chalet, but outside the wind is howling around the roof with such vigor that the shutters tremble and the rafters creak. The sound of the wind fills Julia with an instinctive sense of doom, a familiar sense of doom. It sends her back to Huckleberry Wall, and the night it burned down. That was fifteen years ago, in the Catskills, and this is now and thousands of miles from home, in the Swiss Alps, but when at night the snow clings to the windows and the wind kicks up, all cabins are the same.
Creepy as fuck and completely cut off from the rest of the world.
She reaches under her pillow for her iPhone. 1:15, no messages from Sam. Damn it. Her stomach turns.
Julia throws back the covers and her body warmth, held by the down, disperses in the draft. The night chill hangs in the attic. It’s the draft, eddying through the chalet like an echo of the storm, that has kept her from lighting a fire earlier that evening. She pictures the draft blowing life into the embers as she sleeps, puffing glowing cinders onto the rug and setting the curtains on fire. Fifteen years ago, her big brother was there to wake her up before the smoke suffocated her—she was six, he was nine—but the last time Sam called tonight was sometime before 10:30, as he was stuck in a jam on the Bern bypass.
The snowplows are doing their best, he’d said over a breaking connection, but traffic’s stop-and-go and the worst part in the mountains is yet to come. That is, if the valley is still open.
Maybe he’s given up and taken an overnight room. That’s what Julia hopes anyway, because Sam’s been under way too much pressure lately, and she’s worried as hell—that he’ll skid off the road and plow into a snowbank, or worse, 300 feet of nothing. She hears more than just simple concern in his voice when he asks her to be on the lookout for Nick . . . and to be wary.
Except it’s been almost three hours now, and Sam still hasn’t called. No sign of Nick, either. By now, Julia is more than worried. She’s scared.
Barefoot, she crosses the floorboards, which crack under her weight, around the supporting wall, out to the landing.
The stairwell plunges straight down into the dark.
There’s a light switch, but before Julia can grope for it, she’s at the top of the steps and sees the people at the bottom.
They’re barely more than silhouettes, black against black, but she feels their gazes fixed on her, senses the purpose in their presence. Six, seven figures, pressed together in the stairwell, motionless.
It’s immediately obvious that they can’t be intruders; the chalet is too remote for that, the night too remorseless. She also knows, triggered by some primitive survival instinct, that she cannot turn on the light. In the light, the people in the stairwell will no longer be visible—and not seeing them, while knowing they’re there, is worse than seeing them.
Much worse.
The chill that envelops Julia as she walks back to bed is more than a physical chill. It’s a cold in her soul, so elementary she has to brace herself against the force with which it possesses her. A floorboard snaps under her foot like a gunshot and she flinches, jumps into bed, pulls the covers up to her chin. She stares wide-eyed at the afterimages in her eyes, too paralyzed to know what to do next.
She can’t see the stairwell from here.
In the safety of her bed, the oh-so-obvious explanation gradually dawns on her: she dreamed up the whole thing. Of course. Julia welcomes this possibility with overly eager conviction; it is, however, irrefutably logical. She certainly did get out of bed—her cold feet are proof—but her half-asleep mind made her see things that weren’t there. Shadows on the landing transformed into human shapes, a sleep-induced projection of her fears.
You were awake and rational enough to wonder where Sam is. Awake enough to be seriously scared.
She pushes the thought away. There’s no one in the stairwell. She’s alone in the chalet. She remembers bolting the doors before going upstairs. Because, yes, she had been on the lookout, as Sam had asked. With a blanket around her shoulders, as she tried getting acquainted with the cabin’s unfamiliar sounds. It felt—still feels—like it’s alive. The cuckoo clock ticks its heartbeat. The slanting roof groans under the snow’s weight, occasional loads come sliding down.