Emily said, “I can hear by the sound of your voice that you know more than you’re telling me, am I right?”
And I said maybe I didn’t know anything at all.
“Sam, I need your help.” The desperation back in her voice, this time out in the open. “Because the other thing you said is also true. It’s as if since that night . . . It’s like I’ve never been alone anymore. Something is following me. It’s attacking me. All the time. And . . .”
Could we maybe meet? Get together somewhere?
I said I wouldn’t mind except that I was in Switzerland at the moment.
“In the mountains?” Her voice sounded sharper. “Is Nick there too?”
“What if he is?”
“What are you doing there?”
“The official story is trauma therapy.” The valley’s cold cleared the soup of my thoughts a bit and I said, “Just suppose, okay . . . ? Suppose I did know more about what’s up with you. And suppose I’m prepared to tell you about it.” I was thinking out loud. “What would you then tell me about that night in August?”
“Not on the phone, Sam. Please don’t make me. I can’t. I won’t.”
“What kind of aftereffects were you talking about?”
“Can’t you come to Holland?”
Symptoms of altitude sickness?
“I’m afraid I don’t have much time left . . .”
Dizziness? Vertigo?
“Please, Sam . . .”
The feeling that she was falling?
Again, a long silence. Only after a while did I realize it was because she was crying. That shocked me more than all that came before. Emily Wan, through her tears, said, “Oh, it’s true—he’s making me fall, Sam. And when I fall, I experience infinity. Then I’m afraid the falling will never stop.”
6
“You gotta do what?” Julia asked. Staring at me in disbelief.
“I gotta go to Amsterdam. Tomorrow morning.”
Five o’ clock and almost dark.
And Julia said, “O . . . kay. Okay. That’s good. Yeah, good. I said so this morning, you have to get out of here. Take a time-out. I’ll have to rebook my ticket, but . . .”
“Actually, I was gonna ask you to stay here.”
And my li’l sis, waitaminute, wut?
I looked away. Gazing into the fire. “I’m afraid to leave Nick alone. In his state.” The subtext being that I was afraid of what he could bring about if he started to wander around. The subtext being that I was even more worried about his own safety. For what the townsfolk would do to him if they happened to cross paths with him. For what he would want to do to himself if he lost control.
Then a real black thought popped into my head. So what? Maybe you should just let it happen. That’ll solve all your problems.
That made all my hairs stand on end.
It’s still Nick we’re talking about here, remembuh?
I said, “It’s just for one night. I’ll leave tomorrow morning, and if all goes well I’ll be back the next evening.”
“But . . . what is it you have to do there?”
“Gather evidence.”
Julia looked at me inquisitively. I hate it when she does that, cuz she’s just about the only person in the world who has the gift of being able to look right through me and read me like an instruction manual. She said, “Can I ask you something?” And without waiting for an answer: “You said that Cécile had come here to harm Nick. But she’s the one who’s missing. Sound familiar?”
What did she mean?
“Augustin, dummy.”
Right. My baby sister, trust her to find a pattern I hadn’t even seen yet.
She asked, “Does Nick have anything to do with Cécile’s disappearance?”
“As a certain wise woman once said, ‘I would never want to risk falsely accusing anyone.’ ”
“So last night, nothing . . .”
“He didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at. And you know I’d never leave you alone with him if I thought you’d be in danger.”
Sounded good, but was it true?
The music had stopped before Cécile had snuck downstairs with her stun gun.
And the front door had been wide open. A red carpet for anything out there that would have wanted to sneak inside.
Okay, it could have been Cécile who did that. Point was, I didn’t know what had gone on downstairs after she electroshocked the Maudit out of him. Didn’t change the fact that I was positive it was safe to leave Julia alone with Nick, even if the Maudit took him over. I’d done it myself for weeks. The key issue was that all the bad things—if they happened at all—had happened in the beginning. Even if you wanted to believe that Nick was indirectly responsible for Cécile’s death, then the time bomb would have been planted when she peeked under his wrappings, in the first days after the fatal expedition. Nick could control it a lot better now.
Theoretically.
Bullshit, I thought. If you think he has any control over it, you’re burying your head in the sand. It’s getting worse; you know that. And this time it’s your sister’s life on the line. What if something goes wrong now? Do you really want to be responsible for that, too?
But the Maudit had never harmed anyone Nick loved. That was a fact.
Before my common sense could stir up more doubts, I opened my mouth. “Listen,” is what I heard come out. As if I was trying to convince myself by saying it out loud, I said, “You really don’t have to be afraid of Nick.”
“Oh, but I’m not. I’m worried about you. It’s destroying you, Sam. You spent the whole night in a snowstorm. And now you wanna drop everything and—How far is it, anyway?”
A thousand klicks. Six hundred miles. Ten hours, with a bit of luck. Once you’re out of the mountains, it’s basically a straight shot on the German autobahn.
“That’s what I mean. You wanna drop everything and drive all the way over there by yourself. And then back again the next day.”
I took Dr. Jingles from the couch and held him up to her. “I have to do this. Seriously. I know you’re thinking I’m letting Nick’s trauma fantasies influence me, but let me do this and I promise I’ll explain everything.”
“Try me.”
I sighed. “Okay. One of the last things Cécile said was that Nick was haunting her. That he’d gotten into her head. The mountain. The Maudit. Said he made her fall, whatever that means. She was really scared of him, Julia. So scared she felt she had no other choice but to kill him.”
“That’s a lot.”
“You see? You think it’s all a load of bull crap.”
“I don’t think it’s bull crap that you think it’s true. I also think you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.”
“What if I told you you did see someone on the webcam?” I said, “The woman in the corner you asked about.”
“I really thought I did see someone. But I may have been mistaken. It all happened so fast. And I was afraid that Nick would hurt you.” She smiled, but there wasn’t a hint of mockery about it. “Or are you trying to tell me that besides that spooky mountain there are also a bunch of ghosts roaming around in the valley?”