and I can only hope that it will come back.
I try not to think about it but to concentrate on the descent. Then I realize what causes the feeling of being watched. Behind me, to the right, the Maudit’s enormous north face rises. I feel its massive presence towering over me. All at once I’m split inside with a burning, devilish dilemma: I want to turn around and look, understanding full well that a single glance will destroy my only possible chance of escape. As if, just by my looking at it, the mountain will regain its hold on me and strike mercilessly. So I focus on the way ahead and don’t look back. I don’t look back.
The pressure on my face increases, makes me dizzy.
I don’t look back.
A hundred yards down, the urge is so strong that I look halfway back.
I’m now on the glacier’s bare, boulder-riddled tongue, which is twisted and broken
(just like mine)
and sinks into the moraine in a labyrinth of cracks and half-frozen pools of muddy water. Behind me, steep snow slopes rise up to the Maudit’s forbidding north face
(but we’re not going to look at it, we’re not going to look at it)
pummeled by avalanches of powder snow from up high. Powerless, I gaze at this shadowy landscape. It looks like a timeless, lifeless place, untouched by the centuries. But appearances can be deceiving. Here, I can feel that power more than ever, the soul of the rocks and of the ice. I can feel it mocking me. And we thought we stood a chance against it? It’s a preposterous idea.
I reach the edge of the glacier. The moraine curves toward the lake, and I start following it.
My face.
It is screaming without any sound passing my lips.
My lips, hanging open flaccidly, or so it seems.
Sensation starts to flow back into them, and now my face screams for real.
It doesn’t take long before I see the surface of the water, dark and smooth. It looks cold, an immeasurably deep, round hole, right at the foot of the Maudit. Involuntarily, it makes me think about what happened to Augustin’s eyes. Those eyes, ripped out by the death birds. I feel that power in the lake as well. It hangs in the silence, holds its breath, and whispers a wordless welcome.
I stagger closer to the bank. Drop to my hands and knees. I need to know what happened to my face.
I see dripping ice residue on the boulders, I see muddy snow, I see the reflection of something incredible bowing over me.
Could you have looked away?
Could you have simply not looked?
I see it as soon as I put my hands into ice-cold water. I think I imagined it—I must have imagined it. I slowly turn away and shut my eyes, as if by doing so, I could undo it. Then I turn back and lean over the water.
I see it again, and this time for real—my face, horridly mutilated. I see the truth, which my mind had until now refused to accept, had suppressed, had put away in a dark, fragile place, but which now, in the face of the mountain, is irrevocably dragged out into the light.
Because earlier, as I stare into Augustin’s eyes on the edge of the crevasse—eyes that aren’t eyes at all but holes in ice—he starts to bellow so wildly that the blood in my veins immediately curdles and my sanity shatters. It is such a devastating, inhuman roar that I wonder whether I hear it with my ears or if the sound is only in my head. And I know it’s not Augustin who is bringing it forth. It’s the roar of an avalanche, the screeching of a crevasse. In a flash, I see the horned mountain before me at the end of the valley, its gloomy shape tall and dark and hideously steep. It isn’t Augustin who’s bellowing out of the gaping crevasse. What I hear is the maniacal, raging voice of the mountain.
I see the swing of his axe in slow motion, I can even hear the air move. I must have instinctively drawn my neck in and jerked my head back, my mouth falling open in a wordless scream. Otherwise he would have slashed the ice axe right through my throat. Now the spike pierces my left cheek, grazes my tongue, and comes out on the other side. For a second we are frozen, stuck in a moment of stupefaction. I taste ice-cold metal in my mouth. I hear nothing. The shock must have temporarily deafened me. Augustin wrenches the axe, renews his grip, and pulls me forward by my cheeks.
Then the anchor shoots out of the snow and the rope swishes. With an all-destructive yank, the axe tears out of my cheeks. Augustin falls into the abyss, the axe flying after him, and as I fall into the snow I think I am dead.
And now, now as I stare at my face in the glacial lake’s water, a swollen and bloody mask is sneering back at me with torn-open cheeks through which you can see lower-jaw teeth all the way to the back. The bottom half of my face has all the colors it isn’t supposed to have, and the torn edges are pitch-black.
The bed of snow and ice has done a perfect job of freezing the dead flesh.
Behind that monstrous face, my own face, rises the horned Maudit’s distorted reflection, its impenetrable north face the mountain’s hidden visage.
I start to scream.
The Modern Prometheus
Notes by Sam Avery
How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow!
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1
Outside the Focus, everything looked exactly the same as the day before, only in reverse. Flashing red taillights southbound and bright white headlights northbound. Cologne, Frankfurt, Mannheim, a movie that was rewinding itself into a déjà vu. Windshield wipers swishing away miles of Germany to the east.
Inside, the same pink bubblegum flavor of Red Bull in my mouth. The only thing keeping my foot on the pedal in my present condition the caffeine kick, the reverse psychology effects of sugar and taurine. The rest of my body—one big, banging NO. My elbow against the window. My head leaning left in my outstretched hand like a bowling ball. Heavy as a bowling ball. My fingers rubbing scuffs into my temples, my swollen tongue tightening my throat.
The cause of all this was that number: thirty-two. Flashing on in your head like a brain cramp.
Nick’s body count in the AMC.
Like a young wolf in a meadow full of sheep. A beast that had killed for fun. Playfully testing out its newly discovered powers.
Nick’s body count, thirty-two and counting. Dr. Genet, Claire Stein, little Rosalie, Cécile, Emily Wan. That made it thirty-seven. Thirty-seven I knew about. A body count of thirty-seven demoted even Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer to amateurs.
Thirty-seven and counting, if Emily Wan’s little girl, Naomi, had also been infected.
I am leaving you my notes, Emily had written. I hope that my insights can be of use to you.
Oh, they were, all right. More than I bargained for.
You finally knew what Cécile meant by “falling.” What Dr. Genet meant in his suicide note. You finally knew what kind of horror was hiding on the dark, unknowable flip side of your hubby’s face.