“Okay, then at least go to the village. There’s a hotel there, too.”
Julia wavered. “I . . . I’m scared, bro. I was trying to call you the whole time, but your line was busy.” She said, “There were people here.”
People?
“From the village. A whole bunch. They were looking for Nick. For ‘the man with the bandaged face.’ And they didn’t look like they had friendly intentions. They were pretty aggressive, frankly. I was afraid they were going to hurt me.”
Christ. So Maria and her neighborhood app were right. The shit had hit the fan. But what had made them come there specifically now? Was it possible Nick had—No, there hadn’t been enough time for him to get there. Not yet.
“What did you say?”
“That both of you had left and I was looking after the house.”
“Hero.”
“But they didn’t leave, Sam. They hung around the chalet for a really long time. And they weren’t being sneaky about it, either. I think they were trying to make sure you were really gone. They only left when they knew for sure.”
I said she did the right thing. That she had to hurry now. And be careful, please. What else could I say to put her mind at rest? Between Julia and me were three hundred miles of blacktop. With my luck, it would be Xmas before I got there.
Idiot. I should never have left her all alone. Now I was powerless.
Fear in my bones, fierce as the wind whizzing through the Focus’s spoilers. By then we weren’t even crawling anymore; we’d literally come to a standstill. Entombed by chrome and rubber. You couldn’t shake the feeling that you were being held back by something. That you were being manipulated, while something terrible was about to unfold in Switzerland, or was already unfolding. Something you couldn’t prevent. The sky in the south looked as if it were night. The rain had turned to sleet. Thirty-five F, your display said. And we weren’t even anywhere near the mountains.
Outside the Focus, a face with hollow eyes was staring at me through the side window. Holy crap—I’m not the first fuckwit in history who jumps at his own reflection, but the trickling streams of thawing snow distorted it, dehumanized it, turned it inside out.
There was nothing out there, outside the Focus. Nothing evil roaming around. Just some phantom with holes for eyes, a phantom with an inside-out face. Every person had a flip side, a darkness that made us capable of committing the most heinous crimes. It’s just that most of us were lucky enough never to come across a detonator that would set it off. Was it sheer bad luck that Nick did? So how many close calls did we have in our day-to-day lives without our even realizing it? How close were we all to the edge of the abyss?
That question chilled me to the bone.
An hour and a half later. Twenty miles further. Julia again. She’d tried to walk to the village but was chased away. Like a stray dog. None of the hotels had wanted to rent her a room. As if she were cursed.
The weather in the mountains was rapidly deteriorating and La Poste stopped its runs to the valley. Walking in these conditions was not an option. Conclusion: my sis was stranded. Compelled to wait it out in the chalet. My only consolation: if it was getting difficult for Julia to go down, it would be just as difficult for Nick to go up.
Except that a mountain was controlling the weather.
A mountain was the source of the weather. Creating its own microclimate.
Which was the last thing you wanted to think about.
The Police Cantonale called back, too. By then it was late in the afternoon and on the radio they were talking of a weather alert, of a severe front unexpectedly advancing over Central Europe toward the Alps, of snowfall records that would most probably be shattered in the course of the night. By then they were talking of truckers who would have to spend the night on the shoulder, a travel warning that advised against any driving unless absolutely necessary; but tell that to all the people stuck in gridlocks, crawling behind South German salt trucks.
This Police Cantonale rep, she assumed that Nick must have found a place to stay somewhere. With the weather this bad, he wasn’t going to be wandering the streets. As long as they didn’t know where he was, there was nothing they could do.
It got dark. Julia was alone in Grimentz. I was stuck in traffic ahead of Basel. Nick had disappeared without a trace, and in the mountains even the echoes were quiet, waiting for what was about to come.
3
You wouldn’t believe this: one a.m. and still not up there. My brain way past the stage where Red Bulls could do it any good—what I’d kill for was a Long Island iced tea. A Cuba libre. A hundred milligrams of Ritalin.
You wouldn’t believe this: so I’m driving behind the flashing orange lights of a snowplow. Zigging and zagging at a snail’s pace from hairpin to hairpin, sprays of road salt biting into the profile of my summer tires, higher and higher into the Val d’Anniviers. Or that’s what I hoped, cuz the only things I could make out in my fog lights were the snowbanks the V-shaped plow shoved onto the side of the road and the spiraling ice crystals. It’d taken my full array of special persuasion powers to even get the guy to go up, but five minutes into the blizzard in my role as father-to-be and a cockamamie tale about junior’s fontanels already being compressed, as we speak, by his mother’s puffing cervix, and I was wide-awake. Past Bern, I’d almost nodded off into the guardrail, but now my eyes agreed to stay open. Way beyond exhaustion. What took its place was unease. The fear that I was too late—too late to ward off an invisible doom. Bullshit, but true all the same.
The mountains outside the Focus, I couldn’t see them, but I felt their presence, more threatening than ever. Their crooked summits, groping like fingers. Their dark caves full of blind eyes, peering into the night. Their cold, dead breath. Sometimes they seemed to hypnotize me, and then I feared I’d lose sight of the orange flashing lights, that I’d be stranded here, alone on the frozen mountain road, alone with whatever horror was lurking out there in the snow.
And smack! Slap in the face, cut the crap. Press the pedal down carefully, make sure you don’t slip.
Waiting at the end of this gauntlet was Hill House, and with it, the unavoidable was coming closer: What was I to do if I had to face Nick? His being up there defied all logic; the last update I got, when Julia hit the sack around eleven, was that there’d still been no sign of him. And yet . . . And yet . . .
Sixteen hours alone with my thoughts and not a single strategy popped up. Not a single epiphany richer.
One twenty. Peering through the snow-free half-moons cleared by the windshield wipers, and suddenly the light from my phone comes on. Groping through all the shit on the shotgun seat: my open backpack, my half-eaten McFilth, Dr. Jingles—my iPhone. My Beats. Peering at the road, I tried pulling them over my ears with a single hand. The screen lit up; two missed calls. Just in time to answer the third one and pick up the Bluetooth signal.