Categorizing something like that under “dizziness” would be like calling Mount St. Helens a corporate barbecue.
One look into that room and all the panic, all the emotions about Julia, gone like a shot. One look and the room was gone. Where the interior and the large windows used to be, a vista unfolded before me that was beyond comprehension. What I saw there, any attempt to describe it would fall short of its actual magnitude. The panorama defined a curve through space and time, punched holes into dimensions, and triggered an avalanche of the nerves, an overload of electromagnetic pulses. My mind, my soul, had two choices: die or look.
And I said, “Nick?”
There he was. There was Nick. Always and everywhere. Nick was the Maudit. Rising sky-high into the macroverse and carrying me up with him. A jagged peak, sharply outlined against the night sky. Black ridges etched by a ghostly silver light that seemed to be falling directly out of the stratosphere. Snowy ledges carved by the wind into sharp edges of shiny steel. Like this, he reigned over his landscape, straight through the eons, and laid me down on his summit. Shackled and naked. Stripped not of my clothes but of all my life’s burdens. This was more than making love; this was a transcendental fusion. Nick and me. A pairing of souls.
Sure, if I’d heard myself talk like this a coupla months ago, I woulda thought, Dude, go flex your macramé club or something, but for a split second I knew what it was like to be him—and be part of the geomorphological processes that life had blown into him. That split second, it stretched out over a life span of millions of years. Bound to his summit, alone but not alone in pure being, that’s where I felt the mountains’ heartbeat. That’s where I saw it all. Everything that, because of one spark, one chain reaction of lies, I’d spent my whole life hating.
Forests.
Brooks.
Glaciers.
Mountains.
The scars of a silent, scorched landscape.
And as I was looking at it, the wheel of the universe turned above my head and I understood what infinity was. One glimpse had robbed Cécile, Dr. Genet, and Emily Wan of their sanity and had sent them to their deaths.
And I thought, fuck it.
Because all of a sudden I got it. How I could give meaning to a fucked-up life.
Cécile Métrailler, a gazillion years ago in H?tel du Barrage: That place mutilated him, Sam. . . . It’s a bad place. And don’t get me wrong, but I’m not sure Nick was supposed to come back from it.
Sooner or later, all roads led back into the mountains.
Nick had come back to the chalet only cuz there was still a bit of the human left in him. Within that primal force that had grown inside him, I’d still seen Nick. Because I loved him. That had been my trump card. That’s why I hadn’t fallen. Hadn’t frozen like all the others. I had looked into the abyss and had still seen Nick.
But the abyss had looked back . . . and Nick had seen me too.
I was the umbilical cord that still connected Nick to the valley.
Nick had come back to the chalet because he wanted to take me out on a date.
My future: everything I’d seen in my vision. How you gave meaning to your life: the ultimate lovemaking on the mountain’s summit. Chained till the end of time. Your ultimate bondage fantasy.
Hail Prometheus, not the narcissist but the sacrifice.
Here was my penance. My self-sacrifice.
If this was how I could lure the monster Nick had become out of the world, if this was how I could avenge his victims and prevent more slaughter, what did I have to lose? I’d gambled Julia away, I’d gambled away my own sister, and it’s not like I was dying to face Pa or Ma Avery. Not exactly something I was thinking of adding to my CV.
It took only a single moment to fuck up the rest of your life. It took only a single moment for redemption.
And there, in the middle of time, in the middle of my vision, in the middle of Hill House, Nick’s face finally loomed up in front of me. Nick’s perfect face, that flawless face, it was shocking, it was brilliant, it was abundantly beautiful. The snow crystals adorning the vaulted and cleft tissue of his deformity radiated, sparkled, phosphoresced when he smiled at me, and the cuts in his cheeks split open. His teeth, glistening white all the way to the back. His eyes glittering like heated diamonds. They expressed both an infinite tenderness and an incredible detachment, like the corona around the sun or an orographic cloud covering distant peaks.
And Nick said, Hiya.
And I said, Hiya.
Omigod. We were back in first date territory.
So here we are, he said shyly.
This was all so Romeo and Romeo.
Where exactly? In the chalet?
To a certain extent, yes. He pulled the collar of his Gore-Tex coat down and scratched behind his hairline, a gesture that, despite everything, was so incredibly Nick. Things didn’t exactly go as planned, huh? Not like we thought they would.
Nothing ever goes as planned. Remember the first time we met? When you were making a show of doing your bench presses in the UvA gym, hoping I’d look your way?
Of course I remember. How could I forget?
I thought within a few weeks you’d probably have a girlfriend. That’s how provincial you seemed to me then.
But you looked anyway.
Yeah, I said. I looked anyway.
A shadow passed over his face, like something sad suddenly remembered after years of silence. I’m sorry, he said. About everything. I had no control over it.
Doesn’t matter. You did all that stuff because you’re emotionally deranged.
Wow. Look who’s talking.
Oh, come on. I may not be completely balanced, but next to you I’m Mike Pence’s marriage.
He tilted his head.
And I said, Aww, looking out into the distance. Maybe I coulda said more. Maybe I shoulda said more. Maybe I should have said there was a possibility we could pretend that all those things never actually happened. That everything could simply go back to being as it was before Nick had gone into the mountains. My stomach clenched in an almost painful longing for that possibility, but I was afraid, so terribly afraid that if I were to utter those words, they’d turn out to be lies. You can’t unopen Pandora’s box.
Instead, I said, Hey, if I go with you, can we take Ramses? I’d hate for him to be left behind all alone and not knowing where we are.
Of course, Nick smiled. You just have to envision his travel carrier and he’s coming with us!
So I did, and the next thing, Nick was holding up the cat, his one forepaw still wrapped and tied in white bandages. Maybe the concept of Sturm und Drang didn’t do full justice to Ramses’s expression, but it sure came close.
Hey, smiley face, Nick said and he scratched the cat’s tummy. Feel like going on vacation with us one more time?
Ramses looked at him, and somewhere, lava turned into glaciers. Nick eased him into his travel carrier and closed the flap. Then he stood up and showed all his teeth. So, you ready to go?
And I said, Yeah. Let’s.
And that’s when some maniac bashed his axe through the shutters and smashed the chalet’s large window into smithereens.
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