So this was how it all turned out. A cold snowdrift whirling inside through the hole. An infernal orange shine. The roaring of a crowd, and not the dead this time. Only Maria’s neighborhood app, IRL. Democracy in its rawest form.
The axe was pried out of the hole and smashed into it again. Splinters flying everywhere. The hole got bigger.
Instantly jerked out of my vision, I tumbled right into the here and now. What I saw was Nick, a floating silhouette, he swirled around in a single motion toward the opening, and I swear, from somewhere deep in the earth came a profound rumbling, causing the furniture to tremble and the collection of génépy bottles on the wall to tinkle.
What I saw was an angry mob in the snow outside the chalet, waving bamboo garden torches. Pieces of wood with nails hammered into them. Seriously: pitchforks.
Everyone knows how these kinds of scenes end. No ritual, no exorcism, just an old-fashioned lynching.
How it all turned out. Go figure. I was too late even for my own redemption.
A J?germeister bottle came sailing through the hole, trailing a tail of fire. But you could bet your ass there wasn’t any J?germeister in it, cuz when it belly flopped onto the ground—which of course it did on the exact same spot in front of the fireplace where, fifteen years earlier, I’d scattered burning coals over humanity—it exploded in an inferno that instantly set the sofas ablaze. Set the curtains on fire. The moment you realized you could kiss your deposit good-bye was the moment when Nick’s clothes caught fire.
Let’s face it, with me here, this was an accident waiting to happen.
And I shouted, “Nick!”
Don’t tell me anything about how fast fire can spread. What they didn’t tell you on Airbnb: your tasteful suede sofas, your south-facing million-dollar mountain view, and the ghoul gamboling about in your living room, they were all category I combustibles. Arms flailing, Nick swirled around again while the flames consumed more and more of his clothes. Consumed more and more of the chalet.
Through all of this echoed the wailing of lost human souls, like a chorus of wild hounds—or maybe it was just the smoke alarm. And I figured they were uncorking more than a single bottle of J?germeister. In no time, the inferno in the chalet had become so fierce and so hot you couldn’t even look at it. My skin started to glimmer, the hairs in my nose started to singe. In a split second of utter despair, I stared at Nick, but his scream, it wasn’t so much human as it was the rumbling of thunder. It wasn’t so much pain as it was the raging of wrath.
And I knew something terrible was about to happen.
And I ran.
The power of fire is that you can’t stop it. You have no control over it. Your only control is your own position in its vortex—if you’re lucky. As I ran, part of me must have already known how this was going to end, because at that moment I had only one goal in mind. Leaping over licking fingers of fire, bouncing down the stairs in one, two, three leaps, I screamed, “Julia!” Screamed, “Grandpa! Grandma!” Tears suddenly streaming down my cheeks, I screamed, “Julia, wake up! Wake up!” Screamed, “We gotta get out!”
In the bedroom. The bed. The nightstand.
I found what I was looking for.
A subtle, almost imperceptible power shift took place in the universe, high above the highest summits of the Alps.
Then something shattered through the bedroom’s terrace door and I was struck to the ground by a heavy object. In my head a flash of light, an explosion. It was less a KO and more that suddenly everything was moving in extreme slow motion, swallowing the earsplitting buzzing in my brain and leaving room for only one single, solitary thought: My face! They bashed in my face!
Oh, Jesus, I couldn’t focus. Everything was fuzzy. Everything was swimming around me in pungent, suffocating smoke. Julia, I had to warn Julia. Shouted, “Julia!” But I still saw leather boots walking into my vision, snow between the shoelaces. I still saw wet jeans. They grabbed me by the legs and dragged me outside. And me kicking, me screaming, me clutching, but all I got ahold of was a handful of blankets from the bed, which I pulled behind me like a bridal train. Then over the threshold and sliding through frigid snow.
What looked like a long braid of dark maiden’s hair hanging out of a castle tower window was in fact a trail of blood from my split eyebrow. What looked like an inferno against a backdrop of angry mountains was in fact an inferno against a backdrop of angry mountains.
And still, despite all that, from the corners of my eyes I saw the flashes of falling echoes coming down over the chalet.
Faint and weak, I heard their dying screams.
Then they grabbed me by the collar and hauled me to my feet. My head spinning on my neck like there were ball bearings inside. Rough hands were holding me upright in the middle of the circle of torch-bearing townsfolk. Of raised clubs and pitchforks. I looked around, blood leaking into my left eye, I looked around and saw them all. I saw the orange glow on their haggard faces. Over the roar of the fire, over the roar of the storm, I could almost hear the chattering of their teeth. The village folk, they were hella scared, of course. Here they were, triggered by ancestors who had kamikaze’d themselves against the bars of their birdcages. Living barometers that shot over the max cuz they’d sensed the coming of the Maudit.
Here, in the sloping terrace behind our burning house, in the lee of Castle Rock, they were chanting some slur. A chorus. An incantation.
In the midst of the mob, I saw that dude with the white jabot. That churchguy with his congregation. One of those bozos next to him was holding a whopper of a birdcage, inside it a screeching black chough, inflamed by the fire or by the clamor of the crowd. At the bottom of the cage was a neck-wide hole.
You didn’t need to explain what the cage was for.
Only now did my grogginess ebb away enough for me to hear that what they were chanting was supposed to be English. That and the fact that they were Switzers, and their accent contained more holes than Emmental cheese.
They were chanting, “Come out! Surrender! Come out! Surrender! Come out! Surrender! Come out!”
Oh, Christ. I was the bait.
They were all going to get themselves killed.
The guy holding me, I tried to jab him in the stomach with my elbow, and I shouted, “Run!” Shouted, “Run while you can! Before it’s too late!”
Switched to French, shouted, “You don’t get it! You don’t stand a chance! Run! Run for your lives!”
A coupla those morons stopped chanting and looked around hesitantly, waiting to see what the others would do. Most of them carried on. Fists raised at the fire. Right then, a part of Hill House’s front wall collapsed and a swirl of flames and sparks rose up into the night sky. Ashes and soot whirled through my lungs with every breath.