And I hollered, “Fly, you fools!” Me, totally Gandalf.
The figure that stepped out of the conflagration, nonchalantly stepping onto Hill House’s balcony, that wasn’t Nick. His Gore-Tex coat burned away to the seams, his hair incinerated, his fuming face a shredded Frankenstein’s monster mask that resembled Nick’s face but wasn’t: soot and blood and charred flesh and two gaping, bewildered eyes.
The villagers, they saw the devil and crossed themselves.
I saw the Hermit from my grandpa’s story.
In the midst of my trauma soup, someone here was having his own déjà vu.
But instead of falling headfirst off the balcony, face-planting in the snow, and melting right through it with a sizzle, Nick opened the hole of his mouth and let out such an annihilating sound that I thought I’d instantly gone deaf. That sound, you couldn’t even put it in terms of volume or frequency. It was so heavy and sonorous that you could only hear it in your skull. In a flash, I saw the horned mountain at the end of the valley. In a flash, we all saw it.
The townsfolk dispersed like cattle. Torches died, pitchforks left dentate impressions. Me, suddenly no longer under arrest, I fell with my bare hands onto the snow. The thundering carved its way into the world, suddenly reduced to earthly proportions: it came rolling out of the clouds like Wodan’s fucking Tesla. I couldn’t help turning around and looking to see where it was coming from.
Back in the valley, Grimentz’s lights went out. The hotels and the empty ski chalets on the slope—where they had once been, I now saw billowing clouds of snow, rising, bulging into the night’s darkness like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow. Trees were swept away. Grimentz was buried. The air rumbled, borne by the avalanche.
To this, you cannot react. Cannot act. A scene like this—all you can do is stare.
And the village people, whaddya think, screaming, of course. Screaming for those left behind in the village. Screaming for their ancestors. Houses could be dug up. People could be saved, but birdcages on housefronts would be pulverized.
And then you thought that was it—but nuh-uh. What came down from the balcony, smoldering and charred like a steak on a barbecue, it wasn’t through with its destruction. What looked out on the fleeing, screaming crowd like a tsunami on its coastline was impassive in the face of the terror it induced. Only the guy in the jabot, he hadn’t budged. His eyes wide and round behind his fire-reflecting glasses, he raised both hands and called out in clear English, “Stop! Let us help you!”
Then he started floating, of course.
Nothing ever changed. A fire would always consume any house you ever lived in. Nick’s terror spree would always keep spreading, like a deadly virus infecting the entire world. The way my life was unfolding, nothing ever got resolved.
The dude in the jabot, his arms were flapping in a vain search for something to hold on to, like a fledgling learning to fly. He looked down in shock, down at Nick, who was now standing in front of him in the snow. His feet swung upward behind him till he was floating facedown above the ground, on a meditative bird’s-eye tour of the snow. His habit fluttering in the wind, all he managed to let out was a squeaky “Mon Dieu . . .”
Then they all started to float. All the fleeing villagers. One minute they were scrambling through the snow, the next they were scrambling through the air. You could see the panic in their eyes. You could see that, in their perception, they’d already started falling.
And I thought about that kid in the AMC. Thought about how he crashed to his death in front of Emily Wan’s eyes, his skeleton pulverized.
And I screamed, “Stop!”
Absently, as if tugged out of his thoughts, Nick turned what was left of his face to me. And I confess, I staggered—but I convinced myself that what I was looking at was only the destruction of necrotic tissue. Only the oxidation of cooked fat and muscle, which, with a certain degree of effort, you could scrape off the underlying bones. Like the charred rims off a leg of ham.
Everyone has scars. With a certain degree of effort you could look right through them, and then you simply saw Nick.
I said, Let those people go, Nick. They’re none of our concern. Put them down.
I said, You and me, we have a mountain to climb.
And Nick, he smiled at me with that boyish longing.
Everywhere around the burning house, bodies plopped softly onto the snow. The people of Grimentz looked around in a daze, as if they’d just woken up from a dream.
Hill House was burning down, but the sky above the chalet was at rest, and the only thing echoing now was the silence.
The Maudit had flown, and I was flying along.
6
Don’t wanna sound psychedelic or anything, but I have no idea how we got up there. Every human body reaches a point when it just gives you the finger. Enough is enough, it says. Sleep comes and takes over your body like a mountain takes over your mind.
At such a pivotal moment—that’s what I call submission.
The human condition: in situations when all control is snatched from our hands, we capitulate. It’s in our DNA. Anyone who gets on a plane accepts his fate, whether it’s Captain Sully behind the stick or not. If Tolkien sent you eagles cuz you’re in a dead-end situation, it’s your cue to shut up and say thanks for the ride.
Ethon or your Uber driver, for some reason we always have complete trust in whoever’s behind the wheel.
Nick and me, who knows, maybe we actually really flew. Trekking into the mountains through Nick’s mindscape, ideally you pictured it as a purely spiritual affair. You didn’t want something like that to be too material. But it wasn’t a one-hundred-percent out-of-body trip, either, cuz sure enough, our bodies ended up in that bewitched valley. After all, we needed them for the transition. In order to set our souls free, something still had to be spooned out.
The way I pictured it was that, as I was catching those Zs, I was being pulled uphill on a sleigh, right through a tunnel of snow and ice. The constant crunching of ice crystals under the runners. Around my shoulders a wool blanket, keeping me warm against the stinging wind. Between my legs a thermos of Swiss herbal tea with a dash of something that smelled like Pflaumenschnaps. Every time I dozed off, I would fall over onto Ramses’s travel carrier, from which two gleaming eyes were giving the darkness the silent treatment.