We have asked each other that question so many times, like every couple newly in love. Would you stay with me if I ended up in a wheelchair? Would you stay with me if I got mutilated for life? Pretty dramatic, right? I know what the morally correct answer is. The in-love answer. But you’re young. There’s so much you still want to do. There’s so much you still can do. And me? I know what the realistic answer is and I’m more afraid of that than of all the rest.
Because Sam, even if I understand it, I still hope you’ll come back soon. I know you’ll need time to think. But please come back. I need you. I know, because of what happened to me last night.
I went to sleep wearing my hospital gown, but when I woke up I was standing naked in the corner of the room, my hand gripping the IV stand, which I must have rolled along with me in my sleep. My face was burning. A flaming pain that reminded me of the feeling you get when the blood flows back into your fingers after they have been frozen. Just like before . . . only ten days ago, to be exact, when Augustin and I were forced to spend the night in that crevasse, high up on that mountain, while the storm was howling over the glacier and blowing drifts of snow over the ridges. Only it wasn’t my fingers now but my whole face that felt like it was thawing. God, the pain. And I was cold, Sam. So cold that my brain got misty and my body numb.
The IV stand was rattling and the solution bag swung back and forth and I only realized later that it was because I was shivering so badly.
I stood there endlessly, apathetic, cold all over. When the pain finally ebbed away and I could think clearly again I realized that strands of bandage were dangling from my face, stinking of disinfectants. I can’t remember doing it, but the only logical explanation is that it was me who’d pulled them loose.
And I realized something else. In my right hand I held a small but razor-sharp piece of rock. Gneiss by the looks of it, but pointy and unusually dark. I recognized it immediately.
How did it get in my hand? Now by daylight, I still can’t explain it.
The last time I saw the stone, I had put it in the inner pocket of my North Face jacket and my parents took it home with all my other stuff. I’d picked it up on the Maudit’s summit, as a keepsake. Of course, the summit! We’d reached the top; I only remembered that then. We’d reached the top and then everything went wrong. No . . . by then everything had already gone wrong. And now I was standing here, 450 miles away and I had that summit literally in the palm of my hand. There was a terrible heaviness to it. I almost dropped it.
That was the worst. It was quarter to four in the morning and I staggered back to bed through that dark, mirrorless room, shivering uncontrollably with those bandages hanging like strips of skin off that unfamiliar, pressing face. I’ve never felt so miserable and alone. And scared, Sam.
Back in bed I put the stone in the nightstand and pulled the sheets up to try to get warm. Only then did I hear the muffled chatter coming from the intercom in the hall. In my ward, where patients recuperate from surgery or receive long-term care, they don’t have intercoms in the rooms (to not disturb the patients, they told me later). At that time the only thing that seemed strange about it was that the noise just kept going on and on.
I called the night nurse and it took her ages to come. That was strange, too. But she changed the bandages. I told her I must have tossed and turned them off in my sleep. She gave me some more covers and a temazepam, but then she felt how cold my skin was and then I saw the worry in her eyes. And after she took my temperature it wasn’t just worry anymore, it was total panic. She called, but no one came, so she went out to the hallway and started to shout.
Before long, a battalion of doctors rolled me to the ICU. After that my mind is a blank. I only remember lying there, plugged into monitors and shivering in the same bed I’ve been in for over a week, and as the sedative started to take effect, I thought I could hear that same storm howling in the distance, full of hollow menace.
The cold, Sam, it wasn’t a normal cold. It was the same cold I felt up there. Up on the Maudit. And the cold brought back all kinds of things. Things that happened up there.
Augustin is dead, and it’s that place, that mountain, that’s to blame.
And I’m afraid that . . .
Six times I’ve tried completing that sentence and six times I pressed backspace to delete the whole thing. I can’t write it down, not like this. I want to be able to look you in the eyes when I tell you what I think I remember. I want to see that you believe me. Because even though I may be a wreck physically, I don’t want you to start doubting my mental health. Not you. That’s all I got left and it isn’t much. If what I think I remember is true, my own doubts are more than enough.
You want to hear something really freaky? There are rumors here that some of the other patients—the victims—froze to death. I mean, how could that even happen?
Come home, Sam.
I love you.
I need you. Now more than ever.
Yours,
Nick
P.S. This morning two detectives came who asked the same two questions in about fifty different ways: what did you hear or see (nothing) and how do you feel (my face is gone, how do you think I feel). I didn’t say anything about the cold because it didn’t occur to me that it might be important.
Maybe it isn’t.
3
Subject: Re: More spooky shit
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 8-18-2018 5:59 p.m.
Yes, I wrote that email myself and no, it wasn’t recounted by a priest during an exorcism. Not by the Cloverfield monster either. Thanks for the colorful imagery. But fair enough. It’s not cool of me to scare the living daylights out of you, and not tell you what actually happened.
N.
4
Subject: Re: ‘My dearest Mina,-
From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 8-22-2018 12:51 a.m.
Dear Sam,
Really had to laugh at your subject line. You’re such a creep. You’d come up with something to shock everyone even at my funeral.
But there is something romantic about it, don’t you think? Writing each other these really long emails after a disaster like that. Like we’re playing a role in our own gothic romance.
Okay, so here it is. My story. I didn’t think I could piece it together so clearly because I remembered so little of it at first. But once I started writing, it all came back to me. It ended up pretty long. I’m not saying this is the whole thing, but it’s most. The important bits.
But it didn’t serve me well, Sam. There are things, places, which are better kept concealed and that mountain is one of them. But you asked me to, so I told the truth, as far as I can recall. I can only hope it doesn’t make you lose faith in me.