This was your cue for a gasp. This was your cue to hold your breath.
The sudden transition to light was hard to take in. The colors suddenly became more intense. They took the deep blue hollows out of the mountain. Took the dark purple shadows from the north face. The steep crests anchoring the summit, they’d captured the first rays of sunlight and burst into yellow and orange and pink glitter. Nick stood exactly between me and his temple and it was like you were looking into a mirror inside a mirror. Because Nick was glittering with the same sparkling colors. His body, you could tell by how hunched it was that the fire and the ascent had gravely weakened it, but what I was looking at was something loftier, an amalgamation. For a moment, I thought it was a reflection or a mirage, but the colors were really flowing out of him and swirling into the air, where they entered into their courtship display with the Maudit’s aura.
He’d come home. His becoming, his unification, was complete.
A warm hand of blazing sunlight stretched out toward me and I took hold of it.
There was a slight tug of the soul when I was pulled out of my body. Then I sailed away, a gliding bird high above an anchored mountainscape. Around me, a whole flock. Their wings spread. Their feet clenched. We rode the invisible waves of the thermal, soaring higher and higher. It shoulda felt awesome to be part of that flock. The refinery process of the human soul, completed.
But it wasn’t awesome.
It felt like I was suffocating.
Something huge was weighing on me, something lonely and heavy that wanted to take me back to the col where our bodies had been left behind, and it took all I had to keep it from pulling me all the way down.
Somehow I must have managed to resist it, because when I slid back into consciousness I finally found myself in the place where life had been leading me, in large circles, ever since that night in the Catskills fifteen years ago. And I’d been here before. In terror-filled dreams. In nightmares about monstrous birds and ripping beaks, from which, as a boy, I would wake up screaming. Later, in fantasies you didn’t tell anyone about. And in the vision I’d shared with Nick.
My penance.
My redemption.
Me, the altar and the sacrifice.
Hail Prometheus. I was even wearing the loincloth to complete the outfit.
I was chained to the mountain’s summit. There was no cold anymore, no fatigue. Only the pink and orange light of dawn on the endless horizon. Shackled, not in iron chains like my childhood hero, but with a bundle of energy that blew life into my echo. An echo, was that what I was going to be up here? Deprived of all the good—not that it was much or anything. Nick would come every night, my nemesis, my paramour. We would make love, and he would eat up more and more of my emotions and feelings, till nothing would be left besides an echo of what I had once been. Something that resonated against the valley’s distant stone.
We’d be together forever.
Somewhere down there in the valley, it wouldn’t take too long before my body would stop breathing. It wouldn’t take too long before one of those death birds would come and rip its eyes out. A bird like that, it didn’t care whether its snack was still breathing.
Talk about birds and snacks.
The sound of mighty wings. I looked up and there he was. Nick. The way Nick was meant to be. The Maudit had done to him what the Greeks did when they sculpted their gods in marble. Your best Insta filter, your cuteness overload. Picture all of that and you’re warm. Abs: check. Pecs: check. Eagle wings: check. Nick’s face was back to how it used to be, before this mountain had destroyed it. He was smiling at me. His mouth formed inaudible words but I still knew what he was saying: My Sam.
And oh, that instant. Oh, Nick. Oh, Nick, sweet Nick, my Nick.
If only I could have returned your smile.
If only I could have answered your words.
Supernovas of dizzying, dark deepness opened up in my stomach. I suddenly understood what it must have been like for Cécile and all the others to fall.
Because.
Because this wasn’t my redemption.
Back to the sled. Back up the Panther Mile. That epic descent, that epic climb. If you imagined that the night of Huckleberry Wall and the night of the Maudit were essentially the same, that Grandma really was sitting behind you on the sled, then it could only be fulfilled if another someone were there too.
At some point I’d dozed myself awake and seen that Julia was there too.
Like the old folks who took their last journey during the Morose, so Julia had embarked on her journey to the valley. The echoes had gotten hold of her. Bewitched by their luring call, she’d plodded up through the snow. If some geriatric crone from Grimentz could get the job done, so could Julia.
Sometime during the night we must have caught up with her. Sometime during the night I must have thought her onto the sled.
Julia was alive.
That meant that the spell could be broken.
The image of you waiting down there on the col till you turned into bird feed, the image of empty, bloody eye sockets in a mummified, semi-decomposed corpse that would maybe one day, in thousands of years, be exhibited in a museum as the new ?tzi—if it were me we were talking about, that was one thing. But if Julia was lying there too, and those black birds were hop-, skip-, and jumping her way, then there was no more time for me to lose.
I felt inside my loincloth and wasn’t surprised to find what I was looking for. What I had fished out of Nick’s nightstand in my epiphany, while Hill House was burning to ashes around me.
It was a sharp piece of rock.
Nick’s talisman. The Maudit’s summit. The souvenir he’d brought back down from the mountain.
The conquering or destruction of trophies has always been the decisive factor in overtaking someone’s power. Let’s face it: if your name was Sam and Mount Doom was on the horizon, then you were predestined to fling some magical artifact into an abyss.
Only at the last moment did Nick see what I was doing. The chain that shackled me, the Prometheus chain, was the umbilical cord that bound me to Nick.
Using the rock, I cut it.
The ravine of tormented shock that opened in his eyes was infinitely deep. When I let go of the rock, I watched it disappear into its depths. A tiny red dot that fell and fell and fell and would be forever out of reach.
Then I turned around, looked down from the summit’s ridge, and jumped.
Epilogue
The Exorcist
Notes by Sam Avery
From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-Sixth Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. As he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn’t moved but was standing under the streetlight glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time.
—William Peter Blatty