Silence.
Nick reached for the bandages on the pillow, and his eyes sought mine. I straightened up and raised both hands. “Seriously, before you start chewing me out, this I didn’t know. I couldn’t have.”
But Nick wasn’t pissed. He was shocked. Shocked, and by the look of it, dead scared. His body soaked with sweat. His hair stuck to his forehead. He pulled the covers up to his eyes, wiped them with it, and, with trembling hands, started wrapping himself with the bandages.
“What the fuck just happened?” I said.
Something had blown me across the room.
Only now I saw the havoc surrounding me. There was a crack in the wall. Not from my impact but from the same shock wave that had blown the window off its hinges. The linen closet doors were dislodged, drawers cast away. Our framed picture on the floor. Neighbors musta thought it was a gas explosion. My mind said landslide.
I looked at Nick and said, “Birds came out of your face.”
The new normal in our world.
“Birds. Birds came out of your face,” I repeated.
And something else too, I thought, but didn’t say. Didn’t wanna upset him even more.
I walked to the bed and pulled off the covers.
The foot of Nick’s side of the mattress was soaked. The hairs on his legs were standing on end. Grit between his legs. Ice grit.
My mind went to what I thought I’d seen under the covers.
I was chilled to the bone.
“Sorry,” Nick said.
It was the first word I’d heard him say since the accident. I looked at him in disbelief. It sounded muffled from behind the bandages and the articulation sucked, but it was unmistakable.
“Dude, everything’s different now, don’t you understand?” I sat next to him and closed him in my arms.
Something had blown me clear across the room.
Birds had come out of Nick’s face.
That meant it was real.
My boyfriend possessed. By the supernatural.
And I was Bella with balls. My boyfriend no pussy werewolf or sparkling vampire but a fucking mountain god.
Log of the Demeter
Passages from Nick Grevers’s digital diary
Written 18 July, things so strange happening, that I shall keep accurate note henceforth till we land.
—Bram Stoker
1
September 22, 2018
I brought something down with me. Can’t deny it any longer. I brought something down from the Maudit.
What was that thing in our bedroom last night? The thing under the covers?
And the birds, you saw them too. So much for the delusions Ms. Claire the shrink keeps referring to. Your look was priceless. “Birds came out of your face,” you kept saying. You must have repeated it at least fifteen times. At some point, you even laughed. And what else could you do but laugh? If you can’t laugh, you either cry or go stark raving mad.
Because they were alpine choughs. No doubt about it.
And the thing under the covers, it was Augustin.
I dreamed about him. Dreamed he was dragging himself up from the crevasse, right onto the foot of the bed. I fought with him under the covers, because I was dead scared he’d drag me back into the crevasse. So that I would be with him in the dark. And he was cold, Sam, so terribly cold, because he had been stuck inside the glacier for so long. I remember flailing about, and suddenly I was back in the bedroom with those screeching birds everywhere, and he was gone. But the ice was still there, at the foot of the bed. The ice he’d kicked loose as he climbed out of the crevasse. Augustin I may have imagined, and you say you didn’t see anything. But where did that ice come from? That was no more a figment of the imagination than those choughs.
Still, despite everything, there’s one shimmer of light, and you have no idea what a relief that is. You believe me now. There’s nothing worse than when your loved ones think you’re crazy.
Okay, so you’ve seen it. Seen what has become of my face. I’m not happy that you looked after I asked you not to, but I’m thankful you at least didn’t run away screaming. That would have been a conceivable reaction. Sometimes I want to run away from it, and Claire Stein says that’s exactly what I’m doing by insisting on putting the bandages back on. But I think that I’m only now starting to understand that there’s more to it than shame.
At breakfast, I asked why you aren’t afraid of me anymore. I’m sure you want to understand—though “understand” may be an overstatement in this case. Wiyah na affway ami anymoa?
“I was afraid of you the whole time,” you said. “Now I’m more afraid than ever, but not of you. I mean, like my mother always used to say, ‘When birds start flying outtaya face, that’s where I draw the line about what I’d hold you responsible for.’ ”
“Because before, you did hold me responsible.” Beecaw beefaw, yu-dud homi wisponsabah.
“Uh-huh. Now you’re a victim, too. We can be afraid together. How romantic is that?” And then, typical you, “Let’s face it, what you did was totally badass.”
Not even close to badass, if you ask me. But more importantly, I wasn’t the one who did it. Ask me to throw you across the room and I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t have superhuman powers. But there’s something inside me that apparently does . . . and I can’t control it. Sure, the glazier’s been around. We can patch the tiles back on the roof where they were blown off, and we can plaster up the crack in the wall. But what are the implications for me, Sam? And what are the implications for you? Last time, it wrapped your face with steel wire. And now this. If it’s capable of this, what else can it do? Not such a badass idea, if you ask me.
Even now, we keep avoiding the issue, because that’s easier than facing the truth. Because we don’t want to face the truth. But I’ve known it from the moment I woke up in the CHUV in Lausanne. I brought something down with me from the Maudit, something that’s living inside me like a parasite. And it isn’t Augustin, despite what I saw under the covers last night.
It’s the Maudit itself.
This is the story of a possession.
“Okay,” you said, when you’d sipped the last of your cappuccino. “How do you exorcise a mountain?”
I have no idea.
2
September 23, 2018—private notes