“No, I’m . . .”
“You are crying! Sis, what is it?” His voice sounds suddenly sharp. “Did anything happen?”
“Please come, oh god . . .” she whispers. The whispering turns to sobs as she tries to not lose sight of the intruders. She doesn’t dare to blink. Blinking could be her death sentence.
“I’m coming! I’m on my way, you know that, but I can’t go any faster! What happened?”
She finally brings herself to say it. “There are people here.”
“What?”
“There are people here.”
Silence. The swishing of the wipers. Two bleeps.
The woman is still standing at the foot of the bed. Her taut fingers contract. The dead skin under her left eyelid trembles.
“Whaddya mean, ‘people’?”
“In my bedroom.”
“Whaddya mean there are people? From the village? The people from the village who came earlier?”
“No, not them. There are people here . . .” She can only repeat it. But then it bursts out of her. “The whole room is full of people and they’re staring at me. Oh god, Sam, they’re getting closer! Oh Jesus. They keep getting closer. Help me. Please come right away. There’s a woman and she’s staring at me, she’s standing next to my bed and she keeps staring at me . . .”
“Julia! Oh god, do they have eyes? Do these people have eyes?”
Do they have eyes? Why would he ask that? Of course they—
She blinks. She can’t help it.
Julia finally screams, her face a disjointed mask of mortification. The woman is sitting ramrod straight on the edge of her bed. It’s true: she has no eyes. She has holes for eyes. Where her eyes should be, two deep tunnels disappear into her head. In those tunnels, pitch-black darkness abounds. The fat man is now standing where she had just stood, not a second before. He too has blind, black tunnels instead of eyes. The others crowd behind him. Blind. Gaping. And all of them about to scream.
Julia is out of her wits. The nightmare is complete. She feels like she’s being strangled, that the veins in her body are bursting open. That her heart is starting to leak and will stop beating in an instant, because it can’t endure so much terror.
“Julia, get the hell outta there!” Sam yells in the distance.
But how? She is completely petrified. She’s a prisoner in her own body, a hostage in a cell. And those people—of course they have eyes. How could she think otherwise? Intense eyes, staring eyes, digging into her own eyes. Or . . .
They don’t have eyes.
Wait . . . they do.
Their visages shimmer; it seems like she can see both.
Julia slaps her face with both hands to distract herself from the madness besetting her. She shouts to her brother, who is too far away to help her, but it’s a voiceless shout. Her throat is so tight she can’t produce a sound.
“Get out of there, now! Julia! Julia!”
The woman is leaning toward her. Right in front of her. The fat man’s hands are on the edge of the bed.
Julia abruptly tugs the covers over her head and rolls up in a cocoon. Away, away, she wants to get away from here. It used to be safe under the covers. She remembers it clearly from when she was a child. That queasy feeling inside, when you would wake up and discover that there was still a long night ahead. When the storm would bash the roof up at Huckleberry Wall and the snow would pile up against the walls and you were too old to wake Grandpa and Grandma up but still young enough to think the unthinkable. If you rolled yourself up in a cocoon, you were safe and nothing bad could happen to you. Then you knew Sam was nearby, in the other bed, and he was always watching over you.
“Sam,” Julia whispers into her iPhone. “Sam, I love you. I need you. Please come quickly. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want . . .”
The silence is oppressive.
Julia looks at the screen and it’s dark. When she presses the side button, only the empty battery icon appears.
Julia starts crying again, silently, uncontrollably, terrified, but this time it’s a submission. She feels the end is near and consciously detaches herself from the world to avoid experiencing it.
Here, under the covers, she’s alone.
Alone in her cocoon. Alone in the chalet. Outside is the storm, the world.
Her heaving chest finally settles. Her foot is shaking, but then stops. It’s quiet.
Something presses down on the mattress.
The covers are pulled tight.
Someone is lying next to her. In her cocoon. Someone who is hugging her like a lover. Like a brother.
She feels an icy hand on her shoulder. Julia shuts her eyes and imagines it’s Sam who’s holding her.
2
From de Volkskrant, November 9, 2018
woman jumps from amc, possible connection to august tragedy
By our correspondent Robert Feenstra
Amsterdam—A 44-year-old woman jumped to her death from the roof of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. Her motives are as yet unclear, but a police spokesman has confirmed that she was a hospital employee. The AMC is withholding comment until investigations have been completed.
According to reports, the suicide is neurosurgeon Emily Wan, who was on duty during the August 18 tragedy, when 32 AMC patients died due to as of yet undetermined causes. In early October, after excluding the possibility of bioterror, Minister of Justice and Security Ferdinand Grapperhuis confirmed that there are no suspicions of foul play. Last week, the Dutch Safety Board announced that the first report on the case will be published by the end of the year.
The police cannot confirm whether Wan had been questioned in connection with the case. The dead woman is the third AMC employee to commit suicide since August.
Two years a widow, the neurosurgeon lived in Amstelveen with her two young children.
The Invisible Man
Notes by Sam Avery
“You don’t understand,” he said, “who I am or what I am. I’ll show you. By Heaven! I’ll show you.”
—H. G. Wells
1
When the Airbus started its descent into Geneva, Nick, or whatever was left of him, was still in a medically induced coma. And up here in the mountains it was booming thunder. Up here, a nightmare of jerks and jolts in unstable skies. The Airbus circled endlessly and blind-eyed, then suddenly torpedoed through a break in the clouds, and I realized we’d been flying lower than the surrounding ridges all along. The total lack of orientation instantaneously twisted into a razor of claustrophobia.
Not counting Manhattan skyscrapers, this was the first time in sixteen years I had been confronted with the mountains.
No doubt about it: I hated the mountains.
Always did, always will.
I hated the way they closed in on us. The way they were leaning over the plane. Tearing right through the storm, jagged like a predator’s teeth.