“Stiller than still. That’s the thing.”
Nick tensed up noticeably when a group of men started making their way down from one of the streets higher up. They were speaking a dialect I couldn’t make heads or tails of. When they saw us, they shut up, sized us up, ignored us, and walked on toward one of those hotels-slash-inns. One of those cribs-slash-crime scenes. One of those storm-beaten buildings with projecting eaves and empty flower boxes hanging down from dark window alcoves. H?tel du Barrage, it was called. The kind of local hangout where they don’t mind if you bring your grandmother, even if she’s been residing in formaldehyde for years. When they pushed open the door, it smelled like someone’s grandma in formaldehyde. That, and melted Gruyère. The men hurried in, heads hunched, but one of them snuck a look at us. At Nick. Nick’s mummy mask.
I said, “If you think I’m gonna mingle with orthodox mountain pygmies to find out what the local superstitions are, you got it wrong.”
This hotel, Nick said, this was where he and Augustin came up with the plan to go to the mountain. In the cellar, he said, next to the toilets, that was where they found the old etching that pictured the Maudit.
“In the mood for a Pflaumenschnaps?” Nodding to the door, I said, “My treat.”
Nick, eyes hovering under the tip of his Claude Rains hat, shooting daggers at me.
Once past the inn, you only hadda walk into the old village center for the anxiety to pounce on you again. Houses of blackened larch wood, moss-covered slate roofs, and big, sooty chimneys. Old granaries leaning so heavily they’d collapse without struts. And all so cramped that the streets looked more like tunnels. Bending in all directions, connected to each other by narrow stairways along the housefronts. Not a single sign of life. House doors bolted shut. Latched shutters. Upside-down flowerpots against the walls. The village had been winterized . . .
And was waiting.
Look at it, and your sweat glands jump into action. Look at it, and it is big-time claustrophobia.
So you’re walking, and suddenly it’s there. The feeling that forced you to look around skittishly. As if the still air were being disturbed by minuscule electromagnetic pulses, imperceptible except on the very edges of your retina and by the tingling in your fingertips. Just by looking around, you’d swear something had moved just outside your line of sight. That, just out of earshot, someone had called. A shadow. An echo.
“Nick?”
I cleared my throat. My voice sounded unusually thick and raw. Nick didn’t answer. Stood there under one of those gables, under those eaves, looking.
Then I saw it too.
The shadow that hung there, that hung on all the houses, it wasn’t someone’s grandfather’s frayed climbing rope. No Walliser cuckoo clock or satellite dish tuned to SFR or RTS. It was a birdcage. In the cage, a crow. Nope. A jackdaw.
And I thought, Birds.
Thought, Birds came out of your face.
The birds that flew through our bedroom in Amsterdam. The birds Nick had painted on the walls. These birds here were exactly the same. And they were all over the place.
There were cages hanging from all the roofs. No wonder I didn’t notice them before, cuz those creepers within were black as death and perched perfectly still in the dark. Even when I walked up to one of them, brought my face right up to the bars, I hadda convince myself it wasn’t stuffed. It looked stuffed. Feathers dull and dead, like the animals in those dusty display cases in a museum of natural history. But then the smell hit me. Musty, malodorous, pungent like rotting textile and raw flesh. The bird was alive, and its glassy, indifferent eyes looked out of the darkness directly into mine.
Rust? Fuggedaboutit. Spiderwebs? No way. The cage was practically brand-new, spick-and-span.
A shrill cawing made me jump back, but it wasn’t the jackdaw in my cage that’d stirred. It was the one in the cage Nick was in front of. Other side of the street. Nick, he took a few steps back too. Our shoulders touched. We spun around.
In Nick’s cage, the shadow was pacing restlessly on its perch, hampered by a leather strap around its leg. Spread its wings. Cawed again, louder this time, a melodious yet chilling spreeeh.
The daw that’d just gazed at me now also stared past me at Nick.
All the daws were staring at Nick.
And me, my heart lub-dubbing in my throat, I said, “Did you know about this?”
Nick’s eyes shot from cage to cage to cage. “No.”
“They’re the same ones, right?”
“Yep. Alpine choughs.”
“The animals you called death birds.”
“That was superstition.”
“Dude, this is superstition. Don’t you see?”
’Course. What else? All those birds in their cages, on every single house in Grimentz. Superstition incarnate. Old wives’ tales from the mountains. Alpine choughs: oracles’ birds, messengers of the Old Testament God. Fate-fending fetishes. Animal barometers for reading the air—not temperature or pressure, but something else in the black night.
But what?
From the mist came a weak cry, probably from higher up in the village. Hard to tell if it was human or animal. Maybe one of those choughs. Something wasn’t right. Something about the way the echo vibrated inside my head made me wonder whether I’d really heard it.
Again, the thickening air. The strange shimmering in the corners of my eyes. The set of electric shocks, as a warning.
I looked around me. Looked up. Listened.
“Did you hear that too?”
Nick asked, “Hear what?”
But before I could say anything, one of the birds shrieked, and then all hell broke loose. All at once, all the birds went into a frenzy. Hopping up and down on hooked claws, dusty wings beating, chains clattering, cages rocking. One of the shadows—I saw it giving its primitive rage free rein, taking it out on its cage door with all it had.
Nick grabbed my arm and wham, adrenaline rush, head spins. But it was still Nick, and he said, “What was that again about CinemaSins?”
“Animals-sense-supernatural-presence-before-humans-do cliché. Jesus Christ, Nick, let’s get outta here.”
We hurried away, but all over the place the birds reacted to our presence. A cacophony of caws from swinging cages in the mist, heralding some impending doom.