Up the road was a courtyard with a trough, a church on the other side, which under different circumstances you’d label idyllic. White stucco walls, wooden bell tower, the whole Lonely Planet secret marvel thing. But next to the heavy wooden door was a curly copper fixture, and hanging on it was another cage. Bigger than all the others. This time, five imprisoned choughs, flapping around in a mad frenzy, pecking each other’s mangy bodies with their nasty beaks.
A swelling growl made my hair stand on end and chilled me so much it felt like my skin was sinking into my body. I clung to Nick. From a dark corner of the courtyard, a big black dog appeared, with a bell on its neck. Barking, snarling, drooling. On a leash, okay, but his owner, this little dude with a pale and soulless face, still a kid basically, was having trouble keeping it at bay. Shrill voice barking orders. By his side, two more kids, staring wide-eyed at the caged birds’ tumult. One of them, arms spread, ran to the church’s cage as if he wanted to hush them, but his little friend shouted something and he turned around. When he caught sight of us, the expression on that dorky face switched from concern to such demoniac mortal terror it was almost comical.
That kid is also someone’s son, I thought. Someone’s son and nephew, by the looks of it.
The first little dude, the one with the wolfdog, tightened the leash, choking it just a coupla steps before Nick and me. Shouted something. The beast panting behind his white breath, black lips curled away from its snout. Teeth like little bunched nails, forepaws thrashing the air.
And the two of us in that narrow alley, my hands tight around Nick’s arm, Nick’s body hot and shaky, a feverish tension behind that mask, as if the scar tissue under it was sliding over the bone. His eyes intense and sunken, and in those eyes I read escalation, in those eyes I read that we hadda get the hell outta there before something really bad happened. Something terrible.
The kid shouted something again, but his dialect didn’t even come close to French.
“Que se passe-t-il ici?” I tried, but the only reply I got was a stone. Granted, not perfectly pitched, cuz it bounced off the granite splint of a shed this side of the courtyard, but a stone nonetheless.
I raised my hands and called out, “Arrêtez! Qu’est-ce que tu fais?”
And all around us, the choughs freaking out in their cages. All around us, black feathers and slick blue flashes. All around us those beady eyes staring, and groping claws, looking for us. And the kid gesturing. Calling. The other one, the little dude in front, siccing his dog. All around us, serious trouble brewing.
The next stone knocked Nick’s Claude Rains hat off his head. A second later, blood. Nick’s knees buckled, but he rebounded and his body stiffened, his body hardened, something took over, and who knows what woulda happened if I hadn’t given him the biggest shove of his life right then, so hard that he fell backwards, hands up, splat against the Walliser supply shed.
Somewhere a light went on. Somewhere a shutter opened.
Nick stared at me, spluttered out a WTF, and I pulled him by the sleeve, making a run for it. A barrage of stones came at us, one hitting my shoulder, but I didn’t wanna give those little motherfuckers the satisfaction of seeing me flinch.
We ran till we were past the cable car terminal, past the edge of the village, where Nick staggered, had to hang his head between his knees, me holding him up.
But we were invisible there. Those little dudes and the birds and the dog, way back behind us. Swallowed by the mist.
“What the fuck was that?” Nick panted.
“A fucking hate crime, that’s what it was. A fucking stoning.” Screaming, “A fucking stoning, fils de pute!”
A weak cry seeped through the mist and Nick gestured, “Shh. The birds, I mean. Those boys. I scared them.”
“Jesus, Nick, you okay? Your head’s bleeding.”
He looked up at me. Blood dripped over his eyebrow to the edge of the bandages, seeped in and spread like merlot on a napkin.
I wiped it off and kissed his forehead. The kiss, he must have sensed some of my rage in it, some of my zinging adrenaline, cuz Nick laid his hands on my shoulders and said, “Seriously, you need to calm down. I’m okay now.”
“No way. We were shooed away like animals! They took your—”
“It doesn’t matter. Come on, Sam. Let’s go home.”
But it wasn’t until we’d reached our side of the valley floor, and Hill House’s dark outline and the rock formation behind it were looming up in the mist, that the essence of the word home really hit me.
2
First chance next day, I got Julia on FaceTime and told her the whole episode. Picture it: Me pacing up and down in front of the chalet’s big windows, the woods and rocks in front of the enormous sunny V of the valley, Grimentz’s bell tower chiming two o’clock in the distance. Woods and rocks and me pacing, iPhone in hand, Julia on full-screen killing her straight-out-of-bed look in New York, still stunning, but that’s just good genes, as I always say.
“Dude, what a story,” Julia said. “Remember Grandma’s rhyme? She always sang it when the crows stole the bread crumbs from the cardinals in the garden. One crow sorrow, two crows joy. Three crows a letter—”
“Four crows a boy. Oh my god, I forgot it! Five crows silver, six crows gold—”
“Seven crows a secret never to be told. How many did you see, bro? Maybe we could tell your future.”
I said they weren’t crows but choughs, and Julia retorted minor detail for the superstitious, and I said there were way more than seven, and BTW I’m not superstitious, but A for effort.
Oh, and did I send Pa and Ma a postcard? The chalet was on Pa’s card, wasn’t it?
Julia sitting cross-legged over her steaming mug of Teatox Skinny Morning, asking why the hell I went to Switzerland with Nick, away from his psychologists and medical treatment.
Nothing new about sis worrying about me. We look out for each other; always have. The epic descent on the Panther Mile, that frozen night in the snow—if you only had each other the moment your life started and the rest went up in smoke, you bonded. Us standing hand in hand in the snow, teeth chattering, watching the inferno consume our childhood, and our grandfather running out like a human torch—it’s safe to say we’ve never really let go of each other since that day.
“I really love Nick, you know that, but you’re not safe around him. You don’t know what he’s capable of. I read that delusional people can—”
“He isn’t delusional, Julia.” My voice subdued, listening to make sure I didn’t wake Nick while he was sweating out an oxazepam in the bedroom downstairs. “There’s something real creepy going on with him. And this village is totally creepy too. You can feel it everywhere; it gets under your skin. Ramses is totally weirded out by it too. And the valley . . . Here, check out how fucked up it looks.”
I flipped my iPhone to the window and Julia rolled her eyes. My sis may have poisoned her tropical fish and pissed her bed till she was ten, but she had no mountain traumas. She’s the type who could go down a black diamond run in Aspen or Banff or Calgary with her eyes closed.
Smoke was what triggered her. Smoke and flames. Sandalwood-based oil.