“I grew up in the mountains,” Cécile said. “Not in the Val d’Anniviers, but in the Val d’Hérens, on the other side of the chain right above Grimentz. As the crow flies, it’s less than ten miles from where we are, but for all intents and purposes it’s a different world. The valleys here are isolated; each has its own course and its own stories. The mountain folk don’t need more than that. They know their valley like the back of their hand.
“Of course we heard the stories of the highlands, when we were kids. Ghost stories. Strange things that happened in isolated valleys. You didn’t give it a lot of thought. When you grow up in the mountains, the world outside is full of secrets. You know the exact place by the brook where the old herdsman from Fourcla was caught in a spring tide and swept away. They say that at high tide you can still hear him screaming on that side of La Borgne gorge. You know the exact places around the village where wolves and lynxes come during the winter months. The snow there was always tamped down with four-toe paw prints. At night you could hear the wolves howling at the moon. But there were places upstream where the snow always remained untouched. As if the animals shunned those places, see?
“Well, there were also stories about a mountain that was always covered in clouds. About a valley that was full of echoes and where no one would go anymore, because the devil had put a curse on it. Here in the mountain villages, the Roman Catholic Church still leaves a heavy mark on what people believe.
“Anyway, when I was twelve, we moved to Lausanne. You get older, you lose touch with the mountains and forget the stories you were told as a child. I hadn’t thought about that mountain for very a long time. Until last August, when Nick was flown in by the rescue team.”
She paused, but I didn’t dare to break the silence. The inn, the people, the fire—clean forgotten. The way Cécile told her story, I was nine years old all over again. Back in Huckleberry Wall, back in my PJs, listening to Grandpa’s ghost stories, goose bumps all over.
“I felt sorry for you. For both of you. I knew what was in the Police Cantonale’s report couldn’t be true and that Dr. Genet’s diagnosis of Nick’s wounds was a lie. Why would he lie about something like that? Something wasn’t right. There was such a strange atmosphere in the ward; nobody wanted to talk about it. Remember the night we met, that I blatantly lied about what Nick’s note said?”
’Course I did.
“Well, that’s why. It kept haunting me, even after you’d left and Nick was repatriated to the Netherlands. So I started nosing around. And when I read in the report where the mountain rescue had found him, all those old stories came back to me, and I sank my teeth into it. I felt I owed you. Because I ran away that night. I regretted it.
“And yes, you were right. Maybe I did feel something weird when I was changing Nick’s dressings. Even though he was maxed out on morphine. I thought it was pure intuition that got me so scared all of a sudden, but after everything you’ve told me, it’s reasonable to assume I sensed the same as everybody else. That I sensed the Maudit in him. But I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Sink your teeth into it” meant tracing the clues back to the source. That’s why Cécile drove up to the Air-Glaciers base at the Sion airport to talk to one Benjamin Crettenand, the guy who signed off on Nick’s report.
Turned out Benjamin was the pilot who flew the chopper that day. After Cécile told him who she was, after she told him the Dutchman they picked up was her patient and that she knew that mountain cuz she grew up in its valleys, he practically begged her to let him answer her questions. Turned out he’d been waiting for someone to spill his guts to all along.
“Seriously,” Cécile said, “you don’t know how much of a miracle it was that Nick was rescued. When he made his call, he was unable to speak, but he did have the presence of mind to text 1414—the Swiss 911—his GPS coordinates. Plus ‘HELP’ in all caps. Benjamin told me that when he and his team saw the coordinates precisely lined up with the col of the Vallée Maudit, they looked at each other and got cold all over. Because no one had apparently called from up there before.”
“How’s that possible?” I asked.
“For one, because Benjamin claimed hardly anybody ever goes up there. He said you won’t find any hikers or climbers or cross-country skiers in those parts. Not even hunters. I found that hard to believe, because the Swiss Alps are overflooded with tourists and explorers. But Benjamin was adamant. One valley up north, right here above Grimentz, flocks of students tear down the slopes in winter. One valley down south, swarms of mountaineers crawl up along the ridges in summer. But this particular valley, nobody. Because those who know about it—the locals and the guides—apparently work very hard to prevent people from going up there.”
You couldn’t close a mountain, this pilot of hers said. But you could keep it under wraps. Discourage its ascent in the guidebooks. Fence off the access. Loop trails the other way. And the ones who did find it, either by accident or by otherwise unlucky fate?
They ended up as code 33–11s.
“Code thirty-three eleven stands for the Swisstopo’s official metric elevation of the Maudit, but Benjamin says they’ve got it all wrong. The valley’s dimensions, too. Satellite images make it look like the glacier that used to flow through it has mostly melted away, but he says that doesn’t tally with what it looks like up there, either. He says no one knows exactly how big the valley really is. Bigger than assumed, in any case. And the mountain, it’s higher.” “Most of the time,” Cécile added.
And I said, “Most of the time?”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I asked what he meant by that, but Benjamin just laughed. He said I’d never been up there. Said the place does something with your head. The available information is inconclusive, because most code thirty-three elevens are never found. A worried call from the family to the emergency services or the Police Cantonale, and that’s it. Then a funeral—after a while. Only once they’ve been declared dead. The coffin is always empty. As if the mountain has swallowed them up.”
Cécile, a pale face hovering in our dim corner of the inn, said it didn’t happen very often. Once every two years, tops. Consider the 120 hikers and climbers that die in the Alps each year and you could call it statistical noise.
“And even then, they’re never sure. It’s hard to know, with the little bits they dig up. Where the car was parked before they towed it away. On what page in the guidebook the ribbon was—it’s all basically detective work.”