“I can’t explain what’s wrong up there, but it scares me. Didn’t you notice how similar Nick’s and Benjamin’s stories were? Didn’t Nick also say the valley looked bigger from the inside?”
“Yeah, sure, ’course I noticed. But that was disorientation. Delirium. At least that’s what I thought before that pilot of yours started claiming you might as well chuck your map, up there. And that the mountain is higher. I beg your pardon; it’s higher most of the time. What the hell does that mean?”
Cécile said softly, “That’s exactly what scares me, Sam. I don’t know.”
I do, but what I was thinking was too wacky to say out loud: a valley that somehow morphed . . . that was alive.
Admit it, if the mountain could possess Nick, this was just origin.
Baby steps in the hierarchy of the supernatural.
The barwoman returned with our beers, but my mouth suddenly dried up. Nick had survived, that much was certain. He’d lain up there, lost, alone. Bleeding in the snow, thinking he was gonna die. Hairsbreadth diff and they wouldn’t even have gone searching for him. He must have been so unimaginably terrified. So fucking lonely.
Realizing he’d been that close to dying turned my stomach. I hadda stop thinking about it. So I was sitting there, sweating up my shirt. Looking around, dizzy, suddenly convinced that something enormous was coming. Something enormous, with big, hollow tunnels for eyes.
The water inside freezes and thaws, freezes and thaws . . .
It was like a slap in the face.
“Sam, are you okay?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, not.” I drained my beer and banged the glass on the table so hard that the fogeys by the fire looked up. “You say that place scares you; it gives me the fucking creeps. Because it changed Nick. What came down that valley, what was picked up by the chopper and was operated on by your doctor, that wasn’t Nick. Not just Nick, at least.”
“So you really believe that. That he is possessed by the Maudit.”
“Yep. Yeah, I do. Don’t you?”
She nodded slowly, reluctantly.
“And I don’t know how, but his mutilation has something to do with it. Like he’s hiding it under his bandages. Maybe you can convince him to show it. Offer to give him a checkup or something, and then . . .”
Cécile visibly recoiled.
And I said, “You’re afraid of him, huh? You’re afraid of Nick.”
And she’s all uneasy, like I, uh, like I’m not sure if . . .
“Yeah, you’re afraid of him.” I leaned forward, took both her hands. “Cécile, there’s something you’re not telling me. I saw it today, in the chalet. I saw the way you looked at Nick. How nervous you were. This is no time for secrets, Cécile. If there’s something I need to know, I’d rather hear it now.”
And she, snapping at me, the scapegoat: “And you wouldn’t be nervous? The way I left him behind? The way I left you behind?”
“What did you see under the bandages?”
“I already told you.”
“You sensed the mountain in him.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know what it was.”
“And nothing else?”
“No.”
“But what was it you felt?”
Same old. Dizziness. The proximity of something enormous. Difficult to describe. Fuck, her stony face. Impassive, a statue. Still, cracks. Behind it, a glimpse of something uncontrolled, almost hysterical. A lie? Or was I chasing shadows?
“Cécile . . . Why are you so afraid of him?”
Her trembling lip.
“Cécile?”
Her voice, only a sigh in the dark: “Because Dr. Genet killed himself.”
I practically jumped out of my seat, so violently that the people in the adjacent tables turned to look. “No shit!”
“I didn’t want to tell you with Nick around.”
“Holy shit.” The image that popped up in my mind was Dr. Genet frowning and turning the police photos upside down and right side up again. Louise Grevers raising her hands to cover her mouth. “What happened?”
“No one really knows, it was hushed up in the ward. But it was all so strange. There had been no signs that he’d had any depressive tendencies. There’s a panoramic terrace on the CHUV’s roof, where the hospital employees sometimes have receptions in summer, because you can see the whole city and the lake. Early in September, Dr. Genet went up there, climbed over the rails, and jumped. He was found on the plaza, twelve stories down.”
“Jesus Christ.” Trying to find my composure, I said, “I’m really sorry. But what’s that got to do with Nick?”
“Can’t you see?”
“No. He wasn’t even around when it happened.”
“No, he wasn’t around. But he also wasn’t conscious when I changed the bandages. And what he showed me was heavy-duty enough to make me drop everything and run away.”
Oh boy.
Cécile, she said, “That place mutilated him, Sam. That place in the mountains. On this, I agree with Benjamin: it’s a bad place. And don’t get me wrong, but I’m not sure Nick was supposed to come back from it. Dr. Genet may have been a bit arrogant, but he was a good man and an excellent surgeon. I worked under his supervision for a year and a half, and he was always cheery, always joking around. As far as I know, he had a happy marriage. They had three children and were going to go to Mauritius in September. He had no reason to do what he did. Until Nick was flown in, straight from that place in the mountains, and everything changed. Everything. Dr. Genet operated on him, looked straight into his mutilated face. A couple of weeks later, he killed himself.”
I coulda said a thousand things but I shut up. Didn’t dare cut her short now.
“I saw him a couple of times in August, between that night and his death. He’d changed. We all saw it. He looked pale, his hair was straggly. It was so bad the head of the ward, Martine Guillarmod, even summoned him to ask whether he was ill. I can still see his expression. He didn’t say anything those couple of weeks, but something was going on behind his eyes. Beats me what it was, but it upset me. It was like he was consciously letting go of life.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “But again, I don’t see what Nick’s got to do with it. You looked under the bandages; so did I. We’re both here.”
Cécile, her breath a nicotine/beer cocktail: “The smack when he fell was awful.” Her bottom lip trembling, she said, “The sound . . .”
“Oh shit. Were you . . .”
“I was outside, smoking. It was sheer coincidence I witnessed it. And at the same time, it didn’t feel like a coincidence at all. Paranoid, huh? But yes, I was the one who checked for a pulse, before the Police Cantonale arrived. As if I somehow expected he might still be alive.” Some cheerless sound, more a sob than a chuckle. “I was the one who found his suicide note in his coat pocket. The note he had found the answer to.”
“What did it say?”