With blind eyes staring over the fields, Louetta told us, “It was a long time ago, a whole life before you were born, when your grandfather was still young. In the mountains above La Sage, there’s a pasture they call Le Tsaté. In those days, there were a few old huts next to a chapel. That year, it must have been ’48 or ’49, we spent the whole summer up there, and we let the flock graze on the slopes above the alp. Every Sunday, Father Zufferey, priest of La Sage, came up to read the Mass and bless the cattle and the milk. He’d done that as long as we could remember, because everyone knew there was a place up there in the mountains that was defiled by the Evil One.”
Louetta’s gaunt shoulders shivered when she uttered the moniker. The foul place, as she called it, was on the other side of the chain, and you never went up there. The mountains were too steep; it was impossible to reach that valley from this one. What’s more, she said, that place spelled doom. The wind that came down from there was disturbingly cold, and its night sky was said to be starless.
“I’m too old to remember much, but this I remember like it was yesterday. That year, when the days were getting shorter and the nights colder, the people from the alp left for the valley, one by one. After the last blessing, I too went down to the village with Father Zufferey. But your grandfather didn’t, child. No, Jér?me loved the pasture. He always wanted to spin the summer out as much as possible, until the good days were up and the dark days came. High up in the mountains, there are only two seasons: the good days and the dark days. Nothing in between.
“In any case, Jér?me stayed behind with two other cowherds and the cattle, and it got me all nervous. Because something had stirred in the air. We all felt it. A shroud of unease had descended on the alp at the end of the summer. It made the cows fidgety. And we all knew what had brought it about.
“ ‘You must go down, you hear?’ I said to Jér?me before I descended. ‘You know what dwells up there, and I don’t want you getting yourself into trouble!’ Your grandfather assured me that he’d come down within a week and that he’d stay away from the higher slopes. But once in the valley, I regretted that I didn’t insist for him to come and join me. They were all alone up there. No one was going to go up again that year, and the alp was completely forsaken. Even by God.”
Louetta said, “And then the dark days came.”
The old mountain folk, she said, had older ways of telling when a storm was brewing. They felt it in their bones. Bones grated. Joints creaked. Teeth tingled. The layman’s osteoporosis prophecy. Nature telling you that you don’t need the AccuWeather app but good ol’ witchcraft.
And there were more signs. Omens, when high in the atmosphere, the dense, cold air mass pushed its way toward the Alps. The corona around the sun. Great flocks of birds spiraling upward, then hurriedly descending into the valley. Lenticular clouds hanging above the peaks with deceptive calm. The mountains, you could read them, if you knew their language.
All of this, Louetta told us, was before you heard the Morose.
The Morose existed only in the Val d’Anniviers. And only downwind from the Vallée Maudit, which they called the Valley of Echoes around here.
When the Morose began, according to the old mountain folk, you heard the valley bewailing the death of the world.
“It was an October like this one,” Louetta said, “and we’d known for days that the storm was coming. Any moment, we expected to see your grandfather and his cronies come walking into the village. But he didn’t come. And I started to worry. On the last day, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and when you looked to the south, it looked like the night had already come! Outside, you had to struggle against the wind to make your way. Everyone in the village was up and about, fastening the shutters and closing off the fences.
“And then Ambroise Nicollier suddenly came running over the gravel road from La Sage, out of breath and wide-eyed with fright. Ambroise was one of the two cowherds who’d stayed up there with your grandfather. Such a nice young man. His daughter Marie-Louise used to play with your mother, sweet child. Died in ’57 in a landslide in Ferpècle. It was quite a tragedy.”
They’d planned to descend that morning, Ambroise said, so they could stall the cattle before the storm broke. But when he woke up, he had found himself alone in the cabin. No cronies. No cows. Everything obscured by mist.
And outside, the wind was bewailing the death of the world.
Ambroise, he knew the stories, Louetta said. That if you heard the Morose, strange things would happen to you. That you had to hurry for shelter before it lured you up like the singing of the Sirens. So he made a run for it and didn’t slow down until he’d reached the valley.
“ ‘It’s wrong up there, Louetta,’ Ambroise said, still panting. ‘He dwells on the slopes up there, and all we can do is pray for Jér?me and Nicolas. I heard the devil sing! The devil!’ And he was gone. To his mother’s house, we heard later, and it was weeks before we saw him.
“By now, I was in a state. I put on my coat and walked all the way up to La Sage, while the weather was deteriorating all around me. When I got there, I told Father Zufferey what had happened. I begged him to gather some strong men from the village and go look for Jér?me, but he said there was no point. Darkness could fall any minute. And as if on cue, the storm broke at that very moment. Hail drummed down on the chapel roof, and that meant the Morose had reached its peak in that accursed valley, and I lost all hope of ever seeing your grandfather again.”
“Then what happened, Mamie?”
“Well, an hour later the chapel door swung open and there he was. Exhausted, soaked to the bone, and pale as a ghost. I rushed to embrace him, but Jér?me was shivering like an old man and didn’t want to say anything before he’d prayed with Father Zufferey and had knocked back a glass of hot red wine. ‘Never,’ he then said, ‘have I heard what I heard today, and I hope to never hear it again as long as I live.’ And then he started talking.”
When he’d woken up, it wasn’t in the safety of the cabin but in a boulder field. Everywhere around him, mist. Everywhere around him, the whistling of the wind, a hair-raising singing, swelling in the unseen. He yelled to Ambroise and Nicolas, and everywhere, surrounding his yells, fanning out behind him and all around, he saw phantoms stirring. Horned, lumbering heads that rose out of swirling openings in the mist and fixed their gazes on him. Only after prolonged moments of absolute mortal fear did he realize he was looking at his own cows, restlessly snorting behind the subdued clanging of their heavy bells.