“Jér?me called his friends again,” she said, “but only the wind replied. Panic struck his heart. Still calling out, he started to wander around the slope, but he didn’t know which way to go. The mist drifted by him in cold ripples. In the distance, or at least that’s how it seemed, he was sure he heard a cry. He stood and listened until he heard it again, from higher up the slope. It was such a grim, anguished howl, it caused the herd to run wild and disappear into the mist. But Jér?me had heard his own name being called, and he rushed up the mountain.
“ ‘Ambroise, Nicolas, where are you?’ he shouted, over and over. Then several voices answered, thin and distant and way up high. It still sounded like a cry for help, but suddenly your grandfather wasn’t sure anymore that they’d been calling his name or that it was Ambroise and Nicolas who were calling out there. They kept on coming, the cries from the mist. Sometimes he thought he could see shadows, but every time he approached them, they vanished.
“Exhausted and shivering from the exposure, Jér?me eventually stopped. He realized he’d been fooled, and it could now prove fatal. The mist had become impenetrable, his breath was vaporizing, and the wailing of the wind sounded like a choir of screaming souls. A dissonant melody brought forth directly by the devil himself.
“ ‘Father Zufferey,’ he said in the La Sage chapel that evening, ‘I heard the Morose up there, and I managed to tear myself away from it only by the grace of God.’ ”
Because it had suddenly gotten louder.
That sound, it had pierced his soul, Louetta said, but it had also cut deeper. Much deeper. You knew it was the Morose when you heard it. And then?
No one knew. Because no one who’d heard the Morose had lived to tell the tale.
You see . . . Jér?me Molignon, Cécile’s grandfather, he didn’t really hear the Morose. That was raging on the other side of the crest, in the Vallée Maudit. Jér?me, he only heard the outer frequencies. Muted. “Dans la marge,” in Louetta’s words. So close to it, it had almost killed him.
In Grimentz, Louetta said, dead in the valley’s outwash, the wailing of the wind came shuddering down unhindered. There, your best bet was distance. Everything scatters in the end. Everything dies down.
Still, the cattle got sick. Men went crazy. Mothers had miscarriages. Children became mutes.
“Sérieusement,” I said, staring at the old woman in disbelief.
“Oh, yes,” Louetta said. “I heard the story of a little girl who was hiding from her mother in a barn when the Morose hit, and she never spoke another word till she was on her deathbed, sixty years later.”
So, once a year, they closed all the shutters in Grimentz. Once a year, during the first violent storm of fall, they hung crosses on the doors, and the locals played L?ndler music in their chalets till the wee hours. Outside, you could hear the alpenhorns and the Schwyzer?rgeli above the yodeling of the night.
A blitz of sound to drown out anything that could be worse.
Infertility, outbursts of violence, people who fell under the spell of the wind and disappeared into the night—there were worse things than Swiss traditionals.
According to Louetta, it still went on, to this very day.
Which they didn’t tell you on Airbnb.
9
“I’m not going in there,” Cécile said, staring at Hill House through the windshield. “Not with him around. Sorry. I can’t.”
Outside, the wind breathed through the pine forest.
“Awkward,” I said.
Afternoon, Nick’s Focus parked next to Cécile’s Peugeot, Cécile not stepping out but lighting up a Lucky, and now we’re sitting there in a totally normal situation. My black V-Wire Curves between us to ease me up, but when the silence was too drawn out, I plucked the Lucky from her fingers and took a good drag. Usually I only smoked in NY’s most Vogue-approved drinking dens, and I’m not talking tobacco, so I basically erupted into a hacking aria.
“Ugh, ya really gotta kick this, babe,” I said. I flicked the cig out the open window. Cécile didn’t look like she even noticed.
“I want you to go in, get my stuff from the attic, and bring it out here,” she said. “Please. Could you do that for me?” Begging: “Without him noticing . . .”
“Cécile, come on. You’re overreacting.”
“I mean it, Sam. I’m not going back in there.”
“But we were gonna talk to Nick. You weren’t gonna leave before—”
And that’s as far as I got before Cécile threw the door open, stumbled out, and puked in the tall grass next to the drive.
So I got out. Ran around the car, laid a hand on her back. Felt how wet she was. Wet and cold. “Jesus, Cécile, you’re really sick, huh?”
When she got up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, I saw she was crying. “Please, Sam, don’t make me go back in there. I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.”
She was scared. Real scared; panic attack scared. So I held her in my arms and said, “Shush. I won’t make you do anything. If you really wanna go home, go home. You’ve already done more than I could have hoped for.”
“I’m so sorry, Sam.” Whimpering and shivering against my shoulder, she said, “It seemed such a good idea to come here and tell you all I know. But now I’m not so sure it was the right thing to do.”
“Why?”
“I’ve only complicated things for you, and it didn’t get you anywhere.” Her whimpering got heavier, making her more difficult to understand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you more. I’m really s-s-sorry.”
“Hey, whoa, whoa. Nonsense, Cécile. Hey, look at me.”
She looked up reluctantly, wet eyes red-rimmed, makeup running in dark streaks. “I look terrible.”
“Who cares? You don’t need to impress me.”
Limp smile. “That’s not what Mamie thought.”
I danced my eyebrows. “For better or worse, sugarplum.”
Now she laughed through her tears. “Only an American could say something like that to a woman and mean it as a compliment.”
It felt good to still be able to laugh like, well, normal people, but her gaze soon shifted past me to the chalet, and the shadow descended on her face again. In that gaze, I suddenly saw the family resemblance between her and her grandmother.
Louetta Molignon, she’d finished telling her story, but I only picked up half of the last part. About how the grandpa, alone, lost and wet to the skin, had descended in the mist, bumped into his herd, and Nicolas, lower down the slope and upon arriving in the valley, had discovered he could still hear the wind’s whizzing. But this time in his ears. An annoying hum that didn’t go away and kept him up for nights on end. The doctors couldn’t find anything. Made sense. The cause was the same as for Nicolas’s sudden impotence. The reason cows suddenly stopped giving milk. They’d heard the Morose—muffled, the way you heard someone screaming behind a closed door and couldn’t make out the words—and the Morose had left its imprint on them. For three months, the symptoms didn’t go away, and then they suddenly disappeared. By then, the mountains were buried under a thick blanket of snow, and the valley was still.
And me, I listened to it all. Saved all her words to my mind’s hard drive, but my brain got stuck on trying to process this story into something saleable. To downplay it as just a de facto superstition.
Something I could hoodwink Nick into buying.