When Louetta was done talking, I asked, “Madame Molignon, what did you mean when you said you could see a mountain in me too? A very old one?”
“Did I say that?” Smacking her thin lips, the old lady said, “Don’t take it too seriously, young man. Sometimes I get a bit confused.” She turned to Cécile. “Sweet child, will you please pour me half a glass of red wine? The bottle is on the shelf in the kitchen. I always say, ‘Half a glass a day keeps the grim reaper away.’ ”
And she started laughing so hard her face wrinkled like a bisteeya.
As soon as Cécile was gone, Louetta gazed at me with a stern, milky-white eye, and I again got the chilling feeling that she was looking right through me. “Maybe you can be as old as me one day, young man,” she said. “But you’ve still got a lot to unlock.”
“What do I need to unlock?”
“The world.”
Somehow, I knew she was right.
“There were birds that night, Sam. Big ones, with long beaks, looking for prey.”
My face started to heat up.
“Everyone carries a curse. We can help others only once we’ve gotten rid of ours.”
That staring white eye, the mist inside it—it felt like it was hypnotizing me.
She’s just like Auntie Bernstein. Watch. In a second she’ll disappear, and when we drive off it’ll be like she never existed. Like we’ve never even been here.
She didn’t disappear, but the moment was gone, and by the time Cécile came out you hadda admit to yourself that it was more likely you’d imagined the whole thing.
That was then.
This was now.
“What are you going to do?” Cécile asked quietly.
“Talk to Nick, I guess.” I shrugged. “With all due respect to your mamie, I don’t believe in the devil and omens and all that religious claptrap. But I do know there’s a power up on that mountain that gives both of us the creeps. And that power is also inside Nick.”
“You could go too,” Cécile said. “Together. Away from here. Away from that mountain.”
But I shook my head. “I wish that was so. I’m really scared a kind of Pandora’s box will open if Nick stays so close to the source of it for long, but our only hope lies here.”
Now she took hold of me, hard, her fingers clawing my arms. “Please be careful, Sam. He’s dangerous.”
All kinds of stuff was going on behind Cécile’s face, but that expression . . . I couldn’t place it. It bothered me. Only later that evening, alone in bed and thinking about dark days and a starless sky, did I realize it had been relief. Relief about what? Relief that Nick and me were staying in Grimentz? But why?
Apparently, Cécile hadn’t seen I was telling only half the truth. Because whatever that power was, I didn’t believe it had turned Nick into a monster. I didn’t believe Nick had driven that doctor to jump to his death.
What I did believe was that it had changed him.
And it got me curious.
Wouldn’t you be?
If Pandora’s box opened, I wanted to be there with him and look into it together.
I did what Cécile had asked: got her stuff from the attic. Didn’t see Nick anywhere. Probably sleeping downstairs. Even if he’d noticed me, I was outside too fast to hear him call.
“Now, girl,” I said, back on the drive, “sashay away.”
But Cécile just stared upward. “Look,” she said. Pointing to the hazy sky.
I took off my shades.
In the west, low above the mountains, there was a perfect halo around the sun.
At the Mountains of Madness
Nick Grevers’s manuscript (part 3)
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even vaster hideousness.
—H. P. Lovecraft
Trekking in the mountains is an introverted affair. Not everyone is cut out for it. Despite your climbing buddy’s company, most of the time it’s you alone with the mountain, alone with yourself. Since you need to save energy for the ongoing physical effort, you fall into a silent, steady cadence from one step to the next, which may increase the distance between the two of you without you noticing it. Pretty soon you move in a disconnected, trancelike determination, a purely meditative state in which your head is empty and your mind is so receptive to the surroundings’ hidden powers that you can feel the earth’s pulse. It’s the perfect mindfulness exercise; whenever I come home from a climbing vacation, my mind is fully recharged.
It’s in the same sort of trance that we completely lose our grip on reality, during our hours in the valley, as we gain elevation.
I remember there are moments when I become aware of the changing surroundings. They are just like photos but snaps in my memory, images and fragments that I can still see clearly.
This first snap is not long after we leave the col. Behind us, in the north, it has become dark. The Berner Oberland has disappeared behind a purple-gray wall of clouds and it looks almost as if night has descended on the Rh?ne valley.
The next snap—I’m not sure how much later—the view of the valley is obstructed by shreds of clouds rolling down from the steep rocky slopes surrounding the valley’s entrance, as forerunners of the storm. A wind has kicked up, which cools the sweat on my forehead and flutters Augustin’s hair over his bandanna.
We follow the bed more or less upstream, although you can’t really call it a bed all the time. One moment the brook winds through the valley in a broad, furrowed outwash, and the next it has disappeared under the scree and all you hear is the dripping of meltwater. The terrain is easy; it rises only gradually, and if you know how to move, it’s an elegant dance, skipping from rock to rock, occasionally supported by your Black Diamonds but mostly relying unfailingly on your equilibrium and the welcome balance the boulders offer. At that moment I’m still convinced we’re gaining ground well and will be able to pitch our bivi before long.
Then all at once I’m jerked out of my reverie when Augustin says, “It’s further than it seems, huh?”
I look up and around. I ask him how long we’ve been going. Fifty minutes now. I can hardly believe it. We’d estimated that it should take us less than an hour to get there. The clouds, heavy with rain, have descended on the glacier under the Maudit’s north face, but the glacier has barely gotten any closer. Gray-white and cracked, it holds its breath in the distance. Behind us, the col where we left our stonemen has now disappeared from view as clouds creep in from the valley. It makes it difficult to gauge distances. It had seemed so close from below.
“Let’s walk some more,” I say. Soon enough I sink back into my absentminded dreaminess.
The wind picks up and becomes beastly cold.
This isn’t right, I think, who knows how much later. Augustin is up ahead and I don’t want to disturb his cadence, and since I don’t have a watch on, I worm my hand into my pocket to take out my phone. I see that it’s more than an hour and a half since we left the col, and I know: We should have reached the lake a long time ago.
But we aren’t even close.