“The Maudit will show me the way.”
“Chilled to the bone” is just an expression, but that’s exactly what I feel. Who am I actually arguing with here? To my amazement, Augustin turns around and starts walking toward the glacier.
Now. With night falling.
I impulsively grab him by the shoulder. He flings his arm up, and before I know what’s happening, a white flash explodes in my face. The flash bursts in the shadow of something unimaginable, a superhuman force that is much more than the elbow that hits me full in my cheekbone. In that flash, an avalanche of gigantic chunks of ice crashes down on me. Shock waves of pain shoot through my head, and with a smothered scream, I fall backwards against the rocks, both hands pressed against the left half of my face, causing me to roll over on my side.
[But Sam, in that split second when I fall back, I fall much, much further. Straight into the illusion of an immeasurably deep void.]
When I look up, I see Augustin towering over me. The wind finally gets a grip on his hood and blows it off. The face that is exposed is divided. On the one hand, I see Augustin, though I can’t make out whether the expression on it is one of delight, despair, or detestation.
But there is also another face, one I don’t know, have never known—and it is so alien and aloof that I involuntarily start to groan.
In this face, dehumanization reigns. It’s the face of something ancient, and I don’t need to look at the black tower behind it to know I’m looking directly into the face of the Maudit.
Sleepy Hollow
Notes by Sam Avery
His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region.
—Washington Irving
Meteorologically speaking, fall had already been under way for a few weeks, but if you believed Louetta Molignon, if you swallowed the story that there were only two seasons in the mountains, then the last real day of that year’s summer was the day after Cécile had tooled back down in her Peugeot, that Sunday, October 14. After that, the weather turned, but that Sunday, picture it: the sky one giant hug from the sun. A monkshood hug, a juniper kiss, and picture it: Nick doing his exercises on Castle Rock, he’d taken his shirt off, and the way he was stretching, the way he was overlooking the valley, the sun was sparkling on his bronzed skin like he was emanating light.
That place mutilated him, Cécile’s voice said in my head, as I was looking at him, but what difference did mutilation make if you were a polished natural phenomenon?
Nick doing his burpees and his planks on his yoga mat. His lunges and his squats. Glistening body, radiating, shimmering like the peaks I’d seen on the other side of the dam. The bandages on his face so brilliant white in the sun it made you squint. This was Nick. So what was I supposed to do but to scramble up there with one hand and two feet, Ramses at my heels—Ramses, who stopped halfway up the rock and looked up at Nick with suspicion.
“Hiya,” I said.
“Hiya,” Nick said.
Holy fuck. We were back in first date territory.
“I brought you some grape juice. The kind you like, from the Coop.”
“Thanks.” He took the glass from me and the straw disappeared between two dressing bands. He sucked up half of it in one quaff, then put it down on the plateau. “Here; feel this.”
He took my hands and pressed them to his chest. A nervous charge of maybe a million volts shot through me, a yearning that made my ears pound. Nick’s skin was hot. Not workout-in-the-sun hot, but subcutaneous-microreactor-meltdown hot. Evaporating-star hot.
“Wow,” I said.
“Bizarre, huh? Can you feel the energy?”
“Some people would call it ‘fever.’ ”
“But it isn’t. I feel great. No more pain. Actually, this is the best I’ve felt since I left the hospital.”
He articulated better too, that’s for sure.
“You’re totally glowing.”
Nick’s eyes were burning. “It started the moment I climbed up here. It’s like the sun is melting all my negativity away.”
The heat in his pores musta evaporated his sweat, cuz his skin felt smooth and dry. He led my hands up above his shoulders, crossed around his arms. My fingertips, his skin—there was something predetermined about it, unavoidable, a this-is-the-end-of-the-universe-and-nothing-else-matters kind of quality. And the heat, you could feel it wafting out of his whole body. Even the implant scar below his biceps was quivering like the air above a hot blacktop.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re staring.”
And the space between us getting smaller. Me suddenly feeling that Nick is leaning forward to kiss me, kiss, breath and lips and oh god, a stab of pain and emptiness cuz I’d been forced to do without his lips this whole time and then wham, full-frontal crash against the wall, his eyes huge, the sparkle in his face deleted, as if the reality of his bandages touched down in both of us at exactly the same moment.
Like he’d been burned, Nick let go of me and, guess what, everything was reeling again. Everything was tumbling down. Three years together and everything turns topsy-turvy, coming to this moment, with Castle Rock tipping steeper and steeper down to the drop into the creek, the slopes swaying and spinning around us, and Nick towering up above me. He grabbed my arm before I could fall, and me, flailing my legs, a clumsy kick, hit something. Sound of breaking glass and the rock bleeding red grape juice out of slashed quartz veins.
There are holes in the ice, I thought. They look just like eyes.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, Sam, I didn’t mean to . . . you know . . .”
“Yeah, I know. Same here. Please hold me.”
Everything around me seemed deep and abysmal, the sound of the brook alternately close and far. Without Nick’s arms, I was totally off balance.
“You okay?”
“You’re doing it again.” My fingers tracing circles next to my temples.
“Sorry. It’s not on purpose.”
Nick shut his eyes, the expression on his face intense concentration, like he was spiritually clinging on to something. Couldn’t focus on him, everything too wobbly, too much light everywhere, my teeth tingling too weirdly in my head, so I shut my eyes too and surrendered to the dizziness.
No, I thought. Not dizziness. Fear of heights.
Did it ever occur to you that it could be you who’s doing this? I heard Nick say, but his voice, it was in my head. No one here had said anything out loud. The realization filtered in slowly, and Nick musta felt me suddenly tensing up, cuz we opened our eyes at the exact same instant. Looked at each other. There was something different about the light. There was a brightness and a deepness to it that wasn’t there before. Reality a real-life Instagram filter, an ultra-hi-res, gigapixel panorama, color intensity a spectacle beyond imagination. Nick’s eyes in that light big and round and fascinated and unknowable. Bored right into me.