And I thought, Telepathy. This isn’t salubrious mountain air; this is LSD.
“Come sit next to me, Sammy.”
Did he speak those words out loud? Methinks. But hey, we were already wheeling to the ground and had sunk down onto his yoga mat, he on his side, me cuddling into him and he spooning me, and maybe alarm bells started ringing somewhere, but without his arm around me I had the feeling I’d fall, and with his arm around me I had the feeling I’d fall, so at this point, what’s the diff?
Cécile and all her warnings, if she saw us now, she wouldn’t understand. She wouldn’t understand my intense and terror-stricken yearning for Nick.
Last night I told him everything. Everything I learned from Cécile. Everything bar how Dr. Genet had kicked the bucket. Some beans you didn’t spill, cuz you didn’t want to upset him. You chewed it over, couldn’t find any relation between Nick and that dude’s death, so decided it didn’t matter.
Except that you were afraid of what you’d see in Nick’s face if you told him. Except that you were afraid of the same confession in his eyes as when you asked him about Augustin, if he—
Whoa! Floodgates, file it, check.
Still. Those stories had brought us closer.
That’s how horror stories work: they dull reality’s sharper edges. Made the face hiding behind the bandages a little less frightening. Cuz it could always be worse. As evidenced by Marjorie Hatfield, who, eye sockets empty, had screamed herself to death. As evidenced by Alexander Ru?gsegger and Augustin Laber, who didn’t have faces at all anymore and forever dwelled between frozen mountain cliffs. Nick wasn’t gonna be one of those stories. Nick was alive. And the cliché turned out to be true: what didn’t kill you made you stronger.
Now, spotlighted by the sun, Nick dizzying: “I thought that after all those stories you’d find me so repugnant that you wouldn’t let me so near you again.”
“It’s standard procedure to face your inner demons before exorcising them, Nick. Possession 101.”
“Am I your demon or is it the Maudit?”
I stretched and twisted my spine, like Ramses, who always makes it look like it feels so good. It did feel good. “Watch out or I’ll exorcise you and keep the mountain. Lemme tell ya, I could definitely get used to that spin.”
“And me thinking you never wanted to have anything to do with the mountains.”
“I never met one that made me trip this wild.”
For a while, there was only our breath and the play of sunlight on water droplets and little flying bugs in the air. My ear against Nick’s chest, I listened to the earth’s heartbeat. Deep and slow, it resonated through both our bodies. In my muzziness, I noticed that it beat five, six times a minute max, but who cares. My head refused to mold it into a single coherent notion. It was much more fun to just float above Castle Rock and rise and fall to the rhythm of the primeval life germinating in Nick.
I said, “Seriously.” My voice dreamy, I said, “The new you. The mountain. Whatever. I never let you so near cuz I was always afraid of it. But now . . .”
“Near” meant more than just his arms around me. I saw the image of a delta of living streams of energy at the source of a glacier tongue. Winding streams, which didn’t enclose only my soul but also the deepest essence of my being. I couldn’t find the words to describe the image, but there was no need to. Nick shared it. I knew that.
In that new, creepy, sparking way we shared things.
His words drifted toward me, And is it a good trip or a bad one?
“Holy fuck, are you seriously in my head?”
So what are you going to do about it?
“Hello? I stash private info in there.”
He roared with laughter, and the earth seemed to quake. I was pretty sure it wasn’t only Nick who’d laughed. Believe me when I say I know just about all your secrets by now, Sam. Why don’t you come and join me?
Can you do that? Testing . . . testing . . .
Are you kidding? Babe, this is peanuts compared to what I can do.
. . .
You see?
Damn.
How much further would I let myself get carried away? I didn’t want anything more than to surrender myself to Nick, my Nick, the new Nick, but I was playing with fire. Something in there was on the rise and could reign over much more than just me. The question was not how long it would take for Nick’s transformation to reach a point of no return. The question was what he’d be capable of when it did.
Cécile: Please be careful, Sam. He’s dangerous.
It’s a bad place.
I’m not sure Nick was supposed to come back from it.
He’s dangerous.
It’s a bad place . . .
And Nick: Become one with me.
My breath caught. “Wh-what did you say?”
You heard me.
Intense excitement. Manipulating hands kneading my mind, and the image I now saw before me, bulging avalanche dams about to burst. The dam in Moiry about to give way. The snow-white bandages on Nick’s face pulled tighter and tighter over what was about to tear its way out . . .
Till an all-too-realistic buzzing wrenched me out of my reverie.
A dragonfly. A giant bug. No, a drone.
And me, I fell back into my body. Blinked my eyes. Nick, he’d already jumped up, staring, hand over his eyes, skyward.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouted.
It was coming at us from the village. Silver and black. Four propellers. GPS sensors, a 4K spy cam.
I got up and stood next to Nick. “Are they serious?”
The top of Castle Rock looked down on Hill House’s overhanging roof. The drone glided some thirty yards above us, circling slowly over the valley floor, where it stopped and hovered above the little bridge. The spy cam, a kind of mini periscope sticking out of its bottom, unabashedly aimed at the chalet.
Nick scratched himself feverishly under his dressings. “Maybe it’s the kids from the village . . .”
“Doesn’t look like a toy to me. That size drone costs at least a thousand bucks.”
“Then it’s those fuckers. Goddammit! They’re the ones who came to our door, right? They know who I am, Sam.”
“Jesus, and I’m thinking they still use Morse around here.”
“Dude, they’re Swiss. They built the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. I think they can pretty much handle a drone.”
The drone: the MI6 of the Alps. A DIY kit for every shamus.
Someone was plotting against us.