Help me get rid of it and I’ll be gone, I offered, but the pastor shook his head and whispered, “No servant of the Lord can exorcise what is living on that mountain.”
I asked him to at least tell me what he does know. He must know something, I was sure of that. Said I was as scared as he was. That I hadn’t asked for all this and that I wanted to prevent worse from happening—and that landed. The pastor led me to the rearmost section of the cemetery and showed me the graves of four men, who had all been in their twenties or thirties when they suddenly died in 1957. My heart started to beat faster when I read the inscription by the light of his lantern: pte. maudit.
The men had been members of the Andenmatten group, he said, a team of seven who had attempted to climb the Maudit that year, despite their fellow villagers’ warnings. Of course! That’s why the year had rung a bell. The article in Le Nouvelliste. Just opened the JPEG. It says that bad weather had taken them by surprise and that they never came back. The pastor said that there are two more tombstones in the graveyard in Zinal, but all the graves are empty. The seventh was Jorg Andenmatten himself, he said, the group’s leader. To everyone’s surprise, he had come wandering into Grimentz almost a week later. Weakened, hypothermic, but alive. The whole village flocked to hear what had happened, but Andenmatten couldn’t remember a thing.
“But the minute we saw him, we knew it was a foul thing.”
I looked at him in disbelief and said, “There’s no way you could be old enough to have been there.”
“I was a child, but I can still remember it clearly. Who could ever forget the horror that walked amongst us? Andenmatten had brought the Maudit into our midst and left a disgraceful stain on our community. We all had to bear the consequences, and for some, the burden was heavy. Much too heavy. And then came that endless night of October 29 . . .”
I wanted to ask what had happened, but the pastor raised his hand to his mouth and started tottering. The lantern in his other hand rocked and his face transformed into a mask of horror. I instinctively raised my hands. Was on the verge of running away, because I could feel the pressure behind my bandages build mercilessly. I didn’t want to infect him, you know? To infect him like I had infected the others.
“Please,” I begged. “Really, I don’t mean wrong. Just tell me what happened.”
But the pastor only stumbled backwards. Touched the cross hanging from his neck and reiterated his plea for me to please leave before it’s too late.
“At least tell me if there’s some way of getting rid of it!”
“You will not like the answer,” was the last thing I heard him say, before he turned around and fled into the church.
The pressure receded. I walked home with my hands in my pockets and my head full of questions. They’re still there. But I do know one thing now: it has happened before. Jorg Andenmatten. I have to find out what became of him. But I can’t stop seeing that mask of horror on the pastor’s face as he stands before me, and hearing his last words: You will not like the answer.
5
November 6
Stopped writing. Unable to. Never expected to open this document again. It’s hopeless. The moments I’m still myself are becoming scarce. The very last of who I am will disappear too. The glacier is closing in on me and stretches out till infinity.
Oh, Sam, that soulless thing in the rocking chair . . .
I can’t bear thinking about it.
Have to get Sam out of here. Protect him from himself and me. Can’t put him through what’s awaiting me. But that means I’ll have to break with him, and I can’t handle that. Oh, if only there were some way . . .
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll write it all down. For Sam. Maybe then he’ll understand, when I’m gone.
Two nights ago, I woke up completely disoriented. Face throbbing something awful. It wasn’t so much pain as a feeling of immense hollowness, as if something had dug its way out and left a deep cavity. It was the middle of the night, and it was snowing. The cold burned inside my lungs when I inhaled.
Something was shuffling right beside me. It stank of rot.
My hand shot to my face. No bandages. Skin frozen stiff.
Something brushed against my arms. Hopped onto my chest. Immediately after that, a sharp stab in my left eye. [It was one of those birds, Sam, and he was pecking at my eyes!] Screaming, I jumped up. Before I knew it, I had flapping wings in my grip. Its sharp, seeking claws were grasping my chin and ripping at my lips. In a reflex, I jerked my hands apart and literally tore the bird in two. The stench was sickening. Disgusted, I cast the bloody parts onto the ground, fell to my knees, and covered my eye with my hand. As I was doing this, screeching shadows flew up all around me. A whole flock of choughs had gathered in the snow.
The flock disappeared through the whirl of snowflakes, into the night, and only then did I look around me—and what I saw almost made me wish the bird had blinded me.
I was in a larch forest. The snow, which in places was sticking to the ground and by morning would color the valley white for the first time this fall, reflected the night’s eerie light. This seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. And I knew where I was. Up ahead, I saw the barbed wire barrier with the yellow sign that read accès interdit. On the other side, I could vaguely make out the steep trail to the Maudit. This was where our ascent had started. This was where I had taken Augustin’s picture, with him smiling into the camera, a lock of hair carelessly swept over his bandanna, Therm-a-Rest rolled up against the side of his North Face backpack.
Not six feet away from me, in a jumble of bird tracks, there was a crooked figure. Even seeing him with only one eye, there was no doubt in my mind it was Augustin.
He was turned away from me, motionlessly staring at the accés interdit sign. It wasn’t the Augustin from the photo—this was the Augustin from the glacier. He was wearing his red Gore-Tex jacket. The reason he was bent over in such a strange, impossible posture was that he had multiple fractures in both legs from when he fell into the crevasse. Yet, there he was, up on his feet.
His frozen hand hung limply from his sleeve. His index finger was trembling. Was it the wind? Or . . .
I wasn’t breathing as I stared at him. One-eyed. Blood was trickling out the other, through my fingers. I could barely open my left eye. Had to constantly blink as tears flowed down my cheeks, but as far as I could tell, the damage wasn’t serious.
Augustin, on the other hand . . .
I tried convincing myself that Augustin’s projection had come from the mangled death bird. But I knew better. He had come out of my face. That’s what had caused the hollowness. Part of him had always been inside of me, since that night in the crevasse.