Still, I instinctively knew that what was standing there wasn’t the real Augustin. He was a good person. Full of joie de vivre. This thing looked like Augustin but was distorted. Like a negative. An echo.
A rustle shook me out of my daze. It was the chough. And—it was trying to drag itself through the snow with one mutilated wing. At least, the part the head was still attached to.
What shot through my head was the ibex doe . . . but the image was pushed away by a far more urgent realization.
The death bird had been cloven in two but was still alive.
It was then, I think, that I started to understand so, so much.
I snatched the wing with the torn-off piece of flank from the snow and wasn’t surprised to discover dried glue stuck to the feathers. Thread. Flaxen straw. The other half of the bird struggled and pecked at my wrists as I picked it up and carefully buried it under my coat, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was looking at Augustin. He hadn’t budged, but then his image seemed to shimmer before me, and in the blink of an eye he had turned around and was now staring at me. Without hesitating, I ran the hell out of there.
I looked back once. About thirty yards lower. I wish I hadn’t. Augustin’s specter had turned back around to face the slope. Now I could see what it was that he’d been looking at all the time.
On the other side of the barbed wire barrier were many more human-shaped shadows in the woods. They were all staring down toward the valley.
6
(continuation)
I found the shop right away, on the narrow main street a few storefronts down from Boulangerie Salamin. It had stuck in my mind because of the stuffed chamois in the window and the golden eagle with its wings spread over a collection of minerals and rock crystals. The inscription on the shop window said taxidermie & curiosités naturelles. One of those shops that are strictly for tourists. Now I understand that’s just a facade.
I pounded on the door till a light finally popped on in the house behind the shop. I didn’t care if I was waking the neighbors. The birds screeching in the storefront cages were betraying my presence anyway.
Locks and bolts were turned. When the door had opened a crack and the startled face of an elderly woman stared at me, I didn’t hesitate for a second. I rammed the door with my shoulder and burst into the house. Letting out a yell, the woman sprang back, and before you knew it, I had her pinned to the wall, my free hand on her mouth to prevent her from screaming. I kicked the door shut with my heel. There was a brief auditory illusion, because I could still hear the screeching of the death birds. But one look into the shop and I realized it was coming from inside.
The shop was lined with all sorts of stuffed alpine fauna, but the choughs in the cages were alive. They were all attacking the bars.
“Quiet,” I told her. “Don’t scream.”
I took my hand off her mouth. She looked up at me, terrified. I must have looked like a monster to her, so no surprise. Towering two heads above her, scars exposed, eye bloodshot and lip torn. But her appearance shocked me, too. Long gray hair draped over a battered face, covered in scratches. I immediately understood how she’d got them. They were the sacrifices that came with her line of work.
But it wasn’t my looks that had frightened the old woman the most. She knew that the Maudit had entered her shop along with me.
With my limited command of French, I improvised, “Je suis ne pas dangereux.”
But I was, and she knew it.
Gingerly, almost tenderly, I took the mutilated bird out from under my coat and showed it to her. The little creature had stopped lashing at me and was shuddering with stress, but it was still alive. The woman’s eyes widened and filled with understanding when she took it from me. I took the dismembered wing out my coat pocket and held it up for her.
“Il ne pas mort,” I said, probably redundantly. It was pretty clear it wasn’t dead.
The taxidermist shot me a disparaging look and then, as she rushed past me to her worktable, said, “Il n’y a pas de mort pour les oiseaux.”
That got me cold all over, despite the benevolent warmth emanating from the house. My French is good enough to deduce what she had meant: There is no death for the birds.
So it’s true. It’s all true. Of course. The bird I had ripped apart but that didn’t die. The dead bird Ramses had shown up with, that somehow came back to life and scared the living daylights out of him. They don’t die, because the souls they carry with them don’t die.
But that doesn’t explain how many there are, I thought, as I looked at the bird in the old woman’s hands. So many people couldn’t possibly have died on the Maudit. Never.
And it also didn’t explain why Augustin was still alive when I found him on the ice bridge, after his eyes had been pecked out. Why didn’t he pass into one of those birds?
Because that wasn’t Augustin. It wasn’t something alive. And what you saw tonight wasn’t Augustin either. Not really, at least. You’re missing something . . .
Increasingly anxious, I stared at the blindly attacking birds. Their cages were swinging on their chains. Feathers fluttered downward like pitch-black snow. Even the mangled specimen I had brought in was stirring. It tried to get away from the bright halo of light the floor lamp cast on the working surface. When the old lady slid it back, it let out a hoarse croak and pecked at her abundantly scarred fingers.
“Allez, allez!” she called, now more annoyed than afraid. She gestured for me to leave the shop. But I couldn’t move. The whole situation was grabbing me by the throat.
Those hacking beaks. The talons clawing at the bars. What kind of creatures were these? Not dead, not alive. Bird phantoms possessed by the dead possessed by the mountain. They must feel drawn to human life, maybe that’s why they fly back to the valley. Whatever tradition it had given birth to, they were kept in cages, and because the birds never died, they were associated with good fortune and a prosperous life.
And what didn’t die had to be maintained.
With the skilled ease of a craftswoman or an alchemist, the taxidermist slid a leather hood over the chough’s head and buckled the straps in place. The bird instantly calmed down. She poured alcohol on a wad of cotton and started to dab the bloody hole in its trunk. I tensed up. Turned away. Had a sudden need for cold, fresh air.
The old woman yelled something at me, but I barely heard. My eyes fell on a framed diploma on the wall. I walked up to it, and while the lady yelled again, fiercer this time, I read Certificat d’Honneur et Mérite pour Votre Excellence dans l’Art de la Taxidermie, Marie Andenmatten—Canton du Valais.