I noticed that my feet were leading me deeper into the shop, but I couldn’t control them. The antlers, the dried flowers, the stuffed animals, everything was reeling. I looked back and saw the old woman jab a needle straight through the compressed, fleshy edges of the bird’s body and the torn-off wing.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I heard myself say, but distantly, as if I were underwater. I stumbled past her worktable, into the dark hall, heading for the house. Bumped into the doorpost. The woman let out a startled cry, but her voice, the croaking of the birds, it barely reached me.
There was a staircase to the left, light shining down through it, but I started down the corridor, into the dark. I don’t know what had gotten into me. But that name . . . that name . . .
There was a door with a bleeding Christ on the cross on it, but when I tried the handle it wouldn’t budge. The door opposite was ajar. Air as dank as the air in the shop wafted out at me and made my stomach turn. In the hall’s bleak light, I could see pelts hanging on brass hooks. A grimy bathroom with the odor of the elderly. A closet full of rock crystals. A thick curtain, and behind it one last door. Mounted on the left wall was a framed black-and-white photo of a young couple standing in front of a glacier, which I recognized as the Glacier de Moiry, beyond the reservoir. In the gloom, the couple seemed to be grimacing more than smiling, he lanky with sunken cheeks and she with pale, colorless eyes.
Don’t open the door, I thought.
But of course I opened the door, and I shrank back from the wave of thick, human heat. It was pitch-dark. I almost slammed the door shut again, but then I heard a gentle rustling. Something had moved. With trembling fingers, I took out my phone. Swiped up. Tapped the flashlight icon and aimed it into the room.
And in the naked light I saw.
It was a bedroom, but the made bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in in years. In a rocking chair next to the bed was an old man with no eyes. He was smartly dressed in an ironed shirt and the embroidered gilet typical of the traditional attire of the Valais. His gaunt hands were folded on his lap and, at first, I thought he was dead . . . but then I saw that his stomach was rising and falling with his breathing.
At that instant, I saw the family resemblance. The man was many years older than the young man in the photo, his pasty face wrinkled and pallid, thin strands of hair hanging off an otherwise bald skull, but he had the same lanky figure and sunken cheeks. And the young woman . . .
The man in the rocking chair showed no signs of having noticed my presence. The hard light coming from my phone seemed to be getting sucked into his empty eye sockets and to disappear within them. I, too, felt irresistibly drawn to them, because despite my mind screaming Turn around!, I’d already taken several involuntary steps into the room. Who knows what would have happened if at that instant the monstrously ecstatic shriek hadn’t come from the dark on my left. My body literally doubled up. I pointed the phone at what was coming at me. That broke the spell.
It was an alpine chough, but it was inside a big iron cage. Its bright yellow beak was piercing through the bars like a knife as it spread its shadowy wings.
I turned and ran, because that’s when I understood what the pastor had meant with his last words: You won’t like the answer.
The man in the rocking chair was Jorg Andenmatten.
7
(continuation)
When I ran away from the horror at the end of the corridor and left the dismayed Marie Andenmatten and her mangled birds behind, a small crowd was waiting for me on the street. About fifteen villagers. One look at their faces, their balled fists, and the clubs they were holding was enough. I wasn’t going to escape this unscathed.
So I called on it. [Sam, forgive me.] Never before have I consciously summoned the Maudit, but I did now.
“Go away!” I shouted. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I will, and I can’t help it!”
The anger in their faces transformed into fear. I spread my arms, puffed out my chest, and turned my mind inward. I wasn’t wearing my bandages, and it happened with relentless power. I only remember the sensation of growing, then my mind keeled over, and I came to myself only tonight.
Two days later.
I hope they got away in time. I hope so with all my heart.
I have no doubts that they’ll come back for me. That’s why it isn’t safe for Sam to stay here anymore. For me, either, but what I have to do has to be done here; I know that now. Up to now, I could see only two solutions, both of which bode ill for the future. Either I let what the Maudit had started happen, and bring about total destruction not only of myself but of everything that’s dear to me, or I stop myself to spare us all that fate. My stock of oxazepam is enough to get it done. And honestly, if it weren’t for Sam, maybe I would have already tried.
Death or Pandora’s box—but now I know there’s a third option.
The old man in the rocking chair. That soulless, no-eyed thing. And in the dark, the birdcage with the chough.
I had stood face-to-face with Jorg Andenmatten, who had been possessed by the Maudit, and now I know how the exorcism works.
As I write this, I hear meltwater dripping off the eaves. The snow has almost completely melted away, but there’s a storm brewing.
I can taste it in the air. Clouds are gathering up in the mountains. Before, I would have needed MeteoSchweiz to know that, but now I listen to what a deeper instinct is whispering to me, and I know it as sure as I know my own name.
Sam has to get out of here right away.
In the distance, I can hear the valley sing.
Wuthering Heights
Notes by Sam Avery
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in—let me in!”
—Emily Bront?
1
The Morose came on the seventh of November.
It was everything Louetta had said, but worse.
You knew it was there when, that morning, a human cry descended from the clouds. A cry that shook the large window’s glass in its grooves.
You knew it when the wind picked up and you felt the atmosphere’s dense, cold air zinging in your teeth.
You knew because your cerebral cortex started to tingle. Because your bone marrow itched. You knew it the way rats and weasels know an earthquake is coming. The way fish swim away before a tsunami.
The fireplace going dark was just a harbinger.
The barometer’s drop just prophecy.
Nick, he’d been pacing up and down in front of the big window all morning like a caged tiger. Gazing out, his eyes pulled like a magnet, drawn to that place behind the surrounding ridges where the Maudit waited. His feet excavating a deepening trench in the hardwood.
He’d gotten a little scary.
Fuck that, he was scary on a whole new level. Milly Shapiro in Hereditary scary.
Thing was, there was no getting through to him anymore. Couldn’t find Nick in there anymore. Each time I said his name, each time I ran my tongue over my parched lips and came into his orbit, it was like he was looking straight through me. Like I didn’t even exist.