Then you think you hear another cry, an echo, a reverberation, and your gaze shoots to outside the window.
The valley was on standby. Holding its breath for what was to come.
At ten past ten, the chamois exodus began.
All at once the woods were alive. All at once, black-and-white-striped skull snouts floating between the pine trees. Whole herds of Rupicapra rupicapra, their little horns swinging with their bowed heads, marching past the chalet without giving it a second glance and following the brook downstream into the valley.
Not exactly what National Geographic would describe as “natural behavior.” Not exactly what the zoologically inclined intelligentsia would label as an “ecological anomaly,” but Nick didn’t even see them. This was where I drew the line.
Maybe Nick had taken me hostage. But now the Morose was taking him hostage.
2
For you to know how we got here, I have to take you back, way back, to almost a whole day ago—the moment I hit rock bottom.
Last night, FaceTiming with Julia for the first time in weeks, her voice in my Bluetooth earplugs: “I’m seriously worried about you, bro. Amy Winehouse’s corpse looked better than you do. Why have you stopped answering my messages?”
Cuz I didn’t wanna admit how in over my head I really was, of course.
Even when down in the pits, every boozer, every junkie, every addict comes up with “I got this. Everything under control. No prob.”
’Course, I didn’t tell her that I feared I’d been deliberately set up. Now, in one of my rare clean stretches, that I feared I’d been seduced under false pretenses. After all, I was the one who’d been enabling it. Empowering it by continuously tearing off those bandages and releasing the beast.
Me, his aphrodisiac; he, my cocaine.
Nah, I just said I’d been busy. Every rehab clinic will tell you that’s the addiction talking. Cuz truth is, my fingers were trembling. Truth is, the cold sweat in my neck was a withdrawal symptom. Listening with one earplug out, trying to hear Nick downstairs, trying to make sure he didn’t hear me, cuz everyone knew this was my cry for help. Now, taking advantage of one of my scarce clean-headed moments, this was the oh-so-necessary intervention in the making. Don’t wanna kill the suspense, but at some point during this heart-to-heart, my mask was going to break. Even I knew that.
Even the little boy who’d set his childhood on fire and was shit-scared he’d get caught knew you couldn’t hide forever.
You see, the way my grandfather told the story, Prometheus was left to rot. Chained to the mountaintop above Phoenicia, exposed in his kinky loincloth, with the eagle returning every night to tear out his liver. According to the ancient Greeks, the liver was the seat of human emotions. With that under fire and continually plundered, Prometheus’s soul, over time, got more and more barren. His body no more than an empty shell.
Every night anew, the story goes, his guilt returned to feast on his emotions. Sound familiar?
My grandfather was never too fond of a happy ending.
Only years later did I discover a different ending to that story also existed. In it, a handsome hero called Hercules shows up one day to save Prometheus from his pickle. Prometheus, the princess in the highest tower; Ethon, the dragon to be slain. Hercules shot an arrow right through his noggin, and together they rode straight into the sunset.
Every story can spin an alternate ending. Every story can be rewritten.
What I needed was my detox-shake Hercules. My Rehab Hero.
Enter Julia Avery.
“Seriously, that place is poison to you,” Julia said late last night, full-screen on FaceTime. “Your guy is poison to you. As long as you keep protecting him, it won’t stop, Sam.”
“But you don’t get it. It’s not Nick’s fault. It’s the mountain. It’s the Maudit.”
Silence. A coupla seconds too long for comfort.
“If you could just hear yourself . . .”
I couldn’t tell her. I hadda show her.
I walked to the hall. Warily, I steadied myself on the doorpost, leaned forward above the stairwell, tilted my head to listen.
One earplug out, but still in the other Julia saying, “Seriously, you gotta end this, before it’s too late. You gotta get out of there.”
Silence.
Profound, monumental silence. Roaring on the lower floor. I tried not to move, tried to hold my breath. You could feel Nick before you could hear him. All at once, the stairwell’s magnetic suction. The expanding depth. Wobbling. Shooting at me. The optical illusion of a terrible height. The cognitive experience of something unspeakable.
As quietly as possible I tiptoed back to the living room. Ramses, left forepaw all bandaged up, eyes wide, looked past me to the door. I tried to check the dizziness by fixing my gaze back on Julia, my tiny avatar-sister, but my eyes were burning and she was all blurry.
“Bro, what’s the mat—Are you crying?”
And me with my iPhone at arm’s length, I put it on selfie mode, just me looking at me as I put a shaking finger to my lips.
“Sam, what’s going on?”
I put the phone on the mantelpiece and slid a tealight holder in front of it to keep it upright, with the cam’s eye facing the living room. Checked the composition. I brought Louise and Harald’s postcard and the vase with dried alpenroses closer. A cluster of domestic inconspicuousness. If you didn’t know the iPhone was there, you wouldn’t know the iPhone was there.
In my ear, Julia saying, “Where is Nick, by the way?”
The house shook. The screen glitched.
Ramses disappeared with a nervous hop, skip, and jump via the stairwell to the attic.
Julia said, “What was that?”
And me whispering, “That was Nick.”
He entered the room.
Julia in my ear, “Sam, what’s going on? What’s going on?”
“Hello, Sam,” Nick said.
He was smiling, a Cheshire Cat smile, stretching the complex puzzle of scars and fault lines on his face all the way to his ears. His left eye was bloodshot and there was an ugly, scabbed cut on his lower lip. I looked at it, doing my best to remain undaunted by the dramatic change in atmospheric pressure his arrival had brought about. My fingertips, my lips, my ears became numb. A dull pain was pressing against my eardrums and the backs of my eyeballs.
Something was wrong. This was not the usual way the Maudit affected me. This was worse. Way worse.
Julia was a gasp, a call, a gust of wind in the distance. “Run away! Run away, Sam, now!”
Nick came at me. All the hairs on my body jumped to attention with sizzling, static sparks. Everything in the chalet, every object and its spatial proportions, the shadows and the highlights, seemed to bend toward me, their glowing focal point. My instincts were screaming Run!, screaming Get out of there while you still can!, but I didn’t run. Some kind of fatalistic metalogic took over and whispered to me what every addict knows: cold turkey is pie in the sky. Every shooter mainlines that needle one more time. Just one last time, then I’ll quit.