Nick grinned. “Small, fragile Sam.”
He put his arms around me, and just for a sec it was like I could look through the world and see the world beyond it, in which the chalet was spinning in a cold, inert universe.
And Julia, a screaming voice in my ear: “Who is that woman? Who is that woman in the corner behind you?”
But that caused me only a vague semblance of alarm, because there was no woman, there was only Nick, his aroma an overwhelming Nick in my nostrils, and I inhaled it deeply when—kaboom!—a new shock wave shook the chalet, foundation to roof. A high-pitched flash of electricity, Julia’s scream amplified to a deafening beehive, and all the lights went out. My iPhone screen shattered. The microwave in the kitchen crashed onto the floor. A penetrating burning smell as the router shorted out.
Julia’s voice had fallen still.
Nick, a storm front in the dark of the earth, he said, “You and me, Sam. We don’t need anybody else.”
3
That was yesterday, and that’s why I was now tiptoeing my way through the hall. Bundled up in warm clothes. Pulling on my Ralph Laurens. In my head, Julia. I lay awake all night, wide-eyed in the dark, trapped under Nick’s muscle-bound arm. He slept like a pit bull guarding a bone, or a dragon guarding a ruby. Me dead worried about Julia. Julia most probably dead worried about me, but no means whatsoever of sending her an SOS, with our Wi-Fi severed. My phone—dear, dear iPhone—RIP. The Maudit had cut me off from the outside world. Thank your lucky strikes there were spare fuses for the power unit or we would have been blasted all the way back to the Middle Ages.
And yep, despite everything, still worried sick about Nick, cuz where did he get those wounds? That bar fight lip, that zombie eye? Did the shock wave from the Maudit taking things out of his hands pop a vein in his retina? What if next time it pops a vein in his brain?
I must have fallen asleep after all, and when I woke up I knew it was too late. I knew, then, that up there in the valley, something had also been woken up.
Then I heard the wind and remembered what Louetta had told me.
I had to let Julia know I was okay—okayish—but that we needed help. And fast.
So I fish the SIM out of my iPhone’s carcass so I can stick it into Nick’s phone and use his 4G, except for the minor detail that it’s in a pocket that happens to belong to his sweatpants, which are now pacing up and down in front of the large window.
No way was I gonna ask him could I please borrow his phone, with him like that. Like, Hey, just wanna Candy Crush Friends Saga for a minute, cool?
And no way was I going to pickpocket him, with him like that, either.
So I pulled on my jacket. Pushed out of my mind the thought that he might stop me. That he’d suddenly stare at me with those frigid eyes and demand to know where I thought I was going with that MacBook Air under my arm.
With the aftershocks of his intoxication still reverberating in my body, I wasn’t sure I could keep myself under control.
Stood there for a coupla secs, my hand on the door handle, looking at him over by the window, hypnotized. Something on the inside of my heart was trying to gnaw its way out with its little teeth, but I staved it off.
Then I sneaked out, shut the door behind me, and locked it.
4
Outside it was worse. Way worse.
I hadn’t even gotten halfway to the village before I wished I’d stayed home. The valley was on the verge of a panic attack. The mountains seemed to have been disjointed. The sky rocked. The cold unhinged. There are November mornings when the cold is clear, crackling, and crisp, but this cold was sticky, syrupy, clung to you. Like it was begging you for help. You, the first organism to have crossed its path, and would you please take it with you and protect it from what’s about to happen, because that was much, much worse than the cold itself.
Jesus. The Morose hadn’t even got started yet and my metaphors were already going haywire. I squeezed my eyes shut. Opened them. Hurried on.
And fuck.
Fuck!
Something was wrong with my head.
I stood still. Looked around.
Over there. Or . . .
I got the claustrophobic feeling that I was being stared back at from everywhere around me. The steep slopes, the gloomy sky, everything seemed nasty and horrid. My back was quivering with electricity. What had gotten into me?
My gaze shot upward. My whole body tensed up.
It wasn’t my imagination! Again, one of those human cries. I was sure I’d heard it. I was sure I’d seen it. Something flashing through the sky in a straight line. Just beyond the peripheries of my perception—like my brain was one step too late in registering it.
I peered at the passing clouds, so antsy and intense it was like someone’d blow-dried my retinas.
There, again. And there.
The clouds were laden with cries, as if a massive downpour was coming.
What was it the old mountain folk used to say? When the Morose began, you heard the valley bewailing the death of the world.
And Louetta Molignon: Then several voices answered, thin and distant and way up high. It still sounded like a cry for help, but suddenly your grandfather wasn’t sure anymore that they’d been calling his name or that it was Ambroise and Nicolas who were calling out there.
With an increasing chill engulfing my whole body, I was no longer thinking of local meteorological phenomena or how the tunnel-shaped valley functioned as a natural amplifier for the wind’s fluctuating wails.
I was thinking of what Louetta had said, that no one who’d ever heard the Morose had lived to tell the tale.
Thinking: Outer frequencies. Outer frequencies are what save you in Grimentz. Everything scatters in the end. Everything dies down.
Still, I was thinking about people who disappeared in the night, under the wind’s spell. About the eerie screaming from the valley, which, if its poison penetrated your spirit deeply enough, would start sounding as enticing as the Sirens’ call.
About violence. About disease. About insanity.
About Louetta, who’d said: I heard the story of a little girl who was hiding from her mother in a barn when the Morose hit, and she never spoke another word till she was on her deathbed, sixty years later.
All those things were real.
Why didn’t I turn around then and go back to the chalet, take Nick’s Focus and clear out? Just beat it? I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind.
But I couldn’t do it. Because of Nick.
I loved him, even if I’d become addicted to his power.
That thing in the chalet isn’t Nick anymore. The Maudit is stealing his show. Do you really think you’ll get to see Nick again after today?
I shivered and pushed the thought away, but a new echo of a cry dying down in the wind made me flinch. Suddenly furious, I looked at the sky and yelled, “Fuck the motherfucking fuck off!”