And all of it through her headphones, of course. Ten to one they had noise cancellation.
Sipping lavender tea in Maria’s kitchen, all those closed shutters made you feel you were inside a coffin. On the dresser a birdcage; inside it the motionless shadow of an alpine chough staring at us. That bird staring and Maria saying that the valley above Grimentz had been a place of power from the get-go. That even in the Stone Age, the old Helvetians would bring their enemies up there. Their enemies and, when they finally got the picture, their elderly.
These elderlies, ’course they died up there.
And you can bet your ass one of them birds would be there in no time flat to make room for your soul to toodle-oo by snacking on your eyes. Whoosh, and your last breath, it doesn’t come from your frostbitten lips but from your empty eye sockets.
None of that was unique to this place, Maria said. This was just your standard mountain phenomenon. What this place got in the way of exclusivity was that, at that point, the souls had all been possessed by the Maudit.
At that point, the souls had been upgraded to immortality.
Those old-world Helvetians, their druids weren’t all that cuckoo. They’d known that in the spiritual evolution of man, there was a breakup. A postmortem polarization. Good and bad. Everything in you that had been good reincarnated in one of those birds. All you had to do was clear your life away on that mountain’s altar and you would rise up like a phoenix.
Free of sin. No luggage. And for good.
“What you saw this morning,” Maria said, “was a farewell ceremony.”
People always found ways to turn nature to their own advantage. To milk a miracle.
When the oldest villagers had the feeling they’d just about seen all there was to see, they chose to dress warmly and go for a stroll. One last pilgrimage. The ballad to a fulfilled life, in order for them to return as a patron saint. Not everyone, of course. It took a certain amount of self-sacrifice to give up your spot in paradise for a spot on your children’s gable front or mantelpiece. But each year, you always had a few.
“This morning, two have gone up,” Maria said. “The patriarch of the Gosselin family, who is eighty-seven years old but still mobile, and Muriel Solioz, the mother of a woman I clean for. An absolute darling, ninety-three just last week, and totally senile.”
“And you just . . . dumped them in the woods?” Cécile asked. “As in actually left them behind?” She made no effort to disguise her disgust. “I don’t know what’s more incredible, that you sacrifice your elderly or that you actually think they can reach that valley at their age. That’s a climb of more than 5,000 feet, in the worst possible conditions.”
“Let me tell you, that’s not even half of it,” Maria said. “Old Mrs. Solioz hasn’t been able to get out of bed without assistance for three years. I can personally vouch for that. But when Madame Ducourtil came into her room two days ago, she was on her feet at the window, looking up. Madame was calling out her mother’s name, and when she looked back she said, ‘It’s time to go.’ Then we knew that the Morose was upon us.” Maria, absentmindedly flipping her phone in her hands, seemed to look past us. “Well, and because of the birds, of course. They sense it too.”
You had to look at it like a ship waiting in port until the winds were favorable to sail out. The Morose, venturing into it was perilous . . . except if you wanted to go up.
If you wanted it to hypnotize you.
“Michel Gosselin was the first to leave, this morning,” Maria said. “After that, they pushed Mrs. Solioz in her wheelchair to the edge of the woods. I heard that she stood up, hugged her family, and walked away. It was beautiful.”
“How do you know all about it?” Cécile asked.
“The neighborhood app,” Maria said. She turned her phone screen toward Cécile and said, “News travels fast here.”
Sometime in the next few days, a chough would come and tap on the Ducourtils’ window. A Pyrrhocorax graculus. This bird, possessed with all the good in Mother Solioz, would bring prosperity to the family for the rest of their lives.
According to the superstition, that is.
And the bad?
That was left behind, up there.
It would resonate against the mountains like an echo.
“What you’ll hear screaming tonight,” Maria said, “is all the misery of everyone who ever lost or gave their lives up there.”
You could see them, Maria said, the screaming dead. You could see them falling. Out of the corner of your eye. The embodiments of human error. Crushed souls. Without hope, without love. All that remained of a person after their humanity had been slammed out of them. You could see them, but most of all, you could hear them. On restless nights, when storms raged in the mountains and conditions were the same as on the day they died, you could hear their dying screams even here in the village, in the clouds, against the slopes, in the valley.
Echoes, people called them here. Possessed by the Maudit, they dwelled in the valley, eternally drawn to the mountain. Sometimes they would come down and show themselves in places they held dear. A particular spot in the valley. Their childhood homes. But most of the time they would stay up there. Screaming their sins out at the gates of hell.
“During the Morose,” Maria said, “it gets worse. Then the wind has a way of blowing through the notch of the valley that makes it carry all those sounds.” Drinking steaming tea, Maria said, “Believe me. You’ve never heard anything like it.”
No matter how awful it got, if you listened to it long enough, it enchanted you. You got the irresistible urge to join them—their voices a siren song from the mountains.
“They say the dead want to embrace you,” Maria said. “That they want to warm themselves with your life. Because they’re so cold. So very cold.”
That was like a bullet in the head. Augustin’s phone call. Back in Amsterdam. In the middle of the night. That trembling, whispering voice: Kalt. Kalt. Kalt. The static on the line, like the wind on the glacier.
What Maria had told us, it was something out of a horror story. But in the coffin of Maria’s kitchen, with the rhythmic rattling of the heating and the radio blaring Schweizer spiel and the sporadic, almost imperceptible shuddering of the house in the storm, any horror story could be true.
I hadda clear my throat to get some sound going. Pointed to the motionless shadow in the birdcage and said, “May I ask you who that is?”
“That,” said Maria, “is Catherine Zufferey, Pascal’s mother.” She sniffed, then added, “She’s a real bitch.”
In English.
As if she was scared the li’l pecker would understand her, otherwise.
“Can I look at her?”
“Do as you please.”