It was just a bird. No white, cataract eyes. No clotted blood on the beak indicating that she was dead already. None of that stuff, but still your heart was thumping in your throat. Even if you bought all that karmic shit and accepted that only what’s virtuous lived on in these birds, you still got goose bumps looking at one.
Unnatural, I thought. There was something unnatural about the way it quietly sat there, staring at us. Something almost sacral.
Except that I got the feeling it was ogling our eyes like a seagull would ogle a pile of oysters.
“How do you know it’s her?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” Maria said. “Dead or alive, a mother-in-law always has her ways of showing she doesn’t like you.”
I turned to her. “Have you ever seen her echo?”
The way she tightened her lips into a pale stripe, you would have thought she was through talking. But she spoke anyway. “Once.”
That’s all she would say, no matter how much I insisted.
We really had to leave now, she said. The storm could break loose any minute, and she didn’t want to be responsible if we were still out on the street. But before we even had our coats on, Maria grasped me tight, and now there was heartfelt fear in her eyes.
“Please, take him away from here.” Those eyes big and round and sparkling gray, she implored, “That friend of yours. I don’t know how much longer he’ll be safe here. Take him to the valley and stay away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but what exactly do you mean by that?”
“He’s been up there. No one who goes up there ever comes back. He brought the Maudit into our midst, and ever since, the whole community has been disrupted. Nature has been disrupted. And it’s all concentrated around your house, or wherever your friend has been seen.”
I could still hear Maria, but my eyes were staring into the dim light in the hall.
All those sounds you could constantly hear on the edge of your auditory range.
All those motions you could constantly see just beyond the corners of your eyes.
Constantly around you, the dead. Always. Everywhere. You couldn’t see them, but you could feel them. Like walking through a spider’s web in an autumn forest.
Julia’s screaming on FaceTime: Who is that woman? Who is that woman in the corner behind you?
Maria’s hands, pale and cold, closed around mine. “I’m telling you this because I’m also an outsider. Even after twenty-three years they don’t see you as one of their own. I know what people here think about foreigners. When people are scared, they react viscerally. But their fear is real.” Maria, she shook my hands firmly. “Some people in the WhatsApp group are calling for action. There’s currently a stalemate. But I don’t know how long sentiments will keep up. If something were to happen . . .”
I said I’d take her advice to heart. “Thank you for not, uh . . . reacting viscerally.”
Maria laughed, but there was something sad about her eyes. “Querido,” she said, “eu sou Portuguesa.”
10
Outside, it was dusky all over. Dusky and snowy. The world outside of Maria’s chalet a colorless cold. What used to be the Focus was now a four-door igloo by the sidewalk. I was shocked by the amount of snow that had built up in such a short time.
As soon as Maria had shut the door behind us, the storm had me on my knees. My arm hooked around the steep rock walkway’s balustrade, the other around Cécile’s shoulders, gusts of snow smacked me in the face and took my breath away. Snow and dark and Cécile and me, our skin, our eyes, the details of the world around us an indistinguishable blur. The roaring of the wind and, up there, unmistakable, echoes. I plopped down behind the wheel, pulled the door shut. Cécile did the same on her side, all of it now shut out.
The windows started to fog up almost immediately. I fired up the engine, turned the fans on hot and high. Let the windshield wipers swish, swish, swish two semicircles in the snow. With nothing else out there in the dark, I turned on the brights, but that turned visibility to subzero, so I switched back to heads.
When I turned onto the road with crunching rubber, I actually wanted to ask Cécile what she thought about the whole story, but one sideways glance and it was clear that we were beyond headspace for a debriefing. I couldn’t blame her. After all of this, my own Manipura needed some management, too.
I reached forward and wiped a peephole on the windshield with my sleeve.
“Please drive carefully,” Cécile said. “Especially in the turns. You can steer all you like in this weather, but the car can still slide straight on into a snowbank. Or off a cliff.”
The byway was diametrically opposed to how you’d like a byway to be. Unpaved. A quarter inch wider than the Focus. Beyond the last chalets, it plowed through a fallow slope, probably used as a piste in winter. To your right, safe and rising steeply. To your left, just as steep, but down. If you went into a skid here, the barbed wire wouldn’t be enough to keep you from a backyard visit to an empty vacation chalet a hundred yards below.
We crawled up, snowflake by snowflake.
About a third of a mile beyond the village, the leaning pylon of a cableway loomed up. The cables were swaying drunkenly in the wind. Or maybe it was an optical illusion. Everything was moving, layer upon layer of swirling snow that swallowed up even the last remaining light. Behind it, the woods, nothing more than a massive, dark downward-sloping streak.
Can’t tell you why, but I stopped the car.
“What are you doing?” Cécile asked.
It was like something weird had blown into the atmosphere. A held-breath feeling of danger that kept me from driving on. I looked out the side window. Suddenly, my skin started to crawl. Started to tingle, as if invisible fingertips were sliding softly over it. All at once, the isolated intimacy of the car too oppressive, and I opened the door. Snow lashed my face.
Behind me Cécile, alarmed, “Hey, what are you doing?”
Can’t tell you why, but in some funny way it cheered me up to set foot into the snow.
For a brief moment the storm seemed to subside. I watched my breath freezing up into little clouds. Listened, fascinated, to the tempting darkness.
From the far faraway, it was coming nigh.
It had found us.
It started with a scream. Then a second. And a third. And a fourth. Till a whole chorus of lamentation was unleashed upon us from everywhere at once. Saying it made the hairs on my neck stand up wouldn’t be a cliché but a total cliché soufflé, but sho’nuff that’s what happened. It penetrated every pore on my skin. Every fiber in my body. There was a dissonance to it that made every axon in my nervous system go haywire. It was the kind of wailing that would make wolves cower away with their tails between their legs. So much pain, so much suffering, so much hatred, and so much hollowness: only the dead could cry like that.
It was the screaming of hundreds. Of thousands.
The Morose.
Cécile, she reached over her cast arm, dragged me back into the car and slammed the door shut. “Step on it,” she said.