I gaped at her in astonishment. Sluggish and with a feeble smile, as if I’d just come out of sedation, I said, “Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!”
And whap—pimp slap. Me bouncing off the car door, as far from Cécile as I could get, shouting, “Dude, what’d you do that for?”
“Just to make sure.” She pressed the auto door lock button. Pressed the radio button, Muse blaring at us through the speakers. Shouted, “Now step on it!”
She turned the volume all the way up.
So I slammed my foot down. Rear wheels whizzing round, slipping, spewing fountains of snow. Then the tires got a grip and we shot forward.
We fled through the dark with a horde of banshees on our tails.
The screaming gnawed its way into you, despite the engine’s roaring. Despite Muse, our artificial defensive perimeter. It gnawed your mind away. Stubbed it out. The screaming dead. The wailing dead.
If these were the outer frequencies, I shuddered to think what it would be like up there.
Cécile screamed, “Look out!”
My left wheel ricochets off a bump and shoots to the left. I take my foot off the gas, grip the wheel tight till I feel the Focus is back on course, then put my foot back on the pedal, too fast and too deep. Us in a skid again and Cécile yelling. Cécile, gripping the door handle and shouting, “Oh my god, look at that! Look at that!”
I couldn’t see anything, or maybe I did see something right then, something I didn’t want to see, so I only saw flying snow, only the road back in view and my own breath—that’s how cold it was inside the Focus.
Mouth on strike, I cannonballed us down the mountain and somehow managed to get the car onto the road to Hill House without trading in our souls.
“When we get inside,” I shouted, so she could hear what I was saying, “when we get in, the first thing we do is turn on the stereo and the TV.” I shouted, “Then we shutter ourselves in.” Shouted, “You do the kitchen and upstairs, the attic. I’ll do downstairs. We’ll do the living room and terrace doors together. And keep shouting!” The Focus bumping over the bridge, I shouted, “I want to hear you, okay?”
Okay. She nodded. Good.
Hill House loomed up out of the snow like a nightmare.
I parked right in front of the porch steps. Kept the motor running. Let Muse blast away.
“Okay,” I shouted. “I count to three, then we run.”
I thought, Cut engine. Open door. Run.
Thought, Engine. Door. Run.
Cécile, she called, “What do we do against the sound?”
“Cover your ears and sing.”
“What?”
“Sing!”
“Sing what?”
“What difference does it make? ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for all I care. If you sing, you listen to your own voice and not to what’s out there screaming!”
I counted down, three, two, one, and we were off.
And fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck!
The first leak in my watertight plan: the moment I turned the car key, Muse fell silent and the night’s wailing flared up and I needed my hands for, like, everything.
I started to sing, a loud and agitated “Yalalalala!” Seriously. That was the extent of my originality. It wasn’t even melodic.
’Course Cécile was way gone by now.
After wiggling out of my seatbelt, after wiggling myself out of the car, all the sounds started to intermingle. My song, my yalalalala, the wailing chorus of echoes, Cécile’s surprisingly euphonic “I see a little silhouetto of a man”—a wall of sound igniting a chain reaction that made you forget everything else. Not even that different from the way the Maudit took possession of Nick. The slamming of the car door. The roaring of the wind. Sound that bewitched you.
Cécile’s superb soprano, “Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me!”
Our head, the host. We, the possessed.
That’s how we made it to the front door. That’s how we made it in. And that’s how we somehow managed to carry out our plan. To shut out the sound. To insulate the chalet by drowning it out with might and main.
The TV on SF1, continuous news voices. The stereo pumping some French pop song. Volume all the way up.
Running blindly from room to room, it was like the vibrating air in the chalet was supercharged. All the lights on to dispel the darkness from every corner. Listening everywhere for traces of screaming. Anywhere you’d open a window in order to close its shutters, anywhere it would blow in with the wind. Everywhere, wham, the exorcism.
Oh yeah, and Nick.
Ten out of ten on the freaky fucked-up scale: when I went into the pitch-black bedroom, he was sitting straight up in bed. Eyes shut. Beats still on his ears, but his head tilted, like he was listening.
On the bandages, that smiley mouth.
I licked my lips and said, “Nick?”
Nothing. I could just push him back gently and he stayed asleep as if nothing had happened. But he had been sitting straight upright. I hadn’t imagined that.
Cécile and me, we bumped into each other in the living room, and after everything there had been shut tight too, we stared at each other. Listened. For dying screams dans la marge de la marge. In the extreme outer frequencies. Nothing. Right?
Nothing.
And exhale.
11
Right, so we’re now jumping four hours into the future so I can tell you about a loud bang. Spoiler alert: that evening at nine, that bang would announce the end of my life as I knew it. And I wonder, could I have foreseen anything in the hours in between? Caught a glimpse of that black aura as a precursor of how unavoidably we were headed for disaster?
At six I was in the kitchen Antonio Carluccio-ing a veggie lasagna all’uovo. Tomatoes/zucchini/goat cheese. Cécile at the kitchen table, hair in a towel turban cuz her modus operandi for processing the preceding events was to seclude herself and take a long, hot bath. Face like the “Before” photo in a Prozac ad. Looking back now, that coulda been a hint. But what could I have done? Her face had looked like the “Before” photo in a Prozac ad all day.
We ate at seven. Ramses under the couch in the living room, flattened in the corner, eyes big and scared, and no matter how much I here-kitty-kittied him, no matter how much I tried sucking up to him with Sheba Fresh & Fine, he absolutely refused to come out. Bzzz—hello-o!—hint, hint. Think I got it? Nope. Simply thought he was hiding from those dying screams coming from the mountains.
At eight we were sitting by the hearth, the fire burning. Cécile and me alone and afraid in a house full of shadows and too many dark spaces where you constantly thought you saw something flash by out of the corner of your eye. By this point it was almost funny. I found a radio station that played nonstop yodel music. Cécile told the story of a Tyrolean who’d showed off his yodeling skills under a cliff and got buried under sixty tons of limestone, drilled off by the vibrations. With everything that was happening around you, the claustrophobia of the lockdown and the shuddering of the roof, you just hadda laugh. If you didn’t laugh, you’d join in the screaming with the chorus of echoes.
And then it was nine.
Then we heard the bang and the laughing was over.
12