I whispered, “What do we do now?”
Cécile stared past me, down the stairs, and with hollow eyes and trembling lips whispered, “Go look.”
I put one foot on the top stair. Forced the other one a step lower. Stood still, undecidedly.
Whispered, “I’m too scared.”
The problem was the sound we’d heard. That bang. First the bang, massive and dull. A sound you could interpret in any number of ways. A bowling ball falling onto a carpet. An avalanche shaken loose high up the slopes above the chalet. A body rolling off a bed.
Then a couple of thundering bursts, vivid and sharp, and there was no misunderstanding this. A fist banging against the shutters downstairs. Against the closed panel doors in front of the room where Nick was sleeping. Or had been sleeping.
The problem was, you didn’t know whether someone was trying to get in or get out.
“If that’s Nick, then he’s already opened the terrace doors.” Cécile, her breath halting gasps of escaped air, said, “It couldn’t be anyone else besides Nick, could it?”
More bangs. Hard. Loud. Compelling.
In the ensuing silence, the yodel music had lost all its treacly jolliness. It now sounded only screechy. Eerie. In the hall, much further from the source, the lederhosen trio’s harmonies were disintegrating into an uncanny dissonance. It made you flinch. It made you shiver. Till you realized the cacophony was entering the chalet through the ether, not through the speakers.
Only then did it register that here in the hall you could hear the groaning of the roof. The storm’s infectious wailing.
Once you’d heard it, you couldn’t unhear it. Then it started to imprint its message into your brain, so deep that you couldn’t reach.
Downstairs, nothing. Only the dark.
I had to be quick. There were no other options. I licked my lips and whispered, “Okay, let’s go look.”
So I go down the stairs, as quietly and as quickly as I can. Downstairs, the hall was empty. The door to the bedroom shut. At the top of the stairs, Cécile, she hadn’t budged. I gestured to her to join me, mimed Come on, but she just stood there, staring down. Chin slightly up. Lips parted.
My concern for Nick overpowered my fear, so I walked on down the hall. Down here our auditory eclipse wavered even more. Here, the yodeling and the Morose morphed into an utterly off-key ensemble, a depraved, perverse sound, which made you aware of sounds beyond sounds, sounds not suitable for human consumption.
I listened at the door. Nothing. A bulging nothing. An enormous nothing.
I opened the door.
A wet, icy cold wave hit me in the face.
The room was as good as dark, but in the light coming from upstairs, I saw Nick standing in front of the closed shutters. Without his Beats.
The bandages hung in loops around his neck.
I was riveted to the ground. The cold in my face might have been just an illusion of the glacier wind, an echo of the storm in a hidden valley—but what was melting on my shoulders and cheekbones was powder snow, and that was real. Real.
Suddenly you knew you were being watched.
I spun around. No one in the hall. Only shadows.
And me in a rush back to the stairs. Expecting Cécile to be staring downstairs, but she was gone. The hall upstairs was also empty.
“Cécile!” I hissed. Looking over my shoulder, then up again, louder this time. “Cécile!”
Only the yodeling. The screaming of the dead.
My legs, I had no control over them anymore. They brought me back to the bedroom. Back into the darkness. Beyond the darkness, the screaming got louder.
Nick was gone.
Where he’d just been standing, there now were only the shutters. I rubbed my eyes. Big, dancing spots of nothing. Suddenly my heartbeat a rumbling drumroll. My breath, AWOL. I couldn’t think straight anymore. Me, reduced to sheer reactive action.
The darkness came at me.
The doorpost beat an almost imperceptible rhythm under my fingertips. The wood trembling from the screams coming through the walls. Hypnotizing me.
Each step brought you deeper into the bedroom. With each step, you saw more dark space devoid of Nick.
The problem was you didn’t know whether you had to protect Nick from the Morose or yourself from Nick, or all of us from some invisible thing.
One step deeper.
I called out, “Nick?”
No answer.
The bathroom. That was the only possibility. That, or under the bed.
The door to the bathroom stood open.
Inside, it was dark.
And in that dark, there were shapes.
I stared at them, waiting for my eyes to adjust. Expecting to see Nick’s shape standing there.
The bathroom was full of Nick’s shapes.
Human shapes, motionless, side by side. At least eight. Or a dozen.
There were people in the bathroom.
I blinked my eyes and the people, they were now closer, the two in front were standing in the doorway, and after that—a hole in my memory. A blinding flash, as if my brain had short-circuited. What I do remember is that I Usain Bolted through the hall, that I stumbled up the stairs, that I grazed the skin off my shin against a step, that I reached the upstairs hall. Light, light, welcome light. Light to bask in. Music to bask in. It drowned out everything else here, and that was good, cuz suddenly electricity was flowing through my brain stem again, all those cells suddenly glowing with regained life, and I thought, Those people downstairs. The people in the bathroom. What the fuck was that?
And where’s Nick?
And where the fuck is Cécile?
Into the living room. No Cécile. Only the fire, crackling softly. Considered taking a log out with the tongs and dropping it onto the carpet so we’d be free of this business tout de suite.
Cécile. I hadda find her.
Christ, the people in the bathroom. Those people. Those people!
All the outside doors were shut. Cécile’s shoes, still in the hall, drying next to mine. No one had run away. The kitchen. Empty. Ran to the bathroom on the ground floor. Empty. The toilet, dark and empty.
Upstairs. ’Course, her own room. After her bath, she’d put all her stuff up in the attic. The stairwell narrow, a heavy wooden ladder leading up. Steep. Dark. But there was a light on upstairs. Sound of a continuous weather report blaring out of the small, old-fashioned TV set. More auditory eclipse.
And me up the ladder.
In the attic’s vestibule only the dim, phantom shape of the drying rack. The ironing board. The light shone from behind the wall of the sleeping area. Boards cracked when you shifted your weight on them.