Nick, miserable, shoulders drooping, looked down and said, “I promise.”
I turned to the door and started to put on the headphones, but Nick said, “Sam?”
I looked around.
“Please don’t go. This is crazy. Stay here with me.”
I shook my head slowly. Opened the door and didn’t shrink back from the fierce wind.
“But Sam?”
“What?”
“Be careful out there.”
I didn’t say anything, lowered the Beats cushions over my ears and went outside.
14
The moment when I stepped off the porch, walked up to the edge of the darkness, and sank to my knees in an absolute wasteland of snowbanks, with Nick’s ’80s playlist in my headphones, felt like the greatest liberation of my life. The first steps you took through the haze of blizzarding snowflakes, the bashing, lashing, thrashing of the wind immediately yanking your hood off and Bonnie Tyler rasping “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at full volume, it was—in a word—sensational. Maybe it was because, following Cécile’s trail through the icy landscape of my sudden doubts—who am I to miss a metaphor when I see one—the field of possibilities was now wide open. Insecurity is also power. Doubts give you the opportunity to refashion the fundament under your life. Whatever it was, the second I felt the storm biting into my cheeks I was alive and kicking.
Cécile’s traces weren’t simply the delicate footprints of her sneakers. The snow’s depth and the way you had to drag your feet through it made them look like a yeti had walked there. Already filling up with snow, they were only vaguely distinguishable. Hunched forward, I followed them around the corner. Dark, shifting forms loomed up in the swirling drift, then disappeared again. Gradually your eyes adjusted and, left and right, you could now make out the steep mountain slopes and larches, practically buried under the snow. The trail zigzagged past Castle Rock to the edge of the woods and disappeared into the wilderness.
“Cécile!” I shouted. “Cécile, come back!”
You had to yank Bonnie Tyler off your ears in order to listen, but the only thing that cried back was the Morose. The echoes sounded so close that they burned into you like acid, eating into your cognitive abilities and hollowing out your rational thinking.
Just as I was about to rebury my ears under the leather cushions, I saw something flash, out of the corner of my eye. I froze. Waited. Stared dead ahead.
There it was again. A falling flash. A falling scream. Swallowed by the snow.
Again. And again. It was all over the place.
And real close. Just behind the first snowbanks, but if you looked at them, they disappeared before your very eyes.
What you’ll hear screaming tonight, Maria had said, is all the misery of everyone who ever lost or gave their lives up there.
Staring into the dark, I tried convincing myself that they’d only come to warm themselves with my life. According to Maria, they only wanted to embrace you. Because they were so cold. So terribly kalt . . . kalt . . . kalt . . .
The people in the bathroom, I thought. That was them. They were in the chalet. The bathroom was full of them.
This was the kind of old-fashioned horror story I woulda dug when I was a kid. Nine years old, begging my grandpa to make his stories even creepier and bloodier, knowing it was more than just the wolves and the shrieking of the wind howling out there. This was your payoff. The story you’d been waiting for since you were a boy. If you knew how these stories went, you’d accept that Maria’s echoes really were the lost souls of people drawn to the mountain where they had died. Then you’d accept that, if the wind carried their sad, flickering consciousness out of that valley and into the village, it was reasonable to assume that they could sense the Maudit in Nick.
That’s why they wanted to warm themselves with our chalet.
And me, I knew how these stories went. If you accepted that echoes were what remained after you’d reincarnated all the good out of a corpse, then you knew that it wouldn’t end with them just warming themselves.
Staring into the dark, frozen in Cécile’s yeti trail, I thought, Run away. Go back. You’ve got your credit card. You’ve got your life. If need be, wade through the snow all the way down to where the roads are clear and hitchhike to the nearest airport.
And yet, when I started to move, my feet didn’t turn around but only led me deeper into the night. Because, sometimes, you knew there was a layer buried underneath that story.
A good horror story didn’t end with death but with something worse.
I followed Cécile’s trail into the wilderness, using the pale light of Nick’s phone. There, with Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” in my ears and finally enough distance between me and the chalet to let the thoughts in, I heard her uttering the worst possible option: Your boyfriend is a mass murderer. Cécile’s voice, shrill like the wind itself: The boyfriend is blind, because the boyfriend is out of range.
Once the seed had been planted, you couldn’t think about anything else.
Had I been blind?
Was Cécile right?
The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind that Nick could have had anything to do with what happened that night at the AMC. Truth is, with everything that happened since, I’d almost forgotten about the whole thing. When some big government gun had squashed down the rumor of biological terrorism after a coupla days, even the talk shows had dropped the subject. Thirty dead due to some seizure-inducing hospital bacteria outbreak scored less than a desert jihadi with a PhD in virology. What stuck the most in my mind was Nick emailing that he’d been placed in quarantine in the ICU cuz they wanted to test him for suspicious symptoms. But that had just been protocol.
They hadn’t suspected any involvement.
If there’d been even the slightest suspicion that Nick had been patient zero, he would never have been sent home a week later with a bunch of flowers and a Get Well Soon card.
Right. Except that his doctors wouldn’t go looking for involvement in the realm of the supernatural.
With Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” in my ears, I felt my lips drying up in the freezing cold. Could what Cécile had claimed be true? Was it possible that Nick was responsible for thirty deaths?
Plowing through the snow, each time I shouted Cécile’s name, each time I briefly took the headphones off my ears in order to listen, I heard the echoes falling closer. Sometimes I saw them in my peripheral vision, standing between the trees and staring at me with hollow, gaping eyes. And each time I looked away and advanced deeper into the wilderness.
The echoes didn’t scare me anymore.