From the grandmother of the owner of a teahouse in the Manaslu Himal region, Nora first hears of the monastery. The grandmother is tiny and ancient, her spindly limbs making her wrinkled hands and feet appear overlarge, her face as creased and brown as a walnut shell with a kindly face carved into it.
Despite her age, the old woman’s eyes are still young, still bright. She speaks no English, and Nora speaks little Nepali, but somehow the two manage to communicate.
Nora conveys her story to the old woman, and the old woman, in turn, tells Nora about the monastery in the mountains. There she will find what she is looking for.
The encounter, although certain details of it stand out starkly in Nora’s mind, now seems like little more than a dream. As does the solitary trek into the mountains, the lush greenery gradually giving way to rockier outcrops, the air becoming thinner and colder the higher she climbs.
Had she carried provisions on her journey? Did she have a tent? The answer must be yes, but she can’t remember.
One thing she does remember, though, is fighting off the wolves.
She has been trekking for five days, perhaps a week. She is nearing the summit—she must be—but she is also nearing exhaustion. She builds her camp in the shelter of some rocks and is sitting beside the fire, warming herself. The land around her is dark and silent, though the moon and stars, unsullied by light pollution, bathe the surrounding snowcaps in a minty-blue luminescence. The first signs that she is not alone are the glints of light she sees in the darkness, which she initially thinks are fireflies. Then she realizes that the lights are in pairs, and suddenly it occurs to her what they really are.
Eyes.
Sitting up a little straighter, heart thumping hard, she reaches for a length of burning wood. Drawing it from the fire, she stands up slowly—and all at once, as if knowing that their presence has been detected, the glints of light converge on her as the wolves close in.
Nora can hear them, growling softly in the darkness. She sweeps her gaze from left to right, counting the eyes. Seven pairs. Seven wolves.
A pack.
With a snarl, two of the animals rush forward. Nora swings the burning brand, a slash of orange flame in the darkness. One of the wolves yowls and veers away. The other skids to a halt at the edge of the firelight.
It is lean, its fur pale, its jowls crinkled back to reveal long yellow teeth. It snaps at the flame, but when Nora thrusts the brand forward again, it yelps and retreats.
Holding the flaming branch at arm’s length, moving it slowly from side to side, she wonders what to do. Should she yell at the wolves in the hope they will take fright and flee, or should she remain silent? Should she turn aggressor, rush at them with the brand, or stay where she is, close to the fire?
In the end she decides that discretion is the better part of valor—
Or does she? Is that really how it happened?
Looking back now, Nora couldn’t rightly remember the outcome of the encounter. She had a vague notion that the wolves had stuck around for a while, and then, discouraged by the fire, had slunk away, never to return.
And after they had gone? What had happened then?
“Come on, you idiot, remember,” she muttered.
But she couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried, and in the end she decided to move on. Decided to concentrate on the monastery itself, and what had happened when she had finally got there.
She tried to picture her arrival, but all she could remember was collapsing on the steps, half-dead with hunger and exhaustion. But after trekking all that way, had she really been unable to make the final effort to climb those steps to the top and knock on the heavy wooden doors? It seemed unlikely, even a tad melodramatic.
She screwed her eyes tightly closed in the hope that darkness would let her unearth the memories.
She sees the huge double doors of the monastery opening, orange-clad monks hurrying down the steps toward her, lifting her up, carrying her inside. She is delirious, only half-aware of her surroundings. The monks tend to her. They nurse her back to health.
And after that …
After that …
She trains with them. They teach her how to manipulate shadows. How to forge weapons out of darkness. How to—
No!
Her own denial shocked her. Her eyes snapped open. Something inside—something that seemed, for a split second, as if it was independent of her—recoiled. Nora felt overwhelmed by panic, felt her mind attempting to backtrack. Once again she thought of wallpaper covering a crack-filled wall, hiding a multitude of sins.
But something nagged at her. Something about her own story. Something that simply wasn’t right.
It had to do with when she’d been a little girl. To do with something she’d done. Something she’d liked.
So why did she have a sudden memory, dredged from deep within her, of sitting in a dark place?
She probed at the memory, focusing on that dark place in particular. Could it have been … a wardrobe? Yes! But why did she have a memory of sitting huddled in a wardrobe, scared and alone, wishing she could be invisible, finding comfort from books she read by the glow of a flashlight?
No, not books …
Comics!
Yes! Comics! She loves them, doesn’t she? Her mother disapproves, but Nora reads them anyway. She sneaks them into the house, conceals them wherever she can find hiding places—behind the wardrobe, under her thin, ill-fitting bedroom carpet …
“Oh!”
Once again Nora snapped back to the present. The recollection was so vivid she was amazed she hadn’t remembered it before, was amazed that she could ever have forgotten.
Even now, though, she sensed her mind trying to squirm away from the subject. Saw the brightly colored comic-book panels—such an escape from her own miserable existence—blurring and fading in her mind’s eye, as if some part of her brain was attempting to deny her access to her past.
She concentrated again, concentrated hard, squeezing her eyes shut, screwing up her face until the comics came back into focus, and with them particular images, particular stories, popped like hatchlings from her memory.…
Her heart thundered and her breath hitched in her throat.
It was impossible, but at the same time she knew that it wasn’t. The past she remembered, the death of her parents, the monastery in Nepal …
It wasn’t her past. It wasn’t real.
Bruce Wayne’s parents had been shot by a mugger in an alley, leading to him becoming Batman. Danny Rand had learned his skills in a mountaintop monastery after fleeing a pack of wolves and later became Iron Fist. She had adopted their stories as her own.
And don’t forget Doctor Strange, an insidious little voice muttered. He, too, had studied the mystic arts in some mountaintop monastery in Asia, hadn’t he?
“Holy shit,” she whispered.