I rolled over, struggling to breathe. There was blood in the snow; the puncture wound in my navel had opened again as I trekked along the ridge.
I don’t know where I am, I thought. Am I even going in the right direction?
Pain coursed like adrenaline through my system. Soon my breaths started coming in sizable, whooping gasps. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feed enough oxygen into my lungs.
—You can’t stay here, said Hannah.
It was the sound of her voice that made me realize I had been drifting off into a painless sleep. My eyes opened and the pain returned, roiling like a tropical storm in my guts. “Where are you?”
—You must get up, Tim. You can’t stay here. You’ll die here.
“I’m … already dead …”
Then—somehow—I was standing and halfway up the ridge. At one point, I paused and rested against a pylon of ice, shivering in the cold. The familiar bulge of my gear against my back was no longer there. I felt for the pack’s straps around my shoulders, but they were gone. I’d left my backpack somewhere.
Shit …
“No … no … no … no …”
Hugging myself, I stumbled out across the plateau and scanned the moonlit passage that wound through the mountainous terrain below. Every stone could have been my backpack. It was everywhere I looked.
—Up here, Tim.
Turning around, I saw Hannah standing at the pinnacle of the ridge, her body glowing with a fine, angelic aura. She wore the same white, billowy nightgown she wore that night I followed her from the caves, through the trees, and out to the highway, where I collapsed
and was eventually discovered and rescued. “Hannah …”
She descended the opposite side of the pinnacle. I cast one last glance at the passage before giving up on my gear and following her. I climbed the pinnacle and saw her shimmering visage float around the far side of the ridge. She was not heading back to Petras; even in my unreliable mental state I was able to understand that. Nevertheless, I descended the pinnacle and pursued her around the ridge.
10
“CAN’T.” I CRIED. I COLLAPSED IN THE SNOW FACE-
first and felt nothing
—Tim…
“No more.”
I was standing on the balcony of my Annapolis apartment overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. It was midday, and I could see a fleet of white sailboats motoring beneath the Bay Bridge. I was—I was—
—Just a bit farther, Hannah said. Come up to the ridge. “Can’t,” I insisted, grinding my teeth from the numbing pain. I curled into a fetal position in the snow. I was determined to stay in Annapolis, to watch the sailboats cut through the slate-colored waters of the bay …
—Come, she said, and you can touch me.
My eyelids fluttered. For a second, I thought I could actually see the sailboats, their masts rising like cavalry flags. But it was just snowcaps, countless snowcaps.
Above me, Hannah smiled, her skin radiating a tallow glow, her features pure and clean.
“Your hair … is short …” I grinned and it pained me to do it. “I … like it.”
—Come, she said and reached for me.
I touched her hand—her hand!— and felt her lift me off the ground. I dragged myself farther up the incline until my knees popped and my legs finally surrendered. In a jumble of skin and bones, I collapsed to the snow, panting. My body was freezing but soaked in sweat. I couldn’t breathe. With numb fingers, I located the zipper on my jacket, pulled it down. I popped open my shirt, buttons soaring through the black night, and exposed my chest. Beads of sweat coursed down my ribs, my forehead, freezing at the corners of my eyes.
“Can’t,” I mused. “Hannah … can’t… “
11
NO TIME. EARLY MORNING OR TWILIGHT—IT DIDN’T
matter. My eyelids gummy and nearly frozen, I pried them open to see a blurry figure advancing toward me. My vision was kaleidoscopic with snow blindness.
“Hannah …,” I rasped. My throat burned and I couldn’t focus.
The figure doubled, trebled, refused to center itself.
“Hannah …” I struggled. Then started coughing.
But it wasn’t Hannah. The figure was much bigger and darker than Hannah and walked with a noticeable limp.
Again, my heart began to race. My fingers tried to close into fists, but their tips had frozen to the ground, and I couldn’t get them loose.
The figure paused over me. I could smell old camphor and mothballs and stewed meats. I could smell the unmistakable scent of blood, too.
There were a series of tiny pops as I pulled my fingertips, now bleeding, from the ice. My hand shaking, I reached up to touch the bearded face. I tried to speak, although no words came out, and I had no idea what I was trying to say, anyway. It must have hadsomething to do with Hannah because it was Hannah I was thinking about. But I would never know for sure.
“Shhh,” the man said, gently taking my quaking hand by the wrist. He placed it on my chest, then reached slowly down toward my face. He had ten, twenty fingers on that one giant hand. My vision refused to clear up.
He covered my eyes and eased my lids down. I didn’t bother to fight him.
A moment later, I was unconscious and sailing like Münchhausen between the stars.
Chapter 17
1
I WASN’T THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED. BUT I CAN SEE
it nonetheless: the Italian countryside, cool in the stirrings of an early summer that promises not to be too overbearing.
The vehicle appears as a glinting beacon over the farthest hill. David is behind the wheel, donning ridiculous driving goggles, racing gloves, and a worn bomber jacket. Hannah is in the passenger seat, wearing a lambskin jacket and a cream-colored jacquard pantsuit.
She laughs, though I cannot hear her. It as if I am watching all this on television with the sound turned all the way down. Her hair is short, curling just at her jaw, and appears the color of new copper in midday.
There is a sound like a clap of thunder as the motorcar’s undercarriage collides with a mound of dirt in the road. David looks startled, and Hannah grips the dashboard, turning to David to examine his expression. David senses her unease and turns to her, offers a complacent smile, and perhaps even places a hand on her thigh. “It’s okay, love,” he says. “It’s not a—” “David!” she shrieks. David jerks his head back to the front. But it is already too late.
2
I OPENED MY EYES TO FIND MYSELF IN A SMALL.
ill-lit room in what appeared to be a clapboard hut. I lay on a bed of straw covered with a blanket of cheesecloth. My goose-down pillow was soft to the point of near nonexistence. Candles flickered from every corner of the small room, and a fetid, moldering smell—curdling goat cheese, perhaps—permeated the air. At the opposite end of the room facing my bed, there was a doorway with no door, but aside from a straw mat halfway down the hallway and walls the color of sawdust, I could see nothing.
Above my head and tacked to the exposed wooden rafters hung various thangkas painted in bright colors. The one directly above me depicted one centralized, bronze-skinned figure whose black hair was wrapped in a bun and surrounded by a halo. The figure was flanked on either side by smaller figures, one of them white as a ghost and wielding a flaming sword, the other pale blue and multiarmed.