The magnificent landscape I had admired from above—the pristine craggy peaks and luxurious crevices observed from behind the thick Plexiglas of the helicopter window—became a series of treacherous obstacles on the ground. It was bitterly cold. I fought through knee-high snowdrifts, wind scraping my skin, ice crystals stiffening my hair. I blinked and my eyelashes clung together, freezing and melting, freezing and melting again. I hadn’t realized when I slipped out of the courtyard that I would be throwing myself into a glacial hell.
Within minutes, my hands had gone numb, and my feet—buried in snow and protected by nothing more than my running shoes—became wet, then frozen. I knew I could withstand cold better than most people—my walks with my grandfather had taught me that—yet I wanted to lie down, curl up in the mink coat, and sleep. Thoughts of seeing Luca again pushed me onward. I had the leather pouch Enzo had given me in Turin and would use the money to hire a helicopter. Maybe, if I were lucky, my phone would have reception in the village. If I could only get there, I would be on my way home to him.
Just as I was beginning to lose hope, the spire of a church rose into view. I pushed ahead, moving toward it, ignoring the pain in my limbs as I entered the village. I knew that Nevenero had been abandoned, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent of the desolation. The buildings were in ruins, the windows broken, the doors unhinged. The houses were shuttered, some with boards nailed over the windows. Nevenero was a wasteland: deserted, lifeless, frozen. The smoke I had spotted at the castle was impossible to see from the ground. Storm clouds had rolled in, swallowing the smoke in a roiling, ashen sky. But there wasn’t time to lose: the brittle air, the murderous wind—if I didn’t find shelter soon, I would freeze to death.
Just when I was beginning to panic I saw, behind a row of stone houses, a light flicker in a window. A person moved behind the slats of a shutter and disappeared into the depths of a room. Without thinking, I rushed to the door and began knocking. The door swung back.
“Bonjour?”
The man was young and athletic, his features chiseled, his expression a mixture of amazement and suspicion. He wore a tight microfiber shirt, ski pants, and heavy socks. A woman in similar gear stood behind him, peering at me with astonishment. The air smelled of coffee and toasted bread. A fire—the very fire that had sent smoke signals to me at the castle—burned in a fireplace beyond.
I was shivering so hard my words came out in a jumble. “Do you mind if I come in? To warm up a second?” I stammered. “Please. I’m freezing to death.”
The man blinked. He was so surprised he couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry, but I’m very cold.” I stepped back and looked up the hill, toward the castle, its flags minuscule in the distance. “Could I come in for a just a minute? To use your phone?”
The woman stepped into the doorway, rescuing me. “Of course,” she said. From her accent, I gathered that she, like her companion, was French. “Come in, you are looking like a glaçon.”
I stepped into a room filled with climbing gear: boots and heavy jackets; backpacks and ice axes and reams of rope scattered over the floor. A black harness with buckles and straps lay on the table. I must have looked confused, because the woman said, “Alpine body harness. For ice climbing.”
I rubbed my hands together, trying to bring some feeling into my fingers. The woman said something in French, and the man brought me a steaming cup of coffee. “Un café?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” I said, falling into a wooden chair, its thrush seat hard under me. I wrapped my fingers around the ceramic cup, the heat stinging my hands.
The couple sat down and stared, waiting for me to collect myself. I looked more closely at them. The man was tall and athletic, with wide shoulders and a receding hairline. The woman was thin, with dark bangs that fell over penetrating brown eyes. They were young, in their thirties, sporty and very curious about me.
Finally, the woman said, “I’m Justine. And this is Pierre. He didn’t mean to be rude, but you surprised him. There aren’t people up here. Ever.”
“I’m Bert,” I said, relishing the sound of my name, my simple, familiar name. “Bert Monte.”
“Here,” Pierre said, his English heavily accented as he moved my chair to the fireplace. “You’ll warm up much faster.”
I sat, feeling the warmth of the fire against my skin. The caffeine spiked through my body, dispelling the cloud of disorientation that lingered from the cold. “Thank you. I didn’t expect to be out in the snow for long. I thought I’d find someone who could take me down the mountain.”
“Find someone?” Justine said, and by her tone I knew she thought I was utterly crazy. “Here? The village has been empty for fifty years, at least.”
“But you’re here,” I said, glancing around at the boxes of canned food, tins of coffee, and crates of bottled water. “I saw the smoke from your fire.”
“Only for the week,” she said. “As you see, we like to climb. But I am also a journalist. I’m working on a book.” She looked down at my sopping-wet tennis shoes. “I’m sorry to be blunt, but what in the name of God are you doing here? The nearest town from Nevenero is a hundred kilometers away. The ski resorts are even farther.”
“I’ve been staying at Montebianco Castle, helping a sick relative,” I said. “We scheduled a helicopter to take me to Turin, but it . . . didn’t show, and I need to get home as soon as possible.”
Justine looked at me, wide-eyed. “Montebianco Castle?” She turned to Pierre and spoke in rapid French, gesturing to me and then in the direction of the castle. Pierre regarded me with curiosity, then suspicion, as he asked Justine a few questions. Finally, she turned to me. “We don’t understand how it’s possible for you to be staying at Montebianco Castle. It is empty except for an old lady and her domestic employees. I went there to inquire about an investigative article I was writing. I was told that the owner had died.”
“The Count of Montebianco did die,” I said, considering my words with care. I could not reveal the truth about the Montebianco family to this stranger, or to anyone. “I was visiting his wife, my great-aunt Dolores, who was very ill. Cancer. She passed away last night.”
“You are a member of the Montebianco family?” she said, incredulous. “An American?”
“My grandfather was Giovanni Montebianco. He left after the Second World War.”
Justine stared at me, pale and somber. “My family comes from this village as well,” she said. “This house has belonged to my family for hundreds of years. My grandparents fled Nevenero in 1952 and immigrated to France. They were some of the last to leave. But my grandparents loved this place. My family have been goat herders and mountaineers for generations, which may explain why I have been drawn to ice climbing. These mountains are in our blood. My grandparents never wanted to leave. This house was all they owned. But no one could stay here. It is a dangerous place, the castle.” She fixed me with narrowed eyes. “I understand why you would want to leave.”
“Then do you mind calling me a helicopter? Please? I will pay whatever is necessary.”
“I can call the pilot who is supposed to come for us next week,” Pierre said. “The storm has made it difficult to get through, but I will try.”
Pierre stood, went to the fire and threw in a log. It began to crackle and pop behind the screen.
“Anything you can do would be great,” I said. I glanced at the fireplace. The smoke from the fire was visible in the sky. If I had been able to see it, so would Vita.
“I grew up hearing about your family,” Justine said. “But to be honest, for most of my life, I thought these stories were nothing but a bunch of legends my grandparents told about their old village. A way to cope with nostalgia and a way of keeping these mountains alive for me and my brothers.”
“What kinds of stories?” I asked, turning closer to the fire.
“From the time I was very little, my grandparents would tell us about the monsters in these mountains. They had grown up hearing tales of demons, vampires, dragons, and devils. When a dog ran away, it had been eaten by a dragon. If the sheep’s wool was too thin, a vampire had sucked its blood. When a child disappeared—which happened with some frequency—it was stolen by an evil beast. Or so the stories went.” Justine shook her head, as if it were too outlandish to believe.
“Cretinism existed up here until the early twentieth century,” Pierre added, as he collected the empty coffee cups and walked out of the room.
“Well,” Justine said, turning to me, “cretinism is one thing. But there were so many old legends. My grandparents loved to scare us with tales of Krampus. Half devil, half goat, with twisting horns, with teeth like a wolf’s. Each Christmas Eve, Krampus would sneak into the village to punish the children who had been naughty. While Saint Nicholas would reward the good children with toys, Krampus would capture and torture the bad ones, biting and beating them to death. When misfortune occurred in these mountains, it was convenient to blame these tragedies on the regional mythical creature. My parents grew up dismissive of their parents’ tales. But now I believe there is something to the legends. Not Krampus. Not dwarfs. Something else. I am certain there is something monstrous living in these mountains. Something that has lived here for many, many generations.”
“You seem so sure,” I said.
“I have good reason to be sure,” Justine said. “I saw it myself.”
All the anxiety and fear I had felt the night before rose up in me again. “What do you mean?”
Justine leaned forward, looking me in the eyes as she spoke. “Two years ago, we were here in Nevenero climbing on the glacier. I’d drifted away from Pierre, to a great mass of ice hanging between screes of granite. I was frustrated. I had dropped my ice ax. It was my fault—I should have had it tethered—and this made it even worse. If you have no experience on the mountain, you probably don’t realize what a handicap it is to be one hundred meters up a wall of ice with no ax, but I will tell you, it is a very uncomfortable feeling, like losing a shoe while running a marathon. Luckily, my ax had fallen within sight, onto the ledge of a granite plateau. I rappelled over, lowered myself down onto the plateau, and grabbed it.
“It was then that I saw them: footprints in the snow. At first, I was sure they were human. But then I realized that this meant a human being would have been up on the glacier barefoot. It was February in the Alps, and totally unthinkable to be barefoot in those conditions.” She glanced at my flimsy shoes, as if to emphasize how crazy it was to be unprotected in the elements. “Also, there were drops of blood alongside the prints, which made me believe I’d come across a wounded animal of some sort. I got down and looked closer and saw that the prints were very wide. At least this big.” Justine used her hands to demonstrate the size of the prints. “Incredible feet, really.
“I decided to follow the prints. It was snowing, and they would be covered soon, so I hurried along the granite ledge, my eyes trained on the prints. The path was narrow, only a meter wide, with an escarpment of rock to my left and a deep cavern to my right. I am used to heights, of course, but usually I’m clipped in to ropes. Yet, I was so focused on the prints that I paid little attention to the danger. I ran over the icy ledge, heedless of the fact I might slip. The prints went on for a kilometer or so when, all at once, they veered into a gaping passage in the rock.
“I paused, listening. There was a struggle inside. I heard a cry of terror. It sounded human, so I ventured inside. I hoped to take a few pictures to show Pierre and hurry away to safety. But what I found was not at all what I expected. There, at the center of the passage, stood a kind of human being. It was tall and thin, with wide shoulders, long, strong arms, and white hair. It wore a leather vest and some trousers but no shoes, and it stood on two legs, as the prints had shown. The skin was pale, so pale that it blended in with the snow.”
Justine brushed her bangs from her eyes.
“But most terrible of all, it was carrying a human child. A little boy.”
As Justine said these words, a feeling of horror welled up in me. Joseph. It must have been Greta’s son. I wanted to ask her to describe the boy, but I knew if I spoke I would show how deeply her story affected me. I would give everything away. “What did you do?” I managed.
“Everything in my body and soul revolted. I sobbed, or screamed, something between the two. The noise caught the creature’s attention. It turned and looked at me. Our eyes locked for a moment. I wanted to turn and run, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by fear, and by something else, too, something closer to fascination. I stared at it, this tall, white-skinned, blue-eyed beast, and odd as it may sound, I felt that I was in the presence of something marvelous. Some part of nature we rarely experience. I found there was something intelligent about it, something I recognized as human, not only in the shape of the face but the expression. And so I spoke to it, hoping that it would understand. ‘I’m Justine,’ I said. ‘Justine.’”
Justine glanced at me, perhaps worried that I would think she was out of her mind. But I knew the exact feelings she described.
“The creature turned to me,” Justine said. “And I was sure, from its expression, that it had understood, if not the words I spoke, then my intention. It came closer, so close I saw its glassy blue eyes. I wanted to help the child, I wanted to take him in my arms and carry him down the mountain, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid. Instead, I ran.”
Justine looked at me, and I saw that her eyes had filled with regret.
“I was some distance away when I heard its voice. Although the sound was muffled by the wind, it seemed to me that it had called for me to come back. Justine, I heard. Justine. The monster had said my name.”