I rushed through the hallways of the second floor, Eleanor’s revelations thrumming in my mind. I pushed open the heavy doors, and walked into the long, narrow portrait gallery. It was afternoon, and a gray light fell over the room, giving the portraits a diaphanous, otherworldly appearance, as if they were not reproductions in oil, but the souls of my ancestors shimmering through the fabric of time.
The last time I had looked at the portraits had been the day I had pushed Dolores over the polished parquet floors in her wheelchair. I was startled by how much had changed. Then, I had been overwhelmed by the faces looking down at me, the luminous eyes, the traits that were so much like my own. I had gazed at each of these portraits, read the small brass tags, taking in their commanding presence, but I had never really known these people. Not their faces. Not their stories. Now I knew the murderess Isabelle of the House of Savoy and her goat herder husband, Frederick. I knew the strong, persistent voice of Vita’s mother, Eleanor. I knew that Ambrose had loved Eleanor so much that he had married her despite his fear of having children. I felt Eleanor’s feelings of repugnance at the sight of her daughter, Vittoria. I felt the tragedy of Vita’s education, the horror of her rape, the victory Eleanor had felt at seeing that her grandchildren—Giovanni and Guillaume—had been born with normal human features. I felt the loneliness of Giovanni and Guillaume growing up under the tutelage of Vita’s doctor. I understood what my ancestors had suffered, what they had lost. The Montebianco family stories were my stories now. For the first time, these people were really my family.
What would they do, if they were to peel from the walls and stand around me, these ghosts of the past? Would they be benevolent spirits, wrapping around me in a circle of protection? Or would they, like Ambrose, feel it their duty to stop the continuation of the Montebianco line? To kill me, the last living descendant of Leopold Montebianco, and be done with the family’s cursed legacy forever.
I searched the plates affixed to the gilded frames until I found Leopold. In the portrait, he looked every bit as strange and eccentric as Ambrose had described. Tall, lanky, and pale, he had a white cravat at his neck and a book in his hands. He had been painted in the library, and the vaulted ceilings rose behind him, showing the family tree with all the Montebiancos who had come before. Leopold was the opposite of every other man in the room, dreamy as a romantic poet, a Byron or Shelley, his large dark eyes liquid with emotion. The portrait was darker than the others, the paints thicker, as if straining to express the extent of Leopold’s saturnalia.
Vittorio, whose portrait was next in line, could not have been more different in appearance from his father, Leopold. While his father had been thin and introspective, Vittorio was hale, wide-shouldered, exuding power. With Vittorio came the beginning of the extreme whiteness of the Montebianco skin, the bright blue eyes, the hair rinsed of color. The traits—I now understood—that we had inherited from the Icemen. Then there was Ambrose, who was not quite as magnificent as his father, Vittorio, but not too shabby either, rugged from mountaineering, brow wide and tempered as a ram. Finally, I stopped before my grandfather’s portrait. He looked down upon me from his horse. His appearance sent a shiver through me—it no longer reminded me of my own, as it had the first time I saw that painting. He reminded me of the Icemen.
I hurried to the very far end of the gallery where the portrait of Vita hung. Pushing aside the curtain, I stepped into the room. Someone had lit the candles, and the nook glowed with light. It was then, as I sat before the portrait of Vita, that I finally examined the book in my hands, the leather-bound journal that had contained the pages of Eleanor’s memoir. It was a thick book, fat with a thousand onionskin pages, and filled—I saw as I pressed open the cover—with handwritten text, sketches of caves, a makeshift map. The cover was battered and the spine warped, as if it had been exposed to the elements. Some of the pages had been damaged by water, leaving washes of streaked and unreadable words. A braid of long, white hair—a shorter version of the braid in the trophy room—had been attached to the back cover with a string. I sifted through the pages, trying to read the barbed cursive, but it was written entirely in French. I could understand three large, bold words on the first page of the book:
NOTES DE TERRAIN
Under these words I found the florid signature of Leopold Montebianco. These were Leopold’s field notes from his years living with the Icemen, the notes that Basil had been searching for.
In all the months I had known Basil, I had never seen his living quarters and didn’t know exactly where they were. I walked through the hallways of the west wing, tapping on doors, hoping to find him. I had almost given up when I heard a record playing—the low call of a trumpet.
I knocked on the door. There was a shuffling, some coughing, and then the door flung open. Basil wore a silk robe and house slippers and a pair of striped pajamas.
“Oh, hello, Countess,” he said, blinking with surprise. “Come in, please, don’t mind the mess. Right this way.”
He led me into his rooms—which were as big as mine—and I found myself pushing through a tidal wave of objects: flowerpots and empty wine bottles, paintings, old curtains. Books, hundreds and hundreds of books. A narrow passage had been made through the debris, winding through records and stacks of cookie boxes and crates of empty glass bottles and tins of prunes and newspapers, everywhere, stacks and stacks of newspapers. From floor to ceiling, everywhere I looked, was junk.
I squeezed my way into the room, pushing aside a steamer trunk to the small cleared space by the fire. Something in my memory clicked: the trunk was the twin of my grandfather Giovanni’s trunk, the one from the newspaper photograph Nonna had shown me. The fact that he had lived here as a young man struck me with renewed force. Everywhere I went, Giovanni had been before me.
Basil whisked a stack of records off a chair and waved for me to sit. The records were all jazz. The album on the record player: Miles Davis’s Blue Haze.
“I know what you are going to say,” Basil said, pushing a pile of papers off another chair so he could sit. “I need to make a wider path from the doorway.” He bit his lip, looking embarrassed and defiant at once. “And I plan to do that, as soon as I organize that . . .”
He pointed to a stack of leather boots in a corner. They were worn, with holes in the soles and mud on the laces. “Are those Sal’s boots?” I asked.
“And Bernadette’s and Greta’s as well,” he said. “They go through them faster than you’d imagine.”
I glanced back to Basil, who was fiddling with his mustache. I understood, suddenly, why Basil had not left the castle. He had hoarded piles and piles of objects and now he couldn’t bear to abandon them. He was a prisoner of his compulsions. No one was keeping him there but himself.
I gave him the pages from Eleanor’s journal. “I wanted to show you this.”
Basil took the pages, a look of astonishment growing as he read them. “This would certainly explain a few things.” He gave me back the pages. “If, that is, this account is true.”
“You think Eleanor could have made all of this up?”
Basil shrugged. “Well, clearly Eleanor believed it. But this account is not exactly firsthand knowledge. Her husband, Ambrose, told her the story of Leopold and the Icemen. Ambrose was dying. He could have been delusional, deranged. One cannot be certain. He could have been repeating his take on the local legends. These mountains bring out the imagination like nowhere else on earth. Just last month, not long after you asked me about the Beast of Nevenero, as a matter of fact, this came with our monthly book drop . . .”
He stood and walked to the far side of the room, where he dug through a wardrobe stuffed with newspapers and magazines. I hadn’t believed that he had created a system in all that chaos, and yet he went directly to a particular pile of newspapers, lifted a magazine from the stack, and sat down again.
“This is one of the more interesting pieces I have read about the crazy legends up here,” he said, opening the glossy pages of a magazine called New Animal on his lap. There was a reproduction of the James Pringle photograph, a map of the Aosta Valley, a large color photograph of Montebianco Castle, and reproductions of the Shipton Bigfoot pictures. The headline of the article read: “The Search for the Yeti in the Alps.” The byline was Justine Jeanneau.
“This was the woman I met in the village,” I said, astonished, my heart skipping a beat as I read over the article. I didn’t know what startled me more—Justine’s name on the article or the word “Yeti” in bold type. I scanned the pages, finding information about the Montebianco family, the history of the Yeti and Bigfoot legends in the Alps, and her experience watching a Yeti-like creature steal a child. “She showed me these pictures before she called Dr. Feist. Before Sal shot me,” I said. “Before he shot her.”
“Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “It is unfortunate for her that she was still poking around here. She came to the castle to interview Dolores for the article. Dolores nearly had a nervous breakdown. Sal told the journalist in no uncertain terms that she better not come back.”
“Dr. Feist had the same theory of archaic hominids,” I said, going back to the magazine and scanning it, comparing what I saw with what I had witnessed myself. Aki and Jabi were nothing like the creatures in the article, but I had encountered them only once, in the shadowy evergreens, and couldn’t be sure. “He believed they were a missing link between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.”
“Well,” Basil said, pointing to the photo by James Pringle, “so did Pringle, although he didn’t use that language. He came up here over a hundred years ago and recorded them, but no one believed him.” He closed the magazine and sat back in his chair. “But even this very convincing article doesn’t prove that the Montebianco family has anything to do with the Beast of Nevenero, archaic hominids, or Yeti, or whatever it is one chooses to call them. That story is purely speculative. There is nothing in the family records to corroborate Eleanor’s memoir. Believe me, I have looked. Not a shred of evidence about Leopold’s time in the mountains, or his supposed affair with a creature.”
“This article got some of it right,” I said. “But there are mistakes, too.”
The certainty in my voice caught Basil off guard. “How do you know?”
“Because I saw the creatures myself,” I said. “They were here. Vita brought them.”
“Them?” he said. “There was more than one?”
“There were two,” I said. “Both men. But”—I removed Leopold’s book of field notes and gave it to Basil—“I suspect this will give us more information.”
Basil took the book in his hands and examined it. He bit his lip and furrowed his brow—the large mole above his eyebrow flexing—and opened the cover. “Oh!” he said. “Leopold’s field notes. Where was this? How on earth did you get it?”
“It was in Vita’s room,” I replied. “She gave it to me.”
“Devilish Vita,” he said, as he paged through the book, taking in the sketches, reading the French. “I looked everywhere, even in her rooms, and couldn’t find it.” He turned the book so that he could examine the binding. “I believe I can rebind it,” he said, stroking the book as if it were a pet. “Perhaps I can also save some of these water-damaged pages.” Finally, he put the book down, a flicker of elation illuminating his eyes. “Do you know what this is? And what this means?”
Basil paged through the notebook. “There is so much information, one can hardly summarize. But I see that it mostly describes—in intricate detail—Leopold’s years of living with them.”
I pushed my chair close, taking in the pages of sketches, the charts, the endless stream of sentences.
“There appears to be two distinct sections,” he said at last, after he had paged through the book. “One that is more personal—about his relationship with the female creature—and another that is more professional. Clearly, he meant to do something more with the field notes. Perhaps write a book or a scientific treatise, as that section is very well organized. The other parts are a bit haphazard. It may take some time for me to translate the personal bits, but the professional notes are quite easy to understand. I could read a few paragraphs to you now, if you like.”
Sitting back in my chair, I was filled with anticipation for what Leopold’s notes would reveal about the Icemen. As Basil began to read, I closed my eyes and listened as the village of the Icemen and its inhabitants came alive.