Whispers of the Flesh (28 page)

“What is that you’re reading?” Hitch grinned when Emmett held up the magazine, the cover of which featured a spectacular photograph of Mont Blanc in the setting—or was it rising?—sun. “
Ski & Board
? Itching to get back on the slopes, are you?”

“I woke up with skiing on the brain. Dreamt about our little heli-skiing adventure in the Himalayas last night.”

“About the avalanche, you mean?”

Emmett nodded. “Lorazepam tends to give me lucid dreams, and I’d taken . . . a bit more than usual. It was actually a rather entertaining experience, incredibly vivid, felt absolutely real.”

Hitch shuddered, recalling the horror of watching a mountain’s worth of snow roar down on Emmett and Nawang as they slept in their tents. “An incredibly vivid nightmare, entertaining?”

“It should have been a nightmare, but it turned into one of those dreams that helps you sort through things that have been on your mind. You know, when your subconscious takes the seemingly random bits and pieces and fits them together in ways that wouldn’t necessarily have occurred to you during your waking hours.”

“I can’t imagine what was going on in your subconscious to make you revisit something like that.”

“I did revisit it, exactly as it really happened, but just a little . . . I want to say in slow motion, but that’s not quite right. It happened calmly, almost peacefully—waking to that rolling thunder, with the tent vibrating, knowing what was happening, knowing there was no way to avoid it, but trying anyway, yelling for Nawang to wake up as I unzipped my bag, reminding myself of all those things they teach you about surviving avalanches—keep your mouth closed, try to swim up through the snow. I did those things, but with no hint of fear, just a sense of . . . alert curiosity, as if I were looking forward to the novel experience of being buried alive.”

“Uh-huh. Remind me never to take lorazepam.”

“I remember thinking, as I was being trundled down the mountain, ‘What a jolly good turn of events. I get to relax and enjoy the ride this time, knowing that no harm will come to either of us, because Hitch will come along and save us. He’ll know exactly where to dig.’ ”

Raising his cup, Hitch said, “All hail telescoping trekking poles.”

“Yes, the trekking pole.” Emmett frowned at the mountain on the cover of the magazine, absently tracing its craggy contours with a fingertip. “The bit I keep running over in my mind is after you’ve dug me out, and I’m so grateful to see the sun and breathe the air, but I’m gasping and shaking, and I collapse on the snow as you sprint over to where Nawang ended up, and dig him out.” Looking up at Hitch, Emmett said, “You didn’t use the pole to locate Nawang, you just picked a spot, stuck the shovel in, and started digging.”

Hitch set his coffee cup down. “So the dream
wasn’t
exactly like it really happened.”

“Yes, it was,” Emmett said quietly, evenly. “I will admit to being pretty out of it afterward. I barely remember the ambulance and the hospital. I was just grateful to be alive. So the details sort of . . . got lost in the shuffle, I suppose. Until last night.”

“It was a dream, Emmett.”

“No, I remember now. The dream made me remember. You didn’t use your pole to find Nawang. You’d tossed it aside. It was right next to me while I was lying there trying to catch my breath. How did you know where to dig, Hitch?”

After all this time, Hitch had stopped expecting the question to come up. There was no explaining what had really happened on that mountain that morning, even to himself, except that forty-two years ago, he’d arrived in Vietnam a pretty normal guy, and two years later, he left with the old Stark Raving Radar tapping away in his skull. He didn’t have an explanation, but he did have an answer. He’d thought it up while he was frantically assembling his avalanche shovel, picturing Emmett under three feet of snow.

“I saw you,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, just like he’d rehearsed it in his mind. “I saw where you ended up.”

“How could that be? I mean, we were swept down by a bloody avalanche, and a huge one at that, half a mile long and a hundred yards wide at the base.”

While Hitch was plumbing his mind for a response to a question he himself had no answer for, Emmett said,“I’ve been putting two and two together, and I think I know why you found us so easily. I think you have something we call ‘the Gift.’ ”

“We?”

Emmett sipped his tea, and when he spoke, Hitch had the impression he was choosing his words carefully. “The subject of giftedness is something in which
le seigneur
and I take a particular interest. What is meant by ‘the Gift’ is what you might call psychic powers.”

“You believe in that?”

“You don’t? You’re the one who’s gifted.”

“Uh, yeah, well . . .”

“Haven’t you ever noticed anything unusual about yourself? A heightened sense, like hearing, or—”

“Hearing?”

“When did you first notice it?” Sick or no, the man was as animated as Hitch had ever seen him.

“Emmett . . .” Hitch raised his hands as if to ward off this unaccountable attack of new age woo-woo from the formerly rational Emmett Archer, especially since he’d decided to aim it at this particular subject.

Or maybe it wasn’t so unaccountable. “
He’s got too little oxygen in his system and too much carbon dioxide,”
Grace had said.

“Emmett . . .”Hitch shook his head. “Pal, we should really talk about something else, ’cause—”

“When?”

Hitch picked up his coffee cup, set it down. “Hanoi, all right? But it wasn’t psychic anything, it was stress, mental trauma. From being stuck all alone in that fucking little box. I started imagining things—and hearing things.”

“What things?”

On a sigh, Hitch said, “Tapping.”

“Tapping?”

“You know, like on the walls between the cells, the black boxes.”

“But that was how the prisoners communicated. Isn’t that what you said? They never got to see or talk to one another, so someone developed a tap code and taught it to someone else . . .”

“Right,” Hitch said, “and there were two guys tapping to me, one on either side, and I tapped back, but . . . I didn’t need the tapping. Or I thought I didn’t need it, ’cause I started thinking . . .”

He rubbed his neck, thinking
Here goes four decades of managing to keep this shit under wraps.
But Emmett really was like a brother to him. And he really was dying. And he really wanted to know.

“I started thinking I could hear them, you know, those two other guys? Talking to themselves, moving around . . . Right through the walls, and they were pretty thick, let me tell you. But when I tried to talk to them, they couldn’t hear me even when I yelled at the top of my lungs. And I could hear other guys in other cells beyond those two, more and more every day, all of them after a while. I could hear everything they did, and of course all the tapping. They were constantly tapping, it never fucking stopped. It was like being in a roomful of type-writers going rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, all at the same time, just layers and layers of it.”

“My God,” Emmett said quietly. “What a bloody nightmare.”

“It drove me insane. Or rather, I was already insane, and that’s why I heard all that shit, and listening to it made me even more unhinged. A vicious circle of Crazy. And it didn’t go away when I left Hanoi. I was still hearing things I wasn’t supposed to hear, and whenever I did, there was always the tapping, too. That never went away.”

“And of course you assumed it was a delusion. What else would you think?”

“Aural hallucinations, that’s what my shrink called them.”

“You saw a psychologist?” Emmett asked.

“A psychiatrist—in the hospital, when I was recovering. He was a good guy, too, smart, perceptive—I really liked him. He said the best thing was to try and . . . well, basically, keep myself firmly connected with the real world, the better to block out the unreal. He taught me to focus on the here and now by concentrating on my breathing. It’s worked pretty well, for the most part.”

“Look, Hitch, I know you respected that shrink, and I’m sure he was a good one, but believe me when I tell you that we here at Grotte Cachée are far more knowledgeable than he about this phenomenon. The black box didn’t make you crazy. It sounds to me as if it forced your mind inward and brought your giftedness to the fore.”

“Emmett . . .”

Sitting forward, Emmett said, “Think back to when you were in the black box, and you heard all those sounds, the tapping . . . Close your eyes and go back there. Relive it in your mind and try to remember whether it felt real to you, or like something your mind could have conjured up.”

“
Relive
it?” On a bitter laugh, Hitch said, “I’ve spent four decades trying to block it out.”

“Humor me,” Emmett said. “I’m supposed to be on the verge of croaking.”

Supposed to be?
“Pretty cheesy tactic, pal.”

But effective. Hitch closed his eyes and concentrated. It took an arduous mental effort to force himself back into that black-painted, windowless little tomb of a cell, but eventually he was there, hunkered down on the floor with his hands over his ears, hearing all the rest of them, the other guys locked up alone in their own black boxes, shuffling around in there, slurping up that rancid cabbage slop, shifting their chains . . .

“Hitch?”

. . . moaning, snoring, singing hymns and drinking songs, whispering prayers, muttering in their sleep . . . A fucking cacophony, and always, tangled under and through and over all the rest of it like snarls of typewriter ribbons, there was the tapping, great thrumming, prattling, incessant fucking torrents of it . . .
Tap tap tap tap tap.

“Hitch—was it real?”

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap . . .

“Was it—”

“Yes.”
Hitch opened his eyes, took his hands off his ears. “Yes, goddammit, yes, it was real, it was fucking real, it was . . .” He bolted to his feet, turned and walked to the far end of the balcony, gripping the railing to make his hands stop shaking.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever had a precognitive dream,” Emmett said.

Hitch shook his head. “Well, sometimes I would dream about, like, minor little stuff, like flights being canceled, or Katie getting another ear infection.”

“Precognition is precognition,” Emmett said, “no matter how mundane.”

“I did—” His throat snagged. “I, um, I did dream that Lucinda had a heart attack. It was the night of our thirtieth wedding anniversary. And of course, two days later . . .”

His voice was quavering.
God, get a grip, Hitchens.
He sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly.

He heard Emmett’s chaise longue creak, heard his footsteps approaching from behind. To his absolute shock, because they never touched—not homophobia, just the kind of guys they were—Emmett patted him on the shoulder as he came to stand next to him at the railing.

“It’s been six years,” Hitch said in a thick, unsteady voice that should have embarrassed him but, strangely enough, didn’t. “You’d think I’d have gotten over it by now.”

“She was your soul mate,” Emmett said. “So far as I can tell, you two appeared to have a preposterously happy marriage.”

He nodded. “Except . . . Well, there were those early years, when she couldn’t get pregnant—lots of tears then, I can tell you. But after we adopted Katie, it all changed. We really were preposterously happy.”

“I must admit, I was a bit worried about you after you lost her.”

“Yeah. Took me a while to come to grips.”

“But you did. You lifted your chin and carried on. And now there’s Karen. Two soul mates in one lifetime. Most men don’t even get one.”

Hitch thought about the fifteen years Emmett and Madeleine were together. They were pretty good years in an opposites-attract kind of way—until he inherited the
administrateurship
of Grotte Cachée and she decided to pass on moving to a volcanic valley in the middle of Nowhere, France. In no time, she was back in New York with Isabel and married to an old boyfriend, Douglas Tilney, who’d gone from being a male model in his twenties to one of the biggest broadcasting tycoons in the world.

There’d been no one for Emmett after that, at least no one meaningful. Had he been lonely? He wouldn’t be the type to bring it up in conversation.

Wait a minute.
“Emmett, what the hell are you doing on your feet?”

“Standing.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be staying off your feet?”

“It’s not so much that I’m supposed to. I simply haven’t had much choice in the matter. As for auras?”

“What?” Hitch said, thrown by the non sequitur.

“Do you ever see halos of light around—”

“Oh. Auras.” He rolled his eyes and leaned his elbows on the railing. “Guilty as charged. I mean, I don’t see them all the time. Rarely, in fact.”

“Because you’ve closed your mind off to them.”

“I guess. But sometimes they ambush me.”

Like when he was smoking with Madeleine in the courtyard that day after she’d done the number on Bernie and before they’d gone to see Morel. There was just the faintest blue glow all around her—almost the same blue as that dress.

And then there were the thoughts and memories that sometimes drifted into his mind from elsewhere—other people’s thoughts, other people’s memories . . .

“Jesus,” Hitch whispered as it hit him. It had been real, all of it. All those years of thinking the insanity inside him was just lurking there in the dark corners of his psyche, waiting to wreak havoc with his mind unless he kept his guard up . . .

“Jesus.”

“Hitch . . . Isabel has the Gift.”

“Really?” Hitch turned to look at Emmett, but his friend, his hands braced on the railing, didn’t avert his gaze from the courtyard.

Emmett gave a little cough, the first during this entire conversation; he really
was
having a good day. “One of the things we know about giftedness is that one is almost never born with it unless both parents are gifted.”

“Then you and Madeleine are both . . . ?”

Still staring out into the courtyard, Emmett said, “Madeleine has the Gift. I do not.”