Wildalone

Map

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1: What Hides in the Hills

Chapter 2: The Room of Breathing Clays

Chapter 3: Unseen, at Night

Chapter 4: Captive

Chapter 5: The Two Deaths of Orpheus

Chapter 6: The Devil Himself

Chapter 7: Seven Letters

Chapter 8: The Theia Hypothesis

Chapter 9: Noche de Brujas

Part II

Chapter 10: The Moon Countdown

Chapter 11: From Afar

Chapter 12: Friend of the Estlins

Chapter 13: Leap from the Rational

Chapter 14: Ultimatum

Chapter 15: The Guardian of Secrets

Chapter 16: Rejecting an Estlin

Chapter 17: Briefly, Like a Thief

Chapter 18: We Can Change It

Chapter 19: A Single Absence

Chapter 20: The Atrium of Pianos

Chapter 21: Underworlds

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

I
N
1802,
AT
the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria, the monk Rafail carved the last of six hundred and fifty miniature figures on a wooden cross, allegedly losing his sight after twelve years of work on the piece.

In the early 1990s, while going through sealed archives marked as “Threat to Ideology” by the former Communist government, researchers found a collection of religious artifacts. Among them was a scroll taken from the monastery library at Rila, dating back to Rafail's time.

Based on the following account found on the scroll, it has been suggested that when the monk began work on his masterpiece, he may have been already blind.

Monastery of St. John of Rila, this fifth day of the month of August, in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, as spoken to our Lord by one of his humbled servants, transcribed it is thus:

I am told that this is being written at the light of sixteen candles, and I trust the eye of the stranger who counts them, the hand that puts quill to parchment, recording my words—for trust is the only path left to the blind.

I was blinded for what I saw. But by mercy of the One high above all things, was what I saw worth it!

Legends are sung of the Samodivi; grim, lush legends. But no legend unfolds these ravenous beauties in words as they unfolded for me in moon-woven flesh, one silver night, outside these monastery walls.

A woodcarver by craft, I had journeyed to Thrace and back, going from door to door, selling the fruits of my hands—reproduced church relics—to anyone who would pay a trifle for them. A late hour caught me deep inside the forest and I headed to seek shelter with the monks. As my feet neared the end of a long day's labor, I saw a figure cross my path: a girl still, but already ravishing, her white skin ripe like the skin of a lily cut from the stem just before blooming. A thin dress enveloped her, sewn from moonlight, weightless—a spiderweb—hiding nothing of her body as she stepped toward me.

I was not a holy man then, and I had tasted beauty on my travels—beauty as rare in the darkness of our world as a man without regrets among the dying. But I had never, not once, laid sight on a creature to rival her. With a luminous smile, she lured me through the trees, onto a lawn where her two sisters already waited. They closed a circle around me and rushed into dance—stunning, flawless—as the moon poured its jeweled envy over them. Their toes barely touched the ground, but it pulsed under them with the distant beat of drums, as if somewhere, far off, the mountain's heart had been set ablaze. They took me into their fury, into the curve of their locked arms, and I struggled to keep up, fighting the blood that invaded my veins further with each step—until a spasm seized my chest. I saw them smile, saw their eyes flash triumph as my body collapsed at their feet. Slowly, the others dissipated back into the night, but she stayed and held me, spilling her hair like heavy gold all over me . . .

Woe, they say, shall befall the traveler who happens upon the Samodivi, the one who beholds their dance under the full moon. But blessed be a human of such woeful fate: when she bared her skin for me, when she placed her breast within my hands and her hungered lips opened into mine, there was no woe, no torture left in this entire world—not even death itself—that my soul would not have welcomed. Time vanished when her white legs parted over me, quiet, soft like snow whose touch a man never forgets once he has been drunk on it. I took her with my eyes,
my hands, my mouth. Took her desperately, mad with an ache that tore through bones and sinews; an excruciating ache that wouldn't cease, not even when she had me force my way inside her. If she had asked, I would have begged. Died. Killed. Been damned for her. I would have done anything, and done it many times over.

But she asked nothing. Her face bent over mine and she kissed my eyelids, closing them before a sudden pain singed the sockets where my eyes had been. I heard her laughter—free, innocent, the laughter of a child—and felt her lips press once more, this time against my chest. Yet before her fingers could dive in to claim my heart, the cry of a rooster echoed over us, announcing the dawn—

Then silence.

The monks found my body where she had left it, and I was carried into their holy dwelling whose walls I would never leave again. The sights of the world have since been taken from me, and with them—most of its burdens and its blessings. By divine whim, my skill with the wood was left intact, and my fingers now carve with a new fervor: the last joy and last sorrow left to me from among those I had once known, before I came to know . . . her.

I shall grow old in darkness and in darkness I shall leave this earth, all its treasures still vivid inside my scarred eyelids. But until then, every night, within that same darkness she dances for me—breathtaking as she was back then—and she abandons her beauty to my madly aching heart, the heart which her fingers failed to reach but which she stole, she stole nonetheless . . .

The darkness softens. I hear the beat of her steps. Her skin falls on me. Then the rest of her; her quick lips on my mouth. I see her, all of her, as the eyes of a mortal never could. And from then on, for a while at least, death holds no meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
HAVE LEFT
everyone I love. For good.

My mind shoved the thought back into a corner and tried to focus on counting dollar bills, expecting them to decompose any second from the impossible humidity of summer in America. “Good luck here, sweetheart.” The driver of Princeton's airport shuttle took the money and thanked me with a wink. “You'll need it.” Then, to prove the point, he drove off through the alleys of an empty campus.

Deep breath. Ignore the falling dusk. They know you're coming, somebody will show up soon.

I sat down on the larger of my two suitcases and waited. The evening was soaked with heat, with an almost liquid smell of grass so vibrantly green that its juice seemed to find a way straight into my lungs. I could reach out and touch it—smooth, thick as a Persian rug, the grass of a university whose name had become legend, even in my tiny country halfway across the world. Princeton was the one school that had always remained elusive. No flashy photos in brochures. No self-advertising. An enigma, tucked into its own pocket of the universe.

Now all around me, among the lush tree crowns, lay strange gray-stone buildings lifted out of a movie about medieval knights: the sharp corners of walls softened by arched entryways; the roofline punctuated by towers whose zigzag fortresses eavesdropped on the secrets of cloistered courtyards; the iron-barred windows gaping for air, letting out streaks of light saturated to the color of freshly peeled oranges. And over all this—an odd silence. Not of absence, but of something about to happen. Of a fever about to begin.

“It must have been a long flight from Bulgaria. Sorry I kept you waiting!”

The voice had a German accent and belonged to Klaus, the student who had volunteered to pick me up. We shook hands, then he pointed at a golf cart parked nearby.

“I was going to show you around, but maybe we should head straight over to the dorm. You'll get a tour tomorrow anyway.”

Forbes, one of six residential colleges at Princeton, turned out to be far removed from everything else, isolated at the south edge of campus. Annexed to the school in 1970 as an experiment in coed housing, the former inn looked nothing like the neo-Gothic buildings we had passed on the way: a bulk of red brick nestled awkwardly behind a few old trees, with a façade whose slate roof and grid of white-pane windows gave it the air of a sanatorium rather than a college dorm. On the Internet, I had seen open terraces and a large veranda adjacent to a pond—but none of this was now visible from the street. The golf cart swerved into a paved driveway, up to a varnished portico where the U.S. flag and that of Forbes flapped their perky twin greetings.