Don’t look. Mother, don’t look. Mother, don’t …
Meryam turns to look out the window. It’s as if not a moment has passed since she felt Jo’s fingers on her arm. The touch of the little girl she and Adam brought into the world, the daughter she was never supposed to have.
Out on the street, fierce, determined Josephine catches up to the little thief and grabs him by the arm. The moment her fingers touch the boy’s flesh, all of the flowers on their narrow little street in Mayfair wither and die.
The little boy leaves the football in the street. He turns to face Jo.
Meryam hadn’t noticed the horns before.
Meryam is screaming.
And she wakes.
* * *
Meryam woke crying. She rolled onto her side, curled into a fetal ball before she could be completely sure that she had truly escaped the dream. Her body rigid, breath hitching as she shuddered and gasped, she held her eyes tightly shut, afraid of what she might see when she opened them. Her chest ached, heart drumming hard. Her whole body felt cold, icy breeze caressing the exposed skin of her hands and face and throat, and she wanted to scream.
To scream and scream and scream.
The echoes of her ragged-voice shrieking still lingered in her ears, but all she could feel was loss. Loss unlike she had ever imagined might be possible. Every dream she’d ever held in her secret heart, every hope of love and contentment, had been buried down deep the moment she’d learned she had cancer. Now they had been dug up and exposed, the flesh of her dreams flayed down to nothing but raw nerves.
“Meryam.”
It sounded a little bit like Mother.
Cold fingers touched her hand and she leaped up, dragging the blankets with her as she threw herself off the cot and huddled against the hard plastic wall. Blinking, she realized she’d opened her eyes. The lights were dim but still seemed harsh and as the figure above her reached out for her again she batted his hands away.
“You’re okay,” he said. “Meryam, you were dreaming. It was a nightmare.”
Lowering her hands, she stared at him. Walker, she thought. Pulse still pounding, she tried to steady her breath. Awareness finally bled back into her thoughts and she took in the room around them. They were in the infirmary. She’d been asleep on one of the cots, trapped in what felt not like a nightmare but like hell itself. The terror and screaming sorrow still raced around inside of her, searching for some way out, some way to expend itself before it destroyed her.
Walker had his hands out. “You’re okay,” he said again. “Why don’t you get back onto the cot. Take a little time, let the dream fade. It will fade, no matter what it was … no matter how the nightmare’s wormed its way inside you. Just breathe and let yourself wake up from it.”
Exhaling, forcing herself to catch her breath, Meryam crawled back to the cot. The weariness of her disease had grown worse. The extreme nature of this project had taken its toll on her. Walker offered his hand but she ignored him, pulling herself up to the cot. She dragged the blankets over her shoulders and sat on the edge, looking around, feeling as if she were returning to the fabric of the real world for the first time.
Only slightly less hellish than my dreams.
She wiped at her tears. The pace had slowed, but they kept coming. The name Josephine kept circling around inside her head, like a snatch of song that could not be driven out. Josephine. Jo.
A baby she would never have.
The kind of daughter she would have been proud to raise. A girl who would never be born.
On the next cot over, a figure stirred beneath blankets. Meryam saw the mop of his thick, black hair and heard a groan as familiar to her as her own voice. Adam turned over and opened his eyes, squinting against the light. Scruffy and unwashed, angry and unfaithful, hurt and confused, he remained the man she loved. Josephine would never be, but this was the father she would have deserved. Human, and full of love.
“Meryam?” Adam said.
Walker stood back as Meryam climbed off her cot and lay down with Adam. She slid beneath the blankets with him, draped herself over him so that they could fit on the narrow cot. Memories of the night began to float up inside her head and though they were terrible, ugly things—full of horror and blood—still she preferred them to the endless despair of her dream, and so she embraced them.
“You want me to give you some time?” Walker asked, sitting on the edge of the cot Meryam had just abandoned.
Adam studied Meryam’s face. She knew he was searching for an explanation, an answer to the question of how the tension between them had evaporated so instantly, but now was not the time for that conversation. She loved him. For now, that would have to be answer enough. Cancer had stolen her dreams long before this demon had insinuated itself into their hearts. But Adam could still dream. He might have a little Josephine someday, with someone else—someone who might be kinder to him. Death awaited Meryam just around the corner, at some time it had already chosen, or so she believed. But until the moment of that assignation, she would fight for Adam to live and dream, no matter his sins. She was certainly not without her own.
“You’ve been looking after us,” she said, studying Walker from the cot.
“If we’re going to make the climb down, you both needed time to recover,” Walker said. He frowned as he studied them. “Truthfully, I’m not sure any of us will make it. The blizzard’s still blowing like hell out there, and neither of you is strong enough for this. But the sun’s rising in about twenty minutes.”
“Not as if we’ll see much sun,” Adam said.
“It’ll be light enough to see,” Meryam said. “If not for the snow.”
Walker rubbed at his eyes, dark circles beneath them. “It’s the best we’re gonna get, unless you want to wait this out.”
Meryam dragged the blankets off of herself and Adam. His clothes were musky and stale, but the scent belonged to him. It meant he was alive.
SEVENTEEN
Adam allowed Meryam to sit him up on the edge of the cot. He forced a smile as she drew the blankets up over his shoulders and kissed his hand and held it tightly. Her gentle kindness—a side of her that he’d scarcely seen these past few weeks—helped him, but only a little. A spark in the darkness. No amount of loving attention could have burned off the taint he felt inside. If they’d had access to a hot shower, he might have scrubbed the ammonia-stinking film of sweat from his skin, but it would take time for the infection to leave his body. The demon might be gone, but his system still needed to purge the poison it had left behind.
“Hey,” Meryam said, nudging him. “You with us?”
Again, he managed a smile. Weak as he knew it was, Meryam and Walker both seemed relieved.
“I’m here,” Adam said. “Just … you know how it feels when you’ve had a bad flu, or you’ve had some kind of stomach bug. You feel shaky and … tentative … like it’s still lingering—”
Walker stiffened. “You think the demon’s still in you?”
Adam saw the way the other man’s right fist clenched and wondered what Walker might do if he said yes.
“No. I think it’s been pulling our strings for a while, but when it really moves in and takes over, that’s something you know. It wants you to know.”
Meryam’s eyes filled with reflected pain and sympathy and he hated it. They had to act now, not let anguish and regret get in the way. There would be time for recriminations and doubts later.
If Meryam has any time at all.
Adam knew one thing—if her days on this earth would be as short as her doctor had predicted, he didn’t want to spend those days negotiating truth and love. He just wanted to live it.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. About Calliope. About what I thought must be going on, and the role I think the demon might have played.
He didn’t say the rest of it, not with Walker standing right there, but Meryam seemed to understand. She ran the back of her hand across the scruff on his cheek.
Adam wanted to protest. To insist. A gulf had opened up between them and he wanted to know if that dead space could be bridged, if they could really find their way back to each other. They sat side by side, hand in hand, but that was only flesh and bone. The space between them couldn’t be measured in physical inches.
“We have a lot to do,” Walker said, leaning forward on the creaking cot. “I need to know if you can hold your own, or if you’re going to need someone looking after you.”
His hands were on his knees like some grandpa in a rocking chair, and it occurred to Adam that with so many dead and the rest of their lives in danger, Walker was in charge. The Karga-Holzer Ark Project was over. It was just about survival now.
“If I need help, I’ll send up a flare.”
“See you do,” Meryam whispered to him.
Adam opened up the blankets she’d draped him with and put his arm around her, drawing her inside the warmth with him. The set of her jaw and the cast of her eyes revealed that there were words unspoken, but that was hardly a secret. The taint of the demon remained in more ways than one.
A shadow passed across the floor and Adam looked up to see Feyiz standing in the doorway, backlit by the garish glow of the industrial light out in the passage.
“I’m pleased to see you both sitting upright,” Feyiz said.
Under the blanket, Adam felt Meryam stiffen. For a moment it was as if Walker had vanished from the infirmary and it was just the three of them and the tension of the past twenty-four hours churning in the space between them.
“Listen,” Adam began. “You know it wasn’t me.”
Feyiz cocked his head. “Which part do you mean? The raving lunatic who attacked me? The jealous man who thought I was having an affair with his fiancée?”
Walker stood up, moving between the cots and the door. “Do we really need to do this right now?”
Feyiz stepped around him. “I think we do.” He crouched in front of Adam and Meryam, glancing from one to the other. “I am and shall continue to be your friend. Of course I wonder, Adam, where your own emotions and behavior ended and the demon took over.”
Meryam exhaled sharply. “We’ll never know the answer to that question.”
“That’s right,” Feyiz said, studying her face. “We never will. And so we go on, all three of us. We get off this mountain alive, and when we’ve accomplished that, we’ll worry about what it means for old friendships.”
He held out a hand. Adam took his arm from around Meryam and shook it. For the moment, at least, they could be strong together.
“That’s lovely,” Walker said. “Now do you want to give them an update on where we stand, or should I?”
Feyiz stood. “You’re a man with sharp edges, Dr. Walker. Sharp edges and many secrets. I’m glad you’re here with us. I’m also glad we’re leaving.”
“Get on with it,” Walker said.
“Seven killed last night, in total.” Feyiz shook his head, his hard shell cracking as he shared the news. “There are sixteen of us left, including the four people in this room. The bodies have been wrapped up tightly and stowed in a stall on level one for retrieval in the spring—”
“We’re taking them with us,” Meryam said. “I’m not … we can’t leave them here.”
“Meryam,” Walker began.
Adam jumped in. “Feyiz just said there are sixteen people left alive. It’s going to be hard enough getting down the mountain in this storm, not even taking into account whatever the demon might do to try to thwart that attempt. If it gets inside someone else”—or back inside me, he thought—“look, we just can’t. You know this. Someone else will come back for them. I feel a responsibility toward them, too—I don’t want to just abandon them, but our first priority has to be the people who are still breathing. The people we can save.”
“Okay,” Meryam said quietly. “I get it.”
“We can’t endanger them any further by asking them to carry the bodies of the dead down off the mountain,” Adam went on.
“I said I get it!”
Her voice echoed in the little plastic box of a room.
Adam caught movement in his peripheral vision and looked up to see Calliope out in the corridor, filming the whole exchange. Heat flushed his cheeks, anger and shame in equal portion.
“Not now, Callie,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here with that thing.”
She flinched. Blond hair tied back in a bun, pale and drawn and exhausted, she looked as broken and vulnerable as the rest of them. She’d been a friend and a comfort and when they’d made love it had felt like true shelter from the emotional wreckage in his heart. In that moment, it had felt right. Punishing her for it was a shitty thing to do, but he told himself this was not punishment. Just privacy.
“Seriously?” Calliope said. “One of us is doing her fucking job, and just in case the ‘her’ didn’t give it away, it isn’t you. I’m scared out of my mind right now, but I figured…”
She shook her head. “You know what? Never mind.”
Calliope turned, lowering her camera.
Meryam called her back. “Hold on!”
The two women faced each other—Calliope in the doorway and Meryam on the cot—and Adam had to look away.
“Keep doing your job,” Meryam said. “When this is over, we’re going to want a record. Whatever happens, people need to know.”
Calliope seemed about to reply, but was distracted by the arrival of Professor Olivieri. She backed up to let him into the infirmary, and Adam sent thoughts of silent gratitude toward him for the interruption.
“All right,” Olivieri began, placing a cloth bag on the counter by the door. He glanced at Feyiz and Walker. “You two are squared away, yes?”
Walker nodded grimly. Feyiz reached inside his shirt and pulled out a black, gleaming charm—a bit of bitumen that hung from twine that he’d tied around his neck.
Reaching into the bag, Olivieri withdrew two just like it and handed one to Meryam and the other to Adam.
“I’m already wearing mine,” the professor said. “Put mine on first, to be honest.”
The bags beneath his eyes were dark and deep. His nose shone red but his dark complexion had gone pale. Adam thought he looked like hell, but he figured they all did. It helped him to not focus on Meryam’s illness. They all looked dreadfully ill.
“Thank you, professor,” he said.
Meryam slipped her bitumen charm on immediately, but Adam hesitated. Father Cornelius had blessed these things, but it wasn’t the faith of the holy man that tripped him up. Rabbi, priest, imam—he figured a blessing was a blessing. But if he was looking for something to believe in, it wouldn’t be a chunk of shiny, hardened, volcanic rock.
“Hey,” Meryam said, nudging him. “It can’t hurt.”
Adam managed a weak smile and slipped the charm around his neck.
“Of course,” Olivieri said, “with Dr. Walker’s other skills, he may not need outside protection.”
Adam tucked his bitumen charm inside his shirt. “I am curious, Walker. I’ve never seen a Ph.D. fight like that before.”
Walker shrugged. “We’re allowed to have more than one set of skills. Being able to handle myself in a fight has come in handy more often than I’d have wished.”
Meryam toyed with the twine around her neck. “Can we focus, please? Has anyone else shown signs of being…”
“Possessed,” Adam finished for her. “You can say the word, Meryam.”
“All right,” she said, glancing at Walker and Feyiz. “Any sign of anyone else being possessed?”
“Nothing overt,” Walker said. “It could be hiding inside someone, pulling strings the way it apparently did with Zeybekci. Maybe he made it easy for the demon, I don’t know. Right now, the only thing I’m noticing is a lot of tension, but that’s natural.”
“There is actually much less tension, now,” Feyiz added. “The things that had splintered us apart before are no lo
nger relevant.”
“Terror is a great unifier,” Olivieri muttered. “They’ve seen murder now. They believe in evil in one form or another. Everyone left alive up here just wants to survive.”
“On that note,” Calliope said from the passage outside the door, “can we cut the chitchat and get the hell out of here?”
Adam glanced at her, but saw only the eye of the camera. Calliope hid behind it, just as he so often did. With a nod, he placed a hand on Meryam’s back, a moment of connection before he rose from the cot. He felt unsteady, but it passed quickly and he took a deep breath.
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Bundle up, folks. It’s cold outside.”
* * *
Olivieri stood with the others out on the ledge, and for the first time the impossibility of the task ahead sank in. Snow stuck to his goggles and he used his left glove to wipe it away. With the blizzard raging around them, it felt as if they were the last people on Earth. Like most of them he wore a balaclava that covered everything but his eyes and mouth. He told himself this was the reason he could not seem to catch his breath. It was the fabric and the storm, not his fear.
I’m going to die on this mountain, he thought. It was a cold sort of knowledge, like an awareness of his age or height or weight. He would die long before they reached the foot of Ararat. Perhaps that would be best.
Around him, people shouted to one another, trying to get in some semblance of order. Hakan had been project foreman, but now he and Feyiz had returned to their roles as guides. The two of them were working with a third guide, a cousin or something, to get the rest started down the mountain. Some carried heavy packs while others helped the weak or wounded, but the people around him had lost their identity beneath hats and parka hoods and behind goggles and balaclavas. They’d become strangers to one another. He wondered if the demon hid inside one of them, its eyes peering out.
Olivieri wore his crampons. He had a climbing ax dangling at his hip and poles that Hakan had given him. There were ropes and pitons, but only for emergencies. Once they moved away from the cave, sidling westward, back toward the normal path that would lead them down to Camp Two, the mountain wasn’t steep enough to require them all to be tethered together. But he thought there might be another reason why Hakan didn’t want them all tethered.
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