The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  We climbed the steps and entered the keep. In the center of a large bare hall, square, massive pale pillars supported a winding stairway. From the entrance, it looked as though there was only one staircase, but I knew there were two, entwined around each other. A slight dark-haired woman stood on a lower step, leaning against the marble bannister.

  “Vous parlez français?” the woman called out.

  “Oui,” Alberto shouted back, his voice echoing in the empty hall.

  She hurried to us. There was no tension in her face and no fearfulness in her brown eyes as she introduced herself. Her name was Ariane, and she was staying at St-Michel, the inn across from the chateau. She had been over by the canal, speaking to one of the estate’s gamekeepers, when the white light had filled the sky and the terror had seized her. She and the gamekeeper were running toward the inn when Ariane saw her sister, who had traveled there with her, speeding away in their car. By then, other vehicles were racing toward the road. Alberto waited until the Frenchwoman was finished, then translated for the rest of us.

  “She must be furious with her sister,” I murmured.

  Edna shook her head. “Maybe not. Everybody just ran. You don’t know how it was. You couldn’t think of anything else except getting out of here.”

  Jim nodded. “Might of even left Edna behind if she hadn’t been hanging on to me.”

  Ariane didn’t look frightened now. She said something about being content to stay here for the moment; I knew enough French to catch that much. Alberto translated the rest. Jean, the gamekeeper, had gone to let the horses out of the stables; she would wait here for him and then return to the inn.

  She sounded awfully calm under the circumstances. I would have found her serenity eerie except that I was finding it increasingly hard to work up any real fear myself. I almost felt drugged. Maybe we were all too stunned by our situation to react to anything. Our psychological defenses must be kicking in, I thought absently.

  The Haworths decided to wait with Ariane, then walk to the inn with her and Jean. Alberto was saying something else to Ariane as I wandered toward the staircase, suddenly wanting to be by myself. Inside this magnificent château, I could pretend, for a while, that there was nothing to worry about.

  It struck me then that, no matter what the intentions of the interstellar visitor, our world would never be the same. Even if the alien ship left without revealing its purpose, we would all know that other beings were out there, and that their civilization was obviously technologically far in advance of our own. What would that do to us? No wonder I wanted to remain here, near one of humankind’s wonders, thinking back to a time when most people had assumed that beings on other worlds did not exist.

  A stocky brown-haired man had come inside the chateau; I assumed he was Jean the gamekeeper. Alberto said something to him, and then the man led the others toward the entrance.

  I leaned against the stone railing. My feet were beginning to hurt. Ankle-high leather boots with pointed toes and narrow heels weren’t good for walking very far. That was probably why Jim Haworth was surprised to find out I was an American, because I was wearing a pin-striped pantsuit and chic boots instead of jeans and athletic shoes. Alberto didn’t like it when I looked too American.

  Things had not been right between Alberto and me for a while. I wasn’t sure of exactly when I had begun to notice that. Maybe it was the morning when I stood by our apartment window and realized that Rome no longer looked as it had to me, as though fragments of the past were slipping into the present, or as if the present were just an illusion superimposed on something more ancient. The present had finally overtaken my view of the city. All I saw now was the chaotic traffic, and all I could hear was the constant noise of the streets.

  Once, I had been entranced by the city and its layers of history, and then I was longing to get away. The same was true of my feelings toward Alberto. Everything that had drawn me—his expressiveness, his ardent professions of love, his determination to enjoy whatever he wanted to do regardless of the cost, his inability to keep to any schedule for long, his erratic moods—were exactly the same characteristics that had finally convinced me that our relationship couldn’t work. His unquestioned assumption that I was the lady of the house and that he was in charge of everything else hadn’t helped, either.

  Everything had come to a head after yet another hair-raising ride through Roman traffic in the Fiat that he would never allow me to drive. I started screaming at him about his recklessness and the motorcyclist he had narrowly missed and the amount of wine he had drunk. He was retaliating with his usual tirade about my constipated American ways when he abruptly fell silent, then said, “You wanted to spend some time in France. We’ll go, in September or October. We can drive there, stop along the way. The business will not collapse if I leave it in Giancarlo’s hands for three weeks.” He had taken me completely by surprise, so I had gone along with his proposal. Maybe I was also thinking that I might as well see some more of Italy and France before walking out on him. I had known that he wouldn’t come after me if I left, that the break would be final; he was too proud to beg, however wounded he might feel. How irrelevant and unimportant all of that seemed now.

  I looked down. Alberto was below, following me up the staircase. I stopped to work my sore toes inside my boots, and he disappeared behind the central pillar. “Lois!” he called out. He was now above me on the stairway that intertwined with this one.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have left the Haworths without an interpreter,” I shouted back.

  “Jean knows some English. I want to explore the chateau with you.”

  I hurried up the stairs after him, through a vast hall, and caught up with him in a room paneled in pale wood, with a large canopied bed against one wall. “This room once housed a king of Poland,” he said. “Perhaps we should stay here tonight.”

  I found myself laughing. We clasped hands and hurried through large bare rooms, smaller rooms tucked away in corners, and narrow corridors. It was difficult, even in the cozier spaces, to imagine anyone, even the arrogant monarchs and nobles of France’s past, actually living in the vastness of this chateau. Chambord was a place for spectacle and display, for the mighty to show off their wealth and power. I thought of the servants that must have once stood in the doorways that led from small alcoves, rooms, and passages into the staterooms and bedchambers, how they must have marveled at the glittering and careless aristocrats who might as well have come from another world.

  We scurried up stairs, heedless of where we were going. I was suddenly relieved that I had never told Alberto that I was thinking of leaving him, and deeply regretting that I had ever planned to go back to New York. We would lose ourselves inside Chambord, and never find our way out again. What happened outside could not touch us.

  We had climbed to the roof terrace before a stray thought intruded on my contented mood. All of the rooms, even the small alcoves and chambers that lacked the huge windows of the biggest rooms, had glowed with a soft light. I had assumed that daylight was providing much of the illumination, but the overcast sky had not cleared, and evening was approaching. I recalled seeing lighting in some of Chambord’s rooms, but not in the small passages where the walls had also glowed.

  “The walls here,” I said. “It’s almost as if they were lighted from inside.”

  Alberto didn’t say anything. On the terrace, we were amid a forest of towers and chimneys, as if an entire town of spires and steeples had been placed on top of the chateau. I slipped my arm through his as we walked toward the north wall. The air had grown sharper, colder. It had been warmer inside, in spite of the size of the rooms and the lack of fires in the fireplaces.

  We came to the railing. I had a clear view of the moat and the canal that ran through the grounds nearest the chateau. Near a small bridge over the canal, a flock of ducks rested on the bank. I lifted my head, then noticed something else. In the distance, at the western edge of the forest and the groomed field alongside it, a low
wall of thick gray mist seemed to mark a boundary.

  “That fog,” I said. “There’s something odd about it.”

  “I know.” Alberto frowned as he rubbed his dark beard. “Perhaps we should leave now, all of us. We would have to squeeze the others into the auto, but—” His voice trailed off. It was obvious that he didn’t want to leave. I didn’t, either, but the voice inside my head was growing more insistent, saying that there was something the matter with my being so serene, with our willingness to linger in a place where people had nearly run us down in their fear to get away, who had been so determined to flee the area that they hadn’t cared what was in their path.

  “Look there.” Alberto pointed. Four tiny shapes had emerged from the wall of fog. I narrowed my eyes, but some time passed before I could see them more clearly. They were cyclists, pedaling up the road we had taken. “Perhaps we should find out what they want.”

  We left the terrace. It never occurred to me to worry about whether the new arrivals might be dangerous.

  The bicyclists arrived at the inn shortly after Alberto had parked our car near the entrance. One look at their wholesome, clean-featured faces told me that they were no threat to us. They were equipped with maps, backpacks, and other gear; one of them told us that he had visited Chambord before.

  His name was Erland; he had startlingly blue eyes, spoke perfect English, and was a medical student from Sweden. He and his friends, another blond young man and two fair-haired slender young women, had been staying at a hostel near Blois when the announcement came, and had left it only that morning. Later, they had seen a large bright flash of light in the distance, in the direction of Cour-Cheverny.

  “We listened over the radio,” Erland said. We were all sitting in the empty dining room of the refurbished country house that was the inn. “Knut has a short-wave with him. We thought they might be attacking. There were reports from Meung-sur-Loire and Chenonceaux, of people fleeing from the chateaux there, seeing the sky go white, feeling terrified. Then it was over. There were a few auto accidents, collisions, and some people being hit by cars, but nothing more serious.”

  “Happened here, too,” Jim Haworth said, “that business with the sky lighting up. My wife and me saw it.”

  “Have you heard any news since then?” Erland asked.

  Jim shook his head. “Tried a lot of televisions here. None of them worked. Neither did the radios.”

  “I was thinking the government might have ordered a stop to news broadcasts,” I said, “to keep people from getting more frightened.”

  Erland shook his head. “How could they stop the news, even if they wanted to do so? They can’t shut down satellites and the Internet. There are too many ways to spread the news now.” He motioned at Knut. The other young man rummaged in his backpack and took out a small radio. We all huddled around it and heard nothing. No static, weak signals, white noise—nothing but absolute silence.

  “This radio was working before,” Knut muttered in English much more heavily accented than his friend’s. “There is nothing wrong with it.” Astrid and Dorotea, the two young women, glanced at each other.

  The Swedes were on their feet in a few seconds. They swept through the inn, searching for other radios and TVs, but discovered that none of them worked, either.

  They were coming back into the dining room when I heard Ariane murmur something to Jean about the lights. Alberto leaned forward, then glanced at the Haworths. “She is saying that the lights in this room do not look the same,” he said. “When she was having dinner here last night, they weren’t as bright.”

  Erland and his friends sat down at a nearby table. “There is something very odd here,” the young Swede said. “When we saw on our maps that we were near Chambord, we decided to stop here for the night. There was this fog—”

  “I saw it,” Alberto interrupted, “from the roof of the chateau. It looked almost like a wall.”

  “It is hanging outside the wall that surrounds these grounds,” Erland went on. “We had to ride through it. It felt like a warm soft mass, but dry and not damp. I could feel it pressing around me. A strange feeling went through me, like a small electric shock, and I thought of turning back, but by then we were through it.”

  “We all felt it,” Knut added. “But then—” He leaned back in his chair. “I am glad we found this place. We all found ourselves glad to be here when we were closer to this inn. There is probably some food in the kitchen. We should make supper and then get some rest.” He smiled. “Perhaps we should stay for a few days. We will surely be comfortable enough. I feared that we might have to camp out in the forest.”

  Everyone seemed eerily relaxed. Edna’s arm rested on that of her husband; Alberto had the sleepy-eyed contented look I usually saw after he had drunk a couple of glasses of wine.

  “I think we should leave,” I said, having to force the words from my lips. Even as I said it, the rest of me was thinking of supper and then some sleep. “Something’s wrong here. I think—” But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else, and no one was paying any attention to me.

  Knut and Dorotea cooked lamb chops, potatoes, and carrots for our supper, and served the meal with wine from the inn’s cellar. We found room keys behind the desk in the lobby and drifted off to St-Michel’s guest rooms. I slept in my shirt and underpants, too tired even to go to the car and bring in my overnight bag.

  A dream came to me. I was standing on the steps of Chambord’s double stairway, gazing down at the people in the hall below. The hall was ablaze with light, and four people stood near the staircase beckoning to me. I recognized Erland and his companions; they seemed to want me to join them. Looking up, I saw Alberto above me; I hurried up the stairs, lifting the skirt of my long blue silk gown. I left the stairway and came to a room where Edna and Jim Haworth sat in two small wooden chairs, warming themselves near the fire that blazed in the fireplace. Ariane entered the room, clothed in a long red gown. Faces appeared in the embroidery on the walls near the window and smiled at me. I was on the staircase again, with stone dragons writhing on the pilasters above me and stone salamanders flicking their tails as they crawled along the walls. I came to the terrace and found Alberto by the railing, looking out over the forest. He held out his arm and I rested my hand against it, but something about my gesture felt false, as if I hadn’t quite performed it correctly. On the other side of the canal, Jean was riding out of the woods on horseback with a deer slung across his mount. It was all ours, this magical place. No one could take it from us.

  I woke and lay in bed without moving. I was used to waking in the middle of the night, when all my self-doubt and neuroses were working at full strength to convince me that my life was empty and useless. Even when I slept through until morning, I often had to lie there wrestling with lassitude and despair before facing the day. The hollow, stunned feeling of hopelessness with which I was so familiar was gone; I wasn’t quite sure of what I was feeling instead. Anticipation? Happiness? I hadn’t been truly happy for so long that happiness would be hard to recognize.

  I sat up. Our overnight bag sat near the window. The door opened; Alberto entered with a tray holding a pot of coffee and two cups. In all our time together, he had never once brought me coffee in the morning. He had forgotten to bring milk, or else hadn’t found any; I drank the coffee black.

  “I dreamed about you,” I said as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “We were in the chateau, all of us, Ariane and the Haworths and the Swedes. I found you on the terrace. Jean was riding out of the forest with a deer carcass on his horse. It was as if—”

  “—it belonged to us,” Alberto finished. “I had the same dream, Lois, or one much like it. I stood on the terrace, and you came to me, and then I saw Jean come out of the forest. Before that, I was standing on the central staircase, and you were there, and the young Swedes were calling out to us. Then I was in another room, with the Haworths and Ariane.”

  “Isn’t that kind of strange, both of us dreaming the sa
me thing?” I poured myself more coffee. “There’s something else. My dream didn’t feel like one of my dreams. For one thing, mine usually aren’t that coherent. For another—” I tried to think of how to explain it. “I felt as if I was playing a part in a way, almost as if someone were trying to cast me but I wasn’t quite right for the role. And yet—”

  Alberto said, “I felt I was where I belonged.”

  “I felt that you were, too. You know, when I was a kid, I used to imagine that I’d meet a prince some day, or a nobleman anyway, and end up living in a palace. It’s a common enough fantasy, almost a cliché, but—”

  “One of my mother’s ancestors was a count,” he said. “This was several generations back, but she was quite proud of her great-great-grandfather the count.”

  I said, “That explains a few things about you,” and touched his arm lightly.

  “Oh, I considered her pride in him an affectation, but she must have passed on some of that pride to me. There have been a few times, even recently, when I would tell myself while in a bad situation to behave as the count might have.”

  My dream had seemed familiar, as if I’d dreamed it before, and yet parts of it seemed to come from outside my own memories and imagination. I recalled the feeling that I had been playing a part, that something had forced the role on me. I was about to say that we should go to our car and drive away now, but couldn’t bring myself to speak.

  Somehow I got up and got dressed. Alberto was uncharacteristically subdued. We left the room together and found the others sitting on the terrace, gazing at the chateau across the way.

  Chambord was unearthly in the early morning light. Despite its size, it had an ethereal air. As I moved across the terrace, my arm looped through Alberto’s, I could imagine the great castle ascending to the sky to rest among clouds.

  Everyone was staring at us. I was about to greet the Haworths when Jean and Ariane rose to their feet. The blond cyclists stood up then, followed by the Haworths.