The Mountain Cage (32 page)

Older American women often seemed to find my situation romantic. I had once thought of it as romantic myself. My taste for romance was probably why none of my relationships had lasted very long; the romance always wore off in the end.

“Actually, we met in New York,” I said, “trying to hail a cab on the same corner. Alberto was there on business—his firm imports a lot of American products. We ended up going to dinner, and one thing led to another, and a couple of months later, I was living in Rome.”

“How adventurous.”

I had never been adventurous; it only sounded that way. However great my longing for romance and a break from my everyday life, I always covered my bets. My job was safe at the ad agency because my best friend owned the agency; Karen had faxed only last month to say I could come back any time. My apartment had been subletted, so I would still have a place to live if I returned to New York. It wasn’t my style either to burn my bridges behind me or to commit myself completely by abandoning my previous life. I had read that Francois I, Chambord’s builder, had needed thousands of horses to bring his luggage, servants, and courtiers to this chateau just for short visits. I could sympathize with that. I took all my baggage with me, psychologically at least.

All of my past caution might not make any difference now, I reminded myself. At the moment, there might be little security for anyone. That thought should have brought on another wave of despair and fear. Instead, I found myself placidly looking forward to a closer look at the magnificent château. Something’s wrong, my inner voice told me; I ignored it.

The great château was even larger than I realized. We could have walked around it, following the wide pathway that led around the moat to the entrance on the other side, but it would have been a long walk. If any visitors were still inside, I had the feeling we could wander through the chateau for days without ever finding them. Chambord was a world in itself; I no longer feared what might be happening elsewhere.

The main entrance was in the center of a wall; the doors and the gate of the arched entryway were open. The towers of the keep rose behind the wall, still golden even under the overcast sky. We got out and went through the entrance to the pebbled courtyard in front of the keep.

“How strange,” Alberto said softly. “I feel as if I belong here.” In the past, I would have teased him about his arrogance, but the same feeling of belonging had stolen over me. Perhaps it was the strangeness of our situation, of being alone in this monument to Renaissance architecture while the world outside waited—for what?

“Know what you mean, son,” Jim was saying to Alberto. “I feel kind of easy here, too. Almost seems like we got all scared for nothing.”

Across the courtyard, the two doors leading into the keep were also open. We walked toward the steps that led to them. “It’s almost as if someone wants us to come inside,” I said.

“Probably the folks trying to get away just didn’t bother to close up,” Edna said.

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.