The Mountain Cage (34 page)

All four of us got to the walkway. I kept my eyes on the ground, thinking only of getting as far as the inn. Once we made it there, we could get into the car and drive away. I concentrated on that thought. Alberto was muttering in Italian. I kept my hand in his, determined not to let go.

Knut and Astrid were several feet ahead of us, struggling toward the distant inn. The forested land behind the inn seemed beyond our reach. Knut stumbled and fell; Astrid helped him up. We had to get to the car. Maybe by then Alberto and I would have enough strength to help the other two into the vehicle.

“Get to the car,” I murmured, “keep going,” and then noticed that a misty gray wall was rising behind the trees. For a while, I didn’t know what I was seeing as the mist continued to rise, obscuring the cloudless blue expanse. Slowly, I forced my head to my right. Another mass of fog was rising toward the sun.

Astrid and Knut had come to a halt. The young blond woman turned around slowly. Knut was tugging at her arm. Astrid gazed past me. A smile spread slowly across her face, and I knew that she was looking back at the château.

She sank to the ground, Knut at her side. They were both smiling when we reached them, and I thought of how Chambord must look now, the perfect castle with its crown of towers pointing toward the sky. I remembered how happy I had felt while standing at Alberto’s side on Chambord’s terrace.

“Don’t look back,” I managed to whisper as we dragged ourselves around the couple sitting on the ground. They had given up the struggle; the chateau’s spell had claimed them.

I don’t know how long it took us to get to the inn and our car. By the time we spotted the Fiat, the sun had disappeared. Most of the sky was obscured by the fog, a gray iris slowly contracting around the blue disk of sky that remained.

Alberto fumbled through his pockets for the keys. It seemed to take forever for him to find them. I heard him whisper in Italian.

“Don’t talk.” My throat was tight and dry, my voice almost gone.

“We would be happy here,” he said.
 

“No.”

“Get me away from here,” he gasped, and I knew his strength was almost gone.

He had left the car unlocked. I opened the door on the right and shoved him inside, then staggered around to the driver’s side. I got in and started the car.

The engine choked before I could get the motor running. The Fiat weaved as I steered it away from the inn. I clung to the wheel, which kept threatening to twist itself from my hands.

I found my way to a road. If I kept going, I would have to reach an exit sooner or later. The car swerved from side to side as I accelerated. The speedometer was reading fifty kilometers per hour; it felt more like a crawl. Then the motor suddenly died. The car slowed to a stop, throwing me toward the windshield.

“We have to walk.” My voice seemed very far away. “Open the door and get out.” Somehow Alberto got the door open. He got out and dragged me out after him.

We had our arms around each other, holding ourselves up as we stumbled along the road. I could see the fog ahead of us, a thick curtain hiding everything on the other side. It was foolish to go on struggling when we could stay here. I thought of the contentment I had felt with Alberto inside the château, how we both belonged there, our fantasies fulfilled. Then I recalled the mindless looks on the faces of the Haworths and Erland’s vacant blue eyes.

“Don’t look back.” My mind chanted the words: Don’t look back, keep going. We came to the fog. The gray mist enveloped us; the fog was thick and heavy, a dry warm mass. I felt it resisting me and struggled for air. For a moment, I couldn’t move. We clung to each other, embedded in the gray mass; I imagined it growing solid around us. Then the thick fog before me gave way, and we stumbled into the light.

I gasped for breath; Alberto was coughing. The sky above us was blue. The drugged, entranced feeling was gone, and I was beginning to notice how much my feet hurt. A two-lane road lay before us. I turned around slowly. Behind us, the wall of fog stretched to the north and south, hiding all of Chambord.

“Lois,” Alberto said. “I wanted to stay.”
 

“So did I.”

“But not now.”

Far to the north, on the road, I could now see what looked like roadblocks and several parked cars. One car, with a light on its roof, was coming in our direction.

It was a police car, from Orléans. The two men inside quickly motioned for us to get in. I collapsed against the seat, exhausted, while Alberto and the two men talked; during pauses in the conversation, Alberto translated for me. The authorities in Blois had requested the aid of the Orléans police in returning the residents and shopkeepers of Chambord to their establishments. They had come there to find a fog that was an impenetrable barrier, impossible to drive through and steadily increasing in height. The police had thought it best to get people farther away from the area.

We came to a stop at the intersection where the other cars were parked. All of the roads were blocked off; people stood by their cars, gazing toward Chambord. Alberto helped me out of the car, then turned to talk some more with the police. They seemed to be asking him what had happened to us. Two reporters with microphones and cameramen were moving among the crowd; another cameraman was on top of a van, his camcorder aimed in the direction of the château.

I looked south, toward Chambord. The chateau and its grounds were now hidden behind a vast gray dome. I thought of how the fog had held us, then yielded. Something had let us go—or perhaps hadn’t wanted to keep us.

A hand clutched my elbow. “This is not the only place this has happened,” Alberto murmured. “One of the policemen told me. There was news of people fleeing from Plessis-Bourré, the Chenonceau château, other places along the Loire. Now they are all behind enclosures like that one, and there is no way of knowing how many people may be trapped inside them.”

“Not only here in France,” a gray-haired man near us said in heavily accented English. “There is news of such happenings in Germany and Spain also.”

I leaned against Alberto. A woman came to us and was thrusting a microphone in my face when a cylinder of light shot down from the sky and touched the gray dome. The fog disappeared; the pavement under my feet trembled, then shook more violently.

The ground lurched. Alberto held me up. Someone screamed behind me; the ground shook again. In the distance, the forests of Chambord were rising toward the sky. The chateau was a glittering, tiny crown amid the green expanse torn from the Earth. I watched its ascent until Chambord and its grounds were only a speck moving toward the sun. Where they had been, only a gaping canyon remained.

The aliens gathered up châteaux from the Loire, a couple of German castles along the Rhine, and two stone fortresses from Spain. They left deep gashes in the Earth and billions of bewildered people. Enough footage of the incomprehensible theft of these treasures had been obtained to fill news programs for weeks. Again and again, in reruns and slow motion, castles and the towns or lands around them were torn from Earth’s surface and ascended to the heavens. The craters and ravines marking the places where they had once stood were filmed from different angles. There was even footage taken by the cosmonauts and astronauts in orbit. Their film showed castles on disks of land floating toward the alien ship, seemingly encased by translucent domes, small bubbles against the blackness. An opening in the metallic gray alien vessel had opened to receive them, and then the ship vanished as mysteriously and abruptly as it had arrived.

Alberto and I spent a few weeks doing interviews, occasionally in the company of others who had managed to escape from other stolen castles. Representatives of various military establishments also had questions for us, but I suspect we didn’t enlighten them much. Eventually the reporters and debriefers had lost interest in us. I flew back to New York, talked my friend Karen into letting me do freelance work for her in Italy, found a publisher for an account of my adventure, and then returned to Rome.

We can pretend that things will return to normal, but I doubt they ever truly will. I find myself thinking of Chambord, imagining it housed inside the alien ship, perhaps on an inner surface where one could stand on the chateau’s terrace and see other castles in the distance. I think of the Haworths, the young Swedes, the gamekeeper Jean, and Ariane, and wonder if they’re still under the spell the aliens cast. I often feel, as Alberto does, that the aliens let us go out of respect for our resistance to them, but perhaps they were only toying with us as we toy with smaller creatures, or rejecting us as unsuitable for whatever roles they wanted us to play. I tell myself that the aliens took too much trouble in collecting their castles not to care for them and preserve them, but maybe they only mean to play with them for a while, as children do with new playthings before discarding them.

And I wonder, as everyone wonders now, if they will ever come back to collect the rest of our castles and palaces.

Afterword to “Collectors”:

Stories come to me in different ways. Some stories inhabit me for a while, lurking at the edges of consciousness until they’re ready to be written. Others suddenly spring into my mind full-grown, only to fade a few moments later. The process of writing them then becomes a recovery operation, an effort to remember what was forgotten; the final version almost always falls short of the original vision.

“Collectors” was a story that might not have been written—maybe a more accurate way to put it is to say that I might not have realized I wanted to write it—had John DeChancie not asked me to contribute to an anthology he was editing with Martin H. Greenberg,
Castle Fantastic.
The only requirement was that each story be set in a castle or be about castles, and although John expected that most of the authors would contribute fantasy stories, he was also open to other kinds of tales.

This story came to me immediately, and I had the perfect setting for it—the château of Chambord, surely one of the most ostentatious and monumental dwellings ever built, which I had visited not long before. I was even more encouraged to write “Collectors” by the fact that an editor (who also happens to be a writer himself) had asked me for a story. Having a story requested from me and knowing that whatever I write will be accepted and published is a powerful inducement, largely because an editor is expressing his faith that I will deliver a good piece of work. In a profession where one’s confidence can so easily be destroyed (by thoughtless or scathing reviews, by the troubles and distractions of life, by the demands of the work, by the abysses of self-doubt that afflict us all), having that kind of trust is extremely liberating. You
do
and
do well
because you simply cannot disappoint the giver of such freedom.

So I began writing this story, fairly sure of what I was doing and knowing how the story was likely to end, and soon came to a dead stop. To promise a story, and then let the editors down—I couldn’t allow that to happen, but “Collectors” wasn’t cooperating with me. Fortunately, I eventually realized what the problem was: the story had come to me, fully shaped and in its appropriate setting, but I had not heard the voice of the story properly.

How a story is told can make all the difference, and this one came alive only after I began to tell it in first person; only then did the central character live. My mistake had been in not waiting long enough to hear that voice speak clearly.

ISLES

Their hotel was near the train station, close enough for Miriam and Alan to walk there. She hefted their carry-on bags while he picked up their two suitcases and followed her down the steps. At the docks along the Grand Canal, people were getting out of a long flat-topped passenger boat as three gondolas glided away across the greenish-blue water. The air smelled of sulphur and salt water and gasoline and faintly of rotting fish.

Alan had a map showing the location of the hotel. Miriam knew that he would not look at it and would only get annoyed if she stopped and rummaged in her bag for her own map. He would never look at a map or ask directions. In Florence, it had taken them forty minutes to get to the Uffizi from the Piazza Santa Croce because Alan knew exactly where the Uffizi was and how to get there and you couldn’t miss the place because it was only a five or ten-minute walk from the Piazza Santa Croce.

He led her away from the Grand Canal to a narrow cobblestoned walkway that ran between a row of buildings and then past kiosks and booths offering postcards, marionettes, newspapers, magazines, cheap jewelry, T-shirts, toy gondolas, and masks. The hotel, a square yellow six-story structure, turned out to be only a five-minute walk from the station. Miriam sat on a sofa in the lobby while Alan checked them in, studying the map she had bought after getting off the train. Her friend Leah had told Miriam that she would need a good map in Venice. Her hands shook as she refolded the map. The strain of trying to be calm during the train trip was catching up with her. If she dwelled too much on the problems awaiting her and Alan when they got home, she would panic and lapse into one of the fits of hysterical weeping that so enraged him.

“It’s Room 414.” She looked up as Alan handed her a metal key attached to a small plastic cylinder bearing the room number. A porter in a red uniform was with him, carrying the suitcases.