Chapter Twenty-nine
The temptation had been to stay over. But Enzo was concerned that he had not seen Sophie for a couple of days. Not since the night that her aspiring boyfriend had attacked him at the chateau. And he wanted to be around if she needed him. So it had been with some difficulty that he had managed to tear himself free of Dominique’s arms and get dressed again for the drive back up to the hotel.
It was almost midnight, and the road was deserted. The cloud was low over the hills, the air made opaque by the damp delineating his headlamps in misted white beams that raked across hectares of thick pine forest as he navigated the winding road up the hill.
Finally he reached the turn-off and took a left, accelerating up into the private road that cut through the trees toward the auberge. The dark seemed particularly impenetrable here, and the two horsepower engine of his old deux chevaux strained as he pulled back into third and pushed the accelerator to the floor. He passed the beaten parking area at the foot of the track that led up to the buron, following the curve of the road past the point where he had seen the men putting in snow poles the day he arrived. The red-and-white striped poles reflected the light of his headlamps now. With the road falling away, first on the right, then on the left, he could see why they would be vital for keeping a vehicle on the road in heavy snow.
With the warm air powering out of the heating vent below the dash, Enzo felt a wave of fatigue wash over him, and he remembered the taste and scent and touch of the woman he had been lying in bed with just half an hour before.
He rounded a bend, and a dark shape loomed up at him suddenly out of the night. He jammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt centimetres before making contact with the tree that lay directly across the road blocking his path. Cursing his luck, he got out of the car to take a look, his body cutting through the beam of his headlights and casting a long shadow ahead of him into the night.
The old pine tree was half-rotten and must have been on the verge of falling for some time. Pine needles stabbed him through his pants as he clambered over the trunk to see if there was any way it could be rolled aside. But it was completely immovable. It would take a mechanical digger to shift it.
It was only then that he became aware of the light around him fading, and he looked up to see the headlights of his car receding as the vehicle started rolling backwards down the hill.
“Hey!” he shouted. As if it might somehow hear him and stop. He clambered back over the trunk, feeling branches tearing at his clothes, and started running after it. For a moment he seemed to be catching it, but with the steepness of the descent it was rapidly picking up pace, and he realized it was hopeless. Still he ran, arms windmilling now as he too started losing control, stopping himself from falling at the last moment only by jarring his feet against the pitch of the incline. He brought himself to a shuddering halt just as his car disappeared silently from view, tipping backwards down the slope at the bend in the road, its headlights tilted suddenly upwards, like spotlights searching the sky.
Enzo ran on to the bend and stood at the edge of a steep precipice, looking down at his car half buried in bracken at the foot of the slope. It was cradled by a mesh of sapling branches and undergrowth in an impossible position, its headlamps still pointed straight up, the engine racing.
Enzo was almost tempted to go down after it, but it was a treacherous, crumbling scree, and in the dark he risked a fall that could break his neck. And to what end? There was no way he could get the car out of there. All he could have done was extinguish the engine and the lights and plunged himself into complete darkness.
So he stood, breathing hard, his heart pounding, wondering how in God’s name it could have happened. He had secured the handbrake before leaving the car. Either the brakes had failed or the cable had snapped.
He turned and peered back up the hill through a darkness so dense he could almost touch it. Mist and cloud cover effectively blacked out any light from the sky. He could only see his hands in front of him because of the reflected light from his car’s headlamps in the gully behind him. But as he started up the hill that quickly faded, and he felt the night wrapping its blindness around him. Very soon he could see nothing ahead of him at all, and almost fell, stumbling as he blundered into the fallen tree. Needles and branches scratched and tore at him and he clambered clumsily to the other side of it.
He had no option but to try to follow the road up through the trees until he could see the lights of the auberge. But strain as he might through the veil of darkness that lay all around, he could discern no sign of them. Not even a distant glow in the sky. For the first time in his life he experienced how it must feel to be blind. Only his feet beneath him would tell him that he was still on the paved road, his outstretched hands preventing a collision with some unseen obstacle. He had rarely felt so helpless.
Progress was painfully slow as he took one careful step at a time, only too conscious of how the land dropped away to his left. After several minutes, the sound of the waterfall that he had seen many times as he drove up the road began to impinge more powerfully on his consciousness. What had begun as a background ambience had grown to something close to a roar. The expectation of his experience that somehow his eyes would gradually become accustomed to the dark remained unfulfilled. He could still see nothing.
Then a noise somewhere in the trees up to his right made him stop in his tracks, straining to listen above the thunder of the falls. There it was again. A sound like the rustle of branches, the crunching of brittle pine needles underfoot. An animal, perhaps. Guy had said that there were deer and wild boar in the woods. And poachers. His mouth was dry and he could feel his heart pulsing in his throat, almost restricting his breathing.
He called out. “Hello? Hello, anyone there?”
The blast of a shotgun almost deafened him. He saw a momentary flash of searing light among the trees, and felt the force of the pellets as they passed within centimetres of his head.
“Jesus!” he shouted involuntarily. He began running, in no way wanting to present a sitting target for the second barrel. Panic impelled him recklessly into the dark. He had covered only a few meters before becoming aware that he was no longer on the road. He could hear the sound of someone crashing through the woods above him in pursuit, and wondered how the hell the shooter could see him in the dark when Enzo couldn’t see him.
Almost as the thought went through his mind, his left leg tripped over the low wooden fence that ran along the side of the road, tipping him sideways. A second volley from the shotgun passed harmlessly over his head. But he was falling now, into the pitch black. Tumbling head over heels, making sporadic, jarring contact with the earth and rock of the hillside, before suddenly flying through space. Complete spatial disorientation felt almost like floating. Only the sound of the waterfall growing in deafening intensity provided him with any sense of his own movement, before he felt its spray in his face, and hit the pool at the foot of it with a force that took his breath away.
Now he was deaf as well as blind. Completely submerged, shocked by the extreme cold, and struggling desperately to hold his breath as he fought to break the surface. But even as he did, the force of the water falling on top of him forced him under again, and he felt his strength and energy being leeched away by icy liquid paralyzing muscles. In a moment of terrifying lucidity, he realized that if he lost consciousness he would never regain it. But it was slipping inexorably away, like sand through his fingers, the last moments of life before death.
Most people who return from near-death experiences talk about a blinding light, as of that at the end of a long tunnel of darkness. Enzo saw that light now. But there was no retreating from it. It sucked him toward it, filling his head and his mind, relentlessly, painfully, until it took him over completely.
If this were death, it brought no relief from physical sensation. The pain of the cold, the injuries sustained by his fall, were all acutely felt. He was shivering uncontrollably. He could hear his teeth chattering, and another, completely involuntary, sound coming from his throat. As if he was attempting to speak.
He heard a voice. “Man, another thirty seconds in there and you were a goner.”
The light in his eyes shifted, and he saw the tumbling white water of the falls caught in the beam of a flashlight. Now he saw the face of his rescuer looming over him. A hard, expressionless face, with dark brows gathered in what looked like a frown, beneath a peaked cap pulled down low. It was Lucqui, the gardener. Enzo registered the barrel of a shotgun rising up over his left shoulder, where it was strapped to his back.
“Can you sit up?” He was having to shout above the roar of the water. Strong hands helped Enzo into a
