a dog ran away, it had been eaten by a dragon. If the sheep’s wool was too thin, a vampire had sucked its blood. When a child disappeared—which happened with some frequency—it was stolen by an evil beast. Or so the stories went.” Justine shook her head, as if it were too outlandish to believe.
“Cretinism existed up here until the early twentieth century,” Pierre added, as he collected the empty coffee cups and walked out of the room.
“Well,” Justine said, turning to me, “cretinism is one thing. But there were so many old legends. My grandparents loved to scare us with tales of Krampus. Half devil, half goat, with twisting horns, with teeth like a wolf’s. Each Christmas Eve, Krampus would sneak into the village to punish the children who had been naughty. While Saint Nicholas would reward the good children with toys, Krampus would capture and torture the bad ones, biting and beating them to death. When misfortune occurred in these mountains, it was convenient to blame these tragedies on the regional mythical creature. My parents grew up dismissive of their parents’ tales. But now I believe there is something to the legends. Not Krampus. Not dwarfs. Something else. I am certain there is something monstrous living in these mountains. Something that has lived here for many, many generations.”
“You seem so sure,” I said.
“I have good reason to be sure,” Justine said. “I saw it myself.”
All the anxiety and fear I had felt the night before rose up in me again. “What do you mean?”
Justine leaned forward, looking me in the eyes as she spoke. “Two years ago, we were here in Nevenero climbing on the glacier. I’d drifted away from Pierre, to a great mass of ice hanging between screes of granite. I was frustrated. I had dropped my ice ax. It was my fault—I should have had it tethered—and this made it even worse. If you have no experience on the mountain, you probably don’t realize what a handicap it is to be one hundred meters up a wall of ice with no ax, but I will tell you, it is a very uncomfortable feeling, like losing a shoe while running a marathon. Luckily, my ax had fallen within sight, onto the ledge of a granite plateau. I rappelled over, lowered myself down onto the plateau, and grabbed it.
“It was then that I saw them: footprints in the snow. At first, I was sure they were human. But then I realized that this meant a human being would have been up on the glacier barefoot. It was February in the Alps, and totally unthinkable to be barefoot in those conditions.” She glanced at my flimsy shoes, as if to emphasize how crazy it was to be unprotected in the elements. “Also, there were drops of blood alongside the prints, which made me believe I’d come across a wounded animal of some sort. I got down and looked closer and saw that the prints were very wide. At least this big.” Justine used her hands to demonstrate the size of the prints. “Incredible feet, really.
“I decided to follow the prints. It was snowing, and they would be covered soon, so I hurried along the granite ledge, my eyes trained on the prints. The path was narrow, only a meter wide, with an escarpment of rock to my left and a deep cavern to my right. I am used to heights, of course, but usually I’m clipped in to ropes. Yet, I was so focused on the prints that I paid little attention to the danger. I ran over the icy ledge, heedless of the fact I might slip. The prints went on for a kilometer or so when, all at once, they veered into a gaping passage in the rock.
“I paused, listening. There was a struggle inside. I heard a cry of terror. It sounded human, so I ventured inside. I hoped to take a few pictures to show Pierre and hurry away to safety. But what I found was not at all what I expected. There, at the center of the passage, stood a kind of human being. It was tall and thin, with wide shoulders, long, strong arms, and white hair. It wore a leather vest and some trousers but no shoes, and it stood on two legs, as the prints had shown. The skin was pale, so pale that it blended in with the snow.”
Justine brushed her bangs from her eyes.
“But most terrible of all,