The Silent Land

11

The wind had died down and the entire resort had a scraped look, as if raked clean by a giant claw. Loose snow had been swept and piled high against doors and apartment blocks; parked cars had been shaved of ice and snow on their windward sides; and the entire village seemed to have been blown back at a minute angle, only now emerging to blink in surprise at the morning sun.

Every cloud had been chased from a sky rendered the thrilling lapis lazuli of a Pharaoh’s death mask. The early-morning sun had been reborn white-gold.

‘Today is the last day that I intend to ski,’ Jake declared.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s stunning. These are perfect ski conditions. We will never get another day like this. I want to finish on this high.’

‘Why do you need to finish at all?’ There was a slight tremor in Zoe’s voice, one which she couldn’t hold back. It was as if Jake was declaring a loss of faith in some religion. ‘Why not ski while we can?’

‘I think our time is limited. I can’t tell you why. I just sense it. And I’ve stopped enjoying it.’

Zoe didn’t argue. Jake seemed resigned. But she didn’t believe it; couldn’t believe it. This was not the end. He had been into the kitchen that morning and had reported that the beef on the stainless steel worktop was beginning to smell. His clock was running. But she, after all, was running an anti-clock in her belly.

She was still testing regularly, and in every case the test was positive. The baby was still alive inside her and she knew, in a way that required no test, that it was thriving. It might be no bigger than a fingernail, a crescent moon in a vast night sky, but she felt it drawing on her, feeding on her every heartbeat. While it was growing, while it was quickening—and she didn’t care how old the foetus was because she felt the tapping of a butterfly’s wing no doctor would ever convince her was gas or stomach pains—this could not be the end for them.

She wanted to shout this to Jake but didn’t have the strength. It just seemed absurd to philosophise about their predicament. She couldn’t accept that this ‘death’ was to be one long debate. She knew that this baby was alive inside her and that it would come to term. She didn’t know what would happen at that moment. It was just unimaginable to be in death and pregnant at the same time. Unless Jake were correct, and they were all the twisted offspring of some marriage between physics and dreaming.

Jake had gone out of the hotel to put on his skis. Zoe clumped across the lobby behind him. As she crossed the lobby she dropped one of her ski gauntlets and bent down to pick it up.

As she did so she heard the unmistakable sneeze of the air brakes of a luxury bus, and as she straightened up, glove in hand, she almost dropped it a second time. There was the bus parked outside the hotel, and the lobby was thronged with chattering people all over again. The babble of their voices filled the air. Zoe could feel the warmth from their bodies as they crowded the lobby space and they all spoke with great animation.

She turned back to face the reception desk and the same three women were in place, in their smart hotel uniforms, each engaged in exactly the same activities as when she had first seen them. The young woman with the ponytail had the phone pressed to her ear. The lady with the auburn hair and black glasses was processing a credit card, and the third receptionist struggled to hear what her grey-suited manager was trying to say above the racket.

The people were mostly dressed in ski gear, apart from the arrivals coming in trailing their suitcases-on-wheels. Though she was standing in a different part of the lobby, the same man came by and winked at her. She caught a whiff of his cologne all over again. She had to check to make sure she wasn’t wearing her towelling robe as before, but no, she was properly equipped with ski gear this time. She turned to the reception. There were the two English women talking about an avalanche.

Zoe felt her breath coming short. She looked out through the glass doors to see if there was any sign of Jake. But there were so many people thronging the lobby, and both they and the newly arrived bus obscured her view of the road outside.

Bewildered, she was about to turn to speak to the two English women at the reception desk, but at that moment the concierge at his blond-wood desk happened to look up and catch her eye. He raised his eyebrows quizzically, and then opened his eyes wide, as if suddenly remembering something. ‘Madam!’ he called to her. ‘Madam!’ He raised an arm high, fluttering his fingers at Zoe in a come-hither motion.

Zoe was at first mesmerised by the concierge, who was smiling and beckoning. Then she was sure that he was not calling to her, and that he was after all beckoning some other person behind her, perhaps someone at the reception desk. She turned almost a half-circle to look over her shoulder.

But there was no one behind her. No one at all.

The English women, the three receptionists and their manager and the people waiting in line at the desk had all gone. The sound of animated voices had been sucked away. Even the whiff of cologne had vanished from the air.

Zoe turned back and the concierge had disappeared too, along with all of the other skiers and hotel residents, and along with the luxury bus that had parked outside. She could now see, through the plate-glass doors, Jake waiting for her to come out.

She paused for a few seconds, then glanced back again at the empty reception desk before leaving the hotel. Jake was standing with his legs apart and his arms folded. He smiled. It was obvious that he’d seen none of it.

‘You okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ Zoe said.

From the very top of the mountain, and with the great coin of the sun imprinted in the sky behind her, she watched Jake ski. He swooped down the slope ahead of her, executing perfect turns, carving the snow, attacking the slope. His long shadow raced ahead of him like an independent spirit. She’d never seen him ski so well. He seemed to have mastered technical perfection. Though she had always been the superior skier, there was no doubt that now he was outstripping her in ability. She watched him speed through the trees at the bend in the slope, and disappear over the next rise.

She set off after him, determined to catch up. But her early turns were cumbersome, poorly executed. At one point she let the tips of her skis cross and had to pull up to compose herself. She was exasperated that while Jake appeared to have perfected his technique, she seemed to be moving backwards. Perhaps it had been the second hallucination of people thronging in the lobby that had so unsettled her. Or perhaps it was the presence of the baby, unconsciously urging her to caution. A fall could be dangerous. She had good reason not to want to attack the slope.

The awesome silence of the place crept up on her. The spruce and pines, all still loaded with snow, spread their limbs in a frozen ballet, breathing a ghostly incense from dark, arid chapels sheltered by their branches. She inhaled the cold, wine-sharp air deep into her lungs. Grow, baby, grow. We will cheat death.

She said this to herself defiantly, but considered it might be an affront to some angry God of the underworld. She looked down the slope. Her shadow stretched ahead of her for maybe twelve metres. Then she noticed a movement, a faint twitch at the periphery of her vision.

Next to her own, there were other shadows.

On her right-hand side was a cluster of shadows, roughly human in form, swaying gently. The dark shapes were clearly imprinted on the snow ahead of her. She stopped breathing. She dared not turn her head to look behind her. There she could feel the presence of several beings. Perhaps they were people. Perhaps not.

She kept her eyes on the swaying shadows, convinced that they were unaware she had spotted them. Her skin prickled. It flushed cold and became an abrasive substance, like sandpaper. She felt the fluid in her eyes freeze.

There were perhaps five or six of them, huddled in a group. It seemed incredible that they hadn’t seen her. She could hear them talking, murmuring quietly to each other. She studied the outline of their shadows on the wax-like snow. They were certainly human in shape but with extra tall limbs like long poles or long-stemmed trumpets emerging in front of them, perhaps from their mouths. They were moving, advancing towards her, and yet at the same time not seeming to come closer.

Zoe was already standing with her poles at the ready. She made her limbs unlock, flexed her feet in her boots, preparing to make her fastest descent down a ski slope ever. At the last moment she took her gaze from the moving shadows, and with an insane sense of defiance, she turned her head to meet her adversaries eye to eye.

She almost slipped backwards. There was nothing.

Behind her was the crest of the slope, and beyond that the great, forbidding and crumbling horn of a white mountain peak, goring the blue sky. Beyond that the implacable sun.

The shadows too were gone. There was nothing there, and nothing indeed that could form a shadow. Seconds earlier there had been people—or things—behind her. She had felt their breathing. She had heard their low murmuring voices. Now, nothing. Only the horn of the mountain nodded back at her, unconcerned.

She waited in a kind of shock. The idea that she had somehow hallucinated the presence of other people—other beings—was untenable. Their moving shadows had been cut clear into the white snow. Their voices had been made buoyant by the chill air. Their breathing had almost tickled the nape of her neck.

Now their absence was almost as terrible as their presence. For the first time she wondered if this place might be inhabited not by other people, not by other ghosts, but by something she might call demons. She needed to catch up with Jake. She flexed her grip on her poles and turned her skis in the snow.

Then her phone rang again.

The sound plucked her out of her terror and triggered her back into another. The playful signature call was coming from the inner pocket of her ski jacket. Her gauntleted hand flew to her jacket and she fumbled with the zip, but the padded fingers of the gauntlet were too thick to pull the zip open. She was afraid she wouldn’t get to the phone before the caller hung up.

She dropped her ski pole and tore the gauntlet off her right hand as the signature tune played louder inside her jacket. Her fingers fumbled at the zip and clawed inside her pocket, at last folding around the cold metal curve of the ringing phone. She flipped open the cover and pressed the phone to her ear.

‘Hello? Hello? Who is it?’

It was the same voice on the line again. A gruff male voice, speaking in a language or accent she couldn’t understand. The line wasn’t clear. It was muffled and distant and the man seemed to be repeating the same phrases over and over.

‘I can’t hear you! Please! Je ne comprends pas!’

The voice barked an instruction or phrase at her.

‘Encore! Say again! Oh God! Please! Who are you?’

The voice spoke again. He seemed to say the words la zone, la zone. But the line crackled. It was impossible to know what he was saying. He might have been calling from the dark side of the moon.

The line went dead.

La zone. Or was it La Zoe? No, no. It was more like la zone. He might have been saying that. He might have. The zone. But what did that mean?

Zoe turned her skis to the fall-line and let them slice through the fluffy snow. She dropped a few hundred metres in seconds. Jake was waiting for her.

‘Skiing good,’ he said as she carved a turn to draw up beside him.

She looked at him. His huge sunglasses shielded his eyes, bouncing the sun’s glare back off the blue glass. She wondered how much to tell him.

‘You okay?’

‘The phone went again.’

‘What?’

‘Same voice. Same incoherent words.’

‘You’re not okay. You didn’t—’ ‘No, I didn’t imagine it. Why does it only ring when you’re not there? I’m going to give you my phone. You can handle it next time this happens.’

‘No, you keep it. I have my own.’

‘I thought he said la zone. The zone. But that might be wrong. I don’t know. It was so muffled and distant.’

‘The zone.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Come on. Enough. Let’s call it a day.’

They had no appetite for food that night. Jake re-inspected the vegetables and the meat on the slab in the kitchen and reported that they were finally going off. The celery sticks were browning. A grey patina was forming over the chopped potatoes. But it was all still happening very slowly.

They went out to a bar. They found a CD of songs by The Kinks and drank rich, dark, juicy Malbec; but they couldn’t be bothered to remember how it tasted or how to be drunk. The music they loved gave them little pleasure, as if that too had to be remembered. They ran out of conversation, so they went back to their room early and showered.

Zoe noticed Jake’s erection as he dried himself. She made some comment.

‘It’s odd. I’m hard all the time here.’

‘All the time?’

‘Yes. Well, it subsides for a little while after we’ve had sex but not for long.’

‘You should say.’

‘Sweetheart, I can’t be inside you all the time. You know you wouldn’t like it.’

She raised her eyebrows at him.

Their sexual activity had regulated a long while ago. She had never used it, like some women, as a means of getting her way on other matters. But she had never made herself open to him either. She had always controlled the flow. Sex was never rationed; but neither was it unrestricted. He liked to have her from behind; she didn’t. He liked to do it outside; she wasn’t much for that. He liked her to sit astride him; she preferred conventional positions. He occasionally suggested dressing up; she found the idea too bloody ridiculous for words.

‘I’ve been a disappointment to you in that department, haven’t I?’ she said.

‘No you haven’t,’ he countered.

‘I’ve been lazy.’

‘Not true.’

‘It doesn’t mean I loved you any less.’

‘I know that.’

‘Sex isn’t a measure of love. Sometimes it has nothing to do with love. Nothing whatsoever.’

He sat on the bed in his towel, and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Why are you saying all these things?’

‘Because here it feels like I have to make everything I say count for something.’

‘Didn’t you before?’

‘No. Not always, anyway. I was careless with things I said. I was careless with my decisions. Careless.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t matter any more.’

‘Oh, it does matter. Everything matters. And in this place the rules are different.’

‘In this place we make up the rules, it seems to me.’

She sighed. She knew her words had depressed him a little. He’d simply come at her wanting a fuck and she’d disheartened him. But if there were to be no lovemaking that night it would represent the first pause since the day of the avalanche. Zoe didn’t want to allow that to happen. If a night went by, then the next day might, too; and then the next night. And what Zoe feared most was the wedge.

She couldn’t say exactly when she had started to feel the presence of the wedge. It might have begun in those very first days when they had argued about how to get out of this place. But she felt that some force, some power like magnetism or anti-magnetism was doing its best to quietly insinuate its way between them. Again it was like a law of physics, some current grounded in the place that behaved like another woman who wanted to split them up, through barely perceptible and insidiously manipulative means.

Her pregnancy was intimately connected with this feeling. She was still testing obsessively. And each time confirmation that the baby was swelling inside her was offered, then so did she become attuned to the possibility of a division between her and Jake. This was nothing to do with love or lack of it. Her love and affection for him, and their mutual dependence in this shadow world, had amplified massively. But there were forces of reversal at work here. If love was a force of gravity, this place had a centrifugal force, dragging at her psyche.

She wanted to arm herself against this centrifuge and sex was part of her armoury. She placed the flat of her hand on the rise of his belly and then leaned across him to lick a sensitive spot just above his pelvis, because it would always make him spasm. He kicked. She spat into her fingers and rubbed the saliva under the head of his cock and squeezed him. His cock grew harder in her hand.

She slipped his cock inside her mouth, sliding her tongue around the glans, and as his cock grew even harder and swelled in her mouth she felt his body give in to her and become limp by contrast. He lay back, surrendering to her, giving her all the power. She released his cock and sat upright, swinging her leg over him, to mount him. Outside the alpine light was a mysterious species of blue she associated with neon, almost ultraviolet. It illuminated his teeth and the whites of his bloodshot eyes and gave his limbs a tanned, healthy hue.

He had once said to her that she was such a sexual creature she could make a dead man come, and here she was, proving it. She levered herself onto him, impaling herself, gasping at the moment of yield when her vaginal muscles relaxed and let her slide down over him. She leaned forward, letting her long hair fall across his face, inhaling the smell of his hair and his sweat. The smell of fuck charged the room, circling above them like smoke, like a ghost. She pressed her fingertips against the white wall over the headboard above him to give herself leverage, raising and lowering herself onto him. She was fucking him hard and angrily and with a desperate air, as if this might be their very last time. The headboard was banging against the wall as she thrust with her pelvis, thudding against the wall, and she didn’t stop even when she felt him ejaculate and shiver as his orgasm eclipsed him entirely. She went on, driving herself, slamming the headboard against the wall until she started to feel the wall itself crumble under the touch of her fingertips, turn to powder, dissolve until it was no longer the powder of plaster but the powder of snow, freezing to the touch, and collapsing back into a swirling, gaping hole, from which a man’s arm reached through and took her by the neck, took her by the throat in an icy grip, closing off her breathing, pulling her, trying to drag her off Jake, choking her until she shrieked out loud, not in ecstasy but in terror.

Jake sat up. ‘What is it? What is it?’

The outstretched arm released her, and the pool of snow, the swirling white hole in the wall simply closed up, becoming white painted plaster on a bedroom wall all over again.

Now Jake was holding her face between his two large hands, his eyes searching hers for explanation.

She looked at him; she looked at the wall. ‘I’m seeing things. Jake. I’m seeing things.’

‘What things?’

‘Nightmarish things.’

‘Tell me.’

But she shook her head. She’d recognised the arm that had come through the wall. She recognised the ring on the middle finger and a small scar on the back of the hand before it had started to choke her.

They lay together for a while, he stroking her hair. But even with his eyes closed he could almost see her restlessness, and he said so. ‘Go to sleep, my darling, go to sleep.’

‘No. I can’t. I have to talk to you.’

‘I never like the sound of that.’

‘I feel like this is a chance to pull a thorn out of my skin. It’s about Simon.’

‘Yes. Best man at our wedding. I know about that.’

She blinked at that. ‘Yes. I always feared you knew.’

‘Can we leave it?’

‘It was a bad time for me. You weren’t paying me much attention. I’m not saying it was your fault. I’m telling you it was meaningless, mistaken and a folly. That’s all. I knew you knew, all along. I just needed to have it said in the open.’

‘Feel better now?’

‘A little.’

‘Well, don’t expect me to feel better. You’ve taken the thorn out of your skin and stuck it in mine. And it hurts.’

‘I’m sorry, Jake. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t cry. It doesn’t matter. If there is any sense to marriage at all it’s so that I take your thorns, and you sometimes take mine.’

They lay together in the dark of the room. There was enough light reflecting off the snow from the lamps outside by which to see. Nothing more was said.

After a while Jake’s breathing changed: he had fallen asleep. Zoe fell asleep too, but woke shortly after when she heard the gentle sound of harness bells outside.

They were the kind of bells associated with animals in train, of distractions for tourists. Zoe glanced at Jake’s sleeping form and swung her legs out of bed. The harness bells had stopped. She moved over to the window.

Since they had moved across the hall, their window looked down onto the road passing the entrance to the hotel. And there stood the vast shadowy form of a splendidly muscled black shire horse harnessed to a large sledge. It was a stallion, its flanks sleek, coal-black and sparkling with fresh sweat. The breath from its muzzle steamed in the cold air like an old engine at a railway platform. The animal’s hooves were magnificently feathered and on its head it sported a brilliant crimson plume that in the moonlight was the colour of spilled blood. The horse chewed at its silver bit, but otherwise remained perfectly still, as if waiting.

Zoe gasped at the sight of the creature. She stepped back, automatically reaching a hand to wake Jake, but changed her mind. Throwing a blanket around her, she hurried out of the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. She ran out barefoot in the snow, hardly conscious of the cold.

It was still snowing. Large fluffy flakes, some already clustered as they fell. The horse stood utterly immobile as she approached, doing nothing to acknowledge her presence.

It was an enormous stallion, powerful in its withers and boasting a great curve of muscle at its loin quarters. Zoe knew enough about horses to estimate that she was looking at one a staggering twenty hands high. Though the horse wasn’t saddled for riding, to mount such a beast would require a small ladder. She put a tiny hand to its flank and felt its hairy and muscular warmth. Snowflakes dissolved the instant they fell upon its steaming sides. Rows of tiny bells were stitched into its polished-leather harness, and the metal foil of each bell was stamped with the emblem of a six-pointed snowflake.

The horse waited patiently, as if for a command. Zoe moved her hand along its shoulders and neck, failing to reach the poll between its ears, so tall was the horse. Though the horse pricked up its ears at her gentle lunge, and clouds of mist spiralled from its muzzle.

‘So black against the snow! You are beautiful!’ Zoe said. ‘Beautiful!’

She moved to the front of the horse. Its nostrils were terrifying, flaring black holes releasing snorts of steam. It was like a creature from the origins of the universe. The horse turned its head slightly away from her, so that its eye, regarding her steadily, was like a polished black obsidian mirror in which she could see herself distorted: a small thing, swathed in a single blanket, looking up with hope and wonder. The horse tossed its head and shook its crimson plume, and began to chew again on its bit. Zoe tried to blow gently into its nostrils but it shook its plume at her again. She took it as a sign that he didn’t like her approach from the front.

Instead she walked around the patient animal to examine the sledge it was pulling. It was a simple construction: a heavily built wooden frame with giant steel runners to glide over the snow. The seat was comfortably upholstered with smart, plush black leather with a velvet trim. Though the seat was large enough to take two or more passengers, there didn’t seem to be a special bench for the driver. The studded leather reins lay coiled across the front of the sledge as if waiting for someone to take them.

Zoe thought to try the seat. She lifted a foot to climb onto the step-board but found it way too high for her. She jumped back with a tiny exclamation of surprise. The step-board was now level with the top of her head and the horse and sledge also appeared to have expanded. Now it was terrifying, enormous, and she felt like a small child looking up at the beast. What’s more, the instant she moved backwards the horse, as if flicked by an unseen crop, tossed its head and trotted onwards.

‘Hey!’ Zoe shouted after the horse. ‘Hey!’

But the stallion was already away and moving on through the gently falling flakes of snow at a steady clip, its bells shivering in a percussion of admonition. Zoe watched it go. The horse and its empty sledge rounded the curve of the road and disappeared behind a dark row of snow-burdened firs.

Zoe waited until its sound diminished and silence returned. She looked up and down the street. Then she returned to the hotel, and to the room where Jake was still sleeping.

She sat on the bed watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he slept on. She reached out and held his hand, half-hoping that he would wake, half-hoping that he would not. She decided to leave it to the Fates. If he woke she would tell him about the horse outside. If not, she wouldn’t. She had to ask herself why she was not allowing herself to tell him about some of the events that were happening around them. Why she was staying quiet about these things was also a mystery to her. It was as if some primal part of her was terrified that no event in this place could be good for them. She felt—irrationally but with a conviction that came from deep in her bones—that with each new development, something was trying to insert itself between them. Only absolute stasis would leave them alone.

She held on to his hand. One of the first things she had noticed about him when they met was his hands. They were large and manly, but also elegant and descriptive. He used them a great deal in conversation. She wanted to be able to hold his hand for ever.

She fell asleep beside him.