The Silent Land

14

Jake was at the window of their hotel room.

‘What are you looking at?’ Zoe wanted to know.

‘Nothing.’

She stepped forwards to see for herself, but he turned quickly and blocked her advance towards the window. She giggled, and tried to slip by him. He blocked her again.

‘What are you doing?’

He said nothing. Just held her so that she couldn’t get to the window. She tried to push his arms away from her, but he bear-hugged her, steering her towards the bed, finally toppling her backwards onto it.

‘Get off me, Jake! I want to see.’

She pushed him away and struggled to her feet, rushing to the window. She looked out across the snow. The sky presaged more in heavy grey clouds. The road curved away into the distance, flanked on either side by trees like frozen sentries in a forgotten war. There was nothing she hadn’t seen before.

Jake came up behind her, peering over her shoulder. He reached an arm around her belly, stroking her.

‘What was it?’ she demanded to know.

‘Nothing.’

‘You lie.’

‘Yes.’

‘So tell me.’

‘No.’

Something made her shiver. She turned suddenly and grabbed his jaw with her hand, squeezing. ‘Are you protecting me? I don’t want to be protected. Whatever there is to be known about this place, I want you to tell me.’

He took her hand away from his mouth. ‘It was a horse.’

‘A horse?’

‘Yes, a horse. And a sledge. It was waiting there. Now it’s gone.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’ve seen it there before. It frightened me.’

‘What do you mean? You’ve seen it before?’

‘Yes. A few times.’

‘I saw it too.’

‘What? You saw it? You saw the horse and you didn’t tell me?’

‘Yes. A huge black horse with a red plume, pulling an enormous sledge.’

‘How could you not tell me? Zoe, what were you thinking?’

‘Can you hear yourself? A moment ago you wouldn’t even let me look out of the window.’

He shook his head and sank onto a chair. ‘All right. Let’s make a promise. Let’s not try to protect each other. In this place. I mean it.’

Jake was astonished to learn that Zoe had stolen out into the night, and had stood next to the steaming horse; that she had stroked its flanks and had even tried to get onto the sledge. She told him that the horse and sledge were huge, but that when she’d tried to climb onto the sledge it had swollen massively without warning; or perhaps she had suddenly shrunk, like Alice.

They decided to go out and look at the place where the horse had stood.

There were tracks in the snow, left by the runners on the sledge and the horse’s hooves. There was also some dung.

‘Well, that shows it was real,’ Jake said, ‘but just look at this stuff.’

He picked up some of the dung in his ski glove and offered it for her to see.

‘Nice. Thanks.’

‘Look at it.’

It was the shape and texture of ordinary horse dung. But it rippled with iridescent light. It sparkled. It shimmered blue, green, red and violet; swirling with its own light.

‘Are we dreaming?’ Zoe said. ‘Is it a trick of the light?’

‘It’s not.’

But even as Jake held it in his glove, the sparkling dung faded, crumbled, turned to sand, disappeared. The rest of the dung on the snow vanished too, and so did the hoof-prints and the tramline impressions left behind by the sledge’s runners.

‘And I was just about to suggest we follow the tracks,’ Jake said.

‘Jake, we haven’t tried for a while.’

‘Tried what?’

‘Just to walk out.’

‘No.’

‘Why haven’t we?’

‘Because we’re in a place where a horse shits rainbows.’

‘Right.’

They went back to the hotel. Neither the lighting nor the heating had returned and the temperature was dropping rapidly now. It was astonishing how quickly a hotel of that size could discharge its heat. Jake remembered he had found an axe embedded in a log at the house they’d raided. He said he was going out to chop kindling. He said that if they needed to, they would sleep in front of the fire.

While he was out Zoe swept and prepared the fireplace for his return. In a nook in the stone surround she found a set of playing cards. She took them out. They were some kind of Tarot cards. Zoe had seen packs of such cards before and this was some continental version with the Major Arcana titles in French. Most of the major cards were the same as the standard Tarot deck, La Lune, Le Soleil and such, but some were different. There was a card called La Montagne, the mountain, and another depicting a compass, perhaps instead of the conventional Wheel of Fortune. Another card was Le Chien and she didn’t remember a dog card from the Tarot. She found another card that made her catch her breath.

It was a depiction of two large black birds, each perched on one of the posts either side of a gate. It brought to mind the two large crows she had encountered on the morning when she had returned to the stranded police car. She shivered.

She began slowly sorting through the cards, looking for the Death card. Her hand slowed as she turned each card, knowing that it was in there somewhere. Then she decided that whatever it looked like, she didn’t want to see it. She gathered up the cards and returned them to the nook in the fireplace where she’d found them.

When Jake returned with his kindling she helped him to build a fire. They got it ready for the match, but didn’t light it. Of the cards she said nothing.

The food laid out on the kitchen workspace had rotted. Jake cleared it away. He had watched it like you would watch a clock; but now he had unpleasant thoughts about maggots and decomposition, so he scraped it all into a plastic bin-bag and took the bag out behind the hotel. He wiped down the workspace with bleach.

There was now no power, neither electric nor gas, on which to cook. So they found cheese and biscuits and fruit. Plus of course a very fine bottle of red wine. It occurred to him that they would run out of food long before they ran out of wine.

‘We’ll never run out of sin,’ he said while drawing the cork from a bottle.

‘What?’

‘I said we’ll never run out of wine.’ He handed her a glass. ‘Here.’

‘No you didn’t. You said we’ll never run out of sin.’

‘Wine. I said wine.’

‘No you didn’t. You said sin. You said we’ll never run out of sin.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Must have been a slip of the tongue.’

‘Yes. Are you going to light the fire?’

So he lit it, and they watched intently as the flames licked at the kindling, like it was a programme of entertain ment with the outcome uncertain. But the flame ate the kindling and Jake put smaller logs on the fire, and the flames grabbed at the logs like fingers rolling them into a devouring mouth. Then he laid bigger logs in its path and pretty soon the fire was roaring in the chimney breast.

Twilight fell like a mantle, a quiet invasion, a horde of creeping creatures surrounding the hotel. Jake dragged a couple of mattresses from the nearest hotel rooms and went back for duvets while Zoe placed and lit candles all around the reception desk and the lobby. Outside, the twilight plumped itself into darkness.

Jake watched without comment as Zoe bolted the hotel side door. As for the plate-glass doors of the lobby, she took a pair of decorative antique skis from the wall and inserted them through the door handles, barricading the door.

‘Who do you think is coming?’ Jake said with a half-smile.

‘No one.’

‘The Devil?’

‘No.’

‘God?’

‘No.’

‘Something else?’

‘Shut up. I just feel better with it all locked and secure, okay?’

They drank two bottles of wine. Jake kept the fire stoked with logs. Zoe settled under the duvets and gazed into the flames. She saw shapes there. She fell asleep.

In the night she heard men. They were tramping around the hotel. She heard their voices. She heard the sound of their boots squeaking and stamping on the snow. They called softly to each other. She was unable to understand what they were saying, and neither could she get up to look out of the window. She was paralysed both by terror of the men outside and by the half-sleep that had folded her in its arms. When she tried to rise she felt unable to move. It was as if she were drugged. She was unable to stir a hand or a foot. She was unable to blink. She couldn’t speak or call out to Jake, because her lips and her jaw were clamped shut. All she could do was gaze into the fire, and witness the blurred shifting of burning logs.