The Silent Land

4

‘Damn thing is working fine now.’ Back in their hotel room, Jake sat at the table, playing with the magnetic compass. Each time he moved it, the needle wobbled and returned to train its pointer towards magnetic north.

Zoe gazed out of the window, in a kind of trance. ‘It’s clearing. A little.’

‘I can’t explain that. Why is it working fine now?’

Zoe wanted him to stop talking about the compass. Her point was that to follow the dial of even an accurate compass, you had to be able to see where you were going.

‘It’s like there’s a conspiracy,’ Jake said, ‘to keep us here. Look at that: bastard thing’s working perfectly.’

Zoe leapt up. ‘Look at this shithole of a room! Where’s the maid when you need one? Come on—help me clean up a bit.’

‘Why? We’re not staying.’

‘We might have to, for another night at least.’

He checked the window. ‘You said yourself it’s clearing. And even if we have to stay we could just use another room.’

‘You do what you want. I’m cleaning up.’

Zoe began to stack their used dishes on the trays they’d bought up from the kitchen. She scraped plates into the bin and pointedly set the empty plates and dishes on a tray in the middle of the table, where Jake’s compass clearly indicated the way to its magnetic home. Jake put the instrument away.

She began to strip the duvet and sheets from the bed. ‘Help me remake this bed.’

‘I don’t know why we’re remaking a bed when—’

He didn’t get to finish his sentence because there was a slight flutter in the air, and then a tremor started to shake the hotel. The doors of the wardrobe and the TV cabinet began to shiver on their brass hinges. Zoe froze and looked at Jake.

There followed a vast, hollow, doom-laden groan from somewhere high above them, high on the mountain slope. The hotel’s foundations trembled and there came a booming and the vibration of an impact that felt as if someone were banging not on the hotel wall but on the sky, or on the wall of life itself.

‘Come here!’ Jake shouted. ‘Come here!’

Zoe scrambled across the bed. He threw his arms around her and flung her to the floor, rolling her as close to the bed as possible. The booming shook the hotel and then stopped abruptly.

They were breathing heavily in each other’s arms.

‘Is it gone?’ she whispered.

‘I think.’

‘Can we get up?’

‘Maybe.’

‘What was it?’ she asked, not making any effort to rise from the floor.

‘Avalanche. A big mother. Let’s get up.’

They scrambled to their feet, then shared another long hug.

‘Well, now we know why they evacuated the place,’ Jake said.

‘We already knew that, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah, we already knew that. We just doubled our knowledge.’

‘I think it’s cleared enough to try again,’ Zoe said.

Jake looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘We’re not waiting around for that snow to sweep the village away. We’re not doing that. Look, wait here.’

‘Where you going?’

‘I’ll be a few minutes. Relax.’

‘I’m already relaxed,’ Jake said. ‘If I was any more relaxed I’d be sleeping. Christ, I’m so fucking relaxed.’ He picked up the compass again.

Zoe let herself out of the hotel room and got into the elevator. In her pocket she fingered the keys to the police car. She knew she had to go and recover the car alone and without telling him; Jake would never let her risk it.

In truth the mist had cleared, and the snow was falling more lightly again. Visibility was restored—or at least reasonable—for driving, and anyway it was unlikely that they would encounter other traffic on the way into the next town. There was just the small problem of recovering the police vehicle from the roadside.

She quickened her pace. She knew exactly where the police car had gone over the edge because she’d passed it twice that very morning: once on the way in their aborted attempt to get out of the village, and once on the way back. In less than twenty minutes she could make out the snow-covered shape of the vehicle higher up the mountain road.

But there was something else up there with the car, something she couldn’t at first make out. Two cylindrical black shapes protruded from the roof of the car, jet-black against the white of the snow. Zoe stopped for a moment, squinting at the unrecognisable shapes. Unable to make them out, she quickened her pace towards the car.

As she drew nearer, one of the two shapes moved fractionally; or at least appeared to move. No more than a slight adjustment to the right. Zoe slowed as she approached, then realised to her astonishment that she was looking at two very large sleek black crows that had settled on the car’s roof.

Perhaps she ought to have been pleased to see the birds. They were the first other living things she’d set eyes on since they’d been caught in the avalanche. But the creatures looked both uninterested and vaguely threatening at the same time. Zoe knew she ought to be able to walk towards the dark birds and that they would immediately fly off. But they looked unusually large.

She felt a sensation of revulsion and with it a flutter of fear.

She clapped her hands together, to frighten the crows away. Her ski gauntlets merely deadened the sound, so she took them off and tried again, clapping her hands loudly as she took a hesitant step towards the car. There was a slight stirring in the dark feathers of one of the hooded black birds, and the creature seemed to peck at something moving under its feathers. The birds showed no sign of being intimidated.

Zoe was no more than four or five metres from the car, but she’d come to a halt. The truth was the birds terrified her. The crows regarded her steadily from their perch on the roof of the police car. One of them held its yellow beak open to her, as if expecting to be fed. The image of the creature with its beak gaping had a hallucinatory clarity. The open maw of the bird was like a small cavern, and in the cavern was a silver river, threading away into darkness. The bird made a strange cough.

Zoe stamped her foot and ran at the crows, flailing her arms. Almost grudgingly surrendering their perch, the birds dropped away from the roof of the car into clumsy, wheeling flight. From there they went gliding down into the valley, soon fading into the mist.

Zoe stared after them. She had to shake herself, almost as if to break a trance.

She remembered she’d seen a shovel stowed in the boot of the car. She took out the keys and opened the boot, found the shovel and used it to clear the snow from the windscreen, the bonnet and the rear window. Then she threw the shovel back in the boot and closed it. She went around to the front of the car and rested her weight above the airborne driver’s side wheel. It rocked a little, but not too much. She tried it again, levering more weight onto it. She decided it was safe to get into the car and start it up. She thought she’d be fine so long as she didn’t make any stupid mistakes with the gears.

She eased herself into the driver’s seat, and waited for a moment. The car was stable. The handbrake was engaged, the gearstick rested in neutral. She slipped the key in the ignition and turned it.

The diesel engine spluttered and died. It took a few turns of the engine, but eventually it started. She gave the engine some revs, and saw through the rear-view mirror great clouds of dirty grey exhaust polluting the pure white mist behind her. Then she let the revs settle. The 4WD green light lit up the dash. She took a deep breath, engaged the clutch and slipped the car into reverse.

The back wheels spun but found no traction. She slowed the revs and tried again. This time the car eased backwards over the snow-covered rock and up across the lip of the road. She stopped the car in the middle of the road and let out a mighty breath. Trying to temper her elation, she made a three-point turn in the road and steered the car back down to the hotel.

Outside the hotel she left the engine running and the door open, and went up to get Jake. She wouldn’t explain what she’d done until he came down and saw for himself.

He stood there with his arms folded and an oafish grin. ‘I don’t believe you did that!’

She said it wasn’t difficult.

She didn’t tell him about the crows.

‘I don’t know whether to kill you or kiss you. Can you see well enough to drive?’

‘Just about.’

‘You want me to drive?’

‘I’m doing fine. Aren’t I?’

‘You are. Doing fine, you are.’

They got into the car and set off all over again.

They sat in numbed, disbelieving silence.

The police car had died on them at exactly the spot where they’d turned around in the snowstorm earlier that morning. They could see the junction in the road. It was the same spot.

Zoe tried to turn the engine over again. The starter-motor cranked, but the engine stubbornly refused to spark.

‘Let me try.’

Zoe blinked. ‘What are you gonna do? Turn the key a different way?’

‘Let me try it, will you?’

Zoe sighed but climbed out of the driver’s seat to let Jake try his hand.

Jake had a kind of ritual in these situations. He shuffled his bottom into the seat, flexed his fingers like a concert pianist, wobbled the steering wheel, pressed down the clutch pedal and flicked the key in the ignition. Nothing. No spark. He rocked the car a little and went through his ritual all over again. Nothing. ‘Is it petrol?’

‘Of course it’s not petrol. There’s half a tank.’

‘Don’t get snitty. What did you do before it died on you?’

‘What did I do? Nothing! I drove it, normally, standard fucking normal driving with no extra added female flourishes, okay?’

‘Just be calm.’

‘I didn’t sing to it, or spit on the steering wheel or breathe too hard when I changed gear… Stop making out it was something I did!’

‘Well, you always screw up the DVD and the Apple Mac and the—’

‘You shit!’

‘Okay, you changed gear as we came up the hill?’

‘No!’

‘I’m just trying to establish—’

‘Well, don’t establish anything.’

He tried the ignition one more time. It failed again. He could almost feel the battery exhausting itself a little more every time he turned the key. ‘We’re on a hill, that’s good. We’ll bump it in reverse. I’ll take the handbrake off and you give it a little push.’

Zoe went around to the front of the car. Jake engaged the clutch and put the gearstick in reverse. He nodded to her. She didn’t respond. He stuck his head out of the window. ‘Any time today would be, like, cool, as they say on MTV.’

She looked furious but said nothing. She compressed her lips and pushed at the front of the car. As it rolled backwards she slipped and fell on her knees. Jake let the car run for several metres before disengaging the clutch. The gears groaned and the car juddered to a halt. There was not even a cough from the engine.

He pulled on the handbrake, got out of the car and walked towards her. With the snowflakes swirling around her, settling on her hat, on her scarf, she stood in the middle of the road rubbing her skinned knees. ‘Now what?’

With his back to the road leading up from the village, he stood at the T-junction and looked east and west. At least they could just about make out the road this time. There was a good chance they wouldn’t fall off its edge. It was just a question of deciding which direction they should go. He took out his compass, squatted and laid it on the ground. After a few moments, he gently put it back in his pocket. ‘Piece of shit!’ he said softly. He was red in the face.

Zoe felt her heart squeeze for him: him with his useless compass. ‘You decide.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You have a better sense of direction. You always have had.’

‘Okay. No recriminations if I’m wrong, right? I say… that way.’

They linked arms and set out along the road. They didn’t even bother to look back at the abandoned police vehicle. It stayed at an angle in the middle of the road with the driver’s door open, looking like the aftermath of a hijacking.

A little over an hour later they were back in Saint-Bernard. The familiar church tower confirmed it long before they reached the centre.

‘Sorry,’ Zoe said, while they were still on the road.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t be. I would have picked that direction, too.’

Pretty soon Zoe had another idea. ‘Follow me.’

‘Seems like every time I follow you we land up in trouble.’

She ignored him, leading him back to their hotel and into the ski store: a pine-clad locker room where a giant piste map was displayed on the wall behind a sheet of Perspex. It showed that the village of Saint-Bernard nestled in a valley, with pisted ski runs flanking the village on both the north and south sides of the valley. The south side was less popular because the sun melted the snow early, but after the recent snowfall the pistes would be in good order anywhere. Zoe’s plan was to get hold of some skis, ascend the south slope of the valley and ski down the other side to the neighbouring resort.

She pointed it out on the map. ‘There are chairlifts right up to the top. We know the power is still on, so we can take a chairlift up. There’s at least one pisted run down the other side that’s marked, with a big T-bar drag lift to come back up. We’re at nineteen hundred metres here, right? There’s another resort over the other side at sixteen hundred metres and just a few kilometres across the mountain. There are no runs marked after the pisted one, but we can make a steady traverse. The snow’s good.’

Jake breathed out. ‘That might be a bit beyond our skiing abilities. You don’t know what the terrain is. Rock. Trees. Deep snow. You don’t know the gradient. Anything really.’

‘You’re a good skier. I’m a good skier.’

‘Why don’t we just try to walk out again? Follow the mountain road. It’s much simpler.’

‘Yes, we could do that. But—and it’s a big but—you said yourself it’s a four- or five-hour hike. We’ve left it too late after what just happened—we’d end up walking in darkness again. If we’re going to hike out of here we’ll have to stay another night in the hotel and head off first thing in the morning. Or we grab some skis, get up the mountain, and from the top we could be down to that village at sixteen hundred metres in what, twenty minutes?’

‘Twenty minutes? Not a chance.’

‘Half an hour tops to drop down that sort of distance on skis. No more. Half an hour, Jake.’

‘I don’t know. I’m not happy about it. Do you think we have enough daylight left?’

‘We will if we stop yakking and set off right way. Do you really want to spend another night here?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s go for it then.’

‘Look at you. You really think it’s that easy, don’t you?’

Zoe dusted her hands together, to show him how easy it would be.