The Silent Land

5

They pushed open the door to a ski store and set about choosing themselves a good set of skis apiece from the rack. They told each other that they would return the skis eventually, and that no one would blame them for ‘borrowing’ skis, given the circumstances, though Jake joked about the growing size of their theoretical bill.

‘I’ve always wanted some of these,’ Zoe said. ‘Flame orange. Top spec.’

‘You would. You want new boots?’

‘Sure. What about these?’

‘Rack your skis up here, then, and sling me one of your boots.’

While Jake adjusted the ski bindings, Zoe poked around the shop. The owners had left in a hurry. A CD player was still switched on and there was a half-empty mug of coffee. Someone had even left a wallet under the counter. She opened it. It contained credit cards and a wad of banknotes.

She waved it at Jake. ‘Look.’

‘Just put it back.’

‘I am putting it back. Did you think I was going to steal it?’

‘I’m just saying, leave everything exactly as is. Except what we absolutely have to take.’

‘Like I might do different?’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Well, don’t “just say”. It’s not like I was about to skim a few Euros from some bloke’s wallet. Heck.’ She put the wallet back where she found it, and then for good measure hid it under a pair of old ski gloves that were lying on the counter. ‘They left really fast. I mean really, really fast.’

‘That’s what worries me. Here, these are done. Grab yourself a pair of fancy poles and we’re away.’

They trudged through the snow carrying their new skis on their shoulders until they reached the church at the top of the hill. The streets hadn’t been cleared of snow since the evacuation, so it was an easy thing to step into their bindings and slip straight down the main road, gliding through the village to the chairlifts on the south-facing slopes. Then they had to walk for a hundred metres or so to reach the lift station.

The station was utterly silent and muffled under the recent fall of snow. Even now, though the snowstorm had long subsided, a few tiny flakes still fell around them, feathering the old layers of snow covering the roof of the station shed. Jake stepped out of his bindings and pushed at the station door.

The door was stuck, frozen. He put his shoulder to it and it flew open. The air inside was still warm, as if the heating had been left running. A couple of dull green and red lights shone from a grubby console by the smeared window, alongside a shallow bank of switches. Someone had left a pack of cigarettes and a plastic lighter on the console desk.

‘Do you know how to do it?’ Zoe asked.

‘It looks pretty much like the drag-lift equipment.

There was a nice big fat button there but I don’t see one here.’

Jake went out of the station and entered the pine shed where the giant wheels and steel cables gleamed with black grease. He stared at the immobile row of sullen chairs waiting to move through the half-light on their endless loop. As he skirted the machinery he saw what he was looking for: a row of buttons and a huge emergency stop switch. He pushed the buttons hopefully but without result. When one of the buttons triggered the sound of an engine powering up and an immediate clatter of moving parts, he startled himself. The chairlift didn’t move, however. The engine hummed loud in his ears as he looked for a way to send the chairs on their journey up the mountain. He saw a brake that was holding them back, and released it. Then he discovered a lever that cranked the giant overhead wheel. When the wheel began to move, so did the chairs.

Zoe had come out of the operator’s cabin and was getting back into her skis. He wanted her to wait for the chairs to complete a full loop, so that they could be certain they were safe. She was less patient. Then he suggested that they take different chairs.

‘Why would we do that?’

‘Because,’ he said calmly, ‘if the lift stops and there’s a healthy interval between us, at least one of us might be able to get down and do something to help the other. Whereas if we’re both stuck up there, swinging in the wind, there’s nothing we can do.’

‘I don’t see the logic. I mean, if we both happen to get off at the end just as the lift stops, then we’re in a better position than if one is safely off and one is stuck up in the air.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No more ridiculous than your idea. It’s just random luck. Random together or random separate. We’re still subject to randomness. I’d rather we face that random together.’

There and then, in the deserted ski village, with the chairlift engine whistling over their heads and the empty, icy, snow-covered chairs proceeding up the snowy mountain one by one, they had an argument about randomness.

‘After everything that’s happened to us, I’d rather we climbed in the same chair,’ Zoe said. ‘For fuck’s sake, I can’t believe we’re arguing about this!’

Jake sighed and shuffled along to form up with his skis. They stood side by side waiting for the next sixman chair to come around, and as soon as it bunted the backs of their knees they dropped into position. Jake reached for the safety bar and pulled it down.

They ascended the slope in silence.

It was a long chairlift, and secretly both were wondering what they would do exactly if the chair did stop. For much of the journey they were fifteen metres off the ground. The cable mechanism thrummed steadily and the wind manufactured ghost-like whistles and moans around the pylons at regular intervals. The returning chairs on the other side of the pylons, having been exposed on the mountainside without service, were piled with snow and hung with ice; grim dark chariots, it seemed to Zoe, returning after depositing their cargoes in a place of death.

As they made their ascent, below them the build-up of snow on the branch of a pine would reach its limit and trigger a sudden spray of snow. Other than that there was no movement anywhere.

‘So quiet,’ Zoe said, if only to resist the baleful murmur of the wind in the pylons.

The chair juddered as it approached the penultimate pylon and tilted into its descent. Jake lifted back the safety bar. They shuffled their bottoms in the chair, readying their skis to glide off at the lift terminal. When they did so they hit deep snow and came to an abrupt stop. Normally the dismount point was packed and maintained by lift operators.

‘The piste is going to be deep,’ Jake said.

‘We’ll take it steady. Are you going to shut off the lift?’

‘I’ll leave it running.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Why? Why? Are you going to contradict everything I say?’ At least he was smiling about it now. ‘Why do I get a whole lifetime of why why why?

‘It just seems… a waste of energy. We should shut it off.’

‘I want it to stay running. I want people to know we’re here, okay? Stop trying to be top banana about everything, will you?’

‘You’re the one who does top banana.’

‘Listen to that! That’s such a top-banana statement. Can’t you see that?’

‘Can we just look at the map, please?’

Jake shuffled across to where Zoe was studying her map.

‘It’s not difficult,’ she said without looking up. ‘We go halfway down the piste, then cut off on this track through the woods. After a while we should meet a winding road—probably a lumber track—through the forest and we can follow it all the way to the next village. There won’t be any traffic to worry about.’

Jake fixed the retaining straps of his ski poles over his wrists.

‘Wait,’ Zoe said. ‘Take a moment to look at this, Jake. People would pay a king’s ransom to be here on virgin snow with no one else about. In fact you couldn’t buy it. No one can. Look: it’s so beautiful.’

Jake snorted. Here they were trying to get out of the place with their lives, but she was right. There wasn’t a track anywhere to be seen in the light, powdery snow. The grey, pregnant clouds loured above them, but there were blue smudges in the sky. A transforming power had breathed over the land and turned it into a perfect wedding cake, and the two of them were now perched on the top like a marzipan bride and groom.

‘Kiss me,’ Zoe said.

His lips were cold but she wanted to thaw them with her kiss. She didn’t want to pull away, but eventually Jake did. She blinked at him. For a moment she thought she saw something strange reflected in the black glass of his pupils.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Come on. It’s a black slope but it doesn’t look too steep,’ she said. ‘Just make sure you don’t miss the turn.’

‘Sounds like I’m following you again. Fucking banana-face.’

They plunged across the slope, and the snow was thick and crusty on the unprepared piste, but it represented no challenge to their abilities. Their skis ran a little slower, but the snow peeled away from the blades of their skis with a soft, sensual whisper. It was possible, on the deserted slope, to make wide, wheeling, swooping turns and leave perfect parallel tracks behind. Within a couple of minutes they were already halfway down the run. Zoe had drawn up at the side of the piste.

Jake came gliding to a stop beside her.

‘Enjoy that?’ she asked.

‘Oh yessir.’

‘That was the easy bit. Now we have to drop through here.’

A clearing in the trees at the side of the piste led to a thickly wooded and more steeply plunging descent. Outcrops of sharp limestone rock stuck up through the snow. Though they were both experienced skiers, neither of them had done more than short-burst or open-mountain off-piste skiing. This was going to be something new.

Reading his apprehension, she said, ‘We just ski where we can, side-slip where can’t, step round, or take off our skis and walk where we have to. Ready?’

She didn’t wait for his answer. She turned her skis towards the trees and let them glide into the mouth of the dark woods.

Ten minutes later they were in trouble. The terrain was steep and uneven. Jagged teeth of amber rock broke through the snow at random intervals; the pine trees hid aggressive roots under the deceptively smooth white carpet and thrust stout, low-hanging branches at shoulder height above it. Finding a path between the trunks was tricky. The going was made worse by the presence of semi-frozen channels carrying meltwater down the mountain. Some of these streams were hidden by snow bridges; others were open and too wide to step across. They lost a lot of time trying to negotiate these streams, and sometimes had to step back uphill when it became impossible to simply point the skis down the fall-line.

Zoe fell early and took a crack on her arm from a boulder. Jake also went on his back twice when his skis got tangled in black roots or hidden snares under the snow. He shed a ski and they lost a lot of time finding it and digging it out. They pressed on, helping each other where they could. They tried to take off their skis and carry them on their shoulders; but in their heavy moulded boots they were plunging thigh-deep into snow at times, so they abandoned that idea.

Opportunities to let the skis run never delivered them more than fifteen or twenty metres. It took them two hours to make the kind of distance they had covered on the piste in two or three minutes.

They made a stop, cleared a space in the snow and rested. Though both knew that the light was fading. They could not be caught in the woods on skis after dark.

‘I didn’t think it would be quite as tricky as this,’ Zoe said.

‘How much further, would you guess?’

‘So long as we keep heading downhill at an angle, we have to hit that road through the woods. Can’t be above an hour. Or two at the rate we’re going.’

‘An hour or two until we get to the next village? Or an hour or two until we hit the road?’

‘One or the other.’

They sat in the profound silence of the snow and the woods. She wished he would say something.

‘I’m sorry for bringing you this way,’ she said. ‘You can give me hell if you like.’

‘It was a good idea.’

‘No it wasn’t.’

‘It was a brave idea, at any rate.’

She wished he would tease her. When they had no banter, that meant the situation was serious. Zoe looked through the trees up at the grey sky. She hoped the thinning light would hold out long enough for them.

‘Ready to go again?’

‘Ready.’

In fact they met the road just half an hour after they’d got started again. It was no more than a logging track winding between the trees, but it plunged downwards and Zoe was elated because her map-reading had been accurate. It had been tricky, but they’d made it.

It was a huge relief to ski freely again. The road was deep with snow and a little narrow but it presented no further challenge to their skiing abilities. The light around them was fading rapidly now. On occasion the road would hit a dip and if they couldn’t generate enough momentum to carry them up the other side they had to sidestep up; but that exertion was invariably rewarded with a free sweep through the dusk downwards on the other side.

Eventually the spruce and the fir parted wide enough to afford them a glimpse of lights twinkling in the small village below. As they got nearer they could see illuminated hotels and houses, and cars parked alongside the road leading into the village.

They hugged and laughed, and confessed that back up in the woods they’d both been too afraid to admit that they had been out of their depth. But now they could let their skis glide further down the track, a little more slowly, though, for fear of encountering moving traffic.

But there was no moving traffic. And as they entered the village there was no sign of people, either. It was as deserted as the village they had left behind them.

Jake spoke first. ‘You’re not going to like this.’

‘What?’

‘I think they’ve evacuated this place, too.’

Zoe groaned.

They had arrived at a flat stretch of road and had to take off their skis and carry them over their shoulders. They marched into the centre of the deserted village, scanning the houses for the least sign of activity, like soldiers in a conflict but carrying skis instead of guns.

Zoe’s face clouded over. ‘This can’t be right. This just can’t be right.’

‘What?’

‘Stop. Stop. Look at that hotel. And look at the church at the top of the hill.’

‘What about it?’

‘The tower. It’s the same. Same as the one in our village.’

‘Similar.’

‘Not similar, Jake. Not similar at all. It’s the same. So is that hotel. We’re back in Saint-Bernard. We haven’t gone anywhere!’

Jake half-smiled at her, an agonised grin of disbelief. He looked up the road, squinting at the church ahead. Then behind him, to examine the road they’d come in on. He twisted his neck around all points of the compass. Finally he threw down his skis and poles in a clatter and went running, in his heavy ski boots, up the hill towards the church.

Zoe was right. It was the same church. Same hotel. Same houses and streets. Same supermarket, with the police station next to it.

They’d circled back on themselves.

Jake ripped his woollen hat from his head and ran his fingers through the sweaty strands of his hair. Then he walked back down to Zoe. She was crouching, holding her gloved fists under her nose, looking up at him. ‘How?’ he wanted to know.

‘It’s not possible.’

‘We must have taken a wrong turn.’ He couldn’t keep the blame out of his voice. She’d been leading, after all.

‘It’s just not possible.’

‘Of course it’s possible. We’ve just proved it’s fucking possible. Here we are. Q. E. Fucking. D.’

‘No. You’re wrong. We went up that mountain, and on that side.’

‘There must be a pass! A pass must snake through the mountain and wind back down here. We’ve inadvertently followed a pass.’

‘I’m sorry, Jake! I’m really sorry!’

He looked like he wanted to be furious with her, but he couldn’t. He’d asked her to go in front, after all. He had no sense of direction whatsoever himself, and he had been the one who’d told her to lead the way.

‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkk! It’s a joke! I feel like someone is having a laugh!’

‘Jake!’

The road delivered them to the opposite side of the village, in the same place where they’d emerged when they’d tried to walk out. They had to walk past the church all over again. Jake took his compass out of his pocket and in frustration he hurled it at the silver tower of the church.

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Where you going?’

Zoe walked up to the door of the church and pushed it open. In the traditional Catholic style it was a cave of shadows and echoes and images of agony, relieved by alcoves in which numerous candles were burning. Jake entered the church behind her. Their footsteps echoed on the stone flags. The air inside the church was cold. Their breath was visible.

‘It’s almost like something is keeping us here in this village,’ Zoe said, looking around her and up at the ceiling. ‘Like something doesn’t want to let us go.’

‘I feel the same thing. I felt it before today. I just didn’t want to say it.’ Jake glanced around the vaulted ceiling of the church, and at its walls and doors, as if looking for something that might sign them a way out, or offer them a clue, but there was nothing. He stared for a while at the steadily burning candles.

‘Come on.’

Jake looked exhausted, so Zoe marshalled him back to the hotel and immediately ran him a hot bath. She found the storeroom and raided it for bath foam and fresh towels. She thought he was worn out with anxiety. She knew he felt acutely his masculine duty to get them out of this situation, and that he was failing; even though she wasn’t the sort of woman to need that; even though she accepted responsibility as much as he did. It was a weakness in him, something his father had taught him, a controlling thing. A protective instinct, for which she could easily forgive him. But nature didn’t seem to be playing by the rules and it was wearing him out.

After his bath she helped dry him and bullied him into bed. Within minutes he’d fallen asleep.

She sat watching him sleep. It was impossible to stop loving Jake. He was so full of fire and fight and goodness, and yet so vulnerable when he was tired. They’d been together for more than ten years, and in all that time she’d kept an inextinguishable candle burning for him. She decided that thought was both trite and not. It had occurred to her when she’d seen the candles burning brightly in the church of Saint Bernard.

Something about the church, and the candles in particular, bothered her greatly.

She wondered who had lit the candles in the church. Though she didn’t know anything about it, she assumed that candles—even good quality church or otherwise candles—didn’t burn for days on end. She therefore assumed someone had to keep them going: that it was a job of work for some church acolyte.

She stood over Jake, listening to his breathing, making sure he was deeply asleep. Then she let herself out of the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click. She rode the elevator down to the lobby and walked from there into the restaurant.

She went directly to the table at which they’d had dinner and drunk champagne the previous evening. The plates and glasses and remains of their meal were all exactly as they had left them when Zoe had wantonly dragged him off to bed. And in the middle of the table, a candle—a candle that she herself had lit—was burning.

Still.

She clearly remembered lighting that candle. It had been a new candle, with a fresh white wick. That meant that it had burned all evening, and all night, and all day, too, while they’d been out. It just hadn’t burned down. Not a centimetre. Not half a centimetre. There was no sign of wax having dripped from the flame. It could have been lit just a moment ago.

She blew at the candle and the flame snuffed out, with a smell of wax and a twist of grey smoke released into the air. Then she lit it again, and the flame burned brightly.

From there she went into the kitchen. Some of the unwashed pots and pans, left behind after Jake’s cooking adventures the previous evening, lay carelessly discarded. But on another side of the kitchen, on a clean worktop, lay the meat and chopped vegetables that had rested there untouched since they’d walked into the kitchen on the afternoon of the avalanche.

She made a close inspection. The rosy meat, tinted with delicate marble-threads of white fat, glistened as if it had been chopped only moments earlier. The vegetables too exhibited a healthy, freshly sliced hue. Neither the meat nor the vegetables showed the slightest signs of decomposition.

She had to think hard, once again, to work out exactly how long it had been since they were caught in the avalanche. Oddly enough it felt as though they had been living in that place for weeks; but this was only the third day. But that meant that the meat and vegetables had sat on the worktop for between fifty and sixty hours in this warm kitchen. She picked up a strip of meat and sniffed it. It smelled perfectly fresh. She bit into a crisp slice of carrot. She lifted a slice of celery to her nose. It smelled garden-fresh, beautiful. It was showing no sign of wilt. She snapped the celery in half and it broke cleanly, and with a click.

Candles that didn’t burn. Meat that didn’t decompose. Vegetables that didn’t wilt. She stared at the meat on the worktop slab for a long time.

A hand touched her on the shoulder from behind. She screamed.

It was Jake. He wore his bath robe.

‘Don’t do that!’

‘I’ve had the very same thoughts,’ he said. ‘The candles. The food. I looked at it last night. I just didn’t want to say.’

‘But what does it mean?’

Jake turned away and sorted through some kitchen implements. He found a very sharp chopping knife. He waved the knife at her, then rolled up his sleeve.

‘What are you doing, Jake?’

With his eyes trained on hers he sliced the inside of his forearm, making a gash a couple of centimetres wide. The flesh opened up and he winced at the pain. But no blood flowed. Not a single drop.

‘Jake! Stop it!’

He made another smaller incision on the tip of his ring finger on his left hand. Again he winced at the bite of the knife, but again there was no flow of blood, not even a pinprick. He put down the kitchen knife, rolled down his sleeve. ‘I cut myself while I was cooking and playing the fool last night. It was a deep cut. But no blood. I decided not to tell you. God. I love you, Zoe.’

His eyes were misted.

She blinked at him. ‘I love you too, Jake. Please tell me what’s going on.’

‘You don’t know what this means?’

‘No! Please tell me! And please stop harming yourself, my love!’

‘It means we died,’ said Jake.