The Silent Land

7

In the morning Zoe got out of bed, slipped on her towelling robe and went off in search of breakfast. She wanted to make things as normal as possible for Jake, and a tray of toast, bacon, coffee and juice with a flower filched from the lobby might just do the trick. And that was something: the fresh flowers in their crystal vases seemed in no more danger of wilting than the food in the kitchen. She padded down the carpeted hall and summoned the lift.

The lift door opened and when she pressed the button for the ground floor the chime echoed around her. She’d thought hard about how to make things normal. It was the only way to hang on to sanity. She wanted to hit the ski slopes again. Jake seemed more concerned than she was about the terms of their existence. He’d wondered out loud if they were scheduled to be in this place for eternity. If they were, he’d said, there might be a few more things they would like to do besides skiing.

Zoe had agreed to that. She was just wondering what those ‘few more things’ might be exactly, in a ski resort, when the lift arrived at the lobby and the doors opened. Zoe gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth.

The lobby was filled with people. They were noisy, animated, chattering and they thronged the reception area. They were mostly dressed in ski gear, but there were others, too, waiting in line at the reception desk, shuffling forwards with suitcases.

Zoe stepped into the throng, still with her hand pressed to her mouth. Behind the desk, three receptionists in smart hotel uniforms were dealing with the new arrivals, looking slightly harassed. One young receptionist, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, pressed a telephone receiver to one ear and held the palm of her free hand against the other. An older woman with copper hair and black-framed spectacles was meanwhile processing a credit card from one of the new arrivals waiting in line. A third was straining to hear what her manager, a thin man in a grey suit, was trying to tell her above the din and commotion in the lobby. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.

Outside the plate-glass doors of the hotel a modern bus arrived. Zoe heard the sneeze of its air brakes as it halted abruptly and parked up. The door opened and the bus began to decant more new arrivals into the hotel.

Elsewhere the concierge Zoe recognised from the day of their arrival was busy with a customer. He leaned on a lectern-like desk of blond wood set aside from the reception, scribbling rapidly on a sheet of yellow paper. His maroon and grey hotel livery shone softly and his bald head reflected the bright overhead lights. A bloom of sweat had appeared on his brow.

Zoe was distracted from the concierge when a man walked past her and gave her a lascivious wink. She caught a whiff of the man’s cologne and remembered that she was in the middle of all these people wearing only her towelling robe. She clutched at the robe and tightened the belt. People around her chattered in spirited French, but two women in ski gear nearer to the busy reception spoke in English. She overheard the word ‘avalanche’.

She stepped towards the English women.

‘Excuse me,’ Zoe said, interrupting them, ‘did I hear you say there has been another avalanche?’

The first woman turned to her. Her face was flushed, as if she herself had just returned from the mountain slopes. She had the smile-lines of middle age around her eyes. She nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, first thing this morning.’

‘But is this another avalanche? A fresh one?’

The woman didn’t get the opportunity to reply because the young receptionist with the ponytail and the scraped-back hair called both women over to her. Zoe was left waiting, hugging her robe to herself.

The people crowding the lobby didn’t seem frightened in any way. Rather they appeared to be excited. Zoe turned to see the new holidaymakers stepping off the bus outside. As she gazed across the lobby, the bald-headed concierge looked up from his papers and instantly spotted her. He raised his eyebrows at her, quizzically.

But Zoe’s next thought was: I have to tell Jake! I have to tell him!

She skipped back to the lift. It was waiting, open. She hopped inside, flapped at the button and rode it up to her floor. She was giggling. When the lift chime announced her arrival she tried to push open the doors in her haste to get out. She ran down the corridor and hammered hard on the door. ‘Jake! Jake!’

There was a grunt and after a few moments he came to the door. He was naked. He yawned like a bear. Sadie was behind him wagging her tail, wanting to slip past him. ‘Where’s the fire?’

‘Get dressed. Come quick. Leave Sadie there. No, just put a robe on! Quick. You won’t believe this! You won’t believe it, Jake!’

She was laughing so hard now she was almost convulsing. Jake slipped on his white robe and followed her down the corridor. She grabbed his hand. He wanted to know what the hell was happening.

‘Wait and see! Wait and see!’

They got into the lift and pressed the button to go down. Jake blinked at her. She grabbed his face and kissed him hard, slipping her tongue in his mouth. She wanted to stop all his talking and show him the miracle that had happened. The lift arrived in the lobby and the doors opened. Zoe pushed Jake forwards into the lobby and stepped out behind him.

There was only silence.

Nothing and no one. Just as before.

Zoe stopped in her tracks. She stammered something incomprehensible, shaking her head. Then she leapt towards the reception desk, casting around. She looked hard through the plate-glass doors and beyond where the bus full of newcomers had parked. She looked at the concierge’s desk. She checked behind the reception desk, where the three women had been working. Then she turned and raced pell-mell outside, through the glass doors and out into the snow.

All was quiet. Everywhere was deserted. There was only the white, white snow of the silent land.

Jake came out after her.

She looked up and down the road. She looked for wheel tracks that the bus might have left behind. There were none.

‘Can’t be. Can’t be.’

‘What happened?’ Jake asked.

She ignored him, shouldering him aside to re-enter the hotel.

Back in the lobby, she looked all around for some practical proof that things might have changed; for any tiny forensic scrap of evidence that all those people had really been there, in the flesh and not just in her imagination. She fingered the corners of the concierge’s blond-wood desk.

‘Come on,’ Jake said. He was waiting patiently for an explanation.

‘There were people, Jake. Dozens of them. Chattering away. New people coming in with their suitcases—’

‘When?’

‘Just now! Minutes ago. That’s what I rushed up to tell you. Some were talking about an avalanche. One man leered at me.’

‘Was it a nightmare?’

‘No, he just winked at me. I think my robe was hanging open. I hadn’t expected people. They were… ordinary. It was just ordinary. It’s changeover day. People are leaving, people are coming.’

‘Do you want a hug?’

‘No, I bloody well do not want a hug. I’m not mad. They were here. It was busy, but normal. Everything for a moment was back to normal. Like back before… before it happened.’

Jake blinked at her.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

‘Zoe, do you think there is anything I can’t believe at the moment? But let’s think.’

‘Hell, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.’

‘Right. Can I give you some possibilities without you screaming at me?’

‘No. Keep them to yourself.’

‘Right. One possibility is that it was a kind of wish-fulfilment. You want everything to be back to normal and for a moment that’s how you saw it. Two, it might have been a dream-lag. I’ve had dream-lags where you get out of bed and the dream won’t quite wash out of your brain for a while.’

‘Dream-lag? What is a dream-lag? You just made that fucker up!’

‘Sort of.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know!’

‘Come on. Let’s get dressed and get out of here.’

As they put on their ski clothes, Zoe described the scene she had witnessed in minute detail. It couldn’t have been a dream, she asserted, because there was nothing remotely illogical, uncanny or other than prosaic about it; whereas all her dreams were stamped by the irrational. She went over it again for him, delineating each of the characters she’d seen in the lobby.

Eventually Jake told her, firmly, to put the matter behind her. When they went back down to the lobby Zoe was unable to contain the hope that when the lift door opened again all the people would reappear.

They didn’t.

Once outside, Zoe tried to shake off the morning’s experience. With Sadie trotting happily beside them, they decided to fully explore the village.

The question of what to do with their time was a pressing one. It seemed to both of them that they had landed the ultimate dream of affluence, one that they weren’t sure they wanted. The restaurants and supermarkets were stocked to capacity with food and drink. They could freely take anything, of any quality, from the stores. It didn’t even amount to stealing, since nothing in the stores actually belonged to anyone. What’s more, they didn’t even have to work to maintain this dizzy standard of affluence. Death had delivered to them an idle abundance.

Jake suggested they go shopping. He was simply trying to find a way to comfort her. Shopping normally brought an expression to his face like that of a Nazi at a Jewish Gay Pride festival. But it was his idea.

They went into the ski stores and picked out new ski suits and gloves and goggles. They took new, top-of-the-range ski boots from the racks. They tried them on. The boots were beautiful. But they both found that their old boots were more comfortable, so they left the dazzling new boots in the store for another time when they might need them.

Then they went into the chic boutiques, helping each other choose complete new sets of clothes. Where before Jake would have stood aside with his arms folded, now he joined in with enthusiasm. Zoe laughed at the prices. Jake mocked the displays.

‘Where do we stand on fur now we’re dead?’ he wanted to know.

The boutiques carried every designer label. Zoe had no great interest in clothes but even she could name Prada, Gucci, Vuitton and Fendi, even if only to rail abuse at the fashion victims who made the names famous.

‘But look at some of this stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s couture.’

‘I ain’t heard o’ that one,’ Jake said.

‘It’s not a brand. It’s handmade stuff, even more expensive than those designer brands.’

‘Well. We’ll help ourselves to a brace of that, shall we?’

It was fun, for a few minutes, to pick out new trousers and handbags and scarves and shoes. Then Zoe tossed a coat on the floor. ‘You know what? I don’t want any of this shit.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Who would be impressed by it, anyway?’

‘Not me.’

‘And what’s the point of taking it back to the hotel? It’s here if we want it. Which I don’t.’

‘Right.’

‘Shit, Jake, there must be more to death than shopping.’

‘You know I’m on board with that. What else can we do?’

They considered the leisure opportunities, in addition to skiing, afforded by the village. There was of course no TV and no Internet; but they shed no tears for the absence of either. Jake said that watching TV had for the most part made him feel dead anyway, and that the Internet was a murky half-life of random surfing, needless messages, moronic football chat and porn.

‘You indulged in football chat?’

‘Once or twice,’ Jake admitted.

There were spa complexes in several of the hotels, offering saunas and steam rooms. There were sledges by the dozen and Skidoos, if you could get them unlocked, or you could swap your downhill skis for cross-country skis or snowboards. There was ice skating. There were polished granite stones and brooms for some incomprehensible winter sport called Curling. Beyond these opportunities, the entertainment prospects in the village were thin. There was no cinema, but they did find a bowling alley.

So they went bowling.

The machinery was working fine. They even honoured the request to wear proper bowling shoes though they had to discourage Sadie from chasing the bowling balls down the polished lanes. Since neither of them had ever been bowling before, neither knew how to score, so they simply bowled without scoring. It was encouraging to see and hear the balls returned by the operating mechanism with a pleasing click. And the pins made a delightful clatter as they went down. But the pleasure offered by the activity was somewhat limited.

‘I dunno,’ Jake said. ‘I just don’t see myself doing this for the rest of my death.’

‘I disagree,’ Zoe said, flinging a ball down the lane only to see it drop into the gutter. ‘I could see myself doing this for at least another ten minutes.’

Pretty soon they had their skis on again and were ascending the mountain by chairlift. Sadie sat between them, panting slightly, tongue hanging out. They planned to take her to La Chamade as a midpoint on the mountain where she could choose to stay indoors or be outside.

‘Same logs, still burning,’ Jake said after he’d been inside the mountain restaurant.

‘That’s crazy.’

‘It is. I thought I detected a slight shift in the position of the logs.’

‘A slight shift?’

Jake had left Sadie in the gabled porch of the restaurant. The dog had wagged her tail as he crunched through the snow back to his skis to rejoin Zoe. ‘I think one of the logs was at a different angle. Different from how we left it, I mean. It was leaning at maybe thirty-seven degrees against the other burning log, as opposed to forty-five degrees.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I think I am.’

Although she’d initially thought he was joking, she was serious just the same. They both read the details of the landscape avidly; they watched the weather, alert for signs; they studied the condition of the snow, to find meaning or portent; they hunted for cracks in ice and assessed the flow of streams; they scanned the surface of this world for the tiniest signals of change.

And they scanned each other’s faces for the same.

‘What’s up?’

‘That shopping this morning,’ said Zoe, ‘and that bowling. I’m sort of cross with myself.’

‘Time wasted?’

‘You know me so well. Now that we’re… well, I’ll say it, now that we’re dead, I’m thinking about my life all the time. What I did. And I’m not thinking about the good or bad things I did. I’m thinking of all the stupid time-wasting things. Shopping. Bowling. Not that I ever went bowling, but the equivalent. Pastimes. Pisstimes more like. And it’s making me think, is that what this is—all this hammering up and down the mountain slopes on sticks?’

‘No, this is different.’

‘Why is it?’

He didn’t even have to think about an answer. ‘Because it’s living on the gradient, where you have to stay focused, and you can’t switch off or go to sleep for a second; but at the same time as you are the sum of all those lumbering forces trying to stay in control, you are nothing on the enormous mountain, a fleck, a speck of dust, a melting flake.’

‘Stone me. You’re sounding religious.’

‘You don’t have to be on your knees to pray. This is me praying. This is me giving thanks, on the knee of the mountain. I’m a moving prayer. See the tracks behind me? Can you read what I wrote there?’

She looked back up the slope and wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s just tracks. I can’t read anything.’

‘Yes you can. That’s my writing. It’s a poem of praise.’

She blinked at him, impressed. He was smiling back at her, a thousand-watt smile. But she said, ‘You’re fucked up.’

‘Maybe. Are you coming skiing?’

He slipped away down the slope and she followed, trying to catch him. His words stayed with her. It was true: they were writing notes of praise on the page of the mountain, she told herself. That’s what they were doing.

They raced down the Black-graded slope, skis chattering where the trees had shaded the piste and ice had crusted on the surface of the snow; and the skis whispered and soothed where they emerged into the sunshine and the crust had melted or softened.

After several more runs they checked back at La Chamade for Sadie. She was still waiting in the outside porch. She stood up, tail thrashing as they approached, and followed them inside.

They peeled off their ski jackets and Jake fetched a bottle of wine from behind the bar. He pulled out the cork and was about to pour two glasses when Zoe said, ‘Do you hear that?’

He set the full bottle next to the empty glasses on the table and listened hard. There was a distant droning, like engines far-off; or like the movement of heavy, armoured trucks in the distance; or maybe one very large truck.

‘Is it a piste-basher?’

They listened again, and the drone became a rumble, sounding indeed like an approaching piste-grooming tractor, but without the beeping electronic alarm. The deep rumbling had an eerie low frequency, muffled and unsettling. It was as if someone had stuffed cotton wool in their ears.

‘That’s no piste-basher,’ Jake said. ‘That’s the sound of snow moving.’

The low rumbling got louder and brought with it another layer of sound, like a hissing, and when that came the entire restaurant quivered. The bottle and the glasses that Jake had placed on the table began to clink together and work their way to the edge of the table.

The restaurant was shaking. Jake and Zoe were both already on their feet, peering through the window up the mountain. There was nothing to see, but everything to hear. Bottles, crated or racked behind the bar, shivered and clinked. The wine bottle and glasses fell from the table to the wooden floor without breaking. One of the glasses went rolling.

Jake shouted that they should lie down in front of the bar, which lay between them and the source of the sound. He dragged a large table across the floor and jammed it against the bar. They scrambled underneath the table.

‘Sadie! Here, girl! Come here!’

The dog was trembling. The rumble had evolved into a cushioned booming, like sustained thunder, and the hissing sound was like that of a huge commercial aeroplane taking off right outside the door.

Bottles tumbled and smashed behind the bar. Plates and other equipment crashed and fell in the kitchen. They heard the wood of the log-built walls actually begin to groan and split. The restaurant threatened to shake itself into matchwood. Zoe and Jake crouched under the table, holding on to each other as the roaring and the sound of splitting wood engulfed them.

At last the shaking subsided, and with it the great hissing and the deep, low roar began to diminish, and pass on over them. They stayed under the table wrapped in each other’s arms, both holding the dog.

In less than a minute the sound of the avalanche had dropped to a low thrumming, and then was gone. But the sounds that followed were less easy to identify. There came on the log wall of the restaurant three clear, dull thumps, and then a skittering sound, perhaps like a bird scrambling for bread on the roof. Then silence.

‘What just happened?’

‘Don’t know. Let’s wait here a little while longer.’

They stayed under the table until they felt ready to explore. Jake scrambled out, looking uneasily at the roof. Then he stepped over to the wall that had resisted the main burden of snow. The plaster and lath had been smashed in and the snow had forced a gap between the outer logs, reaching long white fingers between them,probing the interior of the restaurant. It was as if the snow had made a grab for them.

‘Look at that!’

They couldn’t get out of the door through which they’d come in. A wall of snow blocked their way. They left by the kitchen door at the back and skirted the restaurant to see the mounds of snow piled high against the wall.

Zoe was about to remark that that was the second avalanche they’d survived, when she remembered they hadn’t survived the first one. Instead she said, ‘Can you die twice?’

He turned and looked at her, and snorted.

‘Do you think it’s like the layers on an onion? That if that avalanche had claimed us, we’d still be here? Or would we be somewhere else? Once I had a dream and in the dream I went to bed and fell asleep and was dreaming. And I knew it. I knew I was dreaming inside a dream. Do you think it’s like that? Do you?’

‘Are you okay?’ he asked, squinting at her.

‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re chattering, that’s all.’

‘I’m okay. That thing that happened where I thought all the people had come back. It upset me, Jake.’

‘Shall we get the hell out of here?’ Jake said. ‘I’m kind of done with dying today.’

‘Done with dying?’

‘Skiing. I said I’m done with skiing.’

‘No, you said “done with dying”.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘Yes you did. You may have meant skiing but you said dying.’

‘Zoe, you’ve just escaped an avalanche and you’re talking gibberish.’

‘No I’m not. I’m clear as a bell. I know what I’m saying and I know exactly what you said.’

‘Can we please go?’

‘Sure we can. Let’s get Sadie.’

They went back inside, but they couldn’t find her. She was nowhere. They searched the place, calling her name. They knew she was safe because she had been with them under the table. She hadn’t emerged from that spot until they did. But now she couldn’t be found.

‘She must have gone outside.’

They hunted for Sadie in front of and behind the now semi-derelict restaurant building, calling her name across the lengthening shadows of the trees, into the cold. There was no trace, and no paw tracks either. Jake was dismayed by her disappearance, but concluded she must have gone down the mountain.

Zoe made one last search of the restaurant. As she was checking under the tables she heard a burning log spit in the hearth. She turned and looked at the fire. The log that had for so long leaned unmoving against the other had split and fallen, and rolled just a centimetre from its brother.

No more than a centimetre.