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.
