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.
6
The snow stopped. The swollen grey clouds drifted on and the sun appeared in the ice-blue sky. The sun lanced off the snow and they had to wear sunglasses all the time. Good sunglasses, expensive ones, and all they had to do was walk into a store and pick out the very best designer pairs available.
Of course Zoe did not immediately accept that they had died in the avalanche. Swallowing that was more than a little difficult.
For who could acknowledge such a thing? But it was as if once Jake had enunciated the fact, and had himself accepted the logic of the situation and openly proclaimed it, then the weather had changed accordingly. There was no longer any need—it seemed—for the world to be wrapped in a spectral mist of snow, and the best of all possible worlds could be on display.
Naturally Zoe blanked the idea. She insisted they walk out of the village all over again, this time on the clear roads. Jake offered no resistance, beyond commenting that it would make no difference. He was right: even on a clear day, with no confusion over the direction in which they walked, the roads unaccountably delivered them back to Saint-Bernard-en-Haut all over again. They commandeered the police car again and successfully started it up; but whichever route they drove it was as if a giant, gentle hand curved the road and steered them back to their starting point.
‘How can this be?’ she had railed. ‘How can this be happening?’
Jake had merely blinked his eggshell-blue eyes. ‘I’ve explained it to you. There’s no more to be said.’
Four days of this. It was impossible; it couldn’t be happening; it made no sense; it defied natural law. But there it was. And in that time lighted candles did not burn down, meat and vegetables on the slab showed no sign of decay or wilt, and blood did not flow.
While her brain resisted and reasoned, fought and tested the uncanny and undeniable logic, her heart never
