‘Yes. I just woke up and saw him.’
‘Did he attack you?’
‘No, he was at the door. He didn’t come in.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘He was reaching an arm into the room. Slowly. That’s all.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He wore black. All-black ski gear. His face was in shadow. I don’t know.’
‘Heck. Well, he’s not there now, darlin’. I swear to you he’s not there now. Okay?’
She nodded.
He put his big hands either side of her face. ‘I think you could have dreamed it.’
She shook her head, no.
‘I think you could easily have dreamed it. We’re in a strange place in our heads right now. You could have dreamed it and woken and thought you saw him at that moment.’
‘No.’
‘You know that place, that moment between dreaming and waking? That’s it. That’s where we see these things. That’s exactly where these things live. You know it.’
‘The door was open, Jake! It’s still open.’
It was the hole in his reasoning, the gaping puncture. He looked over his shoulder at the open door. ‘Did we close it? Did we close the door before we went to sleep?’
‘Of course we did.’ She marched over to the door. ‘Look! Look here!’
On the carpet just outside the door were a few small chunks of dirty snow-ice, just beginning to ooze from crystal to water. ‘It’s not possible that was from our boots.’ Her voice was keening. ‘Any snow from our boots would have melted hours ago. There was a man here. That snow says there was a man here.’
Jake turned her around and pressed her back into the room. He closed the door behind him, and dropped the lock and secured the chain on the door for the first time since before the avalanche.
‘There are other people here,’ Zoe said.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes I do. Other people are here.’
9
They hesitated in the doorway of the hotel, equipped for going out onto the mountain slopes, but afraid. The world—the shadow world, the world of death, of dying, had changed again. The implication that the crisp, white, wide-open, snow-deep slopes were populated reconfigured everything.
Jake barred Zoe’s path with an arm across the doorway. ‘I think I know what’s happened,’ he said. ‘I think I get it. On the morning of the avalanche, there must have been others. Other people who were killed in the avalanche.’
‘And?’
‘I think you saw one of them last night. There’s no other explanation. The same for the man on the phone. If we weren’t the only ones to die at that moment then there would be others, here. Caught here. Just like us.’
‘You mean they’re coming for us, Jake? I don’t want them to come for us.’
‘There’s no need to be afraid. What if it’s just one man, desperately trying to contact us? Imagine how lonely it would be to be here alone.’
‘But what would he want? What will
‘They’ll look like us, of course.’
‘You don’t know that. Maybe some of them were horribly disfigured in the avalanche.’
‘Were we disfigured?’
‘No. But I thought about it. What if we can see each other as we were, not as we are?’
Jake shuddered. ‘Just don’t go there. You’ve got no reason to think they will look any different from us. Look, the weather is changing.’
He pointed at the clouds in the distance, coiled above the white peaks of the far-off range of mountains to the east. It was an unsubtle attempt at distracting her, but one she accepted gratefully; at least for the moment. Oyster-grey and coral-pink clouds were advancing like an army of aerial wraiths, an army tangled on the impaling snowy horns and bull-necks of the alpine range. But they were supported by reinforcements, fanning out south and north. The pink and grey clouds shimmered with a luminescence both stunning and scaring.
‘Red sky in the morning,’ Zoe said, and neither wanted to complete a rhyme that completed itself. ‘What do we do?’
‘We carry on as we have been doing,’ Jake said. ‘If we encounter someone we just behave as we normally would. But I want you to consider that you may—just may, don’t get mad—have hallucinated that man, or even the phone call, just as you hallucinated those people in the lobby. Otherwise you have to be open to the possibility of encountering someone.’
She went to speak but he waved his open palms at her. ‘Peace.’
Though Zoe had of course already considered the possibility of hallucination, the notion was of little comfort. Their basic existence in that place seemed like one giant hallucination, so how were they supposed to feel about hallucinatory bubbles inside the hallucinatory bubble? They were still too new to this place to know the currency. If they could remember the savour, the smell, the touch of all earthly sensations, and in the act of memory make them real, then maybe they could manifest other thoughts. This world, this death that was so like a dream and yet so unlike a dream, could be full of possibilities. Perhaps in wanting help to come, Zoe had manifested help. There was no way of knowing if her desire for help was greater than her fear of it.
‘Do we go looking for them?’
‘I don’t want to do that.’ Jake said. ‘I don’t want to go looking for something when I don’t even know if it’s there.’
‘Or if we don’t know what it is.’
Jake blinked his bloodshot eyes. They were giving each other lots of space. Their conversations were all the time shrinking in length but expanding in implication. Sometimes Zoe had to ask herself if Jake had actually spoken out loud or had just thought something that she had picked up. Intersubjectivity. Their thoughts were locking together like hexagonal snow crystals.
One of the hotel flags slapped against its tall mast, quite suddenly.
‘Bad weather is coming in,’ Jake said. ‘Let’s ski while we can. If there’s anyone out there, we’ll deal with it.’
The sun was strong and the sky was blue, but a queer blue like a mass of interlocking blue beads, as if it were comprised of pixels. There was an extra chill and a lifting breeze. The thought crossed Jake’s mind that later the authorities might close the lifts; then he remembered that there were no authorities other than themselves.
They made their way to the Cadet chairlift to get to the western extreme of the slopes. The Cadet was a modern and speedy apparatus offering a pull-down canopy with a Perspex windshield. They stood side by side in the track and dropped together into the seat. Jake put a protective arm around Zoe as they ascended.
‘Okay?’
‘Yeah. Think so.’
The fresh breeze on the mountain was scythe-sharp. Zoe shivered, so Jake tugged down the canopy. The windscreen was smeared and crazed; it was difficult to see anything through it, but at least it stopped the wind from biting. Zoe had wanted to scan the slopes. Look for other skiers. But she said nothing.
The chairlift moved forwards in a steady glide, rocking and rumbling slightly at each pylon. The canopy had reduced the sound of the motion to a hiss, though the wind murmured around it like something smoothing its Perspex curves, restlessly searching for a crack or purchase hole for slender fingers.
Jake stared dead ahead through the dirty canopy. He seemed absorbed in his own thoughts. He had less
