reason to be shaken by the events of the previous evening, she suspected, since he’d neither seen the intruder nor heard the telephone ring out. She understood him well enough to know that he wouldn’t write her off as silly or neurotic; but then neither of them knew anything about the true flora and fauna of this place.
If this really were death, or some version of an afterlife, then why should it not be populated? Even in the few days that they’d been here she’d made herself adapt very quickly to the idea that they were alone together; and even to try to see that it might be something poetic and wonderful, an elevation of existence rather than a diminishing. It was like a personal Eden, or an anti-Eden. They were an end-of-days couple, not naked in a garden but wrapped in layers in a snow-covered landscape where there were no more apples on the trees and women would no longer have to take the blame, because the old lie had been covered over by snow. But if this were anti- Eden, she had been given strong evidence for the existence of an anti-serpent.
She hoped that the man she had glimpsed in the doorway of their hotel room, and the man on the other end of the telephone, was not the Devil. Zoe shifted in her seat and Jake stirred from his daze. The canopied chairlift rumbled over another pylon.
‘Was that our first run down, or our second?’ Jake asked at the bottom of the slope.
‘This morning? It was our second.’
‘I’m losing track.’
She knew what he meant. The snow was so soft and forgiving that it received the skis into itself and it was possible to drop down the mountain in a state of lost consciousness. At one point she looked back up the gradient and calculated that she had skied for three kilometres without any of it registering. It was a pocket of blackness in the white-out. As if she’d gone to sleep. A little death, inside this death.
She didn’t discuss this with Jake.
They had become more adventurous, careless even, wandering off-piste through trees, connecting pistes by negotiating silver streams and the jagged,rotten-coloured teeth of rocks. They continued to test the boundaries of their enclosed world, and no matter which point of the compass they followed, they were always, always delivered back to the environs of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut.
It was when they were in the middle of a clump of pine and spruce still heavy with snow, slowly steering a way between the dark trunks, when they stopped at a frozen stream. The ice stream was like a thin, twisted bolt of silk, mysterious and beautiful in the fairy-tale darkness under the snow-laden boughs of the trees. Jake stopped, listening.
‘What is it?’
‘Shhh. Silence.’
True silence. The freezing of all sound. It wasn’t possible, in the modern world, to listen to the sound of true silence. Perhaps not even in the ancient world either: there was wind in the desert; insects in the depths of the forest; wave activity in the middle of the ocean. Nature did not tolerate silence. Only death accepted silence; and there was silence here.
It was the snow singing to her.
Her heart beat in terror and rapture. She was about to open her mouth to speak when she heard, far off, a dog barking.
‘Did you hear that?’ Jake said.
‘Is it Sadie?’
He nodded. ‘It has to be! Which direction?’
They listened again.
Then Zoe heard it again. A single bark. She moved closer to the ice stream and stooped down by the frozen watercourse. ‘I know it’s crazy but the sound seemed to come from the stream. Is that possible? Can frozen water carry sound? I mean, if Sadie were up the mountain, could the sound of her bark be conducted by the ice? Do you know anything about that?’
‘Maybe,’ Jake said, his voice full of doubt. ‘If a vinyl record or a CD can—why not?’
Zoe listened again to the ice. From there, in the arrested flow and turn and gyre of the stream, came another sound. Human voices, brief, calling.
She stood upright.
‘What is it?’ Jake said.
‘I want to get out of here.’
‘But—’
‘I have to get out of the trees. Right now.’
She didn’t wait for him. She turned her skis down the gradient and slipped between the dark, dry trunks of spruce, made a spinning turn around a rock and dropped through the woods until the growth thinned and she was able to pop out of the trees onto the piste.
There she waited until Jake caught up with her a minute later.
‘Sorry. I panicked.’
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ve been panicking since day one. I’m still panicking now. I’m just better at hiding it than you are.’
‘I heard voices.’
‘Human voices?’
She nodded.
‘Oh my Christ.’
‘They were carried by the ice. No question. No doubt about it.’
‘And the dog?’
‘The same.’
He pushed his skis between hers and embraced her. ‘Come on. If we traverse this slope we can get down to La Chamade. Have a drink of something.’
‘Have a drink that doesn’t taste of anything.’
‘I’ll remember it for you.’
La Chamade was almost exactly how they had left it. The wall on the slope side was split and banked with snow. The main entrance was buried so they went in by the rear door. Debris and broken glass littered the floor. Jake kicked a path through with his heavy ski boot and went over to the fire.
It had burned down. It was mostly just soft grey ash, but it was still glowing.
‘It’s still warm. After all this time, it’s still warm.’
He kneeled in front of the embers in the hearth and blew gently. He found some strips of bark to make kindling, laid them over the embers and blew again. Small flames licked at the corners of the bark, and caught. He laid more sticks over the fire and within moments the same fire was alive again.
‘Well, that’s something,’ he said, nodding at his own work.
‘What?’
‘It means time is running, but at a different speed from… our speed.’
‘Time is running.’
They drank, vodka this time because Jake said it didn’t taste of anything anyway. He became morose. Zoe thought it was because the bark of the dog had made him sad all over again. He started to throw back the vodka like it was water. She asked him not to, but he said he wasn’t drunk, and it seemed to be true, that it had no effect on him.
He shivered, quite suddenly. He looked at her, and the light from outside the window played on his still- bloodshot eyes, and for a moment they looked like watery gems. ‘Oh. That’s the first time since it happened,’ he said, ‘that I’ve felt the cold.’
She wished he hadn’t said it. ‘Come on. Let’s get moving. I think that wind is picking up outside. Maybe that’s what you felt.’
