Then a child screamed behind him.
He chanced a fearful look back.
His imagination didn’t disappoint. Frightened children and probably their mother rode two chairs behind him, and the mother, sobbing, clung desperately onto them as if doing so was the only reason they didn’t fall off. Further behind them, at the terminal, lay two more victims: a small boy, no more than ten years old, and what must have been his father—the one who had been prone on the ground. The crazed woman chowed down on the head of the father but left the boy alone.
Maybe she had already finished with the boy. Sure enough, Alexander watched, almost in hysteria by now, as the bloody boy got up and ran down the hill at breakneck speed. He was faster than the chairlift! And two figures ran down the mountain ahead of the boy at an even faster pace.
They resembled the initial victim and gray-suit man.
As Alexander moved away from the gruesome scene at the platform, the boy ran past him along the chairlift. Then he spotted the woman running behind him. And before Alexander could come to grips with this situation, the father ran past him, too. That made at least five crazed people running down to meet him at the end of the lift.
Day One
Jocelyn’s grandfather’s sword weighed heavily on her forearms as the wood stove with no thermostat heated the cabin to a stifling eighty degrees. Opening her eyes slowly after emerging from her meditation, Jocelyn causally examined the sword—sharp with a groove through the middle to keep the weight manageable.
But it wasn’t her grandfather’s sword anymore—it was hers. She sheathed it in its old leather scabbard and leaned it against a wall before taking off her robe and leaving the windowless cabin naked. Sure enough, a light snow was falling, an inch on the ground, and she breathed in the fresh air and pine of the trees. She headed for the outhouse, then returned to roll around in the snow, “washing” off her stink.
There was no running water, and she dared not risk being seen by people by going to the lake. But the snow invigorated her, and immersion made her feel cleaner than she actually was.
She went over to the woodpile to gather firewood. The stove needed to keep burning throughout the night’s sub-freezing temperature.
The snow continued to fall throughout the day.
Late in the afternoon, Jocelyn ate a can of stew heated on the wood stove. She was still naked as the heat of the cabin afforded her that luxury. A month of nakedness made her comfortable with her body, and only during meditation did she wear her ritual robe.
After eating, she put on clothes, including her winter jacket. George, her “landlord,” had insisted she buy the coat, along with the snowshoes, and she was glad she hadn’t argued with him.
Snowshoes strapped on, she went outside and hazarded a peek onto the road leading up to her car. It hadn’t been plowed, but then she remembered George had said that if it snowed, he wouldn’t plow the cabin’s driveway until after she completed her vigil, lest their eyes meet and risk ruining the vigil.
At least a foot of snow covered her Toyota. As a Californian who didn’t ski, she had never seen so much snow in her life. She shivered in the cold air; her thermometer—weather station outside, wireless display inside—registered twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit. She wondered how much sun was required to melt or sublimate the snow in sub-freezing temperatures, but at some point, the temperature would get back into the fifties or sixties. Still, she didn’t expect a lot of melting, and so for her to leave tomorrow, someone would have to come and plow.
Snowshoeing proved to be great exercise, and as she wandered through the forest of pine and birch, the trees were silent except for the occasional falling of snow from the weighted branches, as there was no wind.
She remembered she might have the ability to communicate telepathically with the birds. It was rather difficult to digest everything she had learned over the last four years, and she understood why her training stretched out over ten. She stopped, closed her eyes, and envisioned a breeze blowing on her face. It came at once. She Willed it to increase, and it did, and when she Willed it to calm down, the air became still.
Now for the birds. She concentrated on the call of one noisy bird nearby and read its mind. It was worried. The winter was here though its young remained in the nest. She assured it that it was still summer.
Jocelyn looped back to the cabin. She must have traveled only a mile, but in snowshoes it was as tiring as four. Upon her arrival, she dislodged clumps of snow off her shoes and walked over to a mirror. Her cheeks were pink because of the cold air, but otherwise she was the same, plain self she always knew—and was beginning to love.
She scrutinized her jet black hair, straight with bangs. She used to fantasize about dyeing it blonde, but she never had the courage. Now that she had some of that courage, an effect from her training, she found she liked her natural hair color. Her face wasn’t ideally pretty, with slightly puffy cheeks and chin, but she liked to think her old boyfriends judged otherwise. She always liked her nose, small but sharp. A taller-than-average woman, she loomed large in the mirror, and a month of vigorous exercise did not erase the slight bulge of her belly. She loved the skunk tattoos on her upper arms—her left arm, the natural black skunk with the white stripe in the
