“Come on, Lel,” I said, and we went back into the hall. There we met the owner, and I let him in on my plan. We were in total sympathy with one another.
“Now is the perfect time for sitting in front of the fireplace,” he said. “Go on ahead, Peter, please—I’ll get things ready.”
I accepted his invitation and, after grabbing a place by the fire, began warming my freezing hands. I listened as the owner walked down the hall, muttered something to Kaisa and then kept walking, flipping switches as he went. His footsteps grew quieter, and the music in the dining room shut off. He plodded heavily down the stairs and then walked back up the hall again, lecturing Lel softly. “No, Lel, don’t pester me,” he said sternly. “You’ve disgraced yourself again—in the house this time. Mr. Olaf complained to me. What a shame. Where have you ever seen a respectable dog do something like that?”
So, the Viking had suffered a second embarrassment, I thought with no small amount of relish. My gloating increased as I recalled how avidly Olaf had danced in the dining room with the kid. When Lel approached me with his head bowed in shame, and nudged his cold nose into my fist, I patted him on the neck and whispered, “Good boy—just what he deserves!”
At that exact moment the floor shuddered gently beneath my feet, the windows rattled piteously, and I heard a distant and powerful rumble. Lel lifted his head and pricked his ears up. I glanced automatically at my watch: two minutes after ten. I waited, my whole body tense. The rumble did not repeat itself. Somewhere above me a door slammed heavily, rattling the kitchen pots. Kaisa said, “Oh my god!” loudly. I stood up, but by then I could hear the sound of footsteps, and the owner came in carrying two cups of hot liquor.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“Yes. What was it?”
“An avalanche in the mountains. Not too far away either… Excuse me for a second, Peter.”
He put the glasses down on the mantelpiece and left the room. I picked up my glass and sat back down in my chair. I felt completely calm. Landslides didn’t scare me, and the port, which had been infused with lemon and cinnamon, was beyond praise. Excellent, I thought, settling in.
“Excellent!” I said out loud. “Right, Lel?”
Lel didn’t object, even though he hadn’t tried any of the hot port.
The owner came back. He picked up his glass, sat down beside me and stared at the embers for some time.
“It doesn’t look good, Peter,” he said finally, with heavy solemnity. “We’re cut off from the outside.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“How long does your vacation last, Peter?” he continued in the same dull voice.
“Until around the twentieth. Why do you ask?”
“The twentieth,” he said slowly. “More than two weeks… In that case, it looks like you should be able to get back on time.”
I put my glass on my knee and repaid his mystifications with a sarcastic look.
“Out with it, Alek,” I said. “Don’t pull any punches. What’s happened? Has HE finally returned?”
The owner flashed a placating grin.
“No. Not yet, thank god. I have to tell you—just between us—that HE was quite a moody and grumpy type of person, and if HE did ever return… However, let’s not speak poorly about the dead. Let’s talk about the living. I’m glad you have two weeks left, because it may take them that long to dig us out.”
Now I understood.
“The road’s blocked?”
“Yes. Just now I tried to get in touch with Mur. The telephone isn’t working. That can mean only one thing, the same thing that it’s meant several times in the past ten years: an avalanche has blocked Bottleneck. You passed that way yourself. It’s the only way into my valley.”
He took a sip from his glass.
“I realized what had happened immediately,” he continued. “The rumble came from the north. Now all we can do is wait. Wait for them to remember us and organize a work crew…”
“We’ve got more than enough water,” I said thoughtfully. “But what’s to prevent us from descending into cannibalism?”
“There’ll be no need for that,” the manager said complacently. “Only if you want to spice up the menu. Except I’m warning you up front: I won’t give you Kaisa. You can gnaw on Du Barnstoker. He won seventy crowns off me tonight, the old cheat.”
“How about fuel?” I asked.
“There’s always my perpetual motion machines.”
“Hmm…” I said. “Are they made of wood?”
The owner gave me a reproachful look. Then he said:
“Why haven’t you asked about the booze, Peter?”
“What about the booze?”
“When it comes to booze, we’re doing very well,” the owner said proudly. “A hundred and twenty bottles—and that’s only the house liqueur.”
We stared at the embers for a while, sipping quietly at our drinks. I was as happy as I’d ever been. I thought about what might come of this, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.
Suddenly the owner spoke.
“The only thing that bothers me, Peter, if we can be serious for a moment, is that I think I’ve lost a good client.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked. “So far as I can see you have eight tasty flies in your web, and now they have no chance of escaping for another two weeks. Now that’s what I call good publicity! When it’s all over, they’ll talk about how they were buried alive and almost had to eat one another…”
“That’s true,” the manager said with satisfaction. “The thought had occurred to me already. But there would be even more flies if Hinkus’s friends managed to make it here…”
“Hinkus’s friends?” I said, surprised. “He told you that he had friends who were coming?”
“Not told me, exactly… He called the telegraph office in Mur and dictated a telegram.”
“And…?”
The manager raised a finger and recited solemnly.
“‘IN MUR, AT THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S INN. WAITING. HURRY.’ Something like that.”
“I would never have guessed,” I muttered. “Hinkus has friends who are willing to share his solitude. But then again, why not? Pourquoi pas, as they say…”
7.
By midnight the owner and I had a pitcher of hot port already under our belts, and had moved on from discussing how best to notify the guests that they had been buried alive to more universal questions—for example, Is mankind doomed to extinction (Yes, doomed, but we won’t be around when it happens); Is there a force in nature that the human mind cannot fathom (Yes, there is, but we’ll never know anything about it); Is Lel the St. Bernard capable of sentient thought (Yes, he is, though convincing scientific dolts of this is impossible); Is the universe in danger of succumbing to so-called “heat death” (No, it is not in danger, due to the existence of perpetual motion machines of both the first and second type in the owner’s barn); Was Brun a boy or a girl (Here I was unable to come to any conclusion, but the owner put forward the odd idea that Brun was a zombie, that is, a sexless creature animated by magic)…
Kaisa was cleaning in the dining room; she had washed all the dishes and presented herself to ask if she could go to bed. We let her go. Watching her as she went, the owner complained about his loneliness, and the fact that his wife had left him. That is to say, she hadn’t left him… it wasn’t as simple as that… but, in a word, to speak plainly, he was currently wifeless. I told him not to marry Kaisa, first because it would hurt business, and second because Kaisa loved men too much to make a good wife. The owner agreed that this was true, he had thought about it a long time himself and come to the same conclusions. Still, he said, who am I supposed to marry now that we’re going to be buried in this valley for the rest of our lives? I was unable to give him any advice on that score; all I did was admit that I was on my second marriage, and therefore had probably already taken more than my share. It was a terrible way to think about it, and although the owner forgave me immediately, I still felt like an egoist and bad Samaritan. In order to repay him in some way for all my awful attributes, I decided to school him in the technicalities of forging lottery tickets. He listened attentively, but this didn’t seem like enough to me, so I demanded that he write it down. “You’ll forget!” I repeated despairingly. “You’ll sober up and forget all about it…” The owner grew terribly afraid that he really would forget it, and demanded that we give it a practice run. I think it was around then that Lel the St. Bernard suddenly jumped up and gave a deep bark. The owner stared at him.