That night she had a vivid dream of Marguerite and another guest who had stayed at the inn during the summer. Stella had forgotten his name, but he was a handsome young man whom Marguerite led to a large bed covered with tiny, writhing snakes. Then his face changed into that of another young man she remembered, and then another. As they lay down together, the dream slipped away.
The next day she was able to uproot several turnips from the small garden which she cultivated at the rear of the inn. That afternoon she asked Simon if he would help her bury her husband.
She had not entered the cellar since the morning after the snowstorm. Although the thaw was now well advanced, the cellar was still icy cold and her breath misted as she descended the stone stairway with Simon at her shoulder.
She had a sudden image of Thomas making love to her: he was a stout, red-faced man who snorted and panted, flacks of spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth, his eyes bulging. He lay on the stone slab where she had left him. The snow which had covered his body had hardened and crystallised during the winter so that he seemed to be encased in frosted glass. Then she saw that despite the coating of ice, a rat had gnawed away his face.
She tried to dislodge his body from the slab, but it would not budge. Silently she pleaded with Simon to help her, but he watched, unmoving, until finally she ran past him up the stairs.
He made her sit in an armchair and brought her a mug of strong, sweet tea. Then he returned to the cellar and brought the body up on the handcart which was used for moving wine casks. He took it outside and left it in the woodshed.
"We have to bury him," she insisted.
He shook his head. "Not until he's unfrozen." That night the temperature dropped sharply and it began to snow. Stella sat at the window, watching the world turn slowly white again. Simon had already retired, leaving his pipe on the arm of the chair. The fire in the hearth was dying; she added more wood before retiring to her room.
Through the spy-hole she saw him reading by candlelight. With the snowfall a pervasive silence seemed to have settled on the inn, and she had the impression that they were two people trapped, frozen in by the weather. She imagined Simon removing her husband's body from the woodshed and chopping it into pieces which he then fed to the fire.
At length she undressed and got into bed. She always slept nude, piling more blankets on her bed as the winter advanced until she felt like an animal cocooned in a deep burrow. To her surprise, sleep came easily. She dreamt of her husband, remembering the time in summer when a party of six guests had arrived, bound for the city. She had gone to fetch him to help prepare their rooms and had found him asleep face-down on their bed, a winy vomit surrounding him. In her dream the vomit was the colour of bile, and when she rolled him over there was a dark hole where his face should have been. Then the young men of whom she had dreamt earlier were standing in the doorway, pointing at him and laughing. She was smiling at them.
Their laughter grew louder and more staccato until she became aware of a rapping on the door knocker downstairs. She went out into the empty corridor and descended the stairway without haste, her hand on the banister.
The moment she opened the door, the icy wind blew in a flurry of snow. Marguerite was standing there, dressed in white. Her face was as glacially beautiful and as timeless as ever. She smiled her irresistible smile, and Stella felt as if she was drowning in the blueness of her eyes. Then she entered, shaking the snow from her cloak.
Stella followed her like a sleepwalker as she passed through the vestibule, glancing at the empty hook on the key board. The faint aroma of Simon's pipe-smoking still lingered in the air. Silently Marguerite ascended the stairs.
She went directly to Simon's room and turned the handle. It opened without protest, closed behind her without a sound. Stella stood outside, her mind blank. Then a shiver freed her from her numbness. She entered her own room and went directly to the spy-hole.
Everything was dark and silent in the room, but she had the strong impression of movement and life. She waited. Outside it had stopped snowing and a sickle moon shone bright between scudding clouds. The stars looked adamantine. She waited.
Abruptly Simon's room erupted with a brilliant white light which made her recoil from the spy-hole. There was a piercing scream which rent her mind like fingernails scraped on ice. And then silence.
The light continued to pour through the spy-hole as she cowered on the floor. Then, after a long time, it gradually began to fade to orange and then to red. The dimming of the light was slow, but Stella did not move. Nor did she entertain the thought of putting her eye to the spy-hole when it had died completely. Chilled to the marrow, she crawled into her bed. Dawn seemed to come quickly, and she did not know whether she had slept or not. She lay there, watching the gathering of the light and the movement of the clouds, patterns as fickle and inexorable as life itself. Beyond the wall there was no sound. The cradles of snow on the windowpanes began to melt under the sun.
At length she heard a movement next door. She waited. The door opened and footsteps receded in the corridor and down the stairs. She crept to the spy-hole and peered through. The bed was unmade and the curtains had not been drawn. She could not be sure whether the tousled white sheets were darkened with shadows or a greyish dust. She heard the crow give an enfeebled cry, and realised that she had forgotten to take him in that night. She hurried to the window. Simon was walking through the melting snow towards the city road. She opened the window and found the air possessed of all the mildness which heralded a true spring thaw. His long cloak erased his footprints in the snow as he went.
Then she saw that he had taken Thomas from the woodshed and laid him on a pile of straw under the sun. His body already looked free of its surface coating of ice; a black cloth had been tied around his face. At the bottom of the garden Simon had dug a grave.
Before the sun set she would go down and give him a decent burial.
(c) Christopher Evans 1983, 1997
This story first appeared in Lands of Never edited by Maxim Jakubowksi (Unwin Paperbacks, 1983).