‘What does that mean?’ Zoe said.
Jake didn’t answer.
She grabbed it; shook it; put it down on the snow again. The needle continued to hunt for its magnetic home, without coming to rest.
‘It’s fucked.’
‘It was working fine when I picked it up,’ Jake said. ‘It was working fine.’
‘Right.’
‘It was. It was working fine.’
‘Nevertheless.’ ‘Nevertheless? What does that mean? Nevertheless?’
‘It means we’re turning back.’
‘Like hell!’
‘Jake, we’ve been walking for what, an hour? We haven’t gone more than a kilometre or two. If you think we’re going to get anywhere in this you’re stupid. I’m not carrying on in this. And as you say, we can’t stay here.’
She turned from him and began to retrace her steps. Within seconds they couldn’t see each other. After a moment he started yelling after her.
‘I’m just here!’ she shouted.
He loomed out of the mist and grabbed her coat. ‘Don’t do that, Zoe!’
‘Don’t do what?’
‘Don’t just walk off like that! We have to stay together. You don’t seem to realise that I could lose you in this. It could happen in seconds! This is the mountain and there’s no one around! No one! This isn’t a walk to the shops!’
‘Okay.’
‘You have to respect the mountain.’
‘I said okay, didn’t I?’
They stood in the billowing snow, their noses perhaps fifteen centimetres apart but barely making out the expression on the other’s face. In the mist, each appeared to the other like a faded and fading grey photograph.
‘We’re going back,’ said Zoe.
4
‘Damn thing is working fine now.’ Back in their hotel room, Jake sat at the table, playing with the magnetic compass. Each time he moved it, the needle wobbled and returned to train its pointer towards magnetic north.
Zoe gazed out of the window, in a kind of trance. ‘It’s clearing. A little.’
‘I can’t explain that. Why is it working fine now?’
Zoe wanted him to stop talking about the compass. Her point was that to follow the dial of even an accurate compass, you had to be able to see where you were going.
‘It’s like there’s a conspiracy,’ Jake said, ‘to keep us here. Look at that: bastard thing’s working perfectly.’
Zoe leapt up. ‘Look at this shithole of a room! Where’s the maid when you need one? Come on—help me clean up a bit.’
‘Why? We’re not staying.’
‘We might have to, for another night at least.’
He checked the window. ‘You said yourself it’s clearing. And even if we have to stay we could just use another room.’
‘You do what you want. I’m cleaning up.’
Zoe began to stack their used dishes on the trays they’d bought up from the kitchen. She scraped plates into the bin and pointedly set the empty plates and dishes on a tray in the middle of the table, where Jake’s compass clearly indicated the way to its magnetic home. Jake put the instrument away.
She began to strip the duvet and sheets from the bed. ‘Help me remake this bed.’
‘I don’t know why we’re remaking a bed when—’
He didn’t get to finish his sentence because there was a slight flutter in the air, and then a tremor started to shake the hotel. The doors of the wardrobe and the TV cabinet began to shiver on their brass hinges. Zoe froze and looked at Jake.
There followed a vast, hollow, doom-laden groan from somewhere high above them, high on the mountain slope. The hotel’s foundations trembled and there came a booming and the vibration of an impact that felt as if someone were banging not on the hotel wall but on the sky, or on the wall of life itself.
‘Come here!’ Jake shouted. ‘Come here!’
Zoe scrambled across the bed. He threw his arms around her and flung her to the floor, rolling her as close to the bed as possible. The booming shook the hotel and then stopped abruptly.
They were breathing heavily in each other’s arms.
‘Is it gone?’ she whispered.
‘I think.’
‘Can we get up?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What was it?’ she asked, not making any effort to rise from the floor.
‘Avalanche. A big mother. Let’s get up.’
They scrambled to their feet, then shared another long hug.
‘Well, now we know why they evacuated the place,’ Jake said.
‘We already knew that, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah, we already knew that. We just doubled our knowledge.’
‘I think it’s cleared enough to try again,’ Zoe said.
Jake looked out of the window. ‘I don’t know about that.’
‘We’re not waiting around for that snow to sweep the village away. We’re not doing that. Look, wait here.’
‘Where you going?’
‘I’ll be a few minutes. Relax.’
‘I’m already relaxed,’ Jake said. ‘If I was any more relaxed I’d be sleeping. Christ, I’m so fucking relaxed.’ He picked up the compass again.
Zoe let herself out of the hotel room and got into the elevator. In her pocket she fingered the keys to the police car. She knew she had to go and recover the car alone and without telling him; Jake would never let her risk it.
In truth the mist had cleared, and the snow was falling more lightly again. Visibility was restored—or at least reasonable—for driving, and anyway it was unlikely that they would encounter other traffic on the way into the next town. There was just the small problem of recovering the police vehicle from the roadside.
She quickened her pace. She knew exactly where the police car had gone over the edge because she’d passed it twice that very morning: once on the way in their aborted attempt to get out of the village, and once on the way back. In less than twenty minutes she could make out the snow-covered shape of the vehicle higher up the mountain road.
But there was something else up there with the car, something she couldn’t at first make out. Two cylindrical black shapes protruded from the roof of the car, jet-black against the white of the snow. Zoe stopped for a moment, squinting at the unrecognisable shapes. Unable to make them out, she quickened her pace towards the car.
As she drew nearer, one of the two shapes moved fractionally; or at least appeared to move. No more than a slight adjustment to the right. Zoe slowed as she approached, then realised to her astonishment that she was looking at two very large sleek black crows that had settled on the car’s roof.
Perhaps she ought to have been pleased to see the birds. They were the first other living things she’d set eyes on since they’d been caught in the avalanche. But the creatures looked both uninterested and vaguely threatening at the same time. Zoe knew she ought to be able to walk towards the dark birds and that they would immediately fly off. But they looked unusually large.
She felt a sensation of revulsion and with it a flutter of fear.
She clapped her hands together, to frighten the crows away. Her ski gauntlets merely deadened the sound, so she took them off and tried again, clapping her hands loudly as she took a hesitant step towards the car. There was a slight stirring in the dark feathers of one of the hooded black birds, and the creature seemed to peck at something moving under its feathers. The birds showed no sign of being intimidated.
Zoe was no more than four or five metres from the car, but she’d come to a halt. The truth was the birds terrified her. The crows regarded her steadily from their perch on the roof of the police car. One of them held its yellow beak open to her, as if expecting to be fed. The image of the creature with its beak gaping had a hallucinatory clarity. The open maw of the bird was like a small cavern, and in the cavern was a silver river, threading away into darkness. The bird made a strange cough.