‘Stop. Stop. Look at that hotel. And look at the church at the top of the hill.’
‘What about it?’
‘The tower. It’s the same. Same as the one in our village.’
‘Similar.’
‘Not similar, Jake. Not similar at all. It’s the same. So is that hotel. We’re back in Saint-Bernard. We haven’t gone anywhere!’
Jake half-smiled at her, an agonised grin of disbelief. He looked up the road, squinting at the church ahead. Then behind him, to examine the road they’d come in on. He twisted his neck around all points of the compass. Finally he threw down his skis and poles in a clatter and went running, in his heavy ski boots, up the hill towards the church.
Zoe was right. It was the same church. Same hotel. Same houses and streets. Same supermarket, with the police station next to it.
They’d circled back on themselves.
Jake ripped his woollen hat from his head and ran his fingers through the sweaty strands of his hair. Then he walked back down to Zoe. She was crouching, holding her gloved fists under her nose, looking up at him. ‘How?’ he wanted to know.
‘It’s not possible.’
‘We must have taken a wrong turn.’ He couldn’t keep the blame out of his voice. She’d been leading, after all.
‘It’s just not possible.’
‘Of course it’s possible. We’ve just proved it’s fucking possible. Here we are. Q. E. Fucking. D.’
‘No. You’re wrong. We went up that mountain, and on that side.’
‘There must be a pass! A pass must snake through the mountain and wind back down here. We’ve inadvertently followed a pass.’
‘I’m sorry, Jake! I’m really sorry!’
He looked like he wanted to be furious with her, but he couldn’t. He’d asked her to go in front, after all. He had no sense of direction whatsoever himself, and he had been the one who’d told her to lead the way.
‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkk! It’s a joke! I feel like someone is having a laugh!’
‘Jake!’
The road delivered them to the opposite side of the village, in the same place where they’d emerged when they’d tried to walk out. They had to walk past the church all over again. Jake took his compass out of his pocket and in frustration he hurled it at the silver tower of the church.
‘Don’t do that.’
‘Where you going?’
Zoe walked up to the door of the church and pushed it open. In the traditional Catholic style it was a cave of shadows and echoes and images of agony, relieved by alcoves in which numerous candles were burning. Jake entered the church behind her. Their footsteps echoed on the stone flags. The air inside the church was cold. Their breath was visible.
‘It’s almost like something is keeping us here in this village,’ Zoe said, looking around her and up at the ceiling. ‘Like something doesn’t want to let us go.’
‘I feel the same thing. I felt it before today. I just didn’t want to say it.’ Jake glanced around the vaulted ceiling of the church, and at its walls and doors, as if looking for something that might sign them a way out, or offer them a clue, but there was nothing. He stared for a while at the steadily burning candles.
‘Come on.’
Jake looked exhausted, so Zoe marshalled him back to the hotel and immediately ran him a hot bath. She found the storeroom and raided it for bath foam and fresh towels. She thought he was worn out with anxiety. She knew he felt acutely his masculine duty to get them out of this situation, and that he was failing; even though she wasn’t the sort of woman to need that; even though she accepted responsibility as much as he did. It was a weakness in him, something his father had taught him, a controlling thing. A protective instinct, for which she could easily forgive him. But nature didn’t seem to be playing by the rules and it was wearing him out.
After his bath she helped dry him and bullied him into bed. Within minutes he’d fallen asleep.
She sat watching him sleep. It was impossible to stop loving Jake. He was so full of fire and fight and goodness, and yet so vulnerable when he was tired. They’d been together for more than ten years, and in all that time she’d kept an inextinguishable candle burning for him. She decided that thought was both trite and not. It had occurred to her when she’d seen the candles burning brightly in the church of Saint Bernard.
Something about the church, and the candles in particular, bothered her greatly.
She wondered who had lit the candles in the church. Though she didn’t know anything about it, she assumed that candles—even good quality church or otherwise candles—didn’t burn for days on end. She therefore assumed someone had to keep them going: that it was a job of work for some church acolyte.
She stood over Jake, listening to his breathing, making sure he was deeply asleep. Then she let herself out of the room, closing the door behind her with a soft click. She rode the elevator down to the lobby and walked from there into the restaurant.
She went directly to the table at which they’d had dinner and drunk champagne the previous evening. The plates and glasses and remains of their meal were all exactly as they had left them when Zoe had wantonly dragged him off to bed. And in the middle of the table, a candle—a candle that she herself had lit—was burning.
Still.
She clearly remembered lighting that candle. It had been a new candle, with a fresh white wick. That meant that it had burned all evening, and all night, and all day, too, while they’d been out. It just hadn’t burned down. Not a centimetre. Not half a centimetre. There was no sign of wax having dripped from the flame. It could have been lit just a moment ago.
She blew at the candle and the flame snuffed out, with a smell of wax and a twist of grey smoke released into the air. Then she lit it again, and the flame burned brightly.
From there she went into the kitchen. Some of the unwashed pots and pans, left behind after Jake’s cooking adventures the previous evening, lay carelessly discarded. But on another side of the kitchen, on a clean worktop, lay the meat and chopped vegetables that had rested there untouched since they’d walked into the kitchen on the afternoon of the avalanche.
She made a close inspection. The rosy meat, tinted with delicate marble-threads of white fat, glistened as if it had been chopped only moments earlier. The vegetables too exhibited a healthy, freshly sliced hue. Neither the meat nor the vegetables showed the slightest signs of decomposition.
She had to think hard, once again, to work out exactly how long it had been since they were caught in the avalanche. Oddly enough it felt as though they had been living in that place for weeks; but this was only the third day. But that meant that the meat and vegetables had sat on the worktop for between fifty and sixty hours in this warm kitchen. She picked up a strip of meat and sniffed it. It smelled perfectly fresh. She bit into a crisp slice of carrot. She lifted a slice of celery to her nose. It smelled garden-fresh, beautiful. It was showing no sign of wilt. She snapped the celery in half and it broke cleanly, and with a click.
Candles that didn’t burn. Meat that didn’t decompose. Vegetables that didn’t wilt. She stared at the meat on the worktop slab for a long time.
A hand touched her on the shoulder from behind. She screamed.
It was Jake. He wore his bath robe.
‘Don’t do that!’
‘I’ve had the very same thoughts,’ he said. ‘The candles. The food. I looked at it last night. I just didn’t want to say.’
‘But what does it mean?’
Jake turned away and sorted through some kitchen implements. He found a very sharp chopping knife. He waved the knife at her, then rolled up his sleeve.
‘What are you doing, Jake?’
With his eyes trained on hers he sliced the inside of his forearm, making a gash a couple of centimetres wide. The flesh opened up and he winced at the pain. But no blood flowed. Not a single drop.