Zoe stepped into the throng, still with her hand pressed to her mouth. Behind the desk, three receptionists in smart hotel uniforms were dealing with the new arrivals, looking slightly harassed. One young receptionist, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, pressed a telephone receiver to one ear and held the palm of her free hand against the other. An older woman with copper hair and black-framed spectacles was meanwhile processing a credit card from one of the new arrivals waiting in line. A third was straining to hear what her manager, a thin man in a grey suit, was trying to tell her above the din and commotion in the lobby. Everyone seemed to be talking at once.
Outside the plate-glass doors of the hotel a modern bus arrived. Zoe heard the sneeze of its air brakes as it halted abruptly and parked up. The door opened and the bus began to decant more new arrivals into the hotel.
Elsewhere the concierge Zoe recognised from the day of their arrival was busy with a customer. He leaned on a lectern-like desk of blond wood set aside from the reception, scribbling rapidly on a sheet of yellow paper. His maroon and grey hotel livery shone softly and his bald head reflected the bright overhead lights. A bloom of sweat had appeared on his brow.
Zoe was distracted from the concierge when a man walked past her and gave her a lascivious wink. She caught a whiff of the man’s cologne and remembered that she was in the middle of all these people wearing only her towelling robe. She clutched at the robe and tightened the belt. People around her chattered in spirited French, but two women in ski gear nearer to the busy reception spoke in English. She overheard the word ‘avalanche’.
She stepped towards the English women.
‘Excuse me,’ Zoe said, interrupting them, ‘did I hear you say there has been another avalanche?’
The first woman turned to her. Her face was flushed, as if she herself had just returned from the mountain slopes. She had the smile-lines of middle age around her eyes. She nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, first thing this morning.’
‘But is this another avalanche? A fresh one?’
The woman didn’t get the opportunity to reply because the young receptionist with the ponytail and the scraped-back hair called both women over to her. Zoe was left waiting, hugging her robe to herself.
The people crowding the lobby didn’t seem frightened in any way. Rather they appeared to be excited. Zoe turned to see the new holidaymakers stepping off the bus outside. As she gazed across the lobby, the bald-headed concierge looked up from his papers and instantly spotted her. He raised his eyebrows at her, quizzically.
But Zoe’s next thought was: I have to tell Jake! I have to tell him!
She skipped back to the lift. It was waiting, open. She hopped inside, flapped at the button and rode it up to her floor. She was giggling. When the lift chime announced her arrival she tried to push open the doors in her haste to get out. She ran down the corridor and hammered hard on the door. ‘Jake! Jake!’
There was a grunt and after a few moments he came to the door. He was naked. He yawned like a bear. Sadie was behind him wagging her tail, wanting to slip past him. ‘Where’s the fire?’
‘Get dressed. Come quick. Leave Sadie there. No, just put a robe on! Quick. You won’t believe this! You won’t believe it, Jake!’
She was laughing so hard now she was almost convulsing. Jake slipped on his white robe and followed her down the corridor. She grabbed his hand. He wanted to know what the hell was happening.
‘Wait and see! Wait and see!’
They got into the lift and pressed the button to go down. Jake blinked at her. She grabbed his face and kissed him hard, slipping her tongue in his mouth. She wanted to stop all his talking and show him the miracle that had happened. The lift arrived in the lobby and the doors opened. Zoe pushed Jake forwards into the lobby and stepped out behind him.
There was only silence.
Nothing and no one. Just as before.
Zoe stopped in her tracks. She stammered something incomprehensible, shaking her head. Then she leapt towards the reception desk, casting around. She looked hard through the plate-glass doors and beyond where the bus full of newcomers had parked. She looked at the concierge’s desk. She checked behind the reception desk, where the three women had been working. Then she turned and raced pell-mell outside, through the glass doors and out into the snow.
All was quiet. Everywhere was deserted. There was only the white, white snow of the silent land.
Jake came out after her.
She looked up and down the road. She looked for wheel tracks that the bus might have left behind. There were none.
‘Can’t be. Can’t be.’
‘What happened?’ Jake asked.
She ignored him, shouldering him aside to re-enter the hotel.
Back in the lobby, she looked all around for some practical proof that things might have changed; for any tiny forensic scrap of evidence that all those people had really been there, in the flesh and not just in her imagination. She fingered the corners of the concierge’s blond-wood desk.
‘Come on,’ Jake said. He was waiting patiently for an explanation.
‘There were people, Jake. Dozens of them. Chattering away. New people coming in with their suitcases—’
‘When?’
‘Just now! Minutes ago. That’s what I rushed up to tell you. Some were talking about an avalanche. One man leered at me.’
‘Was it a nightmare?’
‘No, he just winked at me. I think my robe was hanging open. I hadn’t expected people. They were… ordinary. It was just ordinary. It’s changeover day. People are leaving, people are coming.’
‘Do you want a hug?’
‘No, I bloody well do not want a hug. I’m not mad. They were here. It was busy, but normal. Everything for a moment was back to normal. Like back before… before it happened.’
Jake blinked at her.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
‘Zoe, do you think there is anything I can’t believe at the moment? But let’s think.’
‘Hell, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.’
‘Right. Can I give you some possibilities without you screaming at me?’
‘No. Keep them to yourself.’
‘Right. One possibility is that it was a kind of wish-fulfilment. You want everything to be back to normal and for a moment that’s how you saw it. Two, it might have been a dream-lag. I’ve had dream-lags where you get out of bed and the dream won’t quite wash out of your brain for a while.’
‘Dream-lag? What is a dream-lag? You just made that fucker up!’
‘Sort of.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know!’
‘Come on. Let’s get dressed and get out of here.’
As they put on their ski clothes, Zoe described the scene she had witnessed in minute detail. It couldn’t have been a dream, she asserted, because there was nothing remotely illogical, uncanny or other than prosaic about it; whereas all her dreams were stamped by the irrational. She went over it again for him, delineating each of the characters she’d seen in the lobby.
Eventually Jake told her, firmly, to put the matter behind her. When they went back down to the lobby Zoe was unable to contain the hope that when the lift door opened again all the people would reappear.
They didn’t.
Once outside, Zoe tried to shake off the morning’s experience. With Sadie trotting happily beside them, they decided to fully explore the village.
The question of what to do with their time was a pressing one. It seemed to both of them that they had landed the ultimate dream of affluence, one that they weren’t sure they wanted. The restaurants and supermarkets were stocked to capacity with food and drink. They could freely take anything, of any quality, from the stores. It didn’t even amount to stealing, since nothing in the stores actually belonged to anyone. What’s more, they didn’t even have to work to maintain this dizzy standard of affluence. Death had delivered to them an idle abundance.