The Silent Land, page 19
She screamed.
She came round in front of the fire in the hotel lobby. Jake supported her neck and was trying to get her to drink the water that was spilling down her chin. She sat up, looked to right and left, still in the grip of her fear, ready to bolt.
‘You passed out,’ said Jake.
‘I saw one of them.’
‘You screamed and you passed out.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘No.’
‘He was close enough to touch me. I could have reached out and touched him.’
‘There was no one there, my love.’
‘I saw him.’
‘I don’t know what you saw. You were certainly frightened. When you’re frightened you can see or hear anything. There’s no one there. I had a good look around. There’s no one.’
She shivered. Her teeth chattered again.
‘You’re cold. I’m going to build up the fire again for you.’
She pulled the duvet around her and he drew a second one over her knees. She was shivering violently. Jake went to work straight away, splitting miraculously thin kindling with the axe, all of which he grouped amid the ashes of the fire. He lit the thin spills and expertly assembled a pyramid of larger splints around the burning wood. It all burned fast. Soon the fire was roaring and throwing out welcome heat.
‘Aren’t you cold, Jake?’
He didn’t answer. He continued to build up the fire.
After a while her shivering subsided. She told Jake she needed the toilet but in fact she had an overwhelming desire to check her pregnancy status again. She was terrified that the shock to her system might make her lose her baby. She had hidden her supply of tester kits in places all round the hotel. There were some behind the reception desk, so, wrapped in her duvet, she went and collected one and took it into the toilet, locking the door behind her.
She unwrapped the stick, took down her pants and held the stick under her and urinated on it. She waited. Two thin but clear blue lines appeared. She knew it was too early to tell if the shock of fainting and falling had made her lose the baby, and that she would have to test again and again, but for now she was reassured.
This baby will be fine, she told herself. This baby will be fine.
She disposed of the stick, pulled up her pants and her jeans and went to wash her hands in the sink. The tap made a dyspeptic wheeze, but no water flowed. She tried another sink, turning on both taps, but without result. The water supply had stopped, or frozen. She could hear the airlock singing in the pipes from the opened tap. She put her ear to the mouth of the tap. The air in the pipe sounded so much like music, she had to strain her powers of listening to convince herself that it wasn’t music she could hear coming out of the taps. And then after all she became certain that it was not an airlock she could hear but music after all, faint music being carried through the pipes. The music was orchestral, rising and falling; and then it was just the sound of an airlock again.
She opened the door of the bathroom and walked straight into Jake.
‘Oh?’
‘You okay? You were gone a long time.’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘Everything okay?’
‘Yes. Everything.’
He eyed her strangely. ‘Let’s get you back by the fire.’
Jake put his arm around her and tried to stroke some warmth into her as he led her back to the fireplace. He made a bed for her there and banked up the fire, complaining about how rapidly the logs burned before they had to be replenished. Zoe huddled as near to the fire as she could without actually setting her duvet aflame.
She told him about the water. ‘Maybe it’s frozen.’
‘Maybe the generators in the village have just stopped pumping it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll drink red wine.’
Jake was already drinking red wine. No matter how much he downed, he didn’t seem to get drunk. Zoe was not so sure. Previously she had happily joined him in sampling the best bottles, but now she was much more cautious. Too many strange things were happening and she wanted to keep a straight head. Plus there was her baby to think about, even in this world.
She hid her anxiety. When Jake was at her side she made a determined effort to keep things light; but when he went away for a few minutes, perhaps to fetch another bottle of wine, she got up and went to the glass doors of the reception, trying to peer through the mist, looking for movement.
And she saw it. Or if not movement, then in the form of more dark grey shapes. The mist billowed and drifted and she saw them again. The men. But now they were six. All in the same place as before. All gazing steadily back at the hotel, and smoking, smoking, smoking.
‘Come quickly,’ she said to Jake when he returned with a bottle of fine Bordeaux. ‘But keep out of sight.’
He came up behind her, holding her, looking over her shoulder. She pointed a finger at the vague outline of the six men, all of them waiting like crows or patient birds of prey, watching the hotel.
‘What is it?’
‘Six of them. Now there are six.’
‘Where?’
‘Surely you can see them, Jake! Surely you can see their shape in the mist!’
‘I don’t see anything. Where are you looking?’
‘There! And there! And there!’
Jake squinted into the mist. He shook his head minimally. He creased his forehead.
‘Jake, tell me you can see six grey shapes! Just over there!’
Jake turned her to face him. ‘I think you’ve been hallucinating stuff.’
‘Look! Look! That’s not a hallucination! They are all smoking cigarettes, staring back at us! You’ve seen the cigarette ends – that’s where they’re coming from!’
‘I’ve seen the fag-ends, my darling, but I can’t see anything or anyone. There’s nothing there. Look, I’ll go outside and check if it’ll make you feel any better.’
‘Don’t you dare go out there!’
‘Okay, okay, be calm. We’ll stay here.’
Jake settled her by the fire again but not without her darting looks across her shoulder at the mist – and the grey figures she perceived outside. He sat with her, holding her cold hands, watching her, searching her face for external signs of internal distress.
Then he said, ‘Do we still have two blue lines?’
‘What?’
He nodded.
‘You know?’
‘Of course I know.’
She vented a huge sigh and hugged her midriff.
‘Did you think,’ he said, ‘you could keep that a secret from me? In this place, where nothing else is happening but you and me?’ He was smiling.
‘You’re not angry?’
‘Never. I was just waiting for you to tell me yourself that you were carrying our baby.’ He looked at her with eyes full of anger and pity and desperate love. He took her hand and kissed it. It was a while before they spoke.
‘How did you know?’
‘I think you’ve got about a gross of those kits hidden in the room alone.’
‘Right. Maybe I wanted you to find them. I’ve been testing several times a day. Sometimes hourly. I want it to change. And I don’t want it to change. Would you have been happy, if it had been before? Before all this?’
‘Given how I feel now? Yes I would. It would have been ecstasy.’
‘And now?’
‘I’ve been watching you carefully, knowing that you’re carrying our baby. I don’t mind telling you I’ve been worried.’
‘About the baby?’
‘Yes. And about the mother. You get cold; I don’t. You get hungry; I don’t. You get frightened by everything; I don’t.’
She flicked an involuntary glance towards the glass doors. ‘You mean to say you’re not afraid? Not afraid of what’s out there?’
He shook his head, no.
‘That can’t be true,’ she said. ‘I saw you take the axe with you when you went outside.’
‘That was to reassure you, not me.’
‘Why aren’t you afraid, Jake? This place terrifies me.
I want to know what’s going to happen to us; to our baby.’
‘I can’t explain why I’m not scared. I only know that my job is to look after you.’
‘What’s going to happen to our baby? What’s going to happen?’
Jake sighed. It was the sigh of one who has no answer. He opened his mouth as if to speak and then changed his mind. Then he framed his lips into an O as if about to try again. But he was interrupted. Zoe’s mobile phone rang.
It was ringing from her coat pocket, which she was wearing under her duvet. She almost ripped it from her pocket.
Jake took it from her. ‘Let me answer it.’
He pressed the answer button and held the cellphone to his ear. He remained expressionless. He said nothing. Then he clicked off the phone and handed it back to her.
‘Who was it? What did they say?’
‘Same as before.’
‘Did the voice say la zone? Is that what it said? The zone?’
‘It was hard to make out, but I don’t think he said la zone at all. He said laissez sonner. Which means let it ring. Laissez sonner. Then it went dead.’
‘He wants me to let it ring?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Why would he say that? Laissez sonner. Why would he tell you to let it ring?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Jake checked the battery level. ‘There’s not much charge left in this. But I think we should put it aside and if it rings, we just leave it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s what he said.’
‘But how do you know that’s a good thing? How do you know that it’s not someone who wants to harm us? Maybe by answering it we’re keeping him away. Have you thought of that?’
‘No one is going to harm us.’
‘You can’t say that. You don’t know!’
‘We’re in a place beyond harm.’
Zoe clasped her belly. ‘I wish I could believe that. But I don’t. Who is calling us? Who are those men out there?’
‘You’re feverish. Come on; keep warm.’ He threw another couple of logs on the fire. ‘Damn these logs! They don’t last five minutes!’
Jake got up and set Zoe’s mobile phone on the recep tion desk. Then he sat down beside her again, and they watched the phone, from that short distance, as if it might perform an act of combustion, like indoor fireworks.
It didn’t ring.
Her teeth were chattering again. She was feverish, but it was a cold fever; she just couldn’t get warm. Jake piled her with covers and stoked the fire and while his back was turned she looked over at the window.
There it was again, a face. A scarf masking the lower half. Darting eyes, the hint of red lips above the scarf. The eyes were like pinpoints of fire, grains of light; those half-hidden lips were moving, forming unheard words.
She was on the point of warning Jake when the window itself shattered, and glass crystals rained into the room. The pressure within the lobby escaped into the dark and a wind from outside roared and shrieked, driving a blast of cold air around the room, gusting at the fire, threatening to blow out the flames. The wind shrieked and the mist roiled in at the broken window like wraiths liberated, baleful, mischievous, searching.
Jake leapt to his feet and grabbed a mattress. He dragged it to the window, ramming it hard into the aperture, stuffing it until it filled the hole, muffling the shrieking wind.
She was shivering now, too violently to speak, to tell him what she had seen at the window before the glass blew in.
He said, ‘I’m going to get you some cognac.’
Even though she knew he was only gone for perhaps a minute, two minutes at most, in that time she saw the light outside fading, incrementally, as if visibility were being shut down by precise mathematical commands. In those few moments the logs on the fire flared, burned, split, fell apart and died down.
Jake returned with the cognac. Before he gave it to her he lit two candles and set them nearby. Then he poured a glass of cognac apiece. She sipped it. He did too, but complained it tasted of nothing. ‘According to the price list we could never afford this. You’re going to have to remember it for me.’
‘What happened to the window, Jake?’
‘Remember it for me.’
‘How can I remember cognac?’
‘Approximate.’
She took a sip. ‘Our first kiss. You were a little drunk.’
He savoured more of the cognac, without taking his eyes from her. ‘I love you, Zoe. Never abandon something so deep.’
‘What?’
‘What’s what?’
‘What you just said to me. Never abandon something so deep.’
‘I said that?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t remember. It’s getting so I can’t remember what I said to you two seconds ago. Look at the fire. I feel like I only put those logs on a few minutes ago and they’ve burned down.’
‘You did.’
‘And look at the candles.’ He nodded at the yellow, flickering flame. The candle was burning fast, so fast it was possible to see the candle shrinking as the molten wax rolled back from the burning wick.
‘What’s happening, Jake?’
‘Time seems to have … Our precious time will … I don’t know, my darling, I can’t even think to the end of a sentence. Isn’t that funny?’
‘I’m very frightened.’
He turned away from her and threw some more logs on the fire. They flared quickly. Twilight had already turned to darkness outside. She lay back on her bed and felt herself dozing. So exhausted was she that she gave in to it.
She was awoken by what she took to be a wolf howling in the mountains. The air was freezing on her cheeks and a stiff breeze lifted her hair. The animal’s howl came again: a sustained ululation travelling clear, mournful, melancholy and yet oddly sweet in the cold night air. She sat up to look out of the window and to her astonishment the window was gone.
Not only was the window gone, but so too had the glass doors. Two complete walls of the hotel had been removed while she slept. She cast about her, trying to make sense of it.
Two walls still sheltered her as before, but only two walls; the fire burned brightly in one of them, the logs sparking merrily, flames flaring and twisting in the grate. But the entire south side of the hotel, along with the eastern wall, had gone, though the roof above her remained. Now she looked out directly onto the slope of the mountain, with its terrifying expanse of gleaming moonlit-white, like the wing or shoulder of a primordial spirit of nature.
Jake was in the act of lighting another candle. He smiled at her. A breeze chased around the sheltered quarter and he held his hand across the flame to stop it from guttering. Even as it guttered she could see the flame was burning down fast – faster than a candle should burn, faster than was sensible.
Another howl came back across the open eastern expanse of snow, within which she could no longer see any shape or form of the village. But in the darkness for a moment she thought she could see the twin red points of the animal’s eyes reflecting back at her; then she saw more tiny red embers. One of the embers flared briefly and died down. Then another. She realised it was not eyes, but the lighted cigarettes of the smoking men. They had moved nearer to the open walls of the hotel. Two of them had dropped to a crouch, their fingers grazing the snow in front of them. One was pointing at the fireplace. The others cast glances at the ceiling.
‘It’s the men!’ she told Jake. ‘They’re just outside.’ ‘Where?’ he said.
‘There! Look at the lights! The tiny lights.’
He looked casually out into the darkness, scanning the wax-like wastes of unforgiving snow. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see them. I’ll go and speak with them.’ But something in his voice betrayed the fact that he couldn’t see them at all, that he was simply humouring her.
‘No!’ she cried in horror. ‘You must never do that. Stay here. Stay.’
‘That’s right. You stay here,’ he said soothingly, his voice oddly tranquil, no more than a murmur. ‘Stay here.’
He got up and walked out of their sheltered corner. This time he didn’t even take the axe. She hauled herself to her feet to watch, almost hyperventilating as Jake walked across the snow towards the men. He seemed no more than a silhouette creeping in the snow. He drew within a few metres of the men before he squatted down on his haunches.
The men began talking and making animated gestures with their hands. She couldn’t hear any of it. Though she strained to catch what they were saying, their talk was obliterated by the wind buffeting at the remaining walls of the hotel. There was also something amiss with the way in which Jake engaged with the men. He was not looking at them. He was not even facing them. He talked, and nodded or shook his head occasionally as if in some kind of negotiation, but it was as if they were in different worlds; and as if he couldn’t see them, nor they him.
This curious negotiation went on for a long time, during which the candles burned down to their stumps and the fire died.
When Jake came back, he looked grave. He didn’t answer any of her questions. He stoked the fire again and banked up the logs.
‘What did the men say?’ she demanded.
‘The important thing,’ he said, pulling the pile of duvets closer around her, ‘is to keep you warm.’
‘Do you know what they want?’
‘Who?’
‘The men! Did they say what they want?’
‘Yes, they did. But it’s hard for me to remember. Very hard.’ He poured her another glass of cognac and refused to answer any more questions until she’d drunk it. Exasperated and exhausted, she gulped it and lay back again. Her weariness outweighed her fear, and she felt herself dozing again.
When she woke this time, the remaining walls and the ceiling of the hotel had been removed, along with the entire hotel lobby. There was still a fire, but it burned merrily on the snow itself, without the surround of the brick chimney or the mantelpiece or even the hearth. Jake was loading logs from a diminished pile onto the fire and they were burning supernaturally quickly.
