Graham Joyce - The Silent Land

Twilight fell like a mantle, a quiet invasion, a horde of creeping creatures surrounding the hotel. Jake dragged a couple of mattresses from the nearest hotel rooms and went back for duvets while Zoe placed and lit candles all around the reception desk and the lobby. Outside, the twilight plumped itself into darkness.

Jake watched without comment as Zoe bolted the hotel side door. As for the plate-glass doors of the lobby, she took a pair of decorative antique skis from the wall and inserted them through the door handles, barricading the door.

‘Who do you think is coming?’ Jake said with a half-smile.

‘No one.’

‘The Devil?’

‘No.’

‘God?’

‘No.’

‘Something else?’

‘Shut up. I just feel better with it all locked and secure, okay?’

They drank two bottles of wine. Jake kept the fire stoked with logs. Zoe settled under the duvets and gazed into the flames. She saw shapes there. She fell asleep.

In the night she heard men. They were tramping around the hotel. She heard their voices. She heard the sound of their boots squeaking and stamping on the snow. They called softly to each other. She was unable to understand what they were saying, and neither could she get up to look out of the window. She was paralysed both by terror of the men outside and by the half-sleep that had folded her in its arms. When she tried to rise she felt unable to move. It was as if she were drugged. She was unable to stir a hand or a foot. She was unable to blink. She couldn’t speak or call out to Jake, because her lips and her jaw were clamped shut. All she could do was gaze into the fire, and witness the blurred shifting of burning logs.

When they woke up the fire had gone out. It was impossible to see anything from the windows of the hotel because a thick mist had descended on the valley, bringing with it fresh snow. Zoe stood at the plate-glass doors of the lobby, huddled in her duvet. The doors were still barred by the ancient skis. She debated whether to tell Jake about the men walking around the hotel in the night.

She was still protecting him, just as he was trying to protect her. But from what? From what? They were already counted among the dead. What could possibly threaten them?

She heard him stir behind her. Without looking around, she said, ‘There were men, in the night. Walking round and round the hotel. Unless I was dreaming. But if I was dreaming it was the first dream I’ve had here.’

He came up behind her. He sniffed and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I heard them, too.’

She turned quickly, her eyes flaring. ‘You did?’

He slid the old skis out from behind the handles of the glass doors and leaned them against the wall. Then he dressed quickly.

‘You’re not going out there.’

‘I am.’

‘I don’t want you to. What did you hear? In the night, what did you hear?’

‘I heard some men pacing around the place.’

‘How do you know they were men?’ she said, and now there was a tremble in her voice.

‘Well, I don’t. But I heard their footfalls and it sounded like men. I heard their breathing. I heard a cough, too.’

‘Did they try to get in?’

‘I don’t think so. I think they came right up to the window but they didn’t try to get in.’

‘What if it’s not men?’

‘What would it be, if it were not?’

‘What if it were demons?’

He snorted with derision. ‘You don’t believe in demons.’

‘Maybe I do now. I don’t want you to go out there.’ Jake stamped his feet into his boots and laced them up in silence. ‘We can’t stay in here for ever, that’s for sure. I’m not going to be a prisoner. If there are men out there, I want to find out what they are doing. And if they are demons, well, I want to see what they look like. Are you coming?’

He held out his hand for her. She didn’t budge.

‘They can’t hurt us.’

‘They can.’

‘Zoe! We died! Some time ago we died in an avalanche! What can they do to us? What can they possibly do? Kill us again?’

She blinked. She knew exactly what they could do. Something Jake didn’t understand. But she didn’t say it. She just said, ‘Wait.’

She dressed hurriedly, pulling on the boots and ski jacket she had liberated from those deserted stores. He waited patiently; then, when she was ready he held the door open, and they stepped outside.

The icy cold clawed at them. Visibility was less than a few metres. The damp mist was in their faces and the fog of it was in their throats. Snow was coming down hard in small flakes.

They walked around the hotel, looking for boot-prints made by the men in the night; or if not boot-prints, then any kind of tracks that might suggest the nature of whatever had been out there. Or what might still be out there. But there were no boot-prints, nor claw-prints, nor tracks of any kind. They had presumably disappeared in the same way as those hoof-prints and tramlines left behind by the horse and its giant sledge.

But Jake did find something.

He held it up for her. It was a cigarette butt. The filter had been bent as if twisted between the fingers as it was put out. There were more. Every few yards they found another. They discussed how long the cigarette butts might have been there; how fresh they seemed; whether the residual tobacco smelled stale, whether the paper looked pristine and chalky white or weathered and grey. They discussed whether they had spotted the cigarette butts in the snow before that moment; they couldn’t be certain. Perhaps they had been there all along, and it was only now, after the presence of intruders, that they had spotted them. They sniffed the stubs, opened out and spread the remnants of paper, crushed the tobacco between their fingers. They pored over the discarded butts like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, papyrus writings in an inaccessible language, all the time looking for meaning, meaning, meaning.

Then, behind the hotel, Zoe spotted another cigarette butt in which a single burning cinder of tobacco glinted and went out. A miraculously thin wisp of smoke floated upwards from the cigarette butt. She reached down and plucked it up, blew on it and it sparked.

She held the stub of cigarette at arm’s length for Jake to see and he gazed back at it with appalled eyes.

Zoe turned and shouted into the swirling mist. ‘Hello! Hello! Who is there?’

But her words were muffled by the freezing fog, seeming to fall back with a clatter at her feet.

Jake made a megaphone of his hands. ‘Helloooooooo!’ he bellowed. But his voice didn’t carry. ‘We know you are there!’ he shouted. Then he turned to Zoe. ‘No we don’t,’ he said quietly.

They both peered deep into the mist, and Zoe saw, or thought she saw, a tiny spark, crimson-to-gold, perhaps the glowing ember of the tip of a burning cigarette as it was inhaled by the smoker. But it was so small, and the flare was so brief, that she couldn’t be certain.

Perhaps Jake saw it too, because he set off into the mist, weaving slightly, as if targeted on some point in the middle distance. He hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps before his outline began to fade. Unable to conceal the panic in her voice, Zoe summoned him back.

‘I’m just going to take a look around.’

‘I’m afraid! You might lose your way back.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘Jake, you asked me what they could do that was worse than dying. I’m going to tell you. They could separate us.’

‘What?’

‘They could separate us.’

Jake hesitated, staring back at her. He seemed not to have considered this possibility. He returned to her side and hugged her to him. ‘I won’t let them do that. Let’s go back inside.’