by C. A. Smith
As the clouds briefly parted, the figure of a solitary hiker standing in the middle of the untouched white mountain top was revealed. The figure of this person was that of a tall man of medium to large build who, although dressed in a fairly warm looking long black hooded coat and boots, lacked the usual attire of a hiker one would naturally expect for these conditions. More like a smartly dressed amateur chancing his luck. Even more remarkable was that other than the two depressions made by his boots, the surrounding snow remained crisp and virgin.
The face of this tall figure, initially obscured by the brim of his dark hood, was pointing down looking at the pure white floor beneath his feet. As he raised his head a tuft of dark hair protruded from beneath his hood, followed by a clean-shaven face wearing a slightly intrigued yet focused look, studying every snowflake that had started to fall around him. He turned as though absorbing every visible snow dusted stone of the locked summit café. Its frosted windows seemed to stop all light entering causing a deep black backing for the white dust.
Slowly he raised his hands to the height of his chest and studied each snowflake as it landed and began to instantly melt into tiny beads of water within the warm surface of his upward facing bare palms. With a deep breath his eyes momentarily closed as though savouring this moment of serenity. He slowly squatted and scooped a handful of snow from the summit floor examining it as a person experiencing the sensation for the first time. He smelled the heap of cold white clumped powder and expressed a frown as though denoting a certain mild surprise as if he’d only just realized it was odorless, and after gently tasting it, also tasteless.
After looking around for a few more seconds and once again picking up more snow just to observe it drop from his open hands, he began to walk toward the nearest point of descent. The clouds gradually closed in, completely filling the earlier break. Now devoid of direct sunshine the summit had instantly transformed into a lonely misty wasteland where all sense of direction had disappeared. It rapidly became difficult to determine where the edge of the mountain ended and the sky began. Stray too far from the path and you wouldn’t be coming back.
The hiker continued without hesitation as though he knew the mountain like the back of his hand. His footsteps left a trail of what would be the first of many blemishes in the smooth icing like covering of this calm yet sometimes-eerie peak.
Chapter 5
In contrast, across the border nearly two hundred miles away, England’s capital city was virtually still and quiet with the bright copper light of the rising sun shining over the great city of London. As the mirrored windows of the bold modern office blocks reflected their light they caused a long drawn shadow to be cast over the lower levels of the city lying behind them. This time of the morning brought with it just the odd police car patrolling. Soon this waking city would become instantly transformed into a metropolis of activity.
Further out in the suburbs, the whistling of the birds echoed through the bedroom window of no. 56 Wrenwold Street, a semi detached house within the commuter belt only a short train journey from the city. A concentrated beam of dawn light illuminated a rhythmically ticking analogue clock as it shone diagonally through the ‘v’ shaped gap at the top of the drawn curtains. Tiny particles of dust glistened as they silently passed through the beam. The calm ticking continued for only a few more seconds until abruptly broken by a single click as the hands of the clock arrived at their alarm setting. A ringing alarm fit for a fire station followed immediately after.
Accompanied by a groan, a masculine hand appeared from under the covers on the side of a queen size bed furthest from the window. As though with a life of its own it fumbled around the top of the bedside cabinet occasionally crossing the beam of sunlight until finally locking onto its target. With a slightly more coordinated movement, it grabbed the alarm clock and pulled it toward its owner’s emerging face for disarming. However, unlike a disarmed bomb, there was no elation following the event, just a croaky sigh at the final confirmation of bad news, the weekend was over!
Gradually the owner of the hand, a man in his mid thirties, sat up, placed both hands on the bed behind him and slowly spun his legs out onto the blue carpeted floor. While sitting on the edge of the bed in just pants, he turned to his wife, who had by now also managed to open her glazed hazel eyes and stare blankly at the bedroom ceiling in disbelief that the weekend has passed. Her husband’s half opened eyes stumble onto her sleepy image and still retaining his ‘just woke up’ croaky morning voice he asked, “Toast or cereal?”
“Toast, please hun.”
The certitude that it wasn’t her turn to make breakfast offered a slight consolation to the fact the weekend had gone. Her husband hauled his tired body from the bed and left for the kitchen as his wife smiled knowing the toast was a good choice. A good choice, why? Well, because she knew it would take her husband longer to prepare toast than throwing some cold milk over a bowl of cereal. This bought her those precious extra few minutes of calm before the inevitable happened…. Monday morning started!
The few precious minutes had passed in the blink of an eye. Her husband had returned to the bedroom holding a tray containing a plate with two diagonally cut slices of toast with butter that hadn’t quite managed to make the corners, covered in an uneven layer of marmalade. There was also a bowl and two cups of tea, each sitting in a small localized puddle of their own recently spilled contents and a couple of barely balanced letters protruding from its edge. He handed his wife one of the cups and the plate of toast after waiting for what seemed like an age for her to plump up her pillows and sit up. He then placed his bowl comprising of cornflakes with cold milk onto his bedside cabinet followed by his cup of tea, strategically placed on his recently acquired beer mat. Before dropping the tray onto the floor he tossed the letters over onto his wife’s side of the bed and returned back into the warm cocoon. She sat up and examined the first envelope;
“Bank statement,” she said knowing their overdraft hadn’t magically healed since the last time they’d looked at it. Then, managing a shallow sigh, she opened the next envelope;
“Telephone bill.”
Her sigh was met by a grunting noise from her husband while drinking his tea.
“One tells us how much money we don‘t have and the other tells us how much less we‘re about to have. Don’t you find it strange how we all work so hard just to survive? It’s as though we’re being used like bees by some higher realm. I’d be better off robbing a bloody bank than going to work!”
“Ah, but who’d make me toast when you’re in prison?”, his wife jokingly replied.
“No but seriously though, we work our balls off…”
Her right eyebrow raised. This was a technique she used to great effect.
“Well, you know what I mean, and where’s it getting us eh? We manage to pay the bills to keep ourselves alive so we can carry on working and paying the bills. I feel like selling up and buying a place in France like that family on the TV the other night.”
Sue intervened, “Yes well they probably had more equity in their house than we have. If we sold up now we’d probably cover the cost of a run down place over there and then we’d need to find the money to do it up. Also what about the bills? You’d still have to work. ”
“Hmm.” Mike raised his eyebrows and accepted her point.
This was one of Mike’s normal Monday morning moans. Sue saw it as his weekly acclimatization to the mundane life they had to return to after each weekend and was well used to it. She then followed her natural feminine ability to display understanding of the moment whilst really thinking about something entirely different by oo’ing and umm’ing in the right places. Mike felt understood while Sue was actually deciding on the type of shoes she was going to wear to work!
Chapter 6
The four hikers were on their way up the mountain, chatting slightly less now due to a combination of concentration, breathlessn
ess and the fact they were all in single file. They were reaching the snow line that transformed this already stunning mountain into a thing of beauty.
Around half way up, they stopped and took a well-earned drink from the fresh water falling from the rocks. They had water within their kit, but how often did they get a chance to drink from a source as natural as this? Harry, the oldest of the group realized he probably shouldn’t have had that extra cup of tea at breakfast that morning.
“I’ve got to take a leak lads. It must be all this running water.”
“Just keep away from the fresh water supply Harry!” joked one of the others.
Harry made his way a little further up the mountain for some privacy and took a sneak preview of the scenery the others were about to see. In the background he could hear the faint voices of the other three joking and talking among themselves while he was taking a leak. Even though he was a mature man he still couldn’t resist the temptation to cut random shapes in the snow with the urine laser at his disposal, although nowadays the beam wasn’t as powerful.
After a few stops and starts of the laser, the relief artwork was complete. Harry took another look around and started to make his way back to the group. As he navigated back down the rocks still out of sight of the others, his foot slipped. A surge of adrenalin flashed through his body as it dawned on him this fun weekend was just about to turn into a real life horror. It became quickly apparent there was nothing to grip onto. He was beyond the point of no return. The bottom of the mountain lay a long way below and unfortunately for Harry, it didn’t seem as though it was about to stay far away for long.
Before he could say or think any last words or thoughts he felt his chest tighten as though his heart was giving out. Why he wasn’t falling to his death was a real struggle for his shocked mind to comprehend. Confused and leaning over the side of the mountain at an angle far too steep to be natural, his fixation on the point where he should be falling toward was broken by a further increase in the tightening sensation around his chest. He felt a slow but steady change in angle until he was returned to a more natural standing position.
In a state of confusion and disorientation he looked down hesitantly at the source of the tightening and found a hand cradling his chest. Harry’s eyes slowly followed the hand up the arm to the smiling face of the lone .
“Close call,” he said calmly.
Harry said nothing and just looked a the smiling man dressed as though he was just out for a walk on a cold day then back at point were he should be laying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of a mountain. The man, still smiling spoke to Harry.
“Probably time to get back to your friends. They’ll start to wonder where you are.”
Harry just nodded, still too confused to even thank the stranger and worked his way back down to his three friends. They were completely oblivious to his experience until they saw the look on his face.
“You OK Harry? Surely not frostbite in that short amount of time. Anyway, from what Hilary said, there can’t be much to worry about!”
As their lighthearted humor and attention was concentrated on Harry, the stranger passed behind them unnoticed by the group of laughing men. Harry still wasn’t laughing, but had summoned up enough composure to raise a temporary holding smile while he figured out what exactly had just happened to him.
He quickly recapped the whole event in his mind. His logic started to kick in and he wondered what on earth a man dressed that way would be doing half way up mount Snowdon. Where is he now, and his hand, it didn’t even shake when it held most of his body weight. He shook his head as if to clear his mind of such rubbish. The adrenalin must have made it all seem worse than it was. Probably just slipped a little and another climber from a passing party on their way up helped.
Chapter 7
Mike was well on his way to work driving along the familiar country lanes and through the first village, which he called the ‘grumpy village’ because hardly any of the drivers ever thanked him or acknowledged his thanks. He thought maybe it was something to do with the angle of the sun at that time of the morning. Maybe the reflection stopped them seeing into the passing cars of the drivers who thanked them, which probably caused the same thoughts in their minds. He also reasoned that they can’t all be from the same place, so it must be something to do with the location rather than the individuals. Whatever reasons he came up with, it really did seem unusual.
As he approached a group of parked cars on the opposite side of the road, a car coming from the opposite direction stopped, as though forced to give way. Mike continued past the parked cars and lifted his hand to thank the driver who just gave him a dirty look without any acknowledgement, as though he was trying to say that he’d only gave way because he had to. Without thinking, Mike kept his hand up in the ‘thanks’ position and dropped all of his fingers except his middle one. The dirty look on the other driver’s face dropped into one of surprise.
“Ha, grumpy git!”
Even though it was very childish, Mike felt a sense of vindication as though he’d eventually got his own back on the grumpy drivers. A quarter of a mile further down the road and he started to question if the guy had actually acknowledged him without him seeing!
A news report came on the radio. A female voice reported another child in the area had gone missing…
“I’m live at the scene on Worddoll Road where the young girl was last seen walking home from school. Police haven’t released any further details and won’t yet comment if there could be a link with this missing child and the recent abduction in the area, but they certainly aren’t denying it either.”
Mike looked at the radio in disgust. This report only added to his feelings of despair with the world.
As he approached a ‘T’ junction at the bottom of a hill he indicated to turn right and couldn’t help noticing how the driver in the flash car in front was talking away on his mobile without any thought of indicating his direction. Totally oblivious to anyone else, the driver gradually slowed down and stopped in the middle of the junction.
“Bloody idiot!” he mumbled to himself. The mumble escalated in volume as he noticed the break in the traffic would allow more than enough room for three cars to get out onto the main road.
“Come on!” he shouted while pressing his horn. The driver of the car in front just casually looked in his rear view mirror and pulled out into the road with his phone still held to his ear. By this time the gap had closed up and Mike was left sitting at the junction. He waited at the mercy of the drivers of the vehicles in the slow moving traffic on the main road he watched them as they crawled past the front of his car.
“Oh, come on!”
He shook his head in disbelief of how they all looked directly ahead pretending they couldn’t see him waiting. As much as he wanted to hold onto his relaxed weekend state of mind, Mike could feel his stress growing like an elastic band rapidly tensioning across his shoulders and down the length of his spine.
“At last! Cheers mate.”
Mike put his hand up to the driver who seemed to be one of the few still able to hold onto their humanity once they got behind the wheel.
The news had moved onto another report about some mundane local issue concerning signposts while the traffic continued to crawl in a similar mundane way until grinding to a halt in a Mexican wave of brake lights. After a minute had passed Mike could feel the elastic band in his spine pulling a little more.
“Now what?”
Although the traffic on this stretch of road was normally slow, it didn’t usually stop for this long. About fifteen cars ahead Mike observed the traffic moving out onto the right side of the road forming a bulge in the snake of morning traffic. Gradually he approached the cause of the hold up.
“Oh, what a surprise!” he mumbled with a guilty sense of vindication. There in front of him was mobile phone man’s car with its hazard lights flashing like a beacon of stupidity
, joined to the crumpled rear bumper of the car in front.
While slowly pulling out and assuming his turn in the belly of the snake, Mike couldn’t help himself looking at mobile phone man taking an ear bashing from the other driver. He tried to quell the feeling that justice had been done, because it hadn’t really. It had only ruined someone else’s day along with their car too. He thought to himself at least it was only a couple of cars that were damaged and also, at least if only for a while, a dodgy driver was off of the road.
The earlier prang was soon forgotten and as Mike concentrated on his journey, he settled back into a more relaxed state knowing the parade of shops he was currently passing on his left meant there were only a few minutes of the journey left. He noticed the woman at the baker’s where he sometimes bought his lunch was outside fighting with the canopy as she tried to push out the water gathered in its folds from the previous night’s downpour. The rubbish bin sitting on its concrete platform outside the newsagents on the end of the parade displayed the usual scattering of empty beer tins and food wrappers around its base as though their consumers couldn’t quite make it to the bin.
He approached the final landmark before the office, the village green with its needle like concrete structure pointing toward the sky. This was the memorial bearing the names of those souls from the village who lost their lives during the last World War. A cherry blossom tree stood proudly behind it like a supportive old friend, and in these winter months looked like a picture from a Victorian sepia photo with its dark bare vascular looking branches reaching out into the cold ether around it. A very different picture than it’s colourful spring image.
As he drove past, an unusual sight caught Mike’s attention. At the foot of the old tree there was a large flock of birds, approximately thirty. The strange thing was, half of the birds were pure white doves and the other half, jet-black crows. They were standing in their two separate and distinct groups.
