And thirdly, the number ‘326’.
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Keen to get out of the hotel and up closer to the Matterhorn as soon as possible, he showered quickly, packed his small rucksack, ate a large but rather hurried breakfast in the hotel restaurant, and headed out into the town.
He stopped in a shop on the way to buy some thermals, sunglasses, gloves and a thicker hat. He had already brought sun-tan lotion from Scotland, but on the advice of the shopkeeper, he bought a large tube of a more powerful factor 50 cream, which he immediately applied and rubbed into every exposed area of flesh.
Now fully equipped he followed the instructions from the travel guide, and headed to the other end of town, looking for the cable car to the Schwarzsee.
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Queuing up to climb aboard the next gondola as it swept towards them, for a moment he wondered if this was just one step too far. As the other skiers overtook him, he hesitated in the doorway. In the airplane he had flown high above the clouds, but there he had felt secure, enclosed securely within a spacious cabin with only small windows to look out of. Here he was surrounded by large windows on all sides and the only security offered to everyone in the cable car was a piece of metal which attached to the overhead cable, from which the small cabins dangled directly underneath.
Still not aboard, the doors to the first cable car closed, and the cabin bounced forward on its journey up the hill without him. It was immediately replaced by another, identical cabin which automatically rolled around the big wheel of the end-station on one giant continuous loop.
Each gondola was quite small, offering enough room for only about twelve people at a time. Already others were climbing aboard the new car.
The past few days had been a roller-coaster ride in a new life. He was a new person. A better person. He was pretty sure his fears had vanished, but if they hadn't, in a few minutes he would find out for certain.
"In for a penny-in for a pound," thought Peter. Without further hesitation, he stepped inside, and quickly made his way through the other skiers so that he could be at the front of the car, with the best view.
The doors closed. The cable car lurched forward, and moved off.
As it left the security of the station, the car began to sway rhythmically backwards and forwards like a massive pendulum. This lasted for a few minutes, but quickly settled down.
Peter looked out of the window.
The ground had dropped far below…he was flying!
Someone on a path beneath them looked up and waved. Like an excited child, Peter raised his hand and waved back.
No sooner had he done this, when the cable car started to rise rapidly up into the heavens above. Up and up and up.
Several times Peter was forced to swallow to clear his ears.
Looking behind him the town of Zermatt was dropping rapidly behind, and as they gained altitude, Peter saw that just as the guidebook had said, the town was surrounded by mountains. From the cable car they looked out onto a world of white. Everywhere beneath and all around was blanketed with beautiful white snow, and the higher the cable car rose, the more incredible the view became.
They could see for miles.
Someone beside him muttered the word 'Matterhorn' as part of a sentence in German, and Peter turned around.
He breathed out, exclaiming involuntarily.
"Wow…"
As if from nowhere, the Matterhorn had suddenly appeared in all its majesty on their right hand side. A solitary peak, massive, unique, beautiful…it stunned Peter with its raw, natural beauty. It seemed to exude power.
He had to get closer. He had to find a way to touch it, to stand on it, to climb it!
The thought made him laugh aloud. There was a certain irony in the attraction he felt towards it. Did the mountain know that only a few days ago he could not stand on top of an upturned bucket without feeling dizzy and falling off?
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Mesmerized by the mountain, Peter hardly noticed the other mountains that stood silently beside it. Yesterday he had read their names in the travel guide, but he had quickly forgotten all of them, with the exception of the 'Klein Matterhorn', a smaller neighbour, which sounded similar but was not comparable to the real deal.
The cable car abruptly started to slow down, and for an instant, Peter panicked, reaching hard for the rail beside the window that ran along the inside of the cable car. He turned quickly to look ahead of him, breaking his focus on the Matterhorn, and realising with surprise that they were already about to arrive at the Schwarzee station.
They had arrived at a small plateau, and as soon as they stepped out of the cable car, they entered a different world: blue sky, clear air, sunshine, skiers all around him who were busy adjusting their goggles and starting to ski away from the lift. The panoramic view on all sides that rolled around him on every side was breathtaking. Never, never, in his wildest dreams had he imagined that being at the top of the world like this could be so beautiful.
And then there was the Matterhorn.
It dominated the view on one side of him, more massive than ever, more majestic, more powerful. Reaching higher and higher, up and up and up. Blue, blue sky surrounded it, not a cloud to be seen.
The mountain seemed very close, but was actually still far away. From where he stood, he could see the route that would take intrepid walkers to the very base of the Matterhorn. Higher up, he could see where the path started to wind its way around the side of the mountain, before it disappeared from sight and zigzagged back and forward on its steep climb up to the world famous Hörnlihütte: a mountain hut, accessible to walkers and ramblers, which acted as the base camp for climbers who attempted the vertical face of the Matterhorn that rose directly above them.
In the summer, Peter had read that it would take about 2.5 hours for a fit and healthy person to reach the Hörnlihütte from the Schwarzsee. In these conditions, with snow everywhere, it was simply not possible to get anywhere close by foot.
"Shit!", he said to himself aloud, surprised by the magnitude of his own disappointment that he could not get closer.
Just then a moving object on the slope below him caught his attention, and he looked down and saw a red two-man snowmobile whoosh across the snow.
Looking around to find where it had come from, he quickly found its source...a small building a few hundred metres away that was obviously offering trips around the plateau, for a fee. Probably a very hefty fee indeed.
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Thirty minutes later, and 95 Swiss Francs lighter in his pocket, Peter stepped off his privately hired snow-mobile and stretched. For what was probably the equivalent of a taxi-ride from Edinburgh to Glasgow, the nice Swiss driver had taken him across the snow from the Schwarzsee to where he currently stood: standing on a plateau at the base of the Matterhorn mountain looking almost straight up.
He agreed with the driver that he should be ready to leave again in twenty minutes, and accepting the use of a pair of binoculars which the driver offered him, he started to trudge slowly through the snow, to a large rock he could see not too far away from him.
It only appeared to be about ten metres away, but getting there almost killed him. By the time he reached the rock he was out of breath, dizzy and sweating heavily.
For a moment Peter panicked: were his kidneys finally being rejected? Were they beginning to fail? Was he going to die here on the mountain?
"Langsam!" he heard the driver shout after him, who had obviously been watching him struggle. "Gehen Sie langsam...Go slowly my friend...Ze air is here very thin!"
"Thanks," Peter shouted back. "I'm OK!" Relief swept over him, being instantly replaced by a feeling of slight stupidity. He remembered reading in the travel guide last night the warnings about altitude sickness. Obviously, that was what he had got.
He reached the rock, and after brushing away a small mountain of snow, he sat down rather gratefully.
Catching his breath he starting lo
oking up at the mountain, which towered and towered above him. It just went up, and up, and up, and from where he sat, it seemed almost vertical.
It stunned him.
"How come this mountain fascinates me so much?" he asked himself. "Does it have this affect on everyone?"
He felt drawn to the mountain. It was almost as if it was calling to him.
"Climb me...climb me..." it said silently. Hypnotically.
He stared at it for nearly ten minutes before he remembered the binoculars in his hands. Raising the glasses he began to scan the cliff face that rose above him. Almost immediately he picked out the figures of four climbers, who like ants, were climbing up the face of the cliff. Looking above them, further up, he discovered another group of two, and then even higher there were three others: tiny, tiny, people in red and blue hats.
Peter felt a longing. An excitement.
His binoculars began to zigzag back and forward across the face of the cliff, at first hunting for more climbers, but then scanning the cliff face itself, looking for the actual routes they took to make the ascent: guessing how a climber would make it from A to B, from B to C, and so on, all the way to the top of the Matterhorn.
As he raised his binoculars still higher, he came to a ledge, a point where a little shelf extended out from the cliff-face. Almost incredibly, he saw a man sitting on the ledge, a tiny tent behind him, almost definitely where the man already had or was still planning to spend the night.
He zoomed in to the ledge, ignoring the man, but studying the rock.
There was something about the ledge that fascinated him. He felt something within him stir, and for a second, he felt incredibly dizzy. Coughing, he breathed in deeply. The world steadied again, and he raised the binoculars once more. This time it only took him a second to find the ledge. The climber was now standing up, as if preparing to climb again. He saw the climber turn and look down the cliff below him.
As he did, a picture flashed through Peter's mind, a blinding vision that filled his head and swept through his body like a bolt of lightning.
For a split second, it was as if he was seeing through the eyes of the climber, as if it was him that was standing on the ledge, looking down.
In his mind's eye, he could see what the climber was seeing: the sheer drop that fell beneath him, and went on for hundreds of metres. Hundreds of metres of vertical nothingness. Down and down and down...
Then suddenly the world around him went dark and Peter began to fall.
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He awoke to the stench of smelling salts being wafted back-and-forward below his nostrils. The driver of the snow-mobile was leaning across him, smiling.
"Machen Sie keine Sorgen. Sie sind halt in Ohnmacht gefallen!...do not worry, my friend. You have just fainted...You are very high up in ze sky...You will be better soon, ja?"
Peter was lying on his back in the snow. He breathed deeply, and pushed himself up into a sitting position.
"Thanks," Peter whispered. "Sorry, about that..."
"When you are ready, I think it good, if we go back now," his taxi-driver suggested. "You will feel better when you are sitting in ze bar with ein beer further down near Zermatt where you are not so high in ze sky!"
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As he sat at the rear of the snow-mobile being whisked back to the cable car station, Peter looked over his shoulder at the mountain behind him.
He was still shaking. And he was not completely convinced that the experience that he had just had was entirely down to altitude sickness.
Something very strange had just happened to him. Something that he didn't understand and wondered if he would ever be able to explain.
For a second, it had been as if he himself had been standing on the ledge, as if it were him that had been looking down the cliff from halfway up the mountain.
It had been so vivid, so realistic.
Then he realised something even more odd. The vision he had just experienced in his mind's eye or seen through his own eyes as he had looked down from the ledge, had been of a panorama full of green pastures, green grass and grey and blue mountains. In his vision, there had been no snow.
It was as if he himself had been standing on the ledge, that same ledge, but at another time of the year. Sometime during the summer.
And then he remembered his dreams from the night before. He remembered again the vision of the girl's face, the number 326, and then also the experience and view that he had seen or imagined while he had dreamt that he was standing at the very top of the Matterhorn.
That too had been a vision of green pastures, countryside and blue and grey mountains. There had not been a single piece of snow in sight.
For a very odd moment in time, Peter had an uneasy feeling that the dream from last night, and the vision from just now were inexorably connected. They were two different views from the same ascent of the Matterhorn, viewed as if he had seen them with his very own eyes.
For the third time in two days, Peter shivered again.
..
Chapter Twenty Six
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Zermatt
Switzerland
'326'
27th February
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At the Gondola station Peter thanked his good Samaritan, gave him a tip, and then found a place beside the window in the restaurant.
He had bought himself a large glass of non-alcoholic Swiss Mountain Tea (essentially some strong local herbs dried to make 'tea', mixed with honey and hot water), and a coffee.
Looking out of the window at the other mountains around him, he cupped the glass of hot tea and sipped it slowly.
He was scared.
Deliberately, he avoided looking at the Matterhorn itself, for fear it would spark another unpredictable vision,...or worse.
Something peculiar had just happened. No, something peculiar was happening to him.
Physically, he felt absolutely fine now. His body felt strong, even more so as the tea began to warm his bones and bring colour to his cold fingers, cheeks and face. He frankly doubted that there was anything wrong with his kidneys. He knew what it felt like when they weren't working properly, and right now, everything continued to look and feel brilliant. Nevertheless, he promised himself that as soon as he got home he would make an appointment with Dr Jamieson, his nephrology consultant. Just to make sure...
He drank the Swiss tea, which helped steady his nerves wonderfully, and then downed the coffee, to wake him up.
Afterwards, he enjoyed a short thirty minute walk around the edges of the plateau, admiring some of the other scenery, before catching a gondola back down into Zermatt.
By the time he got back into the town centre, he felt tired and was looking forward to a lie down in his bed.
He was walking leisurely back down the main street in Zermatt, stopping occasionally to drop into a shop and see if there was anything worth buying, when he found himself once again at the junction of Berg Gasse.
Looking up at the street sign, it struck him how familiar the street sign seemed to be to him.
Glancing again up the small street, he noticed that there were three or four hotels, none of which he had noticed when he walked up the 'Gasse' yesterday.
Almost without realising it, he started to walk back along the Gasse, looking up and around, admiring the buildings.
Halfway up he found that he had come to a stop outside a hotel with the rather grand name of 'Hotel Matterhorn Superior'.
He climbed up the steps and entered the reception area.
Almost immediately another intense feeling of déjà vu overcame him. It felt like he was stepping through that doorway for the second or third time today, as if he had already been here several times in the past few hours.
He looked around himself at the reception area. He was sure he recognised it from somewhere else. Had he seen the hotel in a holiday brochure? Or on a TV programme?
; Instinctively he knew, just knew, that if he went forward and turned left there would be a lounge bar where the hotel guests could rest and enjoy a few drinks. He walked in, following his imagined footsteps and soon found himself in the room he had visualised. Exactly as he had seen in it his mind's eye a few seconds before.
He stepped into the room, walked over to a table and sat down.
Almost immediately a young woman in a traditional looking Swiss dress appeared, and asked him what he would like to drink.
"An orange juice, please," he replied.
Peter looked around him.
This made no sense. He had been here before. He was certain of it. But how was that possible?
The girl reappeared and put the glass down on the table, first placing a beer mat underneath it.
Peter picked up the beer mat and looked at the logo of the hotel: it was the name of the hotel, wrapped in a circle around that classic side-on image of the Matterhorn that had initially fascinated and drawn Peter to this town all the way from the travel agency in Edinburgh.
He knew this place. He knew it.
Someone walked into the room, a young woman, long brown hair. Tall, attractive.
Peter looked at her.
Instantly the picture of a woman's face flashed into his mind. The same face that he had dreamt of the night before, along with the number ‘326’ and the view from the top of the mountain.
Peter blinked. The vision in his mind cleared, and he quickly saw that the woman looked nothing like the woman he had just imagined.
"Fuck!" Peter swore. "What's happening to me?"
He took another drink of his juice, left a banknote on the table, and left the room.
Outside the bar, a broad staircase began to sweep upwards inside the hotel, spiralling round and round as it went higher and higher.
Peter started to climb.
At first taking the steps one at a time, then gathering speed and changing to two at a time.
When he got to the third floor he stopped, turned left and then hurried down the corridor.
A moment later he was standing outside of Room 326.
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BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 11
