Stefan sighed and looked in the direction of a squat, confused-looking student nestled among the rugby boys. “You don’t have to call me Sir, Jacob. I’m just a ski instructor. You’re right, though, there was a lot of blood. But it could have been a deer, one that got lost then brought down by something. Maybe somebody went outside, fell, perhaps…”
It was as if Stefan realized the unlikelihood of what he was saying, and he abruptly fell silent.
Tara’s words came out before she could stop them. “I want to go home. Can’t we just go home?”
Stefan glanced in her direction and smiled reassuringly. “Not right now. The lifts are shut. It’s too windy for us to run them – when it’s as stormy as this the whole network could come down. That’s the only way in or out of here, apart from skiing. And the visibility out there is so bad that you’d get lost before you went ten feet. We just have to wait.”
Tara felt tears sting at her eyes. She wanted more than anything to be back at home, at her mum’s apartment in Clifton, expensive duvet wrapped around her, hot chocolate steaming away next to her. She wiped at her eyes again with her knuckle. “How long, then? How long till we can go home?”
Stefan shrugged. “Two days. Three at the most. Some of the weather reports reckoned that this was going to be the biggest storm in years, and it built so quickly, but it’s not the first time they’ve said that. I went out a while ago and I found it hard to get beyond the porch. Once you get away from the hotel there must be a metre of fresh snow out there in places, and it’s building. But it can’t snow forever. Whatever happens, it’s not going to stop you going home at the end of the week.”
Shiv’s voice competed to be heard over a particularly strong gust of wind. “Can’t we just ski down? Get some goggles, wrap up warm, take our time and get down to the valley?”
Stefan shook his head slowly. “With the amount of snow we’ve had, potential avalanches are going to be everywhere. Normally the ski patrols would get out on the slopes with dynamite to trigger them and make it less dangerous, but nobody’s done that. The runs will be brimming with snow. And if you didn’t get caught in an avalanche, in a storm like this you’d get lost, even if you had GPS and there was a signal. You could easily lose your way, fall, freeze…”
He raked his eyes over the crowd in front of him. “We’re safe here. Warm. We’ve got food, and each other. We just need to sit tight. We’re not in any danger here, as long as we stay inside. A few of you could build a fire, get the hearth going. A day or two and someone will come, or the lifts will be running, for sure. Who knows, your teachers might be back here any minute with some crazy excuse as to where they’ve all been.”
Stefan tried on a zany smile but everybody just stared at him despairingly.
He shook his head slowly. “Look, I’m going to go outside again, into the storm, see if I can find anybody, or spot any lights in the buildings. There’s bound to be someone out there. The storm must be keeping them inside.”
He nodded towards the black-haired girl at the bar. “Hanna’s a guide. She’s going to come with me. We’ll see what we can find.”
Tara had a sudden vision of the two of them heading out of the village, hand in hand, leaving the rest of them as prey for whatever had caused the bloodshed at the front door. At the back of the room a pretty, raven-haired girl called Leandra evidently had the same mental image.
‘Don’t … don’t leave us. Please.”
Stefan shook his head in her direction. “We won’t, I promise. We’ll take a look around, see what we can find. We won’t be long.”
The two of them headed out towards the lobby. A few of the other students followed them out of the dining room and there was the sound of several pairs of footsteps climbing the stairs. A moment later there was a howl of wind, the crash of a door flying to and then Stefan and his surly girlfriend were gone.
Across from Tara, Ryan rose slowly to his feet, crossed the room and sat down next to her. He had a white T-shirt on, huge biceps bulging on his bare arms. He stared at Tara for a moment then awkwardly placed his hand on hers.
“Thank you. For not telling Mrs Newman and the others about Monday night. They’d have taken me off the team for sure. Worse maybe.”
Tara shrugged. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you. You’re the only good thing that’s come out of that shitty school.”
She nestled into him, comforted by the solid feel of his chest. “But anyway, nobody would have believed it, even if I’d have told them. Me … and somebody from the Benedict estate? Those flats? I don’t think so. I mean, I know you don’t fit in there, but…”
Ryan nodded and gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
“You’re right, I guess. I won’t always live there. I know you see past all that. But I’m still grateful you didn’t tell them. You OK?”
Tara shook her head slowly.
“Not really. I wish Newman had sent me home yesterday. And I wish more than anything that I’d gone to my mother’s chalet in Verbier rather than here.”
Chapter Eight
Hanna paused at the edge of the mountain and watched the last of the day slowly slip away. The temperature must have been minus fifteen and dropping. Even with her thick ski jacket, gloves, hat and scarf, Hanna’s teeth still chattered inside her skull and she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. The relentless snow and wind burned at the exposed skin round her nose and cheeks, and she felt herself sway forwards and back like a zombie.
But as cold as she was, she didn’t want to make her way back to the hotel.
Not yet.
She wiped the ice away from her goggles and stared down over the edge of the ravine, into the chasm of whirling snow. Somewhere down there, through the cloud and fog and ice, hundreds of feet from where she stood, was the foot of the valley and the nearest glimmer of civilisation.
But Hanna wouldn’t find the answers she longed for down there.
Kaldgellan had never been the busiest of resorts, tucked away as it was from the rest of the world, but that had always been part of its attraction. In winter, the only way up to the mountain range was on the gondola, and there wasn’t much in the way of après ski unless you liked hanging out in a gloomy bar with the local drunks and a selection of dusty, fading mounted heads. There was usually little more than a handful of visitors at a time, a school party or two and a few walkers. No normal teenager would have wanted to spend their time up here, cut off from the rest of the world. But Hanna had given up any pretence of normality a long time ago.
She felt a sudden urge to turn and run, to dash back to the hotel, away from the unseen eyes that she felt sure were watching her. But she fought it, wrestled against it, trying to ignore the sense that the life had been sucked out of the village overnight, and all the residents along with it.
Stefan and Hanna had spent their day going from hotel to shop to lift to residence, and they had found nobody. They had knocked on doors, peered through windows, hammered on grilles and shutters, and tried every house they could get to. But if there was anyone home, they didn’t want to be found.
They had looked into car windows, checked the lift stations, even squinted up into the cable cars that swung to and fro in the screeching wind. But every time it had been the same.
Nothing.
When she had been little, Hanna had heard the story of the Mary Celeste and she had always been fascinated by the tale. Now she felt like she had wandered right into the middle of the fable and stepped aboard the famous ghost ship.
She had sent Stefan back to reassure the students at the hotel, but the truth was there was nothing to tell them. The village was deserted and Hanna had no idea why. But she had the surest, keenest sense that it wouldn’t be long until she found out.
She thought back to Matthias’s garbled warning of the day before, a nonsensical stream of frightened words, something about how the mountains weren’t what they seemed.
Somehow, she’d known he was speaking the truth.
<
br /> Matthias had told her to leave. And yet here she was.
And perhaps it was her imagination, but every time the wind fell, every time the howl across the drifts lessened, the faintest of sounds seemed to come to her ears: chatter, voices, scuttling, the quick fall of feet.
Something was out there, waiting. Something that had brought Hanna back here, after all she’d been through. Something terrible.
Hanna stole one last glance at the valley far below, then turned back towards the hotel, wondering if tonight she might finally learn the answers to the questions that had haunted her for as far back as she could remember.
Chapter Nine
They were sitting in the hotel lounge, the last of the light long gone from the sky, when a dull, insistent pounding on the door stopped Stefan mid-sentence. Several of the girls screamed. One of the rugby boys swore, the word loaded with fright.
And then it came again.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Stefan looked like he was on the edge of exhaustion. He had stood by the fire, dripping on the carpet, hollowly reassuring them that everything would be all right. Tomorrow, he said, somebody would be on their way. Tomorrow the internet would be back and they’d all laugh about what had happened.
Charlie sat at the back of the dimly lit room, measuring the disbelief on the faces of the students around him. He was pretty sure that Stefan himself didn’t believe the words he was saying.
Then the noise had cut him dead.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It sounded to Charlie like a bear’s paw knocking on the glass; a mindless, heavy pounding.
“Oh no, please… Is it … is it the teachers?” A girl called Amy whispered the words from among the pinched, scared faces gathered in the dowdy Alpine bar. She rose out of her chair, looked towards the hallway then quickly sank back down.
There was a scrape as Ryan pushed his chair back, but Stefan held up his hand decisively. “No. I’ll go.”
Stefan started to walk hesitantly to the lobby, dark rings under his eyes. When Charlie thought about it later, when he considered what had happened to the students who had been sitting just next to him against the glass of the dining-room windows, he couldn’t have said why he got up and went after Stefan. But when he looked back later that night, he realized that it had been the most important decision of his life.
By the time he got to the entrance that led to the lobby, Stefan’s fingertips were on the door that led out into the storm. The guide, Hanna, was standing next to Charlie, an uncertain light in her grey eyes. Charlie jerked as Ryan’s large hand came to rest on his shoulder. The rugby captain pushed him gently to one side so that he could see what was happening.
Stefan looked back for a moment at them, his face confused.
“There’s nobody there. Nothing.”
Charlie studied the television static of the world outside, his mouth dry. Nothing moved beyond the door but a constant, steady fall of snow. Stefan turned back to face the blizzard.
And then the whole door blew inwards in an explosion of snow, glass, and ice. Stefan screamed as the debris engulfed him and everything seemed to slow down.
Charlie saw something dart into the lobby – a tall, thin figure, fast and dark. It moved so quickly that he barely registered it. One second Stefan was there amidst a feverish cloud of debris, the next the shape wrapped itself around him. Charlie just had time to make out a set of dirty, taloned fingers folding themselves into the thick mop of the instructor’s hair.
Then both Stefan and the intruder vanished back out into the storm. Nobody had time to even move.
At Charlie’s shoulder, Ryan was shouting the instructor’s name frantically. Hanna was frozen stock still, her eyes wide with disbelief.
And then there were more screams.
This time they came from inside the room at their backs, coupled with the sound of more shattering glass. Charlie turned to look back into the dining room, two frenzied girls pushing past him. He stared past them and tried to process what he saw.
All around the room the curtains were billowing in amidst a blizzard of glistening shards of ice and snow and quick figures were darting in, embracing the students nearest to the windows and stealing them back out into the storm. Other members of the party, those lucky enough to be sitting away from the windows, streamed past Charlie in the direction of the lobby, faces pale with terror.
Charlie watched as a screaming, red-haired girl clung to the arm of a chair by her fingernails before being torn away and dragged out into the darkness. He couldn’t make out what it was that took her.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
He was about to turn and run himself when he noticed that over in the corner of the room, by the forgotten television screen, a dishevelled, grey figure had pinned down another of the students who hadn’t moved quickly enough.
Charlie knew who the pounding fists and kicking legs belonged to.
Her name was Kelsey and she was a tall, olive-skinned girl that caught the same bus as Charlie and scowled across at him every morning. She still wore the same pair of checked Vans that Charlie had seen propped up on the seat in front of her on the long journeys to school.
One taloned hand clutched the girl’s dressing gown, another was tangled in her short dark hair. Charlie couldn’t see the face of the intruder because it was buried in the folds of the dressing gown by Kelsey’s neck, but its head moved up and down frantically, ravenously. As if it was savaging the girl, biting at her. Ragged swathes of dirty, faded material seemed to cover her attacker, loose edges catching in the wind.
Charlie watched as Kelsey’s frenzied movements grew less and less urgent, the fight seeping out of her. A long, thick stream of blood started to run down the patterned material of her dressing gown to pool on the grubby carpet at her feet.
A hand grabbed Charlie’s arm and he heard himself cry out. Hanna pushed past him, towards the bar, her hand scrabbling for something that hung amidst the beer glasses above the till. She grabbed the front of his hoodie and shouted into his face, her nose inches from his.
“Move! Go!”
She ran out of the room and turned left to scramble up the stairs. Charlie stared for a heartbeat more, then tore himself away from the horror in the dining room and followed Hanna. His feet worked automatically, the stairs moving under him like a conveyor belt, his mind frozen and numb.
As he neared the first-floor landing, he chanced a glance backwards. Students stumbled this way and that, fleeing from the dining room, trying to put as much space between themselves and what was happening in there as they could. Charlie watched as something slipped in through the glass in the shattered lobby door and lashed out at one of the students, Amy, catching her by the arm and dragging her screaming. Charlie caught Amy’s eyes for a second, saw the pleading and terror there.
Then he turned and ran.
He didn’t have time to register how many students were on the landing with Hanna. Ten maybe, a dozen.
One of them, Tara, was shouting and crying. Jordan looked like he was about to throw up, chanting feverish words to anyone who would listen.
“What the hell are they? What’s happening? What are they? What’s happening?”
Without a word, Hanna pushed past Charlie and started to run along the corridor. She didn’t look like she wanted to be followed, but out of instinct more than anything else he turned and ran after her, aware that some of the others were doing the same behind him. There was more screaming from the bottom floor, more sounds of forced entry into the rooms below.
Charlie ran up one flight of stairs after Hanna, then another. His heart was pounding in his chest, his mind a blank. By the time he caught up with her, Hanna was standing at the end of a corridor on the top floor, one hand clenched around a hatch above her head. She waited until several more students had arrived, then she spoke quickly and quietly.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on but I’m not staying in here. I’m going out on to the roo
f. It will be freezing. But I’m not staying in this hotel. If you come with me, you need to be silent and you need to stay down. If you can’t do that I’ll throw you off the roof myself. Understand?”
Nobody spoke. They were all too out of breath or too scared to speak so much as a word.
Taking the silence as agreement, Hanna reached up, pulled the hatch down and released the stairs that led up on to the roof. She took four quick steps and was gone. Charlie watched as Ryan helped Tara up ahead of him then clambered up himself. Another figure climbed up. Then another. Charlie knew some of them. Poppy. Chloe. Ellie. Jordan. Shiv. There were a couple more, but he didn’t know their names.
He was last to climb up the metal steps. By the time his turn came he was shaking, his eyes constantly flicking back the way they had come, expecting to see a dark shape slip into the corridor and then launch itself at him. He pulled himself up the steps and found Hanna waiting for him. She shoved him to one side without a word and, as quietly as she could, pulled the cord on the hatch and retracted the stairs.
Charlie glanced around.
They were on a small, flat rooftop, the barest sliver of a moon visible through a barrage of snow that was coming at them almost horizontally. A small huddle of students gathered in the middle of the space, as far away from the knee-high walls on all sides as it was possible to get.
Some of them were wearing pyjamas. One wore a dressing gown, while Ryan and another of the rugby team were just dressed in T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms.
And Hanna had been right, it was beyond freezing. Charlie was only wearing his hoodie and jeans, and he felt his teeth start to chatter.
He watched as Hanna pushed past him on her haunches and made her way to the edge of the roof. She paused there, lifting herself up so that she could see over the edge of the low wall. Charlie pulled up his hood and paced after her, suddenly aware from the numbing cold in his toes that all he had on his feet were socks.
He put his hands on the low wall. Hanna glanced across at him, but didn’t say a word. Charlie stared up at the sky, the thick swathes of snow driving across on the wind, then he looked downwards at the drifts that had settled three floors below.
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