Whiteout

by Gabriel Dylan

  But when he’d turned round he had seen Charlie stumble out of the hotel into the snow. Under the arm of his parka he held a battered, stickered-up old snowboard that looked like it had been found gathering dust in somebody’s loft. His gloves and trousers resembled clothing that had come from a second-hand store and his snowboard boots were partly held together with strips of silver duct tape. If Charlie had heard the sniggers he didn’t show it.

  But the laughing had stopped when, just to the side of the lift, Charlie buckled in and rose to his feet. He had leaned left and right as if stretching, jumped the board round and then zoomed away across the slope in a blur. As he went, he threw the board this way and that at will, letting loose a dazzling array of jumps and flips as he rode.

  Quite where Charlie had learned how to snowboard like that was a mystery, just like Charlie himself. And it had certainly shut up the boys from the rugby team.

  As if they’d read his mind, a cry went out from those assembled at the other end of the room, and Nico spun round to see Ryan and his group sitting around a table, playing that strange game where you try to throw a plastic bottle in the air and make it land again. It was a game Nico had never understood, but then he supposed he wasn’t really sporty enough to ever be good at throwing balls, bottles or anything else for that matter.

  Watching them, Nico wondered if the boys were part of a hive mind, like the Borg from Star Trek. When news had gone around that there was going to be a sixth-form ski trip, ten of the thirty places had been snatched up by the rugby team. They could have gotten more than a little bit rowdy, bored as they were, but Ryan seemed to keep them all in check. Or maybe it was Ryan’s athletic female friend, Shiv, who had been accepted into the rugby inner circle in a way Nico never would, and who seemed to lend a little calm to the testosterone-fuelled gathering.

  Even the thuggish blond-haired one, Jordan, whose dad was rumoured to be affiliated to some of the scarier gangs in Bristol, was much less offensive out here on the trip than he usually was back at sixth form. Underneath his curly hair he had a cruel, mean face and heavy-lidded, emotionless eyes. Back at home he seemed to spend the majority of his time slouching in the common room, grime music blasting out of his mobile phone.

  Nico tried to avoid the common room, but on one of the few occasions when the IT suites were shut and he’d stumbled his way in there, Jordan had purposefully barged into him, sending him sprawling into a nearby table. The boy’s cold, shark-like glare and scabbed knuckles had prompted Nico to very quickly apologize and move away.

  Nico decided to look away before he was caught staring. Two tables of girls sat next to the rugby boys. While most of them leaned together, chatting or feverishly checking their phones, a few of them cast sad, longing looks at Ryan and the better-looking boys on the team. Nico knew some of the girls and had even spoken once or twice to a couple of them, but most of them ignored him or treated him as if he was some annoying little brother. One of them, Tara, was conspicuous by her absence, and Nico had heard a rumour that she’d been confined to her quarters for the day by Mrs Newman for some heinous crime, though he didn’t know what.

  “Two days of this, sitting here listening to that lot cheer and shout, and I’ll be dying to go home,” mumbled Chris.

  Nico nodded and Chris gestured out through the large bay window that ran along one side of the dining room.

  “Look at all this snow. It’s like Narnia out there. You think they’ll let us out tomorrow?”

  Nico shrugged. It sounded more and more as if the lifts would be shut, the resort closed and skiing pretty much off the table for the rest of the trip. He had spent his sixteen years coming to terms with the fact that he was rubbish at all sports, and he had discovered this week that skiing was no exception to that rule. All the same, he didn’t want to be imprisoned inside for the rest of the trip with the rugby boys for company, or lose out on the few days’ skiing he had left.

  The teachers, hunched over their beer and wine around a small table in a far corner of the room, looked to be equally dejected. Mr Down seemed half-drunk, Mr Potter exhausted and Mrs Newman just her plain old miserable self. Maybe, Nico thought, they just wanted to go home.

  A gasp went up as the wind shook the glass of the windowpanes and the lights above their heads rattled and flickered. Nico glanced at his phone once again.

  Nothing.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter Six

  It was one of the girls that found the blood.

  Leandra hadn’t been able to sleep, she told Charlie. First it had been the screeching wind that had stirred her. Later, in the dark hours past midnight, the creaks and groans of the old hotel had jerked her awake whenever she’d started to drift. Finally, as the first grey streaks of dawn had seeped in through the shutters of her dorm, she had given in and thrown back the covers.

  The other girls in her room had still been snoring and twitching, exhausted from their time on the slopes, but Leandra had staggered up, thrown on a hoodie and wandered downstairs. She’d wanted to look outside, she said, to see if the snowfall was as spectacular as Stefan predicted it was going to be, to see if the drifts were really up to the top of the door. Her first destination had been the front of the lobby and the battered glass doors that opened out into the snow.

  Her screams had woken Charlie in an instant. At first he thought he was at home, his gran moaning and crying out from the room next door. He had been down the flight of stairs to the lobby even before the last tendrils of dreams had fully gone and he’d realized where he was. Leandra had been standing there, sobbing, clinging on to the wall.

  He knew her a little from two of the classes he was failing and she’d chatted to him once or twice, although he couldn’t have said anything about her other than her name. But before he had been able to move she had her arms draped around him, her thick black hair pressed against the side of his face. All he was wearing was an old T-shirt and a pair of shorts, while Leandra didn’t seem to have much more on than a hoodie. Charlie had found it hard not to feel uncomfortable as she mumbled what had happened. He’d put one arm around her while trying to work out what had made her scream.

  Then he saw the blood.

  It was as if somebody had stamped on a giant raspberry just outside the front door, in the kneehigh snow, then dragged it away so that it left a long trail of juice and debris to signpost which way it had been taken. A few feet was all you could see before everything melted into the blizzard outside, snow hurrying this way and that like ash after a fire. But there was no mistaking that the trail was made of blood.

  Lots of it.

  Charlie used his one free hand to wipe at his bleary eyes and shuffled across towards the door, Leandra still pressed against him. He reached out his fingers to the metal handle, and when he pulled it open he was met with a huge gust of wind and a whirling flurry of snow that made Leandra cry out as loudly as before. He quickly pushed it to then jumped at the sound of another voice.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  Charlie hadn’t heard Ryan make his way from upstairs. The rugby captain glanced suspiciously at Charlie for a moment, then looked at the front door and froze. “What the hell is that?”

  Leandra still couldn’t talk. Charlie turned back to Ryan and shrugged. “I don’t know. Leandra came down here, saw it, and her scream woke me up. That’s all I know.”

  Ryan nodded slowly, scratched at the stubble on his chin, and took a step nearer to the door, his hand outstretched.

  Charlie shook his head. “I wouldn’t. That storm’s horrendous. And you can’t see more than a few metres anyway.”

  Several of Ryan’s friends stamped down the stairs and gathered alongside him. Charlie recognized the first one as Jordan, a tall, hard-faced student whose features looked as if they had been pummelled in a scrum one time too many. He wasn’t wearing a top, and his pale, athletic torso had the look of Renaissance statue, carved out of marble.

  Charlie and Jorda
n were already acquainted. When Charlie had first joined the school, the other boy had made a beeline for him – eyeballing him, throwing scraps of food in his direction and generally trying to come up with an excuse to make Charlie ask for a beating. Charlie had met his kind before, a lot of times, at a lot of different schools. And once Jordan had realized that Charlie wasn’t going to rise to it, he had quickly moved on to more responsive and easily tormented targets.

  Jordan’s sullen eyes fell on to Charlie and he marched straight over to him. He stood there in nothing but a pair of tracksuit bottoms and studied the scene like a slightly confused Doberman, then he bumped his chest against Charlie’s shoulder. Leandra stumbled and Charlie took an involuntary step backwards.

  Jordan’s nose hovered inches from Charlie’s, his breath stale and dry and unpleasant. His pale eyes flickered towards Leandra, lingering on her long legs. “What you been doing, Crim? Trying to get cosy with the girls?”

  Charlie shook his head wearily. “I reckon you’ve had too many bumps to the head. She’s so scared she can’t even speak.”

  It was as if someone had punched a syringe of adrenaline into the boy’s chest. Jordan’s eyes widened under his cherubic curly blond hair and he lunged forwards, his fingers grabbing at Charlie’s shirt.

  “Come on, then, you criminal! You think you can disrespect me? You think I’m scared of you cause you’re some cheap scrawny hood?”

  Ryan grabbed Jordan by the arm and hauled him away. “Pack it in, Jordan. It’s nothing to do with him. At least I don’t think it is. Look!”

  Ryan nodded at the doorway. Most of the assembled boys were ready to pounce on Charlie, but slowly their eyes gravitated to the trail outside the door.

  “It’s blood, isn’t it?” one of them mumbled, a red-haired student called Angus. He was normally one of the more lary of the group, but in the grey light of the lobby he looked like a scared little boy.

  A few of the girls from the top floor stumbled into the crowd that was developing. There was a chorus of whimpers and gasps, then a girl called Ellie stepped forwards and gently eased Leandra away from Charlie and into the arms of their group.

  For a while nobody spoke. The wind howled and whipped around the hotel’s eaves, and somebody’s stomach growled morosely. A thin, curly haired girl called Poppy stepped forwards. She had pretty, delicate features and pale skin, and Charlie tried not to notice that her nightgown was almost totally see-through. The hairs on her arm stood up as she put her fingertips on the cold glass. She stood there for a moment before asking the question they were all thinking.

  “Whose blood is it?”

  Nobody answered her. Poppy moved away from the doorway and Charlie watched as the small circles of condensation from her fingertips faded away. A girl that Charlie thought was called Tara started to cry, ashen tears running down her cheeks to land on the chest of her purple hoodie. Her bottom lip was wobbling, her sobs a few seconds away from hysterics. Ryan moved over to the girl and slipped his arm around her. He looked at the faces around him.

  “Where are the teachers?” asked Ryan, turning towards two of his friends.

  “Go and have a look, boys. Knock on their doors and tell them there’s a problem.”

  Jordan and another lad – a huge, chunky guy who Charlie thought was called Jacob – thundered away up the stairs.

  “Hey, hey! What’s all the noise?”

  Charlie glanced up to see Stefan staggering down the stairs. His thick blond hair was dishevelled, his eyes still half closed with what was probably a mixture of tiredness and hangover. He yawned, pushed through the mass of teenagers and stopped by the front door. Charlie watched as the carefree smile slipped from his face like a dropped barbell.

  “What is it?” asked a voice Charlie recognized. The words were hard and heavily accented, the speaker someone who was used to being listened to.

  Charlie’s heart sank. He tried to shrink into the shadows as the girl pushed her way through to the door, the same girl who had dug him out of the snow the day before. Her black hair hung down in thick strands and her pale face was alert and curious.

  A blanket enveloped her from under her chin to down by her feet, and Charlie found himself wondering if perhaps she and Stefan were more than just colleagues. She probably wasn’t any older than Charlie himself and Stefan must have been at least twenty, but from the whispers he’d heard on the ski lifts and in the dining room most of the girls in the school party had their eye on the handsome ski instructor.

  The girl looked at the blood through the glass and ran her tongue over her lips.

  “A fox, maybe, dragging its food away? A wolf perhaps? They say they are on the rise again in Germany, but I’ve never seen them here.”

  “Wolves? Out there?”

  The words came in a whimper from one of the huddles of students that were slowly growing as the last of the school party made their way into the lobby. A thunder of footsteps came from above their heads and Jordan and Jacob thumped back down the stairs.

  Jordan’s usual leer was gone as he looked back and forth from Ryan to Stefan before finally choosing to give his report to the instructor.

  “They’re gone. Their rooms are empty, me and Jacob went in. We probably shouldn’t have, but Jacob tried the door to Mr Down’s room and it just opened. All his stuff’s still there, but there’s no sign of him. Or Potter. Or Newman. We tried them all.”

  One of the girls, Chloe, started to cry, the noise low and mournful as it fought against the screech of the wind. Tara tapped away at her glowing phone, swearing at the lack of reception. Ryan looked uncertainly at Stefan as he started to gently guide the group towards the dining room.

  “Come on. Let’s get a drink, get some coffee going. I’m sure the teachers will be back in a minute. There must be an explanation for all this.”

  A few students stepped hesitantly over to where Charlie stood and inspected the red smear before retreating back into the lounge with the others.

  After a while, only Charlie and the black-haired Austrian girl were left. She came to stand by him next to the glass. Up close, he realized how striking she was. Her pale grey eyes studied him for a moment and she scratched at the shaved hair on the side of her head. Neither of them spoke. A howling gust of wind broke the silence, and the girl turned to the window and stared at the trail in the snow, her breath fogging around her face like mist.

  Chapter Seven

  It had gone eleven and the morning outside was still grey and dull, the air thick with snow, the wind so fierce that every now and again the whole hotel seemed to rattle and strain against its foundations.

  It felt apocalyptic.

  Stefan walked into the dining room just as Tara forced down a reluctant mouthful of dry cereal. As well as the teachers, the Polish girls who had cooked dinner the night before seemed to have gone missing, and the students had been forced to scavenge what they could from the storeroom at the back of the kitchen.

  Bran flakes were the only thing that vaguely appealed to Tara, and she’d poured as many as she could face into a chipped bowl and then sat down next to Kelsey and Chloe at one of the tables. There wasn’t any milk. Pretty much all of the students had stopped crying now, including those who had tried to act like they just had something in their eye, but whenever Tara pictured the blood by the front door or thought about home, she felt a sharp jolt of fear run through her like electricity.

  When she looked up, Stefan was hovering nervously at the bar. He had dressed properly now, in his red ski jacket and trousers that were emblazoned reassuringly with the word instructor. He coughed into his hand then looked at the crowd gathered in front of him.

  “OK, so the lifts aren’t working; I think they’ve been switched off further down the valley. But even if they were running, this storm is so bad it wouldn’t be safe. This wind is too much.”

  Maybe it was Tara’s imagination, but Stefan’s normally impeccable English seemed clumsier somehow, his pronunciation a little rougher.
>
  A thin pale arm went up just behind Tara.

  “Where’s everyone gone? Where are the people that work here? Where are the teachers?”

  Tara turned and saw that it had been Poppy that asked the question. She was one of those girls that pretended to be badly behaved, a bit of a rebel, but in reality was really obedient and did exactly as asked. Tara had heard her before in the common room, going on about how she’d given attitude to this teacher and that, how defiant she was. But actually she wasn’t at all. Normally she had a smug, mutinous confidence about her, but now she just looked terrified.

  Stefan ran a hand over his unruly mop of hair and shook his head.

  “Honestly? I don’t know. It makes no sense. A lot of the locals left because of the storm, I know that much. But there’s no reason for your teachers to not be here, or Martyna and Alicja. I have no idea where they are.”

  A geeky, dark-skinned kid, who Tara had never really bothered to speak to but thought was called Nico, asked a question from where he was slumped in the corner. “So whose blood was that? Outside the front door? Was it one of the teachers’?”

  Stefan flicked a quick glance towards the girl at the bar, the pale, black-haired one who took people out on tours around the valley and didn’t seem to have any other expression than a scowl. Tara had fallen out with her on the first day when she had asked her, politely, to carry her bags. The Austrian girl’s crass response had sunk the slim chance there might have been of any friendship developing between the two of them.

  Stefan shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It was probably just a bird, a rabbit. There’s lots of wildlife here. Something caught it, ate it.”

  “But, Sir, that was a lot of blood. Once, I saw someone get stabbed down on Park Street and he bled a lot, but not as much as that out there.”