Charlie nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Hanna shrugged and played with the ring in her nose. “It was a long time ago now. But like my parents, I don’t think I ever moved past it.”
“So why did you come back here?”
Hanna felt her guard come up, a line drawn in the sand that she wasn’t willing to cross. Matthias’s words from the day before the storm echoed in her mind, the fear shining in his eyes.
She couldn’t quite bring herself to meet Charlie’s eyes when she replied. “I’m still not sure. I came back when I was fifteen, worked across the valley, in kitchens, bars. Part of me wanted to see this place again. To try and get it straight up here.” She tapped the shaven side of her head with a savagely bitten fingernail.
“Then when I came to Kaldgellan I just felt closer to him. To Jon. I found myself talking to him when I was up in the mountains. A little later I got a job as a guide, mostly showing rich hikers around the passes and runs, making sure they didn’t kill themselves. I was only going to do it for a year. But I never left.”
She caught Charlie’s eyes and breathed out slowly. He didn’t believe her, she was sure of it, just in the same way she felt certain that he was the type of person that kept more than a few secrets of his own.
“Now I’m not sure I ever will. So. That’s my story. That’s why I’m here. Your turn.”
Charlie nodded resignedly, swallowed a mouthful of his drink and coughed. “What do you want to know?”
Hanna watched him like a hawk. “All of it.”
Charlie picked up both of their glasses, stumbled towards the bar, filled them again, and made his way back and slumped into his seat.
“I moved around a lot as a kid. My mum died when I was little, I never really knew her, and my dad found it hard to settle, I guess. I learned to snowboard when we moved to the Scottish highlands. My dad worked as a tree surgeon, and in the winters he’d take me out on to the snow. He tried to teach me to ski, but I couldn’t get it at all. Then one day he strapped me on a board and it just came naturally. After that, it was just the two of us, exploring, being in the mountains. I remember it as being pretty perfect. Then we moved to a little village up at the very tip of Scotland. My dad loved to surf and the waves there were really special. We started to make friends, settle a little, and through somebody he met out in the waves he got offered a job as a lifeguard, working the boats, the water patrol.”
He paused, his eyes far away, and Hanna could tell that Charlie didn’t want to go on, that it was an effort just to get the words out.
“One night there was a bad storm, so strong that the tide took out the houses at the front of our village, came straight over the seawall. The electricity went out all along the coast, the lines went down. It was bad. A trawler got into trouble out at sea just before dawn, and my dad got the call to go. He hugged me before he went out, just as I went off to school. I remember the briny smell that clung to him, the feel of his grizzled beard. I never saw him again.”
Charlie shrugged neutrally, but Hanna could recognize only too well how the memories still gnawed away at him.
“At his funeral a week later one of the other crew members told me that he died trying to rescue a guy who’d been swept overboard. Being selfless, like he always said. Dad went into the water to try to fish someone out. Neither of them made it. Ben, the guy from the lifeguard crew, told me my dad didn’t think twice, just went. I have a grandmother, down in Bristol. After the funeral, I moved the little stuff I had down in with her.”
Hanna’s found herself studying him anew, the mystery of their first encounter starting to fall into place. “So that day we met … is that why you didn’t care? When you were out there on the mountain … because of your dad?”
Charlie shrugged and shifted uneasily.
“What about your gran? I mean, wouldn’t she miss you? Aren’t you all she has left?”
Charlie shook his head, his face betraying the conflict within. His eyes looked torn, pained, and tears glistened in the dark when he finally spoke.
“I’ve never told anyone this. But so far keeping it in has just got me into more and more trouble. So screw it. My gran’s sick. Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t have long. So I don’t have a lot to go home for. Last time I saw her, just before I left, she didn’t even really know who I was. They were in the process of putting her into a home, and me… Who knows. I wasn’t sure whether to come out here or not, but my tutor, he got it and he knew that things weren’t so good for me at home. He put in a word for me, pulled some strings, so that they let me on the trip, despite all the shit I’ve done. I used my dad’s money to pay for it, the little bit he left for me. And when I got here, I realized I’d not really been living for a while. That’s where I was when we met, I guess. I didn’t care any more. And I really didn’t want to go home.”
Charlie’s eyes met hers and Hanna found herself battling against a wave of feelings.
Ones she couldn’t afford to accommodate.
She forced the emotion away from her face. “Well, now you might not have to. So what were they, these things you did, that Jordan and the others talk to you the way they do?”
Charlie closed his eyes, shook his head and heaved himself up from his chair. “Some other time.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Tara was staring at her phone screen when Poppy’s croaked mumblings made her look up. On the sofa across from her, Poppy sounded like she’d been crawling across some arid desert, starved of water. Cold beads of sweat shone on her forehead.
For a moment Poppy lingered at the edge of sleep, then she opened her eyes and glanced up blearily at Tara. It seemed to take her a while to come back into the room and Tara wondered if the strange hallucinations she’d complained of earlier that morning were still plaguing her. She sighed, switched off her phone and gazed in Poppy’s direction.
“So the voices … are they still there?”
A little at a time, the confusion slipped from Poppy’s face and she nodded slowly. “They come and go. But some of the things they say aren’t nice.”
Poppy tried on a stoic smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Tara felt a prickle of unease, and she found herself trying to keep a little distance from the other girl and the possibility of some weird infection from the bite.
“But it’s just a fever, right? That’s what Hanna reckoned. Once they find us, once someone comes, they’ll fix you up, bandage your leg and you’ll be fine, won’t you?”
Poppy’s lack of answer spoke volumes. She swallowed dryly and nodded at Tara’s phone. “Anything?”
“Nothing. I’ve not been able to get any signal since the day it started snowing. Since the day everyone vanished. I can’t even make an emergency call. And now I’m pretty sure my battery’s going to die next time I switch it on.”
She leaned her head back against the sofa and glanced over at Poppy’s ankle, where blood still seeped slowly through the material. “How’s your leg?”
Poppy reached her pale fingers down towards the wound. “It hurts. And I’m so, so tired. I can’t do any more than hobble, so unless those two find something that can carry me off the mountain, I won’t be going anywhere. But the pain’s bearable as long as I keep doped up on painkillers.”
Tara nodded absently, her attention caught by a movement out beyond the shutters. They had made a rough camp of sorts on the first floor of the decaying hostel and a growing pile of debris was starting to develop on the floorboards. Hanna had scavenged some more cans of food at first light, and the empties lay derelict on the floor, among a few bottles of water and a pile of sleeping bags and duvets.
Nico had insisted that they let a little light into the lounge, just for their own sanity, and Tara stood and placed her hands on the shutters, opening them a fraction more. She blinked against the daylight, watching the whirling flakes outside, then she shook her head and came and sat back down next to Poppy.
“Nothing. Maybe those two ran away together. Maybe they realiz
ed that we’re not going to survive another night and they made a break for it.” She realized what she was saying. “Do you … do you think they did?”
Poppy shook her head slowly. “No. I don’t know Hanna very well, but no matter what Charlie did or didn’t do back at home, I don’t think he’d do that. Where are the others?”
As if in reply to her words, Ellie padded in through the doorway, glanced around, then looked across at Tara. “Nico’s gone for a sleep. He’s lucky, I’ve been trying, but there was no way. Jordan and Leandra went to get some more water. Nobody really wanted to go outside but we’re nearly out. I thought the storm had gone this morning, that help would come, but it’s started again, hasn’t it? It’s worse than ever now. How long can it last?”
Tara turned away and watched as Poppy wiped a fresh fusillade of sweat away from her brow.
“I don’t know. But those things didn’t find us last night, even though they were right outside. Somebody is going to come soon, surely. Ryan will have made it. And it’s been nearly three days since we spoke to anybody on the outside. Surely they’ll come soon.”
Ellie wrapped her arms around herself. “Not soon enough.”
Poppy glanced across at Tara. “You know, they might be on their way up here right now. Ryan and the others, they might have made it down to the valley, raised the alarm, got help. They could be here any minute.”
Tara chewed at her bottom lip and felt a fresh burst of hope slip over her like a blanket. “I saw a film a few months ago. It was about a mountain, Everest, a place a lot of dumb people wanted to climb. I watched it with Ryan, over at his mum’s place. We didn’t go out in public too much. We weren’t really supposed to be together. He’s from the wrong part of the city, you know, those flats, over in St Paul’s? My parents would never have let me anywhere near him so we had to keep it secret. But Ryan was always really nice to me. He made me feel better about things, my mum and dad, losing all our money. And he liked me for me.”
She stared away wistfully for a moment, then slipped back to what she had been saying. “The film he chose for us to watch, it had this scene where a storm came in and all the people climbing the mountain got caught in it. A lot of them froze, just died out in the cold. And that film, the storm, looked just like this. But some of them, they made it. It took them days. But they made it to safety. And Ryan, he’s going to make it.”
She glanced up at the window. The sky was slowly darkening, black clouds obscuring the mountains in the distance. “I hate that skinny black-haired girl, Hanna. And I’m sick of being told what to do by her, bossed around.”
Tara chewed at a rogue nail, then glanced across at Ellie. “You’re brave, you know. You haven’t seemed scared through all of this.”
Ellie played with one of the rings on her finger, twisting it round self-consciously. “Trust me, I have been. But where I grew up, it wasn’t always pretty. I’ve seen some heavy things. Nothing like this, but there’s rarely a day that goes by without a fight, a mugging, someone getting stabbed or beaten up.”
Tara kept her eyes fixed on the other girl. “We never really talked, did we? But I saw your fashion work, the stuff you did in textiles, at that show after school in November. It was stunning.”
Tara paused for a moment, and a slow blush swept across Ellie’s cheeks.
“You think so? It’s what I want to do, you know. Fashion. I mean, what I wanted to do. Before … this.”
Tara nodded slowly. “You’re really talented, you know. And too clever to let that Austrian skank tell you what to do. Next time she starts throwing her weight around, maybe we should make a stand, tell her what we really think.”
Tara reckoned Ellie looked flattered by the compliment from someone so many leagues above her socially, but there was still a fraction of uncertainty on her face. Tara sensed that her campaign was gaining momentum and pressed on.
“And maybe, if those things come out again tonight, tomorrow we should just tell Hanna where to stick it, and walk or ski as far away as we can get. Anything is better than being stuck here.”
Poppy sighed loudly, disrupting Tara’s takeover bid. “I don’t have a choice.”
Tara looked back at Poppy, then peered dubiously at the bandage, noticing the odd, sweet smell that seemed to linger around it. “So these voices … are they talking now?”
Poppy nodded slowly, her eyes far away. “They’re in my head. Like a radio, drifting in from miles away, fuzzy and garbled. Half of their words I can’t understand. And the ones I can… What they’re saying isn’t nice. And the things they’re telling me to do, I—”
Tara didn’t hear the rest of what Poppy was saying because she heard voices too, drifting up from the street below.
She quickly stood up and moved to the window, her heart thumping in her chest like a hammer. “There’s something moving out there. Two figures. I think it’s them. I think they’re back.”
Chapter Twenty-five
A weight on the edge of the bed woke Charlie up.
He had fallen asleep picturing Hanna, the haunted shine in the grey of her eyes, the way her face had lit up in the bar when he had finally seen her smile. The more time Charlie spent with her, the more he felt that there was something between them, something a little more than a desperate co-dependence.
After they had left the bar, Hanna and Charlie had weaved their way back through the storm to the hostel. Charlie hadn’t been able to stop yawning as they told the others about the damage to the lifts and the snowmobiles. It had been three days, he’d realized, since he’d had any real sleep, and he was starting to feel ill with exhaustion, shivery and sick. He had found an old dormitory on the first floor and fallen on to the bed nearest the door. Covering himself with a sleeping bag, he had been asleep in seconds.
He awoke to find the room darker, the walls greyer. Charlie guessed it was some time after lunch. He wiped at his eyes and looked towards the end of the bed.
Leandra was sitting there. Her long black hair hung loose and a blanket covered her from her shoulders down to her feet. A shy smile flickered on her lips, but tears brimmed in her eyes.
“Sorry for waking you. I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t. I was just sick of sitting down there, looking out at the storm, waiting for it to go dark again. Sick of being scared.”
Charlie sat up, yawned, rubbed at an itch on his scalp. “That’s OK. I was only dozing. You don’t have to be sorry.”
Leandra shook her head. She seemed to be shaking a little, though Charlie wasn’t sure it was from the cold. She shuffled a millimetre closer to Charlie, and it was as if her nervous energy thrummed along the bed in his direction.
“I wanted to say sorry for lying to you the other night. It wasn’t Fatima that liked you. It was me. I didn’t want … didn’t want to get to tonight without telling you. And I wanted to feel something other than scared.”
Charlie felt his mouth go dry. Leandra’s hand fell on his and his heartbeat started to hammer in his chest.
“I’ve always liked you. From the first day you came into my class. I’ve thought about you a lot, wondered what it would be like to…” Leandra trailed off and a sad smile flickered on her lips. “I wasn’t ever going to tell you. But it doesn’t matter any more, does it?”
Charlie started to speak just as Leandra leaned forwards and placed her mouth on his. Her lips felt soft and warm, and she moved her hand and placed it at the back of his neck, holding him locked against her. Charlie’s heart felt like it might rip its way out of his ribcage and he pulled away from her.
Leandra’s eyes swam with confusion. Her mouth formed a single word. “Please.”
She brushed her lips against his again before he could reply. Her movements were hungrier now, more urgent. Charlie found himself kissing her back, felt her tongue run over his teeth. Her hands were in his hair, their bodies jammed together and he could feel her breath coming in fast, heavy gasps. He put his fingers up to her face, feeling her tears on his fingertips.
/> She pulled away from him, her chest rising and falling quickly. Her dark eyes bored into his. “I want you. Can we…”
She didn’t finish, but instead she kissed him again, her hands on his chest, then his stomach, then lower, until he felt her starting to undo the zip on his jeans. Charlie felt like he was being swept along on a wave, one he couldn’t stop.
A forceful knocking made them pull abruptly away from each other. Charlie looked up and saw Hanna’s face peering at him through the gap in the door. He felt strangely guilty and his face flushed red.
Hanna lingered by the door, staring at the two of them. It was a few seconds before she spoke. “Am I disturbing something?”
Leandra glanced at Charlie, rose up from the bed, and pushed past Hanna and out into the corridor.
Hanna took a step into the room. “I’m sorry if I did. But there’s something I need you to see. It’s important. Get your coat on and come with me.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Where are we going?”
Charlie could barely make out his own words above the storm. He’d trailed Hanna to a handyman’s store where they’d picked up some supplies she thought they might need, including a crowbar that she’d handed ominously to Charlie. Now she was marching him towards a small group of chalets that sat at the edge of Kaldgellan, just before the mountain fell into the valley far below.
He doubted that Hanna would hear him at all, but she turned back and lowered the scarf that covered her mouth. The battered hockey stick was in her other hand. The sight of its bloody tip made Charlie want to turn and run back to the hostel.
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