your fingertips.
If I can get down to it, I think it will be passable—surely we’ve had enough snow to cover the worst of the jagged rocks, and it’s out of the path of the main avalanche.
But it’s not a run so much as an obstacle course—a twisting, turning slalom of boulders and tree trunks, hard enough to navigate in daylight, let alone with no light but the moon. It’s also very prone to mini avalanches—the snow builds up on the ridges above, and breaks off without warning, deluging the skiers below.
That’s not the worst part though. The worst part, the part that is making me hesitate, is that once you’re down there—there is no way out. The sides of the crevasse rise higher, and higher, and there is no way of getting a helicopter or a blood wagon down to someone trapped there. You just have to keep going, until the chute spits you out among the trees at the top of the village.
It is my best chance. And Liz very likely doesn’t know about it. There’s no way of finding it unless someone shows you the entrance.
It’s also my worst nightmare.
But I have no choice.
Holding my skis like a crutch, I begin to walk towards the head of the pass.
LIZ
Snoop ID: ANON101
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 0
Snoopscribers: 1
Erin is missing.
I almost don’t notice. When I first walk into the living room, I am so sure she will be there that it doesn’t even occur to me to check. But then something catches at the corner of my vision—something that is not quite as I left it. When I turn around I see what has changed, the sofa is empty.
For a moment I just stand there, too puzzled to be worried. Has she woken up? Stumbled to the toilet?
“Erin?” I shout. I go back into the lobby. I stare around the dark space, shining my torch up the stairs, into the kitchen. “Erin, where are you?”
She cannot have gone far. She drank enough of those pills to knock her out for a week.
It is only when I go back into the living room that I see the dark spreading stain on the sofa. I touch it and sniff my fingers. It smells of tea. That is when I understand. She never drank the tea at all.
I don’t often swear, but I do when I see this, and I realize how she tricked me.
I run. First to the door in the lobby, but the snow outside is untouched. She hasn’t left the building by that route at any rate.
Then into the kitchen—but she is not there either.
I am halfway upstairs, ready to check the bedrooms, when I hear a noise. It is very faint, but it sounds like something falling onto the snow outside. It is coming from the back of the building, where the ski entrance is.
I make my way back down to the lobby and I open the door to the rear part of the building, where all the ski lockers are. It takes a moment for my eyes to get used to the darkness—and then I see something—or someone—moving at the far side of the room. It is Erin. She has climbed up on top of the ski lockers, and she is almost out of the window.
I hurl myself across the locker room, scramble up the bench she has placed below the window, ignoring the twinges in my knee, and grab hold of her helmet, which is just about to disappear through the window.
Then I realize why she is still there. The helmet won’t fit through the gap. She is stuck. She is dangling from the helmet, horrible wheezing noises coming from her throat, kicking and kicking to try and get enough purchase on the snow to twist free.
But before I have had time to figure out what to do, there is a sudden jerk, and the weight on the helmet falls away. The catch has broken—or she has unclipped herself, I am not sure which. For a second she lies, gasping and winded in the snow, and then she staggers to her feet, picks up her skis, and begins to hobble off towards the front of the chalet and the path that leads up to the funicular.
I have to follow her, but the helmet is stuck in the frame, blocking it. It is only after a few minutes of fruitless tugging that I realize, this is stupid. Erin has her skis and poles. She is clearly intending to ski