Dead Straight Meanders

By now it was three thirty. At best there were ninety minutes of daylight left before darkness fell, after which any glare refracted off the ice would do no more than impart a dim cruel clarity to his helplessness. James had no money, no Canadian SIM. Losing her was not an option. He shook the snow from his shoulders and walked. Dirty slush bore its way through the unstuck toes of his boots and anaesthetized his feet and his boot-heels made roguish slides from under him. With nobody on the street – nobody stupid enough – the world’s edges felt closer, closing. Silence more like a willful suppression of sound. And then, when the sparse whistle of the wind seemed to embody all nature gagged and in pain mingled with that plough’s horn, it described to James the turmoil fast seeping into his thoughts and interpretations. He was panicked. Consequently the landscape around him turned from white to bleak, ethereal to menacing. Wonder gave way to fear and, out of breath but colder than ever, he let his mind transform the snowstorm into a harbinger of ill and of bad.

Then, reaching the top of the stairs James saw that the deserted plain on which the chateau stood was littered with corpses. Fully hundreds of figures stood, featureless and half-collapsed, their faces blown from their heads and scattered on the snow before them. A fortunate few had retained their eyes, others their mouths or pipes, and one of the completely faceless majority still wore a black bowler hat. Not one nose, however, had stayed on. Because the snowmen were arranged in precise columns, if James looked through their rows at an angle the carrots, stuck tip-down, appeared to be markers for a kind of emergency runway, a last resort for planes run aground in the tempest. Presently he noticed that in front of and behind each column were magnificent ice sculptures depicting Elk and Moose and Indian braves. And on its perch the chateau, with icicles hanging from every awning, flags of Quebec and Canada flying from its two highest spires, channeled the grandest European palaces. Tracking old footsteps in zigzags and circles, James moved as if he were dreaming. Surely this was what she had wanted to show him! But there was still no sign of her anywhere. There was nobody.