Christmas Under the Stars Read online

  She swallowed. She didn’t like the idea of a child being out in these conditions any more than him but did that mean she had to offer up the man she loved, like a sacrifice to the gods?

  ‘Look, I’ll be fine. I’ll take care, I promise. I’m not as crazy as you seem to think I am. Even I can see it’s a bit breezy out there.’

  She blinked at him, furious for doing the right thing, furious with herself. The snowmobile – that damned machine – if she had just let him repair it the other day, he could have travelled on that. The climb to Wilson’s Gully was steep but on the snowmobile, he would have saved precious time. Getting to these hikers sooner. Coming back to her sooner.

  ‘How long will it take?’ They both knew perfectly well how long it took to hike to Wilson’s Gully. As the crow flew, it was 1.5 km from here but the gradient was merciless and even in the summer when they picnicked there with Badger, it was a forty-minute exercise. But in these conditions, with this visibility? They both knew what she was really asking was, What time should I start to worry?

  ‘Give me five hours.’

  ‘Five? But you said you could be there within the hour.’

  ‘It’ll be slow going. I’ll need a good margin of time for rests and orientation both ways, and I don’t want you worrying unnecessarily. If I’m not back by’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘eleven-thirty, or you haven’t heard from me, then you can raise the alarm in town.’

  He cupped her face in his warm hands and kissed her sweetly on the lips, her hands holding onto his elbows, trying to keep him there with her, in this moment.

  But he pulled away, resolute. She couldn’t entice him this time. There was a man and his child running out of time on the mountain and no one was coming to look for them. No one but Mitch.

  ‘I love you,’ he murmured.

  ‘I love you,’ she replied fiercely, kissing him again.

  Gently, he released her grip on his shoulders, reaching down to pat Badger, who was sitting patiently and looking up at him beseechingly.

  ‘Ready, fella?’ he asked, ruffling the dog’s head.

  Mitch opened the door just as a gust rushed at them, blowing Meg’s hair clean off her neck and lifting the corners of the rug. Snow that had been blown onto the porch spilled in, great froths skimmed off the surface like the steamed milk on a latte, skittering a haphazard path into the cabin.

  Meg gasped from the shock of it. Minus three temperatures with a wind-chill factor of minus twenty was not something you could ever adapt to, not even if you had lived in it your whole life.

  Mitch bounded down the porch steps and unlocked the walking hinges in his boots, switching his bindings into tour mode before clipping into the skis. Meg closed her eyes at the sound of it, knowing he was unstoppable now. One small push and he’d be gliding away from her, faster than she could catch, heavier than she could slow. Badger was turning circles in the snow excitedly, his tail aloft, nose to the ground, trying to track a scent the way he always did – except it wasn’t squirrels they’d be looking for tonight.

  The carabiners jangled against each other on his harness and she tried not to whimper as he switched on the head-torch and the full brute force of the storm’s strength was laid bare in that single strobe of light – trees were almost bent double beneath the wind’s power, the air thick and dense like sifted flour as falling snow mixed with whipped-up snow so that flakes seemed to be defying gravity, whirling up, down and sideways.

  Mitch secured the pole straps round his wrists and looked back at her, careful not to blind her with the light of his torch. ‘Five hours,’ he said.

  And then, stabbing his poles into the snow, he pushed off, gliding away into the black.

  Badger raced ahead, his joyous bark echoing like a gunshot in the crystalline night, fading too soon. She stared into the silence, straining to hear anything that would tell her she wasn’t alone.

  But the night had claimed them.

  They were gone.

  10 p.m.

  The world had become a negative of itself – the sky black, the land white, everything the wrong way round. Meg stood with her face pressed to the glass, her hands cupped round her face trying to spot the swing of a light beam somewhere in the trees or spiking into the night sky, but nothing interrupted the storm’s rampage. Birds kept to the safety of the trees, bears – tricked out of hibernation by the rogue thaw a few weeks earlier – stayed in their caves, the people in town safe behind bricks and mortar. Only four living beings were pitching themselves against the elements tonight, and the storm – as though sensing their defiance – grew in intensity.

  Meg’s concern deepened as she watched. The storm felt apocalyptic, end-of-the-world epic. Occasionally in the far-reaching dark, she heard the sharp crack of branches cleaved by the overwhelming weight of the drifts, the muffled rumble of snow shifting like tectonic plates on the mountainsides, and then worst of all, the return to silence afterwards, when her aloneness was amplified.

  She checked the time: 10 p.m.

  Ninety minutes left until she officially raised the alarm and told them Mitch was missing, that her fiancé had defied orders and logic and sense, that he had walked into a storm to save two strangers who might very well already be dead.

  She paced the living room, wondered whether Lucy was still awake. The early starts at the hotel meant she was often in bed by now, but if she could just hear her friend’s no-bull voice down the end of the line . . . She was good in a crisis, was Lucy.

  Meg walked across the room and picked up the phone, dialling her friend’s number automatically and then hesitating.

  She frowned suddenly. Something was wrong . . .

  There was another silence where there should be sound. She pressed the phone harder to her ear as though that would make a difference—

  No dialling tone.

  No!

  With a gasp, she pressed down repeatedly on the connect button, her heart rate automatically shooting up. With no mobile or Wi-Fi connection up here, the landline was her only contact with the outside world. It couldn’t be dead. It just couldn’t. Mitch and Tuck had been talking on it just a few hours ago.

  But it was. No familiar burr, no static or whine, even – just the silence as complete as that filling up this cabin in the trees.

  Her hands flew to her mouth as she straightened up, standing in the centre of the room and taking in the full implications of what it meant. It wasn’t that Mitch would be trying to get through to her – mobile reception was almost non-existent up on the mountain. But if he didn’t walk through that door ninety minutes from now, towing a very cold father and son and demanding a foot rub . . . if he didn’t walk through that door ninety minutes from now, she had no way of raising the alarm.

  If he didn’t walk through that door ninety minutes from now, her world would end.

  Midnight

  The storm had worsened, if that was even possible. Meg had pulled on her boots, coat and gloves and headed out as far as the brook at the edge of their land, screaming his name into a wind that threw her own echoes back over her like a bucket of water. She had tried scrambling up the escarpment behind the cabin but the ragged handholds she could grab with childlike vigour in the summer months were now rounded and swollen with ice and snow, leaving no grip, no way up. She couldn’t go further up the mountain and she couldn’t go down it to town, not without the snowmobile – it would be impossible to ski through the forest in these conditions, in the dark.

  Mitch was half an hour past his own deadline and all she could do was keep running outside, screaming his name into the maw of the storm, but the cold was dizzying, numbing her head, shredding her voice, and each time she was driven back into the glow of the cabin, feeling treacherous for seeking out its warmth when Mitch couldn’t. Each time, she cried from the searing pain as blood returned to her extremities, filling the capillaries with painful progress, vital minutes dragging past before she could walk across the room to the phone and coordinate her hands
sufficiently to try the line again.

  But every time, nothing.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  The minutes were passing, the night growing wilder, and she was doing nothing to help him, to save him.

  She stoked the fire with trembling jabs – fear as well as the cold making her quake – knowing she had to keep the place warm for when Mitch returned. Because he would. He would.

  She paced endlessly, her arms crossed and hands warming in her armpits as she tried to imagine what he was doing right now. She knew from her own failed forays that the winds were too strong to move through any more – he’d be blown off the mountain; that, or the mountain would move beneath his feet, deep slabs of snow finally losing their tentative grips as the wind bashed and whipped and scarred its surface. No, he wouldn’t be walking now. He’d have dug a snow hole, that was it. If he’d caught up with them – and even if he hadn’t – he’d be using his supplies and skills to keep warm and protected, knowing they wouldn’t be able to venture back until first light. They’d be safer staying where they were now.

  She dropped her head in her hands again. If only she’d let him repair the damned snowmobile . . . the blizzard he’d been working in back then had been but a shadow of this. It was their lifeline, the only thing connecting them to civilization and safe—

  Her head snapped up.

  She gasped and ran through to the spare bedroom, a single red power button winking back at her in the darkness.

  Meg stopped and stared. This was Mitch’s domain, his study; she only ever came in here to dust and she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had stayed over as a guest. As much as everyone cooed over their views and the solitude and the night skies, they preferred to return to town and sleep in the safety of the valley floor.

  She felt her breath come more quickly as she stared at the banks of black radio monitors stacked three, four high along the wall, the endless rows of buttons. There were so many. Why had she never listened when he’d tried to teach her how to work it, trying to share his interest with her? How many times had she run a cloth over these black machines, muttering about all those damned fiddly knobs and switches, things she didn’t understand and had never bothered to try? It was Mitch’s thing, that was what she’d always said, usually with a roll of her eyes as though it was a nerd’s train set or a geek’s Lego collection. But it wasn’t. It was contact with the outside world. A lifeline. He’d actually told her she might need it one day if there was an emergency. And she’d always laughed it off, saying she didn’t need anything so long as she had him. But now . . .

  She sank into the chair, her hands pulling her hair at the roots, eyes scrunched tightly shut as she berated her own diffidence, her arrogance of always believing she was right.

  She took a deep breath and opened her eyes again. No. She knew more than she thought she did. Because she had come in here on countless occasions, bringing him coffee and a doughnut, sitting on his lap and trying to distract him as he chatted with Pavel in Assam, or Guido in Santiago, or Derek in Maryland – all these far-flung people he’d never met but counted as friends as they chatted over the airwaves.

  She tried to slow her thoughts, to cast her mind back. What had she seen without noticing it? She brought the image of him, in here, to her mind. He always held this in his right hand for a start, she knew, picking up the mic and feeling the ‘speak’ button under her thumb. And . . . she looked at the monitors . . . and when she called him for dinner, he always switched off this button last, she remembered, reaching furthest left and pressing it. The red light turned green. But was that . . . the transmitter? Or the receiver?

  Her eyes skipped over the sleeping machines, her mind becoming sharper and clearer. She pressed what looked like a power button on another monitor and another green light blinked on; an LCD display flashed yellow, transmitting clusters of digits as unintelligible to her as lines of computer code.

  She squeezed the button under her thumb and spoke quickly into the mic. ‘Hello? Is anybody there?’

  She let go of the button, knowing this at least would clear the channel for someone – anyone – to talk back to her.

  Nothing. Nothing at all, in fact. There was none of the static noise, that electronic crackle that she always heard when Mitch operated it. Was it even on?

  She checked the monitors again, pressing whatever looked like a power button and a couple of dials sprang into life, their needles swinging metronomically.

  ‘Hello?’ she tried again. ‘Can anybody hear me?’

  Still nothing.

  She tried the biggest dial straight in front of her, turning it to the left and then the right. Immediately, that distinct static noise she recognized so well filled the room.

  ‘Hello?’ she cried again, her heart rate jumping up. ‘Can anybody hear me? Please? Hello?’

  She heard voices, or rather fragments of indistinct, tinny voices speaking in foreign languages. They sounded so far away, so out of reach. She slowed down her spinning of the dial, noticing the digital display that changed with her movements. 14.245.50 . . . 14.245.36 . . . 14.245.20 . . .

  She realized the static lessened when she landed on an even number.

  ‘I need help! Hello? . . . Please, can anybody hear me? . . . Mayday? . . .’ She sobbed, battling to hold back her panic and desperation, as she picked up the voices of people casually shooting the breeze whilst her fiancé was lost in a storm, fighting for his – and others’ – lives. ‘Please help me . . . Can anybody hear me . . . ?’

  Her fingers turned the dial slowly, her eyes on the digital display, trying to stop on round numbers, her thumb squeezing on and off the ‘talk’ button as she continued to call ‘Mayday’ into the void.

  ‘Delta Echo Six Bravo Foxtrot, calling CQ, calling CQ, over . . .’

  The voice filled the room, clear and distinct. Meg gasped, leaning in closer to the mic. ‘Hello!’ she cried. ‘Can you hear me?’

  She realized her thumb was off the button. She tried again. ‘Hello? Can you hear me? Please, it’s an emergency, I need help . . . Hello?’

  ‘Bravo Foxtrot, calling CQ, over . . .’ The man’s voice was blurrier again. Had she gone too far on the dial? Her hand was shaking but she watched the numbers carefully as she scrolled back, trying to stop on the band that was clearest, willing her fingers not to let her down. She needed micro movements, not the big jerky, flailing movements the adrenalin in her body was calling for.

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me? Please? It’s an emergency. I need help.’ She heard the tears in her voice. Why couldn’t anyone hear her?

  ‘This is November Alpha One Sierra Sierra, what is your call sign, over?’ The man’s voice burst into the room, as clear as if he were standing in the hallway.

  ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’ she yelled. ‘Oh, my God, please say you can hear me!’

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’ she cried.

  ‘This is November Alpha One Sierra Sierra, Commander Solberg, we can hear you loud and clear on the International Space Station. What is your call sign, over?’

  Meg stared at the mic. The what? Had he . . . had he said the International Space Station? . . . Was she talking to an astronaut?

  ‘I . . . I don’t know!’ she cried, forgetting to squeeze the button. She realized and did it again, squeezing the button so hard her thumb blanched. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it is! But I need help! Please!’

  Silence.

  ‘This is NA1SS, Commander Jonas Solberg speaking. What is your name and location, over?’

  ‘I . . .’ She willed herself to stay calm. ‘My name is Meg Saunders and I’m in Cascade Creek, in Banff, Alberta, in Canada. Can you hear me? Did you get that?’

  Silence. She closed her eyes and willed herself to wait for a moment.

  Nothing.

  She pressed the talk button again. If she just put the words out there, maybe someone would hear them, someone would help. ‘Hello? There’s a polar storm here. My fiancé
Mitch Sullivan is lost in the mountains. Wilson’s Gully. He went out to try to save some hikers but he hasn’t come back . . . Please, we need help. Can you help me?’

  ‘. . . One Sierra Sierra, copy that. Are you with him, Meg, over?’

  Oh, thank God, he’d heard! ‘No! No, I’m in our cabin. I’m on my own. I’m trapped and the phone line’s down. I can’t get down to town. He’s going to die.’

  Another pause, and then: ‘Copy that. I need your call sign, Meg, over.’

  ‘But I don’t know it. I don’t . . .’ she panted, her panic beginning to overwhelm her again. ‘I don’t know how to use this. It’s Mitch’s. I don’t know how . . .’ she sobbed.

  ‘NA1SS, copy that. Meg, I need you to take a breath. It’s a collection of letters with a single number in the middle. Just take a moment, can you see it written down anywhere? Over.’

  His voice was calm and it was enough to stem her desperation. She rubbed the tears from her eyes and desperately scanned the desk, speed-reading the papers on the top, but she couldn’t see anything that looked like what she was searching for.

  ‘No, I . . . I can’t see anything. There’s nothing here but old . . .’ But just then, she caught sight of a small sticker stuck to the side of the black monitor with the big dial on it. ‘Oh, wait!’ she gasped, leaning out of the chair to get a better look. ‘Uh . . . Oh, God, is this it? V for Victor, X for X-ray, Four, D for dog, D for dog, E for elephant? Could that be it? Hello? Over?’

  Space crackled between them but a few moments later his voice came back, filling the room again.

  ‘. . . is NA1SS to Victor, X Ra . . . ur, Delta, Delta, Echo. Is that corre . . . Do you copy, over?’

  Static disrupted the line and it took her a moment to ‘translate’ the call signs back to the letters on the sticker in front of her. ‘Yes. Yes, that’s it,’ she cried. ‘VX4DDE.’

  ‘. . . opy that . . . have the . . . sign . . . help is on its w . . . ust sit tight and don’t go . . . side . . . the . . .’

  His voice disappeared, his presence leaving the room and abandoning her to the storm’s ferocity again.