Author: Charlie Higson
Category: Horror
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charlie-higson/page,7,49988-by_royal_command.html
He flexed his fingers, strained with all his strength, and the hand came free. He clawed at his face, compacting the area around it, then dug the snow out of his mouth. This small victory, though, had cost him a lot of energy. He felt weak and dizzy. The blood was roaring and banging in his ears like an orchestra.
It was going to be one hell of a job digging himself out of this.
Then an awful thought struck him – he had no idea which way was up and which was down. He could be lying on his front for all he knew, or even upside-down. There was no point in struggling to escape until he knew for certain how he was placed, or he might only succeed in burying himself deeper. Tears of rage and frustration and helplessness sprang into his eyes. He managed to blink them away and felt them crawling across his skin.
He smiled. He laughed. He gave a small shout of triumph. The tears were trickling over his forehead, towards his hairline. That meant he must be upside-down. It was a start. He could use his legs to kick upwards.
But how deep was he? He could be under twenty feet of snow. A hundred. He pictured himself as a tiny speck in the side of the massive mountain. Best not to think about that. The idea of dying all alone down here, buried alive, was too horrible to contemplate. His body wouldn’t be discovered until the snow melted in the summer, and there he would be, perfectly preserved by the cold.
He shuddered. There was only one way to find out how deep he was. He started to apply pressure with his feet, forcing them upwards into the snow. At the same time he dug with his fingers, enlarging the space around his head. His legs had made some progress; he could now hammer them backwards and forwards. He worked his hand towards his belly, hoping to move the snow aside and scoop it out of the way, and it was then that he felt the rope. This was a fresh encouragement. He could use it to pull himself up to the surface, and with any luck Miles would be on the other end.
He set to work – wriggling, digging, kicking, clawing – and, ten minutes later, he had made a space around himself large enough to turn round in.
Soon he was the right way up and, as he had found so many times before, once he attacked a problem, once he started working hard, his fears faded away and he could shut out everything else until the work was done.
He had a plan, a goal. It didn’t matter how long it took, how hard it was, how much it hurt, he had to get it done.
It was either that or die.
He reached up above his head and started to pull down the loose snow with his gloves. As it fell to his feet he stamped on it, creating a solid base to stand on and raising himself higher. This way he could slowly bore a tunnel upwards, barely wider than his body. It was back-breaking work, reaching up the whole time in the pitch darkness and shuffling the snow down his body to his boots. He had long since lost all feeling in his feet. They felt like two large rocks attached to the end of his legs. Despite being under all that snow he was sweating. He could feel rivulets of warm moisture trickling down his skin under his clothes and the space around his face was filled with stale, damp breath.
Every now and again he stopped and stood still, making sure that he was still going straight up and hadn’t gone off at an angle. Once he was sure he was still on course he would start up again, gouging out a handful of snow, dropping it, shuffling it down his body, stamping on it. He worked like a machine and had no real idea of what progress he was making, if any. His little bubble stayed the same size. His body was begging for rest and sleep, but he shut these signals out, and just kept the one small part of his brain active, the part that told him to keep moving, to keep digging.
Slowly, slowly, as the minutes turned into hours, he groped his way up through the darkness, his throat sore, his lungs burning, his nostrils filled with the smell of the snow.
And then there was a change.
The rope turned at an angle and went off sideways into the snow wall. He checked. No. He hadn’t made a mistake. He tugged at it. It had felt like a lifeline, guiding him to the surface, but now he was confused. Should he follow the rope or go up? And could he even go up if the rope was buried down under the snow?
As he yanked at it, his head bumped against the top of his tunnel and a shower of snow rained down on him. Coughing and spluttering, he cleared it away and it was then that he realised that he could see stars.
A million of them. Sitting in a velvet black sky. He had never seen them so bright.
And this magical, clean, fresh air. He had almost forgotten how good it tasted.
And the smell of pine.
He laughed and howled at the moon, his small voice echoing off down the valley. He was alive. He was free.
But what of Miles…?
What would he find on the other end of the rope?
8
Goodnight, Vienna
James hauled himself out of the hole and slumped on to the snow. He lay there for a long while. Feeling the fire in his cramped muscles slowly subside. Gathering his strength.
It was night, which meant that there would be no search parties out looking for them.
The sky was clear, but it could easily start snowing again. He didn’t know if he could go any further tonight. He would have to find Miles and then decide what to do.
‘Come on, lazy-bones,’ he said, hauling himself on to his knees. ‘Get up and start looking.’ All his muscles screamed in protest as he fought to stand, and, when he finally managed to get to his feet, he stood there swaying, dizzy and nauseous.
He took hold of the rope in his trembling hands and pulled. At first it resisted then at last he felt it shift and spring up out of the snow. He knew that if Miles was buried as deeply as he had been then there’d be no hope of pulling him out. James would simply have to cut through the rope and go to find help. The only thing that gave him any strength was the fact that the rope hadn’t been more than about twenty feet long.
He walked slowly forward, pulling the rope up as he went. After a few paces he felt it tighten. He dropped down and started to scoop up handfuls of snow, which was soft and powdery here. He dug down several inches until he felt something hard.
It was Miles’s head. He was face down and utterly still. James cleared more snow away then used the rope to pull him free.
His body was stiff and cold, but there was a faint pulse in his neck and he was still breathing.
James couldn’t give up now. He had come this far. He had survived the fall. He had got out of his snowy grave. He would get down the mountain. And he would take Miles with him.
The snow-slide had torn a small tree up from its roots and tumbled it over the cliff edge along with the boys. It lay in a twisted heap of broken branches. James picked out a long straight limb to use as a staff, then braced himself against the rope.
The lights of Kitzbühel looked impossibly far away, but there were a few isolated farmhouses nearer with lights showing in their windows. James fixed his gaze on the nearest and started to walk, like a moth towards a flame, dragging the other boy behind him and digging the stick into the ground for support.
The wind tugged at his clothing, searching out every gap. His face was stinging. His eyes were scrubbed raw. His sweat was freezing on his body, which was not a good sign. If his body temperature dropped too low he would pass out. It was hard going on the fresh snow – with each step his feet sank in almost up to his knees, and as his toes were numb he felt very unsteady. Miles moved like a dead weight behind him, and every now and then his body would get stuck, then suddenly jerk loose and James would fall, cursing, on to his face.
The worst part was that the lights of the farmhouse didn’t seem to be getting any nearer. It was impossible to judge how far away it might be. He remembered the time it had taken them to get up the mountain in the cable-car. But surely they had come a long way down already…
He didn’t stop, though. He forced his body to keep moving, and was so intent on simply putting one foot in front of the other that he didn’t notice when the first flakes of snow began to fall around him. It was onl
y when he put a hand up to brush some off his face that he realised how heavily it was snowing.
Then, as he looked for the lights of the house, they flickered and disappeared. This wasn’t good. If he got lost he might wander around in the dark for hours. He groaned and sank to the ground.
It was impossible. He had done all he could. It was time to think of a new plan. He needed to take shelter until the morning.
There was only one thing for it. Although he had spent ages escaping from a hole in the snow, his best chance of survival now was to dig another one and crawl into it. He found where the slope was steepest, checked which direction the wind was coming from, then burrowed into the bank, using the snow he shovelled out to build extra walls as a wind-break and packing it tightly around the top and sides to make it secure. He worked fast, using up his last reserves of energy.
Once it was built he could rest.
Gradually the snow cave took shape. He was too exhausted to do much more than make a coffin-sized hole, though, and he hoped the two of them would fit.
He tied Miles’s scarf to the end of his stick and shoved it into the ground next to the cave mouth as a makeshift flag. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he could do. Someone might spot them once it was light.
The next thing he had to do was somehow get Miles inside. He knew they ought to keep their heads near the entrance, in case the hole caved in while they were asleep, which would mean going in feet first. That was easy enough for him, but for Miles, unconscious and with a broken leg, it was another matter altogether. In the end James lay on his back, rolled Miles on top of him and shuffled into the hole. Once inside he tipped Miles off and held on to him so that they could share their body heat. He soon found that it was surprisingly warm in the cave, and as he lay still he felt the nerves tingling painfully in his fingers and toes as feeling began to return to them. As the wind howled and scraped at the entrance, he fought to stay awake, but it was no use. He felt his consciousness slipping away like melting snow and, before he knew it, he was dead to the world.
Some 230 miles to the east, the Gräfin Frieda von Schlick was sitting alone in her box at the Vienna State Opera looking down at the stage. A huge blonde soprano in a billowing white dress was belting out an aria, her voice filling the whole building.
Frieda was not a fan of opera at the best of times. She found the stories difficult to follow and the acting rather exaggerated, but tonight she was finding it even harder than ever to concentrate. She had spent the last few days at her husband’s side in the clinic above Westendorf. Not that he had noticed. He had been so badly burned he was bandaged nearly from head to foot, and he was on such heavy medication that he was barely conscious. She might as well have been sitting beside a sack of potatoes. They were due to operate on him in the morning, in an attempt to save his face with plastic surgery. There was nothing she could do until he came round.
If he came round…
The surgeon, Doctor Kitzmuller, had warned her that Otto might not survive. He was very weak. Even strong men could die under the knife.
Poor Otto. Lying there, pumped full of morphine, occasionally shaking or nodding his head. She had done her bit, played the dutiful wife, but it had been so boring and all the while she had longed to be back in Vienna.
She knew she should feel more sorry for her dear Otto, but the man was a fool. He always did drive his precious Bugatti too fast, and she had warned him countless times that he would one day have some ghastly accident. Well, now it had happened. The man driving the other car had been equally badly burned, apparently. They were going to operate on him at the same time as Otto.
The doctor had told her that the two of them were lucky to be alive.
Lucky? She had no idea exactly what damage had been done to Otto’s face, and it might be weeks before they could take the bandages off. She couldn’t bear to think about it. If Otto was badly disfigured she knew she would never be able to look at him again. She hated ugly things.
He may have behaved like an idiotic child, but he had been so handsome.
The fool. The silly, damned fool…
There were tears in her eyes. Never mind, if anyone saw her they would assume she was weeping because of the opera. It was the highlight of the whole season. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. And how long it was. The fat German singers had been wailing and screeching all night, it seemed. Some silly story about dying for love.
Hah!
Those Germans with their gloomy romantic notions!
She supposed she loved Otto, in her way, but she would never be prepared to die for him. Thank God she hadn’t been in the car with him. He had been all alone, visiting his gloomy family Schloss in the mountains. If her own face had been scarred…
That was what would make a woman kill herself. Not love.
Isolde seemed to be working herself up into quite a state on stage now and Frieda wondered if she ought to be expressing her own emotions as strongly.
No. That just wasn’t done in polite society.
And keeping up appearances was the main reason she was here for the opening night of the opera. She hated the music, but she loved the occasion. The dresses, the gossip, the sense of being at the heart of things.
She wouldn’t have missed this for the world. There was nothing more she could do at the clinic until Otto came out of surgery tomorrow. So she had been driven home to Vienna this afternoon.
Ah, Vienna…
Tonight there was the opera, followed by a proper meal, not that heavy Tyrolean muck she had been putting up with in the Alps, then home to sleep in her own bed. A long lazy bath in the morning, then back to the hospital to see Otto, refreshed and fragrant.
Ready for the worst.
The door to her box opened and an usher came in carrying a silver tray on which stood a bottle of champagne and a cut-glass goblet. Frieda didn’t even bother to turn round.
‘Put it on the table,’ she hissed, waving a gloved hand.
Had she looked round she would have seen a large, bulky man with puffy eyes.
Frieda didn’t bother to check whether the man had gone out. Why should she? So she didn’t see him standing in the shadows at the back of the box, still staring at her through the narrow slits in his swollen eyelids and listening carefully to the music.
Wrangel had studied it well. All week he had attended rehearsals, sitting out of the way up in the gods. At first he had found the music overlong and overblown, but he had grown fond of it the more he listened, and now he even found it quite moving.
This was the moment he had been waiting for, the climax of Act 3, when Isolde dies of grief over her dead lover, Tristan. The music slowly built in a relentless rising pattern, louder and louder, until the whole massive orchestra was pounding away like huge waves crashing against rocks.
He stood there, counting the beats, following the music in his head, waiting for the final peak, when the orchestra seemed almost to explode. Up it went, up and up and up, Isolde’s voice soaring majestically over the top of it.
Now at last he quietly stepped forward, his soft shoes making no sound. If anyone had happened to look up at the Gräfin’s box they would have noticed him quickly slide behind her, slip one hand over her mouth and the other across her chest and lift her effortlessly out of her chair. But nobody did look up. All eyes were on the stage, as he knew they would be.
Frieda struggled briefly, then was still. Nobody saw her as she fell from the box. The first they knew of it was when she crashed to the floor of the auditorium.
A gasp went up. Now all heads turned.
What had happened?
Had she slipped? Had she deliberately thrown herself off?
Nobody had heard her scream.
What they could not have known was the reason why Frieda hadn’t screamed. The Gräfin’s neck was broken long before she hit the ground.
There was a patch of sky. It had a curious shape. It became an island, a cloud, a monster, a human face, and finally a window
into another world. James could look through it and see angels, all in white, moving around slowly. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the patch of sky had become a stain on a ceiling. This was the most vivid vision of all. He could see every crack and bump on the paintwork. The stain was a yellowish brown, as if from some old leak. He turned his head. There was another window there, with its own view through to another world. This window, though, was square and the view was of mountains…
He fought to take control of his senses.
Come on, you fool, if you can see mountains it’s because you are halfway up the side of one. That’s not a view through to another world; it’s simply the view out of your snow cave.
Then why was the window square-shaped, and not round?
That was too much for James’s tired brain to work out.
He closed his eyes again.
Why was he not colder? And wetter? How was it he could wriggle his toes?
‘James?’
There was an angel standing there… No, not an angel. A female doctor. In a white coat.
He smiled with relief.
He remembered now…
The faces of the men who had found him in the snow. Hannes Oberhauser and the others. And being loaded on to a stretcher. The men skiing down the mountain holding the stretcher between them. A drive in an ambulance. Then the paradise of clean sheets and warmth and dry cotton against his skin.
‘You are awake?’ said the doctor in halting, heavily accented English. She had a kind face.
‘It’s all right,’ said James in German. ‘You can speak in your own language. I’ll understand.’
‘That is good.’ The doctor smiled. ‘Do you know where you are, James?’
‘I don’t really mind where I am,’ said James. ‘Just so long as I’m alive.’
He looked around the ward. It was night time and what he had taken to be a window was a poster hanging on the wall.