Max took a few moments to settle his breathing. Slumped on his knees, he carefully checked his arms and legs. Nothing broken. The old man was muttering something. Max pulled off a glove and tried to dig the freezing wet muck out of his ears.
“I’ll help you!” Max shouted. But he couldn’t hear his own words. The cold must have done something to his eardrums.
Clumsily, he staggered the few steps through the loose snow to the old monk. Now that he was closer, Max could see he was a big man. And he was barefoot. The avalanche must have ripped away his boots and skis. His tangled hair fell across his face; his beard-snarled strands of white and gray, like lichen-was congealed and matted. Through the blanket-like thickness of the monk’s cassock Max saw a spreading bloodstain.
Marbles of snow scattered around Max’s feet. There was another tremor. The mountain was still unsafe. The monk was shaking his head, still muttering, pulling the hair from his mouth and eyes, fixing Max with a frightening, almost demented stare. He tried to get to his feet but fell, unable to wade through the deep snow. Max staggered closer, but fear suddenly gripped him. The monk had slid a meter away. The snow was shifting like sand on a steep dune. The monk’s eyes widened: he knew what was happening and fell forward, trying to lie horizontally, hoping his legs wouldn’t be pulled from under him.
The movement settled. Max lay as flat as he could, as if lying on ice, trying to rescue someone from going under.
“Don’t move! I’ll grab you. I’ll get you down.” He could just about hear his own voice now as it boomed inside his head. But as he yelled he had no idea how he would get himself down from the mountain, never mind the wounded man.
The monk snarled in his effort to reach Max; blood-flecked spittle caught his whiskers. His eyes locked onto the boy’s as he reached out. Max grabbed his wrist and realized for the first time that the man’s other arm was injured, from either the avalanche or the gunshot, and he must have overcome tremendous pain to dig Max out.
And then the slope moved again. A huge sheet of snow, like an ice floe, shifted away. Max held tight. The old monk growled. Max was holding him against the pull of the snow. He jammed his legs into it for grip and realized his chest and stomach were pressing against a boulder just beneath the surface. That was why the spot where he lay was not moving.
“Ez ihure ere fida-eheke hari ere,” the monk shouted in a language Max had never heard before.
“I don’t understand! Je ne comprend pas!” Max yelled, hoping the man understood French.
The monk’s grip loosened, so Max tried to take a firmer hold. The bare arms below the cassock were muscled and sinewy, but they were slippery with blood and sweat and gave him nothing to grab effectively.
Max stared in horror.
Two hundred meters away, silently and without warning, a massive chunk of snow disappeared. It had dropped into a void. And then other huge slabs followed and vanished. The slope they clung to was false. The snow had dammed itself up over the top of a massive chasm and this last tremor had released the pressure. Gravity sucked the crust of snow down, and the snowfield the size of a football pitch had disappeared into nowhere.
The monk saw the terror in Max’s eyes. He twisted his head and squeezed Max’s arm tighter. If another slab fell away they would both be dead-a drop of at least five hundred meters had opened up, like the mouth of a volcano, and it belched powdered clouds from the weight of the snow as it impacted far below.
The monk shook his head. It was useless. He knew he was going to die. His wounds were draining his strength and life force.
“Don’t let go!” Max screamed.
But the monk’s hand, slippery with blood, was losing its grip.
Max’s arm felt as though it was being torn out of its socket, and his ribs hurt from the pounding he’d taken, but despite the pain he pressed himself against the hidden boulder and pulled on the man’s weight as hard as he could.
The monk shouted again, the desperation as strident as before, this time in French, but a sucking, collapsing roar overtook the first words, and all Max heard was a broken cry. “… allez … Abb … aye! … le crocodile et le serpent!”
Max stared in disbelief. There were only twenty meters of snow left behind the monk, the rest had gone. When this slab dropped, they would both die, plunging into a gray, mist-shrouded nothingness.
The monk’s other arm snatched something from around his neck, broke the cord that held it and threw it at Max. It was a crucifix and what looked like a medallion, but Max’s eyes were on the wounded man’s as they pleaded, and his faint, desperate words reached out again. “Ez ihure ere fida-eheke hari ere.”
Max shook his head. Why didn’t the man realize he could not understand him? And then the remaining block of snow fell, and the monk with it, sucked from Max’s grip. His eyes stayed on the boy’s as his clawing fingers ripped away Max’s glove, his father’s watch; nails raked his skin.
In the fraction of a second it took before the monk was swallowed by the churning mist, he shouted one word that Max had no problem understanding.
“Lucifer!”
3
The ski patrol found Max less than an hour later, straddled across a jagged rock that, in turn, stuck out in space across a massive precipice. He was hypothermic and unconscious. The four-man team, wary of the gaping void, roped themselves together and brought Max up on a rescue stretcher. Within ten minutes they had eased him a safe distance down the slopes and called in the Mountain Air Rescue helicopter, which flew him straight to the main hospital at Pau, less than half an hour by air to the south.
Max stayed in the darkness of his mind, at times plummeting through the blackness as if that terrible vortex that had sucked out the bottom of the world was still trying to claim him. The helicopter’s mechanical shuddering snatched at his consciousness. Once, through half-open eyes, he saw the blurred whirring of blades against a gray sky and felt the exhaust vapor sting his nostrils. He tried to get up but he was strapped down and the winch man placed a gloved, comforting hand against his chest. The man smiled. Everything was OK. He was safe.
Max was still unconscious when the helicopter landed. His neck was braced in a medical collar, his arms and legs secured. The French medical team was excellent. Being this close to the mountains and the main highway, they all had extensive experience in shattered bones and hypothermic victims.
Inside the building the team listened to the airborne medics’ concise assessment of their patient. The doctor quickly realized that the young man the trauma team was helping onto the gurney was fit and strong. His muscle tone was good, his heartbeat steady and there was no sign of internal bleeding.
The doctor ordered an MRI scan. The nurse had already cut away his damaged jacket and was about to cut off Max’s cargo pants and fleece when he opened his eyes.
“Don’t cut my clothes,” he said. “They’re all I’ve got.” He slipped back into unconsciousness.
The doctor hesitated. There was something in the boy’s desperate plea that he recognized. Max could not know that Dr. Marcel Riveux was a volunteer in the mountains during his off-duty hours; that he was someone who understood the lure of the high valleys and felt an affinity with others who knew the thrill of the slopes.
He shook his head at the nurse. And instead of cutting Max’s clothes away, he helped ease them from his body.
The hospital was well equipped with the latest technology. The highly specialized teams of doctors meant that each patient received the most up-to-date treatment.