‘The Violence of Snowflakes’ by Louise Mangos – third prize in our ‘Sense of Place’ Creative Writing Competition 2021

18th December 2021

Louise has packed, peddled and paddled the world, writing novels, short stories and flash fiction along the way. Her next novel,’The Beaten Track’ from Red Dog Press, is her most ambitious suspense novel to date with multiple locations in the narrative. There are several suspenseful mountain scenes for those who’ve enjoyed the high altitude element of The Violence of Snowflakes. Louise has won prizes and been placed on several shortlists for her work, and has had a story read out on BBC Radio. She lives in Switzerland with her Kiwi husband and two sons.

The Violence of Snowflakes, set in Leysin, Switzerland

As the cog railway rumbles along the street past the conical roofs of the Château d’Aigle, Alain embraces the anticipation of returning home to Leysin in the change of seasons. The cog engages onto the rack as the train crosses the Grand Eau. They leave behind the trees in the valley, shedding their red and orange cloaks around their bases. They rise through vineyards which have long since yielded their pinot noir and chasselas grapes to the vintners of the region. The train continues up through pine trees laden with cones and moss. Larch needles flutter to the forest floor, winking orange in the shafts of fading sun.

The cog train forges through a layer of cloud high above the valley. The first flakes begin falling as Alain steps off at the final station. He throws his pack onto his shoulders and makes his way to the Club Vagabond where he knows at least two friends will offer him a bed for the night and if not, there’ll be a bunk free at the hostel.

He walks through the upper village, the rapidly falling temperature stinging his nostrils, the smell of approaching winter a familiar cold comfort. Snow has already begun to settle on the verges and trees, the rapid change in weather a thrilling surprise. As Alain walks through the door of the Vagabond bar and sweeps aside the heavy curtain keeping the draughts out, a cheer erupts. Many old friends welcome him, slapping him on the back. They tell him they never believed any girl could keep his heart away from the mountains, especially in grey, rainy England. A moment of sadness is soon eclipsed by the contentedness of being back amongst his tribe. It’s as though he never left.

More people come into the bar, stamping snow off their boots and shaking flakes from their hats. Outside a blizzard is now raging, the first heavy fall of the winter season that is not yet upon them. A lift worker comes in wearing his snow patrol jacket and another cheer goes up when he announces the ski runs will open for the weekend only. They’ve never opened this early before, but it’s been agreed that there are enough employees in the village to operate the highest lifts.

Alain’s usual ski gang begins to make plans. They brag about their predicted achievements on the Chaux de Mont under the menacing anvil of the Tour d’Aï. Each one of Alain’s friends claims they will reach a higher, longer, steeper descent the next day. Someone turns up the volume of eighties classics playing behind the bar, and more alcohol fuels their ambition. Cardinal beer bottles chink louder with each round, along with their excitement.

Alain is offered the sofa of a friend near to where he’s stored his skis during his absence. The gang leaves the bar in the darkest part of the night. The wind whips round their muffled faces, and their boots fill over the rims as the snowplough has yet to clear the roads. They sway and topple as they walk home, the loss of balance in the deep snow a laughable excuse on their drunken, vapoured breath.

The crack of a cannon wakes him at dawn, his mouth as dry as arctic tundra, and his promise an aching regret. He hauls himself from the warmth of his sofa and dresses for the cold. His friend merely grunts when Alain knocks on his door, reneging on their agreement.

Alain fetches his skis and walks to the lift station down the Rue de Commerce, ski boots squawking on the fresh snow. The sun rises over the horns of Les Diablerets to the East into a velvet blue sky. He is invigorated by the morning air, as sharp as a shard of broken glass.

His mates don’t turn up, but he doesn’t wait, wants to be the first on the lift. Their excuses will be a combination of debilitating hangovers and the presence of the hazard lights flashing outside the ski station, telling them to stay on the marked piste. Telling them to stay safe. As he steps out of the télécabine at the top and ducks under the yellow and black ribbon on the Berneuse, the morning sun glinting off the mirrored windows of the Kuklos Restaurant mocks his absent friends as cowards.

*

He opens his eyes and there is a perfectly formed crystal sitting on the glove in front of his face. He focuses on this microscopic crystal with six fragile arms and a multitude of delicate thorns. He knows this thing of beauty has an infinitesimal speck at its nucleus, a nanoparticle of dust around which water condensed in the troposphere, before freezing and falling to his glove. The hidden fatal flaw.

He concentrates on his body, trying to locate each part of himself. He can’t move his limbs. He knows at least one of his legs is broken. His ears are blocked with snow. Silence is a tinnitus roar in his head. He’s lost his goggles, and is unsure which way is up. It’s not quite dark, but an eerie light envelops him in his blue space.

How many times had they been told in their youth? At school? In the ski club? In autumn, the earth beneath the crocus-laden alpine meadows still holds the heat of the sun. The first wintry storms arrive on humid air that carpets the ground, thick and deep. But it is deceptive. The earth raises the temperature of the layer of snow touching the smooth substrate where it sucks the remaining water out of the slope. When the snowpack freezes, usually in early morning, its interface with the ground offers no more friction.

Avalanche.

As Alain’s breath labours through lack of oxygen, he recalls the stuffiness of the bar last night, the smell of stale beer and overheated bodies. The coffee and croissant he rushed on the lift is still acrid in the back of his throat. He remembers the vastness of it, standing on the cornice, the Berneuse at his back, facing south looking over the vast Rhône Valley towards Mont Blanc over the border in France. An invisible magnet drew him to the edge, tipping him into the narrow gully and spitting him out onto a delta of white. His skis met only the resistance of air, like falling into a weightless eiderdown. The best powder ski of his life.

He stares at the snowflake, his eyes straining in the dim light. He wonders if this is the flake that tipped the scale, grasping the splintered limbs of a hundred million others, chasing him down the gully as his skis carved soft serpentine ruts refilling behind him with the feathers of winter. This snowflake lured him into the vortex of a drunken challenge beyond his control.

He recognises the light-headedness, his fuzzy thoughts. He has to get air. He wiggles the fingers on the hand with the snowflake in front of his face. As he twists his wrist, he reaches up an inch at a time in front of his face, his fingers grappling at the snow above his head. He bores further with two fingers. Slowly, slowly, he pushes the concrete mass of snow upwards, knowing that if he hadn’t kept his hand in front of his face, he would have suffocated long ago.

It takes what seems like hours, but he digs himself out through layers of heavy, dense snow interspersed with pockets of crystal powder. He shouts with the pain of a splintered bone in his leg each time he moves, thinks it might be his knee or his shin, but the pain goes all the way up his thigh to his spine.

As he breaks the surface, grey light floods in with a flurry of fresh flakes. How long has he been under the snow? Another front has blown in and the blizzard has started anew. He takes out his phone. Having to remove his gloves, his freezing finger stabs at the screen but the cold has sapped all the power from its battery. He thinks he hears a helicopter somewhere above him, but cannot imagine it could fly in this weather, and it would be impossible to see him as the cloud is so thick.

To the left above him on a protected ridge he makes out the dark shape of an alpine hut, one of the many refuges the cow herders use during the summer. He thinks of some of the animals who will be scuttling to find a suitable hole in the earth for their winter hibernation.

By the time he has dragged himself across the gully and has pulled himself up towards the hut, daylight is fading. He must have been unconscious for hours. He melts handfuls of snow in his mouth, stops once to pee, fumbling with his ski pants as he is shivering so hard. His urine briefly warms his leg before intensifying the cold with its humidity against his skin. He curses and continues his journey towards the hut.

He pushes open the door and crawls in, his progress slowed by the dry wooden floor and the additional weight of the ski boot hampering his broken leg. There’s a table, a few chopped logs in a tatty wooden crate next to the tiny iron stove, and miracle of miracles, matches to light a fire. Hopefully the search and rescue team will see the smoke from the chimney when the weather clears and they come looking. His friends will know he’s up here somewhere when he doesn’t turn up to the bar this evening.

There’s no kindling, but he peels the bark from the logs. He screws up the page of an old newspaper, and can’t believe his luck when it lights from the first of three remaining matches in the box. He will be saved.

Alain keeps blowing the flame in the little nest of fuel he has carefully formed in the firebox. Every puff out of his lungs sends shooting pains down his leg. The pieces of dry bark catch and he smiles at his prowess. The comfort of flames. When they begin to smother with what he assumes is a backdraught, he leaves the door of the stove open so it can draw.

The wind picks up outside the hut in the thickness of night. The only light is from the flickering flames in the stove. As its iron belly warms, Alain’s shivering ceases, but the throbbing in his leg ramps up. He pulls himself closer to the fire, sits up and props himself against the wood crate.

It’s not until he feels a familiar caustic burn in the back of his throat that he looks up and realises his error. The pitched ceiling of the hut has disappeared in a ghostly grey curtain of smoke. How stupid of him! Of course! The roof is covered in a metre of snow. The chimney will be blocked. Any rescue helicopter won’t see the hut from above and certainly won’t see the smoke, as it’s all inside with Alain.

He can barely move, pinned to his position by the pain in his leg and a lack of oxygen. He considers his choices. The pain is now at a level he feels he can’t sustain. Even if he could pull himself to the door and open it to crawl outside the cow herd’s hut, he would surely be dead by morning from exposure.

He thinks of the girl he left behind in England. How she could play music that would lift your soul as purely as the perfect ski line on a powdered slope. The pull of music at the conservatory was as strong as Alain’s pull of snow. It kept her there, and brought him back to this familiar little village in the Pre-Alps, perched above the Rhône Valley. To his fate.

The popping of a log in the burner brings him back to the hut. He tries to erase the yearning to stroke her shiny hair, wipe away her mascara-streaked tears as he left, erase all the sadness and guilt and wasted time. To miss his girl too much now will only enhance his despair and pain.

He would rather dwell on the musical memories. She would have loved this snow-clad landscape once she became used to it, he is sure. The dark granite gullies dusted with white, the drama of the Alps. A concerto on the eyes. But it’s too late now.

They say that dying in the cold is the least painful of all the ways to go. But Alain cannot believe it. He lies down on the floor, to take advantage of the last clear gap of breathable air. His eyes are stinging now. Smoke or tears, he’s no longer sure.

He looks upwards at the descending ebb and flow of the smoke. It approaches like an ocean ready to drown him.

He makes himself as comfortable as possible, stillness reducing the suffering, and readies himself for a very long sleep.

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