I called Miro again. Voicemail. I called the emergency services number and got a recorded message about storm conditions and reduced response times and a recommendation to shelter in place unless in immediate danger. I was in a cabin with a locked door and a stove and a knife on the table. I was not in immediate danger.
I told myself that and mostly I believed it.
Dawn came at twenty past seven as a pale grey lightening in the east, visible through the snow which was finally thinning. By eight I could see the treeline again. By eight-thirty the storm had reduced to scattered flurries and I could see the full extent of the clearing around the cabin — forty metres of open ground, white and unbroken in every direction.
Unbroken. No tracks in the snow. Not at the door, not at the north window, not on the ground anywhere within my sightline.
I stood at the window for a long time looking at that unmarked white. Then I got my coat and my bag and my phone — forty-three percent now, two signal bars — and I unlocked the door.
The clearing was silent and still and very cold and entirely empty. The snow on the ground was smooth and perfect. Whatever had stood at my window and walked across my roof had left nothing in the world below to say it had been there.
I walked to the car. The road down was passable in low gear, slow and careful, and I drove it without stopping and reached the main road and the town at the mountain’s foot by ten o’clock, and I sat in the car park of the first open café I found and drank coffee that was too hot and called Miro.
He answered this time. I told him everything, in the order it happened. He was quiet while I talked and quiet for a moment after.
Then he asked: “Did you look in the bathroom?”
I went still. “No,” I said. “The door was closed. I assumed it was a bathroom.”
A pause. “It’s not a bathroom,” he said carefully. “There’s no bathroom at the cabin — it’s an outhouse. That door is a storage room. Clare, I should have told you — it doesn’t lock from the outside. It locks from the inside.”
The café noise went on around me, ordinary and warm. I held the phone and thought about the door standing open when I arrived. About the single room I had assessed as empty and in order. About the storage room door that had been closed and that locked from the inside.
About the shape at the window. Tall, indistinct. Observing. Waiting to see whether I would open that door.
I had not opened it. I had sat by the stove with a knife on the table and waited for morning and gone out the front. Whatever had been on the roof, whatever had stood at my window — it had not followed me to the car.
But it had come from somewhere. And whatever it had been doing in that locked room before I arrived was a question I sat with for a long time, in the warm and ordinary noise of the café, before I was ready to think about anything else.
I never went back to the cabin.
I never asked Miro what he thought had been in the room.
Some questions, once you are safe, are better left as questions.
The answer, I decided, could not help me now.
Only the not-knowing could.
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