The Magic Circle (17 page)

“No, I’d love to join you,” I said, I hoped not too hastily. “And I’m very sorry. I didn’t know it was you following me.”

“I accept all apologies,” he said with a bow. “But that trick in the mist was quite something. When you vanished I tried roads in three directions until at last I understood what you’d done. Tell me, how does a young woman like you learn to—as I believe you Americans say—‘lose a tail’ with such competence?”

“I guess that’s why I went into the security field,” I told him. “I’ve always had an interest in things that are hidden: in the idea of pursuit and discovery and capture.”

“So have I,” said Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser with an enigmatic smile.

By the time we’d finished lunch at the bird’s-nest restaurant and warming house at midmountain, Dr. Hauser was calling me Ariel and insisting I call him Wolfgang. He’d shown me how to make swing chairs of our parkas by stretching them over our skis and poles, which we planted in the snow. We hung there in the sun just beyond the deck, dipping crusty dark bread in our oyster stew and drinking fruity
Glühwein
spiced with cloves and dusted with cinnamon.

Wolfgang had given me plenty of ski tips as he’d followed me down to the restaurant. He was an incredible skier, even better than Olivier. I’d skied mountains all over the world since childhood, and I knew a master when I saw one. There were very few who had that combination of strength and fluid grace that made everything they did on the mountain seem effortless.

Now, as we reluctantly started collecting our things to go down the mountain, my new colleague turned to me with a bemused look. “I wonder: what should I collect from you in repayment for giving you all those free skiing lessons this morning?”

“You shouldn’t charge anything,” I told him, tying my parka around the waist of my jumpsuit. “Everyone knows it’s in the very nature of the Austrian to give ski instruction, it’s as natural as breathing. You don’t charge for what comes naturally.”

He laughed, a little uncomfortably I thought.

“But I have to ask you a serious question,” he said. “You know, I actually
did
recognize you from your photos—it was really from your eyes alone—when you came into the building yesterday, although you were all bundled up and looking like a polar bear.” Wow, those had been my thoughts exactly. “I wanted to speak with you then, but I felt somewhat awkward doing so in front of others.”

He took my backpack from my hands as I was about to pull it on, and he set it on the ground; then he put his hands on my shoulders. I felt the heat moving from his fingers into my flesh. This was the first man I’d ever met, or even dreamed about, who could make me limp just by looking at me—and now he was
touching
me. But I was rendered totally speechless by what came next.

“Ariel, you know we’ll soon be working together closely on a critical assignment. Under the circumstances, I realize that what I’m about to say to you is probably inadvisable—but I really can’t help it. I must tell you that it’s going to be very, very hard for me to maintain a professional relationship with you—the kind of relationship that is needed for us to carry out this project. I assure you I didn’t plan what’s happened. Indeed, this sort of thing has never happened to me before …” He trailed off, as if expecting me to speak. When I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, he added, “I don’t know how to say this exactly, but, Ariel, I’m extremely attracted to you. I am very … very attracted to you.”

To
me?
Holy shit. I was in deep water and I knew it. I could have drowned in the depths of those turquoise eyes as he stood there looking so
intense
. This guy was dangerous in more ways than one—and I had plenty of danger in my life already without taking any extra free ski lessons. If only he weren’t so … attractive.

Forget it. He wasn’t attractive, he was charismatic: he was magical. I knew it, and so did everyone else who ever laid eyes on him. But this couldn’t be happening to me—not on top of everything else. Not now. Why in heaven’s name had the Pod decided to dish up this poison to
me
? I had to do something to get myself back to reality, such as it was.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Marshaling all my reserves, I stepped backward so that his hands fell from my shoulders, snapping the link. I opened my eyes.

“So what’s the question?” I asked.

“Question?” he said, momentarily confused.

“The serious question you said, only a moment ago, that you needed to ask me,” I explained.

Wolfgang Hauser shrugged his shoulders and looked a little pained. It seemed that he hadn’t thought through what kind of response he himself had really expected of me—nor what might come next in the scenario.

“You don’t trust me,” he said. “And you’re perfectly right—why should you? I follow you like an idiot through the fog, I chase you down a ski mountain and drag you to lunch. I blurt out unsolicited feelings for you that I bloody well should have kept to myself. For all this, I deeply apologize. But I do want to say one thing.…”

I waited. But I was totally unprepared for the broadside when it came.

“I am a personal acquaintance of your uncle Lafcadio Behn, from Vienna,” he informed me. “I’ve been sent here to Idaho to protect you as best I can. Before you came back from that funeral in San Francisco I flew here to be sure you’d be placed on my project—not only for your professional expertise, I admit, but because the documents you are heir to
must not
fall into the wrong hands. Do you understand?”

Holy Mother of God and all the saints. What was he saying?

“Ariel,” he said, “I assure you that when I took this assignment, I didn’t expect to find …” He paused and looked me in the eye for a moment. “Oh,
Scheiss
, how I’ve messed this up,” he said finally, and he turned away to pull his skis from the snow, so I couldn’t see his face. “Let’s just go back to town, shall we?”

This wrench in the works had altered my freshly formed plans. I tried to think up some excuse: that due to my grief, or whatever, I wanted to be alone so I could have some time to think. But now that Wolfgang and I had been so chummy over
Glühwein
—now that he’d disclosed his acquaintance with the black-sheep branch of my family, and had hinted at his burning passion for me, and also, I’d noticed, had eyed my backpack more than once—I felt it might seem too obvious a ploy. And although he had never actually asked me what
I
was doing up here, I understood that my only option was to play for time, ski down the rest of the mountain, and worry about where to stash the manuscript while I drove back alone.

By the time we’d suited up and snapped into our bindings, Wolfgang had recovered enough of his former charm and self-control to suggest that this time I follow him down the mountain. As good skiers learn early, if you can pattern your own form—the rhythmic combination of weight-shifting and pole-planting—after that of a superior skier, it will be worth more than ten thousand lessons with some instructor yelling in a foreign tongue: “Bend zee knees! Stop dragging zee poles!” I was delighted to get this education—at least, until he cut into the powder.

He dropped from the side of the groomed slope and slashed down through a grove of aspen thick with snow, slaloming in and out among the trees. It took a moment before I realized he was headed for a big bowl of sugary powder of a quality that drew tourists by the thousands each year. It was at the far end of these woods. But in all the years I’d frequented this mountain, I myself had avoided it like the plague.

Powder skiing requires a completely different approach from basic Nordic or Alpine techniques. You lean back on your haunches, as if in a rocking chair, which forces your ski tips high above the snow so they don’t bog down and stop you dead in your tracks. This takes enormous flexibility of the knees and strength in the thighs. If your tips get buried, if you stop, if you catch an edge and fall, you start sinking.

Because I’d never found that special rhythm, I felt completely helpless in the powder. But now I also had a heavy backpack adding awkward weight, which explains why I balked in the aspen grove—why I swerved instead to thread my way back to the groomed slope I’d just left.

And that was when it happened.

I had reached the edge of the wood when I knew something was wrong. I felt it coming above me long before I could hear it. There was no sound, but perhaps, like a whisper, the earth breathing a long, shuddering sigh. I think the palms of my hands, tingling with pinpricks inside the warmth of my gloves, sensed it before my conscious brain did. The moment I understood what was happening, I also understood that I had no idea what to do.

The ground was moving under my feet—not the ground itself, but rather the snow! The mountain was shedding its skin: ripping away, in one brutal slash, that five-foot-deep blanket, an accumulation of leaden snow that had taken all winter to fall. I was in an avalanche.

And then the noise began, first a rumble, then quickly a roar, as snow started churning over itself and pebbles and rocks started spinning down the mountain around me. I was speeding just along the forest hem, as fast as I could safely go without falling, but unsure whether to duck into the woods and risk a tree falling on me or to take my chances here, with this mountain of heavy snow moving down like a load of cement.

My mouth was dry from terror and my hands were growing numb. I prayed I wouldn’t black out—then I thought maybe I should, so that when I went under, the angry onslaught would be painless. I was moving, but I knew the snow was moving faster. To my left, out on the open slope, it was tossing big rocks in the air like children’s beachballs. At my right, from the corner of my eye, I saw trees going down, their roots flung up toward the sky. The avalanche was a living, breathing thing, devouring whatever fell into its maw, like the beast of the Snake River.

I couldn’t outrun it. I was no downhill racer, and better skiers than I had tried to beat avalanches in the past, with small success. There wasn’t a thing in my bag of tricks that would save my ass. And I still had this bloody backpack on my back.

Just at that second, two things flashed into my mind. The first, knowing the mountain as I did, was that I was about to run out of woods on my right-hand side, woods that separated me from the powder bowl just at the base of the slope, where the bowl emptied out. The second was, what had become of that bowl? And since powder moved quicker than packed snow toward uncontrollable avalanche, what had happened to Wolfgang Hauser?

These two questions were answered together.

Beneath, I could see the spot where the snows met in a cauldron of violence, where the groomed slope to my left and the powder bowl to my right unloaded masses of snow, rock, and debris. At their impact point a funnel of snow was flung into the sky.

My legs were shrieking with pain from the strain of my flight, every sinew screaming to stop and rest, but I knew that to stop now meant certain death. Then, in a blur to my right, I saw a black form cutting through the trees. Timber was being ripped from the ground as the snows hurtled down without respite, but still he came.

“Ariel!” he screamed above the crashing roar all around us. “Leap! You must jump!” I scanned frantically, trying to see what he meant—and then I knew.

Just below, where the line of forest ended, was the lip of a crevasse that jutted into the air like a ski jump. I couldn’t see over the top, but I already knew what was beyond it. Many times in the past I’d gone off that edge, letting my ski tips tilt over the lip so I slid like a teardrop down the sheer cliff face and into the chasm; then I would slalom through the forest of rock littering the floor of the gorge.

But at the speed I was now moving, I couldn’t slow down at the edge of the gorge to drop safely over the side. If I did try to slow down, I’d be crushed by moving snow. I either had to bypass the gorge altogether, taking my chances on the open slope, which were now practically nil with the avalanche closing on me, or take the jump, as Wolfgang had told me to, and pray I’d land upright on my skis, more than a hundred feet below, and on snow instead of hard, sharp rock.

I had no time to think, only to act. I yanked off the wrist straps, dropping my ski poles in my wake so I wouldn’t get skewered by one of them when I hit bottom. Then I shed the parka tied around my waist for the mobility I’d need to get enough loft. I knew I couldn’t unbuckle the damned backpack in time to make the jump, so it had to come with me: the flying hunchback of Notre Dame.

I crouched into my boots to increase speed and control. As I shot off the cliff, I lifted my body, stretching out full length into the wind with my arms pinned back and my chin thrust forward, so I could completely clear the cliff and make a clean landing.

My skis were resting on bottomless space. I was hurtling into the gorge, falling. It was free fall, and I knew I had to concentrate and not panic. I struggled to keep my tips high and together for the landing, as snow and rubble flew from the cliff, tossed like a sea of confetti around me. I fell and fell. As the ground loomed toward me, I saw how truly narrow was the ribbon of snow beneath, how many and massive were the rocks. And again I thought of the serpentine beast, and the open jaws of death.

After what seemed the eternity of a bad dream, my skis struck snow—and simultaneously my arm smashed into rock. The jagged edges ripped through the sleeve of my silver moonsuit like a serrated knife; I felt the slash of flesh parting, ripped from elbow to shoulder. The impact knocked me sharply sideways, off balance. Though there was no pain yet, I felt a sickening throb as the warm, wet blood soaked into my sleeve.

The forest of rugged rock flashed by me in a blur. I struggled frantically to stay on my feet. But I was moving too fast, without poles for balance. I caught an edge and spun out, whirling sideways and then flipping head over heels. I was somersaulting out of control, my skis striking rocks, knocking the binding locks open. But to my surprise, more than once when I smashed into a boulder, the thickness of the backpack actually protected me.