Christopher Golde
Date: 7th May 1976 Location: Finsteraarhorn, Swiss Alps
Nigel Stansen stood looking at the completely frozen lake. It brought back visions of his childhood when his father would take him fishing for trout. These days he would often salvage his fondest memories as a form of meditation. He remembered vividly the times when he would watch his father for hours, whipping the tip of the light cane rod, causing the almost invisible line to crescent above his head in a perfectly formed arc. The homemade fly would then soar out gracefully over the water and settle gently as a butterfly on the glassy surface. With two or three sharp, perfectly timed flicks, the lure would skip across the water until a giant fish would eventually leap from the depths to swallow its unsuspecting victim. The fight would then be man versus beast, a fundamental reality of existence both Nigel and his father understood.
Nigel had inherited patience and perfection from his father, two qualities that would eventually make him a master at plotting time itself. Nigel studied human evolution, over fifty thousand years of it. At one time, he truly believed he understood just about everything there was to understand about human origins.
In one day, Mehmet Shamir had turned his world upside down, and as each day had passed since then, he seemed to get further and further from anything he was able, with any certainty, to call an answer. Rational explanations could no longer offer him comfort. His structured and orderly life had ceased to exist.
He looked at the frozen water of the lake and imagined once again fishing for trout with his father. Fishing had offered him a logical and tactical order to his privileged childhood; his father had provided the rest. Now he just longed for even the slightest inkling of normality he had in that childhood. The reality was he knew that it was unlikely for him to ever again know anything like normality in his life.
Why had the Universe chosen to involve him in its mysteries? Was it some cosmic joke of godly proportions, to take someone so in control of their own lives and give them the epic responsibility of deciding the fate of everyone else? He looked from the lake to the glacier and behind it, to the peak of Finsteraarhorn. As snow-laden mist spiralled up from its crest, he thought back to the previous month when the mountain had almost claimed the lives of him and his team. Now, it all seemed so peaceful and beautiful, but its rage he would never forget.
He looked about and turned away from the lake. Further down the slope was a chalet. Next to it was parked his Range Rover.
‘I should make this our new headquarters,’ he thought, smiling to himself, ‘how appropriate, since it nearly all finished here, now it can be reborn here. I wonder if there is any trout in this lake.’
He looked back at the lake and for a moment he thought he saw someone standing next to it. He put his hand to his brow, shielding the blinding light that reflected off the snow and scanned its circumference.
‘My mind must be playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn…’
Small eddies picked up some snow next to the lake and swirled into the shape of a cone. Nigel shook his head and dropped his hand back to his side.
‘Must have been the snow that I saw!’
He turned away again and began walking back towards the chalet. If he had continued to watch, he would have seen the swirling snow form a distinct, ghostly human shape, almost eight feet in height and wearing what would have appeared to have been a hooded cloak.
As he walked back towards the car he thought more about his mother and father and how he missed them both. A freak accident had claimed both their lives only five years previous and not that far from where he was standing now. That too was a bit freakish. They were on vacation in the Swiss Alps when something had caused their car to swerve off the road and plummet into a ravine. The resulting fireball had meant that he had never seen them again and all that he had returned to England with were their ashes.
He had been an only child and while his father had been his rock, his mother had been just about the only woman in his life. He guessed the reason he had never really met the right woman, was because the ones he had met, had never come up to his mother’s standard.
As he reached the car he turned one more time towards the lake. He blinked and looked again. Now he was sure there was someone standing by the lake.
‘My God, who is that?’
The figure seemed to walk away from him, though it was way too far away for him to really be able to tell.
‘Am I seeing things,’ he thought, as he squinted to see into the glare, ‘maybe it's the ghost of my father, wouldn’t surprise me, he was stubborn enough not to stay in his grave. I always thought he would be trout fishing in the afterlife.’
Nigel took two steps back towards the lake but then there was a swirl of snow and as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone again. He stopped and watched the lake, squinting with the brightness of the snow, but it was definitely not there anymore.
‘I’m going crazy, but then nothing would surprise me these days.’
He turned and looked back at the abandoned chalet which was now very close to him.
‘Well, this is definitely where my headquarters is going to be, the old man has spoken.’
Nigel shook his head and walked back to his car, then drove off back down to the local town to make his arrangements.
Nigel Stansen
Chapter twenty nine
The Reflection 3