A snowy gust whipped at Anthony’s face as he lit a cigarette and listened to the first hints of thunder from the approaching helicopter. It crested the peak of the mountain and drifted down towards the landing pad on the edge of the chalet’s outcrop, and the monstrous, growling roar filled his ears and shook his body; a horrible thumping, thudding, thrumming vibration that spoke to the earliest, most fearful parts of his evolution.

The flying machine had taken the dramatic route over the peak on purpose: The long ascent up from the flatland at the mountain’s base—over the rolling forest-covered foot-hills, the wide band of scree and rubble from aeons of land-slides and avalanches; then the sudden steep rise of the mountain’s sheer face, jutting abruptly and acutely upwards, a row of jagged teeth stabbing into the empty sky; up and up and up and up and up, until your ears pop, and pop again. The air thins, the sky shifts from a deep blue to a thin blue-grey, and you are enveloped by the massless bulk of wispy cotton-thin cloud. The cloud falls away and then the peak is just above you and the helicopter sweeps up and over. The entire earth opens up and spreads itself out before you as you hang for one moment in empty sky, overwhelmed by the spectacle of creation itself. And then the vertiginous feeling in the pit of your stomach as the helicopter drops into the nothingness beyond the peak and begins its descent down the other side.

Really makes an impression.

Rare was the hotel patron who wasn’t awed by the experience. Which is how Anthony, standing on a secluded terrace on the less-fashionable, leeward end of the pile of shoeboxes, will shortly realise that he is in for trouble.

He leaned on the railing and looked out over the edge of the sheer cliff to the lake far below. The Sensensee {pron. zen-zen-zay} was a long, narrow Alpine lake formed by the mountain’s summer melt waters and stretched out along a sweeping curve, filling the steep valley between two mountain ranges. It took its name from the German word ‘Sense’ {pron. zen-zuh, trans. Eng. scythe}, because of its resemblance to the curving blade of the tool that was traditionally used to mow the fields of the plateau. On the near bank of the lake stood a village founded on ground that had been continuously inhabited for the better part of the last five-thousand years; its population still surprisingly robust, considering its position, so far removed from the modern world and its exciting and enticing hustle and bustle.

Anthony was not a farmer, nor the son of one. Nor was he a patron of the CryoLife Berglicht Hospice and Memorial Chalet. Quite the contrary. Anthony was the cryonics facility’s General Manager, and so was responsible not only for the ground-level, day-to-day operations of both the storage facility—which reached down some 217 metres into the heart of mountain below it—but also for ensuring the satisfaction of the chalet’s very wealthy clientele.

Said clientele was challenging at the best of times, but, given that the living patrons of the Berglicht are also bereaved {though, given that their “pre-ceased” relatives generally arrive pre-frozen, this bereavement was not necessarily particularly recent}, Anthony’s task was often rather more difficult than it would have been at a more conventional exclusive and luxurious hotel hidden in the heart of the Alps.

Which is not to say that he was unsympathetic to his clients’ emotional lability, though he had noticed, for example, a strong correlation between the size of the fortune to be distributed upon the reading of the will and the cantankerousness of those guests whose portion of that inheritance was the least secure.

Anthony’s reflections on this point had brought him to a philosophical realisation similar to our earlier comments about Charles; that being in the presence of death does funny things to people and generally causes them to behave in a more extreme manner than they customarily would. That said, having worked in hotels the whole of his adult life, Anthony would also freely admit that some people are simply selfish arseholes whether they’re at a funeral or not.

The thundering speck grew to a tadpole and then to a dragonfly and then to a hulking mass of finely-engineered steel, hovering a few metres from the ground, blasting away the snow on the helipad beneath it in great curling vortices of displaced air.

Touching down, the blades slowed, the door opened, and a leg clad in red leather stuck out a fur-fringed snow-booted foot. Another leg followed, and then the bottom hem of a long coat made of glistening-black chinchilla fur. Panning up, as it were, her face consisted of a sharp-chinned jaw, bony cheeks under large, dark glasses, and a forehead of smooth marble—which supported a furry hat that looked like a well-groomed cat taking a nap on the top of her head.

She surveyed the scene before her: The sweeping curve of stairs that led up to the previously described modest, and not especially elegant chalet which stood beneath the eternal, looming spires of the mountain’s jagged teeth.

She scowled.

Anthony, from this vantage a mere speck on an upper balcony, noted this change in the woman’s demeanour and thought to himself, ‘Oh, bugger.’