He waited for the figure to reach him, to check the guy hadn’t hopped on the chair without someone knowing he was there. It had happened before. Some girl from Germany last season had sneaked onto the quad from the unmanned half-way point and got stranded thirty-five feet up in the dark when they switched it off from the base not knowing she was there. She nearly bought it with hypothermia, and would have for sure if the guy driving the night trail-basher hadn’t got out for a leak and just heard her cries over the roar of his engine. Big changes after that. You count them on and you count them off, and no station is left unmanned while the chair is still running. So how come this guy got through when it was nearly dark? He’d find out. The chair was getting close, clanking its solitary passenger over the tops of the trees towards the expanse of flat snow between the pylons.

Sam waited, leaning forward on his boots, taking the opportunity to get his breath back after the effort of the run.

The chair stopped. Now there is one lucky guy, thought Sam. A few minutes later and he’d be long gone down the Serendipity trail. Sam pulled himself up and moved off down to where the guy was swinging in the air.

Strange though, that the guy was sitting so still and quiet. He didn’t raise a hand to Sam or look behind him to see what was up. He just sat there waiting and something about him looked like Sam had seen him before. The suit. That was it. As he drew nearer, even in the half-light, Sam recognized that old black suit with red and navy flashes on it. What a dinosaur from the seventies that was. They’d never heard of day-glo or fuchsia and peppermint back then. Every ski-suit had been black, navy or red and they were awful. And the one this guy was wearing was just like the one the Reverend Jenkins used to wear. Exactly like it.

Two more turns and he’d be right underneath him. The hat was the same as the Reverend’s too. An orange hill-walker’s woollen affair with a tiny bobble that clashed horribly with the suit. And the skis were the same. Beat-up Dynastars. And the gloves. And the blue scarf that was wrapped round the lower half of the man’s face obscuring all but his bespectacled eyes. And the spectacles. All the same.

Sam stopped sharply about twenty yards from where he was going. His heart was racing. Not from the skiing, but from the black things that had started to form in his mind again. It was crazy. The Reverend Jenkins had died eleven years ago. Mouth cancer. This was not him. It was a man dressed like him. But it was not him. Sam panted to control himself.