I’m seventeen, I work weekends at a ski rental shop in Aviemore, and I thought I knew Cairn Ridge better than anyone my age. I’d done every run, knew every corner of that mountain. I mean, I basically grew up there. My dad used to joke that I had more ski miles in my legs than most instructors twice my age.
Looking back, I wish I’d stayed behind the rental counter that Saturday.
It was late January, one of those perfect Scottish winter days that tricks you — bright sky, fresh powder, cold that bites but doesn’t kill. My shift ended at two, and my mate Jordan had two lift passes burning a hole in his pocket. The mountain was supposed to close at four. We figured we had time for one last run from the summit.
We should have checked who was operating the lift.
The queue had thinned out by the time we got on. Most sensible people were already heading to their cars or warming up in the lodge with chips and Bovril. There were maybe six chairs ahead of us, a few skiers dotted along the line up the mountain. Normal. Nothing weird yet.
The chair snagged twice on the way up. I noticed it but didn’t say anything. You know how it is — you don’t want to be that person who panics over nothing. Jordan was talking about some video he’d watched, and I was half-listening, watching the treeline below us slide past. The Scots pines up here are ancient and crowded, dark even in full daylight.
It was when we were about two-thirds up that the lift stopped.
“Maintenance break?” Jordan said.
“Maybe,” I said.
We swung there for a few minutes. Then a few more. The cold started finding the gaps in my jacket almost immediately. I looked back down the line — I could see three other chairs hanging in the air below us, skiers on each one, and I felt something I couldn’t name yet. Something that sat wrong.
I should have trusted that instinct.
About twenty minutes in, the sky shifted from pale blue to that flat, mean grey you get before a Scottish winter dark sets in early. I pulled out my phone to call the resort’s main number. It rang out. I tried the ski patrol line. Same. Jordan was quieter now, his breath coming in small clouds, watching the trees.
“Do you see that?” he said quietly.
I looked where he was pointing. The treeline below us, maybe thirty metres down the slope. Something was moving between the pines — slow, deliberate, wrong. I thought at first it was a deer. But it moved upright. Then it stopped and seemed to just stand there, perfectly still, looking up at us.
“Probably just a walker,” I said. I didn’t believe it.
Then the voice came. Low at first, almost swallowed by the wind. My brain tried to make it into something ordinary — maybe noise from the lodge below, maybe another skier shouting. But it was too close, and too clear, and it was saying come down, just jump, you won’t feel it, just let go.
I felt my heart pound so hard I could feel it in my ears.
Jordan grabbed my arm. “Tell me you heard that.”
I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.
That’s when I made myself look properly at the chairs ahead of us on the line. There were four of them between us and the summit station. The first three had skiers on them, same as before — bundled up, not moving. Which I’d assumed was just people sitting still, trying to stay warm.
But nobody stays that still for forty minutes in freezing cold. You shift. You fidget. You wave at people. You look at your phone.
These figures didn’t move at all.
I raised my hand and waved at the nearest chair, maybe fifteen metres ahead. Nothing. I shouted. Nothing. Jordan was making a low, continuous sound under his breath that I don’t think he was aware of.
The figure in that chair — I’ll never forget this — was wearing a yellow ski jacket that had faded almost white. Patchy and worn through at the shoulders in a way that didn’t happen in one season. Their goggles were fogged completely opaque. Their gloves were the wrong shade of blue, a weird flat colour, like something drained of everything. And there was frost. Not on their gear. On them. Along the jaw. Across the shoulders.
I stopped looking at the chairs ahead.
It was close to four by now and fully dark was maybe thirty minutes away. The voice in the trees had gone quiet, which was somehow worse. Jordan had worked out that if we unclipped our bindings and used our poles we could lower ourselves down to the snow — the drop was maybe two metres, survivable if we landed right. I didn’t like the slope beneath us, steep and icy without a clean run-out, but I liked the alternative less.
“On three,” I said.
We landed hard. Jordan twisted his knee and yelped, and I grabbed him, and we just went — half-skiing, half-stumbling down through the darkening powder, not looking at the trees, not looking back up at the lift line. I could feel something watching us from the pines but I did not look. I made myself not look.
We made it to the base station. The operator’s booth was empty, lights off, door swinging open in the wind. A coffee cup sat on the desk, still upright. It had been there a while — the coffee inside was frozen solid.
The resort confirmed later that all guests had been evacuated and the lift shut down safely. No one could explain why the emergency phones weren’t answered.
They didn’t comment on the chairs.
To this day I don’t go near Cairn Ridge after noon. I moved back to Edinburgh for college and I told myself it was for the course, for the opportunities. That’s mostly true. Mostly.
I still ski. I just never take the last chair up.
