Faces loomed in and out of my vision, a terrible beauty in their eyes, coming closer, then withdrawing. Those whom I had met in the Ostal, greeting me once more. Familiar strangers. The man who had sat beside me scowling, his skull now pushing through the skin. In place of his drunken eyes, hollow sockets the size of a man’s thumb. In place of his greasy mouth, emaciated lips and blackened teeth. The gentle face of Na Azéma, almost puzzled as her features slipped away from her, leaving nothing but white bone and the memory of whom she had been.

I knew why I had been brought here. I had been brought to bear witness, both to the manner of their dying and to the nature of the prison I’d fashioned for myself.

Without understanding, there can be no redemption. And at that moment it made perfect sense to me how I, a man who for so many years had walked the line between the quick and the dead, might be able to hear their voices in the silence when others could not. For ten years, I’d heard and sensed things that lay beyond the boundaries of the everyday. I’d been haunted by images of George taken back into the earth. Now, in this place, I was witnessing skin slipping from bone, the putrefaction of flesh, the cavalcade of life and death and decay accelerated. Each feature twisting in upon itself, rotting, collapsing. Lives lived, lives lost. Cradle to grave.

It was too much to bear. I was aware of a different sound, one all too human. The sound of a grown man weeping. At last, I was crying. For George, for myself. For all those who lay forgotten in the cold earth.

Then I felt it. A sudden shift, a thickening of the air. A prickling at the base of my spine and a lightening of the pressure on my chest. They were still with me, the winter ghosts, but they were retreating into the wings.

‘Fabrissa?’

I raised my head and looked straight ahead. The briefest sensation, no more than the tremor of a butterfly’s wing. A moment, not of enlightenment, but of grace in a twist of tumbling black hair and a pale face. I scrambled to my feet and took a hesitant step forward. The vision slipped instantly away, perishing, falling, no sooner seen than gone.

‘No.’ My cry rang out around the cave. ‘Stay.’

I clenched my left hand into a fist, feeling my broken fingernails digging into my scratched palm. I tried to remember the feel of her, so light, the touch of her, her bright grey eyes and the laughter lines at the corners of her mouth.

I took another step closer to where she had been. The weakening beam of light picked out a fragment of blue lying on the ground. A deep blue, the colour of my brother’s eyes, of flax blossom in the Sussex fields in June. The exact colour of the dress Fabrissa had worn. I could see clearly, too clearly, threads of yellow where the cross had been.

I knelt down beside her, more than anything wanting to feel the frail white skin beneath my fingers. But there was only the hardness of bone beneath my hand. I tried to speak her name, to bring her back to life, but I could not.

My ribs seemed to tighten, to crack. Then, at last, I heard her, dazzling in the darkness, speaking to me and me alone.

‘Freddie…’

‘I’m here,’ I said, half weeping, half laughing. I knew she could hear me. ‘I kept my word. I came to find you.’

Did I hold her to me then? I cannot have done, for I knew she was shadow and dust. And yet, I have the memory that, for an instant, I felt her warm in my arms and that I sighed. I had come for her and so she had returned to me. Come to take me home.

I could feel myself slipping further into the darkness, but now I welcomed it. And she started to talk, finishing the story she had begun. I laid my head in her lap, I am sure of it, as I listened, entranced once more, by the beautiful rise and fall of her voice telling the end of her tale of the mountains and the ghosts that dwelt within them.

My eyes slowly closed, lulled by the rhythm of her words, until finally all was silence. And in that silence she slipped away. I felt her go. I cried out, but her ghost, spirit, emanation, whatever it was – whatever she was – was gone. And this time, I knew she would not return.

I was slipping further into unconsciousness. I did not wish to wake. As the light dimmed and dimmed again, I thought of the lights going down in the auditorium and the hush of that Christmas Eve in the Lyric Theatre. I thought of Neverland and Pan. Of George and me eating jellies and giggling. Of how we were both wiser now and knew dying never was an awfully big adventure. And then I was smiling to think that I might see George again, and Fabrissa, and that that would be all right.

Then, suddenly, I was struggling. I couldn’t join them, not yet. The thought was as sharp as a splinter under my skin. Although I had found her, I had not brought her home. Just as I had never brought George home.

‘Fabrissa…’

But the word died on my lips. I was floating down through the darkness, lower into the ice floes of the Antarctic, into the impenetrable silence. The silence of the end of days.

White faces, white walls, white sheets on the bed.

When I came round, I was in the hospital in Foix. I wasn’t sure what day it was, nor how long I had been in the hospital, nor how I came to be there. I had been unconscious for two days, they told me. The fever I’d so foolishly thought to have shrugged off had returned with a vengeance, brought on by the exertions of the climb and hypothermia. For a while, my life hung in the balance.

For forty-eight hours, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Time had little meaning. How could it, after what had happened in Nulle? Now, then, in the past, in the present, all just words. The passing of days, as measured by the accretion of seconds and minutes and hours, was too rigid.

Madame Galy made the journey down the valley of the Vicdessos to sit with me. Though unconscious, I was aware of her gentle presence, her soothing hand on my brow. And in the seclusion and privacy of the night, when she did not think I could hear, she whispered of her son who had gone to war, like George, and never come back. Of his name, Augustin Pierre Galy, carved with those of his friends on the memorial in the corner of the place de l’Église. When the fever had worn itself out and finally I woke up, she was no longer there.

At first, I couldn’t remember what had happened or how I had come to be there. I looked down and saw my hands were bandaged and felt pressure on my temples. I realised I had a dressing on my head, too tight for comfort, and my throat was sore. As if I had been shouting. Or possibly even crying.

Little by little, my memories started to surface. I tried to piece together the sequence of events, all of it, from the point at which the car went off the road. There had been a storm and I had crashed, that wasn’t in doubt. Nor that I had found my way to Nulle and Fabrissa. But everything from that point became blurred, indistinct.

I did remember climbing up into the cave and dismantling the prison wall with my bare hands. I remembered chancing upon the letter, then making my way through the narrow gap that led to the inner cave. Then finding the skeletons of those with whom I had spent an evening. The winter ghosts, as Breillac called them, long dead. I remembered Fabrissa. And my eyes filled with tears.

Later, when I was a little stronger, I learned the doctors had been mystified by how ill I was. The fever had been aggressive and my body temperature in the cave had dropped to perilously low levels, but at the same time there was no severe injury that accounted for my disorientation. The abrasions on my hands and face were minor, and though I appeared to have knocked my head, it was nothing serious. Only one nurse understood, a pretty dark girl from Nulle originally, with round kitten eyes. She knew I had ventured too close to the grave and had been tainted by it. Death had slipped into my bones.