knife that was so clearly not ornamental. I waited until he was safely round the corner, and then ran to my car and drove the other way.

6

A small amount of money and only a little flattery got me a VCR in my room. Either the hotel was better than I'd thought, or my stunt in the bar had convinced the management that I was a guest whose needs were worth meeting. I waited with increasing impatience while a monumentally stupid youth made a mess of a very simple cabling job, and then shooed him out.

I took the tape from my pocket, and carefully inspected it. There was no writing on it anywhere. From the amount of videotape on the spool, it looked like it would run to about fifteen or twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.

I waited until my room-service coffee arrived. I wanted my environment just so. Eventually it came, still fairly warm. Miraculously, there were no fries with it.

I put the tape in the machine.

Four seconds of data hash, the white noise of null information.

Then the sound of wind, and a view of a high mountain pasture. In the distance, a postcard view of snow-covered peaks across a range — seen too briefly to identify. The foreground was a gentle slope covered in snow, cut off by a stern-looking building: no obvious coffee shop, or ski-wear emporium. There was no one around, no cars in the small lot. Out of season. The camera panned to show another administrative-looking structure, and severe grey clouds above. This view was held for a few seconds, the sound of a sleeve flapping in the wind discernible in the background.

Cut to an interior. The camera was held low, as if covertly, and the scene only lasted a few seconds. I rewound, paused the clearest image. It wasn't the world's best VCR, and the frozen picture jumped a little, but I could make out the public area of what looked like a ski lodge, with a cathedral ceiling. A long desk ran along one side, presumably the reception, but currently deserted. There was a large painting on the wall behind it, the usual easy nonsense by some overpaid and under-talented fraud. I could see the left-hand side of a towering fireplace, constructed out of river rock. An ornamental fire generated well-behaved ambience in the bottom. Nut-brown leather armchairs were carefully arranged around low coffee tables, each featuring a heavily varnished wooden sculpture celebrating the sentimentally revered wildlife of the old West: an eagle, a bear, a Native American — none of whom survived the old West in any great numbers.

I flipped the tape off pause and, on second viewing, saw that someone had been about to enter the area just before the scene cut. There was a shadow along the wall of a corridor leading off the top of the space, the sound of footsteps on stone.

Then a final exterior, back out in the parking lot. A little time must have passed since the first shot — assuming it had even been taken on the same day. The wind had dropped and the sky was a clear and savage blue. A medium shot of the stern building, which I assumed must have been the one we were just inside. A number of figures stood in the snow in front of it. There were perhaps seven or eight of them, though it was difficult to tell because they were all dressed in dark clothing, and standing close together, as if in conversation. No faces were visible, and all I could hear was the wind — except for right at the end, when whoever was holding the camera said something, a short sentence. I listened to it three times. It remained inaudible.

Then, as one of the figures seemed to start to turn toward the camera, the screen cut back to white noise.

I paused the tape, stared at the screen as it jumped and fretted. I didn't know what to make of what I'd seen. It wasn't what I'd expected. From the quality of the image, it looked like the footage had been obtained using a digital camcorder. I hadn't seen anything like that in the house. The video could have been shot pretty much anywhere in the mid- to Northern Rockies, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado: but it made sense for it to be somewhere in Montana, and probably nearby. I knew the kind of place it showed. Compounds for the rich, the country's most beautiful areas carved into private home-sites so the wealthy could slide down mountains without fear of bumping into anyone of average income. Some had gated security, most didn't even need it. Put one foot over the border and you knew whether you were welcome. Anyone thinking of burglary would slink right back out, stung to their very core.

My parents probably knew people in the area who'd got themselves a home with ski-in, ski-out convenience. My father might even have sold it to them. So what?

I restarted the tape.

Real noise. Music, shouting, loud conversation. A face, blurred and very close up, laughing uproariously. It fell across the frame to reveal a bar in the throes of a boisterous good time. A long counter ran down one side of the room, ranks of bottles and a mirror behind. Men and women stood in droves around it, bellowing at each other, at the barmen, up at the ceiling. Most looked young, others were clearly in middle age. Everybody seemed to be smoking, and the murky yellow lighting was hazed with clouds. The walls were plastered with posters in rainbow colours or stark black-and-white. A jukebox was working overtime in the background, cranked up so loud it was distorting out both its speakers and the microphone and I couldn't even tell what the song was.

It was obvious this scene was much older than the first on the tape. Not only did the video look like it had been converted from 8mm film, but the clothes the people were wearing — unless this had been some kind of laboriously authentic retro party — said this was an evening back in the early '70s. Terrible colours, terrible jeans, terrible hair. A look that said being 'tidy' had been judged and found wanting. My reaction was probably about the same as their parents' must have been: Who are these aliens? What do they want? And are they blind?

The camera swept and bobbed through the bar, with a verve that suggested the operator was either under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or very drunk indeed. At one point the picture pitched forward alarmingly, as if he or she had nearly fallen over. This was followed by a loud and prolonged belch, which degenerated into a violent coughing fit, the camera meanwhile held down so that it showed a patch of beer-slicked floor. Then it whipped back upward, and careered off into the fray as if fixed to a bumper car. My eyebrows crawled slowly up my head in bemused embarrassment, as I tried to get my head round the idea that it might be my father operating the camera. A few people waved or hooted as it moved past them, but no one called out a name.

Then the camera swerved abruptly round a corner, revealing an extension to the main bar area with people standing and sitting all around the sides. In the middle was a pool table. Some guy was hunkered down on the other side to take a shot. He was large and had a big nose and his face was almost totally obscured with hair and moustache and sideburns. He looked like a bear with the mange. Behind him wobbled a blonde woman with long hair, leaning on a cue as if it was the only thing holding her up. She was trying very hard to focus on the game, a frown of concentration on her face, but it looked like the world was getting away from her. Her partner didn't seem like he was having a much easier time of it, and was taking a very long while lining up for his shot. Closer to the camera, on the near side of the table, was another couple, both holding pool cues. They had their backs to the camera and an arm round each other. Both had long brown hair. The girl wore a big white blouse and a long skirt in dark purples shot with green; the man sported bell-bottoms in tatty denim and an afghan waistcoat that looked only recently tamed.