December 1
Ingrid Berg sits up abruptly. It’s the same dream as always, the one that comes to her again and again. The rumbling. The
white dragon. The snow on all sides. The shouting. The others disappearing. The darkness, the lack of oxygen, the panic. The
pain. In reality, that had come later—after they’d dug her out and she woke up in the hospital.
She doesn’t remember much from those first hours and days, but the bright lights, the people in white bustling around her,
the pain, and the blood—so much blood—she’ll never forget that.
She gets control of her breathing. She isn’t there now. Not under the snow, not at the hospital. She’s in her bed at the Glitter
Peak Lodge. She’s surrounded by darkness, and she’s alone.
***
Ingrid was a climber from an early age—first on the rocks near the hotel where she grew up, then in the mountains. There was something inside her that drove her forward, ever steeper and ever higher. People were surprised that her grandmother, Nana Borghild, allowed it— especially after what happened to her parents! But her grandmother had always been perfectly at ease. “Ingrid was born to climb,” she would say calmly. “Not letting her
climb would be like not letting a mountain hawk fly.”
The people of Glitter Peak had always been climbers; both Nana Borghild and Ingrid’s mother, Angelina, had been up in the
mountains since they were old enough to walk, even though it was somewhat unusual for women in those days. So the last thing
Nana Borghild wanted was to keep Ingrid from pursuing her passion. Of course, she made sure that Ingrid went to climbing courses,
learned how to belay and rappel, wore a helmet, found responsible climbing partners, and did whatever else it took to make
climbing as safe as possible. Nana Borghild trusted Ingrid. Ingrid had always trusted herself, too. She felt confident in
her abilities. She understood the mountain: her fingers instinctively knew where to hold, and she always knew where to place
her feet.
Over time, climbing became her whole life. She explored the world, sought out new challenges, and always felt safe—invincible,
even.
But then last year, her life had changed in a matter of minutes up there in the Himalayas. The images surged through her like
the avalanche they’d barely survived. Preben’s failure, the fatal consequences... she’d never get over it, and every time
she thought about what happened, it felt as if she was once again trapped beneath feet of snow, gasping for air.
She let the hot water flow over her head and body as she sang along to the song streaming from the radio: “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It was almost as though she’d forgotten that she couldn’t carry a tune. It was the first Sunday in December, and Christmas songs had already been playing for weeks. Shampoo, rinse. What a luxury it was to be able to take a hot shower every day! To let last night’s nightmares run down the drain. Ingrid had been on enough expeditions to be able to really appreciate the comforts of indoor life. Clean, dry towels. Hot water. Scented soap. She squeezed a generous amount of conditioner
into her hands and ran them through her long, curly hair to try to get some control over the tangles.
Turning off the water, she reached for a towel. For a fleeting moment, the hot water and the cheerful, jangly music had taken
her back to a time when life was completely different—when Ingrid was completely different. A time when she’d loved this song and the person who’d sung it to her, even though he couldn’t
sing, either.
She stopped and wrapped herself in the towel, suddenly feeling as though she was getting cold. Her body tensed up. It normally
did that when it remembered.
She threw on some clothes before applying a thick moisturizer to her hands and face. After a few intense minutes with the hair dryer on full blast, her hair was dry enough to tuck under a hat. Ingrid looked at herself in the mirror, the one that had been hanging next to the door for as long as she could remember. As a child, she had lived with Nana Borghild here in the manager’s apartment at Glitter Peak Lodge—“The Residence,” as the hotel staff called it. Now, Ingrid was living here alone. Her grandmother had insisted on it when Ingrid came home to take over running the hotel. Nana Borghild had moved into a smaller apartment on the same floor, “The Pensioner’s.” The rest of the staff lived in the annex, with the exception of the hotel facilities manager and the chef, who had their own apartments in the main building, and the caretaker, who had a kind of bachelor pad in the basement.
Ingrid put on her lace-up boots and a thick wool sweater, ran down the stairs to the reception area, and strode out to greet
the morning light. She had time for a quick walk before she had to get started on the day’s work.
The sun was rising over Glitter Peak. Pink rays broke through a thin layer of clouds and silhouetted mountain peaks and trees.
Just under two hundred miles from Oslo and an hour’s drive from Lillehammer, through valleys and up steep mountain roads,
Glitter Peak Lodge was close to the tree line. Only birches and pines grew up here—no big spruces as on the slopes down toward
Dalen. That made the view all the better. The colors of the sky were constantly in flux, and the very shape of the massif
in front of her seemed to be changing with the light.
There was a crunching beneath her boots as Ingrid crossed the heather on her way toward the scree. The moss and lichen on
the ground were covered in frost that glittered in the early morning light. The berries that still hung on the blueberry and
lingonberry bushes were encased in a thin layer of ice and looked like works of art, more elaborately and delicately designed
by nature than anything a human could have created.
It was unusual for the ground to be so bare in December, but despite a cold autumn, there’d been little snow so far this year. Only the peak high, high above was covered in an icy white. The enormous mountaintop stretched up toward the sky. Sometimes you couldn’t even see the top because it was shrouded in clouds—like a dwelling of the gods high above the human world. It was no wonder it was named Heaven’s Horn and had so many associated myths and stories.
Below Heaven’s Horn, the waterfall, Styggfossen, was a blue-white, monumental cascade frozen in time.
The sun melted through the cloud layer, and the light changed color, getting warmer. Ingrid shut her eyes and let the sun’s
rays warm her face. More birds and animals were starting to wake up now. A small flock of Siberian jays fluttered from the
top of a birch and darted past her. She knew they were headed for the door to the kitchen, where there might be breadcrumbs
from the hotel staff, although the chef was wary of the little jays, which she called “bad luck birds”—an unfair name, really.
Bad luck wasn’t caused by birds.
Ingrid looked around. If you were lucky, you could spot herds of wild reindeer on the mountainsides. This morning, however,
there weren’t any to be seen.
The sun rose, and the light grew whiter, the glittering sharper. The winter sun wouldn’t stay above the horizon for more than
a few hours before it warmed up in color once again, said a sleepy “good night,” and went down in a sea of red and orange.
Dusk would then send colorful streaks over the horizon before the darkness returned—a long, cold, and dark winter night in
the mountains of Norway.
But—Ingrid took a deep breath—there was much to be done at Glitter Peak Lodge before then. The jays weren’t the only ones who had business to take care of. The hours between sunrise and sunset also meant a lot of activity for Ingrid and the staff at Glitter Peak Lodge; Christmas was rapidly approaching and they had to prepare for the arrival of the holiday guests and test the dishes that would be served in the restaurant. In just a few weeks, they would find out whether everything they’d worked for over the past months could really succeed.
Ingrid turned abruptly and walked back across the heather toward the hotel, which dominated the landscape. No matter how familiar
the colossal building was, Glitter Peak Lodge never ceased to impress her. It was tall and wide, solid and walnut-stained,
with white window frames and dragon-style carvings. The Berg family had been living at the foot of the high mountains for
hundreds of years and running the hotel for 130 of them. Glitter Peak Lodge had been there ever since the very first tourists
had set foot in the mountains in the 1800s; it stood at an altitude of four thousand feet, where the paved road ended and
the ascent to Heaven’s Horn began.
The hotel had grown over the decades, and several extensions and annexes had been built in the same style as the main building.
As a result, the hotel now had several apartments and family-friendly accommodations in addition to twenty rooms and two suites
in the main building. Ingrid thought the extensions had been nicely done. A place like this should have a traditional building
style. Here, there were none of the ugly additions you could see in some chain hotels. No, this was the family-run Glitter
Peak Lodge, and Nana Borghild had made sure to maintain the original style.
The large lot in front of the hotel was covered with gravel, and a wide staircase with ramps on both sides led to the entrance,
which was protected by an awning and flanked by large, wrought-iron lanterns.
Upstairs, many of the rooms were still dark and had their curtains drawn. Not all of the guests had gotten up yet, but the hotel was far from full occupancy anyway. The windows on the ground floor were fully lit, though; the staff was already hard at work there. Chef Maja Seter had probably been in the kitchen since around five. The early bird gets the worm was one of her favorite sayings. When the other employees came into the kitchen around six thirty, Maja was usually ready
with freshly baked rolls. She would also have had time to empty and reload the dishwasher, knock over a saltshaker and throw
a pinch of salt over her shoulder to prevent bad luck, set the table for her coworkers, light the first candle in the Advent
candleholder, and make coffee. And now that the sun was fully up at nine o’clock, she would already be well underway with
preparations for tonight’s dinner as well.
It was the right choice , Ingrid thought. It was the right choice to come back here . It wasn’t that she was exactly happy about the choice she’d made—to the extent that she’d actually had a choice. Running the hotel involved too many worries,
too much work, and too much uncertainty to make her truly “happy.” Still, something swelled inside her every time she looked
at the hotel—a seed of something that she might even call contentment. There was something about venturing out, having a look
around, then coming back. On her morning walks, she sometimes even found an inner calm that complemented the cold, glittering
silence around her.
But the peace rarely lasted long. And today it was particularly short-lived. Before Ingrid had even reached the front door,
a loud scream cut through the silence.
***
“MOUSE! Mouuuse! ” The old kitchen table creaked beneath Maja Seter’s considerable weight. The chef’s sturdy legs were shaking in her clogs
in the middle of the checkered tablecloth. “Get it out! Get it out ! We can’t have any mice in this kitchen!”
“Mouse? Where is it?” Ingrid had sped straight to the kitchen when she heard the shouts, and she was now standing in the doorway,
looking up at the terrified chef.
“It ran right in front of me when I went to turn on the oven!” Maja shouted. “I’m telling you, it stared at me with these
big, red eyes... then it disappeared under the stove! It was huge ! A real beast! Actually, maybe it was even a rat...”
The chef was breathing heavily and clutching her chest. “We should have taken a couple of Meowgret’s kittens up here,” she
continued before Ingrid could even answer. “We never had any mice or vermin back when we had a cat.”
Ingrid wasn’t totally sure whether having cats in the kitchen would be fully in line with food hygiene regulations but didn’t
have the energy to get into that discussion right now.
“I think the mouse is cute. He likes it here.”
It was only now that Ingrid realized Hussein was also in the kitchen. The six-year-old was sitting on the bench at the window
and smiling at her with two missing front teeth. She looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
“Have you seen the mouse before, Hussein?” she asked.
“Yes, his name is Speedy because he’s so fast. He likes bread. And cheese.”
Ingrid looked at him for a long time.
“You haven’t been feeding Speedy, have you?”
“No, Auntie Ingrid!” Hussein quickly averted his eyes.
“You can’t feed mice, you know. Maja doesn’t want them in the kitchen.”
“You can be sure about that,” Maja said from atop the kitchen table. “They’re deadly! Don’t you know they carry the plague?
We need traps! Or cats! Or poison! Or all of it! Now! ”
“What’s going on?”
Aisha Mansour was standing in the doorway, a confused expression on her beautiful face. Aisha was otherwise the epitome of
order and control. Her long, straight hair was gathered in a clip at the base of her neck, and she was wearing black pants
and a navy blue blazer. Aisha was new to the role of facilities manager at Glitter Peak Lodge—the first person Ingrid had
hired when she took over as manager.
Aisha and her son, Hussein, had arrived in Norway in the spring and moved into the hotel in time for the first day of school
in the fall. Ingrid was happy she’d been able to give them this opportunity, but it wasn’t charity: Syrian-Jordanian Aisha
had excellent references from previous jobs; she was educated, spoke good English, and had extensive experience in the hotel
industry. After only a few months in the country, both Aisha and Hussein could speak fluent Norwegian as well. Hussein’s father,
Mohammed, was from Syria, but was currently living in Jordan.
“Hussein, what have you gotten up to now? And why is Miss Maja on the table?” Aisha asked.
Before Maja could shout “ Mouse! ” again, Hussein had hurried over to his mother and buried his face in her blazer. “Miss Maja wants to kill Speedy!” he sniffled.
“Just because he’s fast and likes cheese!”
***
When the situation in the kitchen was under control again—after Aisha had taken Hussein to her office, Maja had climbed down
from the table, and the mouse hadn’t shown any signs of returning—Ingrid served herself a big mug of coffee. Now she needed
to find Nana Borghild.
Around now, Ingrid’s grandmother would be done with the inspection round she made each morning. Ingrid could picture her stroking
her finger over moldings and railings. They would be dust-free today, just as they’d been every day for the fifty years Borghild
had been manager—with the possible exception of a few chaotic weeks in the early 1990s. She usually greeted the staff in the
kitchen while Ingrid was out for a walk. Then Borghild would bring a cup of coffee into the library, and Ingrid always looked
forward to sitting down with her.
Ingrid had grown up with Nana Borghild; she was Ingrid’s rock, her steadfast pillar. Borghild had been widowed quite early,
when Ingrid’s grandfather Christian died of a heart attack at only fifty. By then, Borghild and Christian had already been
married for almost thirty years and had run the hotel together for more than twenty. Borghild continued to run the hotel with
her daughter, Angelina, and her son-in-law, Marius, Ingrid’s parents.
But misfortune struck again when Ingrid was three years old. Just a few years after Christian’s sudden death, Angelina and Marius were killed in a car accident when they drove off the road coming home from a summer party. There was no explanation, and no other cars had been involved. Was it a moment of inattentiveness, or perhaps an animal had run into the road? No one knew. In the midst of her grief, Borghild was left in charge of both the hotel and a toddler at the age of fifty-three.
Borghild had then run the hotel on her own for the past thirty years.
Ingrid admired her grandmother more and more as she realized the many challenges of running a hotel. Nana Borghild had preserved
Glitter Peak’s traditions as a family business while simultaneously facilitating skiing, hiking, ice climbing, mountain climbing,
and all of the other activities the terrain could offer.
There’d been ups and downs. Competition from larger hotels, fluctuations in bookings, the need for expansions and improvements,
bureaucratic challenges and changing economic conditions—Nana Borghild had been responsible for absolutely everything. Until
now, when Ingrid had come home to take up the baton.
Every morning since Ingrid’s return, she and her grandmother had met in the library after breakfast. They used these meetings
to go over practical issues and discuss how to deal with crises, big and small. And in the category of big crises was the
issue of the mouse; pests in the hotel actually were a real problem, no matter how calm Ingrid had tried to appear in the kitchen. The health inspectors would definitely not be impressed by mouse droppings in the corners.
The door shut with a creak behind her, and even though the entryway was beautifully decorated with spruce branches and candles for Christmas, Ingrid let out an exasperated sigh as she passed the reception area and headed toward the library. She smiled at the new girl standing behind the desk, but Ingrid’s mind was occupied with practical matters. She had to remember to ask Alfred to oil the door hinges. Or maybe it was just as easy to do it herself. There was also the matter of checking those planks in the basement wall that might be rotting. The list of tasks was never-ending. There was so much to take care of, so many things that could go wrong in a hotel. As if the physical maintenance weren’t demanding enough, you also had to make sure that the website was up-to-date and that the booking system worked, and preferably keep up an appealing social media presence as well. You were responsible for ensuring that the right number of staff showed up at the right time, that the food orders made sense, that hygiene rules were observed. Then there were all the things you couldn’t do anything about. Closed roads. Power outages. Illness. Conditions that kept people away.
In her darkest moments, she feared that something would happen that was beyond her control, something that made their guests
abandon Glitter Peak Lodge so that she’d have to throw in the towel and sell the hotel to cover its not-so-insignificant debts.
There were quite a few people who wanted to buy Glitter Peak Lodge—she knew that. She’d been contacted by almost all of the
hotel chains that had established themselves in the mountain valleys in recent years and that increasingly dominated the Norwegian
hotel market, but the prices they’d offered had been absurdly low.
Ingrid had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to give up so easily, though. Once she’d decided to take over running the
hotel, she did it wholeheartedly. The stakes were high, and the risk of failure just as lofty.
She opened the door to the library and found her grandmother sitting in one of the large armchairs by the fireplace.
“Ah yes, it’s a mouse year. I’ve spoken to Barry about it,” Nana Borghild said, setting a large book on the table next to her—a tome about the history of the area, which she was so interested in.
“Nana. Barry is a stuffed bear,” Ingrid said. She sat down in the chair beside her grandmother and looked up at the big bear
next to the fireplace, its mouth open and its paws stiff. Tall and dark, Barry stared at them wordlessly, his gaze steady.
“Yes, I know that,” her grandmother continued, straightening her cardigan. “Do you think I’ve gone completely senile?” She
gave Ingrid a stern look. “Barry’s been at the hotel almost as long as I have, you know that. But he’s holding up a lot better.
He also says he’s seen worse. In the great mouse year of 1961, for example, there were so many mice in the hotel that the
cats couldn’t keep them away. There were even some here in the library, gnawing at his foot. Just look. You can see the marks
there in his fur.”
Ingrid looked at her grandmother again and saw a twinkle in her eye. Ah, she was joking! Thank goodness! Ingrid had to laugh.
She’d been away for so long that she’d almost forgotten her grandmother’s subtle sense of humor. No, Nana Borghild was still
“all there,” to be sure—but Ingrid did think that her grandmother might actually exchange a few words with the stuffed bear
every now and again.
“And how are preparations going otherwise?” her grandmother asked, stroking a hand over her snow-white hair. “Your friends
will be arriving in a few days, too, won’t they?”
Well, perhaps Nana Borghild really did still have just as much control over everything that needed to be done. But her grandmother
made a point of the fact that she was now stepping down and that Ingrid was the new manager of Glitter Peak Lodge, with all
of the responsibility that entailed. And it was a lot of responsibility. There was a reason Ingrid had run away from it once upon a time—down from the mountain and into the city, and eventually up to other mountains all around the world.
But the time felt right now. Her grandmother was over eighty, and Ingrid needed a fresh start.
There had been quite a lot of stress after what happened in the Himalayas, and Ingrid had just wanted to get away—away from
Preben, away from the attention, away from all the memories, and, perhaps most important, as far away from the international
mountaineering community as possible. It was a bit paradoxical, then, that she had come back here to Glitter Peak Lodge with
its view of Heaven’s Horn, which she’d climbed so many times in her youth and which she now, at the age of thirty-three, was
sure she’d never set foot on again.
Nana Borghild had once told her that the most important thing for a climber is to be good at forgetting. Anyone who climbs
mountains needs to be able to forget the fear, forget all the falls and frozen fingers and battles and impassable obstacles—and
try again.
And that’s exactly how it was. You had to learn to forget the pain in order to keep going. You had to find the joy in the
sense of achievement, to push away the difficult memories, over and over again. And Ingrid had done that, until something
happened that was impossible to forget.
She lifted her gaze. Her grandmother had asked something. Ingrid had to pull herself together, focus on what was happening
here and now.
“The preparations... yes, they’re moving forward. Tonight, we’re tasting the pinnekj?tt . If the mice haven’t eaten it up, that is. We want to make sure it’s just right before we serve it to the guests,” Ingrid said. “Do you think it’ll be a hit, by the way?”
“I should think so! People want hearty, traditional food when they come up here.”
“I remember we used to serve meatballs when I was little,” Ingrid said. “And then there were lots of ribs and medisterkaker at Christmas. And sausages.”
Nana Borghild smiled. “You loved sausages! And the ribs were popular, of course. In the old days, it was traditional to have
a m?ljefest one of the days before Christmas Eve.”
“M?ljefest? What’s that?”
“Well, in those days, we boiled the ribs before baking them and served the stock—the m?lje —with m?ljebr?d . It was wonderful! And then we had rakfisk one day during the holidays. Maybe that’s something you could try on your tourists? You have to be pretty tough to eat rakfisk!”
Ingrid raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know if I’ll risk it. Can’t you get poisoned if you prepare it the wrong way?”
Borghild laughed. “Maja doesn’t make mistakes. You know that. And it certainly sounds like you two have control over the menu.”
Borghild stroked her stomach. She’d always been careful about maintaining her figure, and even now, at her advanced age, she
had only a slight hint of a roll over the waistband of her tweed skirt. “There’ll be a lot of samples for us in the next few
weeks, then,” she added, smiling. “With all of Maja’s cakes and cookies as well. Not that it will matter for you, Ingrid.
Fat never sticks to you. You don’t have any extra lumps or bumps. But the rest of us have to be careful, you know.”
Ingrid instinctively touched her belly. Her grandmother was just trying to give her a compliment, but she had no idea how hard the well-intentioned words hit home—because this was the one thing Ingrid had never spoken to her grandmother about. Ingrid had to look away. No, she didn’t have any lumps or bumps. And she probably never would, either.
***
She’d set aside the time between breakfast and lunch to do some work in the office, but she found it difficult to concentrate
on her long to-do list, which included budgets, menus, invoicing systems, and letters from the tax authorities. She felt the
restlessness creeping up on her, and her eyes kept wandering out the window and across the beautiful terrain outside. Was
this really how she was going to live her life from now on? What she appreciated so much about being here—in addition to the
hotel and her grandmother, of course—was first and foremost the nature: the challenging terrain, the light in the mountains,
the changing seasons, the fresh air... But now Ingrid spent most of her time indoors, staring at a computer screen.
While nobody had said so outright, she was expected to contribute her experience as a mountaineer as well. She was so well
known as a climber and expedition leader that a lot of people would find it exciting to meet her and benefit from her experience,
and perhaps even to have her as a guide on trips in the area or hear her give lectures. Her friend and business adviser Vegard
Vang had suggested this. Theme weekends. Inspirational seminars for businesspeople. There was real money in that kind of thing!
Sure, but if only they knew how she really felt, she thought. Who would be inspired by a mountain climber who was now afraid of heights?
She’d just collected herself and logged into the accounting software when her phone rang. It was Aisha.
“I saw something strange up in the attic,” she said. “I think it might be dry rot.”
“Oh no!” Ingrid exclaimed. “Mice, dry rot... What’s next?”
She put her head in her hands. Would this even be possible—this attempt at revitalizing the hotel and bringing it into a new
era? Or was she in over her head?
She wanted to just walk away from the whole thing—to tell her grandmother that it was all too much, that they had to sell
the hotel.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t give up now.
“I’ll look at it with Alfred,” she said.
Keep going , said a voice in her head. One foot in front of the other.