BURIED SKY LODGE
“I mean, I guess it’s been like ten years.” Derrick was filling maraschino cherries with cream cheese for some godawful dessert cocktail. “Sure, why not, I’ll tell you about the weird ski lodge.
"There was a group of us who lived out in Durango who got paid by an agency to work as on-call event staff for remote parties in the Rockies. You could make a lot of money for just being an outdoorsy kid or meth addict if you could handle working service for the kind of assholes who think they can buy mountains.
“That being said, there was one client who paid significantly more than the rest. You had to be ready to go on a two hour notice for their gigs, and you would be moved there blindfolded. It was maybe about an hour and twenty to get to the destination, and the last thirty or so minutes of that were underground. Believe it or not, there was a ski lodge underneath one of the mountains. Nothing you can find on a map or anything. Real Illuminati shit. We were told, very explicitly, not to ask any questions to these people outside the basics. How they wanted their drinks, if they needed anything, so on and so forth. They only spoke to each other in Norwegian, so I couldn’t pick up on much of what they were saying, but they did nothing but eat and drink and sing until the second night came around. I worked a few of those banquets over the course of three years. Three-thousand dollars for two days of pouring shots of akvavit and, of course, my discretion.”
“When it came to the lodge grounds, if you could call them that, you could barely see the cave walls. It was so damn dark and quiet and cold. It had a strong, perpetual scent of nitrogen like after a storm, but more pungent. As for the slope itself, it seemed bottomless. The only time you could see anything down below was during the second night, during their ceremony. There’d be an old man who would ski down first, then light torches in pairs, while the rest of the men watched and recited what I'm pretty sure was the Lord’s prayer. Then one by one, they’d depart, and slalom down between the torches into the dark below. Eventually, the last one would snuff out the fires on the way down. The part that really fucked with us was, we never saw them come back up. There was no ski lift, nothing. Once they'd all vanished, the security detail would blindfold us again, and it was time to leave.”
“You never saw any of them again? Working there for years?”
“Never. Only saw the hosts who hired us on, a few staff members, and the guards. I presume there was another way out we didn’t know about, but I can’t shake the weirdness of it all. Maybe there’s just a pile of bones down there. Or maybe they stayed down in the dark, and there’s a way to actually live in those caves. I tried not to think about my life in Colorado too much after I got clean, but I still dream about that lodge sometimes. What it would be like, following those men down under the mountain, sliding between fading torches until there was no light left.”
“Do you ever remember anything meaningful from those dreams?”
“No. Well. There was one dream where I was getting my outfit tailored. They had us wearing these navy blue suits, and there was this guy, Roger, who cut them. In one of the dreams, he told me that the lodge was the corpse of a dead comet, that died on Earth before there was such a thing as being alive here. That the snow wasn’t really snow, but a sludge produced by ancient bacteria that needed the cold for their metabolism. He never explained what the purpose of the ceremony was, but he assured me that it was important. That I should trust that these men know what they’re doing, and I should focus on keeping them happy while I can.”
“He sounds like a great guy.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. I think so. I do hope he’s alright. He's the one who talked me out of coming back.”