Clara and Aubergine have been stood up, and are shivering at the bottom of a lift, dressed for the promised opening party of a ski lodge at the top of this mountain. The two girls have fled from Florida, where Clara's parents owned a hotel, to northern Oregon, getting men to pay for their meals and stealing what they could from wealthy parties they got into. But since arriving in Oregon, the pickings have been slim, and this party had seemed like their best shot.

The girls decide to go up alone, without the boy who had invited them, and are greeted by a gruff mountaineer, who escorts them to the lodge. Inside, they are mobbed by guests, only boys, who offer drinks and take their coats. Though they slip into their easy social characters well, they are quick to notice they are the only women there—and that the guests are not the wealthy socialites they were expecting but just boys, all workers. Moreover, they realize they have taken the wrong lift after a guest tells them they're standing in the Emerald Lodge, not the Evergreen as they had intended. Though this is bad enough, Aubergine realizes that every man's eyes in the lodge glow an unnatural gold, and she recalls that a woman in town had told her the Emerald Lodge had collapsed, killing all the workers within. These men are all dead.

But the girls have no choice—the lift has stopped for the night and won't resume until morning. So they decide to stay, to keep up the pretense that the men are alive for fear of what will happen if they break whatever spell is holding the lodge and the men together. During the night, both girls end up upstairs with different men, but are interrupted by the arrival of 'the photographer.' As they head downstairs, they realize there is something terribly wrong about this photo session, and they start to run. Some of the men grab Clara and try to get her into frame, and she screams.

She tells them they are all dead, and after a moment, the ceiling begins to crack. The girls run, but in a last moment of clarity Clara hears an unlikely sound, a bird chirping. It is, ironically, a canary. The girls race for the doors and leap for the now running chairlift, and the bird screeches the whole way down.