(Lieutenant de Police) Max Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) is in the nearby town of Sarzac investigating the desecration of the grave of Judith Herault, a girl who died in 1982, and the theft of her photos from the local primary school. Another grave of yet another girl who died of pneumonia in the same year shows signs of an earlier desecration. Judith Herault was killed in a horrific highway accident while travelling with her family and her body only found months later. The mother was the only survivor and was so traumatized that years later she took a vow of darkness in a nunnery. The mother tells Kerkerian that when Judith was ten she broke her wrist, and they went to get help at the faculty's hospital in Guernon where she was born; she claims they were attacked by "demons" on their way back and, when they fled, her husband and her daughter were killed in the road accident. She says the pictures were stolen to erase her daughter from history, and that her face is a threat to the demons who have returned to complete their mission. She tells him it all began in Guernon. Niemans questions Fanny Ferreira (Nadia Farès), a glaciologist and a faculty child, who is immediately suspect because of her climbing ability and due to the fact that she is the fiancée of the Dean's son, something that she denies. Despite being a faculty child herself, she lives outside the premises and shows contempt for the school and its arrogant professors. She works for the university to steer away frequent avalanches, and is incensed when Niemans implies she might withhold evidence to protect the school. She tells him that anyone with good equipment could've hoisted the body up the cliff, and brushes off his obvious attraction. Niemans breaks into the dead librarian's office and finds details on the faculty history. He discovers that it was founded during the Second World War and financed with Nazi-money. The original faculty-staff were intellectuals who believed in creating a super-race based not on physical criteria but on intellectuality, and that was the real reason for their original inbreeding-problems. Soon after, the pathologist (François Levantal) reports that it was acid rain in Callois's eye sockets, which has not fallen in the area since the seventies. Niemans enlists Fanny to take him up the glacier to get ice samples to compare with