Rook: Snowman (12 page)

“Did the snowman save
you
?” asked Jim.

“Me? No, those are only stories.”

“But you’ve done all of this research … and you’re still looking for him,” said Jim, nodding toward the television.

“Maybe just to satisfy myself once and for all that he
didn’t exist. I survived and my two companions died. I don’t like to think that it was down to anything other than luck.”

Jim could sense that Henry Hubbard had more to tell him, but he fell silent, as if he couldn’t bring himself to put it into words. He was obviously still grief-stricken by the deaths of his fellow-explorers; and it must have been hell to put together a documentary of everything they had done together. Jim could see dozens of photographs spread out across the living-room table, photographs of smiling bearded men in bright Arctic clothing, their arms around each other, laughing, optimistic. Now there was nothing left but the snow flying across the television screen.

“I’m going to ask you a straight question,” said Jim. “Can you think of any possible connection between your expedition to Dead Man’s Mansion, and what’s been happening at West Grove College?”

Henry Hubbard gave him an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

Jim waited, and then he said, “You don’t think that, somehow, that there’s a connection between the cold you experienced in Alaska, and the the cold we’re experiencing here? And that Jack could be the link between them?”

“How could there be? It’s not logical.”

“Ray Krueger losing his hands to frostbite, that wasn’t logical either. I’ll tell you something, Mr Hubbard. A whole lot of terrible things happen in this world that aren’t logical, but they happen nonetheless. No summer in the year 1816. The
Titanic
going down. Frost in June. Blizzards in mid-July.”

Henry Hubbard said nothing more. Jim finished his beer and said, “Well, I’ll be going then.” He stood by the door for a moment, watching Henry Hubbard in front of his snowstorm television, and then he went out and closed it behind him.

As he climbed back into his car, he hesitated. The evening was still warm, but he distinctly felt a faint chilly draft blowing on the back of his neck. He looked around him, at the car-cluttered concrete driveway in front of Pico Villas, but he couldn’t see anybody. He looked behind, to Pico Boulevard, with its noisy, jostling traffic. Nothing unusual.

But then he thought he heard a tapping noise off to his right, coming along the cracked concrete sidewalk. A slurring tap, as if somebody were sweeping a stick from side to side, and giving a little sharp tap at the end of every sweep.

He looked around, but he couldn’t see anybody at all. This wasn’t a part of town where people walked very much. Yet the tapping noise continued, and it sounded as if it were coming closer.
Tap
! – sweep –
tap
! – sweep –
tap
! – until it sounded so near that Jim involuntarily took a step back.

Then he saw them. On the sidewalk in front of him, glittering marks appearing, one after the other, like footprints. They came nearer and nearer, and for one moment he thought that they were heading directly toward him. He pressed himself back against the side of his car, and the footprints passed in front of him, only a few inches away. At the same time he felt a sub-zero coldness unlike any coldness that he had ever felt before. This wasn’t the bracing snap you felt on the ski-slopes; or the fresh cold you felt when you were out on the ocean. This was a dead, still cold – a cold that could crack rocks, or freeze a body for ever. This was the cold of the Arctic night, in which penitent monsters floated through the darkness on rafts of pallid ice.

A prickling sensation crept all the way up Jim’s back. One hand was resting on the top of his car door, and he felt the metal being emptied of all of its evening warmth. The windshield suddenly bloomed with white frosty flowers.

His breath smoked. Over by the sign that said Pico Villas, a yucca plant sparkled with ice. Whatever it was that was passing him by, it was capable of lowering the temperature within a fifty-feet radius all around it. Its footsteps continued until they reached the signboard and then they stopped, although the tapping continued,
tap
–
tap
–
tappity
–
tap
, nervous, inquisitive and quick.

Jim didn’t dare to move, didn’t say a word. If there were any kind of spirit here, he would normally be able to see it. But he couldn’t make out anything except frosty footsteps, and even these were rapidly beginning to fade. Cautiously he knelt down and touched one, and it was made up of thousands of needles of sparkling ice, infinitely fragile.

The tapping continued. Patient, but threatening. There was no doubt in Jim’s mind that whatever this invisible presence actually was, it had come looking for Jack. He strained his eyes but he couldn’t see even the vaguest ripple in the evening air. Maybe he was losing his ability to see spirits and phantoms and out-of-body travelers. Or maybe there was something very different about this particular manifestation. Maybe the intense cold was capable of creating a creature that couldn’t be seen and couldn’t be touched, while it could freeze everything around it with complete impunity.

It waited for a while, and Jim had the impression that it was trying to sense whether Jack was any place near. It didn’t seem to be interested in him at all, in spite of the fact that he was less than twenty feet away, his thin arms covered with goosebumps.

After more than five minutes, the tapping started up again, and then the sweeping, and the frozen footsteps continued eastward toward Rexford Drive, sparkling in the streetlight, until they finally disappeared. Jim waited for a moment, listening. Then he swung himself into his car and found
his keys with fingers that were numb with cold. He started up the engine and pulled out of Pico Villas in a cloud of smoking rubber.

He was sure of it now: a malevolent spirit was searching for Jack. It had tried to locate him at school, without success, and Ray Krueger had been frozen instead. Now it had arrived at Jack’s home. Even if it was somehow connected with Henry Hubbard’s ill-fated expedition to find Dead Man’s Mansion, it obviously wasn’t looking for Henry Hubbard himself. So what did it want? And why? What could Jack have possibly done to make it so determined to freeze him?

As he drove home, Jim kept thinking about that tapping sound along the sidewalk. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what. But when he stopped for a red light at the intersection of Venice and Palm, he saw a specialist pet store on the opposite side of the street called Strictly For The Birds. In the window, in a huge domed cage, sat a large red and green parrot, the kind of parrot that Long John Silver might have carried on his shoulder.

Long John Silver, from
Treasure Island
. And who was the terrifying character in the opening chapters of
Treasure Island
who had tapped his way down the road to the Admiral Benbow Inn? Blind Pew.

That was the
tap
-slur-
tap
that he had heard. The tapping of a blind man’s stick, feeling his way. A blind man, or a sightless spirit. Why else would it have frozen the washroom, unless it had been obliged to rely on its sense of touch or smell to tell it that Jack was there? Except that he hadn’t been there, of course – only his sweatshirt. And why else would it have frozen Ray Krueger, unless it had believed – mistakenly – that it was freezing Jack?

The lights changed to green and the car behind him blasted
its horn. Jim gave the driver a wave of apology and took a left turn toward home.

There was one thing more that worried him: if the spirit had come to Jack’s apartment block, looking for him, then it knew that it had frozen the wrong person. That meant that Jack was still in danger, and so were any other students at West Grove Community College who happened to get in its way.

Eight

The next morning, Dr Ehrlichman held a special nondenominational prayer assembly so that the students of West Grove Community College could all pray for Ray Krueger’s recovery in their own way.

Dottie Osias gave an address which she had written herself, and which Jim found deeply touching. She delivered it in a high, asthmatic voice, her cheeks flushed with determination.

“Ray Krueger is one of those people who seem to believe that the universe is something they’ve invented in their own minds, and that everybody they meet is somebody they’ve invented, too. I guess in a way you could say that he thinks he’s God. But just like God, he always takes special care of the world that he’s invented. He’s a leading member of the West Grove environmental study group. He went upstate last summer to fight for the redwood forests, and he spent three days helping to rescue a stranded minke whale on Will Rogers State Beach.

“Everybody knows how tender Ray can be with animals; but not everybody knows how tender he can be with people, too. He suffers from an emotional problem which sometimes makes him shout out rude and aggressive things he doesn’t really mean. That upsets quite a lot of people, and I can understand that. But behind all of those outbursts, there’s
a very special person who cares so much for everybody he meets; and I mean everybody.

“I remember my very first day at West Grove. I didn’t have any friends because my family had just moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland, Ohio. I was overweight. I was asthmatic, and all of the eucalyptus trees in the college grounds didn’t help that any. Nobody spoke to me and I didn’t even know where I was supposed to go for class. I was too embarrassed to ask anybody, because I was in Special Class II, which meant that I was the next best thing to a retard.

“I was sitting alone crying. But Ray Krueger saw me, and came over to me, and asked me what was wrong. It took me a long time to tell him, but he was so patient and understanding; and in the end, when he found out that I was going to the same class that he was, Mr Rook’s class, he put his arm around me and led me there, and told me that I was going to have a great time in Special Class II. It wasn’t a class for retards, he said. It was a class for people who cared.

“Well, Ray Krueger cared. And we care for him. And no matter which God we say our prayers to before we go to sleep at night, let’s make sure that we make a special plea for Ray, to help him through his pain, and to bring him back to us. Not intact in body, maybe. But intact inside of his head. Because the world needs people like Ray. I know that I sure do.”

As everybody filed out of assembly, Jim was immediately approached by Dr Friendly, accompanied by a toothy fortyish woman with bouffant ginger hair and a bright green suit.

“James … I want you to meet Ms Madeleine Ouster, from the Department of Education. She was supposed
to make a visit yesterday, but obviously, under the circumstances …”

With a jingle of gold bangles, Madeleine Ouster shot out her hand. “Mr Book! I’ve heard so much about you and your Special Class II.”

“Not Book, Rook,” Jim corrected her.

Madeleine Ouster blinked at him. “Book, Rook?”

“Maybe you’d be good enough to take Ms Ouster along to your first class, James,” said Dr Friendly. “You know … show her why West Grove Community College thinks that you’re such a star.”

Jim gave him a look that would have killed a parrot on the opposite side of the street. But he laid his hand around Madeleine Ouster’s shoulders and guided her toward Special Class II, while he gave her his full ‘gravely disadvantaged but bravely struggling’ speech about his remedial students. “These young people are having to fight against impossible odds, just to be literate. Everything’s against them. Society, their parents, television, peer-pressure. You have to understand how courageous they are.”

“What interests me, Mr Book-Rook, is your approach. Most remedial teachers rely on simple texts like Dr Seuss and children’s classics. But you’re teaching your students Walt Whitman and Hart Crane and Marianne Moore.”

“They may find it difficult to read and write but that doesn’t mean that they’re stupid,” Jim told her. “I think it’s a mistake to start them on overly simple texts, especially at this age. They get bored too quickly, and who can blame them? You’re nineteen years old and you’re going to read about
Green Eggs & Ham
for two weeks? The answer is to challenge their intelligence, to make them think. Once they’ve started to think, their syntactic skills soon catch up.”

He pushed his way into the classroom. As usual, it was
chaos, with Mandy Saintskill and Christopher L’Ouverture rapping together, and the air thick with flying pellets. Washington Freeman III standing on his head and Suzie Wintz was flapping her hands to dry her freshly polished nails. Instantly, however, the pellets stopped flying and everybody was sitting at their desks with earnest, attentive looks on their faces. Jim made a point of looking to see if Jack Hubbard, and there he was, thank God. Obviously the blind spirit hadn’t returned to Pico Villas last night.

Jim said, “I want to introduce you to Ms Madeleine Ouster, from the Department of Education in Washington. Ms Ouster is interested in the work we’ve been doing here in Special Class II. I hope you’ll welcome her and show her that this remedial class is the equal of any other English class in the country.”

Tarquin Tree stood up and gave Madeleine Ouster an exaggerated bow. Then he clapped his hands and said, “Everybody here … says aloha and hi … and looks you in the eye … like a piece of the sky … we’re going to show you … that we know the lingo … much better than bingo … so you go back … and say we’re on track … and you’re going to be … Ouster the Booster!”

Everybody applauded, including Jim. Madeleine Ouster gave a thin smile and said to Jim, “Why don’t you carry on? I’ll sit in the corner and watch. This promises to be educational, to say the least.”

Jim walked up and down the aisles between the desks, saying nothing at first. He waited for quiet. He waited for everybody in the class to guess what he was thinking about.

Eventually, he said, “We stood and prayed for Ray today. Ray would want us to carry on with our work, bettering ourselves, day by day, the way that he was trying so hard to better himself. So that’s what we’re going to do. But
we’re not going to forget that we have a classmate and a friend who needs our love and our support, and that what happened to him could have happened to any one of us.