Rook: Snowman (14 page)

He straightened the mailbox to a reasonably acceptable tilt and then climbed into the car. Karen looked at him with her hand pressed tightly over her mouth, her eyes dying to laugh. Jim started the engine and swerved away from the curb. “All right, now you know why John Travolta’s famous and I’m not,” he told her.

“I thought you were much better than John Travolta.”

“You did? Well, maybe I was. When it comes to controlled staggering, John Travolta’s an amateur.”

She sat back and let the warm evening breeze blow through her hair. “Didn’t you used to have a pink car?” she asked him.

“That’s right. A Lincoln. I felt like Jayne Mansfield in it. But I found out after I bought it that the woman who used to own it committed suicide in the driver’s seat. Carbon monoxide, from the tailpipe. When they found her,
‘Kentucky Rain’ was playing on the car radio. Every time that song came on, the inside of the car started to smell like exhaust, and I used to have this terrible suffocating feeling. So I sold it. I’m too sensitive to stuff like that.”

“How do you cope with it? I mean, how do you deal with seeing a ghost? I’d be terrified.”

“They’re more frightening when you can’t see them. Like this thing that’s being going around the college, freezing everything.”

“You really think it’s some kind of ghost?”

“Ghost, spirit, entity. I don’t know what you’d call it. I don’t really have any idea what it is. It could be somebody who’s recently died, trying to get their revenge. You’d be amazed how vindictive some dead people can be.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all. A lot of dead people can’t get it into their heads that they’re not alive any more – especially people who were killed in sudden accidents. They’re angry with the people who killed them, and they’re angry with their friends and relatives because they’re all still alive while
they’re
nothing but spirits.

He stopped at the traffic signals and then he said, “Jack Hubbard’s father was the only survivor of an expedition up in Alaska that went badly wrong, and I’ve been wondering whether this spirit that’s bothering us is one of his dead companions.”

Karen said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course I’m serious. This is a serious situation.”

“But a
ghost
?”

Jim swerved on to the freeway, inviting a furious barrage of horn-blowing from a Mexican family with a huge yellow couch on the back of their pick-up.

“I may be wrong. It may not be a ghost. It may be a demon.”

“Oh, of course. A demon. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you don’t believe in demons, that’s why. But anything that the human mind can imagine can exist. I’ve had a run-in with an apparition that was made out of nothing but human fear. That’s all. Fear, and it took on shape of its own. We underestimate ourselves so much. Look at Uri Geller. He’s realized that the human mind is powerful enough to stop clocks and bend spoons. But what he hasn’t realized is that the human mind can create living creatures. If you’re afraid of the dark, let me tell you this: the dark will take on a shape, and the dark will come to get you, and the dark will do all of the things that you’re afraid it’s going to.

“I was reading last year about this woman in Cincinnati who didn’t like to hang her robe on the back of her chair because when she switched off the lights it looked as if there was a hunchback in her room. Her daughter accidentally left her robe over the chair one night, and in the morning the woman was found strangled with the sleeves of her robe tied tight around her neck.”

“You’re trying to frighten me.”

“No I’m not. I’m just making you aware that there are plenty of things in this world that we don’t really understand, and some of them are very dangerous.”

“So what are you going to do? About this ghost, I mean. Or demon, or whatever it is.”

“I have to find out what it wants – and then, I don’t know. I guess I have to exorcize it, or whatever.”

Jim was silent for a while. He wished the subject of ghosts hadn’t come up. He was too worried about Jack Hubbard, and malevolent spirits certainly weren’t the stuff of light-hearted seductive banter.

“You’re going to like the Slant Club,” he said, as they turned off at the Venice exit. “It’s kind of a cross between
the Cage Aux Folles and the Viper Lounge. And the pina coladas are a work of art.”

They parked outside the bright pink neon entrance, and Jim handed his keys to a car jock dressed in a satin mini-skirt and sneakers. It was still early, but the club was already crowded with pretty girls who were girls and pretty girls who weren’t girls and good-looking young men in Versace coats and Emporio Armani pants. Jim was known to the heavily built dyed-blond doorman because he was a friend of Mervyn, and he and Karen were ushered right inside.

Mervyn was in blazing form that evening – probably because he knew that Jim had brought Karen here to impress her. Dressed in yellow peacock feathers and turquoise ruffles, he sang ‘St Louis Woman’ and ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ and ended up with the earthiest version of ‘Tiptoe Through The Tulips’ that Jim had ever heard.

“Having fun?” he asked Karen, laying his hand on top of hers.

She smiled at him with her eyes sparkling in the pink cabaret lights. “It’s different.”

“I was offered a job today,” he told her.

“A job? Doing what?”

“Sitting on the Department of Education’s Literacy Action Force in Washington, DC. Madeleine Ouster asked me. It’s good money – almost twice what they’re paying me here.”

“So you’re going take it?”

“I don’t see how I can. I can’t leave Special Class Two right before their exams. Besides, I have this problem with Jack Hubbard to work out. I can’t risk anybody else getting hurt.”

“But surely somebody else can deal with it? The police are on to it, aren’t they? It shouldn’t be your responsibility in any case.”

“The police don’t believe in supernatural presences.”

“Maybe they don’t. But have you thought that you might be wrong, and it isn’t a supernatural presence? Maybe it’s a meteorological aberration, that’s all. They had hailstones in Australia last month, as big as footballs.”

“I saw footprints made out of ice.”

“Yes and maybe they weren’t footprints at all. Think about, Jim. You’ve admitted yourself that this is the first spirit that you haven’t been able to see.”

“Because it’s blind, that’s why.”

“Why should that make any difference? Stevie Wonder isn’t invisible, is he, just because he’s blind?”

Jim finished his drink and twiddled with the paper parasol. “Okay, I’ll grant you that.”

“So think about that job, Jim. I know how well you get on with your class. It’s legendary. But there are times when you have to stop thinking about other people and think about yourself. This could make all the difference to your career. You could end up with Madeleine Ouster’s job one day.”

“You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you? This is our first date and already you’re trying to pack me off to the east coast.”

Karen laughed and shook her head. “Come on,” she said, “why don’t you take me for a drive? We can look out over the city lights and pretend we’re seventeen again.”

They left the Slant Club and Jim drove them up into the hills, to a favorite vantage point up in Franklin Canyon. Karen was right: it was just like being seventeen again, sitting in the car and watching the glimmering lights of Los Angeles scattered across the night.

“Do you know who I always wanted to be?” said Karen. “I wanted to be Jane, in the jungle with Tarzan, looking after the wild animals.”

“You’re doing the next best thing, teaching biology to the students at West Grove College.”

“I wanted to wear a skimpy leopardskin bikini and swing through the trees.”

“Very appealing, but regrettably I couldn’t have joined you. I could never even climb the ropes in phys ed. Lack of upper-body bulk, that’s what the teacher told me.”

She shifted herself closer to him, and took hold of his hand. “You would have made a wonderful Tarzan. Thoughtful, loyal, caring. You’re all of those things.”

“No, it’s the cry. I couldn’t even manage the cry without coughing.”

They were silent for a while. Karen leaned her head back and looked up at the sky. “I always get frightened, looking at the stars. They make me feel like my life is so insignificant.”

“You’re right. It is insignificant. And so is mine, and so is everybody else’s. When anybody makes fun of the kids in my class, I always ask them why they think their life is so much more important than any of
their
lives. We’re all ants, in the end.”

“You’re not very politically correct, are you? You’re supposed to tell them that everybody’s life means something.”

“An ant’s life means something. It just doesn’t mean as much as the ant thinks it does.”

Karen pointed to the north. “What’s that star there? That bright one?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m not very hot on astronomy.”

“It’s not the Pole Star, is it?”

Jim turned his head around and peered at the star with more concentration. It was so much brighter than the other stars clustered around it that at first he didn’t realize that he was looking at a highly distinctive constellation. It was the same pattern of stars that appeared on the tarot card – the pattern of stars that was supposed to presage death by freezing.

“Jim – what’s wrong?” asked Karen.

“It’s those stars. They’re a seriously bad omen.”

“Oh come on, Jim, you’re letting this whole thing get to you.”

“I can take you to my apartment and show you a tarot card with that exact same pattern of stars on it.”

“Well, I don’t really think so. I think you’d better take me home.”

“Karen—”

“You’ve can’t be responsible for everything and everybody, Jim. The world will still go around without you.”

Jim didn’t say anything, but drove the Cadillac back on to the road, and headed back toward West Hollywood. He switched on the radio but it was playing “Kentucky Rain” and so he switched it off.

Nine

Jim slept badly that night. He imagined that he was walking through the snow in a bleak, Arctic landscape, and that a blizzard was pouring past him like a plague of white locusts. Through the snow he thought that he could make out a tall hooded figure, dressed in white, plying its way across the tundra, with its face always turned away from him.

He was cold and he was deeply frightened, but he couldn’t wake himself up. He tried to walk faster, to see if he could find out what the figure was, and if it could help him, but it always kept away to his left and well ahead of him – so far that he couldn’t decide if it were really there or not.

By the time the morning sun came slanting through his venetian blinds and woke him up, he felt exhausted, as if he had been trudging for miles and miles across cold and unforgiving terrain. He knew it was ridiculous, but he had to sit up and check his toes to make sure that he didn’t have frostbite.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair, and vigorously scratched. It was only then that he caught sight of Tibbles Two sitting upright on the back of the wooden chair on the opposite side of the bedroom, perfectly balanced, perfectly still, staring at him. When he sat up she yawned and licked her lips.

“I don’t trust you, TT,” he said, heaving himself out of
bed. “I’m not even sure that you’re a normal cat. What cat sits on the back of a chair like that? Haven’t you ever heard of gravity?”

He went into the kitchen and put some espresso coffee on to perk. Then he opened a can of catfood and dug a spoon into it to fill TT’s bowl. The only trouble was, the spoon wouldn’t penetrate it. He dug at it again, and then he realized what was wrong. The catfood was frozen solid.

Frozen
.

Urgently, he searched the kitchen. He opened cupboard doors and slammed shut them again. He looked into the broom-closet. Then he went into the living-room and circled around, searching for any signs of icy footprints. There was none. But then he stopped and looked at the vase of yellow orchids in the middle of the coffee-table. The water inside it was completely frozen, and the petals themselves sparkled with hoar-frost.

It had been here. The presence had been here, right inside his own apartment
. It hadn’t only been a nightmare, unless his nightmare had somehow taken on a life of its own, and prowled around his apartment while he was asleep.

“It was here!” he shouted at TT. “That goddamned thing was here, while I was asleep! Call yourself a watch cat? Why didn’t you mew or something? Or yowl? Or miaow?”

TT ignored him and went to stand by her empty food-bowl, flattening her ears as if she were the most long-suffering animal that had ever lived.

“Do you realize that thing could have turned me into a human iceberg? It could have killed me!”

He took out another can of catfood and furiously opened it, slicing his finger on the lid. He was angry, and shaken, but he was also relieved. After all, the presence hadn’t touched him at all. It was looking for Jack Hubbard, not him, but why it should have searched through
his
apartment he couldn’t
even guess. He didn’t have any clothing that belonged to Jack Hubbard, not like Ray, and he didn’t have any of his possessions, nothing that might have carried his scent.

Except, of course, his English homework.

He emptied TT’s food into her bowl, and it smelled strongly of tuna and chicken livers. How could cats eat that stuff, especially for breakfast? Wrapping a sheet of kitchen towel around his bleeding finger, he went back into the living-room. His briefcase was still in the same place where he had flung it last night, behind the couch, and he picked it up. It wasn’t its old dog-eared brown leathery self, it was dark with ice and completely rigid. The lock was frozen solid and he couldn’t open it, so he carried it into the kitchen, put it down on the table, and started to chisel off the ice with his potato-peeler. TT kept on greedily eating.

“You don’t care, do you?” Jim demanded. “All you care about is that great big overstuffed stomach of yours.”