Rook: Snowman (23 page)

They stood beneath a black sky, lost in a never-ending torrent of snow. Jim reckoned that they must be very close to the place where the Ghost Salmon Glacier joined up with the Sheenjek; and where the rocks rose up on the west side of the glacier valley, their black faces scoured by centuries of fierce weather and gradually inching ice. But he wasn’t totally sure. The Ghost Salmon Glacier curved right around before it joined the Sheenjek, and he didn’t know whether he was looking west or east; or even north, where Dead Man’s Mansion stood.

But now TT began to mewl and scratch and to struggle restlessly inside his windcheater. In the end, she stuck her claws right through his woolly cable-knit sweater and into his chest.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, ripping down the zip-fastener and allowing TT to tumble out onto the snow. She landed on her feet, vigorously shook herself, and paused to sniff at the snow. Then she bounded off to stand on a small rocky outcrop only thirty or forty feet away. She was almost lost in the whirl of snowflakes. Sometimes she was plainly in view; at other times she vanished completely, as if she had
never existed. But at last Jim saw her right on the very peak of the rock, and she was staring ahead of her, unwavering, unflinching, even though she couldn’t have been able to see more than either of them.

“Come on,” urged Jim. “She knows where it is; and she’s getting excited; so it can’t be too far to go now.”

“We’ve lost our geo-sat positioning equipment so we’re trusting a
cat
?”

“Do you have any better suggestions?”

“As a matter of fact, maybe,” said Jack. He pointed to a sloping bank of ice off to the left of the outcrop where Tibbles Two was sitting. Jim peered at it and said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

But even as he was speaking, he thought he glimpsed the shudder of long white robes in the darkness; and a tall shapeless hood; and a bony hand carrying a staff. The apparation melted away, almost as soon as he saw what it was. But Jim was furious with tiredness and despair. He had no energy left for riddles or mysteries or optical illusions. He picked up his rucksack and said, “Let’s go. We’ve found ourselves a guide now. We’ve found ourselves a fourth man.”

Jack looked wildly in every direction. “It’s here, isn’t it? You’ve seen it.”

Jim grasped his arm and said, “Trust me, Jack, for God’s sake. This is destiny. This is one of those times when you find yourself doing exactly what the Tarot cards predicted, no matter how hard you’ve been trying to do something else.”

“But it wants my
soul
, Jim. Not just my body, that would be bad enough. My
soul
, man.
Me
. Everything that makes me who I am. And I wouldn’t die.”

Staring at Jack through the teeming snow, Jim suddenly began to understand who he was – the ‘who’ that he was so
frightened not to lose. When he had first arrived in Special Class II, he had appeared to be cool and self-possessed, even arrogant. But he had the same contradictory mixture of adventurousness and self-doubt that his father had shown; and he had something else, something very special: a deep belief in the mystic world that must have come from his Inuit mother.

“Remember one thing,” said Jim. “The Snowman is duty bound to guide us, and save our lives. That’s its job description. The setting-up comes later.”

The tall white figure was still standing in the blizzard, less than fifty feet away. It looked even taller and even stranger than the image that Jim had seen in the mirror, standing in the woods at West Grove. Maybe the snow was distorting it. Maybe he was seeing it face-to-face for the very first time, unreflected, unshrunken. But it terrified him. It was his nemesis, without a face. And what made it even more frightening was the fact that he had to rely on it, to save himself.

He grasped Jack’s arm and said, “Come on, Jack. We can do this. You’re young and I’m crazy. What better qualifications do we need?”

The tall figure moved off into the blizzard. Jim and Jack began to follow it, climbing the slope until they reached the place where Tibbles Two was still standing, her fur thick with snowflakes. Jim knelt down and she jumped toward him. He picked her up and stowed her into the front of his coat, where she wriggled and squirmed until she could make herself comfortable.

They found themselves climbing knee-deep in snow up a steep, angled gradient. It was snowing so hard that visibility was reduced to less than twenty feet, but the terrain reminded Jim of the maps that Henry Hubbard had shown him in Los Angeles, and he guessed that they were
gradually climbing up the left bank of the Ghost Salmon Glacier. Within five or six miles they should reach Dead Man’s Mansion – always supposing that it existed, and that it wasn’t simply a deception.

Several times the blizzard was so blinding that Jim and Jack couldn’t work out where they were going. But whenever they stopped, clearing their goggles and staring around them, the tall white figure was always there, off to their left, waiting for them, waiting to guide them on.

For Jim, most of the journey up the side of the glacier was a disconnected blur, like a broken film whipping through a cine-projector. His feet were so cold that he could no longer feel them. His fingertips burned with frostbite. Every breath dropped down into his lungs like two bucketfuls of chilly cement. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear anything; he couldn’t even think.

Several times he slipped and dropped to his knees. But whenever he knelt in the snow, the tall figure in the white robes was always waiting for him, scarcely visible, and he knew that it was going to guide him to safety.

“I’m coming, damn you,” he croaked, and climbed up on to his feet again, and carried on. And only a few feet behind him, connected by his orange cord, came Jack, staggering with every step, his head thrown back in tiredness and delirium, but still walking – still managing, somehow, to drop one foot in front of the other.

Jim lost count of time. In any case the dial of his watch was frozen over with a solid pebble of ice. The ground grew steeper and steeper, until they had to climb it on their hands and knees. The tall figure stayed well ahead of them, on their left, occasionally turning as if to make sure that they were following it, but most of the time
striding ahead with its tall stick penetrating the snow, its head slightly bent, oblivious to their suffering.

They climbed higher and higher. Jim reckoned they must have scaled a slope of more than 500 feet. He was well beyond gasping. Every muscle in his body felt as if it had been taken out and beaten with a steak mallet. Behind him, Jack was groaning with pain, but he managed somehow to keep on climbing.

And then, the ground began to level off. The snow began to spin away, and dance in diminishing eddies, and the clouds began to clear, as if somebody were tearing them apart by hand.

And then, as they were able to stand up straight, they saw that they were standing on a high rocky shelf, above the snowclouds, with the moon shining pale and true, and the turmoil of the blizzard well below them. There were stars scattered everywhere, ridiculous showers of stars, and mountain-peaks glistening for fifty or sixty miles in every direction.

But the figure beckoned them on, more urgently now, up a gradual rise; and as they reached the top of it they saw what had always been drawing them here.

It was a huge Gothic house, built in the style favored by wealthy self-made men just before the First World War. It stood overlooking a valley that was now filled with clouds, but which must have afforded it extraordinary views, all across Ghost Salmon Glacier and the mountain ranges through which the glacier crept its way, carrying the thousands of souls of the Inuit’s dead catches.

The house had a balcony overlooking the valley, and a veranda all around, and two high chimney-stacks. Except for the chimney-stacks, which were constructed of granite, it was built of solid gray seasoned timber, which must have been cut from the forests further down the valley,
and dragged up here by teams of dogs, since the weather was far too severe for horses.

The house was embellished with decorative balconies and carved shutters and circular windows high up in the roof. It was ghostly and derelict and silvery-gray in the light of the moon, the haunted house to end all haunted houses; and yet it had a period magnificence all of its own, a ruined grandeur, just like the
Titanic
at the bottom of the ocean.

“Dead Man’s Mansion,” said Jack, with awe.

“And it’s not an illusion; or a mirage; it’s real.”

“It’s real to us. But maybe there are some people who can never see it.”

“It’s real, for God’s sake,” said Jim. He walked across the last stretch of icy ground and walked up the steps onto the verandah. “It’s real. Dead Man’s Mansion. It actually exists.”

The tall figure watched them from a distance, half-hidden in the darkness. Jim said to Jack, “You wait. It won’t go away. It’s going to want something for bringing us here. And it’s probably going to want your soul, too.”

They walked along the veranda until they reached the front door. It was then that Tibbles Two began to struggle and thrash inside Jim’s coat. She fought so hard to get out that he had to untie the laces around his waist and let her drop out downward on to the wooden boards. Immediately she rushed toward the front door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed it open.

Jim approached the front door with less enthusiasm. It was huge and heavy and cracked by the weather. A huge bronze knocker hung in the middle of it, cast in the shape of a snarling wolf. Jack approached it and took off his glove, and touched it very cautiously, right on the nose.

“The Wolf-Spirit. The evil one who chases Inuit hunters
and kills them when their dogs are lame or their sleds get trapped in the ice.”

“So what’s it doing on this door?”

“It’s there to keep away lesser mischievous spirits. It’s there to show that the person who lives in this house has considerable powers; and is not to be monkeyed with.”

Jim hesitated for a moment before opening the front door any further. The tall figure was still watching them, standing close to a rocky outcropping that looked just like a huge beckoning figure. But it made no approach and it gave them no sign. Maybe it hadn’t yet completed its task of saving their lives: they were still miles away from safety, in a freezing and hostile environment, with no way of calling for help. The way the legend went, it had to save a life before it could exact a payment for it.

“Well, let’s take a look and see if the stories are all true,” said Jim, pushing open the front door. They stepped inside and found themselves in a large hallway with paneled walls and a brown and white tiled floor. An Edwardian hat-stand stood by the door, on which a frozen Derby hat still hung beside a half-rotted fur
chapka
. There was a large mirror opposite, with a gilded frame. It was misted by age and cold, and its mercury backing had become veined with black, but they could still make out their own fearful images in it, as if they were trespassing on somebody else’s long-vanished life.

Jim nudged open a door to the right. It swung open with eerie ease, revealing a drawing-room crowded with heavy, frozen furniture. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, its original glass pendants covered by sparkling stalactites. Everything had the whiteness of intense cold: the same whiteness of George Mallory’s skin, when they had discovered his body on Everest. Everything looked as if it had been breathed on by cold and death and passing time.

They left the drawing-room and walked across to the dining-room. The door was open a little way, and Jim suspected that this was where they would find Tibbles Two. He opened it up, and saw by the powdery moonlight that illuminated the room almost as bright as day that he was right. Tibbles Two was sitting on a chair beside the large oak dining-table, her head proudly raised, her eyes slitted in complete satisfaction. Somehow, in some extraordinary way, Tibbles Two had come home.

More than that, she had found her master. Because sitting in a carver chair at the far end of the dining-table, almost perfectly preserved by the cold, was the bleached-faced figure of a man in a long black overcoat, his hair white and tufty but still mostly intact, his eye-sockets blackened and crinkly like prunes, his nostrils gaping, his lips drawn back over higgledy-piggledy teeth that were startlingly yellow. Underneath his overcoat he still wore a three-piece suit, a starched collar and a bow-tie. His right hand lay on the table in front of him, still clutching a pen, and there were sheets of paper scattered everywhere, as well as Tarot cards and other fortune-telling cards of every description. Jim recognized the nine of spades from Grimaud’s
Sybille des Salons
: the death card, hollow-eyed, carrying a scythe.

“So here he is,” said Jim. “Edward Grace, in person.”

He walked around the dining-table. His breath fumed with every step. The temperature must have been sixty degrees below, and even in high summer it must have always been well below freezing. Edward Grace had been preserved almost as well as a body in a cryogenic center, waiting for the day when medical science could find a way to revive him.

Jim lifted his rucksack off his back, lowering it carefully on to the floor, because he was still carrying Laura’s mirror. He approached Edward Grace’s body while Jack hung back
a little way, looking around at the frozen velvet drapes and the frozen ornaments and the shelves stacked with solid-frozen books.

Underneath Edward Grace’s left hand lay a leather-bound notebook. Jim tried to ease it out from underneath his fingers but they all appeared to be fused together by the intense cold, in the same way that Ray Krueger’s fingers had been fused to the railing. He tried again, tugging it harder this time, but it still refused to budge. He made sure that Jack wasn’t looking, and he hit Edward Grace’s fingers with a karate chop, snapping his frozen fingers off at the knuckles. The notebook came free, even if it did have three white fingers still attached to the front cover.

He tried to pry the notebook open, but the pages were stuck together, as inseparable as the slices of a deep-frozen loaf. Turning to Jack, he said, “Light us a fire, will you? If we’re going to survive the night, we’re going to need some heat.”