Rook: Snowman Read online

  He nodded. He felt utterly stunned. But he also felt a rising anger, too. Nobody was going to maim and kill his students, nobody. And he was going to do whatever it took to stop it happening, now.

  Ten

  He hammered on the door of Henry Hubbard’s apartment like a man hammering on the door of hell. After a few moments Henry Hubbard opened it, looking shocked. Jim pushed past him into his apartment and went straight into the living-room. Jack was there, too, sitting on the couch with a brightly colored woven blanket wrapped round his shoulders. He lifted his head and blinked at Jim in bewilderment.

  “Mr Rook?”

  Jim said, “Suzie Wintz is dead.”

  “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. Oh, God.”

  “Who’s Suzie Wintz?” asked Henry Hubbard.

  “A classmate of Jack’s. A young girl of nineteen years old from a broken family background with very little chance of ever becoming very much more than a cocktail waitress or somebody’s beaten wife. She drowned today when the college pool froze over. We thought that we could maybe save her but we couldn’t.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Henry Hubbard.

  “Oh, but that’s not true. You know exactly what to say. You know why that pool froze over, just like you know why that handrail froze up, and the washroom was all iced up. There’s something here and it’s looking for Jack and it freezes everything that feels like Jack or smells like Jack. It wants him, and I want to know why.”

  Henry Hubbard turned his face away. “I can’t tell you that.”

  Jim went up to him and grabbed his shirt and stared him fiercely in the eye. “A girl died today, Mr Hubbard. A young boy has lost both of his arms. Whatever this thing is, it’s going to get Jack in the end, and then what will you say to me? ‘No comment’? ‘I can’t tell you that’?”

  Henry Hubbard took a deep breath. Then he said, “Jack … why don’t you leave us for a moment?”

  “No,” said Jim. “He’s one of my students too. If you have anything to say that directly concerns him, I think he has a right to hear it, don’t you?”

  Henry Hubbard sat down in one of the armchairs. He lowered his head for a while. Then he said, “Very well. You don’t give me much choice, do you?”

  “This is not about choice. This is about survival.”

  “Well, yes. You’re exactly right. It is about survival. I never really believed that it would come to this. But now that it has … I’m afraid that I don’t really know what to do about it, how to stop it. That sounds pretty damned feeble, doesn’t it? But sometimes life throws you a problem and you simply don’t have the wherewithal to deal with it. The faith, or whatever it takes.”

  He sat down. Jack was staring at him as if he had never seen him before – as if he had just discovered that his father was a total stranger.

  Jim said quietly, “What really happened in Alaska, Mr Hubbard?”

  “It was the worst blizzard that any of us had ever experienced. The winds were so strong that most of the time we could barely stand up straight. It was no use hoping that anybody would come to pull us out of there. The weather was far too severe for an airplane or a helicopter.

  “On the third day Randy fell down a rocky slope and broke his ankle. I strapped it up and we took it in turns to help him hobble along. But after nine hours we were all exhausted and Randy was in too much pain to go on. We decided that we’d pitch our tent and that Randy and Charles would stay there together while I went on to find help.

  “I walked through that blizzard for a whole day. We had all experienced the feeling that a ‘fourth man’ was with us, but now that I was on my own I started to see it more clearly, and closer. A tall figure in a white hooded robe, carrying a long staff. It was always off to my left, and slightly ahead of me, so that I could never see its face.

  “Once or twice I shouted out to it, but it never showed any signs of hearing me. If I stopped for a rest it went striding on and disappeared into the snow, but when I started walking again he reappeared. It frightened me, but at the same time it reassured me, too, because I thought that it must know where it was going, and that as long as I followed it I had a chance of survival.

  “Of course I didn’t have the video camera with me now, so I couldn’t take any pictures of it. That’s why I’ve been looking at the video footage so hard … to make sure that it was real, and that it wasn’t just an hallucination. Sometimes I think I can see it, but then I rerun the video and look again and it was only a flurry of snow.”

  “So what happened?” asked Jim. “Did it guide you out of there?”

  Henry Hubbard took a deep breath. “By the time it started to grow dark, I still hadn’t reached any trading posts or settlements and I still couldn’t see any landmarks. I was expecting to come across the Sheenjek Glacier, which would have showed me the way south to Fort Despair. But the terrain was all the same, mile after mile, and none of my navigational equipment was working. I didn’t have a tent. The ground was so frozen so hard that it would taken all night to dig myself any kind of shelter. I kept on walking but I didn’t know where I was going and I was quite certain then that I was going to die.

  “They say that when you’re dying of exhaustion and hyopthermia you reach a point where all you want to do is lie down and let the snow cover you and go to sleep. But I didn’t feel that at all. I felt angry. I felt angry because everything had gone so badly wrong, and the weather had been so severe, and because I was going to die so young and never see my son again. I railed against God, if you must know, for letting me down. Hadn’t I always prayed? Hadn’t I always believed in Him? And so where was He now – now that I really needed Him?

  “I collapsed on to my knees. I couldn’t walk any further. It was then that I saw the figure standing not far away, quite still. I dropped my flashlight and when I managed to pick it up the figure was standing even closer, so close that I could have touched it. Although the wind was blowing so hard, its robe didn’t stir at all. It was brilliant white, with a kind of soft white halo of light all around it. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I couldn’t even tell if it was human. Its face was completely hidden inside its hood.

  “It stood beside me without moving for – I don’t know – maybe it was only ten minutes but it seemed like hours. Then I said, ‘Can you help me? Are you here to help me or are you just going to watch me die?’

  “For a long, long time it didn’t say anything at all. Then it spoke to me. It’s very hard to describe its voice, but I won’t ever forget it for as long as I live. It was like thin ice cracking, that’s all I can say. It could have been either a man or a woman, I couldn’t tell. It had an accent of some kind but I don’t have any idea what it was. It said, ‘You didn’t come here to die, did you? You came here looking for glory.’

  “I don’t think that I have ever been so frightened in my life. There was something about it, that figure. Its presence was so cold that it made the blizzard seem warm, by comparison. At least the blizzard was alive, howling and shrieking and full of whirling snow. But this figure, this was something else. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was Death. You know, Death with a capital ‘D’. The Grim Reaper, in person.

  “I shouted at it. Well, I had to shout, to make myself heard. I said, ‘I’m not interested in glory any more. I want to live, that’s all! I want to survive!’

  “The figure was silent for a while. Then it said, ‘How much do you wish to survive? What will you give me, in return for your life? Will you give me the thing that it is dearest to you?’

  “I said—” and here Henry Hubbard had to stop, overwhelmed with the memory of what had happened, overwhelmed with what he had done.

  “You said what, Mr Hubbard?” Jim coaxed him.

  Henry Hubbard lifted his eyes in a look of utter despair. “I said it could have anything at all, so long as I survived. You see, I didn’t really believe that it was real. I thought it was something inside of my head. Not an hallucination exactly, or a mirage, but
a kind of external projection of my survival instincts, to help me think more rationally about how I was going to get out of this situation.

  “I said it could have everything I owned. Everything. But it said, ‘What do I want with possessions, here in the cold? I want warmth. I want the warmth of a human soul.’ I said that I didn’t understand. What soul? And that’s when it said, ‘I want you son. I will let you live, in exchange for the soul of your son.’”

  Henry Hubbard’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s when I was sure that it wasn’t real. Because how could a figure in the middle of Alaska know that I had a son? That’s when I was sure that it was my own mind playing tricks on me. So I said, yes. You can have my son’s soul, and anything else you want, but just let me get out of here alive.”

  “You offered it my soul?” said Jack, incredulously. “You’re my father! You offered it my soul?”

  Henry Hubbard nodded. “I don’t have any excuses, Jack, except that I was still convinced that I was hallucinating. The figure said, ‘Be assured that I will keep you to that promise. Others have tried to renege on their agreements with me, and they have come to regret it.’ I mean, for God’s sake, here was this tall mysterious figure in the middle of a blizzard and it was talking like my lawyer. I had to be hallucinating.”

  “But you weren’t,” said Jim.

  “No. The figure knelt down beside me in the snow and said, ‘Climb on my back.’

  “At first I didn’t want to, but it stayed where it was, waiting for me, and in the end I put my arms around its neck and climbed on to its back. I could feel its body through its robes: it was bony, as if it had hardly any flesh on it at all. But it hefted me up, and put its arms under my thighs to stop me from sliding off, the way you do with your kids, and it began to walk.

  “I felt unsafe and desperately uncomfortable, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of its shoulder bones, but I was too exhausted to have any choice. The figure kept on walking through the blizzard and after a while the joggling began to send me to sleep. I tried not to close my eyes but I couldn’t help it. All I could hear was the wind screaming and the snow pattering against my face and the crunch, crunch, crunch of the figure’s feet, as it kept on walking.

  “I must have slept for hours. I woke up in the morning to find myself lying in the snow outside a small Inuit trading-post called Anatuk. The wind had died down and the sun was shining. An Inuit woman came out of the trading-post and saw me, and called her husband. They helped me inside, and the rest you know.”

  “You didn’t see the figure, or any sign of it?”

  “I saw footprints, leading to the place where I was lying. But there was only one set of them, so I told myself that they had to be mine.”

  “The figure was carrying you, remember.”

  “I know. And the footprints were larger than mine. But it was a warm morning, by Arctic Circle standards, and the footprints had already thawed out some, which could have accounted for that. When they melt, footprints always look much bigger. That’s why some people think they’ve come across Abominable Snowman tracks, when they’re probably only rabbit spoor.”

  “So you decided that it had all been a dream, and that the figure hadn’t really existed?”

  “Well, what would you have thought, if the same thing had happened to you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m less of a skeptic than you are.”

  Henry Hubbard said, “Ralph and Charles were found dead at about three o’clock that afternoon. Their tent had blown away during the night, and they hadn’t stood a chance. I was devastated. They were both such good men. But I guess that was the first time that I began to have suspicions that I might not have been hallucinating, after all. Their bodies were found at the foot of Hungry Horse Pass, which is over a hundred and thirty-eight miles to the south-east of Anatuk. Even the fittest man in the world couldn’t walk a hundred and thirty-eight miles in a sixty-five miles per hour blizzard in the middle of the night.”

  “Did you tell anybody?”

  Henry Hubbard shook his head. “I told a deliberate lie, and said that I had left them a day earlier than I really had. I have a reputation in this business, Mr Rook. Everybody would have asked how I managed to travel so far in a single night. The only logical conclusion would have been that a trapper had come across me and given me a ride to Anatuk by snowmobile. In which case, why hadn’t I made any effort to go back for my two companions? But if I insisted that some kind of snow creature rescued me by carrying me on its back, everybody would have said that I was raving. So that was the choice I had. And that was why I said nothing.”

  “That washroom incident, was that the first inclination you had that the snowman might be searching for Jack?”

  “No. I hadn’t wanted to leave Anchorage so soon, because I needed some time to recover from the expedition, physically and mentally. Apart from that I still had some extra interviews and local footage to shoot. We had an apartment on Northern Lights Boulevard, overlooking Westchester Lagoon. A great place, we both loved it. But I kept having dreams about the figure in the snow. Night after night. And every night I could hear it whispering to me in that voice like crackling ice: ‘Remember what you promised.’

  “Then one day I came back home after only about a half-hour at the sound recording studio. I’d forgotten some of my notes. Jack had left for college – probably not more than ten minutes before, because the toaster was still warm. I checked his bedroom and I was annoyed to see that he hadn’t made his bed. But then it realized that it was freezing cold in there, and that his bed was sparkling.

  “It was frozen solid. You know what sheets are like when you leave them on the line on a winter’s day? You could have cracked these like cuttlefish shells. The whole bed was rock-hard, even his pajamas.”

  “That’s when you knew that you hadn’t been hallucinating after all?”

  Henry Hubbard said, “That’s when I went to talk to my late wife’s father. He told me that there were dozens of stories about the Snowman. It craves human companionship, which is why it accompanies parties of explorers across the ice. It was supposed to have been a kind of angel, privileged to sit on the right-hand side of the Great Immortal Being who created the world. But when the Great Immortal Being made the Inuit people, the angel became fiercely jealous. He had given them souls, and the angel – being an angel – had no soul. One day, one of the Great Immortal Being’s favorite humans, the hunter Ninavut, was caught in a snowstorm. The angel deliberately misled him deeper and deeper into the storm and his sled fell through thin ice and he drowned. When the Great Immortal Being found out what had happened, He was so angry that He took away the angel’s eyes, and banished it to the coldest parts of the earth, the north and south poles. He was never to sit or walk on the right side of one of the Great Immortal Being or one of his creations ever again; and he was charged with the task of rescuing any human whom he found in trouble.

  “The angel begged for mercy, but the Great Immortal Being was adamant. However, He softened His heart enough to allow the angel to exact whatever price he wanted for carrying out the rescue. If ever the Great Immortal Being made a mistake, that was it. Ever since that day, the angel accompanied every party of Arctic explorers across the ice. It’s taking care of them, as the Great Immortal Being commanded it, but at the same time it is hungrily waiting for them to get into difficulty, so that it can save them, and ask for an exorbitant price in return.

  “That price is always a human soul. The Snowman breathes it in, and the soul gives it a few hours’ comforting warmth, and makes it feel for a while that it’s one of the Great Immortal Being’s favored creations.”

  Henry Hubbard turned to Jack and said, “I was delirious, almost frozen to death. If I’d have thought for one moment that the Snowman was real, that it was capable of coming after you – I would have laid down in the snow and given myself up to the blizzard. Anything, rather than harm you.

  “I even asked your grandfather if it was possible for the
bargain to be changed … if I could give the Snowman my soul instead of yours. But he said that it was impossible. The Snowman had been duty-bound by the Great Immortal Being to save my life and to protect me for ever.”

  Jack stood up. “You’re my father, and you offered my soul to some goddamned ice monster? How could you have done that – even if you were delirious?”

  “Jack, I simply didn’t believe it was real.”

  “If you didn’t believe it was real, how did you think it was going to save you?”

  “I don’t know. It was fifty degrees below, Jack. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Straight enough to condemn your only son to death, just to save your ass. And now look what’s happened. Suzie’s dead and Ray might just as well be dead, too. And that thing’s still coming after me.”

  Henry Hubbard lowered his head. “I guess there’s no point in saying sorry.”

  “None at all, Dad,” snapped Jack, and walked out of the room, leaving the door wide open.

  Jim waited for a moment and then he said, “We’re going to have to find some way of beating this Snowman, Mr Hubbard. I can’t have any more of my students hurt, and that includes Jack.”

  “My father-in-law said that the Inuit won’t ever try, because the Snowman’s fate was decreed by the Great Immortal Being. If they attempted to harm it, that would be a direct affront to their creator. But the man who built Dead Man’s Mansion, Edward Grace, told his Inuit friends that he had devised a way to hunt it down and destroy it. Apparently that was one of the reasons he died … his Inuit friends no longer brought him oil and supplies because they thought he was going to commit a terrible crime against their beliefs.”

  “He had actually found a way of licking this thing? Do you know that for a fact?”

  “There are no facts north of the Arctic Circle, Mr Rook, apart from the thermometer. In conditions of extreme cold, all kinds of irrational things happen. Even the basic elements behave in ways that you can’t believe. Robert Peary saw an entire range of mountains in the Arctic, and called them Crocker Land, and in 1913 Donald MacMillan sent an expedition to look for them. He saw them, but as soon as the sun went down they disappeared, and there was nothing but a vast plain of ice for as far as the eye could see. A mirage, Mr Rook. And it’s quite possible that Dead Man’s Mansion is nothing but a mirage, or a myth. Up in Alaska, it’s almost impossible to seperate reality from legend.”