Rook: Snowman Page 15

  “There’s a spell that the Sherpas used to use in Nepal, to destroy the ice-demons which they thought were killing their goats.”

  “Boy, you really know your magic, don’t you?”

  “They used fire,” Laura insisted. “You can always kill an ice-demon by setting it alight.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “No, it’s not that easy. You can light a fire but you can’t force the spirit to walk into it. It has to burn itself voluntarily. In other words, you have to find a way of making the fire seem like the only possible option.”

  “Great. Who, in their right mind – even a spirit – would consider that walking into a fire would be their only possible option? Maybe a Buddhist monk with a chip on his shoulder, but who else?”

  “You ought to have more faith, Mr Rook. You shouldn’t be so cynical, especially with your gifts.”

  “Gifts? You can call them gifts, but most of the time they’re more like a burden.”

  “Mr Rook, magic teaches you one great truth. There’s always a way, natural or supernatural. No matter what happens, there’s always a way.”

  Jim looked at Laura with all her magical beads and her bangles and he wished that he could remember what it was like to be so innocent, and so enthusiastic, and to believe in the supernatural without any doubts. She was so pretty, so trusting in her grandmother’s spells. Yes, there was always a way. But Jim knew from experience that the way through the world on the other side was dark, and as slithery and devious as a pit crowded with snakes and spiders, and that spirits and demons never honored their promises, any more than humans.

  He laid his hand on her shoulder and said, “You’re one of the best, Laura. One day, you’re probably going to be the best witch in the whole of greater Los Angeles.”

  “You’re going to go look for this spirit, aren’t you?” asked Laura.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “In that case, you’d better take this mirror with you. At least it’ll give you a chance.”

  “I can’t take this. It’s a family heirloom.”

  “You have to. I haven’t been a practising witch very long, Mr Rook, but if there’s one thing I know, you can’t fight what you can’t see.”

  “She’s right,” put in Dottie, who was wearing a large strawberry-pink T-shirt with a transfer of George Clooney on the front, and voluminous white shorts. “I went to this party once, and they turned all of the lights off, and this guy really came on to me. I couldn’t see him, but I wasn’t going to fight him. That was my best night ever. Ever.”

  “That was your only night, ever,” Laura put in, unkindly.

  Dottie blushed, but Jim reached out and took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “If I were fifteen years younger,” he said.

  “I know,” said Dottie. “If you were fifteen years younger, you wouldn’t be any different from any of the guys who are fifteen years younger than you. Come on, Mr Rook, you’re a great teacher, but I don’t have any illusions.”

  Jim took the mirror from Laura. “I have illusions,” he said. “But I’m going to hunt them down; and they won’t threaten any of you, not any more.”

  Tibbles Two was acting out of character that evening. She sniffed at her food as if it were poisoned and then she went to sit on her chair on the balcony, staring northward, with the sinking sun shining orange in her eyes and the wind ruffling up her fur. Jim came out with a can of beer and leaned on the railing beside her.

  “What’s up, TT? Lost your appetite?”

  The cat ignored him, and continued to stare toward the north.

  “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Like to tell me what it is?”

  Tibbles Two lifted her nose a little, but apart from that she gave him no indication at all of what she was thinking about.

  “I have to leave you for a few days. You don’t mind if your Uncle Mervyn takes care of you, do you? I won’t be gone long. But there’s some serious business that I have to attend to.”

  For the first time that evening, TT turned her head and stared at him. He had never seen an expression on any cat’s face that was anything quite like it. Cats always looked condescending – and why not? They spend all their lives sleeping and dreaming and amusing themselves while humans pander to their every whim as if they were minor royalty. But this expression was quite different. This was calculating and self-possessed, as if Tibbles Two had already made up her mind about something critical.

  “Give me a sign, TT,” said Jim. “A dancing Tarot card, anything.”

  TT continued to stare at him for a while. Then she jumped down from her seat and walked back inside. Jim hesitated for a moment and then followed her. She padded straight into his bedroom and bounded up onto the bureau, knocking over a bottle of Hugo Boss aftershave, and then on top of his closet, where he kept his airline bag. She sat on top of it and stared down at him imperiously.

  “You’re a cat. How do you know that I’m planning on taking a trip?”

  TT yawned and licked her lips.

  “Listen, you can’t come with me. There’s absolutely no way. Nobody takes a cat to the Arctic. Dogs, maybe, if they’re working dogs. But did you ever see a sled pulled by a team of cats?”

  TT stayed where she was, expressionless. In the end, there was nothing that Jim could do but shrug his shoulders and leave her. She was still there when he had finished his pizza, as watchful as the Snowman.

  Late that evening, he drove around to the Hubbard house. Henry had already dragged all of his cold-weather gear from the closet, and it was heaped on the couch in the living-room: thick sweaters, fur-lined parkas, insulated boots – as well as rucksacks and harnesses and all kinds of assorted webbing belts and tackle that Jim couldn’t even identify.

  Jack was there, too, sprawled in an armchair, talking on the phone to one of his new college friends. “Yeah, yeah. Just like I told him. You don’t have to throw a hissy fit.”

  Jim saluted him and Jack saluted him back. Then he turned to Henry Hubbard. “I thought you ought to know that the Snowman was lurking around campus this evening. I actually saw it.”

  “You saw it? It’s not supposed to be visible in temperatures over forty below.”

  “One of my students showed me a little magic trick with a mirror. I saw it all right, and it was just the way you described it.”

  Henry Hubbard looked at all of his equipment. He picked up a pair of snow-goggles with violet lenses and then dropped them back on to the couch. “I never thought I would wear any of this stuff again. I almost threw it all out.”

  “You’re not going to chicken out on me, are you?”

  Henry Hubbard glanced toward Jack, laughing as he talked to his friend. “No, Mr Rook. I’m not going to chicken out. There’s too much at stake here, isn’t there?”

  He beckoned Jim through to the dining-room, where the table was covered in maps of northern Alaska. “I’ve taken the liberty of booking our flights to Fairbanks. We leave LAX at seven o’clock on Monday morning. We’ll be staying overnight, and the following day we’ll be flying by chartered plane up to Lost Hope Creek. I thought we’d try to reach Dead Man’s Mansion from a different direction this time. We’ll land on the south side of the Sheenjek glacier, here, instead of the north side. The terrain is much more difficult, but we’ll have less than a third of the distance to cover. It’s kind of a gamble, and it’s a gamble we’re probably going to lose if the weather sets in. But I calculated that with your lack of Arctic experience, you’d have more chance of survival if we went for a short, tough twenty-mile run, rather than an eighty-five-mile slog.”

  “Well, I should be pretty fit. I’ve been running up and down stairs at every opportunity. You know, to build up my stamina. My calf muscles are killing me.”

  “If anything will kill you, Mr Rook, it’s the cold. It doesn’t just bite at your fingers and your toes, it bites at your brain as well. It eats away your will to live.”

  “What about a snowmobile? You’ve arranged for a snowmobi
le?”

  “The Sno-Cat will take us most of the way across the glacier. But when we reach the mountains on the other side, we’ll have to go on foot. Seven or eight miles, at least.”

  Jim peered at the maps. “So where do you think Dead Man’s Mansion actually is?”

  “I can’t say exactly. Last time we were relying on two so-called period maps and a whole lot of hearsay, but after my last experience I’m beginning to suspect that those maps may have been seriously misleading. In fact, they could well have been hoaxes – drawn by some imaginative trickster to persuade the University of Alaska to part with a large sum of money for a ‘genuine historical document’.”

  “How about the hearsay?”

  “I’ve read all the transcripts again and again. Most of them sound like the product of cabin fever or too much Yukon Jack whiskey; but there are two accounts which both describe the location of Dead Man’s Mansion quite precisely. Look at this one. This was translated from the Inuit. ‘The big house stands on a shelf of rock beside the Haunted Salmon glacier, which is a tributary of the Sheenjek. Behind it stands the crooked rock known as Death’s Beckoning.’ And this one, from a trapper called Jean-Pierre Troisrivières, who got lost in a blizzard in the same general area. ‘Through the snow I saw a house standing on a high rock. I had never seen such a house in the Arctic before. It was almost like a castle. Who built it and how it was built is a great mystery. To the right runs a glacier which the Esquimeaux call the Ghost Salmon Run, because it is supposed to carry the souls of every fish they kill slowly back out to sea, where they belong. Directly in line with its grand chimney stack is a rocky outcrop like a man’s bent finger.’”

  Henry Hubbard opened a file and took out a sheaf of satellite photographs which had been taken to assist in Amoco’s oil exploration. “It’s impossible to be one hundred per cent certain, but I believe that if Dead Man’s Mansion exists, and if it’s still standing, then it’s here. You see the shadow that mountain is casting on the ice? Curved, like a beckoning finger. And you see the way the glacier kind of winds around this cliff? This topography fits both of those hearsay descriptions almost exactly.”

  Jim bent forward and examined the photograph with what he hoped was professional intensity. “Hmm … I don’t see any house. I mean, with these satellites, you’re supposed to be able to read the National Enquirer from five miles up in space, aren’t you? And from all accounts, Dead Man’s Mansion is a pretty sizeable joint.”

  “If it’s half-buried in snow, and the sun isn’t shining on it directly, then even a satellite wouldn’t pick it up. The Air Force had the same problem looking for Soviet missile emplacements in Siberia.”

  “So how sure are you that this is the right spot? Seventy per cent sure? Sixty? Fifty-five and a half?”

  “I don’t know, Mr Rook. You can’t calculate things like this mathematically. We may find out that Dead Man’s Mansion is the same as the mountains of Crocker Land, nothing but a mirage.”

  “In which case?”

  “In which case we have to start praying, Mr Rook. That’s all we can do.”

  Jim looked at the map a little longer, and then he stood up and said, “By the way, my cat wants to come with us.”

  Twelve

  Jim had a terror of flying in small airplanes. As they approached Lost Hope Creek, bumping and tilting against a south-west wind, he gripped his armrests so tightly that he almost dismantled his seat. All the same, he couldn’t help being impressed by the scenery. They had flown for the past sixty miles over a dazzling river of ice, the Sheenjek Glacier; and the sky above them was so blue that it was almost black. On either side rose dark volcanic peaks, all of them hooded with snow, and in the distance Jim could see nothing but more mountains rising, peak after peak, as if all the mountains in the world had gathered here to greet them.

  Henry Hubbard spent most of the flight talking to the pilot, a stringy man with a pecan-colored face and a restless toothpick in his mouth and no conversation. Jack sat hunched in his seat, staring out of the window. His relationship with his father was still strained, and once or twice, when Henry Hubbard had tried to remonstrate with him for slouching or sulking or talking back, he had said, “At least I didn’t sell your soul!”

  Every time he said it, Henry Hubbard physically winced, as if Jack had slapped his face. But he had kept his temper; and for his part, Jack had agreed to come along with them, to lend them his youth and his strength. As the shadow of their plane jumped and flickered across the jagged peaks and deeply riven crevasses that lay below them, Jim could see that they were going to need him.

  The Cessna’s engine made an alarming buzzsaw noise as they lost altitude and circled to the east to land at Lost Hope Creek. They passed over a settlement of five wooden houses with the Stars and Stripes flying over them, and circled again. Jim saw tiny figures emerging, and waving to them. The ground came up to meet them in a sudden rush, and they landed on skis on a short stretch of glassy ice that ran parallel to the glacier. The runway looked smooth from the air, but it was so bumpy that Jim thought that his teeth were all going to be rattled out of his head. Shifting his toothpick from right to left, the pilot swung them around to a halt only twenty feet before the runway deteriorated into stacks of dirty broken ice.

  “Lost Hope?” he said, rhetorically, as he taxied them up toward the houses. “They don’t even know the meaning of the word ‘hope’ in this dump, let alone what it’s like to lose it.” That was the longest sentence he had spoken all afternoon.

  They climbed out of the airplane and Jim was immediately struck by the chill wind that was blowing off the glacier. After Los Angeles, Lost Hope Creek was so cold that it gave him a tight-bandana headache, just standing by the airplane waiting for the pilot to unload their bags for them.

  The last piece of luggage out of the plane was a cardboard box with holes punched in it. The pilot handed it over to Jim and said, “You want to be careful with this. The dogs’ll have it for lunch as soon as look at it.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  As they walked to the edge of the runway, they were greeted by two tall men in black parkas with furry hoods. One wore dark glasses through which an acute squint was faintly visible. The other sported a long greasy pigtail and hands that were covered in tattoos. There was even the tattoo of a snake’s head emerging from his collar to lick at his right ear.

  “Matty Krauss and Bill Wilderheim,” said the man with the dark glasses. “Your supplies are all here. We’ve been having a little starting trouble with the Sno-Cat, but we should be able to get you moving for tomorrow morning.”

  They were joined by a short, slight Inuit in a sealskin coat. He reminded Jim of the Dalai Lama: bespectacled, courteous, and always smiling, although you could never discover at what. He gave each of them a soft, limp handshake.

  “How do you do, gentlemen. My name is John Kudavak. I work for the state environmental protection agency.”

  “Keeping the ice nice, huh?” asked Jim.

  “A little more than that, Mr Hubbard. I hope you won’t mind if I come right to the point.”

  “He’s Mr Hubbard. I’m Mr Rook.”

  John Kudavak turned to Henry Hubbard and said, “I’m sorry. But we’re very concerned about this expedition of yours.”

  “What expedition? It’s hardly an expedition. Just three of us taking a look-see, and filming some extra footage for my new documentary. How did you get to hear about it, anyhow?”

  “I’ve been up here for a couple of weeks, seeing if we can set up a Sheenjek tourist center. Mr Krauss here told me what you had on your mind.”

  “So what’s the objection?”

  “Well, sir, we’re always willing to encourage moviemakers who are keen to show the natural beauty of Alaska to a wider audience. But you’re planning to look for Dead Man’s Mansion, so Mr Krauss tells me, and Dead Man’s Mansion is not a designated site of natural beauty. As far as my office is concerned, it’s a proscribed area. Quite apart fro
m the fact that more than thirty people have died trying to find it in the past six years, which has put a severe strain on the state’s rescue budget, the house is supposed to be built on a spot that it is very sacred to the Inuit people.”

  “Not the old Indian burial ground problem,” said Jim.

  John Kudavak gave him a thin, strained smile. “The place is sacred because it was here that the Great Immortal Being took out the eyes of his favorite angel, as a punishment for his jealousy, and charged him with taking care of those who are lost in the snow.”

  Jim turned to Henry Hubbard. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Didn’t I? Well, I don’t think that it’s particularly important.”

  “But that must have been why Edward Grace built it there in the first place. Don’t tell me he put it there by accident.”

  “Mr Hubbard,” put in John Kudavak, “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to pull the plug on this expedition. In my judgement, you’re ill prepared and badly under-equipped; and I don’t believe that what you’re trying to do here is in the best interests of the local environment.”

  “This is crazy,” said Henry Hubbard. “If we find Dead Man’s Mansion, it could be the biggest tourist attraction in Alaska.”

  “These days, Mr Hubbard, there are many more ethnic Inuit people working for the environment agency. Like me, they believe in the story of the spirit who rescues people lost in the snow. Some of them have friends and relatives who claim to have been saved by the Snowman. The feeling in the agency these days is that they want the site to remain undiscovered. If it were found, it could constitute a threat to the integrity of their beliefs.”

  “Are we talking about a suggestion here, or a legal prohibition?”

  “I have the authority to prevent you from undertaking an expedition to Dead Man’s Mansion on the grounds that it would materially jeopardize the environment.”