Rook: Snowman Page 18

  Jack took off his snow-goggles. “You don’t think he suffered, do you?”

  “Your dad? No way. He wouldn’t have known what hit him.”

  “I don’t know whether he was a coward or a hero or just plain stupid.”

  Jim didn’t say anything. He was too cold to think of anything witty and uplifting; and, in any case, Jack would have to make up his own mind, as time went by, about his father’s last expedition and his tragic death.

  He took a Snickers bar out of his pocket and snapped it, handing half of it to Jack. “Watch your teeth. In this climate, it’s like taking a bite out of a crowbar.”

  Jack said, “Forget it. I don’t want anything to eat.”

  “I know how you feel, but force yourself. If we’re going to make it to Dead Man’s Mansion, you’re going to need the sugar.”

  “Do you think it’s worth it?”

  “What, carrying on? It’s not going to be easy, but what else are we going to do?”

  “Turn back, maybe? Give it all up? My dad’s dead, what does the Snowman want with me any more?”

  “Believe me, it wants you.”

  “And what about you? Why should you be risking your life? We’ve lost all of our navigation equipment and we don’t even have enough supplies, do we?”

  “Stop being so pessimistic. I’ve got twenty-three bars of rock-hard Snickers.”

  “And what else? A cat, and a mirror that Laura Killmeyer gave you? How are we going to survive with those?”

  The wind roared around the curve in the rocks like a living beast, and snow flew into their faces in a blinding frenzy. They were sitting only two feet away from each other, yet they could scarcely see each other. Jim said, “You can go on, or you can quit, it’s up to you. Personally, my survival instinct tells me to quit. But then I think about Ray and Suzie and I think about you … what’s going to happen to you if we don’t find out how to get this Snowman off your back. And I think about your father. He made a mistake, but he gave up everything to put it right.”

  Jack brushed the snow off his face. “I don’t know. All my life, I’ve always seemed to be doing things because of him. Like living in Alaska, because he had such an obsession with the Arctic, and the Inuit. I’m half Inuit, but that doesn’t mean I want to live in some dogsled community eating fish and frozen caribou for the rest of my life. Coming to California – coming to West Grove College – that was the first time I ever felt independent, the first time I ever felt free. And what did I find out? I couldn’t be free, because my father had sold my soul.”

  “That sounds to me like a vote to carry on.”

  “I don’t have any alternative. You know that.”

  They climbed to their feet. Jim knotted a length of orange cord to his belt and tied the other end to Jack’s rucksack. That way, even if they lost sight of each other, they wouldn’t become separated. They began to trudge slowly eastward, making their way to the point where the Sno-Cat was supposed to have reached the far side of the glacier.

  Jim gave Jack a thumbs-up sign. Then he bowed his head and carried on with the wearisome business of walking.

  He thought about a whole jumble of things as he walked. He thought about Peary and Amundsen and Scott, and all the other men who had risked their lives to conquer the world’s coldest places. He wondered what it was that had given them the strength and the character to carry on. The cold itself induced a kind of madness. It was like being seriously drunk. Your brain had the confidence but your body didn’t have the co-ordination. And the flying snow was almost intolerable. It confused all sense of direction and distance. One second it was blowing to the right; then to the left; then it was swirling in circles.

  They must have been walking for over three hours when Jim called a temporary halt for another Snickers bar and a check on their position. He took out his compass but his hands were so numb that he dropped it into snow. He bent down, furiously raking at the snow with his gloves, but there was no sign of it anywhere. He took one glove off, and carried on frantically searching, but Jack said, “Forget it, Jim. It’s gone. And put your glove back on. You don’t want to lose your fingers.”

  “I don’t even know which direction we’re supposed to be headed.”

  “It’s north, isn’t it, Dead Man’s Mansion?”

  “Sure. North. But at what longitude? In this weather, we could pass within a couple of hundred feet and not even know that it was there. Maybe Tibbles can help.”

  Jim pulled down his zipper. Tibbles Two was still there; but she was sleeping; and even when Jim shook her violently up and down she refused to respond.

  “She’s bluffing,” he said. He took off his glove and pulled back one of her eyelids, revealing a staring green eye, but she immediately closed it again, and carried on purring.

  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 looke
d 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.