Rook: Snowman Read online

  “Well,” said Jack, “you’ve come fresh into this class today but it shouldn’t take you any time to settle. Rook’s First Law is that everybody in this class has to be friends and help each other, because Rook’s Second Law states that nobody is stupider than anybody else, even though I have to admit that some people are really working on it. You’re allowed to laugh at each other’s mistakes, because that’s what it’s like in the real world outside of this classroom, everybody laughs at your mistakes, and that’s a fact of life you’re just going to have to learn to deal with.”

  Jack picked up his pen and said, “Do you want me to … describe you? Like everybody else is?”

  “Sure. This is the first time you’ve seen me. Maybe you’ll come up with something really fresh.”

  “Yeah, like you look like fresh shit,” put in Ray Krueger, and then ducked his head down, in the hope that Jim hadn’t seen him.

  “Ray,” said Jim, “I have a little chore for you. I want you to go to the men’s room and pull out a hundred sheets of toilet tissue. I want you to write on every single one, ‘This is the only place for shit.’”

  “You’re kidding me, Mr Rook. That’s going to take me for ever.”

  “If you argue, I’ll make it ‘excrement’ instead.”

  Ray reluctantly stood up and made his way to the classroom door, accompanied by whistles and clapping and Bronx cheers. He was a skinny boy, with bleached-blond hair that flopped around in front of his eyes. He was amazing with animals, sensitive and gentle and intuitive, and he desperately wanted to be a vet. The only trouble was, his English skills were those of an eight-year-old, and he had an alarming tendency to burst out with insults and obscenities, just at the wrong moment. Borderline Tourette’s, the college psychiatrist reckoned.

  Ray left the classroom. Jim went over to his desk and dropped back into his chair. He started to sort out all of the homework that he had dropped in the parking-lot.

  Tarquin Tree had written, ‘Hamlet goes halfway nuts because he’s the only one who knows the truth about who offed his father. The only way he can get his revenge is by offing King Claudius. He offs Claudius, but he gets offed, too, on account of the swords are poisoned. So the moral is that if your mother’s a fox watch out for your uncle.’

  He thought: he’s getting there. At least he’s read the play and understood it. And even if he can’t fully express himself in writing, he’s had a try.

  He smeared his hand over his face as if he could smooth it out and rearrange it, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He probably had one or two Anacin tablets in his desk drawer, so he pulled it open to have a look. Immediately, he shouted out, “Ah!”

  Crouched right in the front of it, right on top of his college diary, was a huge green furry rat. God, it must have gotten itself trapped in his drawer somehow, at the end of last semester, and slowly suffocated, and then rotted.

  “Hey, what’s the matter, Mr Rook?” asked Washington, half rising to his feet. “You look like – you look like you seen a ghost.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. Nobody panic.” Jim picked up his mechanical pencil and gave the rat a tentative prod. “Kyle, go call Clarence, would you? Tell him to bring his protective gloves and a plastic trash bag.”

  It was incredible that the rat’s fur had grown so long and such a poisonous shade of green. He prodded it again, and to his disgust it fell apart, revealing its whitish, semi-liquefied insides, and a membrane of transparent green slime. The smell was appalling, like overripe cheese. Then he suddenly realized that it was overripe cheese. This wasn’t a rat at all, but a cambazola and lettuce ciabatta. He had hurriedly dropped it into his desk drawer on the last day of last semester when Karen Goudemark, the new biology teacher, had come into his classroom to introduce herself.

  Like the Queen of Denmark, Karen Goudemark was a fox. Brunette, pretty, confident, with a bosom that you had to make a deliberate effort not to look at, because you were both professionals, after all. And gorgeous lips. And great ankles. You didn’t greet a woman who looks like that with a messy half-eaten cheese roll in your hand.

  To a chorus of exaggerated revulsion, Jim lifted the ciabatta out of his desk, balanced on his diary, and dropped it into his wastebin.

  “Something sure is rotten in the state of Denmark,” said Billyjo Muntz, flapping her hand in front of her nose.

  “An extra credit for a spontaneous and appropriate quotation from the Bard,” said Jim.

  “I got one! I got one!” said Joyce Capistrano. “Act 1, scene 2 – ‘the memory be green’!”

  “Okay, an extra credit for you, too. But let’s get back to work, shall we? I’ve got your homework to sort out.”

  He was just about to sit down again when Ray walked back into the classroom. He didn’t have any toilet-paper, and he was frowning as if he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.

  “Ray?” said Jim. “Ray – is everything all right?”

  Ray stared at him. “I went to the guys’ room,” he said.

  “That’s right. And?”

  “And … I think you’d better take a look for yourself.”

  Two

  Jim stepped out of the classroom just as Clarence came along the corridor wearing a livid red pair of industrial gloves and carrying a heavy-duty plastic bag. “What’s going down now, Mr Rook? You only been back here ten minutes and already there’s an emergency crisis.”

  “Tautology,” said Jim.

  “What’s that? Contagious?”

  “Tautology means using two words when one word will do. Like emergency crisis.”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly precisely what it is. So what’s going down here?”

  “I don’t know yet. I thought I had a rat in my desk but it wasn’t, but Ray went to the mensroom and there seems to be some kind of a problem there.”

  “You had a rat? Why are you walking so fast?”

  “I always walk fast. It wasn’t a rat, it was a cheese sandwich.”

  “Easy mistake to make, I guess.”

  “When they rot, Clarence, it isn’t easy to tell the difference between a human being and a pig.”

  “I thought you said it was a rat.”

  “It wasn’t. It was a cheese sandwich.”

  They arrived outside the door to the mensroom and stopped. Ray, who had been following close behind them, pointed to the small circular window in the middle of it. The glass had always been frosted; but now it was covered in sparkling ice-crystals, too. Jim reached up and touched it, and his fingertip made a small melting dimple in them.

  He laid his hand flat against the door. It was so cold that there was a patina of fog over it. When he took his hand away, he left a palm and fingerprints on it.

  “You went inside?” he asked Ray.

  Dean nodded his head wildly up and down. “You can’t believe it, Mr Rook! It’s like a goddamned ice-cave in there!”

  Jim said, “Second time this morning.”

  “For what?” asked Clarence.

  “Unnatural cold. The water-fountain outside Geography Four was frozen solid.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t care. I saw it. And what about this? You feel this door. That’s impossible, too. This is the second-hottest day of the year so far.”

  “What do you think it is, Mr Rook?” asked Ray. “Second Ice Age, maybe?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” said Jim. Whatever it was, he felt so hungover that he wished it weren’t happening. It was going to be enough of a struggle getting through a normal college day without an ‘emergency crisis’. He pushed the mensroom door, and it opened up with a squeaking, cracking sound. Inside, there was a dense frozen fog, so that it was almost impossible to see, but he cautiously stepped forward, waving his arms from side to side to clear it. Clarence came up behind him, but Ray stayed in the doorway, reluctant to come any further.

  “There’s something wrong in there, Mr Rook. Like, there’s a real bad smell, and it aint t
he usual.”

  With the door open, and warmer air flowing into the mensroom, the fog began to eddy away. The sight that met Jim’s eyes was extraordinary. The whole room was thick with ice. The washbasins were encased in it, so that they were twice their normal size, with icicles hanging down from them like sharks’ teeth. The mirrors were all frozen over; and the toilets looked like nothing but huge white mushrooms. Everything glittered. Jim looked around for a moment, his breath smoking, and then he sniffed.

  “Ray’s right. There is a smell. Like dead fish.”

  “The drains are probably froze up,” said Clarence. “Let’s hope they aint burst.”

  Jim took two or three more awkward steps across the nubbly, ice-covered floor. “But how do you think this happened, Clarence? There isn’t a refrigeration unit within five hundred feet of this room. And even if there were – well, it couldn’t do this, could it?”

  Clarence blew out his cheeks so that he looked like Louis Armstrong. “No, sir, it couldn’t. I absolutely don’t know what in heaven or earth could have done this.”

  Jim broke a lump of ice off the side of one of the basins. He lifted it close to his nose and smelled it. “Fish, no doubt about it. Maybe we’re dealing with a disgruntled former pupil who now runs his own fish-packing business.”

  “Maybe we are. But how’s he going to tip a truckload of ice into the mensroom without nobody seeing him do it? And how’s he going to get it in here? The windows are much too small.”

  “Apart from that,” said Jim, “what kind of revenge do you call this anyway? Freezing a john?”

  Clarence tapped his shoulder. “Mr Rook. Take a look at this, Mr Rook.”

  Jim turned around so that he was facing the mirrors over the washbasins. All of them had begun to thaw now, so that they were obscured by nothing more than a wet, silvery haze. On every one of them, though, somebody had drawn four vertical lines, each with a blob on top, so that they looked like four stick men. Jim went up to them and stared at them closely, but they were already beginning to dribble.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “Maybe we ought to call the cops.”

  “The Dean won’t appreciate you doing that, Mr Rook.”

  “I don’t care if he appreciates it or not. This is a very bizarre event we’re witnessing here, Clarence. It can’t be a natural phenomenon. I mean I’ve heard of micro-climates but you don’t get the North Pole in your mensroom in the middle of June.”

  “So who do you think did it?”

  “I don’t know. But kids get up to all kinds of weird revenge things these days. Going on the rampage with guns, shooting everybody in sight. Blowing up schools. If we ignore this, who knows what might happen?”

  “You’re probably right, Mr Rook, but on your own head be it. Don’t say I didn’t never give you no warning caution.”

  “Everything okay in there, Mr Rook?” called Ray.

  “Fine so far. We’ll be out in a minute.”

  Jim circled the room. On the right-hand side, a college sweatshirt was hanging on a peg, and it was frozen so hard that he could have used it for a surfboard. He pushed open the doors to the toilet cubicles. In the corner of the last cubicle, there was a thick accretion of white ice, although it was already beginning to melt, and become more transparent. Jim was about to turn away when he thought he saw a faint dark shape inside the ice. Maybe it was just a shadow; or the toilet-brush holder caught in the ice. But he peered again more closely, and rubbed the heel of his hand across the surface of the ice to clear away the rime.

  There was something trapped inside there, no question about it. He could distinguish a small head, with pointed ears, and a body, and four legs. It was an animal – a black cat, by the look of it – caught by the ice in mid-air, as it tried to jump up onto the toilet-seat.

  “Clarence, come here. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a deep-frozen moggy.”

  Clarence hunkered down and gave the ice another rub. “Jeez, I know that cat. It’s been prowling around here for the past few days. I tried to shoo it away but it wouldn’t go.”

  “Well, it’s sure stuck here now.”

  “You’re not kidding. Think how quick it must have froze in here, to catch it like that. Even its goddamn eyes are still open.”

  “Couldn’t have felt a thing,” said Jim.

  At that moment Ray came up behind them. “Mr Rook – Dr Friendly’s coming down the hall.”

  “Okay, thanks for the warning caution. Did you ever seen anything like this before?”

  Ray leaned forward and stared at the block of rapidly dissolving ice. “Hey – that’s a cat in there!”

  “That’s right. It got caught. The temperature must have dropped in a fraction of a second.”

  “We ought to break it out of there.”

  “What’s the point? It won’t be long before the ice has all melted.”

  “No, but I was reading about this before, in one of my animal magazines. A husky fell through the ice someplace up north, Greenland, someplace like that. It was frozen solid in five minutes flat, and they thought it was dead. But they slowly warmed it up and brought it back to life. Like, it had gone into suspended animation.”

  Jim was impressed. “I wish you read Shakespeare with as much enthusiasm as you read Dogs Daily.”

  “Come on, we should get it out of there quick,” urged Ray. “Even a few seconds can make all the difference.”

  Clarence took a heavy wrench out of his tool-belt. “This should do it,” he said. Jim hefted it in his hand, then swung it right back and cracked it down on top of the ice. Small chips flew everywhere, but the wrench made hardly any impression.

  Ray said, “Look – it’s all melted underneath. We should be able to lift it up and drop it.”

  “Okay,” said Jim. “But don’t strain your back. The college isn’t insured for injuries caused by frozen cats.”

  Between the three of them, they managed to wrestle the block of ice out of the corner behind the toilet pedestal and into the center of the cubicle. It was roughly pyramid-shaped, and it must have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. All the same, they knelt down, gripped the block underneath, and managed to lift it up clear of the toilet seat. Jim could see the cat staring at him through the ice, its yellow eyes unblinking, its mouth slightly open so that its teeth were bared in a silent yowl of surprise.

  “Okay now,” he said. “Lift it up as high as you can … that’s it … and when I count to three, drop it on the floor.”

  They heaved the dripping block over their heads. Ice-melt ran down their wrists and into their sleeves. “Higher,” Jim urged them. Then, “One, two, three – drop it!”

  The block dropped to the floor and cracked in half. The cat flopped out of it, lifeless and bedraggled. Jim lifted its head. Its eyes were still open but there was no doubt that it was dead. “I’m sorry,” said Jim. “It couldn’t have survived being frozen like that.”

  But Ray said, “No, no, there’s a chance!” He picked up the cat’s dangling body and held it close to his chest. “I’ll take it outside, where it’s warm.”

  He was carrying the cat toward the door when Dr Friendly walked in. Dr Friendly looked around at the rapidly melting ice and his mouth opened and stayed open. Then, after a while, he looked down at the water pouring over his gray suede shoes and said, “What the hell is happening in here?”

  Ray ducked around behind him, and Jim heard his Nikes slapping away along the corridor.

  “Little technical problem, sir,” said Clarence, standing up, and returning his wrench to his tool-belt.

  “Little technical problem?” Dr Friendly echoed, walking up to one of the washbasins, which was still thick with ice and noisily dripping icicles. “I might have known you were part of this, Mr Rook. Little technical problem? This looks like subversion to me. This looks like sabotage.

  He walked right up to Jim and stared at him from such close range that he made Jim feel like a waxwork. “What kind of a little technical problem causes
something like this? Ice, everywhere. Ice! This is deliberate.”

  Jim couldn’t do anything but shrug. “Maybe it is. I don’t know. But if it is deliberate, how was it done?”

  “Oh, somebody found a way of doing it. One of those snow-blowing machines they use in the movies, that’s what they used. Rented one, probably.”

  “Well, it’s a theory. But why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why? Why rent a snow-blowing machine for the sole purpose of turning a college restroom into an igloo?”

  The muscles around the corners of Dr Friendly’s mouth worked as furiously as if he were trying to chew a particularly nasty piece of gristle. “Students … you can’t work out what’s going on inside of their heads. They’re not logical. They’re not rational. You’re a college teacher, how can you ask me why? There is no why! Ask them! Ask your students! They don’t know why they ever do anything! You know what the job of a college teacher is? To turn complete and utter cretins into something that can walk on two legs and add up its grocery bill. To take those self-centered, self-indulgent, sweaty, spotty young geeks, and turn them through knowledge and discipline into remotely acceptable members of the human race – people who can read a newspaper the right way up and cross the road without being mown down by the first bus that comes along.

  “But they fight us. They fight us every inch of the way. They defend their stupidity like the Alamo. And this—” he said, waving his arm at the ice-covered basins “—this is the kind of thing they do, to stop us from civilizing them. And they think it’s clever. They think this is hilarious! The day we froze the mensroom! What a killer!”

  Jim said, “This wasn’t students.”