Rook: Snowman Read online

  “I’ll give you a ride to the hospital,” said Jim.

  It was well after seven p.m. before he returned home. As he inserted his key into the lock, Mervyn’s door opened and Mervyn appeared, wrapped in a cerise kimono, his hair pinned up with tortoiseshell barrettes.

  “I saw the news,” he said, grasping Jim’s hand, and squeezing it tight. “Wasn’t that terrible, that poor boy? And they said you were so brave, holding him all the time.”

  “Thanks, Mervyn. It’s been kind of a long day.”

  “I looked in on Tibbles Two a couple of times. She looked bored, so I sang her a couple of torch songs. To tell you the truth, she wasn’t very impressed.”

  “Apart from that, though … ?”

  “Apart from that she’s wonderful. And so are you. You don’t know what it’s like, living next to a hero.”

  “The feeling’s mutual, Mervyn. Thanks for everything.”

  Jim opened his front door and walked into his apartment. He whistled and called out, “Tibbles! Tibbles Two!” but there was no sign of her anywhere. He walked into the kitchen and opened the freezer. He had a choice of beef lasagne or vegetable lasagne or ojingu chim, Korean stuffed cuttlefish, which he had bought in a moment of madness at the local Korean deli. He decided against all of them, and shut the freezer again.

  He didn’t really feel hungry. He was too distressed after what had happened to Ray this afternoon. All the same he knew that he needed something to eat, so he took a sliced loaf out of the breadbox and made himself a folded-over sandwich with eight slices of Oscar Mayer’s baloney and two whole kosher pickles which dripped vinegar all the way down his wrist.

  He walked back into the living-room, and as he did so, he saw a picture on his new widescreen TV of Dr Ehrlichman, his college principal. Dr Ehrlichman was saying, “Everybody worked together, you know, and everybody co-operated. It was a terrible thing to happen to a young student, but everybody rallied around, as they always do whenever something goes wrong at West Grove.”

  “Which is unusually often, isn’t it, Dr Ehrlichman?” asked the TV reporter. “In the past five years we’ve had several fatalities, a considerable number of injuries, and dozens of unexplained phenomena. Would it be right to say that West Grove Community College is haunted?”

  Dr Ehrlichman snapped, “I’m in the education business, mister. Not the California Psychic Society.”

  Jim sat down in his favorite creaky basketwork armchair and flicked through the channels until he found Captains Courageous in black and white, with Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew.

  As he was chewing his sandwich and watching television, he thought he saw a shape out of the corner of his eye. He slowly turned his head; and as he did so, his chewing slowed down too. Gradually, he stopped masticating altogether, and his mouth stayed open, displaying a pulpy lump of wet white bread marbled with pale-brown baloney.

  Tibbles Two was standing on her hind legs on the back of the couch. Upright, not moving, not swaying, perfectly balanced. She was staring at him with both eyes wide open, her ears flattened back against her skull. In her mouth she was holding a single Tarot card.

  “TT?” said Jim, and swallowed the rest of the sandwich so hard that he almost choked. He stood up and walked across to her, but she remained where she was, still upright, unwavering, her eyes still staring at him. “TT … do I get the feeling that you’re trying to tell me something?”

  He took the Tarot card out from between her teeth. It was the same card that he had picked last night, the hooded figure standing alone in the snow. It was still nameless. He turned it this way and that, and then he said, “You’re trying to tell me something, right? This is a privileged communication from the spirit world, right?”

  Tibbles Two said nothing, of course, but yawned, one of those wide supercilious yawns that cats always give you when they think that you’re being slow on the uptake.

  “You’re putting me back on track, aren’t you? You’re telling me to follow the clues that really matter.”

  Tibbles Two jumped down from the back of the couch and padded into the kitchen in search of milk. Jim stayed where he was for a while, turning the Tarot card over and over between his first and second fingers. The blizzard covers your face. You are hidden behind what you have done. At last he went to his briefcase and opened it up, and took out his college directory. He flicked it to the pages marked Students’ Parents, and ran his finger down until it reached ‘Hubbard, Henry’. There was a regular number and a cellphone number. He dialed the cellphone first, guessing that Jack’s father would probably be at the studio, working on his documentary. It rang for a long time before it was eventually picked up.

  “Henry Hubbard speaking.”

  “Mr Hubbard? This is Jim Rook, Jack’s English teacher from college.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, but we’ve had a serious incident on campus today. A young student was seriously hurt.”

  “That’s too bad. Jack wasn’t involved, was he?”

  “No, sir. Not directly.”

  “What do you mean ‘not directly’? What happened?”

  “A student lost both of his arms. Ray Krueger, I don’t know if Jack’s ever mentioned him. Poor kid was only nineteen.”

  “That’s terrible. That’s really terrible. But if you’ll forgive me for asking, why are you calling me?”

  “Because he lost his arms to severe frostbite.”

  “Frostbite?”

  “Worst case the paramedics had seen since a man was trapped in a deep-freeze. Except that this wasn’t in a deep-freeze. This was right outside, in the sunshine, in an ambient temperature of eighty-four degrees.”

  There was a lengthy silence. Then Henry Hubbard said, “I still don’t see how this concerns me.”

  “Jack told you about the washroom freezing over, so he tells me. I was just wondering if maybe we could meet and – you know – discuss it. Seeing as how you’re the only expert on cold weather conditions that I can think of.”

  “I’m sure there must be somebody at UCLA who’s much more qualified to help you.”

  “Well, maybe there is. But I’d like to talk to you about Jack, too, how he’s settling down in class.”

  “He’s not adjusting?”

  “That’s something we ought to talk about face to face.”

  Another lengthy silence. Then, “Okay … why don’t you come by the house around nine tonight? That’s not too late, is it?”

  “That’ll be fine. And watch the TV news, if you get the time. You’ll see what happened to young Ray.”

  “I’ll try my best, Mr Rook. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Jim hung up and turned around to Tibbles Two. “Are you satisfied now?” he demanded. But Tibbles Two simply tucked his front paws into his furry chest and closed his eyes. Jim went over and picked up the Tarot card that the cat had brought him. The figure was still standing in the snow, still waiting. The stars were still shining in the black sky above its head.

  He went to his bookshelf and took down one of his battered Morocco-bound encyclopedias, the ones that his father had given him when he graduated. He looked up astronomy and found pages and pages of star maps, constellations and clusters, to see if he could find any configuration of stars which matched the pattern on the card. Maybe it had some significance, maybe it didn’t, but most background details in the Tarot had some symbolic meaning, whether they were distant castles or lobsters swimming in rivers or figures with their faces turned away.

  The afternoon sun slowly swiveled around the apartment as he turned the pages of the encyclopedia sideways and diagonally and upside-down. The pattern of stars on the card was so distinctive that he couldn’t believe it wasn’t a real constellation. Yet he couldn’t match it anywhere. And every now and then he would find himself stopping his search to think about Ray, his hands burning with cold, going through agonies that it was almost impossible for anybody else to imagine.

  He gave up lo
oking for star patterns. He went to the fridge and stared into it, to see if there was anything else that he wanted to eat. He closed the door again and went back into the living-room. Tibbles Two had opened her eyes now and was staring at him fixedly.

  “Who sent you?” asked Jim, sitting down beside her. “I don’t believe you came here by accident, no way.”

  Tibbles Two jumped off the couch and up on to the chair where Jim had been sitting while he was looking through the star constellations. She hesitated for a second, and then she jumped up on to the table. Her paw caught the encyclopedia, which was resting on the very edge, and it toppled over.

  “Hey!” said Jim, and lunged forward to catch it. But it didn’t fall instantly. He had never seen anything fall like this before. It dropped to the floor in slow-motion, as if the afternoon air were as thick as treacle, and as it fell its pages flicked over, page after page, almost as if somebody were thumbing through it.

  It fell only an inch beyond his outstretched fingers. It was like something out of a dream. It hit the floor and bounced on its spine, and then it slowly settled on to the carpet, with its pages wide open. Tibbles Two had already jumped off the table by now, and made her way to the other side of the room, where she turned and watched Jim with that same supercilious look in her eyes.

  Jim picked the book from the floor. It had fallen open at a page about the signs of the Zodiac, and the movement of stars and planets. On the right hand side of the page was an illustration of the northern sky on the night of 16 June 1816. With one or two minor exceptions, the pattern of the stars was identical to the stars depicted in the Tarot card.

  The caption read: The star-pattern which presaged the ‘year without a summer’.

  Jim said, “What is this? Some kind of joke?”

  Tibbles Two gave a low, soft mewl. Jim glanced at her but didn’t say anything. He was beginning to think that she wasn’t a cat at all, but a human spirit which had been reincarnated as a cat.

  “You should give me a clue, you know that?” he told her. “You should tell me who you are. Then I can give you some of the things you liked when you were a person. A drop of bourbon in your milk, maybe? Or low-cal cat food? You should tell me. After all, you can bring me Tarot cards, and you can open encyclopedias to the relevant page. What’s to stop you from telling me your name?”

  But Tibbles Two remained inscrutable, and started to descend into a deep, larynx-rattling sleep.

  Jim laid the encyclopedia back on the table, took his glasses out of his shirt pocket, and started to read. In early June, 1816, astronomers had noticed a highly unusual configuration of stars in the Northern hemisphere. It was a configuration that had first been mentioned in Old Norse writings in the year 505, although the same pattern had been discovered painted on the walls of caves in the Belgian Ardennes, and these had probably dated from several hundred years BC. The Norse name for the configuration, in the old twenty-four-rune alphabet, was The Harbinger of Cold. Its appearance was said to be a warning that the world was going to be punished for some unspecified sin.

  The morning after the stars’ appearance, at eight a.m., snow started to fall on most of the north-east and parts of northern Pennsylvania. The Danville North Star in Vermont reported snowdrifts up to twenty feet, and spring crops all across the United States were devastated.

  The freeze was even worse in Europe, where blizzards crossed Britain and France, crops failed, and thousands died. One strange by-product of the icy summer of 1816 was that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary were forced to stay indoors in their villa near Lake Geneva, where Mary whiled away the time by writing Frankenstein. And Frankenstein’s monster, in the end, leaps on to an ice-raft in the Arctic Ocean, and disappears into the darkness.

  The next time the same pattern of stars appeared was on the night of 14 April 1912, when it was sighted over the North Atlantic Ocean by Robert Philips, the first officer on board the Mesaba. He drew a rough picture of it in his diary, which would have been forgotten for ever, if 14 April hadn’t seen one of the greatest disasters in modern history, the sinking of the White Star liner Titanic.

  The encyclopedia’s entry concluded, ‘Although there is insufficient scientific evidence to prove it, the appearance of this particular pattern of stars always seems to presage freakishly cold weather conditions; and widescale death.’

  Seven

  Jim drove down to Pico Boulevard shortly after nine fifteen. The evening was still uncomfortably hot, and his room-width windshield was splattered with insects. There were rumbles of thunder far off to the south, and lightning danced across the horizon like stiltwalkers.

  Pico Villas was a shabby 1960s building with a concrete courtyard and a concrete flying saucer planted with dried-up yuccas. Jim pushed open the door to the stuffy, stale-smelling lobby and found the button marked “Hubbard”. He pushed it and waited for an answer.

  Eventually, he heard Henry Hubbard’s voice say, suspiciously, “Yes?”

  “Jim Rook, Mr Hubbard. Sorry if I’m a little late.”

  “That’s all right. Come on up. Third floor, second on the right.”

  Jim stepped into the elevator. It was so cramped that he was glad that he was alone. It was lined with wood-patterned Formica, too, which made it feel like a vertical coffin. It seemed to take hours to groan its way up to three; and even when it did, it remained motionless, with its doors still closed, for almost fifteen seconds. Then, with a convulsive shudder, it opened.

  Henry Hubbard was waiting for Jim with his apartment door open. He was a tall, rangy man, with bristling white hair and a face that looked as if it had been eroded by years of icy-cold winds. His eyes were pale green, and his nose was large and pitted. He was very clean-shaven, as if he had just come out of the bathroom, and he smelled of Hugo Boss aftershave. He wore a green checkered shirt and pale-blue jeans, with a wide leather belt.

  “Mr Rook? Henry Hubbard. Glad you managed to find us.” He gave Jim a strong, dry handshake.

  “Jack home yet?” asked Jim.

  “He shouldn’t be long. He’s meeting some of his friends from college. I believe they’re forming some sort of support group. They’re getting themselves together to talk out their emotions about what happened to young Ray Krueger today, and Jack seemed to be very keen to be part of it. I guess it’s a good way of helping them to deal with it. You know. Young kids, a trauma like that. They need to express what they feel.”

  “Did you see the news?”

  “Yes. But, to tell you the truth, I almost wish that I hadn’t. I’ve witnessed enough tragedy in my time, caused by the cold. I don’t need reminding what frostbite can do.”

  Henry Hubbard led Jim through to a plain, sparsely furnished living-room. It had a distinctly rented look about it. An olive-green carpet, cheap laminated furniture. A large oil painting of an orange sun that looked like an advertisement for Minute Maid orange juice. In one corner, however, stood a huge new widescreen Sony television and stacks of videotapes, all neatly labeled; and above it was a bookshelf crowded with books on meteorology and geography and Arctic and Antarctic exploration.

  “You’ll have to excuse the confusion,” said Henry Hubbard. “I never seem to get the chance to—”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. My place is just the same. That’s the trouble with living alone. That cup of coffee you left on the table in the morning, it’s still there when you come home at night. I haven’t trained my cat to wash dishes yet.”

  “Get you a drink?”

  “Anything. Club soda, Coke, whatever you’ve got.”

  “Beer? Unless you’re on duty or something.”

  “Beer’s fine. I don’t have any problem with beer.”

  Henry Hubbard brought two cans of Pabst and they sat on the leatherette couch together.

  “West Grove must be in some kind of turmoil today, after what happened.”

  “Turmoil?” said Jim. “Turmoil’s an understatement. You can’t blame people for panicking. But I’m dete
rmined to find out how that railing got so cold. I’m not letting Ray sacrifice his hands and never know why.”

  Henry Hubbard nodded, but he kept his eyes lowered, and didn’t look up at Jim once.

  Jim said, “Jack told you about the washroom freezing up?”

  “That’s right. You still haven’t found out how that happened?”

  “No, but I’m working on the assumption that the washroom incident and the railing incident are directly connected.”

  “I wish you luck. But don’t be surprised if you never find out how they happened. The cold can be like that. Full of secrets, you know? The cold … well, let me tell you, the cold is a different country.”

  They sat and drank in silence for a while. Then Henry Hubbard said, “Jack’s doing okay? He seems to like his English class.”

  “Jack? Jack’s doing fine, from what I’ve seen of him so far. He seems to be intelligent, perceptive, articulate. I don’t think he’s going to have to stay for very long in Special Class II. He just needs to find his place in the educational system, that’s all. Once he’s up to speed, I don’t see any problems whatsoever.”

  “He’s happy? He’s not disturbed?”

  “Why should he be disturbed?”

  “I don’t know, losing his mother. Moving around so much.”

  “He seems okay to me.”

  “That’s good,” said Henry Hubbard, nodding. Then, “What happened today … this frostbite thing. I don’t really see how I can help you.”

  “I wanted to pick your brains is all.”

  “Listen … just because I went to Alaska, just because two of my friends got frozen to death, that doesn’t mean I know anything and everything about cold weather conditions. As a matter of fact, my friends and I were exposed to minus seventy-one degrees … and when you consider that the lowest temperature ever recorded in the US was minus eighty – that was at Prospect Creek, Alaska, in 1971 – well, what we went through, that was pretty close to the limit. It was a miracle I got out of there alive.”