Rook: Snowman Read online

  “Jack seems to think that you’ve got something on your mind. Something to do with what happened up there.”

  “You said he wasn’t disturbed.”

  “There’s a difference between being disturbed and being bewildered.”

  “Bewildered? What about?”

  “He says he’s tried to talk to you about your last expedition but you always close up. He says you spend hours staring at the video recordings, looking for something, and he doesn’t know what. He says you’ve hung up all of these Inuit fetishes, around the house; and you make him wear a whalebone talisman around his neck. From where I’m standing, I’d say that it bewilders him. He’s looking for answers.”

  Henry Hubbard shrugged and said, “It was a tough deal, that last expedition. Very, very tough.”

  “So why don’t you share it with him? He seems to have the feeling that he’s being excluded.”

  “Excluded? That expedition … everybody in the whole world was excluded, except us. You can’t share an experience like that. You can’t even talk about an experience like that. I’m only making this TV program because I’m contracted to do it and I need the money. My friends are dead. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d never think about it again.”

  “So what are you looking for, when you stare at those videos?”

  “White, that’s what I see. White, white, white. I have nightmares about it. What am I supposed to say to Jack? He looks up to me, like I’m some kind of role model. But he wasn’t there. He didn’t see what I saw. He doesn’t understand.”

  “He doesn’t understand what?”

  “He doesn’t understand what it’s like when you’re right in the middle of that total white-out and you’re sure that you’re going to die.”

  “But you didn’t die.”

  Henry Hubbard gave Jim a strange, defensive look, as if he had been caught taking money out of somebody’s wallet. “I didn’t, no. I survived. But I was closer to dying than I ever want to be again. If you want to know the truth, Mr Rook, that expedition took everything out of me. My sense of adventure, my courage, everything. It even took my pride.”

  Jim sat back and said nothing for a while. Henry Hubbard was clearly agitated. He kept rubbing his hand backwards and forwards across his mouth, as if he were trying to wipe away the taste of a foul-tasting kiss.

  “So you feel guilty?” asked Jim.

  “Of course I feel guilty. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t come back … just died on the glacier like my friends did. What do they call it? Survivor syndrome. You don’t know how many times I wish I were dead. But it didn’t work out that way.”

  Jim said, “Why don’t you tell Jack about it? I mean, not glossed over, not like a TV documentary, but the way it really happened.”

  “I can’t. He wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “Why don’t you give him a chance?”

  Henry Hubbard shook his head. “He doesn’t want to hear how his old man lost his nerve; and his old man doesn’t want to tell him, either.”

  “Then why don’t you try telling me?”

  Henry Hubbard drank some more beer. Then he stood up, and walked around the couch. “Did you ever hear of Dead Man’s Mansion?”

  “Unh-hunh. Can’t say that I did.”

  “It’s a story that dates back to 1913 or thereabouts. There’s supposed to be a house in northern Alaska, up in the mountains near the Yukon border, much grander than any of the cabins you usually find in those parts. They say it was built by one of the survivors of the Titanic disaster, nobody knows why. Guy called Edward Grace. He was supposed to have lived there all alone for years.

  “I still don’t know how much of the story is true. But Edward Grace was supposed to have lived there until he didn’t have the strength to cut himself wood any longer, and he froze to death. They say that he’s still sitting at his living-room table, mummified, along with his cat.”

  “His cat?”

  “I always thought it was one of those tall tales that people tell you in Alaska. But one night in Fairbanks I got talking to an old man in the hotel bar. He was out in the wilderness once, so he told me, making seismic tests for oil, and he and his companions had gotten lost in the middle of a blizzard. He swore that – just for a moment – he had actually seen Dead Man’s Mansion, although the weather had closed in so bad that he hadn’t been able to get close to it. I thought he was nothing but a rambling old drunk, but when I talked to the barman, he told me that he used to be a world-famous petro-geologist. I looked him up on the Internet, and the barman was right. Senior exploration geologist for Amoco. So that’s when I started to take the story of Dead Man’s Mansion a little more seriously.

  “I persuaded NBC to finance most of the trip, and the rest of the sponsorship came from the University of Alaska in Anchorage. I chose two volunteers to go with me – Randy Brett and Charles Tuchman. Randy was the best historian in the north-west, and Charles was a highly-qualified cartographer, and both of them were experienced climbers and Arctic explorers, too.

  “We flew up as far as Old Crow, on the Yukon side of the border, and then we trekked our way westward, using two 1920s maps that Charles had found in an antique bookshop in Seattle. We also had a whole notebook full of hearsay stories about Dead Man’s Mansion – where it was located, how it had been constructed, all of the legends and myths that surrounded it. One old cannery worker said that his father had not only found Dead Man’s Mansion, but been inside it, too, and seen Mr Grace sitting at his drawing-room table. Apparently Mr Grace had a deck of cards laid out in front of him, from the HMS Titanic. This old cannery worker’s father had even taken one of the cards to prove it – or so he said. He said that he’d lost it, when he moved down south.

  Henry Hubbard switched on his television. “We took two snowmobiles and we made pretty rapid progress. We were convinced that we knew approximately where Dead Man’s Mansion had been built, and that if we made a systematic search it wouldn’t take us more than a week to find it. But then the snow started, and the winds got up, and by day three we were struggling to make more than six or seven miles a day.”

  Jim turned around on the couch and looked at the TV screen. At first it looked as if there was thick white interference, but then he realized that what he was looking at was snow.

  Henry Hubbard said, “It was April, and sure, you can still get plenty of snow in April, up in those latitudes, and up at those elevations. But this was worse than anything I’ve ever seen. The snowmobiles seized up, so we had to walk, and even though we had satellite direction-finding equipment and transponders and you name it, we were lost and we were blind and we seriously began to think that we were in a life-threatening situation.”

  He pointed to a dark shadowy shape on the right of the screen. “That’s me … that’s Randy, walking next to me – you can hardly see him, can you? And Charles was taking the pictures.”

  All that Jim could see was whirling white flakes and occasional dark flickers which might have been anything.

  “Jack says you stare at the screen, real close. What are you actually looking for?”

  Even now, Henry Hubbard had his eyes fixed, unblinking, on the television. “I’m looking for the fourth man,” he said.

  “The fourth man? What fourth man?”

  “Huh! It sounds as if I’m losing my marbles, doesn’t it? But after two days of crossing the mountains, we all began to think that we were four in our party, not three. We were conscious that somebody was walking with us, and after a while the feeling grew so strong that we talked about him as if he were really there.”

  He paused and said, “He always walked on our left.”

  “Did you see him?”

  Henry Hubbard didn’t answer, but continued to stare at the mesmerizing snowflakes. “It was a joke at first. We called him George. If anything went wrong, we could always blame George. But by the end of the fourth day it was more than a joke. We even saved rations for him.

  “I didn�
��t know about this until I got back to Anchorage, but other explorers have experienced the ‘extra man’ phenomenon. It goes right back to Marco Polo when he rode across the Lop Nor desert on his way to China. At night he heard spirits talking who appeared to be his companions.”

  He picked up a loose-leaf folder from the top of the television. “And look at this: when Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in Antarctic ice in 1916, he and two others left the crew on Elephant Island and traveled eight hundred miles in a small boat to South Georgia. They landed on the deserted side of the island and climbed ranges that had never been climbed before to get help from a whaling station.

  “Here, this is what Shackleton wrote: ‘I know that during that long march of thirty-six hours it often seemed to me that we were four, not three. And Worseley and Crean had the same idea.’ Seven years after the event, Worseley wrote that ‘even now I find myself counting our party – Shackleton, Crean and I and – who was the other? Of course there were only three, but it is strange that in mentally reviewing the crossing we should always think of a fourth, and then correct ourselves.’

  “And listen to this: ‘Steve Martin and David Mitchell and another Antarctic veteran, Keith Burgess, came across the fourth man when they were crossing Greenland. They called him Fletch. When they came to record their journey, they put it down as a four-man crossing, and F. Letch was the fourth member.’

  “The extra man has appeared again and again – whenever it’s cold, whenever people are lost. Frank Smythe climbed up Everest in 1933 and always felt that he had a companion, somebody to catch his rope and save him if he slipped. He kept food for his companion, too. And here – in February 1957, a fellwalker called Dennis Goy was caught in a blizzard in Britain’s Lake District. He came across some recent footprints in the snow and followed them. But the footprints stopped, right in the middle of a vast expanse of untouched snow.”

  “Don’t you think that you can put it down to physical and mental stress, in very remote locations?”

  “Probably.”

  “You’re not sure, though, are you? You’re not sure at all?”

  “Well, he seemed so damned real at the time. George, or Fletch, or whatever you care to call him. When I came back, I talked to my father-in-law about it. He’s a full-blooded Inuit, and he lives in Inuvik now – he’s an archivist for Inuit culture. He said that he’s plenty of stories about the ‘extra man’. He has friends who were saved from the wilderness, just like me; and all of them talk about somebody who came to guide them out of the snow. The Inuit won’t talk about him much. But my father-in-law said that they call him an Inuit name meaning ‘snowman’.”

  “Did the snowman save you?” asked Jim.

  “Me? No, those are only stories.”

  “But you’ve done all of this research … and you’re still looking for him,” said Jim, nodding toward the television.

  “Maybe just to satisfy myself once and for all that he didn’t exist. I survived and my two companions died. I don’t like to think that it was down to anything other than luck.”

  Jim could sense that Henry Hubbard had more to tell him, but he fell silent, as if he couldn’t bring himself to put it into words. He was obviously still grief-stricken by the deaths of his fellow-explorers; and it must have been hell to put together a documentary of everything they had done together. Jim could see dozens of photographs spread out across the living-room table, photographs of smiling bearded men in bright Arctic clothing, their arms around each other, laughing, optimistic. Now there was nothing left but the snow flying across the television screen.

  “I’m going to ask you a straight question,” said Jim. “Can you think of any possible connection between your expedition to Dead Man’s Mansion, and what’s been happening at West Grove College?”

  Henry Hubbard gave him an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  Jim waited, and then he said, “You don’t think that, somehow, that there’s a connection between the cold you experienced in Alaska, and the the cold we’re experiencing here? And that Jack could be the link between them?”

  “How could there be? It’s not logical.”

  “Ray Krueger losing his hands to frostbite, that wasn’t logical either. I’ll tell you something, Mr Hubbard. A whole lot of terrible things happen in this world that aren’t logical, but they happen nonetheless. No summer in the year 1816. The Titanic going down. Frost in June. Blizzards in mid-July.”

  Henry Hubbard said nothing more. Jim finished his beer and said, “Well, I’ll be going then.” He stood by the door for a moment, watching Henry Hubbard in front of his snowstorm television, and then he went out and closed it behind him.

  As he climbed back into his car, he hesitated. The evening was still warm, but he distinctly felt a faint chilly draft blowing on the back of his neck. He looked around him, at the car-cluttered concrete driveway in front of Pico Villas, but he couldn’t see anybody. He looked behind, to Pico Boulevard, with its noisy, jostling traffic. Nothing unusual.

  But then he thought he heard a tapping noise off to his right, coming along the cracked concrete sidewalk. A slurring tap, as if somebody were sweeping a stick from side to side, and giving a little sharp tap at the end of every sweep.

  He looked around, but he couldn’t see anybody at all. This wasn’t a part of town where people walked very much. Yet the tapping noise continued, and it sounded as if it were coming closer. Tap! – sweep – tap! – sweep – tap! – until it sounded so near that Jim involuntarily took a step back.

  Then he saw them. On the sidewalk in front of him, glittering marks appearing, one after the other, like footprints. They came nearer and nearer, and for one moment he thought that they were heading directly toward him. He pressed himself back against the side of his car, and the footprints passed in front of him, only a few inches away. At the same time he felt a sub-zero coldness unlike any coldness that he had ever felt before. This wasn’t the bracing snap you felt on the ski-slopes; or the fresh cold you felt when you were out on the ocean. This was a dead, still cold – a cold that could crack rocks, or freeze a body for ever. This was the cold of the Arctic night, in which penitent monsters floated through the darkness on rafts of pallid ice.

  A prickling sensation crept all the way up Jim’s back. One hand was resting on the top of his car door, and he felt the metal being emptied of all of its evening warmth. The windshield suddenly bloomed with white frosty flowers.

  His breath smoked. Over by the sign that said Pico Villas, a yucca plant sparkled with ice. Whatever it was that was passing him by, it was capable of lowering the temperature within a fifty-feet radius all around it. Its footsteps continued until they reached the signboard and then they stopped, although the tapping continued, tap – tap – tappity – tap, nervous, inquisitive and quick.

  Jim didn’t dare to move, didn’t say a word. If there were any kind of spirit here, he would normally be able to see it. But he couldn’t make out anything except frosty footsteps, and even these were rapidly beginning to fade. Cautiously he knelt down and touched one, and it was made up of thousands of needles of sparkling ice, infinitely fragile.

  The tapping continued. Patient, but threatening. There was no doubt in Jim’s mind that whatever this invisible presence actually was, it had come looking for Jack. He strained his eyes but he couldn’t see even the vaguest ripple in the evening air. Maybe he was losing his ability to see spirits and phantoms and out-of-body travelers. Or maybe there was something very different about this particular manifestation. Maybe the intense cold was capable of creating a creature that couldn’t be seen and couldn’t be touched, while it could freeze everything around it with complete impunity.

  It waited for a while, and Jim had the impression that it was trying to sense whether Jack was any place near. It didn’t seem to be interested in him at all, in spite of the fact that he was less than twenty feet away, his thin arms covered with goosebumps.

  After more than five minutes, the tapp
ing started up again, and then the sweeping, and the frozen footsteps continued eastward toward Rexford Drive, sparkling in the streetlight, until they finally disappeared. Jim waited for a moment, listening. Then he swung himself into his car and found his keys with fingers that were numb with cold. He started up the engine and pulled out of Pico Villas in a cloud of smoking rubber.

  He was sure of it now: a malevolent spirit was searching for Jack. It had tried to locate him at school, without success, and Ray Krueger had been frozen instead. Now it had arrived at Jack’s home. Even if it was somehow connected with Henry Hubbard’s ill-fated expedition to find Dead Man’s Mansion, it obviously wasn’t looking for Henry Hubbard himself. So what did it want? And why? What could Jack have possibly done to make it so determined to freeze him?

  As he drove home, Jim kept thinking about that tapping sound along the sidewalk. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what. But when he stopped for a red light at the intersection of Venice and Palm, he saw a specialist pet store on the opposite side of the street called Strictly For The Birds. In the window, in a huge domed cage, sat a large red and green parrot, the kind of parrot that Long John Silver might have carried on his shoulder.

  Long John Silver, from Treasure Island. And who was the terrifying character in the opening chapters of Treasure Island who had tapped his way down the road to the Admiral Benbow Inn? Blind Pew.

  That was the tap-slur-tap that he had heard. The tapping of a blind man’s stick, feeling his way. A blind man, or a sightless spirit. Why else would it have frozen the washroom, unless it had been obliged to rely on its sense of touch or smell to tell it that Jack was there? Except that he hadn’t been there, of course – only his sweatshirt. And why else would it have frozen Ray Krueger, unless it had believed – mistakenly – that it was freezing Jack?

  The lights changed to green and the car behind him blasted its horn. Jim gave the driver a wave of apology and took a left turn toward home.

  There was one thing more that worried him: if the spirit had come to Jack’s apartment block, looking for him, then it knew that it had frozen the wrong person. That meant that Jack was still in danger, and so were any other students at West Grove Community College who happened to get in its way.