Rook: Snowman (25 page)

“Watch yourself!” Jim warned Jack. “The last thing I saw, it was making its way around the side of the table, toward you. Be careful – it wants you first!”

Over the spitting and crackling of the flames, it was almost impossible to hear the tapping of the Snowman’s stick. Jim took hold of Jack’s arm and led him slowly around the room, trying to make his way toward the door, so that they could both escape. The heat was becoming unbearable, and a row of glass vases on the mantelpiece suddenly exploded, in twos or threes. A large oil-painting of a Romanian woman suddenly lurched sideways, its frame already beginning to give off some pretty little flames.

They kept circling around toward the door, Jim waving his left hand in front of him in case they walked directly into contact with the invisible Snowman. They had almost reached the door and so far he hadn’t even felt a bite of frost, or even a chilly draft. Jack said, “Two more steps, Mr Rook, and we’re home free.” The dining-room was
beginning to fill up with dense black smoke, and all the glass panes in the display cabinets were cracking.

Tibbles Two dropped down from her chair and began to follow them. She may have been a mystical cat, but she obviously hadn’t foreseen any death in her own cards, and she wasn’t going to risk another of her nine lives fecklessly.

The dining-room had walls of fire. The huge mahogany server was alight, the books were alight, the table was alight. Poor old Captain Oates was alight, too, his figure bending forward over the table as the heat twisted up his already mummified body.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Jim. “I can’t see any spirit surviving this.”

As they reached the entrance hall, however, making for the front door, Jack abruptly shouted out, “
Annnhhh
!” and dropped to his knees. The next thing that Jim knew, he was sliding across the hallway on his side, as if something were dragging him. And, of course, something
was
dragging him, but in this kind of heat the Snowman couldn’t be seen at all.

“
Jack
!” Jim shouted, but Jack was almost unconscious. He slid across to the stairs and began to bump up them, still on his side, his arms and legs dangling. It was like a weird act of levitation. Jim knew that the Snowman was dragging him, but he simply couldn’t see him.

Unless, of course
… He swung his rucksack off his shoulder, unbuckled it, and carefully pulled out Laura’s mirror. He quickly buffed it with his elbow, then he spat to the north, and spat to the south, and spat to the east, and spat to the west. Then he spat in the mirror and said his own personal prayer. “
Mirror, mirror, I’ll give you this spit … If you’ll just show me this piece of
—”

He turned around, and held up the mirror – and there, just
for an instant, he saw the Snowman on the landing, pulling Jack toward one of the upstairs rooms. It must have been too hot downstairs for him to try freezing Jack to death.

Jim picked up one of the blazing table-legs and ran up the stairs after him. Jack was lying in the upstairs corridor, still half-conscious, his eyes flickering. But he wasn’t moving any more. The Snowman must have let him go when it saw Jim running up the stairs, and now it was trying to hide itself. Jim lifted the mirror again, and quickly scanned the landing. There it was, standing in the far corner, those dried-prune eyes watching him sightlessly but conscious of his every move.

“You can’t get away from me now!” Jim shouted at it. “I know what you are and I know what you have to do, whether you like it or not!”

“
I will have this boy’s soul first
,” the creature cautioned him. “
It has been owing to me for a very long time
.”

But Jim walked into the bedroom directly in front of him. It had a tester bed with a frayed and frozen old canopy. It had thick drapes and net curtains. It had a large closet filled with old clothes. Jim whirled his fiery table-leg around and around his head until it really began to flare up. Then he touched the clothes and the bed-canopy and the nets and anything else that would burn. He stood in the middle of the blazing room with his back turned to the Snowman, but holding up Laura’s mirror so that he could see it coming.

The fire in the bedroom spread even more quickly than the blaze in the dining-room downstairs. Before he knew it, the bed was a blazing funeral-pyre of wood and horsehair and curling springs, and the drapes were being eaten up by the fiercest fire that Jim had ever seen. The heat was growing intolerable, and the smoke was so thick that he was coughing and whining, rather than breathing in and out.

But he stayed where he was as the room burned even
more wildly all around him. In his mirror he could see the figure on the landing outside, torn between its greed to feed itself on Jack’s immortal soul, and its duty to rescue Jim from any harm. Jim was an Arctic wanderer: no matter what threat he faced, the Snowman was bound by the terms of its punishment to save his life.

Still the creature hesitated. The fire was so hot now that Jim’s stormproof coat was softening and melting, and his bootlaces were beginning to smoke. Sweat was running down his face and he could smell his hair starting to smolder. His cheeks felt as if they were actually burning, but he didn’t flinch. If he gave in now, the creature would have them both.

The Snowman came nearer to the bedroom door. It stood with both its hands raised across its face, as if it were making a secret sign, or shielding itself from the heat. Jim could see it in his mirror but even that was becoming too hot to handle. The rug under his feet was glittering with tiny orange sparks and the wool was charring like old, burned flesh.

At that moment, Jack recovered. He dragged himself up on to one elbow and stared at Jim in horror. “Jim! Get out of there! Jim, your goddamned hair’s on fire!”

Jim could feel the heat on his scalp and he patted it with his hand. The palm of his hand was filled with charred black hair.

Oh Christ, he thought. I’ve overplayed it this time. I’m going to roast to death, right here in this room.

Still the tall white creature held back. It turned again to look at Jack, and it lifted its hand as if to seize him and tear out his heart. But it hesitated, hesitated. It had made a promise to the Great Immortal Being and it couldn’t deny it.

The soles of Jim’s boots began to burn. But at that instant the tall white creature made a lunge into the blazing
bedroom to rescue him. Jim saw the figure in Laura’s mirror, its shoulders hunched, its arms outstretched, and for one split-second he thought that he saw its face. But as it tried to seize him, he sidestepped, and rolled over on the burning carpet, two quick rolls and he was out of the door.

The Snowman whirled around in the center of the room. “
You fool
!” it screamed at him. “
You will pay for ever for this
!”

But Jim slammed the bedroom door and twisted the key in the handle.

There was a furious beating on the other side of the door. Then the beating subsided, and they heard a low, agonized moaning. The moaning rose higher and higher, until it was a piercing, mock-operatic screech. It went on and on until Jim thought that it was never going to end and they were all going to go out of their heads.

Then something inside the room exploded. Maybe the creature was too cold to withstand such heat. Maybe there was ammunition in the room; or even a couple of sticks of dynamite. But the whole house shook to its foundations, and fragments of window-frame were sent tumbling into the snow-clouds far below.

Jim and Jack staggered down to the front door, and out into the freezing cold. Dead Man’s Mansion was burning from basement to attic, with huge flames rolling out of every window. Its roof collapsed, sending showers of sparks up into the air, to join the stars. Then the upstairs floor fell in, followed by the stairs. They stood two or three hundred feet away, close enough to feel the heat of the fire, and watched as it brought down the greatest private house in northern Alaska.

Long after the main fire had burned itself out, and there was nothing left but smoking ruins, Jim circled the house whistling and calling. “TT? TT? Where are you, TT?”

But the cat didn’t answer. Jim could only conclude that it had stayed with Captain Oates in the dining-room, and preferred the loyalty of death to the disloyalty of survival.

Jim put his arm around Jack and said, “Let’s go. It’s a long walk back and all of my Snickers have melted.”

Jack said nothing, but turned and stared at the black, skeletal wreckage of Dead Man’s Mansion. Then he tightened the straps of his rucksack and started to walk.

When he arrived at college the following Monday, Karen came across and said, “Jim! Look at you! What on earth happened? Your hair!”

“Little accident with a barbecue,” he told her.

“How was your trip to Alaska?”

“Well, how do you want to put it? It was partly successful.”

“Only partly?”

“I think I learned something. Not to interfere with other people’s problems. Not to get involved in other people’s lives.”

“You’re kidding me. I thought you loved interfering with other people’s lives.”

Jim walked across the parking-lot into the college building. As he turned into the main corridor, he saw Dr Friendly talking to Clarence, the janitor. He went over and waited until Dr Friendly had finished.

Clarence said, “Hey, Mr Rook! You look like you’ve been sunbathing – two inches from the sun!”

“Little accident with a barbecue,” said Jim.

Dr Friendly said, “You’re back, then. Successful trip?”

“In a way. I did what I set out to do. And I guess I discovered something, too.”

“Oh, yes?”

“It’s time I moved on. I can’t stay with Special Class Two for the rest of my life. You don’t support it, Dr Ehrlichman is only half-hearted, and what good am I doing, really? You’re right: I’m giving my kids nothing but false hopes and expectations they can never hope to fulfil.”

He paused, and then he said, “I called Madeleine Ouster over the weekend and I’m flying to DC at the end of the week.”

Dr Friendly put his arm around his shoulder. “You know something, James. For the first time in your life, I think you’re doing the right thing.”

He sat in his classroom that afternoon and listened to his students analyzing ‘The Ball Poem’. Then, when they were finished, he stood up and walked to the back of the classroom.

“What if the little boy had never had a ball to begin with? What if he had never had a ball to lose?”

“I don’t get your meaning,” said Tarquin Tree.

“Well, take
you
for instance. When you first came to this class, you’d never read a single book, you didn’t know a single poem. You thought that Walt Whitman was a country-and-western singer. When you leave this class, I’ll bet you money that you never pick up another book, and that you never read another poem. So what’s the point of your coming here, and what’s the point of my giving you that ball, when you and I both know that you’re going to let it go bouncing off down the road, and lose it for ever into the harbor?”

“What’s the
point
?” asked Tarquin, confused. “What’s the
point
?”

“That’s what I’m asking you, yes.”

“There doesn’t have to be a
point
, does there? Like, what’s the point of anything? What’s the point of music?
What’s the point of red Corvettes? What’s the point of sex, when you’re not having babies? There doesn’t have to be a
point
.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim. “Sometimes, maybe there does. Sometimes you feel that your own life has to have a point. Sometimes you have to do something for yourself and put other people second. I have a gift, as you all know, a very great gift. I can see spirits and ghosts and things that people normally can’t see. But it’s like being a healer, in a way. Everybody comes and asks you to help them, and sometimes they don’t even ask, but you help them anyhow, because you’ve got the gift and who are you to refuse anybody the benefits of it?

“But right now I want to go away and lead a life where nobody knows what I can see; and nobody knows what I can do. Right now I want to try to be an ordinary person.”

“You’re leaving us?” said Linda Starewsky, in disbelief.

Washington Freeman III shook his head and kept on shaking his head. “You can’t leave us, man. What are we going to do if you leave us?”

“You’re going to do exactly what you did before you met me. You’re going to do the best you can.”

“Yes, but who’s going to teach us about all of those poems and stuff?” asked Billyjo Muntz. “You know – who’s going to give us that, like,
insight
?”

“You have your own insight,” said Jim. “Learn to rely on yourselves, instead of me. Look for your own poems. So long as you remember what I taught you – so long as you bother to read, and to think, and never to take anything at its face value – you’ll get along fine.”

Laura Killmeyer said, “Don’t you believe in magic any more?”

“Sure I believe in magic. But magic doesn’t solve
everything. Sometimes we have to sort things out the hard way, the ordinary way, without the benefit of magic.”

He reached the back of the class. Nestor Fawkes was crouched over his desk, writing something in his awkward, spidery script. Jim stood over him for a while, and then said, “What are you doing there, Nestor? Mind if I see it?”

Nestor looked up. His shirt collar was grubby and there was a new red bruise on his cheek where his father had hit him. He handed the piece of paper to Jim, all folded up, and Jim took it back to his desk.

“All right, everybody. You just have time to start reading
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Whatever your first impressions, this is a very strange spaced-out poem full of weird and powerful images.”

Everybody made a noise opening their poetry books and scuffling their feet and whispering. Jim sat down and opened the piece of paper that Nestor had given him. It said, simply,
‘Dont go. Please. Regards, Nestor.’