Rook: Snowman (3 page)

“There’s something wrong in there, Mr Rook. Like, there’s a real bad smell, and it aint the 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.”

“So who was it?”

“I don’t know. But it wasn’t students. Students pull some pretty ridiculous stunts, I’ll admit. It’s their job. But there isn’t any point to this at all.”

Dr Friendly stared at him for a long time, the breath fuming out of his nostrils. “So what are you saying? That it was a natural phenomenon? A miracle? An act of God?”

“I don’t know. I think we ought to keep an open mind. I also think we ought to call the police.”

“Absolutely not. We’ve had enough trouble on this campus already, and we’re only a week into the new semester. That commissary riot, that was enough. Fettucine everywhere. Besides, this is all going to melt by the time the police get here, and then what are we going to say? ‘Some drug-crazed vandal made our washroom all wet’?”

Jim said, “I’m only going on intuition, sir. But I have a
very bad feeling about this.”

“Yes, Mr Rook, I’ve heard all about your psychic sensitivity. Maybe hysteria’s a better word for it. I don’t know what caused this freezing, but it’s melting now, and that’s all I care about. The best thing we can do is ignore it.”

“Let me tell you something, sir. The temperature in this room must have plunged down to minus fifty degrees Celsius, maybe lower, all in the blink of an eye. And you’re telling me to ignore it?”

“Exactly. If it’s a prank, the best thing that we can do is show no interest in it whatsoever. If it’s a meteorological phenomenon, we can’t do anything about it anyhow. So the best plan is simply to tell yourself that you were dreaming: that it never happened. Then we can all get on with the business of running a college without worrying about things that are never going to be satisfactorily explained, whatever we do.”

“And if it happens again?”

“It won’t happen again.”

“But if it does?”

“Read my lips, Mr Rook. It’s not going to happen again because it didn’t happen this time, either. I expressly forbid you to mention this incident ever again, to anyone, and that includes the police and the Press.”

“A cat got killed this time around. What if a student gets frozen to death? What are you going to say about that?”

“I told you, Mr Rook, loud and clear. It won’t happen again.”

Jim stared at Dr Friendly for a long, long time before he finally took his eyes away. “I hope you’re willing to lay money on that,” he remarked.

“I’m not a betting man, Mr Rook.”

“I’ll bet you’re not.”

* * *

Jim found Ray on the sloping lawns outside, with the cat wrapped up in a West Grove college sweatshirt. He was doggedly massaging the cat’s heart with his fingertips, but the cat’s head was lolling back over his knee with its lip exposed in a deathly snarl.

“Ray, come on, man. Why don’t you give it up? There isn’t a creature alive which could have survived that.”

“How about cockroaches?” suggested Christophe l’Ouverture – a very stylish Haitian boy who wore some of the most expensive clothes in the class. He had dreadlocks and flappy white pants and a yellow silk shirt from Armani, the color of molten gold. He bared his white teeth. “Cockroaches can survive any destructive force known to man. Insecticides, H-bombs, earthquakes, floods.”

“This isn’t a cockroach, this is a cat,” said Ray. “And I read about it. Cats can survive extreme temperatures. Somebody cooked a cat in a bread-oven once, and it survived. Kind of crispy, sure. But it was still alive.”

Jim peered at the cat and said, “It’s dead. No doubt about it.”

“I could give it the kiss of life,” Ray suggested.

“What?” Christophe exploded. “You’re going to kiss a dead cat? That’s so sick! Uggh! Fwah! You pervert! You must be out of your ever-living mind!”

But Ray didn’t hesitate. He pressed his thumb over the cat’s nostrils, took a deep breath, and clamped his lips around its mouth.

“Go easy,” Jim warned him. “Just remember how much smaller its lungs are. You could burst them if you blow too hard.”

Ray lifted his head and took another breath. “It’s been eating tuna,” he remarked, before he bent down to blow into its lungs for a second time.

He dipped his head down again and again, and kept on massaging the animal’s heart, but after five minutes there was still no sign of life.

“Ray,” said Jim, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I know you want to be a vet. I know you want to save animals’ lives. But this one, I’m sorry. This one is really beyond saving.”