Rook: Snowman (17 page)

“I felt unsafe and desperately uncomfortable, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of its shoulder bones, but I was too exhausted to have any choice. The figure kept on walking through the blizzard and after a while the joggling began to send me to sleep. I tried not to close my eyes but I couldn’t help it. All I could hear was the wind screaming and the snow pattering against my face and the crunch, crunch, crunch of the figure’s feet, as it kept on walking.

“I must have slept for hours. I woke up in the morning to find myself lying in the snow outside a small Inuit trading-post called Anatuk. The wind had died down and
the sun was shining. An Inuit woman came out of the trading-post and saw me, and called her husband. They helped me inside, and the rest you know.”

“You didn’t see the figure, or any sign of it?”

“I saw footprints, leading to the place where I was lying. But there was only one set of them, so I told myself that they had to be mine.”

“The figure was carrying you, remember.”

“I know. And the footprints were larger than mine. But it was a warm morning, by Arctic Circle standards, and the footprints had already thawed out some, which could have accounted for that. When they melt, footprints always look much bigger. That’s why some people think they’ve come across Abominable Snowman tracks, when they’re probably only rabbit spoor.”

“So you decided that it had all been a dream, and that the figure hadn’t really existed?”

“Well, what would you have thought, if the same thing had happened to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m less of a skeptic than you are.”

Henry Hubbard said, “Ralph and Charles were found dead at about three o’clock that afternoon. Their tent had blown away during the night, and they hadn’t stood a chance. I was devastated. They were both such good men. But I guess that was the first time that I began to have suspicions that I might not have been hallucinating, after all. Their bodies were found at the foot of Hungry Horse Pass, which is over a hundred and thirty-eight miles to the south-east of Anatuk. Even the fittest man in the world couldn’t walk a hundred and thirty-eight miles in a sixty-five miles per hour blizzard in the middle of the night.”

“Did you tell anybody?”

Henry Hubbard shook his head. “I told a deliberate lie,
and said that I had left them a day earlier than I really had. I have a reputation in this business, Mr Rook. Everybody would have asked how I managed to travel so far in a single night. The only logical conclusion would have been that a trapper had come across me and given me a ride to Anatuk by snowmobile. In which case, why hadn’t I made any effort to go back for my two companions? But if I insisted that some kind of snow creature rescued me by carrying me on its back, everybody would have said that I was raving. So that was the choice I had. And that was why I said nothing.”

“That washroom incident, was that the first inclination you had that the snowman might be searching for Jack?”

“No. I hadn’t wanted to leave Anchorage so soon, because I needed some time to recover from the expedition, physically and mentally. Apart from that I still had some extra interviews and local footage to shoot. We had an apartment on Northern Lights Boulevard, overlooking Westchester Lagoon. A great place, we both loved it. But I kept having dreams about the figure in the snow. Night after night. And every night I could hear it whispering to me in that voice like crackling ice:
‘Remember what you promised.’

“Then one day I came back home after only about a half-hour at the sound recording studio. I’d forgotten some of my notes. Jack had left for college – probably not more than ten minutes before, because the toaster was still warm. I checked his bedroom and I was annoyed to see that he hadn’t made his bed. But then it realized that it was freezing cold in there, and that his bed was sparkling.

“It was frozen solid. You know what sheets are like when you leave them on the line on a winter’s day? You could have cracked these like cuttlefish shells. The whole bed was rock-hard, even his pajamas.”

“That’s when you knew that you hadn’t been hallucinating after all?”

Henry Hubbard said, “That’s when I went to talk to my late wife’s father. He told me that there were dozens of stories about the Snowman. It craves human companionship, which is why it accompanies parties of explorers across the ice. It was supposed to have been a kind of angel, privileged to sit on the right-hand side of the Great Immortal Being who created the world. But when the Great Immortal Being made the Inuit people, the angel became fiercely jealous. He had given them souls, and the angel – being an angel – had no soul. One day, one of the Great Immortal Being’s favorite humans, the hunter Ninavut, was caught in a snowstorm. The angel deliberately misled him deeper and deeper into the storm and his sled fell through thin ice and he drowned. When the Great Immortal Being found out what had happened, He was so angry that He took away the angel’s eyes, and banished it to the coldest parts of the earth, the north and south poles. He was never to sit or walk on the right side of one of the Great Immortal Being or one of his creations ever again; and he was charged with the task of rescuing any human whom he found in trouble.

“The angel begged for mercy, but the Great Immortal Being was adamant. However, He softened His heart enough to allow the angel to exact whatever price he wanted for carrying out the rescue. If ever the Great Immortal Being made a mistake, that was it. Ever since that day, the angel accompanied every party of Arctic explorers across the ice. It’s taking care of them, as the Great Immortal Being commanded it, but at the same time it is hungrily waiting for them to get into difficulty, so that it can save them, and ask for an exorbitant price in return.

“That price is always a human soul. The Snowman breathes it in, and the soul gives it a few hours’ comforting warmth, and makes it feel for a while that it’s one of the Great Immortal Being’s favored creations.”

Henry Hubbard turned to Jack and said, “I was delirious, almost frozen to death. If I’d have thought for one moment that the Snowman was real, that it was capable of coming after you – I would have laid down in the snow and given myself up to the blizzard. Anything, rather than harm you.

“I even asked your grandfather if it was possible for the bargain to be changed … if I could give the Snowman my soul instead of yours. But he said that it was impossible. The Snowman had been duty-bound by the Great Immortal Being to save my life and to protect me for ever.”

Jack stood up. “You’re my father, and you offered my soul to some goddamned ice monster? How could you have done that – even if you
were
delirious?”

“Jack, I simply didn’t believe it was real.”

“If you didn’t believe it was real, how did you think it was going to save you?”

“I don’t know. It was fifty degrees below, Jack. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Straight enough to condemn your only son to death, just to save your ass. And now look what’s happened. Suzie’s dead and Ray might just as well be dead, too. And that thing’s still coming after me.”

Henry Hubbard lowered his head. “I guess there’s no point in saying sorry.”

“None at all, Dad,” snapped Jack, and walked out of the room, leaving the door wide open.

Jim waited for a moment and then he said, “We’re going to have to find some way of beating this Snowman, Mr Hubbard. I can’t have any more of my students hurt, and that includes Jack.”

“My father-in-law said that the Inuit won’t ever try, because the Snowman’s fate was decreed by the Great Immortal Being. If they attempted to harm it, that would be a direct affront to their creator. But the man who built
Dead Man’s Mansion, Edward Grace, told his Inuit friends that he had devised a way to hunt it down and destroy it. Apparently that was one of the reasons he died … his Inuit friends no longer brought him oil and supplies because they thought he was going to commit a terrible crime against their beliefs.”

“He had actually found a way of licking this thing? Do you know that for a fact?”

“There are no facts north of the Arctic Circle, Mr Rook, apart from the thermometer. In conditions of extreme cold, all kinds of irrational things happen. Even the basic elements behave in ways that you can’t believe. Robert Peary saw an entire range of mountains in the Arctic, and called them Crocker Land, and in 1913 Donald MacMillan sent an expedition to look for them. He saw them, but as soon as the sun went down they disappeared, and there was nothing but a vast plain of ice for as far as the eye could see. A mirage, Mr Rook. And it’s quite possible that Dead Man’s Mansion is nothing but a mirage, or a myth. Up in Alaska, it’s almost impossible to seperate reality from legend.”

“If Edward Grace
had
found a way, though, there might be some evidence of it, up in his house? If his playing cards were still intact after all that time, who’s to say that he doesn’t have papers, or notebooks, or diaries, something like that?”

“A very slim chance, I’d say.”

“Slim, yes. But still a chance.”

Henry Hubbard tiredly rubbed the back of his neck. “You’d have to find the house first. There must have been dozens of expeditions over the years, but apart from one or two chance sightings, nobody knows exactly where it is.”

“You’d help me find it, though, wouldn’t you?”

“
You
? You’re not serious, are you? Do you have any idea what kind of terrain we’re talking about? What kind of
conditions? You have to be one hundred per cent fit, with years of experience in trekking and climbing and survival techniques.”

“I don’t trek, but I
schelp
down to the liquor store now and again. And I used to climb into my old apartment all the time, when I’d forgotten my key. As for survival … I teach Special Class Two, Mr Hubbard, and anybody who can survive that can survive anything.”

“It’s impossible.”

“It’s not impossible. Nothing is impossible, so far as protecting my students is concerned. If finding Dead Man’s Mansion offers them some kind of a chance, then I’m going to go find Dead Man’s Mansion. I don’t care whether you come with me or not, but since you have the know-how, it would probably make things a whole lot easier.”

“Mr Rook, I don’t think you have any idea what you’re proposing to do.”

“You’re right. I don’t. But I’m going to do it all the same.”

“You realize that you’ll probably die.”

Jim said, “I’m talking about the lives of nearly twenty young people here. Including your own son.”

Henry Hubbard looked away. “I’m not sure that I can face going back to Alaska, Mr Rook. That creature robbed me of all the nerve I ever had.”

“Listen, my students feel like that sometimes, when they’re faced with an English test.”

“There’s a hell of a difference between taking an English test and crossing the Sheenjek glacier.”

“No there isn’t, if it frightens you just as much. I have a severely dyslexic girl in my class. She’s nineteen years old and she still can’t make a rhyme or recite the days of the week. Do you know what she said to me the other day? She said that English tests made her feel physically sick and that
sometimes she felt she would rather take an overdose than have to show up for class to take another one.

“So I let her take it a step at a time. I encourage her to plan what she’s going to do, and make one success out of a series of small successes.”

“Mr Rook, you don’t tackle an Arctic exploration as a series of small successes. Either you succeed totally or you die. Alaska isn’t a land of half-measures.”

Jim was silent for a long time. Then he said, “That’s how we’re going to leave it, is it? You’re just going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself while this Snowman creature tracks Jack down and freezes him to death?”

Henry Hubbard didn’t reply for so long that Jim thought that he was never going to. Eventually, however, he stood up and said: “It’s going to take money. We’re going to need clothing, equipment, transponders; and we’ll have to rent a snowmobile.”

“I have a couple of thousand in my savings account.”

“Well, that’ll help. The TV producers have already paid me twenty-two thousand; and my wife left a little when she died.”

“Does this mean you’ll do it?”

Henry Hubbard gave him the haunted look of a soldier who knows that he has to go back to the Front. “When it comes down to it, I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

Eleven

That afternoon, Dr Friendly rapped on his classroom door and said, “Sorry to interrupt, James. But there’s a phone call for you. Madeleine Ouster.”

Jim told his class to continue reading from
The Lost Boy
and followed Dr Friendly down the corridor to the principal’s office. There were at least fifteen police officers and six or seven forensic investigators milling around in the college lobby, along with reporters and two TV crews. West Grove’s frozen swimming pool had made news all around the world, and meteorological experts from five different countries had come up with wildly differing opinions as to how the phenomenon had occurred.

Two or three reporters came hurrying up to Jim, asking him for quotes. “How do you feel about the tragedy today, Mr Rook?” “How are Suzie’s fellow students coping?” “Some TV preachers are saying that this was a sign from God to bring Bible study back into our colleges, what do you say?”

Jim waved them away and went into Dr Ehrlichman’s office and closed the door. Dr Friendly held out the phone and said, “This is your big chance here, James.”

“Mr Rook? This is Madeline Ouster. I’m leaving for Washington in a half-hour and I was very disappointed not to hear from you this morning.”

“I’m sorry, that was discourteous of me. I was kind of tied up with this swimming-pool business.”

“I was very sad to hear about that. I hope you’ll accept my condolences. I also hope that you’ll accept my offer of a job.”

Jim said, “I’ve thought it over very carefully, Ms Ouster. But I’m afraid that I have to think of my commitment to my class.”

“I know you’re a very loyal teacher, Mr Rook. But think about this on a national level. The needs of the many far outweigh the needs of the few.”