Rook: Snowman (4 page)

Just then Laura Killmeyer came walking across the grass, followed as usual by Dottie Osias. Laura was petite and thin, with long shining black hair and a face as white as chalk, with big black eyes and spidery eyelashes. She was wearing a headband of silver coins and a short dress of red chiffon with gold and silver moons printed on it, and sandals that laced right up to her knee. She was one of the prettiest girls in the class, or she would have been if she hadn’t insisted on making herself up to look like the Wicked Witch of the West. Dottie was plump and fair with frizzy hair and hot red cheeks, and today she was wearing a large beige tracksuit. But she showed her devotion to Laura’s mysticism by wearing a large silver pentacle around her neck.

“What’s happening, Mr Rook?” asked Laura, touching him on the shoulder. She was always touching him, only gently, not suggestively. She believed that touching was the way in which fellow souls communicated, and that words were irrelevant. On her first day in Jim’s class, she had offered to stroke his forehead for five minutes instead of writing a critical essay on
The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe. He had, of course, declined.

Dottie adored Laura because Laura was fiercely protective of her, and never criticized her incredible clumsiness, nor her asthma, nor her failure to attract any boyfriends; and because she allowed her to share the secrets of her amateur witchcraft. Jim seriously believed that Dottie would have died for Laura, if she had ever asked her. Yet when it came to English, it was Dottie who had a far deeper understanding
of words, and what they meant, and she was often moved to tears by poetry that left Laura completely baffled.

Jim stood up. “We found a dead cat in the washroom, that’s all. Ray’s been trying to revive it.”

Laura knelt down next to Ray and stroked the cat’s fur. “It’s not dead,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Laura, it’s not breathing. That counts for dead in my book.”

“Ah, but your book isn’t my book. My book says that when you’re dead, your spirit leaves you, and hurries away. But this cat’s spirit hasn’t left yet. This cat’s spirit is only hiding. And all we have to do is look into his eyes like this—”

Here she took hold of the cat’s head in the palm of her hand and bent forward so that she was staring at it from less than six inches away. The cat stared back at her, yellow-eyed, but still dead – as far as Jim was concerned, anyhow.

“—and we search for its spirit, which is hiding someplace inside of its body. We rummage around with our eyes. We look through its brain, and its lungs, and its liver. Its spirit hasn’t gone yet. It’s only hiding, because it’s mortally afraid. It won’t come out. And –
look
– here it is, hiding in its heart. Stiff with fear. Paralyzed. Which is why its heart stopped. If people only realized that.”

Ray looked up at Jim, and it was obvious by the expression on his face that all of this mumbo-jumbo made him feel deeply uncomfortable, especially since he had tried so hard to save the cat’s life. Jim gave him a little dismissive shake of his head, as if to say, ‘Let her try. She can’t do it any harm.’

Laura pressed her forehead between the cat’s ears and murmured to it, crooned to it, very softly. Jim could catch only a little of what she was singing. “…
don’t hide yourself
…
come out, we pray
…
come out and dance in the light of day
…
in the rabbinical book it saith
…
the cats cry when, with icy breath
…
Great Sammael, the Angel of Death
…
takes through the town his flight
…”

“Laura, it’s bought the farm,” Ray protested. “Don’t mess with it any more. Give it some dignity.”

But Laura raised her hand over the cat’s body and wrote a figure in the air. Nobody could have realized what it was, except for Jim, because he was able to see things that other people couldn’t see. He could see shadows, spirits, and ghosts. And he could by the lingering disturbance that Laura had left in the air that she had drawn a curl with a tail.

“What’s that?” he asked her, nodding toward the shape in the air as if it were still there.

“A ghost-mouse,” she said. “It’s one of the things that cats can’t resist.”

“What’s a ghost-mouse?”

“It’s a little part of your soul. When you sleep – especially if you sleep with your mouth open – a bright little ghost-mouse escapes through your lips and runs around the house. Nothing can stop it and nobody knows what it wants. But if you wake up before the ghost-mouse returns, you lose a little part of your soul. That’s why you should never let a cat stay in the room with you while you sleep. It will always try to catch your ghost-mouse as it comes out of your mouth. That’s why there are far more unexplained deaths in households with cats than there are in households without them.”

“Ghost-mouse, huh?” said Jim. “Well, you learn something new every day.”

“You can see spirits and stuff, can’t you, sir? You should be able to see ghost-mice, too.”

She drew the figure again, and then again, and softly called out, “Come on, cat. Come on back. I know you’re only hiding.”

“Come on, Laura,” said Ray. “Leave it alone, it’s history. Don’t you think I tried everything?”

But Laura closed her eyes and tilted her head back so that the sun shone from the coins around her hair. She whispered something that Jim couldn’t hear, but he suspected what it was. The revival. The invocation to the dead, to return. He felt the back of his neck prickle.

She stood up. The cat lay on the grass, its legs wide apart, its dried-out fur fluffing in the breeze.

“What did I tell you? Dead!”

But then it seemed as if a cold shiver swept across the grass, like a cloud briefly covering the sun. Jim looked up, and when he looked back, the cat had lifted its head and was looking at him.

“It’s alive!” squealed Dottie. “Look, Mr Rook! It’s alive!”

Slowly, the cat rolled itself over. It lay on its side for a while, panting. Then, on trembling legs, it managed to stand up. Laura knelt down beside it again, and held out her hand, and the cat suspiciously sniffed at the tips of her fingers.

“I can’t believe it,” said Ray. “I could have sworn it was totally and utterly kaput.”

“Me too,” Jim told him. “I know cats are supposed to have nine lives, but that was pushing it.”

The cat walked around in a cautious circle, sniffing and peering at all of them. Eventually it walked over to Jim and rubbed itself against his legs.

“Looks like you’ve been adopted, Mr Rook,” said Christophe.

“Unh-hunh. Not me. I’ve been planning on buying a dog.”

“Too late now. She’s definitely taken a shine to you.”

Jim picked the cat up and stroked her. He didn’t believe in fate, as a rule, but ever since he had lost his previous cat, the
feline formerly known as Tibbles, he had felt that he would show up again, somehow, maybe in a different form. And he could hardly ignore the spectacular way in which this cat had appeared.

“What are you going to call her?” asked Dottie, tickling her.

“I don’t know. Maybe Mrs Horowitz. My old grade-school teacher was called Mrs Horowitz, and she always looked as if somebody had just miraculously brought her back from the dead.”

“You should never give a cat a human name,” said Laura. “Like you should never let it share anything personal with you, especially your food. Cats are very vulnerable to demonic possession, especially if you treat them as equals. Why do you think witches use them as familiars?”

“You really believe that?” asked Jim.

“Sure I do. You shouldn’t laugh at myths and stories and old wives’ tales. There’s always a grain of truth in them somewhere.”

“Okay, then. I won’t call her Mrs Horowitz. We don’t want to have to call in the pet exorcist, do we?”

“Why don’t you call her Titanic?” said Christophe. “She was just like the ship, right? She had a fatal encounter with a large block of ice.”

“You can’t call a cat Titanic.”

“You can call a cat anything you like. My mother had a cat called Ropa Vieja because she found him in a basket of old clothes.”

“I think you should call her Popsicle,” Dottie suggested.

“How about Tastee-Freez?”

Jim said, “I think I’ll stick to Tibbles.”

“Tibbles Two: The Return!” announced Ray, dramatically.

Jim let the cat jump onto the ground. It walked off a little way, and then stopped and waited for him.

“I think you’re being summoned,” smiled Laura, one hand raised against the sunlight.

Three

Before he went home that night, Jim went up to the college library and searched through books on ice and snow and natural disasters.

He found several instances of sudden cold snaps. In 1921, at Silver Lake, Colorado, 87 inches of snow fell in 27½ hours. And he found at least four different incidents in which people and animals had been encased in ice.

In 1930, five German glider pilots had been carried into a thundercloud over the Rhön Mountains, and had parachuted out of their aircraft. They had been swept upward into regions of supercooled vapor, and had become the nuclei for five giant hailstones. They dropped to the ground and only one of them survived.

In Candle, Alaska, in February 1948, the temperature had dropped so abruptly that a party of seven petro-chemical engineers were covered in a thick coating of ice and frozen where they stood, like statues.

But Jim couldn’t find any record of ice forming in isolated pockets during warm weather, the way it had in the mensroom. He came across two or three stories on the Internet about haunted houses, in which some of the rooms were unnaturally chilly. However, it was a long way from ‘unnaturally chilly’ to ‘frozen solid’.

All the time he sat in the library, Tibbles Two sat on a chair not far away, watching him intently, as if she were
making sure that he wasn’t going to run off and leave her behind.

On his way back to his car, with Tibbles Two walking close behind him, he saw Jack Hubbard sitting on the tail of his bright yellow Dodge pick-up talking to Linda Starewsky. Linda was a tall, intense girl, all arms and legs, with curly red hair that bounced all around her head like rusty springs. She came from a family who took education very seriously. In fact, they took everything very seriously, and always wore suits and neckties whenever they came to the college to discuss Linda’s future. Mack Petrie, the physics teacher, called them ‘The Funeral Party’. Linda’s problem was that she found it extremely difficult to distinguish between different word-shapes. Even the word ‘word’ could be ‘draw’ or ‘road’ as far as she was concerned. Her lack of confidence had led to her becoming chronically anorexic, and Jim was aware that if he could teach her to read properly, he might also save her life.

“Well,” said Jim, throwing his evening’s marking into the back seat of his Cadillac. “What did you think about your first day?”

“I was just talking to Linda about it,” said Jack, shielding his eyes against the six o’clock sun. “It wasn’t anything like I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be all dusty old stuff like Longfellow, you know?”

“I do Longfellow,” said Jim. “‘But the father answered never a word … a frozen corpse was he.’”

“That’s pretty appropriate, considering what happened in the john today.”

“How about, ‘A traveler, by the faithful hound … half-buried in the snow was found.’”

“Jack’s been telling me about snow,” said Linda, grinning and showing her glittering silver brace. “He says that it’s not true that the Inuit have twenty-three different names for
snow. And he says that you can tell what the temperature is, by the noise the snow makes when you walk on it.”

“That true?” asked Jim.

Jack nodded. “If you tread on snow and it gives out a deep crunch, that means it’s only just below zero degrees C. At minus five the pitch rises and the snow makes a creaking noise that’s kind of higher up the scale. At minus fifteen it sounds like the highest violin notes you ever heard, being played real bad. Lower than that, and it’s almost unbearable. Like a knife being scraped on a dinner-plate.”

“Handy to know,” said Jim. He turned and watched as Tibbles Two jumped into the back of his car and sat primly next to his sheaf of homework.

Jack said, “Not much use in LA. But up past the Arctic Circle … well, it can make all the difference between living and dying.”

“You don’t have any theories about what happened today, do you?” asked Jim.

Jack shook his head. “It was just weird, wasn’t it? Maybe you ought to talk to my old man. He’s the expert on snow and ice. You ought to see some of the video footage he took up at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Now that was awesome. He got caught in this Arctic blizzard and he almost didn’t make it.”

“Well, sure, I’d be very interested to meet him. Tell him to drop by the college some day, after class.”

“I’ll sure try.”

Just then, Karen Goudemark came past, accompanied by two other faculty members, Roger Persky from the biology department and Chuck Rolle, the phys-ed instructor. Roger wore hugely magnifying glasses and a brown-and-white seersucker sport coat. Chuck had a face like a pork knuckle and a white T-shirt full of various assorted muscles. Both of them were walking possessively close to
her, and when Jim gave her a wave they crowded even closer still.

“Jim!” called Karen. “I hear you found yourself a new cat today!” God, she was gorgeous. She was wearing a lemon short-sleeved sweater and a straight white skirt and she looked as if she had just finished serving ice-creams in Heaven.

“That’s right, do you want to meet her?”

Roger Persky checked his watch as if to say, you don’t have time to meet Jim Rook’s cat, for goodness’ sake; and Chuck Rolle arched his back and flexed his arms and looked at Jim as if he were working out how hard he would have to hit him, should the need arise.

Karen came over and Jim took hold of her arm and led her to his car. “There … what do you think of her? Incredible to think she was stuck in a block of ice. Cute, isn’t she?”

But Tibbles Two instantly scrabbled to her feet and let out a harsh, spiteful hiss. The fur on her back stood up and her tail turned into a bottle-brush. Karen reached out to stroke her and she retreated, her claws snagging on the leather seat and her head flattening like a cobra.