Rook: Snowman Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”
    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 understandingof 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