Rook: Snowman Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 weremaking 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