Plays it safe.
This time there’s something in his belly besides icy fear.
Excitement.
He squeezes the wooden orb.
Against every instinct he’s accumulated his entire life, he turns around. He goes back to the door. Standing on the threshold, he stares into the warm confines, blinking rapidly as if, any moment, the illusion will vanish and he’ll be staring at a mud hole instead of a furnished room.
Oliver steps inside.
It’s a simple room with an arching ceiling that’s just within reach.
Although the coarse walls and hand-carved furniture befits a hobbit, the space is almost full-sized but not quite. There’s a small table with candles against the wall and a rug on the cedar floor.
A small window is to his right, a circular port that one would expect to see on a ship. He peers through the dusky glass. Mirrors are positioned to reflect the light through a short tunnel draped with cobwebs. He sees the fallen tree bridging the stream.
Henry and Helen couldn’t have possibly built this place.
It’s been carved from granite. And there’s a fireplace that funnels up to the pyramid of stones that, individually, are too large for a grown man to lift.
His phone sounds off. A message has arrived.
A shiver slithers down his spine.
He hasn’t heard that sound since they arrived on the property. Oliver pulls the phone out and slides his thumb across the glass.
151 unread messages.
He’s getting five bars of reception.
The instinct to bolt out of this place overrides all other thoughts. Only the numbness in his knees keeps him from running.
And the excitement. The curiosity.
How is it that I’m getting reception in a place more remote than the house?
He falls into one of the chairs and scrolls through his messages.
He begins downloading his books.
He updates his apps and checks social media.
Occasionally, he gets up to look through the window and open the door. He’s warm and alone with no chores to do or tea to drink. And now he knows why Henry and Helen trek out here.
And why they’re keeping it secret.
***
Oliver emerges from his phone trance. It takes a moment to realize his mistake.
The sun has set.
He fumbles toward the door but returns to put everything in order, just like he found it. In the dark alcove, he stops. The roots look like knobby claws in the dusky light, but that’s not what sends a shiver up his throat.
Leaves are stirring, twigs snapping.
The forest is waking up.
He creeps to the edge, squeezing the wooden orb in his pocket for strength and confidence. For luck. Something quakes above him. Rocks trickle down the hill. His knees almost quit. Oliver pulls the backpack straps tight against his shoulders and eyes the stone steps leading around the tree. The next disturbance is closer.
Oliver shoots for the exit.
An avalanche of stems and leaves slide down the slope.
Oliver swiftly climbs the stones and swings onto the tree, speed-walking across the river with his arms held out to the sides.
His eyes fill with water.
He keeps focused on his steps. The water, cloaked in dying light, calls from below. He’s almost across, only three steps to go, when the tree vibrates.
Something stepped onto the bridge.
Oliver takes one giant leap off the tree, stumbling down the stones and into a thicket of vines and branches. The wooden orb flies from his hand, disappearing into the snow.
The fallen tree groans behind him.
Oliver scrambles to his feet, blindly sprinting through a world blurred with tears and panic, pulling at ropey vines and tangled branches, tripping on stones. Ignoring where he’s going or what’s in front of him, he pushes ahead—
And slams into a wall.
If it was a tree or a boulder, he’d be unconscious. Oliver bounces on his backpack, flails to his knees, wiping the tears to see what’s in front of him: two enormous stumps of snow.
Legs.
He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes.
Ten feet tall.
Thick body and long arms.
Head like a turret.
It can’t be.
A snowman looks down.
Branches are breaking. The ground trembles. Before Oliver sees what’s coming, the snowman sweeps him off the ground. The wind shrieks in his ears, ripping the stocking cap from his head. A wintry blast hardens his cheeks and fills his head. Tree trunks fly past and disappear. Then the open field is all around.
The world is spinning.
It happens so fast that he’s unaware of when the spinning stops or how he ends up lying in the snow, the screech of the windmill nearby.
The acrid taste of vomit stings his throat.
Oliver looks up at the massive form. Again, he wipes his eyes. Twilight highlights the hulking figure, snow like sparkling skin. It remains still, and, for a moment, sanity returns, and the thing looks like an intricately carved figure of snow, not something that picked him up and flew him across the forest.
I am not an “it.”
Just like that, reality tilts back into fantasy.
The snowman is not an “it.” Oliver thought that. No, he heard it. He thinks he heard it…“him”…think it…and Oliver heard him think it.
The weird fills his head.
It’s the blood sugar weird feeling, a weird-weird feeling combined. It’s falling off a cliff of reality and waiting to land.
The snowman’s chest inflates.
Something’s inside him, a source of light beaming through the snow, illuminating his body as he bends over, reaches out and wraps his hands around Oliver’s arms and pulls him up.
The snowman opens Oliver’s hand and drops the wooden orb into it. It vibrates through his arm.
“Oliver!” Mom calls.
The snowman straightens up and turns toward the windmill. It steps back and, just before dissolving into a shimmering flurry, tosses the stocking cap on Oliver’s lap. The once massive form swirls into the forest like a sparkling cloud of diamonds, no footsteps left to follow. In the midst of the snowy dust, something glimmers.
A metallic sphere.
“Oliver!” Mom runs into the open field.
She sees him. Snow has filled her open-laced boots, and her coat is unbuttoned. “We’ve been looking for you. Where have you been?”
“I’m sorry. I got…turned around.”
He keeps looking at the trees. There’s a light, a shimmering light that lingers.
“Are you all right?”
“What?”
Mom looks where he’s staring. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
She walks closer to the trees. The light goes out.
Grandmother is behind them. Her arm is tucked inside a long black coat. Mom takes Oliver’s arm. Her fingers are cold and quivering. Grandmother waits for them to approach, silently scolding. He apologizes again.
She turns her back and leads the way home.
As she slides her arm out of her coat, he catches a glint of a metal glove.
F L U R Y
nine
Grandmother watches Oliver descend the staircase.
He slides his hand over the ornate post marking the end of the bannister. Arms crossed and lips chiseled, she nods.
Oliver turns around and begins his third ascent.
His legs are beginning to burn, but he’s okay with that because none of this makes sense. The world has rules; existence has limits. The sun rises in the east, diabetes is incurable, and snowmen aren’t alive!
The universe has laws. A snowman that can fly him across a field is not part of those laws. A snowman putting thoughts in his head, either. The world doesn’t make sense anymore.
He’s not an “it.”
“What are you doing?” Mom is outside th
e second floor bathroom, toothbrush in mouth.
“Grandmother told me to walk the steps.”
“Why?”
“Exercise.” Punishment. I’m not going outside anymore.
“Ridiculous,” she mutters. “Get your things. We’re going to the library.”
Oliver looks back. Grandmother can’t see them, but Mom’s voice carries through the house.
“Go on, get your backpack. I’ll meet you at the car.”
He picks up the pace, pushing through the muscle burn. The stairs squeal with glee. He packs books and magazines into his backpack. Checking the door, he grabs the journals from hiding and slides them between the magazines. He needs to get out of the house.
Off the property.
He returns to the staircase.
“What about lunch?” Grandmother says.
“We’ll grab something,” Mom says. “Do you need anything while we’re out?”
Oliver pauses on the bottom step while Mom pulls on her coat, keys rattling in her hand.
“Do you need anything?” she repeats.
Grandmother shakes her head. Lips pursed.
“All right, then. We’ll be back for supper. Come on, Oliver.”
Oliver goes around his grandmother, turning so the backpack faces away, fearing her x-ray vision will see the journals.
“Bye, Grandmother.”
He pulls the door behind him, but she follows him out. Oliver runs to the car. Mom drives around the turnabout, lines scraped across the icy windshield. Grandmother watches them leave from the front porch.
Mom twists one of her earrings. “You all right, kiddo?”
He nods. She sounds confident, but she’s playing with her earrings. She’d be terrible at poker.
He looks out his window, feeling the rules of the universe come into balance the farther they get from the property. Maybe if he closes his eyes, he’ll wake up in Texas and discover they never moved to Grandmother’s, that he imagined secret journals and a hobbit house in the woods.
A snowman.
He feels the wooden orb in his coat pocket.
“Anything weird ever happen to you?” Oliver asks.
“What?”
“Have you ever seen anything, you know…weird?”
She’s coming out of her driving trance, twisting her earring.
“Growing up on the property, I mean.” He can’t tell her the truth. She’d send him to therapy and blame Grandmother. “Did you ever, like, see anything in the woods? Anything strange.”
“Strange.”
Oliver stares through the windshield. She’s frowning—confused not angry. “No,” she says. “Have you?”
“No.”
“Did something happen last night?”
“No, no. I just mean…it gets weird at night, you know? Funny noises and things, that’s all.” He glances at her. “You know what I mean?”
“You having bad dreams again? We can move you to the second floor. There’s a room next to mine.”
“No. I just wondered if, you know, you’ve seen anything weird. That’s all.”
“I have.” She twists the steering wheel. “Your grandmother and Aunt Rhonnie.”
Oliver chuckles.
Mom begins to laugh.
Before long, she’s in a fit of laughter that’s spilling pent-up emotions. She wipes away tears and, just when it seems like she’s done, lets go of another round.
“Family is weird.” She sighs.
***
The library is old.
It’s the kind with water-stained ceiling tiles and faded carpet. The air is thick with aging books.
Oliver checks his phone. His ebooks have already been downloaded, emails and texts received, reminding him that the hobbit house was not a dream. The memories of rushing water and woodland pursuit bring a wave of nausea.
“You look lost.” A girl pushes a squeaking cart past him.
He holds up his phone. “Password?”
“You need an account to use the wifi.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. How do I…?”
“Come on.”
The name tag on her Doctor Who T-shirt says Molly.
He follows her to the circulation desk. She abandons the squeaky cart and leans over one of the counters. Her braided brunette ponytail has a streak of candy-apple red weaved into it.
She slides a form at him.
“Bring it to me if Ms. Chatty Pants is still busy.” She nods at the heavyset librarian. Before Oliver can say thanks, she’s back at her cart.
He fills out the form and waits for Ms. Chatty Pants, who, without breaking away from her conversation about her gifted grandchildren, takes it to process.
Instead of waiting, Oliver scouts the library.
He goes through the nonfiction section and snags an oversized book on his way to a dark corner behind a rack of magazines. Settling in, he opens his backpack and, not without looking up and down the aisles, hides one of the journals in the oversized hardback.
Cracking the journal open, he’s reminded of what really old paper smells like. He looks around before slumping deep into the chair.
The weird sensation he left on the property finds him.
Nog is his name.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My head is a storm of thoughts that blow like dust. The Arctic is not what we thought, my love.
People live here. Well, not people.
Nog is half my height and as round as the moon. His cherub cheeks are buried in his bushy beard, and his green eyes glitter beneath thick brows. He is more than short, my love, barely up to my waist. He slid into the room on bare feet as wide as paddles. He appeared to be a man.
An elven, he said he is. An elven.
There’s a crude sketch of a cubicle with two men and a bed. One of them is twice as tall as the other. Several more sketches take up the next couple of pages. Some are abstract scribbles with resemblances to faces and bodies lost in a mess of static.
The last of the sketches is a very round man with a thick beard lying over his belly. His sausage fingers extend from fuzzy sleeves, and his wide feet have tufts of hair on the toes.
He asked me to sit.
A great peace fell over me. It was like an angel had spoken, his words filling me with love. He said to me, “Welcome to the North Pole, Malcolm Toye.”
I was startled. “How do you know my name?”
“That is not for now,” he said. But he told me, in great detail, of the Jeanette Arctic expedition with Lt. Cdr. DeLong. He knew of the ship becoming lodged in the ice and our hellish escape.
“You were dying of malnutrition,” he told me. “And hypothermia.”
“Where am I?” I demanded.
“Inside the Arctic ice.”
I did not have the clarity to ask how that was possible. How could there be a perfectly square room cut from the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean? Where would this bed come from? Food and clothing?
Yet I stared at a person built more like a snowshoe hare than a man. “What are you?” I blurted in the most unapologetic way.
My manners did not harm his disposition. Perhaps he expected it. He folded his hands atop his plump belly and drew a deep breath before answering. He explained that he and others like him were an ancient race that evolved during the Ice Age. That is when I first heard him say elven.
I must admit, I felt a small sense of vertigo at that moment, yet I observed this short, fat, and hairy man that appeared to be built for the cold.
There are more random sketches, as if he had been trying to clear his mind or make sense of his words. Much of the illustrations are, once again, lost in scribbles, but there’s one of a very large foot. It’s bent to reveal a sole covered with V-shaped lines. An arrow points at the sharp texture and is labeled “scales.”
This would explain the ability to slide over the ice. The sharp ends of the scales, pointing at the heel, would grab the ice to shove forward. Lying flat, they would glide.
“Where
are the others?” I demanded.
“It is best that you talk with me,” he said. “For now.”
He took my hands and turned them over. I appeared to be a giant in his company, yet felt like a child. His pudgy fingers were smothered with wrinkles. Next, he inspected my feet. I let him examine the slightly numb and off-colored flesh.
“Frostbite,” he said. My core temperature had dropped to fifty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. I never should have lived.
How did I?
I was rescued, was all he said.
And the others? The men on the journey? I had vague recollections of them suffering as I did. He confirmed the worst of my memories, that many had succumbed to the dire conditions. But not all of them, he claimed. Some had made it home. I know not if that filled me with hope or dread. I think, when I lie in bed, that his tone suggested I have lived, but am I going home?
He told me that human expeditions were venturing closer to the North Pole, that soon our race will traverse the ice with ease. I felt mild surprise that he referred to my “race” as if he was not human. Strange as he may be, I still considered him to be human.
This was my first mistake.
“Why?” I muttered. “Why save me?”
He stood to his fullest height. We were eye to eye, for I was sitting on the bed, when he reached for me, retrieving the locket from around my neck. It looked so large in his hand. He lifted it, as if to say this was the reason.
That you, my love, are the reason.
“Did you find the dirty magazines?”
Oliver launches the book against the wall. The journal bounces on the carpet. For a moment, it feels like the entire library sees the open journal. Before he can sweep it into his backpack, Molly picks it up.
“This is really old. Did you get it here?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I was just reading…” He takes it from her. One of the corners is dog-eared from the fall. “It’s mine, I brought it. I swear.”
“Don’t forget your book on succulents in the Southwest.” She holds out the oversized hardback he was using to hide the journal. “And you’re pretending to read it? Cute.”
Claus Trilogy (Boxed Set) Page 57