Spirit (52 page)

Mr Krook had been silent all this time, his head bowed, kneeling.

‘Mr Krook!' called Esther. ‘This is Hel, the gatherer of spirits.'

‘I shan't look!' Mr Krook called back. ‘I shan't look, not until it's gone!'

‘Hel wants the spirits of criminals and sinners, and those who die without shedding blood!'

Mr Krook stood up, slowly and painfully, and stared up at the monstrous bony-headed apparition that now stood over him.

‘Thing!' he screamed at it. ‘You may have me not!'

There was a split second's pause. Then the Snow Queen suddenly lashed out, and her claws snagged into Mr Krook's arm and belly. She lifted him clear off the snow, kicking and struggling and screaming, her claws penetrating right through his overcoat, in one side and out of the other, and blood spraying from his coat-tails with every frantic kick. She threw back her grisly head and stretched open her jaws, and a long black tongue slithered over her gums like an anaconda. At the same time, she let her cloak drop down to the ice, and Esther cried out loud at what she saw.

The Snow Queen's skin was white and thin, almost transparent. Inside her misshapen abdomen, Esther could see the arms and legs and faces of naked men and women, scores of them, dead but frozen, like a ghastly catch offish. Every time
she moved, the bodies slid and tumbled inside her, an arm sliding, a leg falling sideways, a torso pressed against her skin.

Mr Krook, writhing on the Snow Queen's claws, saw it too, and stuck out his arms and legs, totally rigidly, and screamed. Blood sprayed out of his mouth, but he didn't stop screaming, even when the Snow Queen shook him from side to side, and his overcoat tore, and his stomach tore, and his intestines fell below his hemline, and swayed wet and bloody between his feet.

‘Mr Krook!' screamed Esther. ‘It's time for your moment of fame. Mr Krook! What will we always remember you for?'

Mr Krook was only a character in a book; or perhaps he was something more than that. Even characters in books have a sense of their own destiny. Whatever he was, whatever he knew, he embraced the Snow Queen as tightly as he could, he held her close, while the white bodies of her victims wallowed around inside her, their dead and desperate faces staring through her skin.

At first, Esther saw only smoke, issuing from his overcoat – thick, oily smoke. Then suddenly he screamed, and gripped the Snow Queen even more ferociously. His white hair burst into flame – the sort of guttering, greasy flames you might have expected from a tallow candle. Then his coat began to blaze. The Snow Queen uttered a terrible clashing sound and tried to pry him free from her. But Mr Krook held onto her like grim death itself. He was burning so fiercely now that his fingers were probably convulsed, and he couldn't have released her even if he wanted to.

The Snow Queen screamed, and when she did so, Mr Krook incandesced. He blazed brighter and brighter, like magnesium, so bright and blue that Esther couldn't even look at him. His body fats spat and sizzled with heat, his bones popped, his intestines roared like fat on a red-hot stovetop.

The Snow Queen began to burn, too, and everything inside
her. Her skin shrivelled, and fire took hold of her, until she was nothing but a mass of flame.

Esther lifted both arms to protect herself as the Snow Queen literally exploded in a fiery eruption of human flesh. Her horselike head dropped down into her blazing ribcage, her arms folded in. Then she exploded again and again, until the snowy plains were scattered with burning human debris, hands and arms and torsos and disembodied heads.

Esther turned to the Peggy-girl, who was standing beside her with her head bowed. Gradually, the Peggy-girl began to fade, and the snowy plain began to fade. Gradually, Esther became aware of somebody shaking her, and shaking her, and saying, ‘Lizzie! Lizzie! Wake up, Lizzie!'

Almost vanished, almost completely transparent, the Peggy-girl raised her head and looked wistfully at Esther with those dark, smudged eyes. Oh, I have left my gloves behind,' she whispered; but her voice was so soft that it could have been the draught, blowing under the door.

Elizabeth opened her eyes. Laura was shaking her, and she was coughing and choking. Her throat was swollen and bruised, and she could hardly breathe.

‘Laura!' she said, ‘Laura, what's happened?'

‘You almost died, for God's sake! You almost died!'

Slowly, Elizabeth sat up. Her throat hurt so much that she could barely swallow. ‘I did it,' she said. ‘I did it. I went there . . . I found Mr Krook. I burned her.'

‘You almost strangled yourself! How could you do that? You almost strangled yourself!'

‘I'm all right. Please, I'm all right. My throat hurts but I'm fine. How's your head?'

Laura promptly sat down on the sofa and burst into tears. ‘It hurts,' she wept. ‘It hurts, and when I woke up, I saw you strangled with your scarf, and I thought you were dead.'

They sat for a moment in silence, while Elizabeth drank a
glass of water and tried to clear her throat, and Laura wiped her eyes.

‘Did you find Lenny?' asked Laura.

Elizabeth had been thinking about it, hardly daring to face it. What had the Peggy-girl said to her? ‘
Where do all our loved ones go? Where did little Clothes-Peg go?
'

Exhausted, bruised, she lifted herself off the sofa and walked through the kitchen to the back door. She opened it up, and saw that it was lighter outside already, and that the wind had dropped. She crossed the garden to the swimming-pool, and even before she was halfway across the lawn she could see the footprints on its frozen surface, and the darker shadow where the ice had broken.

She stood on the edge of the pool, looking through the ice. Lenny swam cold and lifeless, his skin as white as snow, staring up at her through a window through which living people may never pass.

She heard Laura calling her, ‘Lizzie! Lizzie! What's wrong?' Her voice echoed flatly across the cold snowy garden.

She walked across to the snow-covered garden shed, and reached down underneath it, into the crevice where she used to hide her love letters when she was young. Her fingertips found the damp and mildewed pages of a book, and she carefully tugged it out.

The Snow Queen
. It was so blotched and stained that it was almost illegible. All the same, Elizabeth ripped it in half, and tore the pages out one by one, and scattered them all across the snow.

Laura was waiting for her when she returned to the house. They put their arms around each other, and held each other in silence.

 

 

All this happened nearly fifty years ago. Only two or three people in Sherman, Connecticut, now remember the winter of 1951, and how many people died.

Aunt Beverley recovered from her accident with disfiguring facial scarring and became a care-assistant at a retirement home in Pasadena. She died of an overdose of aspirin and alcohol in 1958.

Margo Rossi married a Massachusetts hotelier and never worked in publishing again. Her present whereabouts are unknown.

Laura Buchanan became a TV actress, and appeared in several episodes of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. She died of cervical cancer in 1963.

Elizabeth Buchanan resigned her editorship at Charles Keraghter and moved to Arizona, where she lived with Johnson ‘Bronco' Ward until he died in 1959. He never completed another novel.

Today, Elizabeth Buchanan is still alive and living in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she edits
The Pen
, a magazine for would-be writers. Sometimes, from a distance, she thinks she glimpses a man in a white uniform, watching her. Not bothering her, but watching her.

Every time she sees him, she whispers, ‘
Arriba los manos, senor
,' and tries to smile to herself.