“He’s gone, Gerda. Really.” Niels had peeled off his gloves, and now he was blowing on his fingers to warm them. He was still shaking, though, and his white face went beyond a winter pallor.
It wasn’t that cold outside. About average for a Danish winter. I wondered what else had been going on in town while I was escaping the winter at my fireside, engrossed in a book. Now that I looked at him, Niels seemed more frightened than cold. He was always a follower, always the first one to run when trouble appeared. I wondered what trouble had appeared this time.
“All right.” I sighed. “Tell me about it.”
“We were just horsing around, Gerda. We’d had a few drinks, and somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to swipe some of the kids’ sleds and hitch them to the horse-drawn sleighs?’ That would be a real fast ride-and you wouldn’t have to keep climbing a hill in between rides. So a couple of the lads tried it, but the sleds skidded, and they fell off in a minute or so. Then we saw a different sleigh. We’d never seen it before. It was painted white, so that it blended into the snowdrifts, and the driver was wrapped in rough white fur, with a white fur hood covering the head and hiding the face. The rest of us hung back, because the sleigh was so big and fast-looking, and we couldn’t tell who was driving it. But Kay laughed at us, and said that he wasn’t afraid of a fast ride. Before we could stop him, he’d tied his sled to the runners of the white sleigh, and the thing took off like a thunderbolt. The sled was sliding all over the road behind that sleigh, but he managed to hold on. We yelled for him to roll off. He almost got run over by the horse of an oncoming sleigh. He wouldn’t turn loose. Then the white sleigh got clear of traffic and Kay was gone! We followed the tracks outside town a mile or so beyond the river, until the snow started up again, and then we lost the trail, so we came on back…” He shrugged. “So-he’s gone. I figured you’d want to know, Gerda.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Maybe I’ll ask around.”
“He’s probably dead,” said Niels.
“Yeah. He’s probably dead.” I went back to my book.
I tried to put him out of my mind, and I nearly succeeded for the rest of the winter. I kept thinking that Niels or Hans would turn up with some new story about Kay-that he was back after robbing the rich owner of the sleigh, and wilder, drunker than ever. But the town was silent under the deepening snow. I waited out the silence.
In the spring the thaws came, and the sun coaxed people back out into the streets to pass the time of day with their neighbors. They started asking each other what had become of that wild young man, Kay. Nobody had seen him since midwinter. His friends told their story about the sleigh ride, and how he never came back. “Oh, well, he must have been killed,” people said. When the ice floes broke up on the river outside town, people said that Kay’s body would come floating to the surface any day now. Surely he had drowned while crossing the river ice, trying to make his way back to town after his reckless sleigh ride. A few days later they found the wooden sled buried in a snowbank farther still from town. Kay’s hat was in a clump of melting snow nearby, but there was no sign of his body. But maybe the wolves had got him. They wouldn’t have left anything, not even a bone.
“He’s dead,” I said to the old street singer, who appears on the corner even before the birds come back.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, and went on with a warbling tune about sunshine.
“I’ll ask around,” I said. And this time I meant it.
I didn’t go to the town constable. If Kay had died in an accident, the constable would have discovered it already. If something more sinister had happened to him, the constable would be the last to know. I didn’t waste my time with official inquiries.
I went to the river. My grandmother used to tell me that the river would answer your question if you threw in one of your possessions as a sacrifice. I was tempted to try it, but before I could work myself up to that stage of desperation-or belief-I saw the old man I had come looking for. He lived in a shack downstream from the brewery, and I always wondered how he made it through the winter, dressed in his layers of reeking rags, with skin as translucent as ice under his matted hair. He grinned at me with stumps of teeth that looked like the pilings of the dock. I used to dream about him. I thought he was Kay in thirty years’ time. Maybe dead would be better. But I had to ask.
“You remember Kay? Young blond fellow. Drinking buddy of yours. He’s been gone since midwinter.”
The bloodshot eyes rolled, and the old man gave a grunt that was more smell than sound. I took it to be a yes.
“He hitched a child’s sled onto the back of a white sleigh, and it sped away with him. The word around town is that he drowned-only his body hasn’t turned up. Or maybe the wolves got him.” I could taste salt on my tongue. “Not that it matters,” I whispered.
The old derelict wet his lips, and warmed up his throat with a rheumy cough. I fished a coin out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Get something for that cough,” I muttered, knowing what he would prescribe.
“I know the white sleigh,” he rasped. “I wish it had been me.”
“You know it?”
“Ar-they call her the Snow Queen.” He flashed a gap-toothed smile. “She brings the white powder to town. Ar. Kay would like that. White powder lasts longer than this stuff.” He dug in his overcoat pocket for the nearly empty bottle, and waved it at me. “And it’s the only thing that would take the hurt away. You know about the crack, do you?”
I shook my head. “I knew Kay was in trouble. I never cared what kind of trouble. If I couldn’t help him, what did it matter?”
“The crack. That wasn’t the Snow Queen’s doing. They do say it’s mirror glass from heaven. Trolls built a magic mirror that made everything ugly. Took it up into the clouds so that they could distort the whole world at once. Got to laughing so hard they dropped the mirror. Shattered to earth in a million tiny pieces. Crack of the mirror. They do say.”
“Sounds like my grandmother’s tales,” I said. It was a lot prettier than the truth.
“They say if the mirror crack gets into your eye, then you see everything as ugly and misshapen. Worse if it gets into your heart. Then your heart freezes, and you don’t feel anything ever at all. From the look of him, I’d say that Kay has got a piece in his eye and his heart. And nothing would make the coldness pass, except what the Snow Queen has-that perfect white powder that makes you dream when you’re awake. He won’t be leaving her, not while there’s snow from her to ease his pain.”
I hadn’t realized that it was this bad. But maybe, I told myself, he’s just sick, and then maybe he can be cured. Maybe I can get him past the craving for the white powder. I knew that I was going to try. “Where do I find the Snow Queen?” I asked the old man.
He pointed to a boat tied up at the dock. “Follow the river,” he said. “She could be anywhere that people need dreams or a way to get out of the cold. Give her my love.”
“You’re better off without her,” I told him. “You’re better off than Kay.”
There wasn’t much to keep me in town. I had needed an excuse to get out of there for a long time. Too many memories. Too many people who thought they knew me. It took less than a day to tidy things up so that I could leave, and there wasn’t anybody I wanted to say goodbye to. So I left. Looking for Kay was as good a reason as any.
I spent most of the summer working as a gardener on an estate in the country. The old lady who owned the place was a dear, and she’d wanted me to stay on, but the roses kept reminding me of Kay, and finally one day I told her I had to move on. I had enough money by then to get to the big city, where movies are made. That’s where they sell dreams, I figured. That’s where the Snow Queen would feel at home.