Stranger Things Happen (17 page)

In winter, the road is sometimes closed by avalanches. In summer
there are sometimes unseasonable storms. Even blizzards, sometimes.
Was it winter or was it summer? There was snow on the ground.
Jasper's tooth hurt. He didn't remember.

The Milford Hotel is a tall white colonial building. It has a
veranda for warm weather use in December. From the front bedrooms,
guests look out on the Mitre, rising up from the Sound 1,695
meters, thin and pointed, doubled in the looking-glass water below.
At the back of the hotel, lesser mountains march down to a flat
broad meadow. The Milford Road ends at the hotel's front door; the
Milford Track begins at the back door.

What happens when you get to the end of the world? Sometimes you
find a party. This party has been going on for a long time. There
is music, lights, people drinking and dancing. Strange things
happen at these parties. It is the end of the world, after all.

There is a small guest parking lot behind the Milford Hotel. To
Jasper's dismay, it was nearly full when they pulled in. As they
got out of the car they could hear a band playing jazz. Two windows
stood open on the veranda and they could see into an enormous room.
There was a crowd of people, some dancing, some sitting and eating
at small tables. Someone was singing, "I'd, like to get you, on a,
slow boat, to China," in a low croony alto. They could hear wine
glasses being tapped against each other, knives skittering across
plates—all this through the two French doors that stood open to the
veranda, to Jasper and Serena as they stood there, and to the
Milford Track.

Jasper's tooth, his whole body, burned in the fresh cold air. He
looked doubtfully at Serena, at her uncombed spit-curled tails of
hair, parted haphazardly over the new livid bruise. Her jeans had
holes in them. He was wearing his college fraternity sweatshirt
with a cartoon of two dogs fucking on it. His tennis shoes were
covered in gray caked mud and his knees were still wet. "Serena,"
he said, "They're having a party."

"Well, that's what I said," Serena said. "Come on. I love
parties like this. Everything's always so fancy. Cocktails and
little napkins and weird shit on toothpicks."

Inside, the women wore elegant dresses. The men wore dinner
jackets. They were probably wearing cummerbunds. Jasper's tooth
ached.

Serena turned and made a face at him. "Come on," she hissed.

"Serena," he said. "Wait for a second. Let's find another door.
" The farther she moved away from him—the closer to the veranda she
got—the more the weight of the tunnel fell back on him. His tooth
was

twanging wildly now, like a dowser's rod. He ran after her.

A tall man met them in the open window. The man was all in
black. He had a hairy face. "Here you are," the man said. His
clothes were old-fashioned, the collar of his shirt narrow and
starched. He smiled at them as if they were long-lost
acquaintances. His lips in the black beard were red, as if he were
wearing lipstick.

"You were expecting us?" Jasper said.

"Of course," the man said, still smiling. "The young lady was
most insistent we make room for you both when she called."

Serena said, looking slyly at Jasper, "You do have a room
available."

"We made arrangements," the man said. "But you must come in out
of this weather. My name is Mr. Donner."

"I'm Serena Silkert, and this is Jasper Todd," Serena said. Mr.
Donner held out his hand. It was neither warm nor cold and his
grasp was not too firm nor too limp, but Jasper jerked his own hand
away as if he had touched a live coal, or an eel. Mr. Donner smiled
at him and took Serena's hand, leading her into the hotel.

They came into the room full of people. At that instant the
music broke off. The dancers turned and stared at Jasper and
Serena. A woman laughed as pages of sheet music lifted off the
musicians' stands and came drifting and scuttering across the
floor.

The room was longer than it was wide, with two enormous
fireplaces set into the wall that faced the windows. From the
fireplaces came a gnawing noise; gradually other small noises
sprang up among the tables as the diners collected the scattered
sheets of music. There were chandeliers and candles on the tables
and the wind passing down the room caused the lights to flicker and
dim. Between the greasy yellow light of the candles and the
chandeliers, faces seemed to float like white masks. A man stumbled
against Jasper. He smiled. His teeth were filed down to sharp
points and Jasper flinched away. All the people that he saw had
ruddy glowing cheeks and shining eyes—
Why, Grandmother, what
big eyes you have! 
The firelight elongated and warped
their shadows, draped like tails across the floor.

"What kind of convention is this?" Jasper said as Serena said,
"You're American, aren't you, Mr. Donner?"

"Yes," he said. He looked at them, his eyes lingering on
Serena's forehead. "First thing, why don't you go freshen up? We've
put you upstairs in Room 43. The key is in the door," he said
almost apologetically, giving them a photocopied sheet of
directions. "I'm afraid the hotel is a bit of a maze. Just keep
turning left when you go up the stairs. Try not to get lost."

Jasper followed Serena through a nest of staircases and
corridors. Sometimes they passed through doors which led to more
stairs. From the outside, the hotel had not seemed this large or
twisty. Serena walked purposefully, consulting the map, and Jasper
stumbled after her, afraid that if they were separated, he would
never find his way up or back down again to the dining room. Little
drifts of plaster fallen from the ceiling lay upon the faded red
carpet. Serena muttered under her breath, navigating. They went
left, left, and left again.

Jasper, following Serena, had a sudden familiar feeling. He was
following his grandmother, her beehive hairdo looming ahead of him.
They were somewhere, he didn't know where. He was a small child. He
fell further and further behind, and suddenly she turned around—her
face—Serena put her head around the corner of a hall. "Hurry up,"
she said. "I have to pee."

At last they came to a hallway where none of the doors had
numbers. They passed a door where inside someone paced back and
forth, breathing loudly. Their own footsteps sounded sly to Jasper,
and the person behind the door sucked in air with a hiss as they
went by. Jasper pictured the occupant, ear against the door,
listening carefully, putting eye to spyhole, peeking out.

The last door on the corridor had a tarnished key in the lock.
The door was small and narrow, and Jasper stooped to enter. The
ceiling sloped toward the floor, and beneath the white bolsters and
comforter, the double bed sank in the middle like a collapsed
wedding cake. It smelled fusty and damp. Jasper threw his pack
down. "Did you see that man's teeth?" he asked.

"Mr. Donner? Teeth?" she said. "How is your tooth?"

"There was a man down the hall," he said. "He was
breathing."

Serena pushed at his shoulders. "Lie down for a minute," she
said. "You haven't eaten all day, have you?"

"This is a strange place." He sat on the bed. He lay down and
his feet hung over the mattress.

"It's a foreign country," she said, and pulled her sweater over
her head. Underneath, she was naked. A thick pink line of scar ran
down under her collarbone. There was a faint mark on her breast as
if someone had bitten her.

"I did that," he said.

"Mmm," Serena said. "You did. Maybe you broke your tooth on
me."

"You have a scar," he said. He had traced his finger along the
line of that scar, and she had exhaled slowly and smiled and said,
"Warmer, you're getting warmer." He had bitten her experimentally,
to see what she tasted like, to make his own small impermanent mark
on her.

"That? I thought you were too polite to ask. That was a fire. My
father's house burned down. I had to break a window to get out and
I landed on the glass."

"Oh, sorry." He reached out a finger to trace that line again,
to see if they ended up in the same place again, but she was
standing too far away. He was too far away, lying on the bed.

"Don't be," she said. "First I took all the money out of the
hiding place under the sink. Always look under the mattress, and
under the sink." She pulled something velvety and stretchy out of
the pack, held it up against her body. "Are you going to change
into something clean?"

"These are my cleanest pants," Jasper said. But he took a woolly
sweater out of his bag and put it on. He lay on the bed looking at
her. As usual, she looked utterly at home, even in this strange
place. He tried to think of Serena in her home, her real home in
Pittsburgh. A house was burning down. She sat, domesticated and
tame, nestled on a burning couch, watching a burning television,
the kitten on her lap all made of flames. She was holding a map, he
saw, a book of maps. The fire was erasing the roads, the
continents, all of the essential information. Now they would never
get home again. He tried opening his mouth as far as he could.

Serena pulled at his feet and he sat up and fumbled the bottle
of aspirin out of his pocket. He poured a heap into his hand and
swallowed them one by one.

The other thing from his pocket was the envelope with his tooth
in it. Serena took it away from him. She stuck her finger in a
corner, and ripped the envelope open. She held the tiny bit of
tooth in her palm for a minute and then popped it into her
mouth.

"Yuck!" he said, "Why did you do that?" But at the same time he
was almost flattered.

"Tasty," Serena said. "Like candy corn. Yum. Go on down," she
said. "You take the map. Don't wait for me—I never get lost. I'm
going to have a quick shower." She left the bathroom door open.

In the hallway, he studied the map, his ears pricked, listening
for the occupant of the room down the hall. He heard only music,
very faint. In the end he followed the music down the many
staircases to the dining room. All the way down, just behind his
eyelids, he could see the thing from the road running alongside
him, crouched and naked and anxious. It was burning. Small,
heatless flames licked along its back like fur and dripped onto the
carpet. His grandmother, somewhere behind him, was sweeping up the
flames into a dustpan. 
Someone should put that dog
out
, she said. 
It isn't
house-trained. 
Somewhere upstairs a door opened and
slammed shut and then opened again.

In the dining room a table had been newly laid for two and he
sat down with his back to the fireplace. At the front of the room
Mr. Donner was dancing with a stout woman in red.

The fire behind him traced black figures on the walls and
wavered over the faces of the diners around him. When he looked at
them, they looked away. But they had been looking at him in the
first place, he was certain. He wished that he'd taken a bath or at
least combed his hair.

The heat beat at his skull and the snap of the fire lulled him,
while the cold streaming in through the open doors stung his eyes
and plucked at his jaw. Half of him burned cold, the other half
hot. He thought of going up to the tiny room again, to wait until
it was time to go to sleep. There would be the same discomfort: the
damp cool sheets and between them the sticky warmth of Serena's
body. Jasper thought of the white eyeless walls and shuddered. It
was preferable to sit here between the fireplace and the open
windows.

Framed in the window closest to him was a mountain, blunt and
crooked like a ground-down incisor. Halfway down its slope he could
see a procession of lights. He saw that others around him were
intently watching the mountain and the moving lights.

A waiter emerged from a service door beside the fireplace and
began arranging another table. He set seven places and silently
disappeared again. Jasper looked back towards the mountain. His
tongue went up to touch his tooth. He counted the lights on the
mountain. The musicians sawed at their instruments furiously and on
the dance floor the dancers moved faster and faster, picking up
their feet and slamming them back down, spinning like flames.

Serena came into the ballroom. She was wearing the stretchy
black dress and a pair of gaudy purple tights. She had washed her
hair, and applied makeup to the bruise on her forehead. Her face
was white and delicate as ivory, under a dusting of powder. She was
wearing the silly red lipstick. 
The better to kiss you, my
dear
, someone said.

He stood up and went to her chair. "You look very beautiful," he
said.

She let him seat her and said bluntly, "You look like shit. Does
your tooth hurt? Will you be able to eat anything?"

"I don't know," he said. "But I'd like some wine."

She sat down next to Jasper, put her cool hand upon his
forehead. "Poor kid," she said. "You're burning up."

Mr. Donner left the dance floor. He borrowed a chair from the
table set for seven, and sat down next to them. He was breathing
hard. Jasper thought he could almost see the breath leave his
mouth, like tiny licks of wet flame. "Is your room adequate?" he
said.

"Our room is fine," Serena said. She stretched her hands out
across the tablecloth, towards Jasper. "What a nice hot fire!"

All the better to cook you, my dear, 
Jasper
thought, and touched his tooth again. He said, "Where did all these
people come from?"

"This is the first course," Mr. Donner said. Waiters put down
bowls of thin pink broth and poured red wine into Serena and
Jasper's glasses.

"Some of us have come from very far away," Mr. Donner said. "We
meet every year. We meet to celebrate the triumph of the human
spirit in situations of great adversity. We are all travelers,
survivors of adventures, calamitous expeditions, of tragedies. We
are widows and orphans, the survivors of marriages and shipwrecks.
This is the 143rd Survivor's Ball."