Stranger With My Face

by Lois Duncan

  “Of course I don’t. How could I?”

  “Well, weren’t you there?”

  “There?” I repeated blankly. “Where? What are you talking about?”

  “You were there. Out on the rocks.” He paused, and then with less certainty he added, “I think you were there. Things are getting hazy. I remember seeing you there, because—I wouldn’t have gone otherwise, would I?”

  “I understand,” I said. “You saw a girl on the rocks. A girl who looked exactly like me except for her eyes.”

  “I didn’t get close enough to see her eyes,” Jeff said. “I was halfway to her when I fell. She was calling to me. I couldn’t hear her voice over the sound of the waves, but I could see her lips moving, and she was waving me toward her. It was you. Or am I crazy? It had to be you, but if it was, then—then—you’d have known, and you wouldn’t have fallen yourself. My mind’s groggy. Nothing makes sense.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “There’s somebody, then, who looks like you. That girl Ahearn saw on the beach. It’s that person, right?”

  “Her name is Lia,” I told him.

  “I’m really tired.” He was losing his grasp on the conversation. I could feel him drifting off. “Don’t let me fall.”

  “I won’t.” I was afraid for him to sleep, and afraid for him not to. His shivering had lessened, which must have meant he was warmer. “Have you slept at all?”

  “I was scared to. I knew I’d roll off. Do you think if I sleep now you could hang on to me?”

  “For a while,” I said. “Then I’m going to wake you.”

  “Just for a minute,” he mumbled, and was asleep immediately.

  He slept so hard that it was like holding a dead person, except that I could feel the slow, continuous pounding of his heart. My own mind was awake and churning, far more alert than it had been before. How could I have failed to guess that it was Lia who had done this? Hadn’t she warned me? Hadn’t she ordered me straight out, “Tell him not to come! Tell him never to come here again!” I hadn’t obeyed, so this was my punishment. Jeff was right; we would die here. And no one would find us or learn what had happened. It would be one of those unsolved mysteries: “Two Teenagers Disappear from Island off Coast of New England.”

  Why would she do this? That was the mystery. The whole thing was so senseless. There was no reason. There was nothing for Lia to gain by taking my life, and as for Jeff—what was he to Lia? Until this moment he didn’t even know she existed.

  An hour—or more, or less—moved by; there was no way of knowing exactly. Then, just as I was thinking I ought to try to wake him, Jeff stirred and said, “I love you.” At first I thought I hadn’t heard him right, but he continued drowsily, “I used to lie awake at night and think how it would be to hold you. So now I know. Crazy, right?”

  “No, it’s not crazy,” I said gently.

  “It is crazy, because I thought it would be great. Instead, it’s like saying good-bye.”

  “It’s not good-bye.” But I was beginning to believe that it was.

  “Laurie—” He seemed to shake himself more awake. “We were riding back from school one day, and it was cold, and your hair was blowing. I had my arm up along the back of the seat. I almost put it down around you. Then I thought, no, I won’t try that here. It’s got to be in the dark when she won’t have to look at my face.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” I said. “I’m used to your face.”

  “Nobody gets used to that. My own mom—you know what she said? ‘I can’t take it,’ she said. ‘It makes me sick to see him like this. Can’t they do something?’ And the doctor said, ‘Maybe. After a couple of years, maybe, something can be done. We’ll see at that time. What sort of medical coverage do you carry?’ So she said, ‘I think he’d better live on the island.’”

  “Oh, Jeff,” I said. “That’s awful.”

  “She didn’t put it quite like that. She said, ‘I think he should live with his dad. A teenage boy needs a man for a role model.’ She never thought that before. She always said just the opposite—that my dad was a lousy example for me. What it came down to was that she couldn’t stand to look at me.”

  “I can look at you,” I said. “Your face is your face. It’s part of you.”

  “That’s what Helen said. She said, ‘Tell Laurie how you feel.’ And I told her, ‘Helen, you’re insane. She’d freak out.’ And Helen said—she said—”

  He was slipping away again. A wave of panic swept over me. Somehow I knew that if he left this time it would be for good.

  “Stay awake,” I told him urgently. “You’ve got to stay awake. We’re going to get out of here.”

  “There’s no way.”

  “There is a way! There is!”

  It happened so suddenly that I couldn’t believe it. One moment I was with Jeff on the rock ledge, and an instant later I was floating above him. The darkness hadn’t lessened, yet I could see everything—the boy with the scarred face—the girl with her head on his shoulder. I knew that girl was Laurie Stratton, yet she was someone completely apart from me. I was detached, clear of entrapments, moving upward. Rising like smoke, like the ocean mists, like a drop of water being drawn by the sun, I moved through the opening above me. And I was free!

  Free in a world of sky! It stretched in all directions. I could rise into it, if I wished, and keep on rising. I could become part of it and expand beyond into nothing and everything. The evening air should have been cold, but I didn’t feel it. I could see straight through the gray clouds to the sun. Up I rose, until the clouds lay far behind me. The wind came singing, and it carried a million stories. Lia had been right, there were no words here. There did not have to be. All things were known and understood. A gull screamed somewhere miles away, and I knew. A child cried on the mainland, and I heard. I was apart from the earth, yet everything on it was mine.

  There were far places waiting, strange voices calling, yet I couldn’t resist one look at the familiar. I moved to the level of the rocks in front of Cliff House and immediately saw Neal.

  He had been out riding, and his hair was ruffled by the wind so that it looked like chicken feathers. He was whistling as he wheeled his bike along the path in the direction of the shed. Halfway there he stopped, bent over, and seemed to be inspecting his front tire. Then he slowly straightened and stood without moving, leaning on the handlebars, his eyes unfocused and dreamy.

  He seemed to be staring straight through me out to sea. Then, suddenly, he blinked.

  “Laurie?” It was more of a question than a statement. “Laurie?”

  He stood there a moment longer without moving, his face creased with puzzlement. Then, abruptly, he whirled and, letting the bike fall to the ground, began to run toward the house.

  “Laurie!” another voice called. This was no question but a cry of desperation. Not one of the family, but still, a voice I knew, a voice that drew me. Who—why—?

  And then I remembered.

  It was like awaking from a dream of flying.

  I’m here, Jeff ! I’m here! I answered silently.

  I slipped downward, the rocks offering no resistance, and felt myself caught as though by some gigantic magnetic force. I could not have fought it if I had tried. With a wrenching jerk I was snapped into the body of a girl named Laurie Stratton, and became Laurie Stratton.

  “Don’t die and leave me!” Jeff whispered.

  “I won’t. I’m back. It’s all okay.” It was all I could tell him. I clung to him tightly there in the darkness until my father’s head and shoulders appeared above us, silhouetted against the sky.

  They took us up on ropes. It was easier on Jeff than on me because he was unconscious. There was a whole rescue squad assembled, and Tommy Burbank was lowered to help us. He kept muttering, “Damn, Laurie, you’ve been living out here your whole life. How could you get into such a mess?” By the time they got the harnesses down, Jeff had passed out, so he could be strapped in and raised without c
ommotion. As for me, I screamed my head off.

  The thing that made it so ridiculous was that I wasn’t even that badly injured. We were both taken to St. Joseph’s, but I was released that same evening. My shoulder was bruised and swollen, but there was nothing major wrong. Jeff ’s left leg was broken, and he was suffering from exposure. So I went home, and Jeff didn’t, and it was days before I saw him again.

  It was days before I saw anything. The pain of my shoulder was out of all proportion to the seriousness of the injury, and the doctor prescribed some pills that really wiped me out. I remember little about that period, but the few memories I do have are of murmuring, “Mom?” and of her sticking another pill into my mouth.

  “Sleep, honey,” she kept saying, and the words became a singsong melody at the core of my consciousness—“Sleep, honey; sleep and get better.”

  So I slept. And when I eventually came up from the depths, it was as though I had been away on a long trip.

  “Jeff ?” I asked. “How’s Jeff ?”

  “Better than he should be, considering,” Dad said. “He’s supposed to come home tomorrow.”

  “How bad is his leg?”

  “That was a simple fracture, but the kid nearly froze. Do you realize he was stuck down that hole for almost twenty-four hours? Another night would have finished him. More than that, if Neal hadn’t seen you fall, you could have died with him.”

  “Neal saw me fall?” I repeated.

  “He was walking his bike up the path and saw you on the rocks. The fog was rolling in, and at first he thought it was an illusion. Then he realized it really was you, and an instant later you vanished. It scared him to death.”

  “So that’s how you found us,” I said.

  “Neal rushed in and got me, and the two of us checked out the place where he’d seen you standing. There was that gaping hole leading down to nowhere. It was like a miracle when I heard your voice calling up to me.”

  “Whatever led you to go out there in the first place?” Mom asked. “You knew how dangerous it was.”

  “I found the books Jeff brought over the night before,” I told her. “They were there at the end of the path. All I could think was that he might have gone out to the edge and slipped and fallen.”

  “If that had been the case, you wouldn’t have found him,” Dad said grimly. “He would have been long gone, washed around the point.”

  I shuddered. “I wasn’t thinking that clearly. When I saw the books—” I paused. Where were the books? I had forgotten all about them. “They must still be out there,” I said.

  “Neal brought them in,” Mom said. “I think they’re in the living room.”

  She was right, they were. The cover of the red one was warped from dampness, but other than that they were both intact. I spent the next two days reading.

  I started with the section Jeff had described on the phone about the experiments that had been run on a man named Ingo Swann at Stanford Research Center. Aside from his performances in the laboratory identifying objects on a raised platform, Swann was said to have demonstrated his ability to project himself to distant locations simply by being given their longitudes and latitudes. Upon his return he would prove he had been there by sketching the terrain. On one occasion he had returned from an astral trip to a supposedly uninhabited island in the southern part of the Indian Ocean to report that there had been people there speaking French. Investigation later revealed that the French government had built a meteorological station on that island.

  Swann’s case history was followed by others, all equally amazing. A tremendous number of people had testified over the years to having had out-of-body experiences. “In many cases,” the book reported, “these subjects started having such experiences in childhood and grew up assuming that everyone else did also. When they mentioned their astral trips to family and friends it was done so casually that listeners thought that they were describing dreams.”

  One chapter in the red book was devoted to ancient history. There were photographs of paintings that had been found in Egyptian tombs that showed a second body hovering over the first one. Ancient Chinese and Indian manuscripts were cited, describing men who routinely sent their spiritual bodies on “heavenly flights,” and there was one section that elaborated on the Eastern religions in which lamas and monks were required to leave their bodies as part of their religious training.

  But the thing that interested me most was one short paragraph that referred to “the North American Indians, the Algonquin, Shoshone and Navajo in particular, who seem to have an innate understanding of how to use their astral powers.” I read that sentence several times. I remembered Helen’s casual comment that “the medicine men could do it whenever they wanted, and some of the others too.”

  And now I was among that number.

  The day I finished the second book I phoned Jeff. Mr. Rankin said he couldn’t come to the phone but that he would call me back. The call never came.

  The following morning I struggled into my parka, tucked the two books under my arm, and walked the two miles to the Rankin cottage. I rang the bell, and Jeff ’s voice called out something that I heard as “Come in.” I shoved open the door and stepped into a room that was about as void of personality as any I had ever entered. There were chairs and a couch covered in some sort of drab brown material, and the curtains at the windows were a lighter shade of brown, with a checkerboard design running through them. There was nothing on the walls, not a picture or even a calendar, and there were no plants or cushions or magazines or anything else to show that two people made their home there.

  Some “bachelor pad,” I thought, glancing about me, I bet Neal will make a much more eligible bachelor than this, when he grows up!

  Jeff was seated in an armchair with his leg in a cast propped up on a coffee table. The TV stood against the wall directly across from him blaring out the soundtrack from an old movie in which masked bandits were shooting each other off rooftops.

  I started to say, “Hi,” and then realized that I wouldn’t be able to hear my own voice over the din of the movie.

  Jeff glanced up at me with an expression that made me wonder if he was going to sit there and let the thing keep running. Then, with apparent reluctance, he pushed one of the buttons on the remote control in his lap, and the TV sputtered into silence.

  “Hello,” I said. “How’s the leg?”

  “Broken,” Jeff said shortly. “How’s the shoulder?” His eyes were cool and uncommunicative, with that distant, closed-off look that they held so often.

  “It’s better,” I said. “I got off easier than you did.”

  He didn’t invite me to sit down, but I did anyway. The sofa was just as uncomfortable as I’d thought it would be.

  “You don’t act like you’re very happy to see me,” I said.

  “Well, what are you here for, anyway? I would think you’ve had enough of my company to last a lifetime.”

  “You didn’t return my phone call,” I said accusingly.

  “I didn’t have anything to say.”

  “Maybe I had something to say. Did that ever occur to you?”

  “Not really,” Jeff said. “I figured you were just doing your duty.”

  “Well, I wasn’t. I needed to talk to you, but there’s no sense even trying if you’re going to be like this. What are you mad about?”

  “I’m not mad,” he said. “It’s just—” His eyes shifted away from mine, and he drew a deep breath. “Look, no guy likes to make a fool of himself.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Don’t. I was there, remember?” His voice was brusque and embarrassed. “So, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  I don’t know what he expected, but I’m sure it wasn’t what he got.

  “Astral projection,” I told him.

  “I don’t know anything about it. Only what I read in those books that Helen bought.” He paused, frowned. “Are those the books you have there? Where did you find them?
”

  “Out by the path where you left them,” I said. “Neal brought them in, and I’ve been reading them.”

  “Weird, right?”

  “Yes, but—Jeff, do you believe in it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “A week ago I’d have said ‘crazy.’ But after reading those case studies—well, there’s got to be something. I mean, they were documented and everything. What do you think?”

  “It’s real,” I said. “I know, because I’ve done it.”

  Jeff was silent for a moment. Then he surprised me by nodding.

  “So that’s what happened,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s what happened. Neal saw me in some sort of form out over the rocks. He got Dad, and the two of them came out and found us.”

  “I thought you died,” Jeff said. “That’s when I started freaking out. You seemed to stop breathing, and I couldn’t find a heartbeat. One minute it was you, and the next it was like I was hanging on to an empty shell. How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “You’ve got to know! The people in those books knew!”

  “They didn’t all know the first time it happened,” I said. “In a lot of the cases people projected at a time of shock, like during an accident. They didn’t even know what was happening until it was over and they were back again.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, I guess.” He was regarding me with a combination of awe and amazement. “What did it feel like?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it exactly. Like—being free. Like not being tied to anything or anyone, just able to go. The thing is, I didn’t know where to go or how to get there. I wasn’t in control of it the way Lia is.”

  “Lia? That girl who looks like you? She can do it too?”

  “That girl’s my sister,” I said. “I want to tell you about her.”

  The strange thing was that he didn’t disbelieve me. He sat through the story in silence, and when I was finished he had only one question.

  “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “Why does she hate you like that? It’s not like you did anything. She came to find you, not the other way around. The way you tell it, she’s been slowly moving in on you. It was little things first, like appearing on the beach where Ahearn could see her, and then in your dreams, and then when you were awake, until now it’s like she’s trying to get you separated from everybody who’s important to you.”