by Kelly Link
“They might as well give up,” Serena said. “They’re all dead by now, buried under an avalanche somewhere. They’ll find the bodies in a couple of weeks when the snow melts.” She sounded almost cheerful.
There were tall drifts of snow on either side of the road. Every 500 meters they passed black-and-yellow signs reading: “Danger! Avalanche Area: Do Not Stop Vehicle!” Every sign said exactly the same thing, but Serena read them out loud anyway, in different voices – Elmer Fudd, Humphrey Bogart, the barman’s flirty New Zealand sing-song.
“Danger, Will Robinson Crusoe!” she said, “Killer robots and tsunamis from Mars ahead. Also German tourists. Do not stop your vehicle. Do not roll down your window to feed the lions. Remain inside your vehicle at all times. Do not pass go. Do not pick up hitchhikers-oops, too late.”
All day the sky had been the color of a blue china plate, flat and suspended upon the narrow teeth of the mountains. The road wound precariously between the mountains, and the car threaded the road. The sun was going down. Just where the road seemed about to lift over the broken mountain rim, where the sun was sliding down to meet them, a black pinprick marked the tunnel into Milford Sound. As Jasper drove, the pinprick became a door and the door became a mouth that ate up first the road and then the car.
Serena was reading out of Jasper’s guidebook. “Started in 1935,” she said. “Did you know it took twenty years to complete? It’s almost a mile long. Four men died in rock falls during the blasting. You should always call a mountain Grandmother, to show respect. Did you know that? Turn on the headlights -”
They went from the pink-gray of the snowdrifts into sudden dark. The road went up at a 45-degree angle, the car laboring against the steep climb. The headlights were sullen and small reflecting off the greasy black swell of the tunnel walls. The walls were not smooth; they bulged and pressed against the tarmac road.
In the headlights, the walls ran with condensation. Over the noise of the car Jasper could hear the plink-plink of fat droplets falling down the black rock. He touched his tongue to his tooth.
“Why, Grandmother, what a big dark tunnel you have,” he said. The terrible weight of the mountain above him, the white snow shrouding the black mountain, the stale wet air in the tunnel, all pressed down inexorably upon him in the dark. He felt strangely sad, he felt lost, he felt dizzy. He sank like a slow stone in a cold well.
“Hello sailor,” Serena said. “Welcome to Grandmother’s Tunnel of Love.” She put her long white hand on his leg and looked at him sidelong. He sank down, was pressed down, heavy. His tooth whining like a dog. He couldn’t bear the weight of Serena’s black eyes, her thin shining face. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head. “Claustrophobic,” he managed to say. He could hardly keep his foot on the gas pedal. He saw them spinning through the dark towards a black wall, a frozen door of ice.
And then he had to stop the car. “You drive,” he said, and fumbled the door open and went stumbling over to the passenger’s door. Serena shifted to the driver’s side and he sat down in her warm seat. It took all his strength to shut the door again.
“Please,” he said. “Hurry.”
She drove competently, talking at him the whole time. “You never told me you were claustrophobic. Lucky for you I came along. We should be out soon.”
They came out into night. There was nothing to distinguish one darkness from the other but dirty snow in the headlights. Yet Jasper felt the great clinging weight fall away from him. His tongue went up to touch his broody tooth. “Stop the car,” he said. He threw up kneeling beside the road. When he stood up, his knees were wet with melted snow. “I think I’m all right again,” he said.
“You drive if you want to,” she said. “Your call, pal. It’s about another forty-five minutes to the hotel, and you can’t miss it. There’s only one road and one hotel.”
Iced pinecones shattered like glass under the wheels of the car. The road was steeper, circling down this time.
“What does the guidebook say about the hotel?” he asked.
Serena said, “Well, it’s an interesting story. This is funny. When I called to make the reservation, the man said they were booked solid. It’s a private party or something. But I talked sweet, told him we had come a long way, a really long way.” She stuck her feet up on the dashboard and leaned her head on his shoulder. He could see her in the mirror, looking pleased with herself.
Jasper said, “The hotel is full?” He pulled over to the side of the road and put his head against the steering wheel. Serena said, “This is the third time you’ve stopped the car. I have to pee.”
“Is the hotel full or isn’t it?” Jasper said.
“Have some chewing gum,” Serena said. “Your breath smells like vomit. Don’t worry so much.”
He couldn’t chew the gum, but he sucked on it. He started the car again.
“Is your tooth killing you?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Revenge of the sugar cereal.”
They went another five hundred yards when something ran across the road. It looked like a small person, scrambling across the road on all fours. It had a long bony tail. Jasper slammed on the brakes and swerved. Serena’s arm flailed out and walloped him, catching his jaw precisely upon the broken tooth. He howled. Serena fell forward, knocking her skull loudly against the dashboard. The car came to a stop, and after a moment, during which neither of them was capable of speech, he said, “Are you okay? Did we hit it?”
“What was it?” she said. “A possum? My head hurts. And my hand.”
“It wasn’t a possum,” he said. “Too big. Maybe a deer.”
“There are no deer in New Zealand,” she said. “The only native mammal is the bat. It’s just us poor unsuspecting marsupials around here. Marsupials.”
Then she snorted. He was amazed to see that tears were streaming down her face. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak. “What’s a marsupial?” he said. “Are you laughing at me? What’s so funny?”
She punched his shoulder. “A possum is a marsupial. It carries its young in a pouch. It’s just the word marsupial. It always cracks me up. It’s like pantyhose or crumhorn.”
It didn’t seem that funny to him, but he laughed experimentally. “Marsupial,” he said. “Ha.”
“Your mouth is bleeding,” she said, and snorted again. “Here.” She took a dirty Kleenex out of her bag and licked it. Then she applied it to his lower lip. “Let me drive.”
“Maybe it was a dog,” he said. There was nothing on the road now.
2. Arrival
Milford Sound curls twenty-two kilometers inland, like a dropped boot. Its heel points north, kicking at the belly of South Island. The Tasman Sea fills the boot, slippery and cold and dark. Abel Tasman, the first European to set foot on shore, sailed away in a hurry again after several of his crew were cooked and eaten. He left behind him Breaksea, Doubtful and George Sounds, and Milford Sound, which is now accessible by sea, by air, by foot across the Milford Track, or along the Milford Road by car, through Homer Tunnel.
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 Mil
ford 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 o
ne.
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.