Stranger Things Happen

by Kelly Link

  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.”

  “That’s nice,” Jasper said.

  Serena squirmed in her seat. “You look so familiar,” she said to Mr. Donner. “Have we met?”

  “One meets so many people,” Mr. Donner said. He took a sip of wine. “We’re expecting one more party. They’re a little late.”

  “Is that why you keep the windows open?” Serena asked.

  “We’re hoping that they’ll hear the band playing,” Mr. Donner said. “Music raises the spirits considerably, I find. We hope that they’ll find their way back down the trail without further incident.

  “You’re talking about the lost hikers, right?” Serena said.

  “There were twenty-three hikers,” Jasper said. “They’ve only set seven places.”

  Mr. Donner shrugged. “Do try your soup, Mr. Todd.”

  Jasper took a small sip of the soup. It was warm and salty and as he swallowed, it burned. “I’m starving,” Serena said. She showed them her empty bowl. “Jasper’s tooth broke, but he’s afraid to go see a dentist.”

  “It’s fine,” Jasper said. “I’ll wait until we get back to Auckland.” He had a very clear picture of a dentist in Auckland, who would be a kind man with a well-kept moustache. A gentle man with small knowledgeable hands, who believed in using gas. Or maybe the tooth would grow back.

  The second course was a fatty cut of brown meat. There was a little dish of green jelly and carrots cooked with brown sugar. Steam rose up to Jasper’s nose, thick and sweet. He diced up a carrot and ate it with his spoon. “I’m not really that hungry,” he said.

  “After dinner,” Mr. Donner said, “we sit and tell stories in front of the fire. I do hope you like stories.”

  “Ghost stories!” Serena said. “It’s just like Girl Scout Camp. I used to love the campfires.”

  Jasper’s wineglass was full again. He didn’t remember drinking the last glass. The better to drink you, my dear, his tooth said. He still had a sense of wrongness, an instinct that the proper thing to do would be to leave or perhaps just go up to bed. But that would mean the tunnel again, or the small coffin-like room with its sad, sagging bed. He took another sip of wine to fortify himself. The band was playing a new song. The song sounded familiar. It might have been “Autumn Leaves.” It might have been a hymn.

  “Have the two of you been traveling together long?” Mr. Donner asked.

  “Oh no,” Serena said. “We met three days ago in a bar in Queenstown. We’re traveling around the world in opposite directions. I fly to Hawaii next Tuesday and then I’m supposed to go home again. This is just Jasper’s second stop.”

  “Maybe I’ll come back home with you,” Jasper said.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, but under the table her foot moved up his calf, nudged in between his legs in a friendly way. “I’m trying to keep as far away from home as possible, for as long as possible. Not that I have a home any longer. It burned down.”

  “How sad,” Mr. Donner said, smiling.

  “Not really,” Serena said primly. “I’m the one who burned it down, but I don’t like to talk about that.”

  Jasper looked across the table at the girl he had met in a bar. She didn’t look like a girl who would burn down her house. He wasn’t really sure what girls who burned down houses looked like. What was the name of the lipstick color? That had been the silly thing, something like Berry Me, or Red Death, or maybe Red Delicious. Maybe Firetruck.

  “See?” Serena said. “Do you still want to go home with me?” Under the table, her hand ran up and down his leg, pinching lightly. “Jasper isn’t the sort who travels purposefully,” she said to Mr. Donner. “He isn’t the sort who’s purposeful, or smart, or careful about the kinds of women in bars he picks up in bars, for that matter. You’ve got to be careful,” she said, turning to Jasper for a moment, “about picking up girls in bars, good grief, what if I’d turned out to be weird, or something? But he isn’t careful. He’s lucky instead. For example, he won his trip by filling out a form in a travel agency.”

  “You are a fortunate young man,” Mr. Donner said.

  There was just a small smear of mint jelly on Serena’s plate. “When he told me in the bar how he’d won, I thought it was just a great pick-up line,” she said. “The tie-breaking question was Why do you want to go around the world? And he wrote, Because you can’t go through it. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  “It’s true,” Jasper said. He was careful to enunciate. “Sad but true.”

  Serena smiled at him. “I shouldn’t complain, though. It’s great traveling with Jasper. He gave me a plastic dinosaur. A stegosaurus. Thanks, Jasper,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Jasper. He wanted to say something, to explain that travel was important to him, that someday, he knew, if he traveled long enough he would eventually come to a wonderful – a magical – place. His toothache was almost gone, just the smallest twinge very far away. Practically in another country. Some place that he had been stuck in for a while. He looked past Serena, to the French window. The torches were now at the base of the trail. They swung back and forth, lighting up the great trunk of a kauri tree, a growth of ferns on the lawn before the hotel.

  “Look,” said Mr. Donner, “here they come. Just in time for dessert.”

  The whole room rose from their chairs, applauding. Five men and two women came into the room. They stopped just past the threshold as if uncertain of their welcome. They looked longingly at the fireplaces, at the empty plates piled up on dirty tables, but they did not move. Instead the crowd swept towards them.

  “Excuse me,” Serena said. She got up and went with the o
thers. Jasper watched her recede: the black hair fallen down around her shoulders again, a tail tucked into her painted mouth, the long legs in the purple tights. Waiters were going back and forth between the tables extinguishing candles. Jasper watched as they pinched the small flames between their fingers. Soon the only light would be the red light of the fireplaces; the bulbs of the chandeliers were faint as starlight, guttering to blackness.

  At the opposite end of the room, near the windows, he could no longer see Serena or the hikers. The crowd was clotted and indistinct in the dim light. It moved slowly across the dance floor, pouring through the window like the massy shadow of the black mountain. Sitting by the dance floor was a single cellist. He had put his instrument down, and was cramming balls of sheet music into his mouth. He chewed them slowly, his hands pulling the white pages out of the air around him as if they were alive. The wind blew out the chandeliers, but Jasper could still see the musician, his mouth and eyes wet and horrible. “Where are the other hikers?”

  Mr. Donner was biting savagely at his thumb, frowning down at the table. “Sometimes people do unthinkable things, in order to come home safely,” he said. “Impossible things, wonderful things. And afterwards, do you think they go home? No. You find it’s much, much better to keep on traveling. Hard to stop, really.”

  The French doors had shut – the hikers were cut off from the trail and the mountain, should they wish to go back. The fire behind Jasper was flickering low, casting out more shadow than warmth, and yet the room seemed to grow hotter and hotter.

  His tooth no longer hurt. The wine and the warmth were pleasant. “I can tell you’re a good man, Mr. Donner. Otherwise my tooth would warn me. I’ve never had a toothache like this before. I’ve never been to a place like this before. I’ve never been to a party like this before. But your name, it’s familiar. My tooth says your name is familiar.”

  The crowd was moving back across the dance floor, towards them, towards the table set with seven places, but he couldn’t see Serena. She had been completely swallowed up. The cellist had finished his music, and like a magician, he lifted the bow of his instrument, lowered it into his wide unhappy mouth.

  “Perhaps you recognize it,” said the bearded man. “But on the other hand, what’s a name, hmm? After a while names are just souvenirs. Places you’ve been. Let me introduce you to some of my friends.” He waved towards the approaching crowd. “Mrs. Gomorrah over there, Mr. Belly of the Whale, Ms. Titanic, Little Miss Through the Looking-Glass, Mr. and Mrs. Really Bad Marriage, Mr. Over The Falls in a Wooden Barrel.”

  Off in the distance Jasper could hear a wolf howling. Which was strange. What had Serena said? It was all marsupials here. The plaintive noise reverberated in his tooth.

  The bearded man was practically gnashing his teeth, smiling ferociously. “I have seen snow and I have been hungry, and I have seen nothing in my travels that is so bad as not living. I propose a toast, Mr. Todd.”

  They both raised their glasses. “To travel,” one said.

  “To life,” said the other.

  – Some are leaving this fall for Texas, and more are going in the spring to California and Oregon. For my part I have no desire to go anywhere. I am far enough west now and do believe some people might go west until they have been around the world and never find a place to stop.

  Elvira Power Hynes, March 1852

  SHOE AND MARRIAGE

  The glass slipper.

  He never found the girl, but he still goes out, looking for her. His wife – the woman he married – she has the most beautiful smile. But her feet are too big.

  This girl looks at him, but she doesn’t smile. She’s wearing too much makeup. Blue eyeliner put on like house paint, lipstick, mascara, sexy glitter dusted all over her face and bare shoulders. If he touched her, it would come off on his fingers, fine and gritty and sad. He doesn’t touch her. The other women in the house, they’ve probably told her things. Maybe she recognizes him. These women are paid to be discreet, but once, afterwards, a woman asked him for his autograph. He tried to think of something appropriate to write. She didn’t have a piece of paper, so instead he wrote on the back of a takeout menu. He wrote, I am a happy man. I love my wife very much. He underlined happy.

  They stand awkwardly in this girl’s tiny room. The room is too small and the bed is too big. They stand as far from the bed as possible, crowded up against the wall. On the wall are posters of celebrities, pictures that this girl has cut out from newspapers and fashion magazines. The people in these pictures are glossy like horses. They look expensive. He sees his wife with her beautiful smile, looking down at them from the wall. If he were to look carefully he would probably find himself on the wall as well, looking comfortable and already too much at home here. He doesn’t look at the wall. He looks at this girl’s feet.

  He was never a very good dancer. What he loved were the women in their long wide skirts. When they danced, the heavy taffeta and silk hitched up and belled out and then you saw their petticoats. More silk, more taffeta – as if underneath that’s all they were, silk and taffeta. Their shoes left thin gritty smears along the marble floor.

  He never saw what kind of shoes they were wearing. Only hers. Perhaps they were all wearing slippers made of glass. Perhaps glass slippers were fashionable at the time. Her feet must have been so small. And she was a tall girl, too. She leaned against his arms, and he hovered over her for a minute. He could smell her hair. It was stacked up on top of her head, all pinned up in some sort of wavy knot, just there beneath his nose. It tickled his nose. It smelled warm. He was so happy. He must have had the silliest smile on his face. Her dress went all the way down to the floor. There were diamonds on the hem, which was silk. The dress made a silky slithery scratchy noise against the floor, like tiny tails and claws. It sounded like mice.

  So these are the two things he still wonders about. What’s under those skirts? Those other people dancing – were they as happy as he was?

  In the garden, the clock struck twelve and she went – when she went, where did she go? He never found that girl. He finds other girls.

  (These girls) this girl (they don’t wear) she isn’t wearing enough clothes. Tangerine-colored see-through shirt; short skirt ripped all the way up the thigh; flesh – fat breasts squashed together in a black brassiere, goose-pimpled arms, long stalky legs balanced on these two tiny feet – he finds the body extremely distracting. “First of all,” he says to her, “let’s have a look in your closet.”

  In these closets there is always the right sort of dress. This dress is not the sort of dress one expects to find in a closet in this sort of house. It is prom dress-y – flouncy, lacy, long and demure. It’s pink. This girl, he thinks, ran away from home on her tiny feet, with a backpack on her back, with these things in it: posters of her favorite rock stars, her prom dress. And the stuffed tiger with real glass eyes that he sees now, on top of the red velveteen bedspread. “What’s your name?”

  The girl folds her arms across her breasts defensively. She has realized that they are not the point after all. Her arms are freckled and also, he sees, bruised, as if someone has been holding her but not carefully enough. “Emily,” she says. “Emily Apple.”

  “Emily,” he says, “why don’t you put on this dress?”

  When he was a little boy it was always one of two things. He was petted and pampered and made much of, or he was ignored and left to his own devices. When he was alone what he liked best was to sit under things. He liked to hide in plain sight, to be in the middle of all the people. He sat under the piano in the music room. At banquets he slid down his enormous chair and sat under the table with his father’s dogs. They licked at his face and arms with long thoughtful tongues. He hid in the fireplaces in the great hall, behind the wrought iron screens. In the summer there were sparrows up in the chimneys, also lizards, spiderwebs, broken sooty bits of shell, feathers and bones caught in the grates. The ladies-in-waiting stood dozing in the thin dusty sunlight of his mother’
s rooms, and he crept under their heavy skirts and sat at their spangled feet, quiet as a mouse.

  He helps Emily Apple slide the beautiful pink dress over her head. He buttons the row of buttons up her narrow back. He lifts her hair up, heaps it up and sticks pins all through the sticky teased mass. She sits perfectly still on the bed, the glass eyes of the tiger looking out at her from the folds of her skirt. He brings water in a basin and washes her face. He powders her face. He finds a locket in a heap of bangles and safety pins. Inside is a photograph of a young girl, maybe Emily Apple, or maybe not. The little girl stares at him. What kind of a girl do you think I am?He fastens the locket around Emily Apple’s long neck. Her face is very naked, very beautiful. Her freckles stand out like spatters of soot on a white sheet. She looks as if she is going to a funeral or to a wedding. They find a pair of gloves and pull them up over her freckled arms. Her fingers stick out where mice have eaten the tips of the gloves, but the dress comes all the way down to the floor. They both feel more comfortable now.

  Sometimes it surprises him, all these runaway girls – all these women – with their sad faces and their tiny feet. How long has this house been here? When he was looking for that girl, he went to a lot of houses. He knocked on the front doors. He announced who he was. These were eligible girls from good homes. They had maids. He asked the maids if they would try on the shoes, too. At night he dreamed about women’s feet. But this house, he never came here.

  He has been married for nine years. Perhaps this is the sort of house that only married men can find.

  That girl, where did she go? He’s still looking for her. He doesn’t expect to find her, but he finds other girls. He loves his wife, but her feet are too big. It wasn’t what he expected – his life, it isn’t at all what he expected. His wife isn’t the one that he was looking for. She was a surprise – he burst out laughing, the glass slipper hanging off her toes. She laughed and soot fell out of her hair. He loves her and she loves him, but that girl, he only danced with her one time before the clock struck midnight, and then she left her shoe behind. He was supposed to find it. He was supposed to find her. He never found her, but these girls – this girl, Emily Apple – the other girls in their tiny rooms: the woman downstairs knew exactly the sort of girl he was looking for. In one of these closets, he thinks, maybe there is (perhaps there is) a glass slipper, the match for the one in his pocket.