The Stranger

by Caroline B. Cooney

  She was in a dance choreographed by an unknown, moonlit hand. She had a partner, unseen and unknown, and the only thing was to keep up, to stay with the rhythm, her skirts making scallop shells around her bare stockinged legs, her feet barely touching the white snow, her hands in synchrony, touching, holding, waving.

  Christo struggled free from the snow and circled the boulder.

  He could see her, her gown luminous as the stars, her hair like golden music. He could not imagine what she was doing, but he did not care. She was too lovely and the evening was too extraordinary for reason. He simply wanted to catch up, to be with her, to see her eyes as she danced this unearthly dance.

  When he caught up to her, she was dancing on a balance beam between two black-iced ponds. The path was so narrow his heart stopped. What if she fell? What could she be thinking of? He was too out of breath to shout her name again, he whose breath control and athletic strength were his strong assets. The stillness of the night was so complete it was like crystal, a call from him would shatter the glass in which they danced.

  A black, black hole at the end of Nicoletta’s narrow danger opened wide, and opened wider.

  Christo stared, fascinated, unable to think at all, unable to shout warnings if warnings were needed.

  From the side of the ice-dripping, rock walked rock. Moving rock. The rock and Nicoletta danced together for a moment while Christo tried to free himself from ribbons of confusion. What is going on? he thought.

  It was possible that the night had ended and he was deep in a dream, one of those electrical-storm dreams, in which vivid pictures leap and toss like lightning in a frightened sky.

  “Nicoletta?” he said at last.

  She spun, as if seeing him for the first time, and the rock spun with her, and it had a face.

  The rock was a person.

  Chapter 10

  “YOU BROUGHT HIM HERE,” it said to her.

  She knew who he was now, but not why or how. She wanted to talk to him. Not just this night, but every night and forever. She wanted him to be the only person she ever talked to.

  But he was not a person. He was a thing.

  “When do you change?” she said to him. “When are you one of us?”

  “I am always one of you,” he said desperately. “How could you have brought Christo? How could you betray me?”

  “I would never betray you. I love you.”

  He released her, and the rough granite of him scraped her painfully. There was more red now under the moon: her rubies, her cheeks, and her one drop of blood.

  “Go!” he breathed. “Go. Convince him I am not.”

  Convince him I am not.

  Not what? Not who?

  She was alone now between the lakes and Christo was trying to join her, his large feet clumsy on the tilting ice and snow. “I’m coming, Christo!” she said, and ran toward him, but she was clumsy now, too. Her partner of the silence and snow was gone; her choreography failed her.

  She slipped first, and Christo slipped second.

  They were a yard apart, too far to touch, too far to catch.

  At first she was not afraid, because she knew that even falling through the ice, the creature would save her, lift her, carry her out.

  But the sharp tiny heel of her silver shoe punctured the ice at the same moment that Christo’s big black shoe cracked it, and as the frigid water crept up her stockings, she realized that the creature would not save her, any more than it had saved the hunters. What mattered most to it was being unknown, and being untouched, and being safe itself.

  Christo and I will drown, she thought. We will fall as far beneath the black water as the hunters fell in the black shaft. We will die in ice and evil cold.

  She thrashed desperately, but that only made the hole in the ice larger.

  Christo said, in a normal high school boy’s voice, “I can’t believe I have done anything as stupid as this. Don’t tell anybody, that’s all I ask.” He was crouching at the water’s edge, having pulled himself back. He grabbed her hand and waist and yanked her unceremoniously to dry land. “Let’s get out of here before we get frostbite.” He hustled her along the straight path and back into the woods and back around the boulder.

  Nicoletta was afraid the boulder would roll upon them, would crush their wet feet beneath its glacial tons, but it ignored them. Back in the van, Christo turned on the motor and then immediately the heat, with the blower on high.

  After a moment he looked at her, reassessing what had happened and who she was.

  He knows now, thought Nicoletta. He knows who I love and where I go and what matters most.

  But he did not know. People in love seldom do.

  “You,” said Christo finally, “are not what I expected.” He was laughing. He was thrilled. Nicoletta had proved to be full of well-kept secrets, a girl whose hobbies were not the usual, and he was even more proud of being with her than he had been at the dance.

  Christo started to list the things they would do together—things he probably thought were unusual and exciting. To Nicoletta they sounded impossibly dull. They were of this world. They were commonplace.

  Nicoletta had a true love now, from another world, a world without explanation or meaning, and she did not care about Christo’s calendar.

  The light was on in the bedroom Nicoletta shared with Jamie when Christo pulled into the Storms’s driveway. Jamie had definitely not gone to bed. Her little face instantly appeared, and she shaded the glass with her two hands so that she could see into the dark.

  Christo grinned. “We have to give your little sister a show for her money,” he said.

  No! thought Nicoletta, shrinking. I can’t kiss you now. I’m in love with another—another what?

  Man? Boy? Rock? Thing? Beast?

  Or was she in love with a murderer?

  She thought of the two men falling to the depths of the cave.

  Where are we going? they would have said to each other.

  Down.

  Down forever, down to certain death.

  He could have prevented the hunters from dying, she thought.

  Then she thought, No, he couldn’t. They would have killed him first, shot him, it was self-defense, in a way.

  Her thoughts leapt back and forth like a tennis ball over a net.

  It came to her, as black and bleak as the lakes in the dark, that she had forgotten those two men. They had fallen out the bottom of her mind just as they fell out the bottom of the cave.

  Love is amoral, she thought. Love thinks only of itself, or of The Other.

  There is no room in love for passersby.

  Those hunters. They had passed by, all right.

  Did they have wives? Children? Mothers? Jobs?

  Nobody will ever find them, thought Nicoletta. They will never be buried. They will never come home. Nobody will ever know.

  Unless I tell.

  “Good night,” said Christo softly. He walked her up the steps, dizzy with love. Together they stared at the blank wooden face of the door, at the bare nail where last December a Christmas wreath had hung.

  Christo’s kiss was long and deep and intense. His lips contained enough energy to win football games, to sing entire concerts. When he finally stopped, and tried to find enough breath to speak, he couldn’t, and just went back to the car.

  Behind Nicoletta the door was jerked open and she fell inside, her heart leaping with memories of caves and black lakes, of dancing in front of rock faces that opened like the jaws of mountain spirits.

  “Ooooooh, that was so terrific!” squealed Jamie, flinging her arms around her sister. “He really kissed you! Wow, what a kiss! I was watching through the peephole. Oooooooh, I can’t wait to tell my friends.”

  Nobody could ever accuse a little sister of good timing.

  “Get lost, Jamie.”

  “Forget it. We share a bedroom. I’ll never be lost. Tell me everything or I’ll never let you sleep. I’ll borrow all your clothes. I’ll get a parakeet
and keep the cage over your bed. I’ll spill pancake syrup in your hair.”

  “Go for it,” said Nicoletta. She walked past her pesky sister and into the only room in the teeny house where you were allowed to shut the door and be alone. In the bathroom mirror she stared at herself.

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

  There were answers behind the silvered glass. If she could only look in deeply enough, she would know.

  I didn’t look deeply enough into the cave either, she thought.

  I have to go back.

  Further down.

  Deeper in.

  Chapter 11

  “DADDY AND I ARE going to see the Burgesses today,” said Mother. “This is the first free Saturday we’ve had in so long!”

  Mr. Burgess was Daddy’s old college roommate. It was a long drive and when Mother and Daddy went to see Sally and Ralph, they stayed all afternoon and sometimes long into the night.

  Yes! thought Nicoletta. I’ll have the time to scout out the cave. Nicoletta tightened her bathrobe around her and thought of the long, unsupervised day ahead and what yummy food she would eat to sustain herself. Doughnuts, she thought, Gummi bears, ice cream, chocolate chips out of the bag, and barbecue potato chips. She would take some to Jethro. She would wear a backpack filled with junk food, and—

  “Nicoletta,” said her mother, in her high, firm, order-giving voice, “you’ll stay home and baby-sit for Jamie.”

  “Baby-sit for Jamie?” Nicoletta repeated incredulously. She needed to get out there in the snow and find Jethro! And they were making her stay home and baby-sit her stupid sister who was perfectly capable of taking care of herself?

  Nicoletta tipped way backward in her wooden breakfast table chair, rolling her eyes even farther backward, to demonstrate her total disgust.

  Luckily Jamie felt the same way. “Baby-sit?” she shrieked. “Mother! I am eleven years old. I do not need a sitter and I am not a baby. Furthermore, if I did need one, I would want one more capable, more interesting, and more worth your money than Nickie.”

  It was agreed that the girls could take care of themselves separately, as long as they promised not to fight, not to argue, and not to do anything foolish.

  “I promise,” said Nicoletta, who had never meant anything less.

  “I promise,” said Jamie, who lived for fights and arguments and would certainly start both, the minute their parents were out of sight.

  Their car backed out of the driveway, leaving deep lacelike treads in the snow. The sky was a thin, helpless blue, as if its own veins had chilled and even the sky could no longer get warm.

  But Jamie did not start a fight.

  “Make pancake men,” she said pleadingly to her sister. This was one of the few episodes out of the Little House series that Jamie considered worthy. Nicoletta was excellent at it, too. Nobody could pour pancake batter like Nicoletta.

  So Nicoletta made pancake men and then struggled with pancake women, although skirts were harder to pour. They ate by cutting away limbs with the sides of their forks: having first the arms, then the legs.

  Jamie drowned some of her men in syrup, pouring it on until their little pancake heads were under water, so to speak.

  There was nothing quite so filling as pancakes. When you had had pancakes for breakfast, you were set for a hard day’s work. Nicoletta dressed, carefully hiding her excitement from Jamie. Jamie loved Saturday morning cartoons and with luck would not even hear the door close as Nicoletta slipped out. With extremely good luck, she would still be cartooning and junk-fooding when Nicoletta returned in the afternoon.

  There had been enough money last year for Nicoletta to purchase a wonderful winter wardrobe. She wanted to be seen against the snow. A scarlet ski jacket with silver trim zipped tightly against the cold. Charcoal-gray pants tucked into white boots with furry linings. She wore no hat. The last thing she wanted to do was cover her hair.

  She loosened it from its elastics and let it flow free, the only gold in a day of silver and white.

  “Where are you going?” yelled Jamie, hearing the door open after all.

  “Out.” Nicoletta liked the single syllable. The strength of it pleased her. The total lack of information that it gave, increased the sense of secrecy and plotting. She stood for a moment in the doorway, planning her strategy. She’d be warm inside her puffy jacket, but the pants were not enough and the boots were more for show than snow. She needed earmuffs in the fierce wind, but would die before wearing them.

  “Nicoletta!” screamed her sister, who never called her that. The scream soared upward with rising fear. “Nicoletta!” Loud. Louder than it should be for anything less than blood. “Nicoletta, come here!”

  She flew through the house, remembering emergency numbers, fighting for self-control, reminding herself to stay calm. Was Jamie bleeding? Was Jamie—

  Jamie was fine. Curled in a ball on the easy chair, with Mother’s immense purple velour bathrobe draped around her like Cinderella’s gown.

  “This better be good,” said Nicoletta. “Talk fast before I kill you.”

  “Kill me for what?” said Jamie.

  “Frightening me.”

  Jamie was gratified to have frightened Nicoletta. Nicoletta could think only of time lost, time she needed to find and talk to Jethro. Time in the winter woods, time behind the swollen boulder. Get to the point! she thought, furious in the wake of her unreasoning fear.

  Jamie pointed to the local news channel.

  “You called me in here to look at something on TV?” shouted Nicoletta.

  “Shut up and listen.”

  A distraught woman was sobbing. “My husband! My husband Rob!” she said. “We don’t know what happened to him! He never came home last night. Or Al either. They must be hurt.” The woman’s shoulders heaved with weeping. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “They’re lying out there in the snow. I know they are. Too weak to call for help. Or maybe they fell through unsafe ice. I don’t know. But Rob didn’t come home.”

  As if she, too, had fallen through unsafe ice, Nicoletta grew colder and colder, sinking to the depths of her soul.

  “See,” said Jamie, “what happened is, these two hunters went out yesterday morning and they never came home. Isn’t that creepy? They took a day off from work to go hunting and they never came home.”

  I forgot them, she thought. I forgot them right away. I yelled at the monster once and then I forgot again. But those were people. Real people.

  “What if she never finds out?” said Jamie in a low, melodramatic voice. “You missed it, Nick, but they showed her little kids. The kids are too little to know what’s going on. They just held hands and stared at the camera. You know, that goopy, gaping look little kids have.”

  Children, thought Nicoletta. I went back and danced on the snow while little children waited for a daddy who is not coming home. And I knew, I knew all along.

  Something in her congealed. She felt more solid, but not flesh and blood solid. Metallic. As if she were no longer human, but more of a robot, built of wires and connections in a factory.

  Because I didn’t react like a human, she thought. A human would have gone to the police, called an ambulance, taken rescue teams to the cave to bring the hunters up. And what did I do? I obeyed a voice telling me to keep its secrets.

  The reporter’s face became long and serious. “In this temperature,” she said grimly, “in this weather, considering tonight’s forecast, there is little hope that the men will survive, if indeed they are alive at this moment. They must be found today.”

  Nicoletta’s stomach tried to throw up the pancake men.

  She forced herself to be calm. She supervised every inside and outside muscle of herself. It seemed even more robotic. And it worked. She knew from Jamie’s glance that her body and face revealed nothing.

  “Search teams are combing the areas where the men are thought to have been,” said the reporter. “We will return with updates.” Th
e long, grim face vanished into a perky smile, as if the reporter, too, were a robot programmed for certain expressions. “Now,” she said cheerily,” back to your regular programming!”

  Jamie, who always preferred regular programming, and never wanted interruptions, sighed happily and tucked herself more deeply into her mother’s robe.

  Nicoletta backed out of the room. She stared down at the bright, sparkling outfit she had chosen to shine in the snowy woods, so Jethro would see her.

  I know where they are … but if I tell… his secret … my promise …

  Anyway, they’re dead. It isn’t as if anybody could rescue them now. They have a grave, too—farther underground than an undertaker would put them.

  It was not funny. Not funny at all. And yet a snickery laugh came out of her mouth and hung in the air like frost. She had to pull her mouth back into shape with both hands.

  What shall I do? Does a promise to a monster count when wives are sobbing and children have lost their father? Of course not.

  But in her heart, she knew there had been no promise to a monster. The promise had been to …

  But even now she could not finish the sentence. It was not possible and she was calm enough to know that much.

  But it was true, and she had seen enough to know that as well.

  First, I’ll find him, she told herself. We’ll talk. I’ll explain to him that I have to notify authorities. Then —

  A small, bright yellow car whipped around the corner, slipping dangerously on the ice, and zooming forward to slip again as it rushed up her driveway. Rachel, who aimed for every ice patch and shrieked with laughter at every skid. Rachel, coming for a Saturday morning gossip.

  Nicoletta could not believe this was happening to her. First she had to make breakfast with her sister. Now she had to waste time with her best friend.

  Rachel leapt out of the driver’s side and Cathy from the passenger side. It wasn’t enough that she would be saddled with one friend; now there were two. They slammed their doors hard enough to rock the little car and purposely leapt onto untouched snow, rather than using the path, tagging each other and giggling.