Kelly Link - Stranger Things Happen

"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."

"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."