Stranger Things Happen (8 page)

"Claire? Samantha? Goddammit, you're scaring me. Where are you?"
The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door.
"Samantha? I think I've been bitten by something. I think I've been
bitten by a goddamn snake." Samantha hesitates for only a second.
Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

1.Going to hell. Instructions and advice.

Listen, because I'm only going to do this once. You'll have to
get there by way of London. Take the overnight train from Waverly.
Sit in the last car. Speak to no one. Don't fall asleep.

When you arrive at Kings Cross, go down into the Underground.
Get on the Northern line. Sit in the last car. Speak to no one.
Don't fall asleep.

The Northern line stops at Angel, at London Bridge, at Elephant
and Castle, Tooting Broadway. The last marked station is Morden:
stay in your seat. Other passengers will remain with you in the
car. Speak to no one.

These are some of the unlisted stations you will pass: Howling
Green. Duke's Pit. Sparrowkill. Stay in your seat. Don't fall
asleep.

If you look around the car, you may notice that the other
passengers have started to glow. The bulbs on the car dim as the
passengers give off more and more light. If you look down you may
find that you yourself are casting light into the dark car.

The final stop is Bonehouse.

2. June in Edinburgh in June
.

June stole £7 from Rooms Two and Three. That would be trainfare,
with some left over for a birthday present for Lily. Room Three was
American again, and Americans never knew how much currency they had
in the first place. They left pound coins lying upon the dresser.
It made her fingers itchy.

She ticked off the morning jobs on her right hand. The wash-room
at the end of the hall was clean. Beds were made up, and all the
ashtrays were cleared out. Rooms One through Four were done, and
Room Five at the top of the house was honeymooners from Dallas.
They hadn't been at breakfast for three days, living on love, she
supposed. Why travel from Dallas to Edinburgh merely to have sex?
She imagined a great host of Texans, rising on white wings and
fanning out across the Atlantic, buoyed up by love. Falling into
bed at journey's end, exhausted by such travel. Nonsense.

She emptied the wastebasket in Room Three, and went thumping
down the stairs with the cleaning box in one hand, and the room
keys swinging in the other. "Here, ma," she said, handing the keys
and the box over to Lily.

"Right," Lily said sourly. "Finished up, have you?" Her face was
flushed, and her black hair snaked down the back of her neck.
Walter was in the kitchen, his elbows plunged into soapy water,
singing along with Radio Three as he worked, an opera program.

"Where are you off to?" Lily said, raising her voice. June
ducked past her.

"Dunno exactly," she said. "I'll be back in time for tea
tomorrow. Goodbye, Walter!" she shouted. "Bake Lily a lovely
cake."

3. 
Arrows of Beauty
.

June went to St. Andrews. She thought it would be pleasant to
spend a day by the sea. The train was full and she sat next to a
fat, freckled woman eating sandwiches, one after the other. June
watched her mouth open and close, measuring out the swish and click
of the train on the tracks like a metronome.

When the sandwiches were gone, the woman took out a hardcover
book. There was a man and a woman on the cover, embracing, his face
turned into her shoulder, her hair falling across her face. As if
they were ashamed to be caught like this, half-naked before the
eyes of strangers. Lily liked that sort of book. The name of the
author was Rose Read.

It sounded like a conjuring name, an ingredient in a love spell,
a made-up, let's pretend name. Leaning over the woman's
speckled-egg arm, June looked at the photo on the back. Mile-long
curlicued eyelashes, and a plump, secretive smile. Probably the
author's real name was Agnes Frumple; probably those eyelashes
weren't real, either. The woman saw June staring. "It's
called 
Arrows of Beauty
. Quite good," she said. "All
about Helen of Troy, and it's very well researched."

"Really," June said. She spent the next half an hour looking
across the aisle, out of the opposite window. There were several
Americans on the train, dressed in tourist plaids, their voices
flat and bright and bored. June wondered if her honeymooners would
come to this someday, traveling not out of love but boredom,
shifting restlessly in their narrow seats. 
Are we there
yet? Where are we?

Shortly before the train pulled into Leuchars station, the woman
fell asleep. 
Arrows of Beauty 
dropped from her
slack fingers, and slid down the incline of her lap. June caught it
before it hit the floor. She got onto the station platform, the
book tucked under her arm.

4. Fine Scents
.

The wind tipped and rattled at the tin sides of the St. Andrews
bus. It whipped at June's hair, until she scraped the loose
tendrils back to her scalp with a barrette. The golf course came
into view, the clipped lawns like squares of green velvet. Behind
the golf course was the North Sea, and somewhere over the sea, June
supposed, was Norway or Finland. She'd never even been to England.
It might be nice to travel: she pictured her mother waving goodbye
with a white handkerchief, 
so long, kid! Just like her
father, you know
. Goodbye, good riddance.

St. Andrews was three streets wide, marching down to the curved
mouth of the harbor. A sea wall ran along the cliffs at the edge of
the town, from the broken-backed cathedral to a castle, hollowed
out like an old tooth, and green in the middle. Castle and
cathedral leaned towards each other, pinching the sea between them.
June got off the bus on Market Street.

She bought a box of Black Magic chocolates in the Woolworth's
and then went down an alley cobbled with old stones from the
cathedral, worn down to glassy smoothness. Iron railings ran along
storefronts, the rails snapped off near the base, and she
remembered a school chaperone saying it had been done for the war
effort. Taken to be made into cannons and shrapnel and belt
buckles, just as the town had harvested stone from the cathedral.
Ancient history, scrapped and put to economical uses.

An old-fashioned sign swinging above an open shop door caught
her eye. It read "Fine Scents. I.M. Kew, Prop." Through the window
she could see a man behind the counter, smiling anxiously at a
well-dressed woman. She was saying something to him that June
couldn't make out, but it was her velvety-rough voice that pulled
June into the store.

"… don't know if the rest of the aunties can keep her off him.
It's her hobby, you know, pulling wings off flies. You know how
fond of him Minnie and I are, but Di and Prune are absolutely no
help, she'll do the poor boy just like his mother … "

The marvelous voice trailed off, and the woman lifted a stopper
out of a bottle. "Really, darling, I don't like it. Sweet and wet
as two virgins kissing. It's not up to your usual standards."

The man shrugged, still smiling. His fingers drummed on the
counter. "I thought you might like a change, is all," he said. "So
my Rose-By-Any-Other-Name, I'll make you up a standard batch. May I
help you, dearie?"

"I was just looking," June said.

"We don't have anything here for your sort," he said, not
unkindly. "All custom scents, see."

"Oh." She looked at the woman, who was examining her makeup, her
long smudgy eyelashes, in a compact. Rhinestones on the compact lid
spelled out RR, and June remembered where she had seen the woman's
face. "Excuse me, but don't you write books?"

The compact snapped shut in the white hand. A wing of yellow,
helmeted hair swung forward as the woman turned to June. "Yes," she
said, pink pointed tongue slipping between the small teeth. "Are
you the sort that buys my books?"

No, June thought. I'm the sort that steals them. She delved into
her sack. "This is for my mother," she said. "Would you sign it for
her?"

"How lovely," Rose Read said. She signed the book with a
fountain pen proffered by the man behind the counter, in a child's
careful looped cursive. "There. Have you got a lover, my dear?"

"That's none of your business," June said, grabbing the book
back.

"Is it my business, Mr. Kew?" Rose Read said to the shopkeeper.
He snickered. She had said his name the way two spies meeting at a
party might use made-up names.

"She doesn't have a lover," he said. "I'd smell him on her if
she did."

June took a step back, then another, hesitating. The man and
woman stared at her blandly. She found the store and the pair of
them unnerving. She wanted to flee the store, to get away from
them. She wanted to take something from them, to steal something.
At that moment, a large family, noisy, redheaded, mother and
father, how extravagant! June thought, poured into the shop. They
pressed up to the counter, shaking a battered copy
of 
Fodors 
at Mr. Kew, all speaking at once. June
pocketed the unwanted perfume and quickly left the store.

5. Going to hell. Instructions and advice
.

It is late morning when you arrive at Bonehouse, but the sky is
dark. As you walk, you must push aside the air, like heavy cloth.
Your foot stumbles on the mute ground.

You are in a flat place where the sky presses down, and the
buildings creep close along the streets, and all the doors stand
open. Grass grows on the roofs of the houses; the roofs are packed
sod, and the grass raises up tall like hair on a scalp. Follow the
others. They are dead and know the way better than you. Speak to no
one.

At last you will arrive at a door in an alley, with a dog asleep
on the threshold. He has many heads and each head has many teeth,
and his teeth are sharp and eager as knives.

6. What was in the bottle
.

June sat happy and quiet in the grassy bowl of the castle.
Students in their red gowns and tourists in various plaids
clambered over the worn and tumbled steps that went over the
drawbridge between the squat towers. Outside the castle wall, there
were more steps winding down to the rocky beach. She could hear
people complaining loudly as they came back up, the wind pushing
them backwards. Inside the wall the air was still, the sky arched
like a glass lid, shot through with light.

Ravens sleek and round as kettles patrolled the grass. They
lifted in lazy circles when the tourists came too close, settling
down near June, hissing and croaking. She took the perfume out of
her knapsack and turned it in her hands. The bottle was tall and
slim and plainly made. The stopper was carved out of a rosy stone
and where it plunged into the mouth of the decanter the glass was
faceted like the rhinestones on Rose Read's compact. June took out
the stopper.

She touched it to her wrist, then held her wrist up to her nose
and sniffed. It smelled sweet and greeny-ripe as an apple. It made
her head spin. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again
there was someone watching her.

Up in the tilted crown of the lefthand tower, Mr. Kew, Prop. was
looking straight down at her. He smiled and winked one eye shut. He
cocked his index finger, sighted, and squeezed his fist
closed. 
Pow
, he said silently, pulling his lips tight
in exaggeration around the word. Then he turned to make his way
down the stairs.

June jumped up. If she went out over the drawbridge they would
meet at the foot of the stairs. She grabbed up her pack and went in
the opposite direction. She stopped at the wall and looked over. A
cement bulwark, about five feet below, girdled up the cliffs that
the castle sat on; she tossed the pack over and followed it, heels
first, holding hard to the crumbling wall.

7. She hears a story about birds
.

Down on June's right was the beach, invisible past the curve of
the castle's bulk, cliffs and marshy land to her left. Waves
slapped against the concrete barriers below her. She sat on the
ledge, wondering how long she would have to wait before climbing
back up to the castle or down to the beach. The wind cut straight
through her jersey.

She turned her head, and saw there was a man standing next to
her. Her heart slammed into her chest before she saw that it was a
boy her own age, seventeen or eighteen, with a white face and blue
eyes. His eyebrows met, knitted together above the bridge of his
nose.

"Before you climbed down," he said, "did you happen to notice if
there were a lot of birds up there?"

"You mean girls?" June said, sneering at him. His eyes were very
blue.

"No, birds. You know, with wings." He flapped his arms.

"Ravens," June said. "And maybe some smaller ones, like
sparrows."

He sat down beside her, folding his arms around his knees.
"Damn," he said. "I thought maybe if I waited for a while, they
might get bored and leave. They have a very short attention
span."

"You're hiding from birds?"

"I have a phobia," he said, and turned bright red. "Like
claustrophobia, you know."

"That's unfortunate," June said. "I mean, birds are
everywhere."

"It's not all birds," he said. "Or it's not all the time.
Sometimes they bother me, sometimes they don't. They look at me
funny."

"I'm afraid of mice," June said. "Once when I was little I put
my foot into a shoe and there was a dead mouse inside. I still
shake out my shoes before I put them on."

"When I was five, my mother was killed by a flock of peacocks."
he said, as if it had happened to someone else's mother, and he had
read about it in a newspaper.

"What?" June said.

He sounded embarrassed. "Okay. Um, my mother took me to see the
castle at Inverness. She said that my father was a king who lived
in a castle. She was always making stories up like that. I don't
remember the castle very well, but afterwards we went for a walk in
the garden. There was a flock of peacocks and they were stalking
us. They were so big—they seemed really big—as big as I was. My
mother stuck me in a cherry tree and told me to yell for help as
loudly as I could."