The Stranger (11 page)

“Whoever entered that cave,” said Jethro, “would be forever abandoned by the world. Just as they had been.”

Was he one of them? Ancient as earth? But the boy she knew from Art was her age. A breathing, speaking boy with thick, dark hair and hidden eyes.

“And did Indians fall in?” she asked.

“The Indians always had a sense of the earth and its mysteries. They knew better than to go near the cave.”

He seemed to stop. He seemed to have nothing more to say. She asked no questions. The moon slid across the black, black sky. “Then,” said Jethro, “white men came again to these shores. To farm and hunt and eventually to explore.” Now he was speaking with difficulty, and the accents of his voice were lifting and strange. “My father and I,” he said, “found the cave. So beautiful! I had never seen anything beautiful. We did not have a beautiful life. We did not have beautiful possessions. So I stayed in the outer chambers, touching the smooth rock. Staring at the light patterns on the brimstone. Dazzled,” he said. “I was dazzled. But my father …”

How softly, how caressingly, he spoke the word
father.
A shaft of moonlight fell upon the monstrous shape of him and she could see the boy inside the rock. His eyes might have been carved from a vein of gold. He smiled at her, the sculpture of his face shifting as if it lived. It was a smile of ineffable sadness.

“My father went on in.”

She turned to look at him.

“My father fell, of course. He fell among the abandoned, and they kept him.”

He stopped. The warmth of the great rock dissipated. It was cold. She waited for Jethro to descend through the centuries and return to her.

“I didn’t leave the cave. If I had run back out … things would have been different. But I loved my father,” he said. His voice broke, “I offered myself in exchange. I told the spirits at the bottom of the cave that they could have me if they would give up my father. They were willing. My father was willing. He said he would come back for me. He emerged at the same moment that I fell into the cave on purpose.”

Jethro paused for a long time. “I try to remember that,” he told Nicoletta. “I try to remember that I stepped off the edge because I wanted to.”

“Were you hurt?”

He smiled again, his sadness so great that Nicoletta wept when he did not. “I broke no bones,” he said finally. He said it as if something else had broken.

“What did your father do? He must have run back to the house and the town and gotten everybody to brings ropes and ladders.”

Jethro’s smile was not normal. “There was a curse on the cave,” he said. “I told you that.” His words seemed trapped by the frost. They hung in front of his lips, crystallized in the air.

She had been listening to the story without listening. It was a problem for her in school, too. She heard but did not keep the teachers’ words. She moved her mind backward, to retrieve Jethro’s speech.
“Whoever entered,”
she repeated slowly,
“would be forever abandoned by the world. Just as they had been.”

Jethro nodded.

The moon was hidden by a cloud.

Jethro put a hand gently over her eyes. “Don’t move,” he said softly. “Don’t look again.”

His hand was heavy. Stonelike. “Your father?” she said. “Abandoned you?”

“He walked away. He walked out of the cave and into the daylight. He never came back. Nobody ever came back. I called and called. Day after day I called. He was my father! He loved me. I know he did. Even though there was nothing else beautiful in our lives, that was beautiful. He loved me.”

She opened her eyes under the weight of his hands and saw only the underside of a rock. She closed her eyes again.

“Even though I gave myself up for him,” said Jethro, his voice caught as if it, too, were falling to a terrible fate, “I didn’t understand that it was forever. I was sure he would return and rescue me.”

Rescue. A lovely word. Certain and sure. I will rescue you, Jethro, thought Nicoletta. I love you. I will rescue you from all curses and dark fallings.

“But he didn’t, of course,” said Jethro.

Jethro cried out. A strange terrible moan like the earth shifting. A groan so deep and so long she knew that he was still calling for his father to rescue him.

Being a monster was not as terrible as being abandoned by his father. Nothing on earth could be worse. Forgotten by your father? A child goes on loving a father who drinks too much, or beats him, or does drugs … but a father who leaves the son to endure horror forever … and even forgets that he did that … it was the ultimate divorce.

Abandoned.
The word took on a terrible force. She could see his feet—that father’s feet—as they walked away. Never to turn around. She could hear the cries, echoing over the years: that son, calling his father’s name. Never to hear an answer.

“I try not to hate him,” said Jethro. “I try to remember that there were no choices for him. The curse carried him away from me and kept him away. But he was my father!” The voice rose like the howl of a dying animal into the winter air. “He was my father! I thought he would come! I waited and waited and waited.”

The voice sagged, and fell, and splintered on the forest floor.

“Oh, Jethro!” she said, and hugged him. He was sharp and craggy but the tighter she held her arms the more he softened. She felt him becoming the boy again, felt the power of her caring for him fight the power of the curse upon him. He removed his heavy hand from her eyes but she kept them closed for a while anyhow.

“You can emerge from the cave and be a real person some of the time,” she said.

“It’s a gift of the light. Sunlight, usually. I am surprised that the moonlight is giving me this now. Sunshine is a friend. It doesn’t end the curse, but sometimes it gives me a doorway to the world. Haven’t you noticed that I am only in school on sunny days? I cannot touch the world except on bright days.”

“I will make all your days bright,” said Nicoletta.

“You have,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “I think of you when I cannot leave.”

For a long time they sat in each other’s arms. Moonlight glittered on the fallen snow and danced on the icy fingers of trees. Very carefully she turned to look at him. He was Jethro. She sighed with relief. He had been in there all along, and she—she, Nicoletta Storms—had freed him with her presence. “At least I’ll see you in school,” she said.

“No. I can’t go again.”

“Why not?
Why not?
You have to! Oh, Jethro, you have to come back to school! I have to see you!” She gripped his arms and held him hard.

“You must forget about me.”

“I can’t. I won’t. You don’t want me to. I don’t want to. We’re not going to forget about each other.”

He said nothing.

“Why do you come to school?” she asked him.

“To dream of how it might have been. You are my age. The age, anyway, that I was once. The age when I fell. I hear human voices, I recognize laughter. I see human play and friendship.”

Oh, the loneliness of the dark!

She pictured her family. How loving they were. How warm the small house was. She thought of Jethro, returning every time to the dark and the rage of the trapped undead. She kissed him, hungrily, to kiss away his loss. Around them the trees leaned closer and looked deeper. “Jethro, it feels as if the woods are alive,” she whispered.

“They are,” said Jethro. “We were all something else once. Every tree and stone. Every lake and ledge.”

Horror surrounded her. She breathed it into her lungs and felt it crawl into her hair, like bats. She could not look into the woods.

“You must go home. You must never come again.”

“But I love you.”

He flinched. He pushed her away, and then could not bear that, because nobody had loved him in so very long. He held her more tightly than ever, cherishing the thought.
Somebody loved him.

Love works only when it circles, and it
had
circled. It had enclosed them both. She loved him and he loved her back. He had to love her enough to make her stay away.

“Never come near the cave again. They know about you. They will look for you now, and guide your steps so that you fall. They will take you, Nicoletta. What else do they have to do for all eternity? Nothing. They will never be buried by fire at sea. You must go and never come back.”

She was unmoved. Nobody would tell her never to do anything. Nobody would tell her that she could find true love and then have to walk away from it! No. She would always come back.

“Nicoletta,” he said. His voice was hollow now, like a reed … or a cave.

“If you get too close, not only will you fall, I—cursed by the cave—I would do to you what my own father did to me.”

She was looking into his eyes, eyes like precious gemstones. I love you, she thought.

He said, “
I would abandon you.”

Abandon her? She could not believe it. He loved her. Love did not abandon.

“Abandon you forever, Nicoletta. In the dark. Turning to stone. Forgotten. I would not come back. Nobody would ever come back for you.”

The moon hid behind wispy clouds. The night was too old to be called night. Jethro left. He had been there, and then he was not. She was alone on the stone in the dark.

For he did love her.

And to prove it, he had to leave. And so did she.

I
T HAD TAKEN GREAT
courage to walk into the woods.

It took none to walk out.

If Jethro was not afraid of what the trees and ledges had once been, how could she be afraid? She said good-bye to the boulder, but it said and did nothing, which surprised her. She had expected a response after the conversation and the agony it had heard; the loving it had seen.

When she reached the paved road, she would have to put away these things. Enter into her other life.

How distant it seemed—her other world.

Nicoletta touched the pavement.

Dawn was coming. Quickly the sun threw scarlet threads into the sky, and quickly the snow turned pink in greeting. As if they were flirting and blushing. Like me, she thought. She smiled to herself, and then smiled at the sun.

She walked swiftly. She was happy.

What is there to be happy about? she thought. That the sun rises? That I love Jethro but he doesn’t want me to come again?

And yet she was happy in a liquid way, as if she were still all one, a water glass of pure happiness, a crystal cylinder of delight.

Love, she thought. I know what it is now. It’s every molecule of you. It connects you to yourself, even if you cannot be connected to the person who caused it.

Jethro. Oh, it was a beautiful name!

A car turned down the
DEAD END
road.

She had not wanted the other world to appear so soon.

A second vehicle followed it.

She considered hiding. Stepping off the road into the trees. She knew that the trees would take her in. Circle her, and blind the cars to her presence for Jethro’s sake. Snow, its sides packed like a ski jump by a plow, and a little, green holly tree without berries were on either side of her. She could hunch down behind the sharp, leather leaves and not be seen.

The first vehicle was Christo’s van. The second vehicle was a television network van.

Nicoletta had omitted the part that counted. She had entertained herself. She had run to Jethro for talk and love and comfort and daydreams. But the important part of what she had needed to do before morning, she had skipped.

Christo, who was equally liquid and crystal with love. Christo, who was hot and surging with the need to show off, to hunt, to capture or to destroy.

Not only had Christo come. He had brought teams. Witnesses. Camera film. And, no doubt, weapons.

She thought of the cave. The long fall that Christo and his TV crew would take. The horrible slime and sand and narrowing walls of shining stone. The knowledge that they were doomed. Of course, they would not have that knowledge as they fell. They would think there was a way out. Or that rescue would come.

How many days, or weeks
… or years …
would they struggle against their fate? How long before they became, as Jethro had become, part of the cave? Just another outcropping of sand and rock and dripping water? Would she, Nicoletta, in that other world have grown up and had children and grandchildren and been buried herself by the time Christo understood and surrendered to his fate?

The van rushed down the narrow road.

Christo drove too fast, gripping the wheel of his car, leaning forward as if trying to see beyond the windshield and through the woods, behind the rock and into the cave. He looked neither left nor right, only ahead. He didn’t see the packed snow and the holly, let alone Nicoletta. She had a glimpse of his profile as he sped past. How handsome he was. How young and perfect.

And how excited. He thought this would be an adventure. And oh! it would be. But not one in which he conquered.

She could not let him fall! Nor could she let those poor strangers in the van meet that fate.

The television van came much more slowly. Its driver was middle-aged and frowning, studying the road, the snow, the sky, as if he were worrying about a change in the weather, the studio deadline, his taxes, his wife, and his aching feet all at the same time.

He could have been her father.

He was surely somebody’s father. Would he, like the hunters, end up forever fallen?

I have to do something, she thought. But what? I can’t talk them out of it. The more information I give them, the more eager they’ll be. The more I explain, the quicker they’ll rush to see for themselves. And even if they stay away from the cave, even if I can convince them to stay in the meadow, or between the lakes, or among the trees … they’ll try to shoot Jethro.

I have no control. I have no moves. I have no way to turn.

This is not the world of the ancient Indians who understood that there were mysteries, and that mysteries should not be touched. This is the world of the television networks, who think that everything on earth belongs to them and ought to be captured on their cameras.