WIP Chap. 5: It gets weirder

[leafmeal]

Chapter 5: Good Advice

Mr. Blanding had no idea why he was taking so long over his conference with Aslaug Andersson. In his admittedly limited experience, farm girls who didn’t make eye contact never amounted to much. Around senior year, they got married and then pregnant, or pregnant and then married, and that was the last you heard of them.

But for some reason he found it very important to explain to Aslaug Andersson just why a C-minus on a test followed by a flat F on a pop quiz was not acceptable. “Have you thought about your future, Aslaug?” he asked. “Is college in the cards?”

Aslaug sat on the edge of a desk in the front row. Her head hung low, and her long, scraggly golden hair grazed her kneecaps. She wore a checked wool hunter’s shirt and jeans and work boots - all too typical attire for young women in Cray’s Defile, Anthony Blanding had found. This one might have been pretty, he thought in a dispassionate way, if not for those clothes. And the acne.

She answered, “I’ve thought about college.”

“But you haven’t thought hard, have you, Aslaug?” He adjusted his glasses; raked a hand through his sandy hair. “I’m making a fool of myself, aren’t I? If you want to go to college, you’ll study. If you don’t, you won’t. I can tell you to go to Ms. Gurney and get a peer tutor assigned to you, and I can sit here and explain the Corn Riots till the Jersey cows come home - is it Jerseys you raise here? Holsteins?”

She mumbled, “Brown Swiss. And some goats and sheep.”

“Brown Swiss, then. But it won’t be the slightest bit of use unless you turn yourself around and place more value on your future. Do you understand me?”

The girl blushed. “I will stay in Cray’s Defile. I need to.”

Well then, that’s settled, thought Mr. Blanding. I wish all of them were so clear with their intentions. He stood up from his desk and examined the dregs in his coffee cup. “Maybe you can take some online courses. Increase your earning potential. I suppose you haven’t a flicker of interest in European history. Still, I hope you’ll pay me the courtesy of occasionally studying enough not to turn in the sort of world-class dreadful performance you had on this quiz.”

He felt his head jerk to the right as if a fly had landed on his shoulder; reached up to brush it away. Nothing.

“And,” he said, “I hope you’ll start looking me in the eye when I speak to you or vice versa. You can’t imagine how much of a difference it makes in employment interviews, Miss Andersson, to meet people’s eyes. In all facets of life, really. Now, there are cultural variations. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought an American was staring rudely at me, when in fact he or she was only-”

But the last bell for fifth period rang then, and Aslaug Andersson mumbled, It’s my next class, sorry, bye and went on her way.

Mr. Blanding was left standing in the empty classroom, feeling like a stupid prat. He recalled how useless he had been at sixteen, his head full of Monty Python and Space Invaders. What teenager listened to an adult’s advice?

He had no more classes, so he went to the teachers’ lounge and fetched a fresh cup of coffee. But this only made him shaky an hour later, when he hastened to Bean There Done That for his date with Fiona Cray.

Mr. Blanding despised Cray’s Defile. Many of the decisions he had made about his life in the past ten years perplexed him, but none so much as the decision to take a job in this godforsaken mountain town. True, he’d been raised in an equally godforsaken town in South Queensland - yes, though no one here cared, he was not English but Australian. But when he flew to the States for college, he remembered, he’d come with excitement, with high hopes of becoming an anthropologist or a college English professor. (Which was it? He couldn’t remember.)

Then things happened. He’d ended up running out of money and living in a depressing studio flat in a depressing city with a depressing girl who eventually told him he was depressing and moved on. He spent long hours sweating over exam prep and green card forms, sitting in cafés with views of endless parking lots. It seemed to him that all he needed to be happy was a paying job and a small house with views of trees or green fields full of sheep. And so he’d come here. What on Earth had he been thinking?

He knew his bad mood rubbed off and made people dislike him. He made a special effort to be lively and clever for Fiona Cray, because she was a superior girl - for Cray’s Defile. She had sparkling bronze eyes and glossy black hair, and more important, she could discuss history, as she was working on a graduate degree in the comparative literature of the ancient Celts and Norse. She’d even studied their languages.

“Tolkien knew ancient Norse, didn’t he?” Mr. Blanding asked, fiddling with his espresso cup in the sunny, nearly empty seating area of Bean There Done That.

Fiona nodded and began jabbering about Tolkien. Mr. Blanding scratched a scar on the back of his hand. He was already bored. He knew all the right things to say to get a first date, but he had terrible problems keeping his attention on what people were saying. Women told him he didn’t listen.

Where was his head when he wasn’t listening? He had no idea. Afterward, all he could remember was gazing at the clock on the wall.

“- my little sister,” Fiona Cray was saying. Her pretty lips were twisting into a rather bitter expression. “I hope,” she went on, when he looked blank, “she hasn’t been taking over your class and teaching it for you.”

Had she? Who was Fiona’s sister? The little Cray girl, of course, with the unsettling big eyes. He shook his head. “Your sister, Fiona, is an absolute delight.”

Fiona looked shocked. Mr. Blanding hastily tried to change his own expression to sarcasm. “I don’t mean, of course, to have in the classroom. I mean in terms of her native intelligence.”

“She’s smart, I suppose.”

“Very bright, yes.”

“My sister has been bossing me around since she was old enough to know my name,” said Fiona. “I can’t imagine teaching her. She’s a force of nature.”

“Indeed, indeed.” He glanced at the clock again, feeling a bit desperate. These days, he was finding his memory as lacking as his concentration, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say about the Cray girl - even her first name escaped him. Somehow she was connected in his mind with an odd boy with a surly face and a tattoo on his hand. A tattoo in Cray’s Defile?

“It must be a bore for her, this school,” said Mr. Blanding. He tried hard to imagine how it must feel to be Fiona; if he wasn’t sensitive, he could at least appear it. “And a bore for you as well,” he said. “Tell me, why on earth didn’t you stay near campus where you have the library and so on? Why come out here to write your thesis?”

He stopped, because Fiona was widening her eyes again. He’d forgotten the name of her university and the city where she’d studied, which he felt quite certain she had told him earlier in the conversation. But even he was taken aback when she said, her skinny face closing to him, “I explained that whole situation to you ten minutes ago.”

“Did you? Oh, well, of course. I was asking for the details, as it were. Details.”

“It’s all right,” said Fiona Cray, pressing her lips together. “I babbled on the way I do.”

“But I - well, not at all. I’m quite sure you didn’t.”

“I often seem to have problems keeping men’s attention,” said Fiona darkly. “Anyway, it was very nice to see you.”

“And I too. I -”

But time compressed then for Mr. Blanding, as it had a tendency to do, and he found that he was already watching Fiona as she walked up the sidewalk that glittered red in the late sun, under a violet sky.

Though he had very much looked forward to this meeting, now he was glad she was gone. Had they made a second date? He had no idea.

Mr. Blanding did not know how he came to be standing near the entrance to the cave. Sometimes he took walks in the long dusk, but he never stayed on the mountain this late - looking through the knot of trees, back the way he’d come, he saw the sky was dark sapphire and the fields lost in shadow. Would he be able to follow the path back down, or must he wait till the moon rose? Would the moon be large enough to light the way?

He’d been here before. He recognized the trees and the rock face looming above him. And he knew, as clearly as he knew his name, that if he slipped into the crevice in the stone outcropping and followed it through a few twists and bends, he would soon find himself at the mouth of the small, dark hole that led into the bowels of the mountain.
In the distance, someone shouted, calling someone else’s name. Without thinking, Mr. Blanding took three steps and squeezed himself between the walls of stone.

The shouts came from several yards down the slope, but they were heading this way. Four of them, maybe five, making no effort to keep their voices down. He knew they were teenagers up to no good even before he heard the girl’s hysterical giggle.

Had they seen him? He didn’t think so. All the same, like a hunted animal seeking a burrow, he navigated the stone passage, paying no attention to the twigs and dry leaves that scraped his tweed sports coat. Then he bent to half his height - hearing his knees crack - and crept into the dark opening.

It was odd how comfortable he felt in the cave, considering it was pitch dark. He knew the ceiling was high enough to allow him to stand upright, and sure enough, it was. He could sense the walls weren’t far away, and that was reassuring. But when the voices came closer, and he heard one boy’s high, girlish whine - “You sure you know where it is?” - Mr. Blanding understood that he was not, as it happened, safe. Not yet.

They were coming here.

They were outside now, muscling their way through the trees and trying to find the crevice. In the dim way that teachers know certain things they aren’t supposed to know, Mr. Blanding knew Cray’s kids sometimes dared one another to enter the mountain after dark. They used the cave for private beer parties, bellowing into its tunnels, Come out, wherever you are!

Who or what did they expect to come out? Some local folktale - a giant, a ghost, maybe a giant ghost.

It didn’t matter. His burrow was about to be invaded, but they could not possibly know his burrow the way he knew his burrow. No. Those children had no idea that all he had to do was cross the first cavern - kicking a few beer cans in the dark, hoping they hadn’t heard - and find the place where a passage opened to the right, not quite as wide as his shoulders. He turned himself sideways to fit, hands gripping the rough, familiar stone, and sidestepped neatly down the tunnel till the space widened again.

He was in a small chamber now, almost circular and about twice as wide as the kitchenette in his condo in the valley. He knew if he took two steps to the left he would find a dry outcropping the right height for a sort of bench. It did not matter that he had never, as far as he knew, brought a light here. He knew where things were.

The cave was colder than the fields outside, but Mr. Blanding barely felt it. His bench was there. He sat on it and listened to the homey trickle of water deeper in the caves - and, on his other side, to the invaders.

Oddly enough - but not oddly, really, considering the size of the school - he recognized the voices of Billy Corcoran, Jeremy Bliss, and Kristen Hawke. The second girl he didn’t know, but the others called her Ashley. The third boy had a rough, country voice, a mountain man accent.

He could not see their flashlight beams, but he could hear them yelling excitedly as they shone them on the graffiti generations of Cray’s kids had left in the cave. He heard them kicking the beer cans, then passing around their own six-pack and popping the tabs. Tobacco smoke wafted gently to him, followed by a sweeter whiff of marijuana.

That would be Billy and Jeremy, probably. The girls sounded sober and a little scared, and the deeper-voiced yokel boy was trying his best to keep them that way, telling them a story about someone who’d entered the cave twenty years ago and never come out:

“Was my great-uncle’s best friend’s son. Curtis Fayne, I think his name was. Friend bet him a hundred bucks he wouldn’t sleep overnight in this very cave. They saw him go in at sunset, but when they come back at midnight to scare him with ghostie voices, damned if they found anything. They got search parties out at dawn, went through all the tunnels and underground passages, all the way to the river. Wasn’t a trace except his hat lying on the ground.”

“He probably drowned,” said Kristen Hawke. “Or explored too deep and got lost.”

“Nah, he wasn’t the spelunking type,” said the nameless boy. “Didn’t have nothing but a sleeping bag and a flashlight. And another thing. One of the searchers, he thought he saw something twice as tall as a man, and it moved. Saw it from the corner of his eye, like it was darting out of sight. Said it made the air cold.”

“Ice ghosts!” said the other girl, and tittered uncontrollably.

“Ice ghosts are a legend,” said Kristen Hawke. Like the straight B-plus student she was, she had her wits about her. “My grandma says her grandma heard about them when she was growing up in Norway,” she added. “That’s where the stories come from. They were called Jotuns.”

“Joe-what-agains?”

In the darkness around him, Mr. Blanding could feel large forms moving. It was true they made the air cold, and there was another thing the story hadn’t mentioned: You could see their eyes in the dark. The orbs looked as large as his fist, and they glowed pale, too pale to see by, like fluorescent bulbs right after you switch off the light.

All the same, he didn’t understand why people feared these cave presences enough to tell stories that had to be whispered with squeals and laughter. The beings were large and not quite human, and they brought sad and heavy thoughts with them, but he doubted they had ever stabbed anyone or rended anyone limb from limb. And that was more than you could say about his fellow humans.

Ashley and Kristen were arguing now, their voices rising and echoing shrilly on the cavern’s walls. Beside him, Mr. Blanding felt the great shapes drawing back, away from the girls’ unpleasant energy. He did not blame them.
“You wuss!” Ashley was saying. “C’mon, Kris. I dare, double-dare, triple-dare you!”

“I have to have a flashlight,” said Kristen.

One of the boys made chicken noises, bwak bwak, and Ashley joined in. “She’s so full of it. Does poor baby need a flashlight to explore in the dark?”

“I’ll go with her,” said the boy who had told the story.

“Nuh-uh,” said Billy Corcoran swiftly. “That would void the bet.”

“Who said there was a bet?”

Mr. Blanding closed his eyes. Listening to them made him tired; they were like a nest of baby robins squawking for food. He gathered that Billy and Ashley were betting on whether Kristen Hawke would dare to explore a bit farther into the cave on her own. If she succeeded, Ashley would be Billy’s date for the Homecoming Dance. If she emerged before ten minutes had elapsed, Billy would replace the fan belt on Ashley’s Corolla for free.

“And what do I get?” said Kristen.

“You can be my date.”

That was Jeremy; you could almost hear Kristen batting his hand away. “You should be so lucky.”

“You get the glory,” said the deep-voiced boy.

“Glory for going and standing in a cave?”

Kristen was already at the entrance to the tunnel where Mr. Blanding had concealed himself. Her voice sounded closer than the others as she said, “This is stupid. And I’m apparently the only person here who realizes it.”

“So go start your ten minutes,” said Billy. And to Ashley, “Let her at least have the flashlight.”

“I’m going,” Kristen called. “I don’t plan on going far, because caves can be dangerous. And not because of ghosts. Because of hidden pits and rivers and things.”

As she entered the passage, Mr. Blanding saw light sweeping the rough walls. He could feel the presences around him move a little closer again.

“Just as long as we don’t see you for ten minutes,” said Billy.

Mr. Blanding heard the girl fumbling her way down the tunnel, moving more clumsily than he had done. “Ow!” she yelled. “I can barely fit here. And stuff’s getting in my hair.”

“Wah wah!” mocked Ashley from outside.

“Shut up!” Kristen began. But at that moment she reached the wider place and saw Mr. Blanding.

He did not make any effort to avoid her flashlight beam. He sat where he was on his stone bench and said quietly, “I don’t think they can hear us.”

Kristen stared at him for long moments. When she raised the beam to get a look at the rest of the room, stray light caught her face, and Mr. Blanding saw she had an odd, detached or dreamy expression, like a sleepwalker. He could not tell whether she saw the presences looming beside him.

He stood, and Kristen backed away from him, stepping farther into the cave. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

The light caught Kristen’s glossy, painstakingly hot-rolled curls and her wide eyes. She was a small girl, but she planted her hiking boots firmly as she whispered, “Why are you here?”

“Because you wanted me,” said Mr. Blanding, with no idea why he was doing so. “I’ll protect you,” he added, thinking that made a bit more sense.

“But you don’t even have a light.”

“Will you go out and tell them you found me, then?” Mr. Blanding asked. He wondered how on earth he could explain his skulking here in the dark.

Kristen had begun to scowl. “You followed us, didn’t you? All the way from town?”

“If I’d followed you, would I have been here first?” He could feel the things behind him starting to stir; they were not nervous now but simply impatient. Kristen must not have sensed them.

She took another step away - this time in the right direction, the way she’d come. “I don’t know what your deal is, Mr. Blanding. I always liked you. When people made fun of your accent, I said they were ignorant. But I have to tell them you’re in here. It’s too weird.”

“Please don’t,” said Mr. Blanding.

Kristen gave a sharp gasp. In a dreamlike way, Mr. Blanding realized this was because he had grasped her by both shoulders and pressed her against the cave wall. She was not strong, and it was not hard for him to keep her pinned. He even let go with his right hand and placed it on her down vest, where he could feel her heart beating.

Could he really feel it, even through the padding? Yes, he could. Her heart was a jackhammer in his ears, too near and too fast. Too hot - if he kept holding her, he would burn.

Yet exactly the opposite happened. He felt his hand go cold, almost numb, as if he’d stuck it in a snowdrift. Kristen’s eyes widened with terror, and he knew she had finally seen the great shapes that approached soundlessly and stood just behind him, peering at her over his shoulder.

“Three minutes left, Kristen!” called the voice of Billy Corcoran from the entrance cavern.

Mr. Blanding’s right hand seemed enormous and heavy, as if it belonged to a marble statue. For a moment, he felt nothing in it. Then he began to feel trickles and prickles of pain, the way you do when you come indoors from the cold.
The blood was returning to his frozen veins. But something else was moving the other way, he knew. The cold inside him was trickling straight through synthetic fibers, skin and flesh, into Kristen Hawke’s heart.

“Time!” said Billy. “Krissy, you can come out.”

Kristen’s eyes were closed. Without opening them, she separated herself from Mr. Blanding’s now weak hands and stepped back into the mouth of the tunnel, the flashlight no longer aimed anywhere because she didn’t need it. She called, “I’m coming.”

“Are you OK?” That was Jeremy.

“Yup,” said Kristen. She opened her eyes now, like a sleeper half-waking, and looked directly at Mr. Blanding. He saw her gaze flit higher, taking in the dark things behind him. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” she said. “I’m coming.”

But her eyes, on his again, asked a question. Should I stay? Here with you and Them?

Mr. Blanding shook his head. He took her shoulder and led her gently into the tunnel that led out, then motioned for her to go on alone. This time there was no prickle of encountering something foreign, no difference in heat between her body and his.

He said silently, You can come back any time you want.