Mysterious Stranger
The lights flicker as the storm grows worse. Darcy finishes tidying up the paperwork in her boss’s so-called “lab” and then pulls leftover pad thai from the fridge, feeling ever more pleased with her decision not to accompany the pair of storm chasers on their death-defying attempt to record “unprecedented scientific phenomena.”
She’s a student of political science. Who’s almost regretting her internship. She’s not about to risk her life for six college credits.
The microwave’s only half done with the power finally goes out. Darcy sighs and turns on her phone’s flashlight mode, then plops down on the sofa in the break room to eat spicy lukewarm noodles and listen to the wind. And kinda hope it doesn’t break the windows of this dilapidated old car dealership. Sounds like a real doozy out there.
She spears a piece of chicken (or possibly tofu, but if so, it’s doing a real good job of pretending to be chicken), and just then the door behind her flies open, wind whipping through the room and sending papers flying.
“Giving up already?” she asks brightly. “And here I thought you were a scientist.” She pops the mystery meat in her mouth.
There’s no immediate reply.
Maybe it was the wind? But as she sighs and slides the box of noodles onto the coffee table, the door closes. Not banged shut by the force of the air, but quietly, the lock clicking in place.
Darcy swallows. “Jane?” Picking up her phone, she gets to her feet and turns, shining the light toward the doorway.
And freezes.
The man is hard to make out in the dark, but he’s tall, well over six feet, and thin, with dark hair brushing his shoulders. The sharp shadows make his face look severe, even creepy.
“What are you doing in here?” she asks, trying to keep the sudden fear from her voice, trying to remember if her taser is still in her jacket pocket. Which is in her jacket. On a chair in the little kitchenette. On the other side of the room.
She forces herself not to glance in that direction, and hopes the guy’s not here to murder anyone. Least of all her.
Thunder rumbles and the building rattles; the man flinches, hunching down, eyes wide and darting all over the ceiling as if it might crash down on him at any moment.
Did he just come in to escape the storm?
Probably?
Probably a more reasonable explanation than being a serial killer.
Even so, she takes a slow sideways step toward the kitchenette, and the man’s gaze flies to her instantly, like a predator, though he doesn’t move.
“Um… are you okay?” she asks, mostly hoping to deflect attention away from her movement.
The noise that comes out of him might be a laugh or a sob, but it freaks her out even more. She tries to judge if it’s possible to sprint for her jacket, grab it, and retrieve the taser before he reaches her. Probably not, even with the sofa half blocking his path.
At her next step, he raises his chin. “Apologies,” he says, and it’s such a long and unexpected word that she just stares at him, blinking. He takes a couple of deep breaths. “I merely sought shelter from the storm,” he adds, in an oddly stilted, sorta-British accent. “I did not intend to frighten you.”
“Yeah?” she says. “Well, uh, can’t deny that you’re freaking me out… a little. Where on earth did you come from? I thought everyone who’s sane would already be indoors.”
His brows draw together. “That may well be the case,” he allows, taking a step to the side and leaning back, heavily, against the wall. “I have come a long way; I am not familiar with this… area.”
Did his car break down? “This, uh, this isn’t a repair shop,” she says hastily. “I mean, it used to be, or used to… have… a place to make repairs, I guess, but it’s been out of business for a few years. My boss bought the place cheap; guess there’s not much call for a place like this in the middle of the desert.”
He blinks at her, looking confused. “I have no need of repairs,” he says slowly, shaking his head. “The storm here, it… disrupts, but when it has passed I should be able to move on.”
“Oh. Great!” she says. “That’s great. Well, I guess, make yourself at home? We have a very nice sofa over there, even has a couple of blankets. I’d, um, offer you something to eat, but we really don’t have much, and anything we did have would be cold, so… I mean, we might have a box of Goldfish?” she adds, suddenly realizing that finding something for him to eat would put her in range of her jacket, so she heads that way awkwardly, trying to keep an eye on him without making it look like she’s actively trying to avoid turning her back on the creepy intruder who just came in out of the storm.
When he pushes off the wall, she tenses up, swinging the light back his way, but he merely walks over to a chair—on the far side of the room from her—and sinks down wearily, elbows on knees. His clothes seem… strange. Not a trench coat, exactly, nor a robe, but long and flowing, all the way past his knees. It’s hard to make out any detail, though, not in the bare light of her phone.
Keeping an ear out for if he moves, she opens cupboards she knows don’t have crackers, using her light to look and trying to buy time while she casts about for something to keep them talking. If they’re talking then he’s less likely to attack her, right? She remembers something about forming a bond with your captor. Not that the guy’s her captor, but same principle, right? “So… I guess you’re not here to visit family?”
“I have no family,” he says after a moment’s hesitation. But there’s something odd in his tone.
Oh god, she hopes he didn’t murder his family.
“Are you cold? I’m freezing,” she says, putting her phone on the table to pick up her jacket and shrug into it, feeling the comforting weight of the taser on her hip. “You know, I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Darcy. Uh, student intern. Political science major on a scholarship for Jewish-Americans of Lithuanian descent.” Fuck, he doesn’t want to hear her life story, and if she keeps blathering on she’s gonna make him more likely to kill her. Picking up the phone again, she shines the light his way. “What, uh, what’s your name?”
There’s a long pause; his mouth moves a few times, and then he swallows and shakes his head, brows drawn up. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know… your own name?”
“I thought I did,” he says slowly. “But it was never mine.”
A shiver runs down her spine, and she reminds herself, sternly, that just because someone’s acting creepy or even trying to murder you does not actually imply mental illness. Most people who are dealing with mental illness are perfectly normal people who just happen to have a problem with their brains. She’s known a lot of them. Lived with a couple. Heck, she’s probably got some sort of brain quirk herself, they’re common enough and it’s not unusual to get diagnosed in your forties.
Point is, it’s really not fair to stereotype the mentally ill as serial killers, or vice versa. What was that line? ‘Being an asshole isn’t a mental illness’?
Of course, that doesn’t mean that people who are creepy and/or trying to kill you aren’t also crazy. So there’s that.
With the taser in her pocket, though, she feels less cornered, and more willing to try to grant her visitor the benefit of the doubt. After all, the worst he’s done so far is opening a door that probably wasn’t even locked, and not immediately running back into the storm once he realized someone was home.
And having the visuals of a vampire lord and the accent of every major Bond villain.
(Seriously: Tall. Thin. Pale. Piano fingers. Sharp cheekbones. Long black hair. Clothes from like some kind of Renaissance Faire; he’s even wearing boots, in the desert. Total vampire lord. Except for the desert part.)
(Also, technically, Bond was British, right? So it wasn’t just the villains who had a British accent. At least, when Bond wasn’t inexplicably being played by a Scotsman.)
(Why did she waste six weeks of high school movie nights on Bond films if she can’t even remember the basics? Ugh.)
She fetches the crackers from the right cupboard (“Aha!” she says, for effect, and shakes the box in his direction) and heads back to the sofa, crackers and phone in her one hand, her other hand in her pocket. When she gets there, she has to make a quick decision about which hands do what and how awkward (or obvious) it’s gonna be; she ends up setting her phone on the table and sinking down onto the sofa with both hands out in the open, hoping that she’s fast enough to grab the taser if she needs it.
“So… what should I call you, then?” she asks, pouring herself a handful of goldfish before tossing him the box (and using the distraction to stick her free hand back in her pocket).
As she pops the goldfish into her mouth and starts to chew, he relaxes noticeably. Then he pours himself a few and hesitantly eats one, then a couple more.
“They do not taste like fish,” he offers, after swallowing.
Darcy’s eyebrows go up.
“Nor like confectionaries; I have seen fish-shaped pastries before, in port towns, but these are not sweet, and this village is so distant from any body of water that it seems a strange place to sell fish-shaped foodstuffs. Would it be because your people miss the ocean?”
Okay, forget British: that’s, like, Shakespeare. Who phrases things like that anymore? Maybe he’s an actor? “You’ve… never had goldfish before?”
“Also, half of these are not even golden in color,” he observes, then eats a couple more. “I do find them savory, however. And you have my gratitude for sharing your provisions with me.”
That’s the point at which Darcy stops being afraid that the guy is going to harm her. Pulling her hand out of her pocket, she scoots closer, and lounges over the arm of the sofa. “Man, when you said you’d come a long way, you weren’t kidding, were you?”
“What would I gain by attempting such a deception? Surely in a village this humble it is obvious who is an outsider.”
“Got me there. So, backing up a step, you didn’t say what I could call you.”
He hunches over a little, head bowed. “I will be gone soon enough; I see no need for another false name, even temporarily. Unless that is the custom here? I would not seem ungrateful.”
“Oookay,” she says. “Well, no, if you want to stay nameless, go for it. Maybe I’ll just call you ‘Stranger’? Or ‘Traveler’? ‘Wanderer’?”
“Why did you pretend to look for these goldfish when you already knew where they were?”
And just like that, she’s suddenly creeped out again.