Midnight Wonders

2.2.1. A Stranger at the Green Hill

Luc stood at the bus stop.

He didn't know why he was there again. He couldn't count the times he had been there since he'd first seen it. Every other night, at least.

He knew how he had gotten there. This evening he hadn't even bothered to put his shoes on properly, and the laces were all undone on the left. Luc sat at the bench to tie them. It was a wonder he hadn't been thrown across the street by a speeding car yet. or even a slow-moving car. Perhaps he ought to start wearing a helmet to sleep. Or maybe he had to replace the locks on the door.

Luc finished tying his laces and looked down the path again. The green hill waited in the distance.

He wondered if a bus would ever come here. There was no roadway, so if a bus came it would probably come crashing through the trees and tumbling down the hills. But it was a stop, after all. Those who waited had to expect something to come. He wondered who those were. Then he thought he was silly for wondering when he was right there, and he knew who he was. Maybe.

He couldn't wait all night. Tomorrow was a weekday. But he sat there for a while. At least when he sat, he knew what he was waiting for.

Luc looked at the green hill again. There was something very lonely about it, despite it being surrounded by a family of other green hills that sloped off into the distance. He wondered if it was waiting for something, too.

He got up and walked to the hill.

The night was loud. The wind rustled the branches and whistled over the leaves. Luc looked around him. It didn't feel very empty.

A man emerged from the trees. He was a small figure, yet something about him suggested there was little he could not weather. He was dressed funnily, in a loose knee-length tunic the color of dead leaves, tied around the waist with a hemp rope. The buttons were made of wood. His pants were a darker shade of brown.

The man looked at Luc. Luc looked back at him. He had curly hair, brown, only a few shades darker than his skin. He looked like a vintage sepia-toned photograph, except for his eyes. His eyes were green.

"Hello," he said, faintly.

Luc looked at the man some more. "Hello," he replied, before the silence stretched on for too long.

The man stepped farther out into the clearing. Leaves brushed his hair, and he looked up, though not to push them away. Luc watched as he plucked the hazelnuts from the trees. His eyes met Luc's again. His gaze was sharp and keen, but tired, somehow. "What are you doing here?" he said.

"I don't know." Luc wondered what the man was doing there, but it felt odd to ask. The man looked as if he belonged there, and Luc looked as if he belonged nowhere. He felt as if he had trespassed somehow.

"You were sitting at the bench," said the man.

"Ah," said Luc. "I wasn't waiting for the bus." He sounded strangely pitiful to his own ears.

The man looked down at the handful of hazelnuts he had collected. There were several pouches hanging from his belt. He opened one and dropped the hazelnuts into it, keeping one in his palm. He opened another poud and took out a wooden nutcracker the size of his fist, which was strange because the pouch hadn't bulged at all even though it was small. "You should go back." The end of his sentence was punctuated with the crack of the hazelnut.

Luc didn't know what to say. That hadn't been an invitation to a conversation. he just watched the man shake the hazelnut out of its broken shell. The man eyed Luc as he peeled a papery skin off the smooth surface of the hazelnut. "Have you eaten?"

"It's the middle of the night," Luc said. The man just stared at him, and Luc realized that didn't answer much. he had already eaten if it was still before midnight; he hadn't eaten yet if it was past midnight. He didn't know why that was the way it was, but it was. "I ate dinner."

The man turned the hazelnut in his hand, looking at Luc. Then he held it out. "Do you want it? You can convince me."

Luc wasn't hungry. He didn't really feel anything. But the man seemed to expect him to want it, and Luc didn't feel like proving him wrong. Not that it felt inappropriate, but perhaps a bit impolite. And disappointing.

"I've never tried raw hazelnuts," he said. It was the first thing that came to mind. He didn't think it sounded very convincing. But it seemed as if he could have said anything, even insulted the man if he wanted to. The man already had his hand out.

"I'm convinced." The man stepped forward and took Luc's hand. His skin was rough but warm. He dropped the hazelnut into Luc's hand. "First times should be memorable."

Luc tilted his head at the man. "How memorable?"

The man reached into his pouch for another hazelnut and cracked it open. He placed it in Luc's hand with the other. "One so you can taste, and another so you can remember."

Luc curled his fingers around the hazelnuts. "Thank you." He wondered if he weren't dreaming. He felt very calm, though this was exactly a situation in which he might find himself very panicked. If he had ever been a child, perhaps he would have internalized the concept of stranger danger. But he could not remember being a child anymore. His memories looked like a movie one might have filmed on a tape that had been cut up and stitched together by imaginative gods, and they sounded like the ramblings of an old aunt he could have once spoken to every day over the telephone. He couldn't even know if he had lied or not; if he had eaten raw hazelnuts before and merely forgotten.

He supposed it didn't matter. It felt like a first time. He put the hazelnut in his mouth and bit it. He didn't think about it, he just ate. And when he'd finished, he ate the second one and thought about how it tasted so he might remember.

It tasted like the earth. The flavor was deep, rich. Something about it tasted old. Not as if it weren't fresh from the tree, but old as if it had been cultivating this flavor inside its shell for centuries. And perhaps it had. Perhaps the hazelnut trees, over centuries of existence, had perfected the bite-sized fruit, and he was eating centuries' worth of an old hazelnut tree's knowledge.

"What does it taste like?" said the man, who had been staring at Luc the whole time.

Luc looked at him. "Is this your first time too? I'm sorry; I ate yours."

The man was already cracking another hazelnut. He ate it. He held Luc's gaze as he did; it was perfectly unsettling. Luc felt that this was all too much intimate for someone he had just met, but he didn't know why. They were just staring at each other. Luc could look away easily, but he didn't know where to look.

"I've eaten them before," the man said. "So I don't remember the first time anymore." He reached up to pluck more from the trees. He took Luc's hand again, dropping the hazelnuts into them, still in their shells. He closed Luc's fingers, and Luc wondered at how his touch could be so gentle and firm at once. "Go back." It was a command, but his voice was small, light.

Luc looked at the hazelnuts. He wondered what time it was. He wondered how long he'd been there. "Thank you," he said. He looked at the man again. The man didn't move.

Luc turned around and followed the path home.

As he walked away, he heard the man's voice behind him. "Green Hill...."

Luc stopped at the bench and looked over his shoulder. The man was facing the hill, and the evening breeze was stirring his hair and his clothes. There was a leaf stuck in his curls. Luc had an inexplicable desire to run all the way back and pull it out.

"Green Hill...." The man's voice was a distant sigh, carried to Luc's ears by the breeze. "Open and let your poor knight in."

And a door opened in the hill, and the man slipped through it and was gone.

Luc looked at the hazelnuts in his hand. They hadn't disappeared yet.

They still hadn't disappeared by the time he made it home, and it wasn't until he dropped them on the kitchen table and heard them clatter that he realized they were real. He sat in the kitchen in the dark and looked at the hazelnuts. He remembered that he did not have a nutcracker. He went and got the rolling pin instead.