Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

“It means,” the boy said, his voice betraying his unease with Hallie’s challenging tone, “that you look like you’re more than just sisters. That’s all.” Then he turned around and stared out his own window. He was, of course, absolutely right. Garnet knew that Hallie had in fact also known just what he was driving at. But sometimes Hallie needed to assert herself. Procure for herself a little distance. And that was fine. Besides, just as Garnet had anticipated she would, at that moment her sister discreetly took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

R eseda sat alone in the butterfly position-her back straight, the soles of her feet touching, her fingers gently grasping her toes-on a silk pillow on the gravel path in her greenhouse. She was vaguely aware of the sound of the water from her fountain and the occasional clicking from the baseboard radiators, and she felt the sun through the glass against her eyelids. She inhaled the fragrance of the nearby rosemary. Still, she was uneasy: Her mind kept circling back to the Linton twins, and she wondered what this meant. As she had reminded Anise, she herself was a twin. What was it about this pair that seemed to have such… potential? What might make them more suitable-more useful-than other twins? The tincture demanded the blood of a traumatized twin, but that may have been nineteenth-century drama or alliteration. Moreover, no one had ever been able to tell her what “trauma” Sawyer Dunmore had endured. The girls were still prepubescent, that was true. But the reality was that the tincture was from the second volume, a book that Reseda found deeply disturbing. It was filled with concoctions and cures that demanded animal hearts and human blood. Anise was a vegan, but she was willing to make exceptions for recipes found in the second book-especially when a tincture was as effective as the one leavened years earlier with Sawyer Dunmore’s blood.

Anise-all the other women, actually-had been interested in another set of twins three years earlier. Again, fraternal, childlike, and possibly traumatized. Boys, that time, like the Dunmores. They had moved to Littleton because their father was going to be the superintendent of a nearby correctional facility. They were eleven when they arrived, moving with their parents and two younger sisters from Nashua to the White Mountains. When they had been toddlers, their town house and the adjoining town house had burned down in the small hours of the morning, and the fire had begun in the very bedroom they shared. The wiring behind their night-light had been defective and set the night-light and then their bedding on fire as they slept. But their father had smelled the smoke before they succumbed to it and gotten the twins and his wife safely out of the house. The next-door neighbors had not been so fortunate: They were an elderly couple, and both succumbed to smoke inhalation in their sleep.

Sadly, no sooner had Anise gotten to know the twins’ mother-a deferential and mousy little thing, and thus rather perfect-than the father was involved in a very public, gloves-off sort of fight with the state legislature over funding for the correctional facility and ended up quitting in a huff. The family moved back to Nashua, and whatever opportunities those twins might have offered were gone. They couldn’t possibly try outside of Bethel; they couldn’t possibly try at such a distance. People would notice. They would watch. They would intervene.

She sighed. It wasn’t simply that the earth here in Bethel felt sacred to Reseda-though it did. It was liminal. Connected. A bridge, in her opinion-or, better still, a passageway. She thought of the Egyptian doors to the afterlife, six- and seven-foot slabs of granite found in some of the ancient tombs. Often carved into granite was a series of concentric doorways, suggesting an infinite corridor.

But Bethel was also isolated, and that mattered, too. It was, in the end, why she stayed here. The soil was at once blessed and undiscovered-at least by most of the living.

Sometimes people from other parts of the country found her. They wanted her to host everything from goddess workshops to rites of passage retreats. These strangers had heard rumors about her and wanted to learn from her, though they never wanted to learn anything she wanted to teach. Politely she would direct them to shamans she knew who were legitimate healers and-unlike her-comfortable as teachers. Unfortunately, the world also was filled with hundreds (thousands?) of people who claimed to be shamans and had Web sites, and would be content to take their money and teach them to handcraft a shamanic rattle or drum. Maybe help them to try to make sense of their dreams. The truth was, she wasn’t especially interested in the living. These days, she knew, she was far more fascinated by the dead.

Once again she saw in her mind the faces of the Linton girls and then the face of their father. She saw him flinching reflexively when his plane flew into a cloud of geese. And, finally, she thought of the geese themselves, rising up from a marsh or inlet or patch of swampy soil and flying thousands of feet into the air only to collide with a jet plane. One of the other women in a group she had joined before retreating to New Hampshire had had an eagle for a power animal. But no one, as far as Reseda knew, had ever had a goose. She wondered if those geese had been part of a plan. Had they been sent? Had there been a reason for the sacrifice of the thirty-nine passengers aboard the aircraft?

She resolved she would watch the twins more attentively and she would wait. Unlike the family of the correctional superintendent, she doubted the Lintons were going anywhere soon.

O ccasionally, you recall the unsolicited comments that passengers would offer as they boarded the plane and you were in the midst of your preflight checklist. There was that exchange with a Southern belle as you prepared to lift off from Charlotte. She was a blond debutante, attractive and slim at middle age, and she stood beside the flight attendant, her elegant Burberry carry-on bouncing against her tanned knee and the edge of the galley.

“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?” she asked, peering into the flight deck, her Southern accent emphasizing each and every d .

“I do,” you said.

“I hope so. I have four children at home,” she told you, and you were struck by the way she had managed to lose all that weight four times. “And I want to make sure we get there safely. So you all be sure and tell me if you need any help, okay?”

You had to ask: “Are you a pilot?”

“No,” she answered, shaking her head and smiling. “But I am a very fast learner.”

When you arrived in Philadelphia, she again peered into the flight deck as she was exiting the aircraft. “Thank you,” she said, “well done.” Then she gave you a thumbs-up.

E mily was leaning aimlessly against the counter at the diner on the main street in Littleton. It was lunchtime, and she had ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup-comfort food in her opinion, even when one was nearing forty-that she was planning to bring back to her office. She would eat at her desk and work.

“Are you Emily Linton?”

She turned and saw before her an attractive woman somewhere around fifty. The stranger had ash blond hair that was cut short and a lovely, aquiline nose. She was wearing a down overcoat that fell to mid-shin and leather boots stained white from salt on the sidewalk.

“I am,” she said.

“I’m Becky Davis,” the woman said, pulling off a leather glove and extending her hand to Emily. She smiled, but Emily could sense that she was a little wary. “Do you have a second?”

Emily glanced at the rectangular cutout in the wall behind the counter and peered into the chaos in the kitchen and the plates lined up on the brushed metal sill. It didn’t look like her grilled cheese was up. “Sure,” she said.