Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

Abruptly Mrs. Collier was at her table, standing right between her and Dwight and exuding anger and pain. Fiercely she grabbed the piece of paper with the sketch of the plane from the tabletop and stared at it. Then she glowered at the boy and said, her voice only barely controlled, “Did you hear one single word I was saying? Or one single word your classmates were saying?”

The boy looked terrified. His hands were buried in his lap, and his head and shoulders had gone limp like wilting flowers. Hallie didn’t think he had meant anything by the drawing. He knew about her father-everyone knew about her father-but she didn’t believe that he had been trying to frighten her or tease her in some fashion. He was just a boy, and boys seemed to like drawing airplanes-and, sometimes, those planes seemed to crash.

“Uh-huh,” he murmured finally.

“Uh-huh, what?” Mrs. Collier pressed.

“I was listening.”

“What was the last thing I said?”

Hallie knew it was the comparison of the river to a highway, but it was painfully clear that Dwight had indeed been in his own world and hadn’t a clue. The duration of the silence grew excruciating as Mrs. Collier waited for an answer she was never going to get.

And that’s when it happened. Abruptly Garnet was on her feet, too, and she was crossing the classroom to their table and standing beside their teacher and Dwight. Reflexively Mrs. Collier started to pull the paper toward her chest, crinkling it into a ball, but Garnet was too fast for her. She had an edge of the drawing in her fingers and then the whole picture in her hands. Out of nowhere she revealed a red plastic cigarette lighter, and then she was igniting the wrinkled sheet, holding it so that in seconds the flames had climbed up the image and incinerated every bit of the pulp. The children were either gasping or eerily silent, and Mrs. Collier was demanding that Garnet put it out, put it out now.

But already it was out. The last black wisps floated to the tile floor as gently as snowflakes, and Garnet stepped on them with her clog. Then she handed Mrs. Collier the lighter and said, her voice sweeter than warm syrup, “If you want, I can go to the principal’s office. I know where it is.”

Hallie had never seen her sister do anything like this. Not ever. She presumed that, if either of them was going to pull a stunt like this, it would have been far more likely to have been her.

Later, when they were walking up their driveway where the school bus left them off each afternoon, Garnet finally told her sister where she had gotten the lighter. She said it was in the far back corner of the walk-in closet they shared in the hallway between their bedrooms and she’d found it the night before when she was trying to find places for all of her boots and shoes. She added, “I didn’t know it was a picture of Dad’s plane at first. I really didn’t. I just knew it was making Mrs. Collier unhappy. And I guess I just wanted to try out the lighter.” Given what the picture was, however, and how the adults all presumed Garnet knew that the image was Flight 1611 plummeting into Lake Champlain, neither the principal nor Mrs. Collier felt a serious inclination to discipline her. They simply told her that the school didn’t allow students such things as lighters, and then the principal tried to call Dad at home and Mom at her office. Hallie pointed out to Garnet how she’d received absolutely no punishment at all, and her sister nodded. “You and I can probably do just about anything we want and get away with it,” Hallie added, and it was only after she had spoken that she realized she was stating the obvious. Garnet, it seemed, had known this for months.

Y ou stand tall as you swing the ax hard into the door made of barnboard, your pants and sneakers positively black with coal, your hands and forearms streaked with sweat and muck. You convince yourself that the knobs and lines on the wood really look nothing like a face. Nothing at all. When you pause for breath you recall a historian you once heard speaking on the radio about the testosterone it must have taken to clear great swaths of New England of trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The forests that greeted the first Europeans were substantial, and the tools the men used to clear them were primitive. They swung axes for hours and hours a day.

And now you are slamming the steel blade into the wood, conscious of how different this tool is from the electrical and mechanical ones that kept your airplanes aloft for nearly a decade and a half. The timbers around you quiver with each blow and the barnboard begins to splinter. When you hit the wood just right, there is a high-pitched groan after the crash of the blade that sounds a bit like a tree branch swaying in a fierce wind. But the groan may be your imagination or your mind playing tricks on you for any number of reasons. You are tired, you are lonely, you are-and the notion surprises you momentarily because until this second you hadn’t realized it was the case-worried about Emily. Tending to you-taking care of you-has begun to wear on her. You can tell.

Or maybe what sounds precisely like a moan from the door is a new manifestation of your PTSD: anthropomorphizing the timbers that were used to board up a coal chute.

And then, of course, the whimpers may be real: This may be precisely what shattering wood sounds like.

Regardless, soon enough, you have hewn a hole in the door. With your hands you pull the pieces apart, a chest-high hole that is large enough to reach in far if you want (you don’t). You take the heavy metal flashlight you bought at the hardware store for precisely this purpose (not, as you murmured to the woman behind the counter, because you seem to lose power so often here on the hill) and shine it through the uneven fissure.

And all that you spy are what look like wooden walls. Aged horizontal timbers that resemble a part of the foundation of the house. Otherwise, it is an empty… and what is the word you want? Compartment? Fruit cellar? Bin? The floor, you notice, is dirt, just like the rest of the basement.

But you have determined it is not a coal chute. At least you think you have. You’re not completely sure. Perhaps it had been a coal chute for a time and then it was walled off in this manner and used to store vegetables or fruit. Hard to say unless you tear down the door completely. And so you will. You allow yourself to rest for a moment, aware of the way your heart is thumping in your chest-from effort this time, rather than from anxiety-and then you resume your efforts, raising the ax and smashing it so hard into the timbers that you wonder if this is what the retort from a rifle feels like against your shoulder. But you continue to slam the ax into the barnboard over and over and over, until you have reduced a sizable section of it to kindling. You pull apart the remnants of the lumber with your bare hands as if you are parting the leaves in the trees at the edge of a great forest. It’s that simple. And then you drop the ax and pick the flashlight up off the dirt floor. You bow down just enough to twist your body through the passage you have created, careful as you step not to tear your jeans or catch your sweatshirt on the sharp points of the shredded wood.

And before you know it, you are in. The thirty-nine carriage bolts are still surrounding the frame like the bulbs on a movie marquee, but you are in. It took no more than an hour and a half, including the time you spent shoveling the coal like a stoker on a steamer.

You run the flashlight over the walls and the ceiling, aware that somewhere very far away the phone is ringing. (Later you will learn it is the principal at your daughters’ elementary school; you will be told that Garnet had brought a cigarette lighter into the classroom and reduced to ashes a drawing another student had made. Only after nearly ten minutes of obfuscation on the part of the principal will you discover that the drawing had been of a plane crashing into a lake.) No matter. The answering machine upstairs will get it. And with the flashlight you study the walls made of horizontal beams ten inches thick and easily two inches-two legitimate inches, not the two inches of the modern two-by-four-wide. If, long ago, this really had been a coal chute, the sluice has been boarded up solidly. You tap on the wood behind which the chute most likely would have existed, and it sounds pretty solid on the other side. Earth solid. No hollowness at all. And so you sit down in the dirt, your back to a wooden wall, and contemplate-now, where does this memory come from?-the pit of despair. That’s what it was called, when the researchers weren’t using its technical name: vertical chamber apparatus. You learned about it in college. In a psychology course. Harry Harlow designed it for baby monkeys to see what he could learn about depression. It was a stainless-steel trough in which he isolated the animals alone for months at a time. Even a year, in some cases. And, you recall, he learned only what one would expect from isolating a sentient creature for months in a box. The monkeys were wrecked when they emerged. Depressed. Psychotic. Really couldn’t be salvaged once they were set free. Rarely recovered. Well, this cubicle could be a pit of despair, too. You recall the sensation of lying in bed under the sheets this past autumn. After the accident. There were days, your children at school, thirty-nine dead in the water, your career over and done, when you didn’t get up until three in the afternoon, when the girls got home. Some days you didn’t get dressed at all. After all, what was the point? Really? What… was… the… point?