Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

Michael Richmond flipped the windshield wipers on the car to a faster speed because the rain was relentless and navigating the tortuous two-lane road up the hill to his A-frame was proving a challenge. The thermometer on the dashboard said it was thirty-eight degrees, so he wasn’t worried about the rain turning to sleet or this stretch of road becoming a long sheet of black ice that glistened in the light from his car’s headlamps. But it was nearly ten-thirty at night and he was sleepy, so he sat back against the seat to concentrate and took another sip of his Red Bull. (Valerian, he had to assume, did not approve of Red Bull.) Then he grasped the steering wheel with both hands.

He kept thinking about Valerian’s appalling and absolutely irresponsible belief that Chip Linton should be institutionalized. There was something going on with the captain, there was no doubt about that, but the answer wasn’t confinement in the state hospital. It made absolutely no sense, no sense at all. “The person in this write-up in no way resembles my client,” he had told Valerian.

Tomorrow he was going to contact the Board of Medicine. He considered whether his anger was reasonable and decided it was. Valerian had overstepped her bounds and, worse, was going to try to convince a fundamentally sane man to commit himself. He knew also that she was going to pay: He was going to go after that lunatic’s license.

“Michael,” she’d replied at one point when, yet again, they were arguing, “he may have stuck a knife in his stomach. He has phantom pains that are off the charts. He may have poisoned the family cat. He went berserk over a coal chute door.”

“And that door turned out to be a crypt,” he had answered, though he knew this really didn’t exonerate Chip. The man hadn’t known the Dunmores buried their son there. And so quickly he’d added, “He’s calm and reasonable now, and we don’t know if he poisoned the cat-and we probably never will. Imagine if we were discussing whether the man was competent to stand trial: Well, perhaps he wasn’t competent the night that Molly Francoeur was over at their house and he hurt himself. But you know as well as I do that a person can become competent. And he is definitely competent right now.”

Though they had argued for nearly thirty minutes-their third debate over the past five days-it was clear that she wasn’t going to budge. And neither was he.

Up ahead he saw a vehicle pulled off to the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing, and he thought about what a miserable night it was to have car trouble. He slowed as he approached and saw the car was a new-model hybrid and there was a person in a hooded yellow slicker standing beside it, waving at him with a flashlight. He coasted to a stop ahead of it, wishing his sheepskin coat was waterproof or he kept an umbrella in the backseat. But there was nothing to be done about that now, and so he braced himself for a foray into the chill rain and climbed from his car.

He saw that the individual was a tweedy, athletic-looking older man with a great shock of Robert Frost-like white hair and wire-rimmed eyeglasses, now spotted with rain. He guessed the fellow was in his late sixties or early seventies.

“Thank you so much,” the gentleman said, and Michael realized that he was shouting to be heard over the wind and the rain.

“Not a big deal. What’s the problem?” he asked. The guy must have been desperate to stand out here in the storm.

He shook his head and extended his hands, palms up, signaling his absolute befuddlement. “And there’s no cell coverage here-at least I have none,” he said.

“Yeah, I don’t, either,” Michael told him. “What happened?”

“I heard a beep and then got a mass of flashing warning lights on the dashboard. One for the ABS system, one for the battery, one for the pressure in the tires. I pulled over to turn off the car and turn it back on, hoping it was just some computer glitch that needed a restart. Nope. Now the car won’t even turn over. When I looked under the hood, I saw nothing obviously amiss.”

“Where do you live?” Michael asked. “At the very least I can give you a ride back to Franconia. Maybe something will be open there. Or you can call someone from my house. I only live about two miles up this road.”

“If it comes to that, I’ll certainly hitch a ride. Thanks a bunch. But would you mind first seeing if you can get it started? It would save us both a lot of trouble.”

Michael grinned. “My auto mechanic training begins and ends with adding wiper fluid. Sorry. You probably know a hell of a lot more about what goes on underneath the hood of a car than I do.”

“Well, maybe you’ll have better luck turning it over,” the man said, and he handed Michael the keys. “Would you mind trying? Maybe something will catch.”

“And I thought I was an optimist,” Michael said. “Get in with me and we’ll see what happens. Is the door unlocked?”

“It is,” the fellow said. Then: “I think I have some gloves in the front seat. My fingers are a little numb from the cold.” And already he was racing around the front of the car and escaping the rain in the passenger seat, where he retrieved his gloves. Michael slid in behind the steering wheel, amazed at how already the rain had soaked through his coat and sweater and shirt. He could feel the wetness against his back when he leaned against the seat in the car.

“I’m Michael,” he said as he settled in.

“John,” the older man said. “Pleasure to meet you.” Then he added, “Excuse the blankets on the seats. My wife and I have two very big dogs at home, and sometimes they travel with me.”

Michael looked down now and realized that, indeed, both the passenger and driver’s seats were covered by old, badly stained blankets. “Well, here goes,” he murmured. And almost out of intellectual curiosity, he turned the key in the ignition. He tried twice, and both times the engine made almost no noise. Once he thought he might have heard a dim clicking somewhere under the hood, but otherwise there wasn’t even a gurgle from the engine.

He turned to the older gentleman, shaking his head, his eyebrows raised, and saw him smile. But it was an odd grin, the smile Michael had seen before on patients he’d visited at the state psychiatric hospital-a smile unconnected to normal stimuli or responses. It was a little manic and disturbing. “I tried,” he said sheepishly. “I was-”

He never finished the sentence. He was aware of the fellow’s right arm rising up out of nowhere, and even in the dark of the car he saw the long, wide blade of the knife. But it all happened so fast. One second he was telling him that, as he had expected, he had no magic touch that was going to start the engine. The next? Vicious, stinging pain and he knew he was going to die. He hadn’t even had time to raise an arm in defense. The knife hacked deep and far into his neck, not once, not twice, but three times, and it felt like his throat was full of fluid, a melting glacier in his esophagus. Intellectually he understood that his carotid artery had been slashed wide open on that first, violent pass and he was going to bleed to death within moments. Exsanguination was the medical term. Odd that in these last seconds of life he should think of that. Or, as his head was all but decapitated and balanced briefly on his shoulder before his chin toppled forward against his jacket, the colloquial term: Bleeding out. Bleeeding… out.

Then, he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

W hen it was done, John Hardin took a washcloth from a pocket of his raincoat and wiped the blood off the window beside the driver’s seat, and then dabbed at the steering wheel a little delicately. He wrapped the body in the blanket on which it was sitting, pulling the corners up and over the lolling skull and the limp arms. He was a strong man, but it still took enormous effort to drag the corpse from the driver’s bucket seat to the passenger’s-he had to stand on the pavement in the rain and pull-and one of the psychiatrist’s hands fell from the blanket and got blood on the cushion. He used the washcloth to clean that, too. Clary hated bloodstains. He couldn’t blame her. They both liked a tidy house and tidy cars.