Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

“Coming or going?” Emily asked, as Reseda climbed from her own car.

“Coming,” she answered.

“Does Chip know you’re here?”

“I don’t think so. I just arrived.”

“Well, let’s go inside,” Emily said, and together they started up the front walkway.

“You’re not returning from something pleasant like a dance class or a music lesson, are you?” Reseda asked the twins.

Garnet shook her head no and Hallie sniffed derisively.

“We just tried to make peace with Jocelyn Francoeur,” Emily explained. “Remember the earrings you helped us pick out? Giving them to Molly didn’t go well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She doesn’t approve of you herbalists.”

“She really doesn’t know us well enough to approve or disapprove. I told you that.”

“She would disagree,” Emily said. “She has mighty strong feelings. And…” She stopped midsentence and said to her girls, “Run ahead and tell your father we’re home and Reseda is here. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Are you going to tell Reseda what happened? What Molly’s mom said?” asked Garnet.

“I may, yes. But please don’t you tell Daddy-or at least wait for me. I’ll be right in,” Emily said, and the girls ran into the house. Then she pulled the box of earrings from her shoulder bag and shook it at Reseda, unable to mask the disgust on her face. She recounted for her how Jocelyn had refused to allow her daughter to accept the gift that they had chosen together and how she had all but called the herbalists witches. Finally Emily put her hands on her hips, and her gaze grew earnest. “Tell me,” she demanded of Reseda, “are you a witch?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

“A real estate agent.”

“Don’t be coy. I want to know what’s going on here in Bethel and I want to know right now. I want to know why your little group wants to change our names and what you want from me and my girls.”

“It’s why I’ve come here.”

“Okay then, tell me. Now.”

“First we need to begin with your husband.”

“With Chip? He has his share of problems, but-”

Reseda cut Emily off, pressing one finger gently but firmly against her lips, silencing her. Then she took her hand and started leading Emily away from the house, walking her in the clean spring air into the meadow, where the grass was, suddenly, almost knee-high. There she told Emily of the dead who were with her husband and the dangers they posed for her daughters, and how she wanted to bring her husband to her own greenhouse that night to perform a depossession-and how she already had broached this idea with Chip and he had agreed. She told Emily that there was a second volume of recipes in their group’s canon, and it included a particular tincture that the herbalists wanted to make that also represented a danger to her children.

“What do they all want to do?” Emily asked, her voice facetious. “Graft some of their skin? Harvest a little blood?”

“Not a little,” Reseda said, and for the first time in her life she verbalized aloud what she had seen one night in Clary Hardin’s mind when she pressed for details about the death of Sawyer Dunmore.

T he twelve-year-old boy was drugged with a tincture that Anise had made from valerian, skullcap, and California poppy, his body resting flat on its back on the makeshift wooden altar in the communal greenhouse, his hands folded across his chest as if-and his mother had to have noticed this-he were a corpse. Anise was a decade and a half younger than the others, but every bit as committed. The child’s hair was the color of wheat, and it was damp from sweat, the perspiration a side effect of the tincture. His eyes were shut, and he breathed with the slowness of a seemingly sound, untroubled sleep. But he was not as sedated as everyone thought, the sleep not nearly as deep, and that would be a part of the problem and why everything went so horribly wrong. It was well into the night, and the greenhouse was lit entirely by candles-Sage had rounded up easily a hundred of them, tapers and blocks and votives from the church outside Boston where she and Peyton had been married one summer Saturday in 1932, and now the candles were lining the tables with the plants or ensconced in hurricane lamps on the ground-and the walls were alive with the shadows of the six herbalists. Outside the air was bracing and crisp, as late autumn rolled inexorably toward winter. Parnell had taken Hewitt hunting, and the father and son were with Parnell’s brother at a friend’s deer camp in Danville, Vermont, though there was no question that Parnell knew what his wife and her friends had planned for Sawyer. He had seen how well their tinctures worked-even the ones from the second volume-and, like Tansy, supposed this one would, too.

And so the herbalists surrounded the body in the greenhouse. They edged closer all the time, especially when Anise finally raised the child’s right arm from his chest and Clary held a cast-iron stewpot beneath it while Tansy-the boy’s own mother-took one of her own kitchen knives and made a single cut along the wrist. The boy flinched. Certainly Clary saw that. Probably Anise did, too, and she must have worried that she had either mixed the sedative improperly or-fearful of killing the child with an overdose-given him too little. But the boy did not awaken. At least not yet. Sawyer Dunmore awoke only after Anise and Sage had both observed aloud that the slice had been neither deep enough nor long enough and already the coagulants were starting to stem the tide. They needed far more than a few drops of blood; this wasn’t homeopathy, after all. They needed enough blood to reduce it like a sauce with the ashwagandha and eternium. And though Tansy paused with the knife at her side, summoning the courage and deciding whether she was indeed capable of cutting her own child a second time-and making this gash far more pronounced-she didn’t pause long. Had she been tranquilized, too? Clary didn’t know and so Reseda didn’t know. Clary had never been sure whether the stupor that initially had enveloped Tansy Dunmore like a shawl and made her eyes less animated than the rest of the herbalists-all of whom were electrified by the idea that finally they were preparing this particular tincture, the one that demanded the blood of a traumatized, prepubescent twin-was the result of massive doses of passionflower and schisandra or unease at the reality that she was slashing her own child’s wrist. Regardless, she raised the knife once more and this time made the cut deeper and longer and, intentionally or not, she ran the knife lengthwise along the ulnar artery, rather than across it, and blood geysered up into the air, a punctured hose with the spigot on full, and the boy awoke. He screamed and struggled to sit up, but Peyton Messner and John Hardin were there before he could, the two men pressing the boy’s shoulders back against the altar. But Sawyer fought hard for his life, and his cries pulled Tansy from the somnambulance that had allowed her to forget for a period who she was and what she was doing to her own son. She lashed out at Peyton and John, and managed to tear the sleeve from John’s robe, but Clary dropped the heavy pot-spilling the little blood they had collected onto the dirt floor of the greenhouse, where it disappeared into the earth-and she and Anise together clenched Tansy’s arm and pushed her away from her son and then onto the ground. But Tansy heard Sawyer crying as he bled out (and he really did bleed out very, very quickly), and she wailed his name over and over. The adults might have saved the boy’s life if they hadn’t been working at cross-purposes: Peyton was hoping to stop the bleeding, trying to press the cloth from the cuff of his robe against the deep gash, but Anise and John were squeezing the child’s forearm, trying to keep the vein open. Moreover, at some point someone had toppled one of the candles and set Anise’s long sleeve on fire, badly burning her arm before she was able to smother it. She seemed oblivious to the pain, but the small blaze only added to the distraction. Still, Clary eventually managed to right the cauldron and capture Sawyer Dunmore’s blood as it flowed and flowed, puddling in the bottom of the cast-iron pot and saturating John’s and Anise’s robes.