Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

Emily didn’t like the way her mind had phrased that: something drawing her outside. It sounded either conspiratorial or suggestive of a belief that the house was haunted. Which it wasn’t. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Reseda did. Her husband did-at least he did now. But she did not. The issues dogging her family were mental illness and seizures and a group of neighbors who were either well intentioned but sociopathically intrusive or less well intentioned and interested in her daughters in a way that was delusional and macabre. Neither possibility seemed inconceivable to her. She hoped she had simply failed to lock the front door before settling in the chair to await Chip’s return, and one of those northeaster-like squalls she was hearing now had blown the door open.

After rooting around the kitchen in the dark, feeling her way across the room with her fingertips, she finally found the heavy metal flashlight. It was too long for most of the drawers and so stood upright like a column in a crevice between the Sheetrock and the side of the refrigerator. Then Emily went to the entry hallway and her heart sank: The front door was wide open and the glass storm door was an inch or two ajar, prevented from swinging shut because the entry mat was bunched up beneath it and serving as a doorstop. Some of the downpour was whipping into the hallway, and the frame looked to Emily like the side of a shower stall. She leaned outside into the pelting rain and waved her flashlight haphazardly, unsure precisely what she hoped to accomplish but starting to panic. Although it probably wasn’t much below forty degrees outside, the rain felt almost like ice when she pushed open the glass door and called out loudly into the dark-her voice filled with tears that she hadn’t even realized had started welling up in her eyes-“Garnet? Hallie? Girls?” But her words were lost to the storm well before they reached the greenhouse and the slope of the hill. She saw the greenhouse was dark.

Still, she cried out her girls’ names once again, only then remembering that she had heard at least one of them upstairs on the third floor. She tried to convince herself that they both were there and she was becoming hysterical for naught. Any moment one was going to appear at the top of the stairs, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and asking why in the world she was screaming their names into the night and whether she thought the power would come back on soon. Still, Emily shut both doors and raced up the stairs herself, taking them two at a time.

She stood on the second floor a long moment, not sure whether she should be frustrated or relieved that now the house was quiet; she was aware mostly of the smell of mud and the chill in the air. In one of the empty guest bedrooms at the top of the stairs, her flashlight beam caught a pile of rags on the top of the stepladder, and for a split second a rope of cloth had resembled a cat’s tail and she screamed, terrified at the idea that Desdemona was back from the dead.

“Girls? Hallie? Garnet?” she shrieked again. She tripped as she started up the thin steps to the third floor and fell forward, cutting open the palm of her hand on a jagged sliver of wood when she landed. Then she shone her flashlight into Hallie’s room and saw no trace of her daughter; nor was either of the girls in Garnet’s room. The beds clearly had both been slept in-she felt Garnet’s sheets and they were still warm-but otherwise the twins had vanished into the night. And so, once again, she howled out their names, knowing she couldn’t even call 9-1-1 on the telephone because the electricity was gone and this horrible house on this nightmarish little mountain had absolutely no cell phone coverage at all.

G arnet had only told Hallie about the hole in the wall. She hadn’t yet told their mother, and neither had Hallie. But when Garnet smelled the cold, outside air wafting up the stairs she sat up in bed, fully awake, and she thought of the passage. She couldn’t have said what had awakened her. And while she wasn’t positive that she was hearing footsteps-they were largely muffled by the rain on the roof and the sudden way the wind would rattle the storm windows-she was confident that someone other than her parents and Hallie was inside the house. And so she tiptoed into her sister’s bedroom.

“Someone’s downstairs,” she whispered.

“Yeah, Mom,” said Hallie, and she sat up on her elbows in her bed, her hair wild with sleep. “And maybe Dad’s back.” Neither she nor Hallie knew precisely where their father had gone, but at dinner Dad had said he was going to a meeting that night and probably wouldn’t be home until after they were asleep. They guessed that it had something to do with the depression and strangeness that had marked him since Flight 1611 crashed, but what that meant precisely neither could say.

“I don’t think so,” Garnet said.

“What?”

“It’s someone else. I think we should go hide.”

“Really?”

“Yes! Just till we know. We could hide in the attic. Through that hole in the wall. It’s there for a reason.”

“The attic scares me,” Hallie said, a rare quiver in her voice.

“It’s just dusty and cold,” Garnet reassured her. “That’s all.”

She could tell that Hallie was starting to think about this, and then they both heard a small thud in the dark two floors below them and her sister crinkled her nose. Hallie, too, was smelling the cool, damp air. “Maybe that was Mom,” she whispered, but it was clear that she wasn’t confident.

“Come on,” Garnet urged her, and Hallie nodded and climbed from her bed. For one of the few times in the sisters’ lives, she followed her redheaded twin. The girls returned to Garnet’s bedroom, where Garnet pushed her bureau a few inches toward the window and then knelt and pulled open the door to the passageway. She pushed Hallie through it first and then followed her sister into the dark of the attic. As she was on her stomach on the attic floor, pulling the door back into its slot with the twine so it would disappear into the wallpaper, she could feel the vibrations of someone-some people, she thought-walking just a few feet away on the other side. Then, somewhere far off, she heard her mother calling out both her and her sister’s names. She didn’t believe the people in her bedroom were friends; she didn’t believe her mother even knew they were there. She wished there was a way she could warn her.

Y ou are surrounded by the sounds of the chimes. Here they are once again, the relentless tweets and rings you heard (but only vaguely at the time) in the cockpit as Flight 1611 descended inexorably back to earth. They are meant to alert you that the ground is rising up toward the aircraft. As if you don’t know. As if you need a synthetic voice urging you to “pull up, pull up, pull up.” Or another one informing you that you are too low, too low, too low. That there is terrain. You know as well as anyone that there is terrain, as the small boats on the lake grow more distinct and the forests on the foothills of the Adirondacks on the New York side of the water come into focus and suddenly seem to be higher than the wings of your plane. And yet somehow you and Amy Lynch remained more focused than you would have thought possible when you listened to the cockpit voice recordings with the NTSB. Somehow, despite the noise from the automated warning systems and the radio traffic that filled your small space at the front of the doomed aircraft, you worked the problem until, it seemed, you had solved it. And then there was that wave from the ferry and you were done.

Now it is all back, including the chimes. It is all before you once more, including the sound of Amy’s voice, an unmistakable but absolutely understandable tremor coursing through each syllable. But like you, she worked the problem. She skimmed through the emergency handbook, she tried to reignite the engines, she implemented the ditching procedures.