Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

Well, she had weapons, too. She had knives. In the kitchen.

For a moment she watched the wipers and tried to think. If someone was in the house right now, they had known she was there, too, because of the way she had been frantically screaming and searching for her girls. But they had left her alone. They hadn’t hurt her. They hadn’t drugged or sedated her. Apparently, they hadn’t even been interested in her. They had only been interested in her children: It was Hallie and Garnet they wanted. And if someone was still inside her home, then perhaps her girls had hidden themselves somewhere in the house or in the woods and hadn’t been discovered yet.

And so she kept the car running and the headlights on, figuring that whoever was inside might presume for a few more seconds that she was still in the vehicle. At the same time, if she could find the twins, they could race into the station wagon and speed off the property. Leave this despicable house and this despicable town… forever. So she closed the car door as softly as she could and ran back through the rain into the house.

A thought crossed her mind: I am like a firefighter. I am running into a burning building. But it passed quickly as she tried to imagine where her girls might be hiding.

F ar below them, Hallie and Garnet saw the station wagon headlights bounce against the greenhouse and then watched their mother emerge from the car, barely shutting the door as she returned to the house. They had been sitting absolutely still, curled into small balls, when the strangers were just across the wall from them in Garnet’s bedroom, barely daring to exhale until they heard the sounds move away from them into Hallie’s bedroom and then down the stairs to the second floor. Only then had they stood up and moved to the window, where they waited now, surveying the world below them.

“They’re in the guest room,” Garnet murmured.

“I know,” Hallie agreed. “I hear them.”

“I’m scared.”

“Me, too.”

“How many are there?”

“I don’t know. Two, I think. But maybe three,” Hallie answered. The attic floorboards were cold and her toes were starting to freeze.

“I was hoping it was just one person,” Garnet said. Then: “Think they’ll hurt Mom if they catch her?”

“They haven’t yet.”

“No. I guess not.”

“It must be us who they want,” Hallie said. “I think they want to kidnap us.”

Garnet thought about this, and she realized something she should have understood earlier-the moment she had heard the strangers inside the house. “No, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s not like they’re strangers who want to kidnap us for money. It’s Anise.”

“What?”

“Well, maybe not Anise herself. I don’t know. But it’s the plant ladies. They’ve come for us. I know it.”

“Then why wouldn’t they have just taken us any of the times we’ve been at their houses or greenhouses-or when they’ve been over here in the past? And why would they come in the middle of the night? Why would they be sneaking around? There aren’t any other cars outside.”

“I don’t know. But we can’t just stay up here if Mom’s looking for us downstairs,” Garnet said, and she heard her voice growing a little more urgent. Hallie pushed a finger against her lips to shush her. “We have to help her,” Garnet whispered. “We have to do something.”

They could no longer feel anyone moving anywhere inside the house: not the strangers in the guest bedroom below them or their mother in some other corner or on the stairs. The house went absolutely still. And so for a moment they both stood where they were, staring out the attic window at the storm and contemplating what they should do. Just then the trapdoor was yanked open from the second floor and a flashlight beam rose like a waterspout into the attic.

T his time, the captain’s white shirt starts to fall away. Or, to be precise, you fall away. You drift, swaying as if the wrecked fuselage of the jet were a hammock, rocking you, as you and the others descend toward the muddy bottom of Lake Champlain, your back against the aircraft aisle floor. Once before you grabbed that white shirt and clung to it. Not this time. Someone in the distance is calling to you. Urging you to go home. Someone else-your grandfather-is leaning against his vintage white Mustang with the black vinyl hardtop. Tony the Pony he called that car, and you would laugh and sink deep into the vehicle’s red leather seats. You sat on his lap when you were a little girl in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and other times you would sit beside him on the couch when he would read to you, while your grandmother sat near you both, doing her crewelwork. Their home often had the welcoming aroma of your grandmother’s homemade Swedish meatballs or, as Christmas neared, her holiday sugar cookies. After your grandfather retired, he played an organ at Macy’s in the weeks before Christmas. That was how he would spend his Decembers: playing Christmas carols. He died in his sleep when you were in the second grade, and you cried at his funeral-the first you ever attended-but he and his Mustang are considerably closer to you now than that other voice, the woman encouraging you to go home. Soon that captain’s shirt is above you, far above you and growing small, and then it is gone completely and all that remains is blackness and the beckoning sound of the department store organ.

E mily had switched off her flashlight and now held it against her thigh like a club. She pressed herself flat against the kitchen wall beside the pantry and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She held her breath and listened, trying to hear or feel movement anywhere in the house, but heard and felt nothing. When she could make out the details of the kitchen more exactly, she gazed at the counter with the wooden block with the knives. She couldn’t tell if they all were there, but she saw at least three long handles, and so she knew the most dangerous ones were still in place. She moved quietly across the kitchen and pulled out the carving knife. Then she paused once more, waiting. Above her she thought she heard the groan of the trapdoor to the attic-a prolonged creaking that accompanied the descent of the stairs-but she wasn’t sure. It might simply have been the house shuddering in the wind. She considered taking her knife and going straight up the stairs and challenging whoever was there-assuming someone had indeed just opened the door to the attic-but even if she made it to the second-floor landing without being heard, she would lose all surprise when she ran down the corridor toward the trapdoor. She needed another approach.

And the answer, she realized, was that bizarre back stairway at the other end of the kitchen. She almost never used it. She had ascended it exactly two times since they had moved in-the second time only because Chip wanted to show her how he’d replaced the worst of the steps-but it was still windowless, unlit, and too thin to be of practical use if you were carrying anything of any size. It still felt half-finished. But now it might offer the element of surprise, and so silently she opened the door and started up those steps, the flashlight in her left hand and the carving knife in her right.

T he primary impact rarely kills everyone in a plane crash. This is especially true in the case of a planned water ditching. Reseda recalled Chip telling her in a voice that was almost numbingly clinical that underwater disorientation, drowning, disorderly evacuation, and injuries from not bracing properly were what killed many people, and Flight 1611 was tragically typical in that regard. Moreover, he feared it was likely that some passengers had an unreasonable faith that they would walk away from the disaster as easily as had the passengers on Flight 1549, Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River, and those individuals may not even have braced properly. They had, he presumed, been staring enrapt out the windows, as if this were a mere carnival ride.