Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

But the anger is all and so you fight.

H olly tried holding down the captain’s left arm and shoulder and Reseda his right, but he was thrashing violently-great, convulsive heaves-and the greenhouse was filled with Ethan Stearns’s rage as he died once more in the warm August water of Lake Champlain.

“Go, you have people waiting for you!” Reseda tried to reassure him, the words rushed and, she knew, slightly fearful. He would have none of it. “She’s gone. Your daughter is gone. You can’t stay. You shouldn’t stay, your daughter is waiting-” she said, and she would have continued, Your daughter has gone home, she has gone to her grandmother, she has gone where she belongs and is happy, but she never got to finish the sentence. He broke free and slammed the back of his hand hard into the side of her face and her ears registered the hollow bang of his knuckles on the bones in her cheek, and she was reeling, falling into a table beside her, toppling the plants, one of the clay pots shattering and another spilling its dirt and the small, pink hysterium that was just starting to bloom. From the floor she saw him sitting up and Holly desperately trying to push him back down, but her ears were ringing from the blow and it was as if she were suddenly deaf or watching a movie with the sound off. Then he was on his feet, standing, and, with more strength than she had imagined he had, he was lifting Holly under her arms and hurling her into the glass wall, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Reseda pulled herself off the ground and tried to grab him, but already he was running toward the greenhouse entrance, angrily toppling Baphomet as he wheeled among the statuary and tables, one of the statue’s horns breaking off when it crashed to the dirt. He grabbed something on his way out, but she couldn’t see what it was. She crawled like a crab to Holly and found the woman’s hands and arms were bleeding where reflexively she had tried to shield her head from the glass. The rain and cold air whipped inside and stung the side of her face. Holly was breathing rapidly, and she sat upright and stammered, “He was out like a light, wasn’t he? I mean, where did that come from? I thought he was practically paralyzed.”

Reseda examined the woman’s wounds. They were bloody, but they weren’t deep. “He was,” she said, aware that her own words sounded slightly garbled because it hurt so much to speak. Her face still smarted where he had struck her. “But it wore off. It’s been a long night. There were three of them.”

“Can you stop him?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Go,” Holly insisted, “go!” She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and added, “I think he took my bag.”

And Reseda understood instantly what the captain had grabbed on his way out-and why. “Call Emily right now!” she said. “Tell them to leave the house right this second.” Then she stood, but already she heard a vehicle engine starting and outside she saw its headlights illuminating the trees. A second later, Chip was spinning Holly’s car into reverse, the trees went dark, and he was gone.

Emily knew the communal greenhouse from those afternoons that spring when she had picked up the twins there after school-when, ostensibly, they had been learning about plants and herbs with some of the women at Sage Messner’s. But she had never been inside it at night and she had never seen it so crowded: In her mind, it was always just her girls and two or three older women, and the skies high above the glass ceiling were likely to be blue.

Not now. The wind and the rain were lashing the great panes of glass against their metal framing, and there were at least three censers burning what John had told her with unrestrained pride was frankincense Clary had transplanted from Oman. There must have been twenty or twenty-five of her neighbors present tonight, women and men she was likely to meet on the streets of Littleton and Bethel-the people she had viewed as an extended family of sorts throughout the last couple of months-though now they were all dressed in what looked like burgundy-colored choir robes. There were Anise and Clary and Valerian and Sage and Ginger-who gave Alexander a vaguely chaste kiss on the cheek and then insisted on looking at the wound on his upper arm, her eyes going back and forth between the puncture wound and Emily-and Celandine, the female trooper who had come to Emily’s home that frightening night when Garnet found the skull in the dirt in the basement. She saw her girls’ schoolteacher. In addition, there were another three or four women Emily didn’t recognize. And there were the men, their spouses and partners, and John quickly climbed into a robe and joined Peyton and Claude, where they stood beside a waist-high black marble basin, the column a spiral of interlocking carved vines. There was something unrecognizable about all of them this evening, something far more profound than the reality that they were dressed in red robes: They’d stood and swayed and stomped their feet in a barely controlled frenzy when Anise and John had first nudged the girls into the greenhouse. They were all a little giddy, and Emily couldn’t decide if it was more like a religious rapture or the adrenaline rush that accompanies a nighttime bonfire at a beach in high summer. Some of the assemblage were drinking from identical ceramic goblets with leaves carved into the cups and the stems, dunking their goblets into that basin as if it were a punch bowl.

The electric heaters were warming the greenhouse, but it was illuminated only by clay oil lamps with corked wicks and tall candles in hurricane vases in the corners. The blue flames from the lamps lined the floor and the edges of the tables, all of which had been pushed against the walls, and the flickering light seemed to lengthen all the shadows. It made everyone look about seven feet tall. And at the end of the greenhouse, where some of the group was gathering now in a great semicircle, beside a pane of glass that opened out, was a wrought-iron cauldron that had to have been at least three feet high, suspended on five squat legs that Emily thought were as thick as her ankles. Beneath it was a small fire, and she couldn’t help but recall John’s cryptic words: What do you think we plan to do with them? Cook them in a stewpot?

Her girls looked more stunned than terrified, but she knew how frightened they were and she thought there was nothing she wanted more than to be able to go and comfort them. No, there was something she did want more than that: She wanted out. She wanted to take her girls and run from this greenhouse and from Bethel. She would stop by Reseda’s and get Chip and then leave northern New Hampshire forever. But two younger men she had never seen before-sons or grandsons of the herbalists, she imagined-stood on either side of her, each grasping one of her arms by the elbow.

The idea crossed her mind that Reseda and Holly were involved. Clearly they were herbalists. But had they convinced Chip that he was possessed and brought him to Reseda’s greenhouse so it would be easier to abduct the twins? Or were those two women unaware of what the rest of the group was doing right now? Emily wanted Chip-the old Chip, the man who had overcome a nearly disastrous childhood and wound up an airline pilot-back and beside her.

She could feel her heart racing; if she weren’t so determined to try to find a way to get her girls out of this greenhouse, she thought she might die. Literally, she might collapse with a heart attack. Her girls were standing on the other side of that massive cauldron, Anise’s and Sage’s hands resting like great bird claws upon their shoulders. The twins were wearing their matching winter jackets, which they really didn’t need because, despite the dampness and chill outside the greenhouse, despite the pane that was open to vent the cauldron, the heaters and the small fire were keeping the place almost toasty. But the girls were still in their pajamas, and Emily was struck by the sight of their baggy pajama pants between the bottoms of their parkas and the tops of their boots. She noticed that Garnet had tucked her pajamas into her boots, but Hallie hadn’t bothered. Anise had allowed Emily to put on a pair of blue jeans, but she was still wearing her nightshirt underneath her coat.