Chris Bohjalian - The Night Strangers

Finally John worked his way through the crowd until he was standing beside her, while Anise stepped forward and smiled at everyone as if she were hosting a cocktail party and wanted to welcome her guests. She pulled her robe tight around her neck, and Emily noticed that, unlike the other robes, hers had a silver clasp. She couldn’t make out the design from where she was standing, but she had a feeling it was some kind of ivy.

“Welcome,” Anise said, spreading her arms and smiling. “The earth is with you!”

“And with you!” responded the gathering.

“We merge blood with seed!” she cried, staring down at the dirt floor, enraptured.

“We merge seed with soul!” they replied.

“And soul with earth-”

“To be born anew!”

“Yes,” agreed Anise. “To be born anew.” She looked up and gazed at the gathering and shook her head in wonderment, and everyone watched her expectantly. “We did it. You did it. We have earth. We have twins. And we have… our recipe.” Valerian held open before Anise a thick book, and Emily thought it resembled the one that Anise had given Garnet, and the crowd in the greenhouse murmured their approval.

“To the earth and seeds!” John cried out in a toast, raising his goblet, and everyone drank with him. “To the twins!” he added. “Hear, hear!”

“To the twins!” the gathering shouted back, a loud and powerful and almost orgiastic chorus.

Emily craned her neck to read the title of the book, and her heart sank: The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. She watched the flushed faces of the adults as their eyes darted back and forth between Anise and her girls and started to cry. Anise noticed but was unmoved. Then she pulled from a pocket at the front of her cape what looked like a bouquet of Italian parsley, but Emily was confident it was instead a plant that was both venomous and rare-something discovered or bred by these women from seeds they had found in some exotic corner of the planet. Anise pulled off the leaves and dropped them into the cauldron, as if they were merely bay leaves for a stew.

“John,” Emily whispered, her voice urgent and quavering, “please, let us go. If we can help you, we will. You know that. But, please, please let us go. I’m begging you: Please don’t hurt my girls.”

John’s eyes looked a little watery, too, and his profile a bit less regal: She wondered if perhaps he was weakening. But it was only age. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he smiled and shook his head firmly. “This is hard for all of us. I understand. I really do. But we only need one and it will all be over soon.”

Emily recalled what Reseda had told her, but still it seemed too cruel to be true. “You only need one… what? One of my children?”

He nodded. “It’s a very intense ritual, a very complicated process. A complicated recipe. You need the right person-the right genes-and the right plants. You need a twin, and, according to the formula, the blood has to have been forged by a great trauma.” He raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Tansy never forgave us-or herself. But our intentions were good, Verbena. You have to believe me. And the fact is, it worked with Sawyer. It was awfully effective. I am so sorry about what happened to the boy, but the tincture worked. Sadly, nothing from nature lasts forever, and now we need, well, boosters. We need more.”

“Did you kill Sawyer? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”

“You must think we’re absolute fiends,” John said, and he actually chuckled. “Besides, I’m a lawyer. You can’t possibly believe that I would confess to something like that! Now, you should pay attention,” he admonished her. “We both should.”

Celandine was approaching Anise with a potted plant, the leaves cochleate and yellow as daffodils, with one spear-shaped bulb rising from the center. The plant was perhaps eighteen inches tall and the bulb the size of a grown-up’s fist. Clary Hardin and Ginger Jackson fell to their knees, their heads thrown back, nearly swooning with anticipation, as did another pair of women Emily didn’t recognize. They dropped their goblets onto the ground and spread wide their arms in ecstasy.

“They’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” John murmured. “Many of us have. To be so very, very close to the end and get a second chance? What a delightful notion!”

Sage Messner began herding the twins forward, edging them closer to the cauldron. Then the girls’ schoolteacher, Mrs. Collier-Yarrow Collier, Emily remembered-knelt before the children, handed them each a goblet, and said in a voice as soothing as a lullaby, “Enjoy this. Drink, girls, drink up.”

They both looked across the greenhouse at their mother, wondering what they should do, and so Emily violently shook her head. They looked tiny to her, more like big dolls than small children. Even in their winter coats they appeared waiflike. “Don’t,” she yelled to them, hoping she sounded more resolute than panicked-because she knew she was panicked. But she knew also that whatever herbal potion these women had prepared for her children would only harm them. She was as sure of that as she had been of anything in her life. “Don’t drink it!”

“Verbena, that’s enough,” Anise said, speaking to her for the first time since they had arrived at the greenhouse, and the two men tightened their grips on her arms. Her voice was absolutely inscrutable to Emily. Then she crossed the greenhouse and placed her long, cold fingers on Emily’s cheeks and looked directly into her eyes. For the briefest of seconds, Emily was brought back to that first Sunday morning when the woman’s rusted pickup truck had rumbled up their long driveway and she had appeared with a casserole and brownies.

“Send her away,” hissed one of the women Emily didn’t know.

“We don’t need her!” added Lavender Millier.

“No, I would rather she watched,” said Anise simply. Then she looked directly into Emily’s eyes, brusquely wiped the tears off her cheeks, and added, “Now: I must insist you behave.” Then she released her and went to Hallie and Garnet, kneeling beside Mrs. Collier so the girls were actually a little taller than she was. She seized the goblet from Garnet and took a sip, gazing at the girl and smiling. After that she took a sip from Hallie’s chalice, too, running her tongue over her lips after she had swallowed. When she was finished, she stood up and turned back toward Emily. She raised her eyebrows high above her eyes as if to say, See? Satisfied? I’m still standing. Then she motioned for the girls to drink up, and, much to Emily’s despair, they did, draining the two chalices that had been given them.

“Thank you, girls,” Anise said. “That was very grown-up of you.”

The twins glanced at each other and then at Anise and Sage and their schoolteacher. Emily thought Garnet looked like she might collapse, and she wondered what the group would do if her daughter had a seizure right now. She studied both girls and decided that Hallie looked a little wobbly as well; whatever was in that goblet had acted quickly. When Anise asked them to take off their snow jackets, both twins fumbled spastically with the zippers.

One of the women Emily didn’t recognize, a petite, square-faced blonde her age who would have fit in well at a Junior League luncheon back in Philadelphia, approached Anise and bowed her head ever so slightly. Then she gave the woman a leather sheath, from which Anise pulled a long, ancient-looking dagger with a T-shaped handle that appeared to be made of dull iron. It looked vaguely Celtic to Emily, and had a moonstone nearly the size of a golf ball at the edge of the grip and smaller ones along the handle.