Chris Bohjalian: The Night Strangers

“Blood meets seed,” Anise cried out.

“And seed meets soul,” the herbalists proclaimed together.

With two fingers and her thumb, Anise snapped off the bulb from the yellow plant, and the sound was reminiscent of a cat’s squeal immediately before a catfight. Then she took the bulb and held it above the black cauldron and slashed it open lengthwise with the knife, and a white milk waterfalled into the pot, and the smell-gardenia-like, and yet somehow it conjured for Emily the image and aroma of a just washed baby-overwhelmed the incense in the greenhouse. Then Anise dropped the empty husk into the mixture, too, and stirred it around with the tip of her dagger.

“And the last ingredient?” Valerian asked, though it was clear that she and all the other herbalists knew precisely what they would add next. Still, Anise glanced once at the grimoire that Valerian was patiently holding open for her. Then she signaled for the psychiatrist to shut the book.

“And so we finish,” Anise proclaimed. “To those we once were-”

“And to those we shall be!” the herbalists finished.

“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!”

“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!” they repeated.

Anise raised the dagger over her head, and Emily realized that these people who posed as her neighbors and friends were about to execute one of her children-slaughter a ten-year-old girl. And so she screamed for her girls to run, to run away, as she threw herself violently at Anise, dragging those younger men with her. She was aware of the two of them and John Hardin trying (and failing) to pull her back, but she was enraged and fell upon the woman- the witch, she heard in her mind, the witch -tackling her onto the greenhouse floor, all the while howling for her children to flee. She’d reached for the knife, unsure what she would do with it if she wrestled it from the woman, when she was violently lifted up and off of Anise, her arms wrenched so far behind her that she feared one of her shoulders had been ripped from its socket. She turned, and there was Alexander Jackson and there was his heavy fist coming toward her face, and then all was black.

Y ou had stood over each of the beds in the girls’ rooms on the third floor of the house, the pearl-handled knife in each case raised in your hand high over your head. And yet each bed was empty. Emily had vanished as well, the bed still made (and the knife, fortunately, still held by duct tape to the horizontal slat on your side). Her station wagon was in the driveway, which suggested that, when they left, they had left in someone else’s vehicle.

You wonder if they left because of the blackout. You noted in the kitchen that the digital clocks on the microwave and the oven were dark, and then in the girls’ bedrooms that the automatic night-lights were off. But again, someone would have had to have picked them up.

Since they are not with Reseda, the Hardins are the most likely possibility. And so you drive to their place, peering at the tortuous road before you, the wipers on Holly’s compact battling to keep up with the downpour and the lights no match for the darkness. But then, as you are approaching the Messners’, you spy a conga line of cars parked off to the side of the road and snaking their way up the driveway.

Of course. You are not alone in wanting the twins. You know what the captain knows and he knows that the herbalists want them for… something. You crush the brakes hard and park.

R eseda hadn’t realized that John and Anise were taking the twins that very night. She presumed they would wait for the new moon, since the book suggested the tincture should be prepared when the moon was waxing, and now it would be waning for three more days. She knew only that the twins were in danger because Ethan Stearns had attached himself to the pilot.

Yet as she was approaching the Lintons’ driveway, before she had even pulled in, she saw headlights. She saw Holly’s car speed from the driveway onto the two-lane road, nearly sideswiping the mailbox in the process, and race away from her toward the village of Bethel. He must have accelerated to eighty or ninety miles an hour. Maybe more. Briefly she considered going to the Lintons’ as she had planned, but either they were already dead or they weren’t there. And she guessed it was the latter because Holly must have reached them by phone. She saw no lights on down the driveway.

And so she accelerated, hoping she could keep up with the captain, but she wasn’t sure she would succeed as she watched his red taillights disappear into the night. But she drove on as quickly as she could, the engine so loud that she could hear it even over the pounding drumbeat of the rain on the roof of her car. And then, as she was nearing the Messners’ home, she felt a powerful spike of unease rise up side by side with her frantic worry for the twins: In her mind she saw tall pillars of cedar mesa sandstone spiking straight into the air in the Southwest. There was an enormous amount of activity just beyond her aura, and she had the sense, despite the electricity in the air from the storm, that a gathering was nearby. She felt the presence, inchoate but organizing, of a crowd. And so she pressed hard on the brakes, the car swerving slightly on the slick pavement, and discovered instantly that she was correct. There was Holly’s car, empty, the front door wide open, the downpour saturating the seat and the upholstery on the inside of the door. It was last in the line of vehicles, most of which Reseda recognized. The Messners’ house was dark, but even through the storm she could see a weak penumbra of light emanating from the south side-the side where the large communal greenhouse was built-and so she started running across the yard, the rain-soaked grass saturating her canvas sneakers.

When she got to the greenhouse, she saw a window was venting steam from Clary’s cauldron, a massive wrought-iron pot that Reseda always viewed as a melodramatic affectation. But Clary loved it. A blacksmith had made it for the woman perhaps a decade ago, and she had an almost fetishistic attachment to it. Reseda gathered herself, unsure what she would say or do, and pushed open the glass door. She saw no sign of the captain, but there were the herbalists gathered in their robes, while one of the twins was teetering on her wobbly legs before the cauldron. They had pulled up the sleeve of her pajama shirt and were holding her naked arm above the kettle. Anise had the blade of the group’s ancient boline poised at the crux of the girl’s elbow.

“Anise, don’t do it!” Reseda commanded, aware that her voice could be firm and it could be cryptic, but rarely-if ever-was it menacing.

John Hardin took a sip from the chalice he was holding and then handed it to Peyton Messner. “I am one hundred and three years old,” he said quietly. “You know that, my dear.”

“And all of your extra time was at the expense of a twelve-year-old boy. I know that, too.”

He waved a single finger, correcting her. “All of our extra time,” he said, and then he motioned with his arm at the Messners, his wife, and Anise.

She looked at the group-the whole group-at the way their eyes were glazed and their skin was burning with anticipation. None of them would ever get any younger, that was a fact; but they all believed they could stall further aging for… years. The first tincture, built from the blood of Sawyer Dunmore, had given all of them who had gluttonously drunk from the chalice an extra three and a half or four decades. For someone like Clary Hardin, the best to be hoped for now would be to survive another three or four decades feeling seventy-but she was prepared to strike that bargain, especially since, like her husband, she was in fact well over one hundred years old. Meanwhile, someone like Celandine, the young state trooper? She would remain thirty, and what woman wouldn’t accept the energy and strength and firmness that came with being thirty for an extra third of a century?