The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  Emily rubbed at her eyes. Clearly there was a schism in Bethel. There were her strange new friends with their greenhouses, and then there was the rest of the community. But who had reached out to her except for those odd herbalists? No one. No one at all. Consequently, she decided she was very glad to have that whole perverted crowd a part of her life tonight. John and Clary Hardin had appeared out of nowhere and had been sitting on this appallingly ugly, orange Naugahyde couch beside her until a few minutes ago, holding her hand and comforting her, until finally she had insisted they go home and get some rest. And even before Chip had been rushed to the hospital, Reseda and Holly and Ginger had descended upon her home, Reseda and Holly offering to stay with the girls as long as necessary. (She called, they came. That was friendship.) When Emily had phoned home a few minutes ago to check in, the four of them—Reseda and Holly, Hallie and Garnet—had set up a big slumber party in the living room, piling quilts and air mattresses and pillows onto the floor as if they were all teenage girls on a Friday night. Reseda didn’t think the twins would want to stay alone in their bedrooms, and she was correct. The girls had sounded more tired than terrified when Emily spoke to them, and they were all finally going to sleep. According to Reseda, Anise had been by the house as well. She’d just left, though not before stocking the refrigerator.

  The truth was, Emily knew that she didn’t have anyone but these people in Bethel. Her mother-in-law? She might phone her in the morning, but then again she might not. What precisely would she tell her? And given her mother-in-law’s drinking—given the reality that her mother-in-law was a drunk—what assistance could she provide? Absolutely none. After Flight 1611 had crashed, two days had passed before she called her son, and, though Chip wouldn’t share with Emily the details of the conversation, he did say that his mother had told him fatalistically that it—an accident of this magnitude—was bound to happen. Emily imagined she could phone her theater pals in Pennsylvania or some of the lawyers with whom she was friends in her old firm, but what were they supposed to do? Drop everything and come to New Hampshire so they could hold her hand and help nurse her husband back to health? That was what mothers and fathers and siblings did, and she had none. Since her parents had passed away, she didn’t have any family at all.

  Emily realized that she desperately needed to sleep now, but there was one more doctor who wanted to talk to her, and that was Chip’s new psychiatrist here in New Hampshire. Her husband had only met with him three or four times, but Chip had said that he liked him, and so Emily had called him. His name was Michael Richmond. He had arrived at the hospital just about when the ER physician and the nurse finished stitching up Chip, and he had been allowed to spend a few minutes with her husband after he was admitted. Now the psychiatrist was discussing her husband’s case on the phone with a colleague in Chicago. Emily yawned again and was just about to curl up her legs and lie down on the couch when he returned. He was a tall man, roughly her age, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans. He had thinning blond hair and a strong face made more handsome by the scars that remained from what must have been a titanic battle with acne as an adolescent. He sat on the couch beside her, in the very spot where John Hardin had been earlier.

  “So,” he began, his voice soft and melodic. “You must be exhausted.”

  “I am,” she agreed.

  “And, I imagine, pretty shocked.”

  “That, too.”

  “Do you want something to help you relax? Maybe even just a sleeping pill?”

  She thought about this. “Yes. I will take a sleeping pill. I will even say yes to whatever you’re offering in the way of antidepressants.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” he agreed.

  “Well, let’s start with what just happened to my husband. I really don’t understand it. Did he actually try and hurt himself? I understand his guilt. But the flight was seven months ago. Why tonight? Why now?”

  “We don’t know for a fact that he did try and hurt himself. Maybe it really was an accident.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  He sighed. “PTSD is a complicated thing.”

  “There’s more. There must be more.”

  “Has Chip had any issues with anger since the crash? Rage he couldn’t control?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Frustration that seemed, oh, a little off the charts?”

  “Well, there was a door,” she said after a moment, and she proceeded to tell the doctor about the barnboard door to a coal chute that Chip had turned to kindling with an ax. She wondered if that counted as anger he couldn’t control.

  “How about with the girls? How has he been with them?”

  “He’s been great. Always has been. The issue for me over the years was that he wasn’t home half the time because he was a pilot. Do you have kids?”

  “No.”

  “Try being a single mom with a job and twin toddlers three or four days a week. When he’d come home after flying for three or four days, the girls would swarm on him. We’re talking seagulls on a Dumpster. And while I understood that it was simply that he’d been away, I always felt a little, I don’t know, inadequate. And unloved. No, that’s not right: less loved.”

  “But you realized this was an inaccurate perception.”

  “Intellectually. Not viscerally,” she said, and she regretted that somehow this discussion was starting to become about her rather than about her husband. But it seemed that the doctor sensed her unease and brought the conversation back to Chip.

  “And since the plane crash? How has he been as a dad since the accident?” he asked.

  “Still great. He’s a terrific parent. I mean, he’s been a little spacey. How could he not? And, as you know, he’s been depressed. There was a period when I don’t think he was getting dressed until the girls were about to get off the school bus in the afternoon.”

  “Here in New Hampshire?”

  “No, this was in those months right after the crash. Back in Pennsylvania.”

  He rubbed at his eyes, and she guessed that he was probably as tired as she was.

  “How is he doing now?” she asked.

  “Well, he’s sticking with his story that it was an accident. He fell. And I guess it is possible that he happened to have the knife with him when he took a tumble while going downstairs to check on the pilot light. Or maybe he fell and didn’t fall on the knife. Then, as he was sitting on the basement floor in the dark—he has no flashlight, remember—it all just overwhelms him: the accident, the move, the lack of purpose in his life right now. The flashbacks, the guilt. There is a lot going on inside his head. And so he hurts himself. I mean, we usually associate cutting with teen girls and young women. But it can affect anyone.”

  “He’d never cut himself before tonight.”

  “And perhaps he never will again. But it’s still going to take a bit of work to answer your question: Why did he do this? And we may never answer that question, at least not to our satisfaction. But your husband has no history of schizophrenia or mental illness or violence, correct?”

  “No,” she agreed. “None. Trust me, they don’t let schizophrenics fly planes. They don’t let people who are likely to take a knife to themselves pilot commercial jets.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “But what about that thing he said about some girl on his flight—his last flight—needing a playmate? What was that about?”

  “Oh, it could mean any one of a hundred things. What I found interesting is that he only brought that up after he had given you the knife and collapsed.”

  “He didn’t give me the knife,” she corrected him. “He pulled it out of his stomach and tossed it on to the floor. It was like it was something that repulsed him.”

  The doctor stretched his legs out straight in front of him. She noticed he was wearing black Converse sneakers. “Your husband’s contrition is profound. He is calm but ashamed. Appalled at what he did tonight. He is devastated that his girls saw him that
way. But he is also continuing to insist that the water in the sink seemed a little cool when the two of you were doing the dishes after dinner. He says you went to the dining room to continue clearing the table and he went downstairs to the basement to see what was going on with the hot-water tank. But he tripped and fell. Then the lights went out.” He paused, thinking, and then turned to her. “Did that ER doctor check for a head injury?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Before your husband goes home tomorrow—”

  “If my husband goes home tomorrow—”

  “Make sure he was checked for a concussion. There was no obvious sign of a head injury, but I wonder if maybe he hit the back or the side of his head in the dark and blacked out. It’s just an idea.”

  Emily thought about this and about how Chip hadn’t answered her when she had called out his name over and over, yelling for him as she went from floor to floor in the house. “Wouldn’t the ER have looked into a concussion?” she asked.

  “You had a pretty green doctor and nurse. I think he had graduated, oh, around three-thirty this afternoon. A lot would have depended on what he thought to ask your husband. And I’m not saying your husband even has a concussion. I’m only suggesting that he may have blacked out—if only briefly.”

  “You might be onto something,” she said, and she told Richmond about her attempts to find Chip and how he hadn’t responded when she had positively screamed for him during the blackout. She actually felt a little relieved at the idea that he may have been unconscious. “It would explain an awful lot,” she told him when she was finished.

  “See what I mean?” he said, and he gave her a small smile. “There are a lot of questions about what happened tonight that we’ll never answer. Never. But some may have incredibly obvious solutions.”

  Reseda knew as well as anyone the stories—all suspect in her opinion—that Tansy Dunmore had not buried her son in the cemetery. The woman had feared that Clary or Sage or Anise or one of the herbalists long past would try again, even if it meant desecrating the boy’s bloated corpse. Reseda gave little credence to the idea. Although Sawyer Dunmore had died before she was born (though only by half a decade, a reality that always made Reseda aware of her age since most of Bethel viewed Sawyer Dunmore’s death as chronologically distant as the Peloponnesian War), she knew the women and she knew the tincture. She had always been confident that Sawyer Dunmore’s body was in his casket in the family plot beside the two hydrangeas in the cemetery. It was only when the pilot had come to her office and mentioned that door in the basement that she had begun to wonder if she was mistaken.

  Now standing perfectly still, hunched over, in the muddy chamber that Chip Linton had opened with an ax, she decided that Tansy and Parnell Dunmore had indeed turned a corner of their basement into a mausoleum. They had buried their child here, determined to keep even the soulless, rotting cadaver from the women. She had the sense that, if she took a shovel and dug, it wouldn’t take long to find human remains. The notion filled her with despair for both of the parents, but particularly for Tansy. Her guilt just might have rivaled the pilot’s.

  Nevertheless, Reseda felt nothing attaching itself to her, nothing—no one—at all. If Sawyer Dunmore had remained here with his body (a distinct possibility, given how he died), he was now long gone. She ran her fingertips over the ravaged barnboard. It was appropriate that here was a doorway. A threshold. A liminal world.

  She recalled the first time the dead had attached themselves to her and the trauma that had preceded it. She had understood even then, if only instinctively, how receptive the traumatized are to the dead. How open. Again, a doorway into one’s aura—one’s space. The dead will always find a passage. In hindsight, her twin sister had attached herself to her well before the police and the EMTs arrived. Reseda had been barely conscious and had presumed at first that she was dreaming: One minute she and Lucinda were walking on a path along Storrow Drive, and the next there was a man before them whom her sister clearly recognized and whose sudden presence she found terrifying. But all that had registered for Reseda was that he was wearing a New England Patriots knit cap and that he was massive. It was late at night, and people would tell her later that they shouldn’t have been out. But they were both juniors, Reseda at BC and Lucinda at BU. Soon they would be going home for Thanksgiving. Their family lived perhaps a mile from the ocean in Yarmouth, Maine. Lucinda had taken her sister’s arm when she saw the man, but she had barely started to scream when he killed her. Just like that. Reared up like a stallion and stabbed her over and over in the chest and face. There had been so much of Lucinda’s blood on Reseda’s own white parka that initially the EMTs had been confused as they tried to find where she had been stabbed. And then he had attacked her. The next day in the hospital she would learn that her forearms had practically been skinned and the snow jacket sleeves shredded as she used her arms to ward off the knife blows and defend herself. A tendon in her hand had been sliced through, presumably because she grabbed at the blade while reaching for the knife. But the blade had neither hit her heart nor nicked her aorta, either of which in all likelihood would have been lethal. The knife had missed her liver and her spleen. She had lost a lot of blood, but she had suffered mostly puncture wounds, and nothing vital—no large-caliber veins—had been punctured. Unfortunately, in addition to gaping lesions along both arms and an especially cavernous maw on her right leg (had she kicked at her assailant as he stabbed her?), her left lung was collapsed.

  And yet as she lay on the ground, her attacker disappearing into the night because he presumed she was as dead as her sister, almost right away she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone. The sensation was so pronounced that even when she was being loaded onto the backboard, her neck in a cervical collar, she thought Lucinda was being carried into the ambulance beside her. She wasn’t. At one point Reseda glanced at the trauma dressings and wraparound gauze that made her arms look like a mummy’s, and she could have sworn that she saw her sister’s slim wrist and the Georg Jensen bracelet with the moonstones she always wore.

  Two days later she would be identifying Lucinda’s killer from a series of snapshots. He was a deeply disturbed custodian at the university lab where Lucinda worked and had had a crush on her that had gone horribly wrong. Somehow Reseda knew details of the relationship—and the strange ways the young man had stalked her sister—that Lucinda had never shared.

  The incursion into her aura would prove, in some ways, to be a penetrating injury. And though her sister had meant her no harm (which Reseda knew now was usually, but not always, the case with the undead), Lucinda’s presence was at once debilitating and disorienting. Everyone in her family and at school noticed the changes in Reseda, and even when her internal and external wounds had healed, it would be a long, long time until she was fully recovered—until she was, quite literally, herself again. Everyone attributed this to the trauma, and they were right—though not in the way they meant. Had Reseda not been so traumatized by the attack, she might have resisted her sister’s invasion of her aura.

  Which brought her back to Sawyer Dunmore and his crypt here in the basement. It felt empty, save for whatever bones were somewhere in the dirt beneath her feet. Either he had made it to another plane or he had found another host on this earth. She presumed it was the former, since whatever was tormenting the pilot did not seem to reflect the little she knew about Sawyer. She wondered: Had Chip Linton found the bones? If so, he hadn’t been thinking about them when he had been at her house for dinner. She hadn’t sensed either Sawyer or a skeleton.

  She circled back in her mind to the women. She thought of Anise. Of Clary. Of Ginger. Then she thought of John Hardin and Alexander Jackson. The original tincture was long gone, but now they had a fresh pair of twins at their disposal. The odds were good they would try again.

  When she went upstairs, Holly and the girls were all sound asleep in the living room. She kissed each on the cheek and then perched herself on the deacon’
s bench in the kitchen, prepared to keep vigil until either Emily returned or the sun rose, whichever came first.

  You know you are in a hospital bed. There are the metal rungs along the sides, there is a galaxy of small dots of light: distant stars, but not really distant at all. You listen to the sounds of the nurses, including the slim fellow with the immaculate, graying goatee, as they tend to you and whoever else is on this floor, passing by your half-open door. How long ago was it that Michael Richmond was here? An hour? Two? Three? You believe you are alone, but you are not completely sure. You hear no one breathing in that second bed, and there had been nobody there when you were first brought here from the ER. You recall that earlier your stomach hurt, but no more. They have given you something, and this is your principal source of frustration at the moment. You should be in pain. You deserve to be in pain. When you recall what you were contemplating, you grow a little nauseous. Would you actually have turned the knife on a child? Your own child? Apparently. It was close.

  You fear that you will never be able to look your children in the eyes again. You almost did the absolute worst thing a parent can do. And the fact that you failed (thank God) doesn’t mean that you can be trusted. You can’t. Your daughters should never trust you again. You will never trust yourself. Ever.

  You wonder what time it is and scan the hospital room for a clock. There doesn’t seem to be one amidst all those pinpricks of light. But you presume that your girls are sound asleep right now. As is Emily.

  At least you imagine that they are sound asleep. In your mind, however, you don’t see them in their rooms on the third floor of the house. You hope, when you think about it, that they are not even in the structure: You like to believe that they have gone to a motel or an inn. That they are with John and Clary Hardin. Anywhere is better than that despicable place you now call your home. Three floors of malevolent timbers and plaster and pine board. Knob-and-tube wiring, every inch of which is as ominous as a snake. Rooms and corridors that are claustrophobic, wallpaper designed to make a man despair. Those sunflowers. The foxes. Weapons and cigarette lighters hidden throughout the house like Easter eggs, but evil. And then there is the basement. The pit of despair. Doors that lead nowhere. Whatever led you to nearly take a knife to a child was spawned in that pit. You need to get out. You need to get your family out.