The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

“What do they all want to do?” Emily asked, her voice facetious. “Graft some of their skin? Harvest a little blood?”

  “Not a little,” Reseda said, and for the first time in her life she verbalized aloud what she had seen one night in Clary Hardin’s mind when she pressed for details about the death of Sawyer Dunmore.

  The twelve-year-old boy was drugged with a tincture that Anise had made from valerian, skullcap, and California poppy, his body resting flat on its back on the makeshift wooden altar in the communal greenhouse, his hands folded across his chest as if—and his mother had to have noticed this—he were a corpse. Anise was a decade and a half younger than the others, but every bit as committed. The child’s hair was the color of wheat, and it was damp from sweat, the perspiration a side effect of the tincture. His eyes were shut, and he breathed with the slowness of a seemingly sound, untroubled sleep. But he was not as sedated as everyone thought, the sleep not nearly as deep, and that would be a part of the problem and why everything went so horribly wrong. It was well into the night, and the greenhouse was lit entirely by candles—Sage had rounded up easily a hundred of them, tapers and blocks and votives from the church outside Boston where she and Peyton had been married one summer Saturday in 1932, and now the candles were lining the tables with the plants or ensconced in hurricane lamps on the ground—and the walls were alive with the shadows of the six herbalists. Outside the air was bracing and crisp, as late autumn rolled inexorably toward winter. Parnell had taken Hewitt hunting, and the father and son were with Parnell’s brother at a friend’s deer camp in Danville, Vermont, though there was no question that Parnell knew what his wife and her friends had planned for Sawyer. He had seen how well their tinctures worked—even the ones from the second volume—and, like Tansy, supposed this one would, too.

  And so the herbalists surrounded the body in the greenhouse. They edged closer all the time, especially when Anise finally raised the child’s right arm from his chest and Clary held a cast-iron stewpot beneath it while Tansy—the boy’s own mother—took one of her own kitchen knives and made a single cut along the wrist. The boy flinched. Certainly Clary saw that. Probably Anise did, too, and she must have worried that she had either mixed the sedative improperly or—fearful of killing the child with an overdose—given him too little. But the boy did not awaken. At least not yet. Sawyer Dunmore awoke only after Anise and Sage had both observed aloud that the slice had been neither deep enough nor long enough and already the coagulants were starting to stem the tide. They needed far more than a few drops of blood; this wasn’t homeopathy, after all. They needed enough blood to reduce it like a sauce with the ashwagandha and eternium. And though Tansy paused with the knife at her side, summoning the courage and deciding whether she was indeed capable of cutting her own child a second time—and making this gash far more pronounced—she didn’t pause long. Had she been tranquilized, too? Clary didn’t know and so Reseda didn’t know. Clary had never been sure whether the stupor that initially had enveloped Tansy Dunmore like a shawl and made her eyes less animated than the rest of the herbalists—all of whom were electrified by the idea that finally they were preparing this particular tincture, the one that demanded the blood of a traumatized, prepubescent twin—was the result of massive doses of passionflower and schisandra or unease at the reality that she was slashing her own child’s wrist. Regardless, she raised the knife once more and this time made the cut deeper and longer and, intentionally or not, she ran the knife lengthwise along the ulnar artery, rather than across it, and blood geysered up into the air, a punctured hose with the spigot on full, and the boy awoke. He screamed and struggled to sit up, but Peyton Messner and John Hardin were there before he could, the two men pressing the boy’s shoulders back against the altar. But Sawyer fought hard for his life, and his cries pulled Tansy from the somnambulance that had allowed her to forget for a period who she was and what she was doing to her own son. She lashed out at Peyton and John, and managed to tear the sleeve from John’s robe, but Clary dropped the heavy pot—spilling the little blood they had collected onto the dirt floor of the greenhouse, where it disappeared into the earth—and she and Anise together clenched Tansy’s arm and pushed her away from her son and then onto the ground. But Tansy heard Sawyer crying as he bled out (and he really did bleed out very, very quickly), and she wailed his name over and over. The adults might have saved the boy’s life if they hadn’t been working at cross-purposes: Peyton was hoping to stop the bleeding, trying to press the cloth from the cuff of his robe against the deep gash, but Anise and John were squeezing the child’s forearm, trying to keep the vein open. Moreover, at some point someone had toppled one of the candles and set Anise’s long sleeve on fire, badly burning her arm before she was able to smother it. She seemed oblivious to the pain, but the small blaze only added to the distraction. Still, Clary eventually managed to right the cauldron and capture Sawyer Dunmore’s blood as it flowed and flowed, puddling in the bottom of the cast-iron pot and saturating John’s and Anise’s robes.

  Meanwhile the boy cried out for his mother until he grew too weak and the mother screamed for her son and their pleas were unbearable.

  When the boy was dead and the adults saw what they had done, they brought him home and placed him in a bathtub and allowed the world to believe his death was a suicide. The blood, they forever insisted, had turned the water salmon pink and then disappeared when they opened the drain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  You know that Emily has doubts that the dead from 1611 have attached themselves to you, but she has convinced herself that because you believe this is the case, perhaps Reseda’s little New Age ritual (and, in her mind, there is nothing sillier than a little New Age ritual) will help you. In her opinion, it can’t possibly make your mental illness any worse. You, however, have absolutely no doubts that you are—to use Reseda’s word—possessed. And, because you have faith in Reseda, you agree to the depossession, confident that this is indeed more than a little New Age ritual, in terms of both the likelihood of its effectiveness and the upheaval it will cause in your soul. Your (and this is a new word for you in this context) aura. Reseda has made the depossession sound troubling for a great many reasons, but largely because she has warned you that while under hypnosis you may relive the crash.

  “Can we make the outcome a little more promising?” you ask, hoping to lighten the moment, but she answers that the end will be every bit as terrifying.

  “I was never terrified,” you correct her.

  “Then you won’t be now,” she says. “Your passengers, however, might be. The outcome will be the same, because it’s all you know of the experience and it’s all they know of the experience. It’s what happened.”

  “How long will I be hypnotized?”

  “Until everyone inside you has left.”

  Emily rubs at her upper arms as if she is cold. “And there’s no danger?” she asks again.

  “The spirits represent a danger to others while they have access to your husband—and they may represent a danger to him. But I think the element of the actual depossession that is most dangerous will be the effect on your husband of experiencing the crash once again. But he says he’ll be fine,” Reseda explains, and then she turns her gaze upon you, gauging your reaction. You shrug. Yes, you’ll be fine.

  And so tonight when the girls are asleep you will go to Reseda’s. There, in the midst of the statuary and the plants in her greenhouse, a small world where, she insists, she is strongest and most persuasive, she will attempt to drive out the dead. Or, as she puts it, drive them home. It may all be over in an hour, but it may also take all night. When the Santa Fe shaman performed the depossession on her, liberating her twin sister, it had taken no more than forty-five minutes (though at the time, Reseda says, it felt as if it were taking all night). Twice before when Reseda herself has performed depossessions, once on a firefighter who was saddled with the dead from a house fire—an angry teen boy and his father, a man who had placed the very space heate
r in his son’s bedroom that would cause the electrical blaze—and once on Holly, who was coping with the dead from a car accident she had witnessed, it had taken hours. Reseda suggested this was because there had been multiple spirits trying to cohabit with the living. But she will take whatever time is needed.

  “Is this an exorcism?” Emily asks as she walks the woman to the front door of your house.

  “I don’t believe so,” Reseda replies.

  “You don’t believe so?” Emily says, unable or unwilling to mask the bewilderment in her voice.

  But Reseda merely shakes her head. “An exorcism would suggest that your husband has been possessed by demons. I’m not sure I believe in demons.” Then she smiles ever so slightly and adds, “I try not ever to be too sure of anything.”

  As she speaks, you feel the throbbing in your head and understand that, at the very least, Ethan is listening. Perhaps Sandra and Ashley are, too. You have the distinct sense that Ethan is not going to leave quietly. He may not be a demon in any literal sense, but having to watch his daughter’s unquenchable loneliness in the purgatory he shares with her—a three-story Victorian to most of the living—has turned his anger to madness and made him by any definition more than a little demonic.

  Emily put down the book she was reading—staring distractedly at words, she thought, because she was assimilating nothing—and leaned back in the blue easy chair in the living room. She contemplated what Reseda had said about her husband and then about the other herbalists. Early on, she had sensed a certain remoteness between Reseda and Anise, and today the woman had confirmed her instincts. Emily didn’t focus long on whatever schism might exist between Reseda and the other women, however, because she heard something outside—something other than the wind—and she sat forward, alert. She hoped it was Chip and Reseda finally returning. This was, after all, why she was waiting up. And then the house went dark.

  For a moment, she remained perfectly still, trying—and failing—to convince herself that this was a power outage. The gusts of a fierce spring storm were rattling the windowpanes, and for all she knew there had even been thunder. Although it was only April, the weather reports had suggested there might be thunder that night. And up here on the hill, they seemed to lose power a lot, a detail of the house that neither Sheldon nor Reseda had ever mentioned. She told herself that the power would return any second, and well before it was time to get the girls out of bed and ready for school.

  But she didn’t believe that. She didn’t believe that for a moment.

  And then she thought she heard a thump, either below her in the basement or in the kitchen on the other side of the house, and she felt her heart drumming in her chest. If the cat had been alive, Emily would have attributed the sound to her. She listened intently, her feet flat on the floor in front of her rather than beneath her—the proper position for one’s feet when bracing for impact. Chip had told her that she should never put her feet below the airplane seat when a crash was imminent, because there was every chance that the seat would collapse on her ankles and crush them, making it impossible to exit the aircraft even if she survived the primary impact. Instead she would die in the firestorm that was likely to follow, choking on poisonous air or being burned beyond all but dental recognition. At the time, she had thanked him sarcastically; this was considerably more information than she needed to know. But then, of course, her very own husband’s plane would crash.

  She cleared those thoughts from her mind and tried to recall where they kept a flashlight here on the first floor; she knew there was one beside her bed upstairs. She wondered if she had something nearby that could serve as a weapon—if, dear God, she needed one. Then she heard a noise above her as well, the sound of footsteps. It was the creak of the floorboards just outside Garnet’s bedroom. Already she knew that the boards there were more likely to wheeze when you walked upon them than was the flooring on the other side of the third-floor corridor or even the half-rotted boards on the attic side. She said a small prayer that her girls were awake, that was all it was, perhaps aware that the house had lost power, and it was only their footsteps she was hearing. Then she placed the novel on the floor and climbed silently from the chair, pressing her feet into her slippers. The house felt chillier than she would have expected, and she wondered if she had transitioned from a wool nightgown to a cotton nightshirt too soon. She thought she smelled the not unpleasant aroma of the musky, softening earth and the idea crossed her mind that the front door had been opened, but she tried to reassure herself that this was unlikely. Even though the door was on the other side of the house, she was on the first floor. Wouldn’t she have heard it opening? But the sad fact was, nothing was unlikely in this old house; even its acoustics were peculiar. The truth was, she should worry. She should be terrified. For all she knew, Garnet had opened the front door and was out in the greenhouse or the meadow right now. Once before the girl had wandered into the cellar in the middle of the night; what was to prevent something from drawing her outside now?

  Emily didn’t like the way her mind had phrased that: something drawing her outside. It sounded either conspiratorial or suggestive of a belief that the house was haunted. Which it wasn’t. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Reseda did. Her husband did—at least he did now. But she did not. The issues dogging her family were mental illness and seizures and a group of neighbors who were either well intentioned but sociopathically intrusive or less well intentioned and interested in her daughters in a way that was delusional and macabre. Neither possibility seemed inconceivable to her. She hoped she had simply failed to lock the front door before settling in the chair to await Chip’s return, and one of those northeaster-like squalls she was hearing now had blown the door open.

  After rooting around the kitchen in the dark, feeling her way across the room with her fingertips, she finally found the heavy metal flashlight. It was too long for most of the drawers and so stood upright like a column in a crevice between the Sheetrock and the side of the refrigerator. Then Emily went to the entry hallway and her heart sank: The front door was wide open and the glass storm door was an inch or two ajar, prevented from swinging shut because the entry mat was bunched up beneath it and serving as a doorstop. Some of the downpour was whipping into the hallway, and the frame looked to Emily like the side of a shower stall. She leaned outside into the pelting rain and waved her flashlight haphazardly, unsure precisely what she hoped to accomplish but starting to panic. Although it probably wasn’t much below forty degrees outside, the rain felt almost like ice when she pushed open the glass door and called out loudly into the dark—her voice filled with tears that she hadn’t even realized had started welling up in her eyes—“Garnet? Hallie? Girls?” But her words were lost to the storm well before they reached the greenhouse and the slope of the hill. She saw the greenhouse was dark.

  Still, she cried out her girls’ names once again, only then remembering that she had heard at least one of them upstairs on the third floor. She tried to convince herself that they both were there and she was becoming hysterical for naught. Any moment one was going to appear at the top of the stairs, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and asking why in the world she was screaming their names into the night and whether she thought the power would come back on soon. Still, Emily shut both doors and raced up the stairs herself, taking them two at a time.

  She stood on the second floor a long moment, not sure whether she should be frustrated or relieved that now the house was quiet; she was aware mostly of the smell of mud and the chill in the air. In one of the empty guest bedrooms at the top of the stairs, her flashlight beam caught a pile of rags on the top of the stepladder, and for a split second a rope of cloth had resembled a cat’s tail and she screamed, terrified at the idea that Desdemona was back from the dead.

  “Girls? Hallie? Garnet?” she shrieked again. She tripped as she started up the thin steps to the third floor and fell forward, cutting open the palm of her hand on a jagged sliver of wood when she landed. Then she shone h
er flashlight into Hallie’s room and saw no trace of her daughter; nor was either of the girls in Garnet’s room. The beds clearly had both been slept in—she felt Garnet’s sheets and they were still warm—but otherwise the twins had vanished into the night. And so, once again, she howled out their names, knowing she couldn’t even call 9-1-1 on the telephone because the electricity was gone and this horrible house on this nightmarish little mountain had absolutely no cell phone coverage at all.

  Garnet had only told Hallie about the hole in the wall. She hadn’t yet told their mother, and neither had Hallie. But when Garnet smelled the cold, outside air wafting up the stairs she sat up in bed, fully awake, and she thought of the passage. She couldn’t have said what had awakened her. And while she wasn’t positive that she was hearing footsteps—they were largely muffled by the rain on the roof and the sudden way the wind would rattle the storm windows—she was confident that someone other than her parents and Hallie was inside the house. And so she tiptoed into her sister’s bedroom.

  “Someone’s downstairs,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, Mom,” said Hallie, and she sat up on her elbows in her bed, her hair wild with sleep. “And maybe Dad’s back.” Neither she nor Hallie knew precisely where their father had gone, but at dinner Dad had said he was going to a meeting that night and probably wouldn’t be home until after they were asleep. They guessed that it had something to do with the depression and strangeness that had marked him since Flight 1611 crashed, but what that meant precisely neither could say.

  “I don’t think so,” Garnet said.

  “What?”

  “It’s someone else. I think we should go hide.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! Just till we know. We could hide in the attic. Through that hole in the wall. It’s there for a reason.”

  “The attic scares me,” Hallie said, a rare quiver in her voice.