The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  “It’s just dusty and cold,” Garnet reassured her. “That’s all.”

  She could tell that Hallie was starting to think about this, and then they both heard a small thud in the dark two floors below them and her sister crinkled her nose. Hallie, too, was smelling the cool, damp air. “Maybe that was Mom,” she whispered, but it was clear that she wasn’t confident.

  “Come on,” Garnet urged her, and Hallie nodded and climbed from her bed. For one of the few times in the sisters’ lives, she followed her redheaded twin. The girls returned to Garnet’s bedroom, where Garnet pushed her bureau a few inches toward the window and then knelt and pulled open the door to the passageway. She pushed Hallie through it first and then followed her sister into the dark of the attic. As she was on her stomach on the attic floor, pulling the door back into its slot with the twine so it would disappear into the wallpaper, she could feel the vibrations of someone—some people, she thought—walking just a few feet away on the other side. Then, somewhere far off, she heard her mother calling out both her and her sister’s names. She didn’t believe the people in her bedroom were friends; she didn’t believe her mother even knew they were there. She wished there was a way she could warn her.

  You are surrounded by the sounds of the chimes. Here they are once again, the relentless tweets and rings you heard (but only vaguely at the time) in the cockpit as Flight 1611 descended inexorably back to earth. They are meant to alert you that the ground is rising up toward the aircraft. As if you don’t know. As if you need a synthetic voice urging you to “pull up, pull up, pull up.” Or another one informing you that you are too low, too low, too low. That there is terrain. You know as well as anyone that there is terrain, as the small boats on the lake grow more distinct and the forests on the foothills of the Adirondacks on the New York side of the water come into focus and suddenly seem to be higher than the wings of your plane. And yet somehow you and Amy Lynch remained more focused than you would have thought possible when you listened to the cockpit voice recordings with the NTSB. Somehow, despite the noise from the automated warning systems and the radio traffic that filled your small space at the front of the doomed aircraft, you worked the problem until, it seemed, you had solved it. And then there was that wave from the ferry and you were done.

  Now it is all back, including the chimes. It is all before you once more, including the sound of Amy’s voice, an unmistakable but absolutely understandable tremor coursing through each syllable. But like you, she worked the problem. She skimmed through the emergency handbook, she tried to reignite the engines, she implemented the ditching procedures.

  You couldn’t save her.

  Now you try to open your eyes, but you can’t, and it takes you a long moment to recall where you are. Slowly the details of the pentagonal greenhouse become clear in your mind’s eye, despite the strange mugginess that has engulfed you. You wonder what was in the sweet tea you drank and then the bitter tincture you swallowed immediately after it in two great spoonfuls. The greenhouse had been illuminated by long rows of grow lights, and at one point it was so bright that you found yourself squinting as your eyes adjusted. You remember turning your head and gazing at Baphomet, at his beard and his wings, and you inhaled what you thought was incense. Your fingertips felt for the edge of the gurney. No, it wasn’t a gurney. Nor was it a massage table. It was a long, antique pumpkin pine table, on which the plants had been replaced with a futon.

  You sigh. You decide that what you just experienced of Flight 1611 was a dream, not a flashback. This distinction seems to matter, even now.

  “Where is Sandra?”

  You turn your head the other way—at least you believe you do—toward the sound of Reseda’s voice, and you have the sense that Holly is standing beside her. Perhaps it is the aroma of lilacs that reminds you Holly is assisting Reseda. Doesn’t the woman always smell slightly of lilacs? You cannot recall what the three of you might have discussed when Reseda was steeping that strange tea in the kitchen. When you first lay down here in the greenhouse, over Holly’s shoulder was a pipe with hanging plants, the leaves of which were shaped like Valentine hearts; the colors were an orange and a purple more vibrant than your twins’ Magic Markers.

  “Where is Sandra?” Reseda asks again.

  You try to find your voice, to tell her you don’t know, you don’t feel the specific pain you associate with Sandra’s presence, when out of nowhere you hear her. You hear Sandra. You hear her with the same perfect clarity that you heard her that first time she spoke to you in your basement.

  Here, she says simply.

  “When did you join the captain?” Reseda asks, and you realize that Reseda heard her voice, too. Or did she hear yours? You have read about out-of-body experiences and you long for one now. You want to be both in and above that former pilot on the pumpkin pine table, because you want to witness this. You want to see where Sandra is standing this second. Is she visible to the two other women?

  I don’t know, she is telling Reseda, but I think I joined him in the water. I couldn’t breathe.

  You try to sit up, to find her. But you can’t. You recall the mind-altering crumpets infused with God-alone-knows-what that Anise and Valerian had been feeding you and start to panic that now Reseda and Holly have paralyzed you from the neck down. Is this, you wonder, what it is like to be hypnotized? Or is this something else entirely?

  “Shhhh, you’re not paralyzed,” Reseda says. “Don’t struggle. Let Sandra speak.”

  You try to relax, at least a little. Do you nod? You believe that you do, but, again, you are not completely sure. No matter. No … matter.

  Reseda runs a clay pestle under your nose with a shallow puddle of hot oil bubbling inside it, and you inhale what might be juniper. Then Holly—yes, you can hear her and sense her—is lining the head of the table, just beyond the futon, with burning votives. Each time she places one on the pine, Reseda dips her fingers into the hot wax and presses a single drop onto your forehead and murmurs a name you recognize from the passenger manifest. The sensation is not unpleasant, and you wonder if she will do it forty-eight times. She stops at twelve, however, listing the names of the nine survivors (including yours) and the names of the three people who died but have attached themselves to you. The melting wax in the votives is flecked with aromatic herbs, but the scent is unfamiliar to you. Again she asks Sandra a question, and you are listening to the woman’s response when suddenly there is the water from Lake Champlain that awful August afternoon starting to wash over you in a single great wave. And so you take a deep breath, your cheeks ballooning like a toddler’s, though the air in those pockets is largely irrelevant. And then, before you know it, you are upside down and the lake water is in your nose, the pain stinging, and you are desperate for air, desperate. When you open your eyes to see where you are, you are completely underwater. It happened that fast—the blink of an eye. You are vaguely aware of the blue leather on the seat ahead of you, of slick emergency information cards, glossy in-flight magazines, digital reading devices, and paperback books floating amidst the bubbles like tropical fish, and the way the fuselage is falling, falling, falling through the lake. You see the wide-open eyes of the young businessman in the brown suit, his hair floating up in the water like saw grass, his arms frantically lashing out as he tries to swim. Then he turns away, kicking you with his wingtip shoe. You release your seat belt—not a five-point shoulder harness, a mere steel buckle linking a thick nylon ribbon—and abruptly the eddies of whooshing water slam you hard into first an armrest and next the jagged floor of the jet, which somehow is above you. You probably would have been forced by the pain in your chest to open your mouth in another second anyway, but when the side of your head is cleavered by whatever is protruding from the floor, reflexively your lips part into a wide, silent O, and the lake water pours in, and your throat spasms shut—the laryngeal cords trying desperately to keep all that water out of your lungs. It is an agony more pronounced than anything you have experienced in your
life or, now, ever will. And it seems to last an eternity. You want this over, you want to die now rather than in minutes—because you are conscious of the reality that you are indeed going to perish, there will be no miracle—but it takes time for the brain to black out. The last thing you see before the pain and terror and whiteness obliterates all thought? The white shirt of, you believe, the captain of the aircraft.

  The idea crossed Emily’s mind to get in the car and drive for help, but that would demand that she stop searching for her girls. And because there didn’t seem to be a strange vehicle on the property now and she hadn’t heard one earlier, she told herself that the girls were somewhere nearby. They had to be. And so she raced downstairs and screamed once more for Hallie and Garnet, shouting their names into the storm from the front hallway, the screams desperate, biblical wails that made her throat hurt. Only when her voice had grown hoarse did she finally grab her keys and run for her car, stumbling once on the slate walkway and feeling the sting acutely on the hand that already was cut. But it barely slowed her. She was hysterical and she didn’t care. She climbed into her car and switched on the headlights and the wipers and was just about to throw the Volvo into reverse and glance behind her when she saw it. She saw it for just a fleeting second, and she saw it only because the car had been facing the greenhouse and all that glass acted like a mirror, causing her to look away from the solarlike luminescence of the vehicle’s headlights. She flinched and reflexively turned to her left, back toward the house. And in a window on the second floor, the guest room down the corridor from her and Chip’s bedroom, she saw the halo from a flashlight. It moved briefly but clearly, and she was reminded of the massive fog lights that would cut through the mist at airports. It was that distinct. And then it was gone.

  An idea crossed her mind, cryptic but meaningful: This was why Tansy Dunmore had kept a small arsenal hidden throughout the house. This explained the crowbar, the knife, and the ax.

  Well, she had weapons, too. She had knives. In the kitchen.

  For a moment she watched the wipers and tried to think. If someone was in the house right now, they had known she was there, too, because of the way she had been frantically screaming and searching for her girls. But they had left her alone. They hadn’t hurt her. They hadn’t drugged or sedated her. Apparently, they hadn’t even been interested in her. They had only been interested in her children: It was Hallie and Garnet they wanted. And if someone was still inside her home, then perhaps her girls had hidden themselves somewhere in the house or in the woods and hadn’t been discovered yet.

  And so she kept the car running and the headlights on, figuring that whoever was inside might presume for a few more seconds that she was still in the vehicle. At the same time, if she could find the twins, they could race into the station wagon and speed off the property. Leave this despicable house and this despicable town … forever. So she closed the car door as softly as she could and ran back through the rain into the house.

  A thought crossed her mind: I am like a firefighter. I am running into a burning building. But it passed quickly as she tried to imagine where her girls might be hiding.

  Far below them, Hallie and Garnet saw the station wagon headlights bounce against the greenhouse and then watched their mother emerge from the car, barely shutting the door as she returned to the house. They had been sitting absolutely still, curled into small balls, when the strangers were just across the wall from them in Garnet’s bedroom, barely daring to exhale until they heard the sounds move away from them into Hallie’s bedroom and then down the stairs to the second floor. Only then had they stood up and moved to the window, where they waited now, surveying the world below them.

  “They’re in the guest room,” Garnet murmured.

  “I know,” Hallie agreed. “I hear them.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How many are there?”

  “I don’t know. Two, I think. But maybe three,” Hallie answered. The attic floorboards were cold and her toes were starting to freeze.

  “I was hoping it was just one person,” Garnet said. Then: “Think they’ll hurt Mom if they catch her?”

  “They haven’t yet.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “It must be us who they want,” Hallie said. “I think they want to kidnap us.”

  Garnet thought about this, and she realized something she should have understood earlier—the moment she had heard the strangers inside the house. “No, that’s not it,” she said. “It’s not like they’re strangers who want to kidnap us for money. It’s Anise.”

  “What?”

  “Well, maybe not Anise herself. I don’t know. But it’s the plant ladies. They’ve come for us. I know it.”

  “Then why wouldn’t they have just taken us any of the times we’ve been at their houses or greenhouses—or when they’ve been over here in the past? And why would they come in the middle of the night? Why would they be sneaking around? There aren’t any other cars outside.”

  “I don’t know. But we can’t just stay up here if Mom’s looking for us downstairs,” Garnet said, and she heard her voice growing a little more urgent. Hallie pushed a finger against her lips to shush her. “We have to help her,” Garnet whispered. “We have to do something.”

  They could no longer feel anyone moving anywhere inside the house: not the strangers in the guest bedroom below them or their mother in some other corner or on the stairs. The house went absolutely still. And so for a moment they both stood where they were, staring out the attic window at the storm and contemplating what they should do. Just then the trapdoor was yanked open from the second floor and a flashlight beam rose like a waterspout into the attic.

  This time, the captain’s white shirt starts to fall away. Or, to be precise, you fall away. You drift, swaying as if the wrecked fuselage of the jet were a hammock, rocking you, as you and the others descend toward the muddy bottom of Lake Champlain, your back against the aircraft aisle floor. Once before you grabbed that white shirt and clung to it. Not this time. Someone in the distance is calling to you. Urging you to go home. Someone else—your grandfather—is leaning against his vintage white Mustang with the black vinyl hardtop. Tony the Pony he called that car, and you would laugh and sink deep into the vehicle’s red leather seats. You sat on his lap when you were a little girl in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and other times you would sit beside him on the couch when he would read to you, while your grandmother sat near you both, doing her crewelwork. Their home often had the welcoming aroma of your grandmother’s homemade Swedish meatballs or, as Christmas neared, her holiday sugar cookies. After your grandfather retired, he played an organ at Macy’s in the weeks before Christmas. That was how he would spend his Decembers: playing Christmas carols. He died in his sleep when you were in the second grade, and you cried at his funeral—the first you ever attended—but he and his Mustang are considerably closer to you now than that other voice, the woman encouraging you to go home. Soon that captain’s shirt is above you, far above you and growing small, and then it is gone completely and all that remains is blackness and the beckoning sound of the department store organ.

  Emily had switched off her flashlight and now held it against her thigh like a club. She pressed herself flat against the kitchen wall beside the pantry and waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. She held her breath and listened, trying to hear or feel movement anywhere in the house, but heard and felt nothing. When she could make out the details of the kitchen more exactly, she gazed at the counter with the wooden block with the knives. She couldn’t tell if they all were there, but she saw at least three long handles, and so she knew the most dangerous ones were still in place. She moved quietly across the kitchen and pulled out the carving knife. Then she paused once more, waiting. Above her she thought she heard the groan of the trapdoor to the attic—a prolonged creaking that accompanied the descent of the stairs—but she wasn’t sure. It might simply have been the house shuddering
in the wind. She considered taking her knife and going straight up the stairs and challenging whoever was there—assuming someone had indeed just opened the door to the attic—but even if she made it to the second-floor landing without being heard, she would lose all surprise when she ran down the corridor toward the trapdoor. She needed another approach.

  And the answer, she realized, was that bizarre back stairway at the other end of the kitchen. She almost never used it. She had ascended it exactly two times since they had moved in—the second time only because Chip wanted to show her how he’d replaced the worst of the steps—but it was still windowless, unlit, and too thin to be of practical use if you were carrying anything of any size. It still felt half-finished. But now it might offer the element of surprise, and so silently she opened the door and started up those steps, the flashlight in her left hand and the carving knife in her right.

  The primary impact rarely kills everyone in a plane crash. This is especially true in the case of a planned water ditching. Reseda recalled Chip telling her in a voice that was almost numbingly clinical that underwater disorientation, drowning, disorderly evacuation, and injuries from not bracing properly were what killed many people, and Flight 1611 was tragically typical in that regard. Moreover, he feared it was likely that some passengers had an unreasonable faith that they would walk away from the disaster as easily as had the passengers on Flight 1549, Sully Sullenberger’s successful ditching of an Airbus in the Hudson River, and those individuals may not even have braced properly. They had, he presumed, been staring enrapt out the windows, as if this were a mere carnival ride.

  He had no idea whether Ashley Stearns had braced properly, he said, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered: If Sandra Durant was one of those who did not die on primary impact, then Ashley was one of those who did. Compared to Sandra, she was fortunate, in that her death was almost instant. From what Reseda could see in Chip’s mind and from what he had told her of his encounters with the child, the girl had been all but cut in half—imagine a guillotine blade slicing through the abdomen—by a part of the aircraft when it finished its somersault and slammed upside down into the lake. Based on the airline’s colors and the portion of logo Chip could see on the metal, he had presumed it was either a part of the rear fuselage or a piece of the vertical stabilizer. There was so much more that he could have told her, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to. He didn’t have to tell her of the child’s eyes, open but listless, the light of the living there gone, because she saw the girl in his mind. Ashley’s skin was waxen, a ghost’s right away. The gaping wound—chasmlike, the great, triangular shard ripping through muscle, intestine, and kidney (the blood and urine rising amidst the bubbles like ribbons), until finally it severed even the vertebrae and spinal cord—reminded her of a painting she’d seen once in a San Gimignano torture museum of a specific medieval form of execution: A person would be suspended upside down so there would be as much blood flowing to the brain as possible, and thus the victim would remain conscious through far more of the agony. The heretic’s or prisoner’s ankles would be bound to separate posts to shape the body into a Y. Then he would be cut in half with a two-person saw, the blade starting in the groin and slicing first through the perineum. The difference for Ashley? She had been killed in a heartbeat. Thank God.