The Night Strangers

by Chris Bohjalian

  “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?

  “Where is Emily?” she asked.

  Anise nodded toward the rear of the greenhouse. The woman was sitting in a wooden chair, slumped over, with Alexander standing behind her, his hands resting heavily on her shoulders. She stared at John, reading him, and saw in his mind what had occurred a few moments earlier: She saw Alexander throwing Emily to the ground and knocking her unconscious for a brief moment. The girls’ mother was still stunned. John looked away, but before he did Reseda thought she saw also what had happened to Michael Richmond last month: She hadn’t seen John’s entire recollection, but she saw that the old lawyer had used the very same knife on the psychiatrist that Anise was about to use to slice open a little girl’s arm.

  “You can’t do this,” she said, speaking to everyone and to no one. She knew in her heart that they weren’t going to listen.

  “Enough!” Anise told her. “This is not your decision. It’s ours.” And then she took the boline and scored the child’s arm from her elbow to her wrist, flaying the skin and allowing it to dangle over the cauldron as the blood spurted like a water fountain—Sage Messner, who had been helping to restrain the girl, dunked her mouth into the stream and swallowed a mouthful voraciously—before slowing to a steady rivulet.

  “Blood meets seed!” Anise declared.

  “And seed meets soul!” the herbalists raved.

  And then as one they edged ever closer. The child was so drugged that she only looked down at her arm, a little curious as her blood trickled into the cauldron, but clearly she had felt very little pain. Still, Reseda rushed forward and wrestled the girl from Sage and Ginger’s grip, pushing the child’s thin arm into a V to try to stop the bleeding. But it was doing nothing, nothing at all. She needed a trauma dressing and stitches. Eventually, the child’s knees would buckle and she’d collapse onto the greenhouse floor. Still, Reseda wrapped her own arms around her, trying to protect her, as the circle of herbalists closed in upon the two of them.

  “You’re killing her,” she said to them. “You’re killing a child.”

  “Give her back to us, Reseda,” John demanded. “You know you can’t stop us. We’re going to finish this. Besides,” he wavered, his voice softening, “you’re one of us. You’re a part of us. You know that, too.”

  They had, she realized, become animals. They were selfish, insatiable, violent animals. They needed blood, and they needed enough for all of them. She wasn’t going to be able to reason with them. Nevertheless, she said, “I’m not one of you. I was once. But I’m not part of this.”

  “Reseda, really. The child is losing blood fast and it’s being wasted. Wasted! You’re a New Englander, how can you abide that? Besides: The more she loses now, the less she’ll have when we’re finished and the less chance she’ll have of—to use a term you’re fond of—going home.”

  Anise was still holding the dagger, and so Reseda looked around for another weapon, her eyes scanning the tables and the floor of the greenhouse. On a wooden bench in the corner near her were a pair of one-handed garden clippers. There were shears just like them, it seemed, on most of the tables. The safety was open, which meant the clippers were splayed into a slender Y, ready to harvest herbs or trim dying leaves. With one thrust she could slam them into either John’s or Anise’s eyes, certainly blinding them and—if she drove the blades hard enough into the brain—in all likelihood killing them. The problem, of course, was that there were far more herbalists around her than only Anise and John. They would swarm upon her the moment she attacked either of their leaders, and she knew well how ruthless they could be.

  Besides, she wasn’t built that way; she didn’t believe that she was capable of lodging the steel blades of a pair of garden shears in anyone’s eyes. Not even to protect a child. And so instead she did the only thing she thought she could do. “I’m a twin, too,” she reminded them.

  “Yes, of course, you are. But you are also rather—and you’ll forgive me if this sounds ageist—old for our purposes,” John told her, his voice knowing and smug. “The tincture demands the blood of a prepubescent twin.”

  “And you have some,” she went on, nodding at the cauldron. “You already have a lot. I know the recipe. Use what you’ve harvested from the child and then supplement her blood with mine.”

  John turned toward Anise, his eyebrows raised.

  “We’ll need a good amount, Reseda,” Anise said, a crooked smile on her face. Reseda knew that Anise did not especially like her, but she was unprepared for how happy the woman was to augment the tincture with her blood.

  “I understand.”

  Anise nodded and turned to Clary. “Put a compress on the child’s arm,” she said. “We have plenty of her blood already.”

  Only after Reseda had watched Clary Hardin press a white hand towel against the child’s forearm for a long, quiet minute did she extend her own arm over the cauldron and allow them to roll up her sleeve and gouge a deep trench into the veins there. Anise made the incision, roughly and inexpertly, but Reseda didn’t watch. She focused instead on the moonstone at the tip of the boline handle. The cut hurt every bit as much as she’d expected.

  There they are. There are the playmates your wondrous daughter deserves, standing perhaps a dozen yards apart, separated by a cauldron, each in the arms of those self-absorbed breathers. You stand at the entrance of the greenhouse as Reseda, looking uncharacteristically shaky, stares at something far away. Her arm is held over that massive black kettle, and the blood drips like water from a rusted-out rain gutter. They have not noticed you yet because they are focused only on Reseda and the girls, and they are in the midst of a euphoric chant about seeds and souls.

  And so you charge, running across the greenhouse, oblivious to anyone and anything but the idea that Ashley will no longer be alone. But before you have reached the first of the girls, there is their mother, up and before you and throwing herself into your arms.

  “My God, Chip!” she wails. “Stop them! They’re going to kill them!”

  For an instant, you recall something. Them. Garnet. Hallie. They’re going to kill your children. The instant passes, because they’re not your children. Your child is Ashley. But that still doesn’t give them or you the right to kill … anyone. The whole notion has left you muddled, confused, and you find yourself staring at the knife as if you have no idea how it got into your hands. And just as you are starting to regain a modicum of your focus and your anger smothers your momentary befuddlement, the men in the robes—some, it seems, very old yet strangely strong—have a hold of your arms and the knife, and the greenhouse is filled with their admonishments to
drop it, to stop struggling, to be still. You cry out against them, but there are so many and they are so forceful that they are able to pry the knife from your fingers. Your eyes rest on the women on the far side of the cauldron, and they stare at you, even Reseda, whose complexion is growing pale—as if the color is literally draining from her face and streaming into the cauldron. She murmurs, “Bring him to me,” and you are pushed forward so aggressively that only your toes are touching the greenhouse floor. She looks deep into your eyes across the black kettle and says, “I am telling you, she is gone. Your daughter is no longer here.”

  She has said this before, and she will say it again. She will—

  “I am telling you, your daughter is fine—but she needs you.”

  She does need you. You are sure of this. A pitchfork leans against a glass wall, and the moment you spy it you rear up, bellowing like a wounded animal and breaking free from these old men. You grab it with both hands and jab at the crowd as they surround you. Once more you focus upon the children, standing a little stupefied with two of the older herbalists and their mother. And so you charge, the pitchfork a bayonet in your mind, only to be restrained again by the men and women in their robes. Their hands are everywhere upon your shoulders and waist and arms, and they are wrestling the pitchfork from your grip. And then abruptly they stop. You follow their eyes, but it must have happened so quickly that you are not precisely sure what occurred. Still, it appears that Anise and Reseda have collided and fallen to the ground as they tried to get out of your way. Or, perhaps, Reseda pulled Anise out of the way, trying to shield her, and the two women tumbled in a heap onto the greenhouse floor. Either way, when Reseda looks up at you, her face is oddly vacant. Almost bewildered. And then you understand why, as Anise is repeating “No, no, no!” over and over. Reseda’s blouse is black with her blood, and extending from that beautiful, swanlike neck is the long, elegant handle of the boline. When she fell, she fell on Anise’s hand and impaled herself on the knife.

  “It was an accident, I swear!” Anise cries out, drawing the long blade from Reseda’s neck as if she is prying a carrot from soil, and a geyser of blood sprays the two herbalists in the face. Then, ever so slowly because Anise is trying to pull her up by her shoulders—as if she believes that so long as Reseda is sitting upright the woman will live—Reseda chokes out one last rivulet of blood and collapses, a marionette freed from its crossbar and strings. John Hardin falls upon her, though she’s already dead, as do Ginger and Clary and Sage.

  And almost in that instant you see Reseda, alive and standing before you. She is offering you that unreadable smile, her blue eyes beckoning. She motions behind her, and there is Ashley, your beautiful daughter, the straps of her Dora the Explorer backpack looking a bit like suspenders against her summer shirt. She is grinning happily, her eyes alight, the way she did when she was beside you on the runway at Burlington International Airport and all that loomed was a fifty-five- or fifty-six-minute flight to Philadelphia. She waves. You wave back. And the moment you start toward her, all of the rage that has been burning inside you since Flight 1611 cartwheeled into the lake vanishes. You kneel before her and embrace her. Then, the sky brightening as if the sun is rising in June, you stand up and—still holding Ashley’s small hand—follow Reseda into the welcoming daylight.

  Somewhere very far behind you stands a pilot. An airline pilot. He looks a little haggard—they all look a little haggard—as one of his girls is led back to the cauldron. You hope someday there is someone back there for him, too. Someone just like Reseda.

  Epilogue

  In all the years that you have lived in Bethel, you have to admit: Clary Hardin has never looked better. And while there are some people who presume that both she and her husband, John, have on occasion resorted to chemical injections and peels that minimize lines, you know them well enough to understand that they’re just not the type. Neither is that vain. Both are wary of inorganic toxins. Verbena also looks considerably younger than her peers. Maybe she escaped the pressures of that Philadelphia law firm just in time. The two of you have a daughter in college now, but still Verbena’s hair hasn’t begun to gray. Oh, she hennas it. She likes that look, as do you. But you are confident that underneath that color not a single follicle has turned white, and this despite the crash of Flight 1611 and then the death of a child—the single worst thing that can happen to a parent—a decade ago. Verbena misses the girl. As do you. You miss her madly. You see the child in the cheekbones and the shape of the eyes of your remaining daughter, her twin, when the girl is home from college or when you visit her there.

  But somehow you and Verbena both moved on. You survived. In the end, neither of you wound up like Tansy Dunmore. Thank God. You are, clearly, a survivor. You survived a plane crash, didn’t you? Of course you did. Somehow, you survived even the stultifying guilt that had paralyzed you in the aftermath, the what-ifs, the visions, the ghosts.

  Nevertheless, for months—for over a year, until well after the anniversary of the girl’s death had passed—you had indeed been smothered by mourning; it was all you had. No, that’s not completely true. You had the herbalists and their strange concoctions and desperately needed friendship. They were constantly feeding both you and Emily. Their foods and their tinctures were what kept you both upright and functioning, their medicines were what made the memories bearable—and, then, what made the worst of the memories recede so far into the backs of your minds that it’s almost as if they never happened.

  And, yes, they needed you, too. Holly was especially devastated by her friend’s death, but even Anise and Ginger and Sage—mature enough to have seen a great many of their own friends pass away—seemed to have been scarred by the accident that took the woman’s life.

  And your daughter’s.

  “What do you think, Chip?”

  You turn toward Anise, sipping the Syrah that Peyton discovered this past February in Argentina, when he and Sage were escaping a White Mountain winter. Sage was looking for specific herbs and roots in the foothills of the Andes, while Peyton insisted he was interested only in grapes. You guess they are each at least eighty now, as are John and Clary. You will turn fifty in a month. Peyton is helping you convert what had once been a coal chute in your basement into a wine cellar. The space is ideal, a fitting spot to indulge your new passion. What else could a person put in that space but wine? It’s perfect.

  “Oh,” you answer, no longer worrying about whether you need to choose your words carefully, “I think a green thumb is just an expression. Either no one has a green thumb or everyone does. Sure, some people are destined to be ballerinas and some people, no matter how hard they work, will never be recruited by the American Ballet Theatre. But I think gardening is more like … cooking. Some people are better than others, but, with a little patience and a little practice, most people can make a pretty adequate lasagna.”

  “I disagree,” Anise says, and she reaches across the large pouf in John and Clary’s living room and squeezes your knee. You savor the hint of patchouli in her perfume tonight, and for a moment the aroma from the kitchen is lost beneath it. Rosemary. The main course is a stew of some sort, simmering right now on the stove, and you smile when you recall what Clary had said when you first arrived this evening and inhaled the delicious scent from the great copper pot: A pinch of rosemary makes everything better. “You really don’t believe that your Verbena here is such an extraordinary gardener because it’s in her blood?” Anise asks.

  “I think she’s an extraordinary gardener because you and Clary and Sage are very good teachers.”

  Verbena sips her wine, and her eyes are shining. She is wearing a black velour sweater tonight that clings to her and a string of pearls. She couldn’t, it seems to you, be more beautiful.

  “And your little girl?” Anise continues, pulling her hand back and folding her arms across her chest. She raises her eyebrows a little impishly and smirks.

  Indeed, you wonder about your little girl, though she is
no longer little. She is majoring in plant biology and minoring in anthropology. She grew up, it seems, in that greenhouse beside your home, and the communal one at the Messners’. Nevertheless, in your opinion that was more about nurture than nature—it was proximity, not genes. Had you remained in Pennsylvania, there is no reason to believe that your daughter would have wound up an aspiring botanist and herbalist. Still, the evening is too pleasant to waste energy debating whether her interest in plants was genetically inevitable or a self-fulfilling career path once you landed here in northern New Hampshire.

  “Well, she also had some exceptional teachers,” you answer simply and sip your wine. The goblet has the crest of the coven (there really is no other word for it, though they insist they are nothing but botanists of a sort), and your eyes pause on it for a brief moment. Really, what would you and your wife and your daughter have done if it had not been for these remarkable people? You contemplate this almost unthinkable what-if, as you do periodically: How much does Verbena recall about that night? Supposedly very little. The women have seen to that. Memorium. Delirium. Their magical tinctures. The car was totaled in the rainstorm. They told you it’s a miracle that Verbena survived when your daughter was killed and Reseda was all but decapitated. Celandine was the first on the scene.

  “I’d say she had miraculous teachers,” Sage purrs, saying something that sounds prosaic but you know in reality is really very profound. Then she turns to Clary and says, “Do you need any help getting supper on the table?”

  Clary rises from the sofa with the serpentine arms and nods. “You’re positively psychic,” she says, smiling at her friend, and bustles into the kitchen. Verbena—so placid at midlife, so free from anxiety, it’s as if in addition to discovering a fountain of youth in this northern New England backwater she has also found here the secret to calmness and serenity—stands up and joins the women, kissing you on the cheek as she passes. She is wearing black lace ballet flats, and you are struck by the erotic elegance of even her small feet. Have you ever been more in love? No. Clearly not.