The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [0]
Novels
The Night Strangers (2011)
Secrets of Eden (2010)
Skeletons at the Feast (2008)
The Double Bind (2007)
Before You Know Kindness (2004)
The Buffalo Soldier (2002)
Trans-Sister Radio (2000)
The Law of Similars (1998)
Midwives (1997)
Water Witches (1995)
Past the Bleachers (1992)
Hangman (1991)
A Killing in the Real World (1988)
Essay Collections
Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town (2003)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Chris Bohjalian
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bohjalian, Christopher A.
The night strangers : a novel / Chris Bohjalian.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Air pilots—Fiction. 2. Herbalists—Fiction. 3. Twins—Fiction. 4. Domestic
fiction. 5. New Hampshire—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.O495N54 2011
813′.54—dc22 2010045401
eISBN: 978-0-307-88886-0
Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photography © Robert Norbury/Millennium Images, UK
v3.1
For Shaye Areheart and Jane Gelfman
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part II
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part III
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part IV
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello
Dead … might not be quiet at all.
MARSHA NORMAN, ’night, Mother
Prologue
The door was presumed to have been the entry to a coal chute, a perfectly reasonable assumption since a small hillock of damp coal sat moldering before it. It was a little under five feet in height and just about four feet wide, and it was composed of barnboard and thick pieces of rough-hewn timber. Its most distinguishing feature was not its peculiarly squat visage—and if a person were predisposed to see such things in the dim light of the basement, the knobs on the wood and the character of the planking did suggest the vague shadow of a face—but the fact that at some point someone had sealed the door shut with six-inch-long wrought-iron carriage bolts. Thirty-nine of them ringed the wood and it was all but impenetrable, unless one were feeling energetic and had handy an ax. The door glowered in an especially dank corner of the basement, and the floor before it was dirt. The fact was, however, that most of the basement floor was dirt; only the concrete island on which sat the washing machine, the dryer, the furnace, and the hot-water tank was not dirt. When most prospective buyers inspected the house, this was their principal concern: a floor that seemed equal parts clay and loam. That was what caused them to nod, their minds immediately envisioning runnels of water during spring thaws and the mud that could be brought upstairs every time they did laundry or descended there to retrieve (perhaps) a new lightbulb or a hammer. It was a lot of largely wasted square footage, because the footprint of the house above it was substantial. As a result, the door was rarely noticed and never commented upon.
Still, the basement walls were stone and the foundation was sturdy. It capably shouldered three stories of Victorian heft: the elegant gingerbread trim along three different porches, which in the greater scheme of things weighed next to nothing, as well as the stout beams that weighed