The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [10]
It was only on their third afternoon there, when Chip Linton descended the basement steps with their first ever load of laundry in their new home, that he would sense something from the corner of his eye and turn toward it, realizing as the hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle that behind all that coal in the corner was a door.
Chapter One
You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS painted in billboard-size letters along the side. You recognize it as Burlington’s runway 33, facing to the northwest. When your first officer lifts your plane off the ground, you know there will be a slight bump in about eight or nine seconds as you rise up and cross over the ravine churned out by the Winooski River. There is always a slight updraft there, even on a muggy afternoon such as today’s. The sun has begun its descent in the west but is still high above the Adirondacks.
Already, however, you feel yourself sweating, and so you know on some level this must be a dream. But, unfortunately, you don’t know how to wake yourself up. No idea. Emily, your wife, can do that, but not you. Still, you wouldn’t be sweating unless this were a dream because in reality you never broke a sweat when you were flying. Why would you? And if it is a dream—that dream—you know what’s next. Your heart starts pummeling your ribs even before they appear. And then there they are. The geese. You are upon them or they are upon you. Doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere between two and two and a half thousand feet above the ground, and there are the Bonnie and Clyde–like machine-gun blasts as you plow through them. (Why Bonnie and Clyde? You’re unclear on this, too, but your therapist has told you with a smile what an odd place the unconscious world is. And so it is Bonnie and Clyde’s Browning automatic rifles that you think of when you think of that sound.) Your engines will go—one in flames, one with grinding, steel-cutting-steel immolation, in both cases the nine-, ten-, even eleven-pound birds displacing the compressor blades and sending them spinning like shrapnel through the engines—although your forward thrust will bring you to about twenty-five hundred feet before you will begin your glide and start to lose altitude.
By then, of course, it is your plane. At least it was in reality. You had taken the controls.
So why is it now that it isn’t—why is it that you aren’t flying the jet? In this strange, dreamy version, no one is flying the aircraft, not even Amy Lynch, your first officer. Instead, the jet is immobile in the air, as if teetering on a high wire or balanced on its belly on the top of a great triangular obelisk. And then it becomes—and here is that expression a friend of yours who is in the Air National Guard and flies F-16s uses to convey his own fighter’s absolute lack of glide prowess—a lawn dart. The nose turns down, straight down, still well east of the lake, and you are looking down at trees and grass and death in the sort of cataclysmic fireball after which only small fragments of body are ever recovered and identified. A finger with a wedding band. A foot as far as an ankle, still strangely wearing a black Converse sneaker. A quarter of a jaw with a few bottom teeth.
Only then do you wake up. Apparently, you really can’t die in a plane crash in your dreams. A myth proves accurate. You find yourself cradled in Emily’s arms in the small hours of the night, your whole body wet with sweat and your heart that relentless jackhammer.
When your Philadelphia therapist refers to this as a flashback, you wonder if you should correct her. It’s a nightmare, not a flashback. In reality, you didn’t actually auger into the ground.
They decided they would take a break from the