The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [100]
“Garnet,” she said again, her voice reduced by incredulity to a stage whisper. “What are you doing down there?”
The girl looked up at her, blinked, and then rubbed at her eyes. She looked down at her feet and seemed to realize for the first time the grotesque mess in which she was standing. She jumped away from it, landing in the moist dirt of the floor, which was a marginal improvement at best. Hallie understood that her sister had just—as one of their teachers back in West Chester once put it, infuriating their mom—zoned out. She had gone into one of her trances and lost herself somewhere inside her head. Hallie feared that it might have been a full seizure, and the fact that she was having a second one so close on the heels of another alarmed her. Garnet had never before had two in a week. Moreover, until the other night, it had been a long while since she had had even one.
“Come upstairs,” Hallie said. “Get out of there and come back to bed!” she added, though she guessed that first her sister would have to run her feet under some hot water in the tub.
Instead the girl shook her head and said, “No. You have to see this first. You have to see what I found.” Then she raised her arm and pointed into that little room.
“You went in there?” Hallie asked.
“I think so. I … I don’t know.”
The last thing Hallie wanted to do was go down those stairs: It wasn’t merely the cold and the dirt and the coal on the ground there. It was the reality that she was scared. Her sister had always been able to freak her out; the idea that it was inadvertent didn’t make the sensation any less real. Still, it was clear that Garnet was not going to come upstairs until she went downstairs, and so Hallie held on to the banister and descended the steps, wondering as she went if instead she should have gone upstairs and awakened their mother. But, she decided, she didn’t want to leave her sister alone here; she wanted to retrieve her twin (and here she was surprised when she heard in her head the name Cali instead of Garnet) and get the two of them back into their beds.
“This floor is gross,” she grumbled. “It’s bad enough with shoes on. Have you gone crazy coming down here barefoot?” Her feet made soft squishing sounds as she navigated her way over to the coal.
“You’re barefoot, too,” Garnet reminded her.
“Duh. But only because I was in bed when I came to look for you.” She exhaled in exasperation.
“Look,” said her sister. “See it? I think I dug it up.” Her right hand was indeed brown with dirt, as were the knees of her pajamas.
Hallie peered in, but she didn’t see anything at first, just more dirt inside the cubicle and the wooden framing darkened by earth and coal. “What do you mean you dug it up? Dug what up?”
“That,” said Garnet simply, and the word stuck a tiny bit in her throat.
And so Hallie squinted, reflexively rubbing at her new bracelet, and she leaned in more toward the doorway. Then, a little maddened, she decided that her feet were already a mess so what did it matter if they got even dirtier, and she plowed ahead, crossing the coal and walking right up to the remnants of the hacked door. There she held on to one of the dangling boards, realizing only after she had grabbed it that she was lucky she hadn’t gotten a splinter, and gazed into the dark. And there it was, the object that Garnet in one of her unpredictable though characteristic stupors had dug up. For a second Hallie stared at it, convinced this was some strange Halloween prank, because it couldn’t possibly be real. But it was. Had to be. There on a pile of dirt, beside a hole deep enough to bury a small dog, if necessary, was the unmistakable top of a human skull: the coral-colored Wiffle ball of the cranium, the deep sockets where once there had been eyes, and the tiny beak that she knew was