The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [153]
“Someone’s downstairs,” she whispered.
“Yeah, Mom,” said Hallie, and she sat up on her elbows in her bed, her hair wild with sleep. “And maybe Dad’s back.” Neither she nor Hallie knew precisely where their father had gone, but at dinner Dad had said he was going to a meeting that night and probably wouldn’t be home until after they were asleep. They guessed that it had something to do with the depression and strangeness that had marked him since Flight 1611 crashed, but what that meant precisely neither could say.
“I don’t think so,” Garnet said.
“What?”
“It’s someone else. I think we should go hide.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Just till we know. We could hide in the attic. Through that hole in the wall. It’s there for a reason.”
“The attic scares me,” Hallie said, a rare quiver in her voice.
“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