The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [21]
“Garnet?”
There in the doorway stood Hallie.
In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.
“Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”
Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”
Them? Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.
“I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”
And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.
“I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.
“You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.
“What time is it?”
“It’s like three. Listen!”
“What should I be hearing?”
In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.
“You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”
There was that word again: them.
“No.”
Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”
“What?”
“Shhhhhhhh.”
“No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.
“I’m scared myself.”
“Of what?”
“I heard people.”
“Really?”
Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl—like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”
“In the house?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”
“No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.
“Then why?”
“I don’t know, but the people were mad. Or scared. That’s it, that’s why they were so loud: They were scared. I think they were more scared than mad. And I heard water. Lots of water. Waves and stuff.”
“You were dreaming.”
“I heard it when I was talking to you just this second.”
“What did you hear?”
“The water and the people and someone was, like, choking—”
“We don’t have a pond,” Garnet said, cutting her off. “We don’t have a pool. We don’t even have a brook like we had in West Chester. It had to be just a nightmare.”
“I don’t have nightmares. You do. I don’t.” She made it sound like a failing, Garnet thought, like Hallie viewed it as an accomplishment that she didn’t have bad dreams. But Garnet also had to admit that she was indeed far more likely to have nightmares than her sister. It had always been that way. Supposedly the nightmares had nothing to do with what the adults referred to as her epilepsy or her seizures, but she wasn’t so sure. When she was having one, it was like she was asleep and the waking world—the real world—was a dream.
“Besides, it wasn’t the water that made it so scary,” Hallie went on.
“No?”
“No. It’s that the people were drowning.”
“What?”
“They were, like, screaming for help and choking. Especially the girl. And just now when I came