The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [23]
Meanwhile, Hallie was sleeping badly, too, and no one from the union or the airline or the Critical Incident Response Team had advised her to expect this. There was that strange night when her daughter was convinced she heard people—a child—drowning. It had been three in the morning and had been the worst sort of nightmare: so real that she was convinced she was hearing the child for long minutes after she was awake. And Hallie had never really had nightmares before. Bad dreams had always been far more likely to dog Garnet than her sister in the small hours of the morning.
Consequently, when Emily wasn’t watching her husband, she was watching her daughter. And when she wasn’t watching Hallie, she had to remain vigilant around Garnet: She always had to be prepared for the next seizure. It was a wonder she was able to get out of bed in the morning, much less find the energy to get her girls out the door for school and then drive into Littleton for work. But she had to. She had to. Someone, somehow, had to keep it together.
You are curious about the hallways in this house in the White Mountains because the one on the third floor of the structure seems slender compared to the ones on the second. Or, for that matter, the ones on the first. You really didn’t notice this when you were looking at the house with Emily and Sheldon. And so you track down the tape measure in the carton with the tools you have been using as you settle into the house but have yet to organize in some fashion in that basement made largely of dirt. You find it in the living room, where you were wallpapering yesterday, and begin by measuring the corridor that links the front hall with the seventeen steps to the second floor. (A thought: That strange, thin back stairwell that links the kitchen with the second floor. Is that seventeen steps, too?) Then you climb those steps to measure the hallway outside of your and Emily’s bedroom. Finally you start up the fifteen steps to the third floor. There you kneel and stretch the tape measure across the corridor outside of Hallie’s bedroom. It wasn’t your imagination or an optical illusion: The hallways are thirty-nine inches wide on the first floor (there, again, is that number), thirty-seven on the second, and thirty-four on the third. Five inches is not a great distance, but it is enough to make that corridor feel claustrophobic—or, to use the word Emily and the girls have used as your twins have started nesting like barn swallows on this small, third floor, cozy. The third floor has but three rooms: two bedrooms that share a walk-in closet in the hallway (neither bedroom has a closet of its own) and a bathroom with a lion’s-foot tub but no shower. The attic exists on the same level, but a veritable Berlin Wall separates it from this small nook of rooms. The house narrows between the second and third floors, with that elegant fish-scale trim that marks the screened porch reestablishing itself on the third-floor exterior. Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms are characterized by the house’s sloping roof, snug knee walls, and horizontal windows.
You put the tape measure down on the wooden floor and sit.
She deserves friends.
A man’s voice. You have heard it periodically since you came here. You try to recall if you heard it in Pennsylvania as well, and you decide … maybe. Maybe not. You turn to see if anyone is with you in the corridor, and, as always, you are alone. But you know, in reality, you’re not. There is the voice you have just heard of this man roughly