The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [61]
The discussion below you has grown a little more agitated, and you pause in your pajamas in the frame of your bedroom door. The hallway is lit by the moon through the corridor windows. You ponder the narrow stairs up to Hallie’s and Garnet’s bedrooms and wonder if you should check on the twins before going downstairs: see if they are indeed in their beds, because if they are, then it’s clear that the voices below you are not coming from a DVD.
And so you move slowly and quietly up that thin stairway to the cozy and snug third floor of your house. You press your fingers against the wall for balance because this stairwell is so cramped that there is neither a handrail nor a banister. The girls’ doors are both open, and you peer into each room for a long moment, watching each child sleep in the red glow of her night-light. You have always loved watching your children sleep. Some nights in Pennsylvania—before the crash, when life was filled with only routine and promise—you and your wife would stand in the doorway and watch first Garnet and then Hallie sleep, your souls warmed by the uncomplicated domesticity conveyed by the perfume in a baby shampoo. You would watch the way Garnet’s small hands would be embracing a stuffed teddy bear she had named Scraggles, or the way Hallie would be lying flat on her stomach, her arms burrowed deep beneath her pillow. In the winter, the girls often slept in red and white Lanz nightgowns that matched one of their mother’s. Tonight they are sleeping in pajamas: Garnet’s are patterned with evergreen trees and Hallie’s with Japanese lotus flowers. Now, at three in the morning, you wander as silently as you can into each child’s room, first pulling the comforter back up and over Garnet’s shoulders and then placing the stuffed gray rabbit Hallie named Smokey beside her on her bed. The bunny had fallen to the floor.
Up here, the voices are the same indecipherable buzz they were on the second floor. This strikes you as interesting. You would have expected the sound to be more muffled—perhaps even inaudible—when you are another floor higher. Here you may even have heard what sounded a bit like a laugh: a mean-spirited little chuckle at someone’s expense.
And so you start back down that narrow stairwell and then along the second-floor corridor, passing your and your wife’s bedroom. At the top of the stairs to the first floor, you reach for the flashlight you keep upright beside the trim, but you do not switch it on until you have reached the bottom step because you do not want to risk waking Emily. But when you are on the ground floor, you turn it on and spray the rooms. There in the living room is that wallpaper with the fox that looks like an eel, the image repeated over and over. There in the dining room are the walls of statuesque but sickly sunflowers, as well as the two sawhorses and the piece of plywood on which you drape sheets of wallpaper and then slather them with paste; in this light, with a curtainless vertical window just beyond the sawhorses, the image resembles a guillotine. (You built a plastic one from a modeling kit when you were a boy. It actually came with the pieces for a plastic nobleman with a detachable head. You were meticulous and glued the device and the victim together with the same care you brought to your models of jet airplanes and battleships.) There, in a corner of the hallway, is a stepladder with a gallon of paint on the top step, and for just a fraction of a second you are sure it’s a man.
And, finally, there is the door to the basement, and you find you are nodding to yourself that it is open. The door to the basement is never open. You keep it closed because why would you want the smell of the dirt floor wafting up into the house? Why would you want the heat from the radiators or