The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [62]
Ah, but it is ajar now. Of course. It has been opened for you. It is open now because that’s where the voices are coming from and whoever is down there wanted to be sure that you heard them.
You see in your mind a book jacket: How to Live in a Haunted House. No, that’s not right: It should be How Not to Live in a Haunted House. But then you decide that this construction is wrong, too. All wrong. Both books sound like real estate guides: The first is a manual for finding a house with a history; the second is a handbook for avoiding one. What you are after is an instruction booklet alive with advice for cohabiting with the dead. What to expect. How to cope with the voices that fill the night and the doors that mysteriously open. How to make sense of a house with bones in its basement. Unfortunately, that title eludes you. It hovers like a wisp just beyond your mind’s reach.
Perhaps that’s because you don’t really believe in ghosts. You tell yourself you are not in a ghost story. These voices have woken no one but you. In all likelihood, a draft opened the basement door. Or you left it open yourself: Either you forgot to close it or you left it like this subconsciously. Your therapist would love that. And this conversation below you is only in your head, another invisible wound from the disaster that marked your last flight.
“Hello?” The sound of your own voice surprises you. You hear a slight tremor in it, an uncharacteristic hitch in those two syllables. This is not the tone that told passengers cruising altitudes or directed them to gaze out their windows at the majesty of the Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor or the unexpected expanse of Lake Michigan. This is not the voice that one time (and one time only) told them to brace for impact. Instantly the discussion in the basement grows quiet. “Hello?” you call again, a little louder, a little more confident. Still, there is nothing but silence. You beam the light down the stairs at the stones in the wall at the bottom, at the coils of hose the moving men happened to dump just to the side of the banister. At the wooden pallets you rounded up the other day and on which you have stacked great jugs of cat sand and cases of soda and juice you bought at the warehouse store in Littleton. You feel for the switch at the top of the stairs that flips on the two naked, sixty-watt bulbs in the basement ceiling—really just pillows of insulation amidst thick wooden beams—and, after the basement is awash in the dim half-light, you start down, your feet still bare. You wish you had thought to put on your slippers. Then again, perhaps not. You can clean your feet under the spigot in the bathtub before climbing back into bed. The slippers would have to go into the wash. You never go into the basement without the sorts of shoes you are likely to wear only outdoors.
At the bottom of the stairs you pause, the flashlight at your side, and then turn slowly toward the pile of coal and the doorway behind which you found the bones. Instantly you recognize the pair of adults standing between the doorway and the coal, and you go to them, switching the flashlight from your right to your left hand so you can shake their wet hands if they choose to extend their wet arms to you. And the man does, even though it is painfully clear that you have interrupted a fight he has been having with the woman. A squabble. You wonder: Perhaps you were mistaken; perhaps you were not supposed to hear them.
“Captain,” the man says, but the woman only gazes at you with a worried look in her eyes. A chasmlike gash disfigures the right side of her face, and blood is pooling on the shoulder of her blouse. She is fortunate that she wasn’t one of the three passengers on the plane who were decapitated. Her name is Sandra Durant, though her hair—which was honey in the snapshot photos you saw in the newspaper—has been darkened by lake water and muddied by blood: thirty-two years old, a single woman who you learned in the weeks after the disaster had been on your plane because she had just interviewed