The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [82]
But Ethan is shaking his head.
She deserves friends.
Was it always a plural? Friends? He nods. It was, it was.
You kneel and paw at the dirt floor until you have recovered the knife. There you notice little Ashley, sitting with her legs crossed, her eyes sadder than you have ever seen them. Does she understand what she is asking—what it means?
She deserves friends. Do what it takes.
You gaze at Ethan. No, you want to say aloud, no, but for some reason you are afraid to speak in this dark and crease the blackness with noise. But you do think to yourself: No. Absolutely not. That is asking too much.
Upstairs, Emily searches for you. You can feel the way she is moving up the steps to the second floor; the house—it—is telling you. Meanwhile, the girls huddle around the kitchen table, Molly alone on the deacon’s bench. Desdemona is prowling on that rickety staircase behind the kitchen, the existence of which is, like so much of this house, an absolute mystery. And you? Once again, as you did one morning in the pit of despair on the other side of this basement—Harry Harlow’s vertical chamber apparatus, reconfigured for a house on the fringes of madness—you curl your knees into your chest and try to lie there, unmoving as an egg.
Hallie glanced at Garnet, but she couldn’t quite make out her sister’s eyes in the dim glow of the lantern. She sensed that Garnet had retreated into one of those places where she was gazing at nothing. She wondered if Garnet was about to have one of her seizures—or whether she was in the early stages of one already. She heard their mother call out their dad’s name again. Her mother was upstairs now, going from room to room along the hallway. Hallie guessed that she would head up to the third floor and her and Garnet’s rooms next. She might even pull down that trapdoor to the attic.
“Where do you think he is?” Molly asked, her voice strangely small on a girl Hallie usually thought of as so very big.
“I don’t know.”
The girl looked at Garnet. “Garnet?” she said, but her sister didn’t respond.
“She’s okay,” Hallie said, shrugging.
Upstairs they heard a crash, a small piece of furniture toppling over in Hallie’s mind, and Hallie watched Molly flinch. She knew that she herself had been startled also. But Garnet remained oblivious.
“I’m okay, girls,” their mother called down the stairs. “I knocked into the end table by your father’s and my bed, that’s all!”
“Okay, Mom,” Hallie called back.
“I hope my mom gets here soon,” Molly said.
“Yup.” Hallie didn’t know what else to say. A moment later she heard her mother pulling down the door to the attic, just as she had expected she would, and Molly, unfamiliar with the lengthy groan the hinges made as the door descended, looked a little ashen in the lantern light.
“What was that?” she asked.
Hallie reassured her that it was only the door to the attic, adding, “I know. It sounds really creepy.”
Eventually Emily pounded her way back down the stairs, and Hallie asked her, “Did you really go into the attic?”
“No, I just, I don’t know, I called and shone my light up there.”
“You checked our rooms?”
“Yes, I did check your rooms,” she said, opening the basement door. “Chip?” she yelled down the stairs and bent over, peering underneath the wobbly banister and shining the flashlight into the void. “Chip?” When he didn’t answer, she slammed the door shut and swore, finally succumbing to the fear and frustration she had been experiencing since they lost power and her husband—and, briefly, one of her daughters and their friend—disappeared into the dark. “Damn it! Where is he?” she asked aloud, clearly not expecting an answer. Hallie feared that her mother was on the verge of tears. Normally she would have told her that Garnet might be having a seizure, but she didn’t dare. Besides, what really could her mother do? Most of the time, you just