The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian

Author:Chris Bohjalian
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Library
ISBN: 9780307888860
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-04T05:00:00+00:00

Reseda knew as well as anyone the stories—all suspect in her opinion—that Tansy Dunmore had not buried her son in the cemetery. The woman had feared that Clary or Sage or Anise or one of the herbalists long past would try again, even if it meant desecrating the boy’s bloated corpse. Reseda gave little credence to the idea. Although Sawyer Dunmore had died before she was born (though only by half a decade, a reality that always made Reseda aware of her age since most of Bethel viewed Sawyer Dunmore’s death as chronologically distant as the Peloponnesian War), she knew the women and she knew the tincture. She had always been confident that Sawyer Dunmore’s body was in his casket in the family plot beside the two hydrangeas in the cemetery. It was only when the pilot had come to her office and mentioned that door in the basement that she had begun to wonder if she was mistaken.

Now standing perfectly still, hunched over, in the muddy chamber that Chip Linton had opened with an ax, she decided that Tansy and Parnell Dunmore had indeed turned a corner of their basement into a mausoleum. They had buried their child here, determined to keep even the soulless, rotting cadaver from the women. She had the sense that, if she took a shovel and dug, it wouldn’t take long to find human remains. The notion filled her with despair for both of the parents, but particularly for Tansy. Her guilt just might have rivaled the pilot’s.

Nevertheless, Reseda felt nothing attaching itself to her, nothing—no one—at all. If Sawyer Dunmore had remained here with his body (a distinct possibility, given how he died), he was now long gone. She ran her fingertips over the ravaged barnboard. It was appropriate that here was a doorway. A threshold. A liminal world.

She recalled the first time the dead had attached themselves to her and the trauma that had preceded it. She had understood even then, if only instinctively, how receptive the traumatized are to the dead. How open. Again, a doorway into one’s aura—one’s space. The dead will always find a passage. In hindsight, her twin sister had attached herself to her well before the police and the EMTs arrived. Reseda had been barely conscious and had presumed at first that she was dreaming: One minute she and Lucinda were walking on a path along Storrow Drive, and the next there was a man before them whom her sister clearly recognized and whose sudden presence she found terrifying. But all that had registered for Reseda was that he was wearing a New England Patriots knit cap and that he was massive. It was late at night, and people would tell her later that they shouldn’t have been out. But they were both juniors, Reseda at BC and Lucinda at BU. Soon they would be going home for Thanksgiving. Their family lived perhaps a mile from the ocean in Yarmouth, Maine. Lucinda had taken her sister’s arm when she saw the man, but she had barely started to scream when he killed her.

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