The Night Strangers (38 page)

“And it has been a long wait,” said Anise, and Emily understood that the woman was speaking of something entirely different from what John Hardin had meant.

But the partner in her law firm smiled at Anise’s remark and added, “Indeed, it has.” Then he looked straight into Emily’s eyes and told her, “We’ve been waiting since Sawyer Dunmore died. Now: Let’s go get the girls from the attic. Shall we?”

T
here is nothing you would not do for your daughter. Nothing.

Or is it daughters? You find yourself watching the CRJ descend toward Lake Champlain, but the view is not from the flight deck, it’s from one of the passenger cabin windows toward the left rear of the aircraft. Meanwhile, you struggle with this one strangely unanswerable but profoundly important question: Where on the aircraft is your daughter? Or, again, daughters? You see in your mind the round face and blond spit curls of one girl, but shouldn’t there be a second child? Or (and here the mind feels truly unmoored) a third? Briefly you envision a girl with red hair, but the image grows hazy fast. And then it is gone. She’s gone.

The seat beside you is empty, but you are absolutely certain that your daughter—the blond girl—was there just a moment ago. She was in that window seat. Her Dora the Explorer backpack is still nearby, one of its straps and a nylon handle peering out from underneath the seat ahead of you. But that little girl? Gone. You scan the rows of people in the seats before you, but there is absolutely no sign of her. There is absolutely no sign of any children at all.

At the very least, you must find the child with the blond hair before the plane belly flops into the lake and—as somehow you know it will—breaks apart. You must, because you love her and she needs you and there is no more powerful, more poignant cord. But then the plane is down and for the barest of seconds seems to be skimming along the surface of the lake. This may, in the end, turn out all right. Suddenly, however, the aircraft plows into a surface as solid as a medieval castle wall and is stood upright on its nose, and your head is whipped into the seat before you and then, as the fuselage crashes back into the water, into the collapsing ceiling. Or is it the floor? You have no idea. You know only that the cabin has come alive with the sounds of screaming and ripping metal, and already you can smell the lake water that is rolling like a tsunami down the aisle, and—this doesn’t seem possible, this can’t possibly have happened—a metal pike has pierced your skull like an arrow. You run the fingers of your right hand over the shard, and they come away bloodied. And then you try to take a breath, but already the water is over your mouth and nose and you start to gag.

So you struggle, you thrash, even as you grow weak, even as the water is flooding your nose and you are aware that you will never survive your head wound. You try to rip the seat belt in half because something has dented the metal buckle and now it won’t open. And somewhere very far away someone is calling your name. Someone closer is, too.

But, still, you have no idea what happened to your daughter. Or those other girls. Twins? Yes, twins. You know for sure only one thing: Your daughter didn’t deserve this, and the realization has you enraged. She didn’t deserve to die this way. She deserved more than eight years. She deserved a lifetime. She deserved friends.

And so, once again, you lash out, even though it is futile, even though there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

But the anger is all and so you fight.

H
olly tried holding down the captain’s left arm and shoulder and Reseda his right, but he was thrashing violently—great, convulsive heaves—and the greenhouse was filled with Ethan Stearns’s rage as he died once more in the warm August water of Lake Champlain.

“Go, you have people waiting for you!” Reseda tried to reassure him, the words rushed and, she knew, slightly fearful. He would have none of it. “She’s gone. Your daughter is gone. You can’t stay. You shouldn’t stay, your daughter is waiting—” she said, and she would have continued,
Your daughter has gone home, she has gone to her grandmother, she has gone where she belongs and is happy
, but she never got to finish the sentence. He broke free and slammed the back of his hand hard into the side of her face and her ears registered the hollow bang of his knuckles on the bones in her cheek, and she was reeling, falling into a table beside her, toppling the plants, one of the clay pots shattering and another spilling its dirt and the small, pink hysterium that was just starting to bloom. From the floor she saw him sitting up and Holly desperately trying to push him back down, but her ears were ringing from the blow and it was as if she were suddenly deaf or watching a movie with the sound off. Then he was on his feet, standing, and, with more strength than she had imagined he had, he was lifting Holly under her arms and hurling her into the glass wall, shattering it into thousands of pieces. Reseda pulled herself off the ground and tried to grab him, but already he was running toward the greenhouse entrance, angrily toppling Baphomet as he wheeled among the statuary and tables, one of the statue’s horns breaking off when it crashed to the dirt. He grabbed something on his way out, but she couldn’t see what it was. She crawled like a crab to Holly and found the woman’s hands and arms were bleeding where reflexively she had tried to shield her head from the glass. The rain and cold air whipped inside and stung the side of her face. Holly was breathing rapidly, and she sat upright and stammered, “He was out like a light, wasn’t he? I mean, where did that come from? I thought he was practically paralyzed.”

Reseda examined the woman’s wounds. They were bloody, but they weren’t deep. “He was,” she said, aware that her own words sounded slightly garbled because it hurt so much to speak. Her face still smarted where he had struck her. “But it wore off. It’s been a long night. There were three of them.”

“Can you stop him?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Go,” Holly insisted, “go!” She rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling and added, “I think he took my bag.”

And Reseda understood instantly what the captain had grabbed on his way out—and why. “Call Emily right now!” she said. “Tell them to leave the house right this second.” Then she stood, but already she heard a vehicle engine starting and outside she saw its headlights illuminating the trees. A second later, Chip was spinning Holly’s car into reverse, the trees went dark, and he was gone.

Chapter Twenty

E
mily knew the communal greenhouse from those afternoons that spring when she had picked up the twins there after school—when, ostensibly, they had been learning about plants and herbs with some of the women at Sage Messner’s. But she had never been inside it at night and she had never seen it so crowded: In her mind, it was always just her girls and two or three older women, and the skies high above the glass ceiling were likely to be blue.

Not now. The wind and the rain were lashing the great panes of glass against their metal framing, and there were at least three censers burning what John had told her with unrestrained pride was frankincense Clary had transplanted from Oman. There must have been twenty or twenty-five of her neighbors present tonight, women and men she was likely to meet on the streets of Littleton and Bethel—the people she had viewed as an extended family of sorts throughout the last couple of months—though now they were all dressed in what looked like burgundy-colored choir robes. There were Anise and Clary and Valerian and Sage and Ginger—who gave Alexander a vaguely chaste kiss on the cheek and then insisted on looking at the wound on his upper arm, her eyes going back and forth between the puncture wound and Emily—and Celandine, the female trooper who had come to Emily’s home that frightening night when Garnet found the skull in the dirt in the basement. She saw her girls’ schoolteacher. In addition, there were another three or four women Emily didn’t recognize. And there were the men, their spouses and partners, and John quickly climbed into a robe and joined Peyton and Claude, where they stood beside a waist-high black marble basin, the column a spiral of interlocking carved vines. There was something unrecognizable about all of them this evening, something far more profound than the reality that they were dressed in red robes: They’d stood and swayed and stomped their feet in a barely controlled frenzy when Anise and John had first nudged the girls into the greenhouse. They were all a little giddy, and Emily couldn’t decide if it was more like a religious rapture or the adrenaline rush that accompanies a nighttime bonfire at a beach in high summer. Some of the assemblage were drinking from identical ceramic goblets with leaves carved into the cups and the stems, dunking their goblets into that basin as if it were a punch bowl.

The electric heaters were warming the greenhouse, but it was illuminated only by clay oil lamps with corked wicks and tall candles in hurricane vases in the corners. The blue flames from the lamps lined the floor and the edges of the tables, all of which had been pushed against the walls, and the flickering light seemed to lengthen all the shadows. It made everyone look about seven feet tall. And at the end of the greenhouse, where some of the group was gathering now in a great semicircle, beside a pane of glass that opened out, was a wrought-iron cauldron that had to have been at least three feet high, suspended on five squat legs that Emily thought were as thick as her ankles. Beneath it was a small fire, and she couldn’t help but recall John’s cryptic words:
What do you think we plan to do with them? Cook them in a stewpot?

Her girls looked more stunned than terrified, but she knew how frightened they were and she thought there was nothing she wanted more than to be able to go and comfort them. No, there was something she did want more than that: She wanted out. She wanted to take her girls and run from this greenhouse and from Bethel. She would stop by Reseda’s and get Chip and then leave northern New Hampshire forever. But two younger men she had never seen before—sons or grandsons of the herbalists, she imagined—stood on either side of her, each grasping one of her arms by the elbow.

The idea crossed her mind that Reseda and Holly were involved. Clearly they were herbalists. But had they convinced Chip that he was possessed and brought him to Reseda’s greenhouse so it would be easier to abduct the twins? Or were those two women unaware of what the rest of the group was doing right now? Emily wanted Chip—the old Chip, the man who had overcome a nearly disastrous childhood and wound up an airline pilot—back and beside her.

She could feel her heart racing; if she weren’t so determined to try to find a way to get her girls out of this greenhouse, she thought she might die. Literally, she might collapse with a heart attack. Her girls were standing on the other side of that massive cauldron, Anise’s and Sage’s hands resting like great bird claws upon their shoulders. The twins were wearing their matching winter jackets, which they really didn’t need because, despite the dampness and chill outside the greenhouse, despite the pane that was open to vent the cauldron, the heaters and the small fire were keeping the place almost toasty. But the girls were still in their pajamas, and Emily was struck by the sight of their baggy pajama pants between the bottoms of their parkas and the tops of their boots. She noticed that Garnet had tucked her pajamas into her boots, but Hallie hadn’t bothered. Anise had allowed Emily to put on a pair of blue jeans, but she was still wearing her nightshirt underneath her coat.

Finally John worked his way through the crowd until he was standing beside her, while Anise stepped forward and smiled at everyone as if she were hosting a cocktail party and wanted to welcome her guests. She pulled her robe tight around her neck, and Emily noticed that, unlike the other robes, hers had a silver clasp. She couldn’t make out the design from where she was standing, but she had a feeling it was some kind of ivy.

“Welcome,” Anise said, spreading her arms and smiling. “The earth is with you!”

“And with you!” responded the gathering.

“We merge blood with seed!” she cried, staring down at the dirt floor, enraptured.

“We merge seed with soul!” they replied.

“And soul with earth—”

“To be born anew!”

“Yes,” agreed Anise. “To be born anew.” She looked up and gazed at the gathering and shook her head in wonderment, and everyone watched her expectantly. “We did it. You did it. We have earth. We have twins. And we have … our recipe.” Valerian held open before Anise a thick book, and Emily thought it resembled the one that Anise had given Garnet, and the crowd in the greenhouse murmured their approval.

“To the earth and seeds!” John cried out in a toast, raising his goblet, and everyone drank with him. “To the twins!” he added. “Hear, hear!”

“To the twins!” the gathering shouted back, a loud and powerful and almost orgiastic chorus.

Emily craned her neck to read the title of the book, and her heart sank:
The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans
. She watched the flushed faces of the adults as their eyes darted back and forth between Anise and her girls and started to cry. Anise noticed but was unmoved. Then she pulled from a pocket at the front of her cape what looked like a bouquet of Italian parsley, but Emily was confident it was instead a plant that was both venomous and rare—something discovered or bred by these women from seeds they had found in some exotic corner of the planet. Anise pulled off the leaves and dropped them into the cauldron, as if they were merely bay leaves for a stew.

“John,” Emily whispered, her voice urgent and quavering, “please, let us go. If we can help you, we will. You know that. But, please, please let us go. I’m begging you: Please don’t hurt my girls.”

John’s eyes looked a little watery, too, and his profile a bit less regal: She wondered if perhaps he was weakening. But it was only age. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he smiled and shook his head firmly. “This is hard for all of us. I understand. I really do. But we only need one and it will all be over soon.”

Emily recalled what Reseda had told her, but still it seemed too cruel to be true. “You only need one … what? One of my children?”

He nodded. “It’s a very intense ritual, a very complicated process. A complicated recipe. You need the right person—the right genes—and the right plants. You need a twin, and, according to the formula, the blood has to have been forged by a great trauma.” He raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Tansy never forgave us—or herself. But our intentions were good, Verbena. You have to believe me. And the fact is, it worked with Sawyer. It was awfully effective. I am so sorry about what happened to the boy, but the tincture worked. Sadly, nothing from nature lasts forever, and now we need, well, boosters. We need more.”

“Did you kill Sawyer? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”

“You must think we’re absolute fiends,” John said, and he actually chuckled. “Besides, I’m a lawyer. You can’t possibly believe that I would confess to something like that! Now, you should pay attention,” he admonished her. “We both should.”

Celandine was approaching Anise with a potted plant, the leaves cochleate and yellow as daffodils, with one spear-shaped bulb rising from the center. The plant was perhaps eighteen inches tall and the bulb the size of a grown-up’s fist. Clary Hardin and Ginger Jackson fell to their knees, their heads thrown back, nearly swooning with anticipation, as did another pair of women Emily didn’t recognize. They dropped their goblets onto the ground and spread wide their arms in ecstasy.

“They’ve been waiting a long time for this moment,” John murmured. “Many of us have. To be so very, very close to the end and get a second chance? What a delightful notion!”

Sage Messner began herding the twins forward, edging them closer to the cauldron. Then the girls’ schoolteacher, Mrs. Collier—Yarrow Collier, Emily remembered—knelt before the children, handed them each a goblet, and said in a voice as soothing as a lullaby, “Enjoy this. Drink, girls, drink up.”

They both looked across the greenhouse at their mother, wondering what they should do, and so Emily violently shook her head. They looked tiny to her, more like big dolls than small children. Even in their winter coats they appeared waiflike. “Don’t,” she yelled to them, hoping she sounded more resolute than panicked—because she knew she was panicked. But she knew also that whatever herbal potion these women had prepared for her children would only harm them. She was as sure of that as she had been of anything in her life. “Don’t drink it!”

“Verbena, that’s enough,” Anise said, speaking to her for the first time since they had arrived at the greenhouse, and the two men tightened their grips on her arms. Her voice was absolutely inscrutable to Emily. Then she crossed the greenhouse and placed her long, cold fingers on Emily’s cheeks and looked directly into her eyes. For the briefest of seconds, Emily was brought back to that first Sunday morning when the woman’s rusted pickup truck had rumbled up their long driveway and she had appeared with a casserole and brownies.

“Send her away,” hissed one of the women Emily didn’t know.

“We don’t need her!” added Lavender Millier.

“No, I would rather she watched,” said Anise simply. Then she looked directly into Emily’s eyes, brusquely wiped the tears off her cheeks, and added, “Now: I must insist you behave.” Then she released her and went to Hallie and Garnet, kneeling beside Mrs. Collier so the girls were actually a little taller than she was. She seized the goblet from Garnet and took a sip, gazing at the girl and smiling. After that she took a sip from Hallie’s chalice, too, running her tongue over her lips after she had swallowed. When she was finished, she stood up and turned back toward Emily. She raised her eyebrows high above her eyes as if to say,
See? Satisfied? I’m still standing
. Then she motioned for the girls to drink up, and, much to Emily’s despair, they did, draining the two chalices that had been given them.

“Thank you, girls,” Anise said. “That was very grown-up of you.”

The twins glanced at each other and then at Anise and Sage and their schoolteacher. Emily thought Garnet looked like she might collapse, and she wondered what the group would do if her daughter had a seizure right now. She studied both girls and decided that Hallie looked a little wobbly as well; whatever was in that goblet had acted quickly. When Anise asked them to take off their snow jackets, both twins fumbled spastically with the zippers.

One of the women Emily didn’t recognize, a petite, square-faced blonde her age who would have fit in well at a Junior League luncheon back in Philadelphia, approached Anise and bowed her head ever so slightly. Then she gave the woman a leather sheath, from which Anise pulled a long, ancient-looking dagger with a T-shaped handle that appeared to be made of dull iron. It looked vaguely Celtic to Emily, and had a moonstone nearly the size of a golf ball at the edge of the grip and smaller ones along the handle.

“Blood meets seed,” Anise cried out.

“And seed meets soul,” the herbalists proclaimed together.

With two fingers and her thumb, Anise snapped off the bulb from the yellow plant, and the sound was reminiscent of a cat’s squeal immediately before a catfight. Then she took the bulb and held it above the black cauldron and slashed it open lengthwise with the knife, and a white milk waterfalled into the pot, and the smell—gardenia-like, and yet somehow it conjured for Emily the image and aroma of a just washed baby—overwhelmed the incense in the greenhouse. Then Anise dropped the empty husk into the mixture, too, and stirred it around with the tip of her dagger.

“And the last ingredient?” Valerian asked, though it was clear that she and all the other herbalists knew precisely what they would add next. Still, Anise glanced once at the grimoire that Valerian was patiently holding open for her. Then she signaled for the psychiatrist to shut the book.

“And so we finish,” Anise proclaimed. “To those we once were—”

“And to those we shall be!” the herbalists finished.

“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!”

“To the youth of the earth and the power of the seed!” they repeated.

Anise raised the dagger over her head, and Emily realized that these people who posed as her neighbors and friends were about to execute one of her children—slaughter a ten-year-old girl. And so she screamed for her girls to run, to run away, as she threw herself violently at Anise, dragging those younger men with her. She was aware of the two of them and John Hardin trying (and failing) to pull her back, but she was enraged and fell upon the woman—
the witch
, she heard in her mind,
the
witch
—tackling her onto the greenhouse floor, all the while howling for her children to flee. She’d reached for the knife, unsure what she would do with it if she wrestled it from the woman, when she was violently lifted up and off of Anise, her arms wrenched so far behind her that she feared one of her shoulders had been ripped from its socket. She turned, and there was Alexander Jackson and there was his heavy fist coming toward her face, and then all was black.