The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian Page B

room; you had to pull down that trapdoor in the ceiling in the hallway on the floor below them). Their old home, she recalled, had only the two floors. For a moment her eyes focused on the last remaining moving box that she hadn’t yet begun to unpack, and she tried to remember what was inside it. It was a big one. Barbie dolls and the Dream House? Summer T-shirts and shorts and bathing suits? That seemed right. It had clothes and dolls and the Dream House.
    The day and the evening slowly came back to her. Snowboarding. The tram with her mom and Hallie, and the way the snow on the pine trees at the top of the mountain reminded her of vanilla cake frosting. Hot chocolate at the base lodge. Then there was the dinner at home that was completely inedible: a bean loaf followed by bad-tasting brownies that some woman had baked for them, though Hallie had liked the brownies more than everyone else and had been so hungry after the main course that she had ended up devouring the brownie with Dad’s name on it as well as her own. Then they had watched a DVD of some teen boy who learns he’s a prince, a movie they’d long outgrown that made both girls wish they had the satellite dish hooked up so they could watch regular TV instead.
    “Garnet?”
    There in the doorway stood Hallie.
    In an instant, the second that Garnet had pushed herself ever so slightly off the mattress and glanced at her, Hallie had realized that her sister was awake and raced across the room like a sprinter and dove into bed beside her. She burrowed under the quilt, and Garnet could feel how cold her sister’s feet were.
    “Your toes are icicles,” she said to Hallie. Then: “What are you doing?”
    Her voice a whisper, Hallie said, “You don’t hear them?”
    Them? Mom and Dad? “Who?” she asked anyway, presuming that of course her sister was referring to their parents.
    “I don’t know. Listen,” Hallie murmured urgently. “Just listen.”
    And so Garnet did. She heard the slight whistle of her sister’s breathing through her nose and she heard the occasional soft bang from the ancient radiator that sat like a gargoyle on the wall nearest the bed. But there was no wind outside and the cat, wherever she was at the moment, wasn’t making a sound. There was no noise at all coming from Mom and Dad’s bedroom on the floor below them.
    “I don’t hear anything,” she said finally.
    “You must!” There was an urgency to Hallie’s voice that was rare.
    “What time is it?”
    “It’s like three. Listen!”
    “What should I be hearing?”
    In the moonlight Garnet could see her sister’s eyes, wide and alert, and she thought once again of their cat. Dessy, short for Desdemona. They had gotten the cat from the animal shelter when they were three and Mom had done a Shakespeare play with a character with that name. The cat’s orange fur had reminded their mom of the color of the gown she had worn for much of the production.
    “You really don’t hear it?” Hallie asked in a small but intense voice. “You really don’t hear them?”
    There was that word again: them .
    “No.”
    Hallie was lying on her side, but her head was elevated, her ears well above the pillow. “Wait, it’s stopped.”
    “What?”
    “Shhhhhhhh.”
    “No, don’t shush me. Tell me! You’re scaring me!” Rarely was Garnet ever this insistent with her older sister. Though Hallie was only minutes her senior, Garnet always deferred to her as if the chasm that separated them was two or three years.
    “I’m scared myself.”
    “Of what?”
    “I heard people.”
    “Really?”
    Hallie nodded. “Two or three. I don’t know. But definitely one was a girl—like our age. Or maybe a little younger.”
    “In the house?”
    “I guess.”
    “You guess?”
    “It doesn’t make sense.”
    “Of course it doesn’t. The nearest house must be, like, a mile away.”
    “No, that’s not why it doesn’t make sense,” Hallie said.
    “Then why?”
    “I don’t know, but