Chris Bohjalian - The Sleepwalker

The Guest Room

Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands

The Light in the Ruins

The Sandcastle Girls

The Night Strangers

Secrets of Eden

Skeletons at the Feast

The Double Bind

Before You Know Kindness

The Buffalo Soldier

Trans-Sister Radio

The Law of Similars

Midwives

Water Witches

Past the Bleachers

Hangman

A Killing in the Real World

Idyll Banter

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 by Chris Bohjalian

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Cover design by John Fontana

Cover illustration Mohamad Itani/Arcangel

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bohjalian, Chris, 1960 author.

Title: The sleepwalker / by Chris Bohjalian.

Description: First edition. New York : Doubleday, [2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015531 ISBN 9780385538916 (hardcover) ISBN 9780385538923 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: SleepwalkingFiction. Missing personsInvestigationFiction. Man-woman relationshipsFiction. GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3552.O495 S59 2017 DDC 813/.54dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015531

Ebook ISBN9780385538923

v4.1

ep

For Andrew Furtsch

For Eric Nazarian

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

SYLVIA PLATH

PART ONE

IT MAKES ALL the sense in the world. You awaken and smell smoke and see that the cat at the foot of your bed is on fire. And so you scoop him up and race to the bathroom and douse him with water in the tub. You reassure him that hell be finehe is finetelling him that everythings okay. You hold him firmly but gently under the faucet because you are worried about his burns.

The only thing is, youre not awake. But youre not precisely dreaming, either. After all, in the morning the sheets are wet where the cat slept when you both went back to bed, and there is fur in the tub. There are scratch marks on your arms and the back of your hands, because the cat was justifiably resistant to the idea of a shower in the middle of the night. And, of course, the animal was never on fire. Nothing in the house was on fire. And youre a reasonable person; you know that cats and dogs dont spontaneously combust. But in the middle of the night, in the fidelity of that instant, you were saving the cats life and that was all that mattered.

Or, another time, you open your eyes in the charcoal dark and decide that youre hungry. So, you stroll to the kitchen and whip up an omelet, tossing atop the whisked eggs in the pan a little cheddar cheese and a handful of baby aspirina mortar and pestle, the ground orange a cure in the crock of a medieval apothecarybecause in the murkiness of the moment, you are craving the sweet-and-sour tang of orange St. Josephs.

Or you decide to go for a swim. In the river.

Or you are teased by a stirring between your legs, then a craving, and so you reach for the body beside you. And if no ones there? You push off the sheets and climb from your bed. You will search out a stranger who will satisfy it. With any luck, you will wake before you find one. But not always.

It isyou arevampiric. And while it would be easy to use words like insatiable or unquenchable, they would be imprecise. Because the libertine needs of your sleeping soul will be sated. They will.

And thats the problem.

CHAPTER ONE

EVERYONE IN THE county presumed that my mothers body was decayingbecoming porridgeat the bottom of the Gale River. It was the year 2000, and we were but three seasons removed from the Y2K madness: the overwrought, feared end of the digital age. It was a moment in time when a pair of matching towers still stood near the tip of lower Manhattan. Fracking and photobomb and selfie were years from becoming words, but we were only months from adding to our vocabularies the expression hanging chad.

I was twenty-one that summer and fall, and my sister was twelve. Neither of us fully recovered.

The experts were surprised that Annalee Ahlbergs body hadnt been found, since a drowned body usually turns up near its point of entry into the water. But near is a relative term. And so police divers had searched long stretches of the waterway and even dredged a section along the levee that was built to protect the road from the flash floods that seemed to mangle the great, sweeping curve there every other decade. But there was no trace of her. They had scoured as well the small, shallow beaver pond in the woods a quarter of a mile behind my familys red Victorian and found nothing there, too. Nevertheless, my younger sister and I thought it most likely that our mother was in that Vermont river somewhere. We hadnt given up all hope that she would return aliveat least I hadntbut every day it grew harder to feign optimism for our father or say the right things (the appropriate things) when people asked us how we were doing.

One day after school, a little more than two weeks after the police and the mobile crime lab and the Zodiac boats had moved onwhen all the tips had proven apparitionsPaige took her swim fins, a snorkel, and a mask and had gotten as far as the edge of the river before I was able to convince her that she was wasting her time. My sister was sitting on a rock about fifteen feet above the water in her navy-blue tank suit with the profile of a seahorse on her hipbone, the suit she wore when she swam laps at the pool at the college where our father taught. Clearly she meant business. Paige was in the seventh grade then, already a daredevil ski racer to be reckoned with, and in the summer and fall, at her ski coachs urging, most days she swam laps for an hour or so. She was still young enough to believe that she was a force of nature. She still dreamt when she was awake.