Middle of the Night

by Riley Sager

For most of my life, sleep has come in fits and starts. I fall asleep quickly. An immediate plummet into sweet slumber. The

problem always comes later, when I wake after only an hour or two, suddenly alert, restless, and filled with an undefinable sense of dread.

I’ve seen this picture before. Too many times to count. Each time, I’m struck by how strange it is to see someone I think of as forever young looking thoroughly middle-aged.

The only other notable name not mentioned—on the website or anywhere else I’ve seen—is Andy Barringer, Billy’s younger brother. Seven at the time, he was also left alone by the press, meriting barely a mention.

It must be a squirrel, he thinks. Or one of the other animals that emerge from the woods at all hours of the day. Ethan can only remember one other time when his dog growled—at Fritz Van de Veer during the Fourth of July picnic, for reasons no one could understand.

Oh, and the Hawthorne Institute, which Ethan knows nothing about beyond the fact that it exists and that he’s not allowed to go

Now he looks like a cross between a retiree and a drill sergeant. Big arms, big chest, big belly, a tan that can’t be natural.

He’s larger now, thick in both chest and stomach, and strands of gray pepper his hair and his full beard. Back when he was the neighborhood bully, his face was angular and clean-shaven, all the better to show off his perpetual sneer.

To this day, I’ve only seen the falls once. With Billy and the three other people in this room. On the afternoon before Billy disappeared.

By then my mother was outside the house and stalking toward the car. She looked so strange in that moment. Her eyes gleamed with terror, yet her mouth was twisted into an angry snarl, her teeth literally bared. It made her seem both vulnerable and vicious. It was, I assumed, what mother bears looked like when someone got between them and their cubs.

I suddenly long to reach into the phone, yank my parents through the screen, and have them hold me the way they did when I was ten and Billy first vanished.

He feels strong. He feels confident. Maybe this is the feeling Johnny was looking for when he took the pills that ultimately killed him.

Seeing all those splotches of forest green and dirt brown makes me think of the stranger allegedly seen roaming the neighborhood in camo the day before Billy was taken. The stranger no one found. Why did he feel the need to camouflage himself? Was he hunting in the woods? If so, what was he hunting?

With her tilted head and lips this close to forming a frown, she looks like a kindergarten teacher who just caught someone trying to sneak a second chocolate milk.

The view from the trail cam is different at night. More ominous. Deep pockets of shadow border the frame, tinted a sickly green by the night vision. The grass itself is rendered gray, like dirty snow. Beyond the lawn, barely visible in the darkness, is the forest, the trees there tall and blurry.

Slippers cover his feet. Grass clippings from yesterday’s mowing cling to the soles.

Mr. Wallace stares at her a moment, confusion writ large on his face. The expression soon falls away, replaced by something approaching abject terror. He opens his mouth to speak, but Ashley shushes him and tells him it’s okay. She reaches for him again, and this time Mr. Wallace lets her do it.

“There weren’t many other options,” I say, pointedly not getting into the why and how of it all. It’ll take more than a shot of tequila to get me talking about that.

I look to the margins of the page, which sends fear dripping down my spine like droplets of ice-cold water.

With the flashlight gripped tight in my fist, I rotate toward the woods again. Slowly. So very slowly. Slow enough that I can feel my thoughts changing from fearful to curious to borderline hopeful.

Finally, this moment, in which he realizes Billy had led them to the falls and the Hawthorne Institute even though he’d been warned the day before that no one should be here. Now they’re in trouble. Well, Billy is. Ethan will be, too, if he doesn’t run. He takes a halting backward step as the full weight of that hits him. He could get in trouble. For something he didn’t even want to do. For something that, in all honesty, is Billy’s fault.

“Ashley’s single now,” I say. “If you’re interested.” “I don’t think my husband would approve.” Thrown off guard, I do a surprised jolt in my seat. Ragesh clocks the movement, smiles, and says, “Surprised?” Very, I think. “A little,” I say.

But mostly I’m sorry for not trying to, I don’t know, help you back then.” “There was nothing you could have done.” “I could have been nicer,” Ragesh says. “At the very least, I should have talked to you or tried to take you under my wing. Because of all the people on Hemlock Circle, I knew what it was like to lose a best friend.”

When I move to the woman on the right, my heart stops. Seeing her is so disorienting it feels like I’ve fallen through the floor and am now plummeting into the basement. A free fall so dizzying I think I might faint. I know who this woman is, just as surely as I know that she’s still alive. What I can’t fathom is why she was at the Hawthorne Institute. Mostly because the woman is my mother.

Her boss flashed a smile that was in no way friendly.

Ethan feels something snap inside him. Like there was an elastic band stretched across his heart, keeping his emotions in check. Now it’s broken, and they come tumbling forth in an ungainly heap.

“But you did,” Ragesh says in a way that makes Ethan wish he were six years older, a foot taller, and a hundred pounds heavier.

At first, I notice nothing but the new-tent smell that surrounds me. A cross between a plastic bag and a latex glove, it’s powerful enough to make my nose twitch. Once I get used to it, though, other things emerge.

“You don’t know the half of it.” Ashley says it without anger or accusation or even seeking pity. It’s simply a statement, hinting at untold depths of misery.

“I know what happened to Claudia, Ethan,” she says. “I know she died.”

The phone call as it neared midnight. The somber voice of the patrolman who told me he found an unresponsive woman inside a car registered in my name. The frantic, gnawing anxiety of the drive to the hospital, the body on the table, the white sheet being lifted, the face of my dead wife.

That’s the irony of this whole situation. Billy wasn’t the most devastating loss in my life. It was Claudia. And when forced to decide which memories were easier to face, I chose Billy.

But it’s too late. The words have been spoken, and Ethan knows they will now always be there, a faint ghost haunting their friendship. If there is one after tonight.

Misty charts his progress based on the sound of his footfalls. The creak means he’s reached the third step. The groan indicates he’s now at the sixth. She hears a swoosh—Russ turning at the landing—before two more creaks, the second an octave higher than the first. The last two steps.