The Possession
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Rutger
Cover design by Brian Lemus.
Cover imagery © Christophe Dessaigne/Trevillion Images
Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: July 2019
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LCCN: 2019941727
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6187-8 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-6189-2 (ebook)
E3-20190529-DA-NF-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
From the files of Nolan Moore
Prologue
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part Three Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Acknowledgments
Discover More Michael Rutger
About the Author
Also by Michael Rutger
This is for the Essex Witches:
Tes and Eleanor, Matthew,
& Bex and Kurt and Pip.
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The unseen exists and has properties.
—Richard Ford, Lay of the Land
Prologue
She walked along the side of the road, and she walked fast.
Her legs were stiff, her arms crossed tight. Her head hurt. Badly. As if a metal band was clamped around her temples. Tightening. Her cheeks were stinging. Her neck felt naked and hurt around the back like a burn. Her best sneakers and her new jeans were getting soaked from the wet grass, and the gray-black mass of sky said there was more coming. Let it.
Everybody she saw was ugly. She had never felt more alone in her life.
And none of this was her fault.
She kept stomping homeward but after a while started to slow down, feet turning heavy and miserable. Her head ached worse than ever and her cheeks were wet now, too. And none of this was fair. She’d been so happy. She’d climbed such a big wall and all she wanted to do was share the view on the other side—not discover that somebody else thought they already owned it, that it wasn’t hers.
Her vision was blurred with angry tears, but she’d walked this way so many times she could have done it with eyes closed. She didn’t even notice the man sitting on the bench until she was level with him.
“Hey,” he said.
Old guy. Gaunt face, black hair, bags under his eyes. She knew who he was immediately. Had seen him a hundred times. He’d been in their house, stood by the fireplace talking with her dad, drinking one of his beers. He’d always been in the background of her life like a dusty piece of someone else’s furniture, but she didn’t want to talk to him now. Him or anybody else.
She kept going.
“You okay?” he asked. He stood, started walking with her. Not right beside. But at the same speed.
“I’m fine,” she said, keeping her head down, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. It was probably too late, but she didn’t want him to see she’d been crying. She was fourteen. That’s not a child anymore, whatever dumbass old people might think. Parents and teachers, everyone—but friends most of all. All they ever want to do is keep you small. They’re scared of who you’re becoming.
Of what you know. Of who you are.
“That’s good,” the man said. “Just being neighborly. That’s all. I wouldn’t want your dad to think I’d seen you out here, upset, and not checked if you’re okay.”
“I am totally okay, thank you.”
“Is it a boy thing?”
She stopped walking, stared at him, hands on hips. “Uh, that would be none of your business.”
He stopped too, looked apologetic. “Sorry. You’re grown now. I get that. You got your own world. And I don’t mean to intrude.”
“So don’t.”
“But it’s cold. It’s going to rain. Probably before you get home. I’m just saying why don’t I get you there. You look like you’re having a bad day, is all.”
“I don’t need help.”
“I know. Look, fine, I’ll leave you to it. But I’ll tell you one thing before I go, and you should believe me. Okay?”
“What is it?”
“Tomorrow’s another day. And there’s always a chance it’ll be a good one.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but closed it, suddenly feeling very tired. And dumb and guilty and small. She wanted to be at home, and warm, and dry. To start working out how she was going to fix this. Make it so she could start feeling happy again.
“Where’s your car?”
She knew as soon as he made the first turn that something was wrong. This wasn’t the way home.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I want to walk.”
She was his now.
Part One
We take our measure of being from what surrounds us; and what surrounds us is always, to some extent, of our own making.
—Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead
Chapter
1
You have reached your destination.
Kristy pulled gratefully to the curb and peered out the window. “Thank God for that.”
She was alone and so said it quietly. The vehicle made no response. Kristy hadn’t bonded with it yet—a loaner while hers was in the shop—not least because it adamantly refused to deal with her iPhone. On the eight-hour drive north the built-in navigation system had twice tried to lead her off the freeway, then retreated into panicked rerouting, before abruptly changing its mind and pretending the whole incident never happened. The car smelled pleasant and yet odd, as if doused with a scent designed to be an averaging out of the entire world’s conception of “fresh,” rather than pleasant to any single person or culture in particular. It was like being trapped in an elderly person’s guest bathroom. Having the windows open above forty miles an hour caused an unbearably percussive whap-whap-whap sound. There was a blind spot on the left that hid overtaking cars in a way that seemed specifically designed to cause accidents.
It was a dumb car. Right now it seemed confident of one thing, however.
Destination: 243 Shasta Avenue, Birchlake, CA
It struck her how often we refer to machines not merely for information but also reassurance, as we once would have with a parent, and put a pin in the observation for a short think-piece at some point, or maybe never.
She got out of the car, wincing. It was dark and cold outside her cocoon. Both sides of the street were lined with buildings, few above a single story high, most fronted with wood and all weathered in old small-town style. Trees dotted along the sidewalks, leaves thinned into late-fall mode. A dim streetlight on the corner revealed a small but aspiringly upmarket grocery store. Beyond that, another couple blocks, a liquor store, then town kind of ran out.
Closing the car door sounded loud.
Birchlake looked pretty much as she’d expected. Thick forest on one side, river on the other, with further forest beyond. The narrow highway entered over a bridge at the southern end of town, passing an old motel and gas station. At the other end the road followed the river further into the mountains. The kind of place you’d blow straight through on a road trip without noticing, unless you were desperate for coffee, a sandwich, or the restroom.
243 Shasta Avenue was dark.
One of the handful of two-story buildings, the street-level space had fairly recently been an antique or bric-a-brac store, now shuttered. Originally the building looked like it had been a general store. The business next door was a hipster-style coffee shop, complete with intricately hand-chalked price boards and ironic hashtags, closed for the night. Convenient for the morning, though.
Kristy walked up to 243, stretching her arms and back. Three-quarters of the building’s wide frontage was taken up by display windows flanking an old glass door, all of which had been whitewashed into opaqueness from the inside. On the right was a featureless wooden door with a large deadbolt. 243a. It looked secure but hardly welcoming. All reassuringly recognizable from the Airbnb listing, though a good deal less enticing at nine thirty on a dark, chilly night, a long way from home.
She pulled up the confirmation email on her phone, already wishing she’d booked into the B&B at the north end of town instead.
Pick up key from Stone Mountain Tap—ask for Val.
Kristy turned and scanned the other side of the street.
The Tap looked like it had been a bar for a long time and knew its business and had few regrets. There was a dedicated drinking area on the left, stools along a counter, and a long and low-ceilinged restaurant section on the right, with heavy chairs and tables, booths along the side, and maybe twenty people spread among the seating. The floor was battered wood, the walls randomly dotted with tarnished mirrors and neon beer signs and murky retro advertisements in frames. The lights were low. The music was not. Right now it was Joni Mitchell—who always sounded to Kristy like a cat trying to communicate that it was dying, and sad about it. Shelves behind the bar held bottles of every hard liquor known to mankind. There were a dozen beers on tap, too, half from the local microbrew and called things like pInePA and Cold River. It was the kind of place her ex-husband would like, Kristy knew.
There’s a rare, fine line between anodyne and sketchy, he would have said. And this is it.
A lean woman in her early fifties stood behind the bar. Cropped gray hair, nose stud, wearing a T-shirt that revealed tan, muscular arms dotted with Celtic-style tattoos. She had the loose, easy stance of someone who’d done years of non-dilettante yoga, and gave Kristy an appraising look as she approached.
“Are you Val?” Kristy asked. “I’m looking for—”
“Dangit,” the woman said. “Thought my luck was in.” She glanced at a scrap of paper thumb-tacked to the bar behind her. “I am indeed Val. Kristy?”
“That’s me.”
“Okay, so. Normally I’d let you in and give you the tour, but the Crown Prince of Uselessness didn’t show up tonight, and so I’m holding the fort by myself. I imagine it’ll be self-explanatory. You look like a grown-up.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
The woman took a while fishing a key out of her jeans. In the meantime Kristy cast a glance around to see if anybody was eating, and whether it looked edible. Nobody was. A tall, gaunt man in his sixties sat on a stool at the end of the counter. There was no glass in front of him.
He turned to look at her. Cloudy gray eyes, bags that spoke of a liver past its best, unnaturally dark hair scraped back from a high forehead. He looked so much like the kind of guy you always see in small-town bars that for a moment it almost felt as if she knew him from somewhere. Kristy realized she wasn’t in the mood for a solo meal even if it was an option.
“So what brings you to B-lake?” Val asked, as she finally produced a key. Kristy could imagine her asking the same question, in the same knowing way, of every stranger who walked in the bar.
“Just exploring.”
“Ha. Hope you brought something to read, because exploring will use up all of ten minutes. If you take your time. And to answer your next question, the kitchen closes at eight thirty on weeknights out of season. Sorry. The food’s not bad, though, for future reference.”
“Good to know,” Kristy said, as she took the key.
“All part of the service. And don’t lose that, cos I can’t find the spare.”
The door to 243a opened onto a narrow stairwell. Kristy found the light switch and carried her bag upstairs.
The apartment looked exactly how it had online, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they didn’t always. A five-second tour confirmed it had a small kitchenette and a desk and a door to the bedroom/bathroom—which had looked nice on the website and was an area on which Kristy wouldn’t compromise. The furniture was old, but both it and the rug and pictures had been selected well enough to pitch the place convincingly toward shabby chic, rather than merely shabby. A bay window. Good enough.
She dropped her bag and went back down to the street. A woman was pulling in the sidewalk sign outside the grocery at the corner, but thankfully it hadn’t closed yet. Organic vegetables. Local honey. An excessively wide selection of artisanal vinegars. The problem with seeing a lot of places is they all start to seem the same, especially the ones that are trying to be different. Kristy gathered up milk, snacks, a pre-made sandwich from the cooler. It featured an unnecessary amount of alfalfa sprouts, but she believed she’d be able to struggle through. A middle-aged woman with thick glasses took Kristy’s money and gave her a bag without recourse to speech.<
br />
By the time Kristy stepped back out onto the street it had started to drizzle. The road was deserted, or so she thought at first. Then she saw a figure on the other side. Tall, thin. Hands hanging down by his sides.
He was lit, then unlit, by the flashing sign of the Stone Mountain Tap, and it took Kristy a moment to realize that he’d started crossing toward her.
He stopped a few feet short of the curb. His head still had to tilt to look down at her. Kristy was barely 5′4″ and slim of build. Which was why, in situations like this, she always spoke first. “Can I help you?”
The man said nothing.
“You were in the bar, right?” She phrased it as a question only because most humans are straightforward animals and a trick that simple usually got them to respond more quickly.
Not this guy. He sniffed, wetly, looked away down the street. Remained silent. Kristy was not afraid. There was a dozen feet between them and her reactions were fast. She’d worn her running shoes for the drive. It seemed unlikely this man ran at least a 5K every day of the year, as Kristy did, or that he’d be able to do it anywhere near as fast. She was watchful nonetheless. You just never know, and there was something about this man that she didn’t like.
“You’re here about her,” he said. His voice was quiet, unthreatening.
“Who?”
“The missing girl.”
“Like you probably overheard me say: I’m just exploring.”
“People sometimes disappear for a reason.”
“What kind of reason?”
“You’d be better off leaving in the morning, exploring some other town. But I don’t suppose you’ll listen.”
The man turned away, and started to walk back across the street. Stopped after a couple of paces, half-turned back. He paused a moment, lips pursed, looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Sometimes it’s better if they stay gone.”
When he got to the other side, he turned left and disappeared around the corner.