The Possession Read online

  Chapter

  28

  I arrived in the bar a few steps behind Ken, to see Molly right up in Pierre’s face.

  “Where have you been?” she said, when she saw us.

  The few other people present were studiously ignoring the situation—apart from the young guy behind the bar, who was watching it very carefully.

  “What’s the hell’s happening?”

  “God knows,” she said. “I went to the restroom and when I got back he’s going off at the guy behind the bar.”

  This was the most un-Pierre thing I’d ever heard of. “Pierre—what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was sitting there. Molly went to the bathroom. And I…I dunno. That guy, he just.”

  He glanced at the bartender. Kurt or whatever his name was.

  “He just what?”

  “Nothing.” Pierre was staring down at the floor. He looked about twelve years old. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “Okay then,” Ken said. “Seems like there was a thing, but it’s not a thing anymore, right?”

  “Right.” Pierre glanced at the bartender again. “Sorry.”

  The guy shrugged. “No biggie, dude. I should probably ask you to leave, though. Right?”

  Pierre nodded, accepting this was reasonable. “Why don’t we head back,” Molly told him. “I’m tired anyway.”

  I walked them outside. “Seriously, Pierre,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said—and he did look more himself. “I honestly have no clue what just happened. The guy really…I don’t know. He’s a bad person.”

  “Because…?”

  Pierre smiled sheepishly. “Or maybe he’s not. Shit, I don’t know, Nolan. I felt angry at him suddenly. Sorry. Everything seems different, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean? Different how?”

  “Let’s just go,” Molly said to him, with the gentle, everything’s-okay tone only women can muster convincingly. “Early night. So we can leave bright and early, right, Nolan?”

  She looked me in the eye. “Sure,” I said.

  I watched them walk away down the street into the mist, or fog—I’ve never been sure of the difference. It was getting thicker, either way. I’ve known Pierre for two years. In that time, apart from being unnecessarily handsome and annoyingly personable, he hasn’t caused me a moment’s grief. I found it hard to understand why that might be happening now.

  He’s also extremely transparent, and so I was pretty sure he didn’t know either.

  Just before I went back into the bar, my phone rang.

  “I see you,” Kristy said.

  I turned, saw her in the window of her apartment, a shadow against a dim glow. The edges of the window looked blurred. She waved, a small movement. I waved back.

  “No response from Val,” she said. “I left a message. I don’t expect anybody’s going to happen by and decide to try the back door to the building tonight.”

  “Well, apart from us. So, are you coming down?” I knew what her answer was going to be.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ve had a shower, I’m warm and dry, and I’m not sure I need another night in that bar. Every day here is beginning to feel like the same day. How about breakfast? In the coffee shop? Eight thirty?”

  “Sounds good. And you’re fixing to be on the road soon after?”

  “That’s my…”

  I thought for a moment that the line must have dropped out, but realized I could hear her breathing. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just, be cautious with that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “I talked with him the first night I was here. He came up to me in the street. Said some odd stuff.”

  “Kristy—what guy?”

  “For God’s sake, Nolan—the one on the corner. Tall, older guy. Standing looking at you.”

  I turned toward the grocery store. Nobody there. Back the other way, toward the liquor store on the next block.

  “Kristy, there’s nobody out here except me.”

  “Nolan, he’s thirty feet away. Opposite the grocery.”

  I turned. Even walked a few yards in that direction. The street was empty. “You’re looking out from a lit room onto a dark and misty street, Kris. The light’s playing tricks.”

  She was silent for a moment. “Oh. Okay.”

  “Do you want me to come up?”

  “No. I’m fine. See you in the morning.”

  I didn’t argue the point. I’d had enough of people being strange at me for one night. I went back in the bar.

  Chapter

  29

  When I woke it was cold. Really cold. For a moment this caused a disconnect in my brain, taking me back to the last time I’d woken freezing—at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, in the dead of night on a small beach by the side of the Colorado River, scrunched up in a sleeping bag. Only when I realized I was swaddled instead in sheets that smelled faintly of bleach did I lock back to where I was. My motel room.

  I didn’t open my eyes because I find it harder to get back to sleep afterward. I could tell, in that way you can tell, it wasn’t anywhere near time to get up. That it was still the middle of the night. I curled up tightly, trying to maximize my body’s warmth, hoping to drift back.

  It was working, too—until I heard the sound.

  I ignored it. I’ve stayed in a lot of motels and hotels. Each has its distinctive chamber orchestra of unexpected noises. The whir and clunk of the elevator down the hall. The rustle of another guest careening along the corridor, listening to the television too loud in hopes of making their room seem less empty, or telling a child to get back to their own bed and go to sleep, for the love of God. My condo in Santa Monica has a string section of its own—people arguing as they walk along the beach, a sudden spasm of music from a boom box strapped to a homeless person’s bike, distant sirens. Evidence of things unseen, each clear enough to picture them in your mind’s eye.

  If you try to ignore them they’ll get on your nerves. So instead I listen, accepting them as part of the soundscape, and find it helps me back to sleep, a lullaby from the universe.

  The sound of rain on the window. I was lying on my right side, so that was in front, six feet away. A sudden gust of wind, moving branches around the back of the motel, aspiring toward a howl but falling short, dropping into a slowly fading moan—taking me with it, I hoped, back to sleep.

  Except…

  There was that sound again.

  Or still. I realized it hadn’t ever gone away, only slipped briefly below the threshold of audibility, submerged beneath the steady patter of rain. Then I realized that it was music. A heavy beat, though tinny. A high melody, wistful. I knew it. But couldn’t remember what it was.

  As I listened, I realized it was repeating itself. Like a ringtone. I finally opened my eyes and propped myself on one elbow. I already knew there were problems with the idea, but I flapped out my hand onto the nightstand for my phone.

  It wasn’t there. Now that I had both ears off the pillow it was easier to lock on a direction and confirm what I’d already suspected. The music was coming from a source inside my room. And it still sounded like a ringtone.

  The problem was that it wasn’t my ringtone. I’ve had the theme from Halloween as my call alert ever since phones became sufficiently advanced for you to have a say in the matter. I started by laboriously keying in the tones (it’s amazing what you’ll do when you’re supposed to be writing the fifth draft of a bad script) and graduated via midi files to eventually using a sampled chunk of the real soundtrack.

  That was the first problem. The second is that I always, always, have my phone on silent overnight.

  And the third was, where the heck was my phone?

  My eyes were accommodating to the darkness but there wasn’t much to go on. A red LED on the coffee machine. The rectangle of the big window at the front of the room, only slightly lighter than the wall around it. I t
urned my head, trying to refine the direction of the sound. I always put my phone on the nightstand. I snatch a couple of pages of a book before sleep, and I do that on my device. I also use it as an alarm, checking it’s set before turning out the light.

  Still befuddled from sleep, I couldn’t recall doing either, though that could also be because Ken and I had stayed in the Tap a good deal longer than was wise, before eventually lurching back to the motel.

  When…yes, I read. I remembered it now. And I also set an alarm for eight a.m. While lying in bed. So where the heck was my phone?

  I leaned forward querulously and peered over the edge of the nightstand. No sign of it on the floor.

  I got out of bed, shivering. As soon as my feet landed on the carpet the music stopped—to be replaced with a muffled vibrating sound. I spotted a faint light on the floor, over by the end of the window by the door.

  My phone, facedown on the carpet. Now doing what it was supposed to—lighting up its screen, and vibrating—rather than playing a ringtone out loud.

  But…on the floor. Over there.

  Ten feet from where I now remembered placing it on the nightstand, before I went to sleep.

  The screen confirmed I had incoming, from Ken. It also said the time was 1:44 a.m. I pressed the screen to accept the call.

  “Nolan?” Ken’s voice was low, scarcely above a whisper. “Is that you?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “This is my phone. Are you okay?”

  “I’m in my room.”

  “Okay. But…why are you calling?”

  “I need you to come in here.”

  “In your room?”

  “Yes, where else, you twat?”

  “I don’t know. This is a weird conversation, Ken. It’s nearly two in the morning.”

  “I know what fucking time it is,” he hissed. “Seriously, Nolan. Just get in here.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s someone in my closet.”

  Chapter

  30

  I pulled on clothes and left the room. It was raining steadily, but the walkway was mainly protected by the overhang, and outside actually felt warmer than it had in my room.

  I padded along to Ken’s, tried the handle. The door was locked. A moment later the handle turned, however—and the door was drawn open a little.

  I pushed it further. The room was dark. Ken was immediately inside, close up to the window, in PJs and disheveled hair mode. He had a finger to his lips.

  I closed the door silently behind me. Did a “WTF?” mime.

  Ken pointed at the closet. Like the one in my room, it was on the far side of the bed, forming the wall that demarked the bathroom from the rest of the space. Two sliding doors, both closed.

  We stood in silence for thirty seconds. Nothing happened. My heart was beating pretty hard.

  I looked at Ken. He was very still, very there, fully focused on the closet.

  There was a quiet knocking sound.

  Two knocks, like a knuckle rapped against wood. Not fast, about a second apart, and not hard. But yes, a knocking. Coming from inside the closet.

  Ken looked at me—and pointed to his ear as a question. I nodded. I’d heard it too.

  And I didn’t need to ask why he hadn’t gone over by himself to see what was causing it. No matter how much of a hard-ass you are, if there’s someone in your closet in the dead of night, you want numbers on your side.

  After about twenty seconds there was another double-knock. Same timing, but a little louder. As before, it seemed to be coming from the left side of the closet.

  Ken indicated for us to approach the bed. He climbed onto it, carefully, so as to not cause creaks from the mattress or frame. I went around the end until I was in position between the end of the bed and the closet.

  Another pair of knocks—this time faster.

  Ken lowered himself onto the far edge of the bed and got his feet planted firmly on the floor. He reached across his body with his right hand, toward the handle on the left-hand side door. Got it in position, held it there.

  Looked at me. I nodded. He threw the door aside.

  It slid fast, crashing into the other end of the closet and revealing a space that held a few coat hangers, one with a pair of pants on it, a pair of Ken’s shoes, and a tatty ironing board leaning against the back.

  Nothing else.

  I held up my hand, and slid the door back again, more slowly. Then indicated I was going to open the other half. Ken nodded. And I did it.

  But there was nothing in there apart from Ken’s overnight bag. Finally, I drew the two doors more slowly toward the middle, so the opposite sides were half open.

  There was nobody there.

  We looked silently into the space together. “No,” Ken said quietly. “That is not okay.”

  “A coat hanger?” I suggested. “Swinging against the door?”

  Ken gave it a try. The closet was too deep for a coat hanger in motion—even if you could come up with a rational reason for it to move—to swing against either the door or the back of the closet. “You heard it,” he said. “And how many horror movies have I made?”

  “Too many.”

  “Oi. But, yes. And back in the days when you didn’t do it all in VFX but had to make things actually happen. And as the director of zombie cult favorites such as The Undying Dead and They Eat Your Face III, I’ll tell you: if you want it to sound like someone’s knocking on a door, you can piss about all you like but you’ll wind up holding a microphone next to someone banging real knuckles on real wood.”

  “But there was no one in there.”

  “I know. And that’s what I do not like.”

  “How long was it going on?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “About ten minutes. Must have woken me up. Knock-knock. I got out of bed. Knock-knock. Considered checking it out, but then thought—fuck that. Get Nolan in here. You can use him as a human shield.”

  He winked, and then we were both laughing. Quietly, and a little shaky, but it felt good all the same. When we stopped, we realized that we could hear a noise.

  Knocking. But not the same this time. Three quiet sounds: rap-rap-rap.

  Coming from the door to the room.

  We very quietly and carefully crossed the space. This time it was me who reached for the handle. Ken looked around, grabbed the coffee pot from his machine, came and stood to the side of the door. Nodded.

  I grabbed the handle and yanked it open.

  Scaring the crap out of Molly, standing outside.

  “So now do you believe me?”

  “About what?” Ken said. I’d explained why I was there. Molly in turn had told us she’d been woken by the sound of closet doors slamming above her head—and, knowing it was Ken’s room, come up to check what the hell was going on.

  “I told you,” I said. “Molly thinks she saw something in her shower.”

  “And what exactly was it?”

  “A figure,” Molly said. “Standing in the tub. I saw it in the mirror. But when I turned…it had gone.”

  “Nolan—what the fuck is going on here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And that’s not all. When you called me…my phone was being weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Playing the wrong ringtone. With the sound on.”

  “Not sure that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It was on the floor, half the room away from where I left it before I went to sleep.”

  “Oh.”

  “And when I got out of bed it stopped playing the song, and went back to vibrating.”

  “Yeah, alright,” Ken said. “You can be in the weird-events gang. But I’m going to repeat the same question.”

  “And I continue to not know the answer. It could still be science.”

  “How?” Molly said.

  “Ken’s closet backs onto his bathroom. There will be pipes in those walls. Old pipes. The temperature drops, they make a noise.”

&nbs
p; “Maybe,” Ken said. “But do you think we should check whether someone else has had something weird happen?”

  “Who?”

  “Who’s not here?”

  We went downstairs and to the end of the walkway. Ken knocked on Pierre’s door. Waited a while, then did it again.

  “So I guess he’s asleep,” I said.

  Molly moved up close to the window, however, shielding her eyes. “There’s a light on in there.”

  Ken did the same. “Dim, though.”

  “It’s from the bathroom,” Molly said. “Why would he leave the bathroom light on?”

  “Maybe he just does.”

  “He’s not a child, Nolan. I doubt he needs a night-light.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said, thinking of Kristy, who used to prefer leaving a low light in the hallway outside our bedroom. She gradually got out of the habit while we were together. I had no idea what she did now, which felt weird.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Ken said. “If we wake him up, so be it.”

  He rapped a lot louder on the door. Molly put her ear close to the window and listened. Shook her head. I was getting very cold and a little wet and increasingly keen for us to not be doing this. “One of you phone him.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Around the back.”

  I walked around the end of the building, taking a squall of bitey rain in the face in the process. I was aware this would look odd to anybody watching, but so far as I could tell we were the only people staying in the motel.

  I went up to the narrow window, stood on my toes, and got my face up close. The dim light was enough to show something in the main area. The chair that, in my room, was pushed as far under the desk as possible, to save space.

  Pierre’s was lying on its back on the floor.

  When I got back around the front Ken was knocking on the door again, this time with his fist.

  “He’s not answering his phone,” Molly said.

  “I think it’d be good to check he’s okay,” I said.

  “How, mate? I’m not breaking down another door tonight.”