The Possession Read online

  A companion for years, day after day and night after night. A whisper under the bed. A half-seen face on the other side of the room. Inaudible footsteps behind you, every night. Every day weakened by small and invisible acts of strength, tiny heroic acts of resistance that nobody else knows about. Because you can’t tell. No one must ever know. They can’t see the enemies all around.

  When Alaina was young, her mom had a game she liked to play. She’d grin and thrust out her arm, fist clenched, elbow locked. “Get through that defense!” she’d declare. And Alaina would try, cupping Mom’s fist in her hand (a hand that was tiny at first, but bigger as the years went by) and try to bend her mother’s arm. She couldn’t. A locked elbow is strong. It can hold a great deal at bay.

  The last time they played was a couple weeks before Mom died, and as Alaina pushed she sensed that she could get through that defense. So instead she laughed, and stopped, as if it had been as impossible as always.

  Her mom looked her in the eye and lowered her arm. There comes a point where it’s better not to play.

  It’s the same. You spend years choosing not to give up, locking your elbow against it. Until one day or night you realize you’re not strong enough anymore, or at least not tonight. You let down your guard and lower your head, and accept the rise of darkness with something like relief.

  Mom did that, but with someone’s help. That someone was going to pay.

  And it wasn’t going to happen to Alaina. On that final night in the woods, before she properly returned, she really had died and come back, or so it felt. And if you’ve died once, you don’t have to do it again.

  Nobody had noticed yet—least of all Dad, who was always studiously looking the other way—but she was getting paler by the day. There would come a time when, if she wanted, she’d be translucent. Invisible. Like them.

  Alaina was going to live both sides of the wall.

  Her dad was on the couch. Not reading. Not looking at his phone. Just staring into space. He looked straight-up exhausted. There’d been constant knocking on the walls and roof throughout the night, the sound of things moving around outside, crashing through the bushes, scampering over the porch. Trying to get in. To say hi. To do deals.

  “Bad night’s sleep?” She’d tried to keep a mocking tone out of her voice, but not hard enough.

  He looked up, and her resolve briefly faltered at what she saw in his eyes. “You have to stop this.”

  “Too late.”

  “I should have hidden her journals better.”

  “They would have led me to them sooner or later.”

  “Destroyed them, then.”

  “You wouldn’t have had the balls.”

  “It’s not about balls. I just couldn’t let all of her go. I loved her too, Alaina. For a lot longer than you’ve been alive. I lived the life and paid the price, and you have no idea what that’s like yet. I should have set fire to them.”

  “It wouldn’t have stopped me becoming.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m a quick study,” Alaina said. “As you’re all going to find out. And I have friends to help me.”

  “They’re not your friends.”

  “I thought you liked Maddy and Nadja,” she teased.

  “That’s not who I mean and you know it. Don’t trust them.”

  “Trust who? Say it.”

  Her dad looked her in the eye. “The things we can’t see, Alaina. They killed your mom, and your grandma before her. They’ll kill you, too.”

  The rain didn’t bother her. Something kept pace with Alaina in the bushes as she strode down toward the highway. She didn’t check to see what it was. When she got to the highway she walked out and stood right on the center line for a moment, looking up the misty road toward town.

  Oh, this walk.

  How many times?

  At first carried. Then walking, with her hand held up to hold her mom’s. Later, side by side. But it was different today. She wasn’t the child anymore. And she walked alone.

  Or maybe not. She saw something waiting for her, up ahead. Tall, thin, old. Then he was gone.

  Alaina wished for a moment she was small again. That her mother was there to surround and protect her.

  But she bit down on the feeling and started walking toward Birchlake, her head held high.

  This was her time.

  Chapter

  ​38

  Someone was nudging me—a finger gently prodding into my shoulder. I was impatient with this because I’d been doing something and it was important. And now they’d distracted me, and I couldn’t remember what the hell it had been.

  “Quit that, will you?”

  I was surprised at how clear my voice sounded, because now I thought about it, my eyes were shut, which presumably meant I’d been asleep. Normally I sound like a bear when I wake up after even a short nap, a bear that moreover dipped its snout too deeply into the trough before passing out. But now I sounded like I’d spoken only moments before.

  “He’s back,” someone said. Ken. His voice was on my right side. He sounded relieved.

  I opened my eyes. Again, this wasn’t hard, the heavy-lidded “Okay, let’s face the world” movement of the recently awoken. It was like the upbeat of a blink. My mind was clear.

  I saw two sets of legs in front of me, both wearing jeans. I looked up. Kristy and Molly. They were a few feet away and looking down at me with concern.

  “What?” I said. I stood up.

  Ken looked serious. “This is how we found you,” he said, holding his phone up.

  The photograph on screen showed me lying on my side on the ground, eyes closed. “What do you mean, found me?”

  He looked at Molly. “Tell him.”

  “I was with Kristy,” Molly said. “Looking for Pierre. We were close to giving up and calling you. Then…I don’t know what happened. I…I thought I saw someone. Standing to one side in the trees. I thought it was just a shape in the mist at first but then it wasn’t.”

  “Someone from town?”

  Molly shook her head. “Someone else. Who can’t be here.”

  “Who?”

  She just shook her head again. “Next thing I know, I’m sitting on the ground. I saw another person, twenty yards away. It was Ken. Then he woke up—and we both saw Kristy. She was sitting there blinking. We couldn’t see you anywhere. So we called out. Then we came looking.”

  “Have you got a cigarette?” Ken said. “By which I mean, of course you have, so give me one. Now.”

  His hand was shaking a little. I’ve never seen that in Ken before. “What is it?”

  “You were about a hundred yards away,” he said. “Right where you are now.”

  “That’s…” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “Yeah. But there’s more. Come on.”

  He started walking. We followed. After a minute I saw a wall. Tall, made of rocks. Ken pointed at it. “Recognize that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s the wall we were looking at before we all, well, fuck knows what happened.”

  “No. What we saw was a concrete wall.”

  “Exactly, mate. That’s what we saw. That wasn’t what was there.”

  I turned to Kristy. “What did you see?”

  Her face was pinched. “Same thing, by the sound of it. Two concrete walls joined in a right angle. But I also saw a staircase.”

  “Leading upward. I saw that, too. There was a door at the top. It was opening. And it seemed like there was someone there. A woman. Brown hair. Did you see her?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “I’m cold,” Molly said. “I need to be indoors.”

  My sense of direction is pretty good. Once in a while it will unpredictably fail and leave me even more stranded and lost than someone with no sense of direction, but this time it did not. Eventually a combination of GPS and cached map data confirmed we were headed in the right direction. />
  Ken had been right: we’d made it nearly a mile out into the forest.

  “You haven’t said anything about science yet,” Molly said, when we were about halfway back to town.

  “Gas.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Some kind of natural gas,” I said. “Seeping up from the rocks. You were overcome quickly. The rest of us stayed conscious long enough to undergo mental effects.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I admit that as a theory, it needs work.”

  “Yeah, Nolan. Given that you, Ken, and Kristy seemed to hallucinate basically the same thing, it really does.”

  “I am famously open to new and unusual ideas. So give me your best shot.”

  “I don’t have one,” Molly said. “I am famous for being prone to say if it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. Are you really going to have to hear it quack?”

  She shook her head and kept walking.

  Eventually we came upon a path that led us to a dead-end road at the edge of the middle of town. This had a trash can and recycling bin and a sign telling people to watch out for mountain lions and asking them to not set fire to things, and so was presumably the way most people set out into the woods.

  We made our way around the metal barrier in single file and stopped, looking back into the forest. Even though the barrier was merely a horizontal metal pole, knee-height, designed to swing open to let a service vehicle through once in a while, it felt better to be on this side of it.

  “Okay,” Ken said. “So what do we have?”

  “We went into the forest,” I said. “And something happened.”

  “Nolan, that’s crap. What just occurred was unusually strange. I’d like to feel we have a better handle on it than that.”

  “Well, I know what it felt like,” I said. “But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay. I have smoked a little pot from time to time.”

  “Good for you. But unless you’ve got some on you right now, I don’t know how that’s relevant.”

  “I’m a pot amateur, is my point. Little baggie in my sock drawer. A joint every now and then. But once at a party, five years ago…”

  “God,” Kristy said. “I remember that.”

  “I’m sure. It came up in marital discussions for months afterward. It was late afternoon, a party at an expensive house in Venice Beach. Good time being had by all. Maybe too good. Someone handed me a joint. I thought what the hell, I’d had a couple drinks already…”

  “A couple?” Kristy said.

  Probably the only thing worse than having your spouse edit your story in real time is enduring an ex-spouse doing it. “So I took a big puff, then another, and passed it on.”

  “I don’t want to rush you, Nolan,” Molly said. “But I really am cold.”

  “So then I turned to the person I was talking to, ready to get back into the conversation. They weren’t there. I thought that was a little odd—it’d taken me a few seconds to take the hits on the joint, tops, why would they have walked away so quickly…”

  “You are very dull, mate.”

  “Shut up, Ken—and then I realized nobody was there. And that it was dark. And I was outside, sitting with my back against a brick wall. In an alley. Half a mile away.”

  “I had no idea where he was,” Kristy said. “One minute he was there, chatting. Then he was gone. For two hours.”

  “Whatever was in the joint was either very strong or simply didn’t work for my brain chemistry. I blacked out. Kept talking for a while, then left the party. Walked along the walk, into backstreets. Eventually sat down.”

  “This is precisely why I don’t do drugs,” Molly said. “You could have hurt yourself.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. I’d evidently been conscious that whole time—in the sense of moving, talking to people, doing things. I had a new pack of cigarettes, which I’d clearly bought, somewhere—asking for what I wanted, paying for it, putting my wallet safely back in my pocket. I had no bumps or scrapes. I’d been awake and functioning. Just not present.”

  “‘Know your dealer,’” Ken said, “has always been my mantra. But I get your point. What we all experienced was like a blackout. I’ve had a couple myself, which is why I now try never to drink more than a pint of bourbon in one sitting. Unless it’s really good. But so…what caused ours? And don’t give me bollocks about natural gas. Just not credible, mate.”

  “What else have you got? For it to have affected all of us, we’d all need to have ingested the same thing, more or less at the same time. Kristy and I had coffees earlier—but neither you nor Molly did. Kristy didn’t drink at the Tap last night, either. None of us have eaten anything today. So what’s the common thread, unless it’s some kind of weird gas?”

  “For God’s sake,” Molly snapped. “For someone who fronts a show on weird and spooky things you are remarkably bad at recognizing when they’re right in front of your face. Seriously. Both of you. Stop trying to tie this up in a neat science bow when it’s not and that doesn’t work.”

  “Molly,” I said. “It does.”

  “What kind of drug or gas makes three people hallucinate the same thing?”

  “But we didn’t,” I said. “Yes, we saw walls. But we’ve spent a lot of time looking for walls over the last few days. So they’re in our minds. But what the brain thinks of as a wall, when vision’s unhooked, might be different. Brick walls. Concrete walls. We create a picture, confabulating not in memory but in real time. And then we saw steps: but I didn’t see them until Kristy had said the word steps. So I caught my vision from her. And I saw a figure, right? But Kristy didn’t. What I was probably doing was inserting the figure you thought you saw in your shower into the scene.”

  Molly had started shaking her head before I got halfway through. “No. What did the figure look like?”

  “Female. Long brown—”

  “Not what I saw in the shower. Or in the woods.”

  “Okay, but Moll,” I persisted, “that’s my point. I didn’t see what you saw, so I put something else in. And remember when Pierre turned up at the Tap last night? He was groggy. Said he’d crashed out in his chair. Perhaps that was the same thing. So maybe the question is: what’d he do yesterday that we didn’t?”

  She looked me right in the eye. “He went into the woods, Nolan. Same thing Alaina did, before she disappeared. And like we just did. This isn’t food or drink or gas. It’s not science either. It’s something in the woods.”

  Molly wanted to check back at the motel in case Pierre was there. Kristy volunteered to go with her.

  “Good plan,” Ken said. “For now, let’s not do a Pierre. Stick together in pairs.”

  Moll smiled brightly. “In case we come across any random pockets of hallucinogenic gas in town. Gotcha.”

  We agreed that unless Pierre was back at the motel we’d meet at the Tap. Ken and I watched them head off down a side street. “Kristy’s not saying much,” Ken said.

  “No.”

  “Any clue what’s on her mind?”

  “Not yet.” In ways that I’d find it hard to pinpoint or describe, Kristy had been behaving strangely ever since we’d arrived in town. There was a distance that hadn’t been there when we’d spoken the night of the book signing in Santa Cruz. That had felt like old times. This didn’t. I watched the back of the woman hurrying off along the street next to Molly, the woman I’d shared a house and bed with for eight years, and felt like I didn’t know her at all.

  “So what now?”

  “You remember when we talked to the twins, we knew there was something they weren’t saying?”

  “What about it?”

  “I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”

  Chapter

  ​39

  About halfway back to the motel, Molly realized Kristy was slowing her pace. She stopped and turned. “You okay?”

  “Look. This doesn’t need both of us, right?”

  “Ken said to s
tick together. Nolan agreed.”

  Ken’s not the boss of me, Kristy thought. And neither is Nolan. “I know. But I don’t think Pierre’s going to be there.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I want to talk to someone about Alaina.”

  “Alaina’s not missing anymore, Kristy. And she’s not my friend. Pierre is.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I don’t understand your priorities.”

  Kristy smiled tightly. “Well, you don’t really have to, I guess. I’ll quickly do this, and meet you all back at the Tap. Okay?”

  “Sure. You do that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been interesting to meet you, Kristy. I mean, I’m sure Nolan can be a pain at times. But he’s a good guy. A kind and thoughtful guy, who always tries to do the right thing. And so I never really got how he wound up separated.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I think I understand now.”

  “Not sure I understand what you mean by that.”

  Molly smiled just as tightly as Kristy had. “Well, you don’t really have to, I guess.”

  She walked away.

  Kristy took a chance and headed straight for the school. Sure enough, the Subaru was in position in the lot. The doors to the school were locked. She knocked on the glass, then spotted a discreet doorbell.

  The principal eventually emerged from the corridor inside. He seemed neither surprised nor enthusiastic to see Kristy. He unlocked the door. “You continue to be here.”

  “And growing less popular by the hour. I just want to ask a couple things and I’ll be gone. When you covered witchcraft—how much detail did you go into?”

  “Very little. Nothing sensational. My aim was to hook them with something they’d heard of, that’s all.”