The Possession Read online

  Then it was gone, and a figure stood there instead. Largely obscured, but tall and thin, with a slight stoop in his shoulders. Hands down by his sides.

  “That’s not Pierre,” Ken said.

  “Who’s there?” I said, with a cheerfulness that sounded as forced as it felt. “Heck of a mist, huh?”

  The figure did not respond. The mist continued to swirl, slowly, and after a few seconds it didn’t seem like it was there anymore, and it was hard to be sure that it had ever been. “Keep moving,” Ken said.

  And we did, our backs to the wall and moving as quickly as we could, fixing our eyes on where the crossroad would be if we could see it. Soon we could hear footsteps again.

  “There’s more than one set now, isn’t there.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. His face had a complicated expression on it. Unnerved, but also as if he wasn’t sure whether he was overreacting. I’m sure I looked the same. We moved faster, sidling along the storefronts, until there was a sudden noise behind us.

  “Oh, thank God,” a voice said. Molly’s voice.

  And then hands were pulling us out of the mist.

  Chapter

  ​43

  Derek was in the living room.

  Again.

  He was watching television.

  Again.

  Slowly sipping a glass of wine.

  Again.

  And, once again Gina was in the kitchen by the sink staring unseeingly out into the yard. The mist was so thick that she could barely see the back fence. There were no leftovers, so she needed to cook something. She couldn’t imagine what. There were plenty of ingredients in the fridge and cupboards. She’d bought them herself. She understood that they could be combined to create something to eat. She was finding it hard to remember how, or why. The idea of connecting things seemed ludicrous. Better to let everything remain separate. If you take away the habits between us, all that’s left is empty space and people standing far apart.

  Derek’s voice floated into the kitchen. “Are you coming in?”

  “In a minute.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. He’d done it ten minutes before. And last night. And most nights. It was always him asking her to come in. It was a wonder one or other of them didn’t get the message.

  And it was raining, again.

  It was always fucking raining now.

  And she was always standing at this counter with a glass of wine, delaying the moment. It even sounded like Derek was watching the same TV show as the night before. The same voice droning on. She poured another glass of wine, then got out her phone.

  Three messages via their app had gone unanswered. She’d tried calling, twice. Voicemail. She hadn’t left a message. She’d now waited twenty minutes to see if he’d respond to the missed call notifications his phone must have shown him. Didn’t seem like it.

  She hesitated, then sent a text.

  Two minutes later, a reply came back: I’m gone. Blocking this number. Thanks, but bye. K

  She read the text three times, nodding. Turned the phone over in her hand. The phone she’d sent messages from, to organize meetings. The phone she’d received ones on, too. Confirmations. Private jokes. The kind of thing that keeps the pot boiling. All over now.

  She considered throwing the phone to the ground, stamping on it. But what a pain it would be to get a replacement. That’s how you know you’re a grown-up. You only allow the emotions that are convenient. You carry on.

  Meanwhile, Derek kept turning up the sound on the TV. Louder and louder. The demise of out-of-town shopping complexes. Again. Who cared? Things come and they go. Old things die. New things arrive. And then they run away out of town, leaving you all alone.

  Derek’s voice: “Are you coming in?”

  Had he actually said it this time, again, or had she merely heard it in her head? And why was he still turning up the TV? The music was so loud now it felt like someone stabbing things into her ears. It was killing her. He was killing her. Killing her softly, with his love, with his forever being there, with being so calm and fucking reasonable all the time, about everything, until all you wanted was something dumb instead, that didn’t matter, something you could stay apart from, instead of feeling like you were forever being sucked deeper into soft and loving quicksand.

  And even though it never meant much, having it taken away still made everything vastly emptier. All the little cuts life visits upon you, making it harder to hold back the world, with all its stupid things you had to do and say, all its dumb questions. Because there’s only ever one answer.

  More wine.

  Except now she was standing out in the yard drinking it.

  In pouring rain. Enveloped in mist. She could still hear the television, so very loud. She could still hear the song, going round and round. And voices now, too.

  Lots of voices. None of them saying anything important—everyday conversation as people wandered around. Hey, why don’t we go in there? Hey, why don’t you buy this?

  They were too close. Gina couldn’t see them but she could feel them. Brushing up against her, behind her, past her. A constant flow, flying over the fence, coming from out of the forests, coming to find her at last.

  She heard her name being called. Derek was standing in the back doorway, confusion and shock splashed all over his face—an expression so big it was comical.

  She laughed at him. Who was he? Why was he living in Gina’s house? Was the building even hers? Was it really a house? It didn’t look like one. Garish light designed to pull people in. All the other houses on the street were the same. Buy into life. Buy into the endless bullshit.

  Derek ran out into the rain toward her. “Gina—what are you doing?”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

  She turned from him and ran—sprinting full speed into the back fence, crashing into it, face first, her head jerking back, blood spurting from her nose.

  Derek got to her in time to catch her as she hit the ground. “Gina—what’s wrong? What’s happening to you?”

  But though her eyes were open, staring up into the mist and rain, Gina wasn’t there.

  Chapter

  ​44

  It was Molly who’d pulled me into the Tap. Ken was hauled in immediately afterward by a woman I recognized—Val. Once we were both inside she quickly locked the door.

  “You guys okay?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”

  She smiled, briefly. “Ah, there’s the question.”

  “Is it anything to do with that wall in the space under where Kristy’s staying?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s got everything to do with it.”

  “Wait—where is Kristy? Isn’t she here?”

  Molly shook her head.

  The next thirty seconds were chaotic, as I tried to get back out onto the street. I tried hard, too, but Molly and the other woman turned out to be a strong combination—not to mention the door was locked. “Give me the key.”

  “Not going to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Nolan,” Ken said. “Look on Find Your Friends. Could be she’s nearly here. And at least you’d know where to go.”

  “He’s not going out there,” Molly shouted.

  I got out my phone and fired up the app. The indicator swung around lazily for a few seconds. Then: NOT FOUND.

  “Shit.”

  “That’s not reliable,” Val said. “It may mean something’s happened to her phone. It might mean she’s out of data range. Or it could, at this point, indicate neither of those things—but instead that your feelings toward her are conflicted and you’re not sure what she is to you anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Can I trust you not to do something stupid?”

  “Probably not. Why?”

  The woman hesitated, then reached in her pocket and pulled out the key. I put out my hand. She sho
ok her head. “First turn around and look.”

  “For God’s sake…”

  “Just do it.”

  I turned to face the street windows. Blinked. Ken came to stand beside me. “I don’t…”

  But then he ran out of ideas for what to say. There was no mist outside now. None. It wasn’t raining, either. It looked like a crisp early winter’s late afternoon, old storefronts in dark blue light. “So it wasn’t real?”

  Val unlocked the door. “You tell me.”

  She opened it. The mist was so thick out there that you could barely see the sidewalk—and it was raining hard.

  I glanced out of the window, and saw what I’d seen before. Cold, clear. I looked at my clothing and confirmed, however, that it was soaking wet. “I don’t…what?”

  “Nolan,” Molly said, “there’s things you need to hear.”

  Val told us to sit at the table by the window, and brought a pot of coffee. I could see Ken eyeing the bottles of vodka behind the bar and deciding now wasn’t the time, but putting a pin in the idea for not much later.

  She brought something else, too, which she placed in the middle of the table. It was a large-format book, leather-bound and water-stained, and it looked old.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Take a look,” Val said. “From talking to Molly, I think you’re going to know.”

  I opened the volume at random near the middle. It wasn’t actually a book, I saw, but a notebook or journal. About half of the surface of each of the two pages I could see was covered with small, dense, very untidy handwriting in an old-fashioned style. The rest was filled with drawings.

  I turned the page. More drawings on the left. The right appeared to be a rough map. There was some labeling, but the writing was even smaller and much of the page had suffered water damage. A shape that could have been a river, others that might be mountains. I turned another page. Abstract shapes, some curves, some straight lines with kinks in them. It was pretty obvious what they looked like.

  Finally I turned to the front of the book. There, in the same handwriting, was a name. Mary Paula von Tessen.

  “Jesus,” I said. “This is real? This is her notebook?”

  “One of them,” Val said. “There are supposed to be seven. We have three others in our possession, already digitized. This one was only found very recently.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Nobody knows. Most were damaged in a flood at the mission in the 1940s. We’re lucky to have any of them. It’s possible the remaining three were destroyed. I hope not.”

  Ken leaned forward. “Care to bring me up to speed?”

  “He told us in the car on the way up here,” Molly said.

  “Nolan says a lot of things, Moll. I don’t always listen, to be honest.”

  “Sister Mary Paula von Tessen was a member of the Dominican order at the mission in San Jose,” I said. “When I was researching the walls I found a single reference to her, claiming she’d made a study of them. I didn’t believe it was necessarily true, because I couldn’t find any corroborating evidence—even of the fact that she ever existed.”

  Val sat in the remaining chair and poured herself a coffee. “She was real. And for over a decade in the early 1900s she studied the walls in a level of detail that nobody else ever has, even covertly getting some of the Indians at the mission to go out and search for them.”

  “Is that the kind of thing nuns normally do?”

  “Not most nuns,” Val said. “But Sister Mary wasn’t like most nuns. Though she was a member of the Dominicans, she also had an allegiance to the Knack.”

  “Is that an acronym?”

  “No. Comes from the Old German knak, meaning a crack, or blow. But it came to mean a deception, or trick.”

  “And eventually, the facility for doing something,” I said. “I know. Okay, so—what does it mean in this context?”

  “An organization. To which I also belong.”

  “Instead of waiting for us to ask the right questions, how about you just lay this out? And quickly. Because if Kristy’s not here in ten minutes I’m going back outside even if it means kicking down the damned door.”

  “That would be a mistake.”

  “Mistake is my middle name. Seriously. Talk.”

  “You broke into the area underneath my Airbnb.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “We did. We heard a weird noise and thought somebody might be hurt in there.”

  “You didn’t hear the noise,” Val said. “You felt it. If someone had made an audio recording of the street at that moment, then played back the tape, the noise wouldn’t have been on there. Same with the sound Kristy ‘heard’ a couple of days before.”

  “I saw a glow in there though,” I said.

  “Same kind of thing. Wouldn’t have shown on a photograph. You could just sense something was in there.”

  “And on our way here just now. We heard something similar—in the mist. Was that the same?”

  “Yes. It’s not a sound, or sight. It’s an experience. It’s feeling something and not having any way to process or name it. You file it in your mind as best you can, though there’s a theory it’s actually the big mat of neurological material in the midriff that does most of the processing. The stomach brain. The old, pre-verbal mind, the site of gut feelings and unease. Same with the phones last night.”

  “You heard them?”

  “It wasn’t ‘hearing.’ No phones actually rang. You may have been seeing odd things in the last couple of days, too. And feeling nauseous.”

  “I saw someone in my shower,” Molly said. “And Ken heard knocking inside his closet. Nolan heard it, too.”

  “Not real sounds, again,” Val said. “It just meant something was nearby. You know it’s there, but you can’t see anything, so your mind resolves the conflict by positioning the source somewhere hidden. That motel is right by the woods, which is where they live. You may also have experienced sudden temperature drops. Though those are real. I mean, it’s all real. But there are different reals happening at once.”

  “Great,” Ken said. “We’ve found the one person in the world who talks even more bollocks than Nolan.”

  “I’ve been doing what I can, including trying to replace the wall originally sited here in the middle of town. It’s not my real job, but it was going okay until the last few days. When it all got badly out of hand.”

  “Does this notebook show the walls in this area?”

  “Yes.” She got out her phone and showed me a series of photos of pages in the notebook, stopping on one that showed a drawing of a wall with a slight curve. “The local walls in their original state. Or at least as they were a hundred years ago. That’s the one I’m trying to replace. It was destroyed when the town was built.”

  “Who made the walls?”

  “Nobody knows. They’ve been patched and amended over the centuries but the original designs have been here for thousands of years. From long before European settlement. It’s possible they even pre-date the Native Americans.”

  “Then what are they for?”

  “You’re going to have to be pretty open-minded.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” Ken said. “Nolan’s mind could do with being a lot more closed.”

  “But you’ve only got five minutes left,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do walls do?”

  “Form a barrier,” I said. “Put a wall through an area, and you’ve changed it. It turns one side into the inside and makes another, even if only inches away, an outside. Where before it was all the same thing.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “That’s good. But it’s more than that. Starting to build walls was the beginning of humankind. Nothing we’ve done to the environment since is bigger than the making of the first wall. It was the birth of here, and there; of in, and out. Also, of us, and them.”

  Ken frowned. “You mean of having enemies?”

  “Partly. Before, humans were nomads. S
mall groups, intermingled families with shared goals, wandering in a huge open world. Using parts of it season after season. Centuries before Birchlake appeared on a map, local Indians would stop here at certain points in the year. Because it was convenient. Because they had become accustomed to it, and each generation passed on the habit to the next. That didn’t make it theirs. But it made it a place. And when you build a wall…”

  “That makes one side yours,” I said. “And after that, anybody on the other side isn’t you—and you can pretend it isn’t there.”

  “You’re a smart guy,” she said. “I’m surprised that YouTube show of yours isn’t a lot better.”

  “Oi,” Ken said.

  “You’ve seen The Anomaly Files?”

  “Of course. As soon as you came to town I made it my business to find out who you are. I keep an eye on everybody.”

  “Was it you who wrote the message on our car windshield?”

  “I thought it would be in your best interests to leave town at that point. I was right.”

  “Why would you even care about us?”

  “Walls aren’t only a barrier between people,” she said, carefully. “They can be a boundary between people…and things that aren’t people at all.”

  “What…kind of things?” Molly asked.

  “The things we can’t see, but are there all the same.”

  “Invisible things?”

  “Yes.”

  “If something’s invisible,” Ken said, irritably, “it doesn’t exist.”

  “Why? What makes you think things have to be visible?”

  “The fact I’m not bonkers. Next question.” Ken looked at me for backup, but could see that I was taking her seriously. “What? Nolan, don’t tell me you believe this bollocks.”

  “Things exist in the dark,” I said. “Molecules exist even though they’re too small to see. Feelings exist, and run our lives. But you can’t point to them.”

  “That’s different,” Ken said.

  “Is it?” I said. “We see things because of light. Unless an object produces its own, then we only see an object if light from an external source bounces off and reaches our eyes, after which electrical impulses provoked by the interaction of light with our retinas pass along the optic nerve to the brain, which interprets the signals and presents the result to our minds as an image. Which sounds simple, right?”