The Possession Read online

  She yawned, at last believing that sleep had become a feasible endeavor.

  There was a very loud crashing sound.

  She froze. First out of shock—the noise was sudden, and extremely loud, seeming to come from somewhere very nearby—and then with confusion.

  She’d been close to the window. Yet she hadn’t seen anybody walking the sidewalk toward the building.

  She only realized this after she’d turned toward the door to the apartment. She did this even though she knew that wasn’t where the sound had come from. That’s what you do. You check the perimeter. Hers was fine, but her heart was beating hard.

  She pressed her face up against the window. Looked up the street, then down. Five, maybe ten seconds had passed since the noise. Nobody could have made it to either corner in that time. She wasn’t even sure that’s where the noise had come from—it had seemed to judder up straight through the core of the building, almost to start inside her—but it was the only explanation that made sense.

  Which meant they were still down there. And that the most likely explanation for the noise was someone hammering on the front door.

  So, now what? Call the cops?

  Not for someone banging on a door. Nobody’s coming out for that unless it’s a very quiet night, and if they do, they’re going to make you feel small about it. And—if you’re a woman—they’ll take the time to patronize the living crap out of you, too.

  Kristy waited, braced to hear the noise again. If you bang on a door and nobody answers, you bang again, right?

  Individual seconds passed, one by one, then thirty seconds in a block. Then a minute. And another.

  If you bang on a door that hard in anger, it’s unlikely you’re in a patient enough mood to wait two minutes for a response. So it was only somebody walking home. Fresh from an argument with their spouse, or randomly furious with the universe in general. Bang-bang on a door: that’s showed everyone. Then stand there, fists hurting, head bowed, realize you’re being lame, and lurch home.

  Kristy let these rational, comforting explanations stroll around her brain, feeling her heart rate tending back toward normal. It didn’t get down all the way, though—and her hands were still gripping the back of the chair.

  Still no sign of movement on the street. Must be over five minutes now. She could open the window and look, sure. Hard to imagine what would be gained by this apart from the opportunity to ask them to go away—which would just confirm to them that somebody was inside. Not so smart.

  And then her calm, measured thoughts skidded to a halt.

  What if they were inside the building?

  She stood in front of the door to the apartment, holding her breath, eyes closed, mouth half open. Doing everything she could to make her hearing as acute as possible. No sound from the other side.

  Because there’s nobody there.

  There was no way they could have gotten in. Of course. But was she going to feel comfortable getting into bed until she was sure?

  She slowly and silently opened the door. The stairwell was empty. The street door at the bottom was still closed. She padded down. Hesitated behind the door, then unbolted and quickly pulled it wide. Stepped out.

  Just a cold, dark street in the mountains, late at night.

  She went back in and relocked the door, feeling very silly, then went back up into the apartment, relocking that door, too. The annoying thing was she’d been ready for sleep, and now she was going to have to reboot the entire frickin’ process. She headed to the stove to put the kettle on.

  But stopped halfway. Her phone was in the middle of the floor.

  She glanced up at the counter near the stove. She was prone, she knew—and had been hassled senseless about it by Nolan—to leaving her phone a little close to the edge of things. Tables. Nightstands. Counters, like this one.

  In the year in which she’d lived alone, however, without someone to mansplain phone care to her, she’d made an effort to curb the habit. She was sure the phone had been six inches from the edge. Couldn’t picture it—and knew how misleading that kind of mental image could be anyway, how easy it is to make yourself believe you saw something you never saw—but confident nonetheless.

  And even if it had been there, hanging off, gravity works straight down, right? It would have taken something to cause it to fall. The thud when whoever banged on the door downstairs? Maybe. Except the phone hadn’t been lying on the floor when she crossed the room to the door.

  She picked it up. The front was shattered, glass twisted with lines that looked like branches against sky.

  The screen was cloudy gray.

  Chapter

  ​5

  Alright then,” Ken said, as he steered my car one-handed out of San Jose airport, his other meaty paw clutching a quadruple espresso in a tiny paper cup. “You have against my better judgment lured me up to Northern California, fetid lair of pot-drenched hippies and start-up wankers hell-bent on game-changing and disrupting things that were perfectly fine as they are. To be honest, I was drunk when we spoke last night and had no memory of booking the plane tickets until I saw the email when I woke up.”

  “You didn’t,” Molly said patiently, from the back. “You phoned me and told me to do it. At one thirty in the morning. I also booked a motel.”

  “Oh,” Ken said, as he aimed the car firmly across several lanes of traffic toward the exit for 680, the freeway that would take us north of the Bay Area. Though we were in my car, when you’re with Ken, he drives. Twenty-five years of directing commercials and low-budget horror movies has brought him to the point where he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Or anybody. Especially me. I’ve given up trying to argue the point and simply handed over the keys as he and Pierre came out of the airport. “Good. I’m sure you did a much better job. My point is, Nolan, compelling though your argument must have been, I’m hazy on the fine detail.”

  “We spoke for half an hour, Ken.”

  He thought for a moment, shook his head. “Nope. ‘Come to San Jose,’ you said. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing,” Pierre said. Our cameraman was in back with Molly, an unusually small bag of equipment—he hadn’t been able to bring his usual ludicrous amount of gear on the hop from Los Angeles—stowed in the trunk. He looked a little more annoyingly handsome and tan than when I’d seen him a few weeks before. “All Ken would say is ‘It’s some stupid idea that Nolan talked me into.’”

  “Nice. Well, I apologize to Molly,” I said, “who heard some of this over breakfast. But to teach you to pay attention, Ken—here’s the soup-to-nuts.”

  Everybody’s heard of the Nazca Lines, in Peru. If you haven’t, look them up. I’ll wait. Okay, you know what? Just listen. The Nazca Lines are hundreds of extremely straight lines of scraped earth—embellished with vast parallelograms and narrow triangles longer than a skyscraper is tall, along with massive animal and plant geoglyphs of eerie sophistication. Believed to have been created between 500 BC and AD 500, the lines are assigned to the usual alleged yesteryear obsessions of celestial observation or “ceremonial walkways,” though neither makes much sense. Erich von Däniken and allied ancient astronaut nuts went all in on the idea that they were interstellar landing strips, but it’s hard to imagine why you’d require so many, that are so long, and repeatedly and chaotically cross, or why you’d need vast, stylized pictures of spiders and monkeys and hummingbirds for this purpose (unless they were the logos of alien cruise ship companies).

  Much less famous are the Sajama Lines in Bolivia, again formed by scraping away rocks to reveal lighter undersoil and stretching for up to twenty kilometers across arid and unforgiving landscape. There are none of the cool geoglyphs found at Nazca, but they spread over twenty-two thousand square kilometers, making them fifteen times the size. There are further examples that are barely known beyond academics in the relevant countries—like the Big Circles, twelve massive rings of low stone walls in the Jordanian desert, ranging from seven hundred to
fifteen hundred feet in diameter. Nobody knows who made them, or why.

  The area around the nearby Azraq Oasis has hundreds of more complex circular structures dated to around two thousand years ago. Still in Jordan, there’s a ninety-three-mile-long wall called Khatt Shebib, which stretches across a random stretch of desert. It is not (and has never been) high enough to form a barrier against anything. At times two walls run in parallel, pointlessly. Over in Kazakhstan, meanwhile, there’s a collection of two hundred mounds, ramparts, and shapes—including a vast square with a diagonal cross, and a three-legged swastika—known as the Steppe Geoglyphs, some of which are believed to be eight thousand years old.

  And so on and on. There are famous examples in Europe, too—like the stone lines at Carnac in France. More are being discovered every year, now that people have access to Google Maps. But this kind of thing is only found in other, dusty and ancient countries, right? The weird foreign ones?

  Wrong.

  There are lines in the United States, too. I’m not talking about odd collections of megalith-type structures such as Mystery Hill in New Hampshire, or Gungywamp in Connecticut—or even the stone chambers in New England that conventional archeology airily dismisses as “root cellars.”

  Stranger, to me, are the stone walls.

  There’s no question that the scattered communities of sixteenth and seventeenth century New England would have needed to organize their environment, and likely spent some time piling up rocks for that purpose. A significant number of stone walls may be merely that. But in 1872 the US Department of Agriculture estimated there were 240,000 miles of walls in New England. Yes, all those zeros are correct. And still better than my Amazon sales ranking. A further report in 1939 nudged it up to 259,000 and still didn’t factor in several areas that have especially large numbers of walls: modern researchers put the figure closer to 500,000.

  That’d get you to the moon and back.

  That’s a lot of walls.

  Let’s put this in the context of the times, too—the period when (according to the few archeologists who’ve considered the phenomenon for five seconds) early settlers allegedly erected these features. In the highlands of Massachusetts there’s a town called Hawley, for example. It was settled in 1770 and has never been large: its population in 1790 was 539, it peaked at 1,089 in 1820, and then it slipped back to 600 by 1879. These were farmers living in a harsh, rugged landscape—chopping wood, growing food, performing all the disappointingly tiring tasks required to hack out an existence in the New World.

  Yet this small community apparently also had the time to build over a thousand miles of stone walls.

  Their walls share odd characteristics with others across New England, lines that could circumnavigate the Earth twenty times. Let’s run with the idea they’re to keep wanderlusting sheep or errant chickens in check. In which case, why are some twelve feet high? And yet others built so low that they wouldn’t form a barrier to a determined toddler? Why do some veer all over the place, in jagged or curling or looping lines? Why do so many start and stop suddenly and without apparent reason, failing to form a useful boundary? Why do others go through swamps, or up cliffs, or over mountains that were never farmed, sometimes scaling slopes that are hard to navigate without going down on hands and knees?

  Dunno, right? So let’s just ignore them.

  That happens a lot. In the New York Times of December 18, 2002, you’ll find a piece about a group of scientists diligently mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar. They found evidence for several hundred of the ships recorded to have sunk there over the previous four centuries, which is doubtless fascinating if you have a thing for old boats, which personally I don’t. There’s a wealth of chatty information about the wrecks and items that divers had found—including leather, clothes, and food (blueberries, and a potato) that’d been held together by the mud for a couple hundred years.

  But then, in the middle of the piece is an odd little paragraph. In throwaway style it’s revealed that the survey also found “submerged walls more than 900 feet long, that scientists say are clearly of human construction,” adding that the last time the water levels were low enough for building on dry land was…three thousand years ago.

  Then they go back to drooling over the wreckage of Revolutionary-era ships, and the wall’s never brought up again. If you don’t believe me, look it up—though you’ll have to head straight to the NYT piece because it’s not mentioned anywhere else that I can find, and it’s my job to look for this stuff.

  Doesn’t that seem weird to you? Half a mile of stone wall, built three thousand years ago, cited in the New York Times as discovered and mapped by real, named scientists—and yet everybody’s “Huh, whatever”?

  As The Anomaly Files has pointed out on many occasions, there’s an awful lot of “Huh, whatever” in American archeology—especially when it comes to the country’s prehistory. Which is curious.

  Almost as if there are secrets we’re not being told.

  Chapter

  ​6

  By the time I’d laid this out Ken had gotten us around San Francisco and was heading up a smaller highway into the mountains of the real Northern California. Pierre had fallen asleep, which I was struggling not to take personally, as he’d been the one to ask the question I was diligently answering. To be honest, while he’s a great cameraman and a relentlessly good-natured human being, laser-like smarts is not what we pay Pierre to provide.

  Molly, as assistant producer, seemed to be paying attention—doubtless alert for things she might have to budget for or source or shout down the phone at somebody about. Ken was evidently listening, too, when not snarling at other road users or suggesting unrealistic sexual maneuvers they could perform upon farm animals, inanimate objects, or themselves.

  “Alright, fine,” he said. “Thank you for the only slightly boring travelogue. But we’re not going to Nazca, or France, or even New England, on our budget. So presumably you’re saying there are lines up here, too.”

  “I am,” I said. “Not only that, but they’re one of the most little-known mysteries in the entire country.”

  If people have heard of them at all, it’ll be the Berkeley Walls—which run in sporadic sections up in the hills on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. But these are only a fraction of the lines in Northern California: there are far larger clusters around Shasta, the Sutter Buttes near Sonoma, and other sites. In total there are over eight hundred miles—and those are just the ones that have been located and mapped. Obviously a much smaller number than on the East Coast, but they share the characteristics of odd variations in height, failure to enclose, and a tendency to run through or over things like lakes and mountainsides.

  Not only that, but California has been home to European settlers for a far shorter period. You can’t shrug the structures off to crack teams of unusually wall-obsessed farmers in the 1600s, because there weren’t any.

  “That should make them easier to explain, though, right?” Molly said.

  “You’d think,” I said. “But no.”

  The area’s original inhabitants, the Ohlone, were a sparse population of nomadic hunter-gatherers completely unknown to throw up stone walls for which they had zero need. It’s alleged that Russian traders and even Basque shepherds wandered the territory in the distant past, but with scant evidence. Others have claimed the walls were erected under the auspices of the Spanish mission set up in San Jose in 1797, using conscripted Indian labor. This explanation fails for me on the grounds that (a) the Franciscans kept meticulous records of the many and various ways in which they oppressed and brutalized the region’s inhabitants, and yet there is no mention of this bizarre undertaking, and (b) some sections of wall are over two hundred miles from the San Jose mission: the same distance we were driving. That’s a longish schlep in a modern SUV—a wholly incredible distance to flog embittered Native Americans with no history of stonemasonry.

  Slightly less fanciful—and the closest thing to an
agreed on or sensible explanation, though again, nobody seems to be paying much attention—is the idea they were built more recently by farmers harnessing cheap labor available in the form of abundant Chinese laborers at loose ends after the gold rush. But I don’t buy this either. A 1904 article by a Dr. John Fryer, professor of Oriental languages at UC Berkeley (and another on August 14 of the same year, published in the San Francisco Chronicle and written by Harold French) make it clear that the walls had already been regarded as a mysterious phenomenon for some time, likely decades. French’s article, which points out that the walls serve no discernible “modern” purpose, is titled “Who Built the Pre-historic Walls Topping Berkeley Hills?” He says they’d been a source of mystery to the original prospectors in the region.

  That they were there before the gold rush, in other words.

  But put that aside, because I haven’t been able to track down corroborating accounts. Consider instead that the gold rush ended around 1855, just fifty years before these pieces were published in reputable newspapers. There’s no question that shorter periods of time were sufficient for history and purpose to be forgotten back then, but really? If the walls had been the product of locals taking advantage of Chinese labor, some of those farmers—or at very least, their children, or neighbors—would have still been alive. This wasn’t Jebediah Farmerdude hiring a couple of guys to throw up a pen for his couple dozen sheep. This was building enough wall to stretch from San Jose to Seattle.

  And nobody remembered this happening?

  Nobody at all?

  And none of which comes close to tackling the bigger question of their failure as boundaries. Yes, some of the stone has been repurposed over the years, but it’s a trivial archeological undertaking to tell where that’s occurred.