The Possessors

by John Christopher

  Hamilton, mollified, said, “I reckon we’re all a bit off beam. Need a little something to help us zero in properly. Come on through, and I’ll pour us all a noggin.”

  Jane refused a drink for herself, and insisted on only a very small brandy being poured for Diana. Hamilton produced strong tots for the men, and for Elizabeth. The latter, looking completely controlled, said, “Yes, I do need it.” She drank it down quickly, making a small face.

  Hamilton’s suggestion was that the hunt should be conducted by the five men, four of them searching the area near the house, and Peter, who was an expert skier and used to snow slopes at night, covering the outlying regions. Grainger nodded to this.

  “Fair enough. Though he won’t have got far, if he is out there. Not possible.”

  Elizabeth again intervened, insisting on being included. Jane and Diana pressed their claims, also. Jane said, “One extra person might make the difference between finding and not finding—or finding in time. And better out there than waiting.”

  “Right,” Hamilton said. He tipped his drink back. “Then we might as well get cracking. Upstairs, and wrap up warmly. Meet down here as soon as you’re kitted up.”

  Coffee had been made by the time Jane came down again. She drank it gratefully, and listened to Hamilton’s instructions. They were to go in pairs or threes, to prevent, as he put it, the possibility of someone falling, breaking a leg perhaps, and there having to be a further search party on top of the present one. They were given general areas to search. Diana had already attached herself to the Graingers and was to concentrate with them on the area east of the house. She and Douglas were told to beat around to the west. Hamilton himself, with Deeping, was taking a wider sweep both above and below the chalet.

  Outside, it was colder than she had thought it would be, and brighter. The half-moon light, reflected from the snow, meant that she could see a fair distance in front of her. To the south, the Alps were faint but real against the horizon. Clear of the house, she looked down toward the road to Nidenhaut, and saw that the shoulder of the mountain which cut them off from the village was quite sharp.

  The sky was already beginning to pale a little, *here in the east.

  Although visibility was better than she had expected the strangeness of the light played tricks, interfering with her memory of the contours. Within twenty yards, she missed her footing and slid into a hollow. Douglas came down to help her to her feet. She said ruefully, “That’s what George meant, I imagine.”

  “You’re all right, though? Nothing strained or broken?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  He held her arm with his gloved hand for a moment, and then let her go. To her relief. Not, she thought wryly, that she stood in much danger of a romantic approach at this time and under these circumstances. But it had troubled her a little that they were apparently being thrown together. Diana, whose determination to form a trio with the Graingers had a lot to do with it, had commented on it the previous night. The comment had been only partly arch. She had said seriously, “You do get on quite well with him, don’t you? I mean, to talk to.” Which could be translated, Jane felt, into, “How nice for you to find someone as stodgy as yourself in the party.”

  It was true that she found him pleasant company, and restful. Because of that, she felt it the more important to avoid the possibility of anything else creeping in. She had lived with her body long enough to know that most men found it physically attractive. There was a probability that Douglas, who seemed to be unattached, would do so too. Unless, bearing in mind that most men in their middle thirties could be expected to show signs of attachment, or having been attached, he was uninterested in women. She was surprised to feel a small twinge of disappointment as the possibility crossed her mind.

  Well, that was normal. One preferred a man to be male, with all that implied, even when not personally interested. And the very notion of being interested in him, in any man, was a depressing, draining one.

  Harry’s death, after so short an illness, had inevitably had a numbing effect—for a couple of months she had gone around in a daze. But during that time she had understood what was happening to her, and that it had its limits. The sense of shock would pass; life would fall back into normal, undistorted patterns. What she had not guessed was that the numbness would be succeeded by her present apathy, by the nagging insistence somewhere at the back of her mind that everything was pointless, nothing worth striving or working for, life itself only bearable on a basis of living from day to day.

  Her relations with other people formed an extension of this. Providing they made no demands, they could be tolerated. In some moods, in fact, the company of another was preferable to her own. And where the tie was the simple tie of blood relationship … she had not resented Diana’s boisterous reintrusion into her life, had accepted her attentions passively and, after persuasion, allowed herself to be talked into making the trip. The decision was one which she neither regretted nor was glad of. She had skied a little out here, idled a lot, had drinks which she would not have had in England, talked to people and been talked to. None of it made any difference to the way she felt.

  She had felt moved, for a while, by the death of the child. The unfairness of it had angered her: that the boy, in apparent good health, with everything to live for, should have been deprived of life, which to her was a burden, a necessary unwanted routine. This had passed, and the faint possibility that the boy might be alive still had not revived it. To care about the boy would have been to commit herself, and there was nothing, she knew, worth the committal. Had he lived, it would have been to perform stupidities, to make choices which, whether selfish or noble, ended in wretchedness and boredom. There was no alternative to this.

  They turned to head back in the direction of the chalet, and the east wind was bitterly cold on her exposed face. Pajamas, she thought, and bare feet. He could not still be alive out here. This, like everything else, was a waste of time and effort. Perversely, she was glad of the fact that it was also uncomfortable.

  Douglas, a few feet above her on the slope, said, “It will soon be light.”

  The mountain spur in front of them was delicately touched with rose, the stars fading overhead. On the glimmering slopes, she could see other figures—two together well below the chalet, three higher up and farther off. Physical fatigue and lack of sleep had made her a little lightheaded. She said, “Douglas.”

  He turned his head in her direction. “Yes?”

  “What is worth doing? Anything?”

  It was a ridiculous question, regretted as soon as voiced. Either he would simply be bewildered by it, or else embarrassed. She had a wave of despair with herself.

  But he said, after a pause of consideration, “It varies, I suppose, with different people, doesn’t it? For me? Well, sticking to things, I suppose. And not giving in to other things. That more, really.”

  Well, she had got it—precisely the answer she could expect to get from a rising provincial unmarried solicitor. A worthy man, a solid man. Like Harry, in some ways. Oh God, she thought, it’s so cold. And I’m so tired.

  When she did not reply, Douglas went on. “I don’t think one person’s reactions can be much help to another. The reactions themselves are different, at different times. Patches, phases. When one is in a bad one, it’s impossible to imagine being out of it—you can’t conceive there can be a way out. One does get out, though, eventually. It’s more or less a certainty.”

  With unhappy irony > she thought: he’s being kind. Commiserating with the unmerry widow. He thinks I’m grieving for Harry, and he’s being nice about it. Disinterestedly nice. She thought for a moment of trying to explain that it was really not like that at all, but decided not to. Explanations were pointless, as pointless as questions asked on a snow-packed mountain slope in the freezing pre-dawn.

  She said, “That’s George and Leonard Deeping down there, isn’t it? They seem to be heading back towards the chalet. Shall we do the same?�
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  They had all drawn blanks. While they ate the breakfast Mandy had prepared during their absence—porridge laced with treacle, and thick rashers of gammon and fried potatoes afterwards—they talked about it.

  Hamilton said, “I reckon we’ve covered everything within a reasonable distance. And Peter didn’t find any sign of anything on the outlying slopes. We can have another hunt in a while, but I’m not very hopeful.”

  Grainger emptied his cup of coffee, and poured more in from the pot. He said, “We were over two hours out there. With the time we were hunting through the house, and so on, that makes it more than three.” He glanced at Deeping. “I’m sorry, but even if he weren’t dead yesterday, he can’t possibly be alive now. It’s a medical certainty. And in fact he was dead yesterday.”

  Deeping said nothing. He was eating the food in front of him, his face expressionless. Stoicism, Jane wondered, or callousness? Or neither of these, perhaps, but a dull realization of the way in which the death of the child might become a central inescapable feature of his future life with a woman deprived of her purpose and meaning, and so—having no more to lose—prepared to hate. She halted these speculations. A growing cynicism about the motives of others was one of the more depressing side effects of recognizing one’s own lack of motive.

  Douglas said, “That doesn’t explain why we none of us found anything.” He, too, glanced at Deeping, and went on in a quieter voice. “We’ll presume Andy’s death. It does seem reasonable. But even so, where is he? Not in the house, and not outside—in the immediate vicinity, at any rate. Then where? And how?”

  “He could be somewhere outside,” Hamilton said. “You can miss things pretty easily in the kind of light you get before sunup. You couldn’t tell whether a drift had been disturbed, for instance.”

  Elizabeth said, “Do you mean that someone might have put his body in a drift? But why?”

  Grainger said, “I’ve told you, there could be half a dozen reasons. All of them batty, of course, but the situation is batty, isn’t it?”

  “You were wrong about old Peter,” Hamilton said. “He’s more upset about it than anybody. The Swiss like death to be ceremonious, I gather.”

  “He was just one possibility. All the same, a show of concern doesn’t rule him out. We’re all actors, and we all underestimate the acting ability of the next chap.”

  “What you’re really saying,” Douglas said, “is not that we’re all actors, but that one of us is a particularly unpleasant maniac.”

  “What I’m saying,” Grainger said, spearing a portion of potato, “is that I can’t see a sane solution that makes sense. It doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

  They went on talking afterward over fresh cups of coffee. Jane listened to them, with no more than slight interest. She was very conscious of her tiredness, and of the soft warm bed upstairs from which she had been dragged after only half a night’s sleep. Even the element of puzzle in 64

  the situation did not mean much to her. It was shocking that the boy should be dead, shocking, in a different way, that his body was missing. She registered both facts, but neither of them engaged her.

  The coffeepot, she noticed, was empty, as was her own cup. The solution to that, under normal circumstances, would be to pull the braided bell rope that hung beside the huge ornamental tiled stove. Circumstances, though, were nothing like normal. She decided that the least she could do to help out was to take the pot through to the kitchen herself; it would be some break from tedium and the action might help to wake her up. Hamilton, when he saw what she was doing, said, “I’ll see to that, Jane,” but accepted her smile and shake of the head, and went on talking. She picked up pot and milk jug—she preferred black coffee to the addition of the watered-down tinned milk which was all that was available now, but some of the others could tolerate it—and went out into the gas-sage.

  She saw Ruth Deeping outside the door that opened into the bar. That was not surprising. She had been left sleeping on the sofa there; and presumably she had woken again, found herself alone, and come out to look for the others. What was surprising, though, was that she was heading neither toward the salon nor the stairs, but in the direction of the front door. As she reached the inner door, and wrenched it open, Jane called to her, “Ruth! What is it?”

  There was no reply, not even a backward glance. She went through the entrance lobby, and began fumbling at the heavy iron ring of the outside door. She was still dressed as she had been earlier, in a light wrap over a nightdress, and bedroom slippers.

  Jane saw that there was a ledge over a radiator near her; she slammed down the things she was carrying and raced along the hall. Ruth had managed to get the door open by the time she reached her. They wrestled on the threshold, the frigid air blowing around them, and she called for help from the others. Before they came, she had been dragged out into the snow, and her neck was hurting where Ruth had clawed at her.

  The men between them subdued Ruth and managed to get her back into the bar. She struggled against the restraint they put on her and swore at them as a child might —the words not very bad in themselves but obscene in the way they were torn brokenly from her. Grainger tried to calm her.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You’ve been asleep, and you’ve had a bad dream. You’ll be better in a moment. Easy. You’re hurting yourself.”

  “You bastards!” she said. “You bloody bastards … he’s out there. Andy’s out there in the cold.”

  “We’ve been looking for him,” Grainger said. “And we’ll look for him again.”

  Hamilton had detached himself and now brought a glass of brandy to her. “Here. Get this down, and you’ll feel better.”

  She was still for a moment, and then made a fierce effort to free herself. She did not succeed, but the glass went spinning across the floor.

  “Let me go, you bloody swine,” she said. “Andy … he’s out there. I tell you, I’ve seen him!”

  She said it with a chilling conviction. Even knowing it was nonsense, a delusion brought about by shock and grief and the drug Grainger had given her, Jane found her eyes going automatically to the window. It was much brighter out there, though the sun had not yet risen.

  In a quiet, humoring voice, Grainger said, “Where, Ruth? Where did you see him? We’re trying to help you. Truly we are.”

  She strained to move in the direction of the window. Grainger nodded to the others, and they gave her her head. They went with her, and stood around her. She pointed out across the snow.

  “There. He was there. I woke, and looked out, and I saw him.” She turned to look into their faces, her own drawn, desperate. “I’m telling you the truth. I’m not mad! He was there.”

  “Near the place where the little avalanche came down?” Hamilton asked.

  “On the other side of it. I couldn’t be mistaken.”

  Douglas asked her, “What did he look like?”

  “Like Andy! How else could he look?”

  “I meant, what was he wearing?”

  “Only his pajamas.” A sob racked and tore at her. “In that bitter cold. And he was carrying a basket.”

  It was this last which was the touch of nightmare. Jane felt herself shiver uncontrollably as she in turn looked out.

  The white slopes were empty. The wind, which seemed to be getting up, whipped a faint powdery spray from the rubble which marked the place where the avalanche had descended—apart from that there was nothing, no movement, no hint or sign of life. A boy in pajamas, carrying a basket. An illusion—what else?—but the thought was terrifying.

  There was a silence, which Hamilton broke. He patted Ruth on the shoulder, a warm, comfortingly ordinary gesture.

  “Right,” he said. “In that case, we’ll go out again, and have another look. And you must promise to stay here, and watch us. You’ll be able to see everything that goes on.”

  “I want to come with you!”

  “You’re not dressed,” Hamilton said. “And, more than that, you
’re not well enough.” He looked at Grainger, who gave a small nod. “Leonard and Douglas and I will go out —right away. Three of us will be enough. It’s pretty light now. And the others will stay and wait with you. You’ll get Ruth a cup of tea, Jane, will you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Ruth was quiet for a time, but became more and more restless, watching the three figures as they moved up and down the slopes. When at last they came back, she burst into another paroxysm of sobbing and accusation: they had not looked properly … he was there, and they would have found him if they had looked.

  Grainger watched her for a moment, then said, “We’ll go and look for ourselves. Will that do?” She nodded, still sobbing, unable to speak. He glanced at Elizabeth. “Take her upstairs, and get some warm clothes on her.”

  When they had gone, Hamilton said, “Should she go out, do you think? The kid’s not there. I can tell you that.”

  “It may help if she’s shown that he’s not there.” Grainger shrugged. “On the other hand, of course, it may not. At a certain point, a fixed delusion is no longer susceptible to disproof. But I think we ought to give her the benefit of the doubt. At least, it will ease her a little. She’s under a pretty heavy strain.”

  In the end, apart from Mandy and the servants, they all went. The chalet still lay in the shadow of the mountain but to the west the snow was lit by the morning sun. It looked warm and cheerful out there, although the wind, Jane found, was keener. It brought tears to her eyes, and a smart to her lips.

  They hunted for over half an hour, but it was plain from the start that their task was hopeless. The snow stretched bare and empty before them, smooth except where it was broken by ski- and footmarks, and by the rubble of the avalanche. Some of the footmarks were small enough to have been the boy’s, but, of course, this was the part where the two of them had been playing, before Andy had his attack. There had been no fresh fall of snow since then.

  Ruth seemed to recognize the hopelessness of it all, and when, eventually, Grainger went to her, took her arm, and said gently, “Time we went in, I think,” she made no protest. They returned in silence to the chalet. Mandy was waiting for them in the hall, and she and Elizabeth took Ruth upstairs.