The Possessors

by John Christopher

  “Their chief charge had been to investigate the therapeutic possibilities of mesmerism. They found them proved. But they didn’t stop at that. They said that telepathy and clairvoyance by means of mesmerism had been demonstrated as well.”

  Incredulously, Douglas said, “A French medical commission said that?”

  “It was taken care of,” Grainger said. “The report was never printed. I expect it’s still moldering away in the manuscript archives in Paris. They appointed another committee, and put a chap in charge who’d gone on record as saying that mesmerism was nothing but fraud and chicanery. They examined two subjects, under pretty hostile conditions, and rushed a report out. The Society printed that one. It said that there was nothing in mesmerism, and that the first committee were all nuts. And that wound up the scientific investigation of that particular subject.”

  “There’s hypnotism,” Douglas said. “It’s much the same, isn’t it? That’s pretty widely accepted, surely.”

  “Hypnotism,” Grainger said, “is mesmerism, cleaned up and cut down to size. The point about mesmerism was that it involved what was called rapport—operator’s and subject’s minds all tangled up with each other, subject in deep trance, but operator in mild trance, too. The modern medical profession likes a comfortable distance between doctor and patient; or what kind of authority would the weaker brethren be able to command? So Braid worked out a method for getting some of the mesmeric phenomena by remote control. He found that if you put a bright object before the eyes of a subject and got him to gaze at it persistently, he went into something like mesmeric sleep. You could then control him by suggestion, induce analgesia, that kind of thing. But none of this telepathic or clairvoyant nonsense. Best of all, he gave it a new name, derived from a nice reassuring Greek root, like all the best scientific terms.”

  George said morosely, “I don’t see what all this has got to do with Ruth and the kid.”

  “I’ve been talking about my personal views,” Grainger said. “I think modern medicine is pretty good on the structure of the body, not quite so good on the structure of the mind, and distinctly inadequate on the relationship between the two. Sorry if I’ve been boring you, but I’ve been trying to explain why my being the doctor wallah doesn’t help in this case. My own branch of medicine is strictly physical. I’ve not looked much at the psychological field, because I mistrust their premises.”

  Douglas said, “Fair enough. But it was you who said the boy was dead in the first place, and you who said it was a medical certainty that he couldn’t have survived being out there for that length of time.”

  “Not so extraordinary. We are all conditioned to the usual. Catalepsy of that order is a very rare state. Surviving several hours’ exposure to a severe winter night is rare, too, when the subject is a little boy in pajamas and bare feet. The exceptional is not something you go looking for. You wait till it’s thrust down your throat, and then you forget it, or explain it away, as soon as you can. I knew a Freudian psychiatrist once who saw a ghost. He had it accounted for, of course—a trick of light and sound, making up an hallucination—but he was honest enough to admit that, for some hours until day broke, he had believed that what he thought he saw had reality. When was he right—when he had had time to marshal his defenses and rationalize things, or immediately after the experience itself?”

  “Ghosts,” George said. He poured more drinks for himself and the others. Douglas put a hand over his own glass, to prevent this. “Look, Selby, all we’re asking you is what the hell’s going on?”

  Grainger took his glass, contemplated it, sipped and smacked his lips. “Afternoon drinking,” he observed, “has a frisson all its own. What’s going on? Well, something odd.”

  “Christ! We know that.”

  “And if anyone knows any more than that, they have me at a disadvantage.”

  His blandness was exasperating; it was having an irritating effect on him, Douglas realized, and George was a more irascible type. He said, “You’ve been doing all the talking, but it hasn’t had much application to the situation, has it? Do you feel we ought to do nothing—not even go out and look for them?”

  “No, we have to do that, of course, and before dark. In fact, as soon as we have sunk these particular drinks, I think we ought to make a start.” He nodded toward the window. “The sun’s within spitting distance of Grammont. The night cometh, when no man can work.”

  Douglas went out with the others. They covered the long slopes of snow again, marked, as George had said, by the criss-crossing tracks of their earlier searches. The scene had a strange beauty. The sun’s more level rays lit up a landscape heavy with shadows, displaying a kind of weary grandeur. The distant peaks, above which the sun’s disk was hovering, had gold in their whiteness, and a deeper gold overlaid the thick fleece of the cloud bank which covered the whole of the valley floor and the lake. The sense of isolation that one had up here was heightened; one was conscious of the brilliance here and on the far horizon, and of the aureate carpet covering a darker world between. Darker, but more human.

  The sun slipped down behind the peaks, light drained from the sky, and George’s waving arm called them back to the chalet. The cloud in the valley was a thick ugly-looking gray, and higher, Douglas thought, as though it were rising to engulf them. He himself was tired and dispirited. There had been no sign of Ruth or the boy. They had called, as the other groups had, and heard their voices echo thinly back over the snow. Figures moved, distant and tiny, in a great emptiness. After the first five or ten minutes, he had no expectation of finding either of them.

  They reassembled in an atmosphere of gloom. Mandy was going about the house, lighting the oil lamps. They had seemed attractive at first, but now Douglas was more conscious of their inadequacy, of all the shadows in the corners which their light did not properly reach. George opened the bar again, and was joined by Deeping, the Graingers, and Diana. Not feeling like drinking, Douglas went into the salon, where, at least, the fire was cheerful. Jane accompanied him there, and sat opposite him. She did not pick up a book, but sat looking into the fire. Her hands were folded on her knees. There were two lights on her face—firelight and lamplight. She had a good face, he thought. It was a pity that goodness was so irrelevant in a woman.

  He said, “I suppose she may come back, when the night properly falls.”

  “Yes.”

  “If she can find her way.”

  Jane stirred. “It’s horrible to think of them being out there. Horrible.”

  “Can you think Why …” He broke off. “I mean, one could have understood it if the boy had still been missing, if she had been crazed with grief. But not this way.”

  “There are time lags sometimes.” Her voice was dry and concentrated, as though she were reviewing something long known but never properly understood. “One wakes up and realizes that something terrible has happened, that one failed to see it at the time, but it has happened, and things are never going to be the same afterwards.”

  “But she had the boy with her. She’d found him again, alive and well.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “That’s true, of course.”

  He waited for her to go on, but she stayed silent. She had not been talking about Ruth, he guessed, but about herself. She had had her own loss. She was a woman capable, he thought, of an enduring and single-minded devotion. It would have been a shattering thing to lose its object so comparatively early in married life.

  The silence between them, with this consideration, became awkward. He tried to think of something to say that would be suitable, but the words and phrases spun emptily in his mind, at once banal and outrageous. He told himself he would stay mute and then, compulsively, found himself talking.

  “We should all have training, I think, in the appreciation of impermanence. And some kind of punishment whenever we try to make the transient things into enduring ones.”

  “Should we?” she said. “What are the transient things, for that matter?”

&n
bsp; “Everything passes. And a good thing. If happiness lasted, grief would last as well. As it is, there’s always a monochrome to look forward to. The ordinary is only just around the corner.”

  And there, of course, he was talking about himself, as he had suspected her of doing. He saw her look at him; his voice, probably, had given him away.

  She said quietly, “And if a person chooses the monochrome, deliberately, turning away from brightness—and then loses that, too. What then?”

  “The monochromes are self-perpetuating. They renew themselves very quickly. That’s their big advantage.”

  There was another short silence before she said, “I think I’ll go and take a bath. Will you excuse me?”

  Her face was preoccupied, a little tense, and he wondered if something he said had offended her. But she turned to him from the door and smiled warmly enough.

  “See you at supper, Douglas.”

  “Have a drink first,” he said. “Quarter past, in the bar.”

  Jane nodded. “Love to.”

  The atmosphere remained heavy, not helped by the fact that the bones of iron rations were beginning to be evident beneath the gloss of Mandy’s cooking. There was a nourishing soup, but the main course, while a tribute to what could be done with corned beef, was corned beef for all that. They had tinned grapefruit to follow, which kirsch made palatable. An excellent dinner, really, in view of everything, but nobody seemed to enjoy it much. Afterward there was an attempt by George and Grainger to carry on with the drinking they had started earlier, but their hearts were clearly not in it. They were all tired.

  Just before ten, Mandy said, “If nothing more is wanted, I’ll get off to bed.” She looked at Deeping. “We’re leaving the downstairs light on all night, just in case … And I thought I would leave Stephen in the cot in our room rather than disturb him. Is that all right?”

  Deeping said, “Yes.” He yawned. “I think I’ll be going up, too.”

  There was a general exodus, which Douglas joined. Grainger gave some indication of being prepared to stay on, but Elizabeth insisted on his coming with her. George was left below, having poured himself another whisky not long before. He had got through a fair amount during the evening, but showed little sign of it.

  In bed, Douglas thought at first of the woman and child, somewhere outside in the bitter night. Cloud partly obscured the moon now, and the wind was rising again; looking from his window he had seen the brightness come and go in the cloud surges. But the image, terrible though it was, did not come to life. It existed in a vacuum, and the characters themselves were unreal. The woman was mad, and madness alienated sympathy. The boy … the image of him lying dead was stronger than the later sight of him alive.

  So, abandoning the present, he returned to Caroline, and the amalgam of past and future which he had begun, laboriously but with delight, to build. Remembered scenes mixed with scenes envisaged, and after a time it was difficult to tell one kind from the other. Not that he wanted to do that. This was unreal also, but an unreality where he felt at home. When he got back to Winchester, there would be a letter … no, Mrs. Williams would have left a note on his telephone pad … he would call—not the Black-heath number, of course—a hotel? Not a Winchester hotel —the improbability of that made the whole image shiver on the verge, for a moment, of dissolution. A London hotel, the sort that she would be likely to move into, coming back from America on her own. The Royal Court, perhaps; she liked Chelsea. He worked times out sketchily. The plane getting in to London Airport just before midday, Customs cleared and through to the air terminal around one, lunch, and there was a train about three thirty, wasn’t there? In the flat by six. If he telephoned right away, got through to her, he might make the six thirty back to London, be with her for dinner … Somewhere special. The White Tower, perhaps. The Étoile. Or, in a sentimental mood, Au Père de Nico … and walk back together afterward through the dark, quiet streets, pavements glistening with rain in the lamplight, her scent, and the click of her heels …

  He awoke, hearing a sound that he could not place at first, but metallic, familiar. Of course—the door handle being turned. The door opening. Footsteps. Not just of one person; two at least. Drowsy with sleep, he said, “Who is it?”

  Deeping’s reassuring voice: “It’s all right, Douglas. Not to worry.”

  But spoken quietly. And the footsteps coming nearer, toward the bed. He sat up, and said sharply, “What do you want?”

  There was a faint light from beyond the window— moonlight behind cloud. Two figures silhouetted themselves against it. Deeping, and . .. Ruth!

  “She’s come back, then,” he said. “And the boy? Is Andy all right?”

  There was no reply, but a third, small outline crossed the faint rectangle of light. It was only then that he felt fear. That the Deepings should be in his room at night, unheralded, was strange, but the strangeness of it was offset by their familiarity. What danger could there be in the Deepings? The child was different. The child’s presence tilted the incident from strangeness into nightmare. And with that, their failure to reply to him took on a frightening significance as well.

  He could hear Deeping’s breathing as he approached the bed. In a moment the man would be beside him. In Douglas’s mind, fear and self-preservation warred with the conditioning of a lifetime—nursery, prep school, public school, university. Don’t show fear. Don’t cry out. Avoid embarrassment, above all else. The English ethos.

  He yelled just before the hand reached for his face, yelled for help at the top of his voice, twisted away, lashed out. And yelled again, and again, hearing his voice reverberate in the room and through the house. And the hands broke away, feet scuffled, retreating. Out of the room, and down the stairs.

  7

  They got together in the salon again. Glancing at the cuckoo clock—he had left his watch by the side of his bed—Selby saw that it was five to four. The still small hours, he thought, with a twinge of nausea. It reminded him of the far-off days of being an intern, of being wakened from his truckle bed by a new arrival in Casualty, of irritability and a bad taste in the mouth. He had them both now. Mandy was lighting the second lamp, Marie remaking the fire. Selby looked around the room, checking them. Peter, gaunt and watchful by the door. Jane and Diana, the latter looking sleepy and, he thought, with a small but positive surge of pleasure, quite delectable. Elizabeth, yawning. George, carrying the tousle-headed Stephen. And, of course, Douglas Poole, whose surprisingly stentorian shouts for help had brought them all staggering from their beds.

  He said, “Right. Now let’s have a slightly less confusing picture. What happened, Douglas?”

  George said, “Douglas has told me a bit of it. I think I’ll bed Steve down first.” He moved to go toward the hall, then checked. “I’ll put him on the settee in the bar for the time being. Fetch a blanket, Mandy, will you?”

  George carried the boy through the connecting door, and closed it after him. Mandy went off, too, presumably to get the blanket, and Marie followed her out. She seemed to have reached an extreme of apprehension which was only allayed by Mandy’s presence.

  Douglas said, rather shamefacedly, “I’m afraid I kicked up a pretty horrible din.”

  “Reasonably horrible,” Selby said. “But it wasn’t just a nightmare, I take it? More to it than that. And it concerns Deeping.”

  “All three of them. Ruth and the boy, as well. They were in my room. I spoke to them, and they didn’t answer. Just came towards the bed. That’s when I yelled.”

  ‘‘Didn’t answer at all?”

  His brow creased, remembering. “No, I’m wrong. I heard someone in the room, and asked who it was. Deeping said not to worry. It was afterwards I asked what he wanted, and said something about Ruth and Andy. That was when there was no reply.”

  “And when you sang out?”

  “He had just made a grab for me. He broke away. They all cleared off, downstairs.”

  George had come back into the room, closing the doo
r again. He said, “He’s asleep. He didn’t properly wake up at all, which is just as well. They went downstairs. It looks as though they went right down to the basement. I found the basement door open.”

  Elizabeth said, “I don’t get it. They were going to attack Douglas in his bed—the Deepings, that is—and Andy was with them—and they ran off when he called out—out of the house … but why go all the way down to the basement? Why not the front door?”

  “There are two doors there, both pretty heavily bolted. The basement door’s a single.” George looked at his hands; he kept his nails well manicured. “Someone was in a hurry to get away.”

  Diana said, “But it’s silly. Why should they attack you, Douglas? And if they were attacking you, they wouldn’t have Andy with them. And how did Ruth and Andy get back into the house, without anyone knowing? Though I suppose Leonard knew, didn’t he? I mean, did he go down and let them in?”

  “I think I’ve got the answer to the last bit,” George said. “And it gives another reason for them heading on down to the basement. There’s a little window down there Mandy leaves open for the cat—not really open, but ajar. It’s wide open now. An adult couldn’t get in through it, but the boy could, if he were given a leg-up from outside. And then he could open the door. So on the way out there wouldn’t even be a single bolt to draw.”

  “That’s silly, too,” Diana said. “We were looking for them yesterday afternoon, calling for them … I mean, there was no need to break in. If she had rung the bell…”

  “We should have known they were in the house,” Selby said. “And that, apparently, was not the idea.”