The Possessors

by John Christopher

  Elizabeth said, “That’s probably what will happen with your mother and father. Except that they aren’t really electric shocks—not the kind that hurt you.”

  “And Andy?”

  “I’m not sure about Andy. I should think he’ll just get better. But we shall have to find them all, and look after them, until they can be taken to a hospital. If you see one of them, you’ll tell us, won’t you? And keep away from them yourself.”

  “Yes. If they have got down to the village, they’ll look after them there, won’t they? And take them to a hospital?”

  “Yes. Of course, they will.”

  Elizabeth threw, a seven.

  “Mayfair!” he said excitedly. “That’s mine. Fifty pounds rent, please.”

  Jane, as the play continued, took stock of herself unhappily. She had thought she was living in an emotional vacuum, but did nature, perhaps, abhor this kind of vacuum as much as any other? Twice in a short space of time she had found herself reacting—to Elizabeth’s competence in dealing with Stephen, and to Diana’s yawning. Two very different things, but the reaction, in each case, had been one of resentment. Could it be that resentment was becoming the keynote in her life, the automatic reaction to other people being successful, other people being natural and unabashed? The thought appalled, and scared her. But what was the alternative? Getting outside herself, taking an interest in others—being positive and active, instead of negative and withdrawn? The prospect was wearisome, the effort of will required daunting. And for no conceivable reward.

  The dice came to her, and she shook them.

  “I was on your property,” Stephen said gleefully, “and you forgot to ask for rent! Six. That’s Fenchurch Street station. You can have that.”

  They finished playing at about a quarter to twelve, and she decided to use the time remaining before lunch to write to Wendy Gabriel. Wendy was the only one of her old Oxfordshire neighbors with whom she had remained in touch, and even this link, she was well aware, had been kept in being by Wendy, not by her. She had scribbled a brief note, in reply to two long letters, mentioning the impending Swiss trip, and another fat letter had followed her out here. It was full of news about the people who had once rounded out her life, but whose doings now failed completely to interest her. Her first thought had been that a picture postcard would provide sufficient reply, but in the aftermath of her moments of self-criticism she decided to write a letter instead.

  Consciousness of virtue got her to the point of sitting down with pen and paper and writing the salutation, but could not take her much further. The bizarreness of what was taking place up here, she found, inhibited the telling of it. To say that one had been cut off by an avalanche would be easy enough, but to go on from that and recount the rest of it—a boy apparently dead, but resurrected, the mother gone mad and attacking her other son, the father apparently catching insanity from her, and the three of them wandering out somewhere in the mist-enshrouded snow—she felt irritated by the absurdity, the irrationality of it all. Letters to be successful required the ordinary, the undemanding; as life itself did. She put her pen down with a sigh of exasperation.

  Douglas, at this point, came in from the bar, and she turned to him with relief. The letter would keep, until it was all over and could be set down briefly and tidily, bracketed by the commonplace and, if possible, reduced to it. She greeted him lightheartedly before she noticed the tense, worried expression on his face. He said abruptly, “Have you seen Peter?”

  “Peter? No. Why?”

  “He seems to have gone missing.”

  It took a moment or two for the implications to sink home. She said, “You don’t mean … ? Along with the Deepings?”

  “Mandy thought he was seeing to the boiler. But according to Marie, he said something about going out to get more logs.”

  She got up from her chair. “I’ll help look.”

  Diana and Elizabeth and Stephen were apparently upstairs. They found the others in the basement, near the boiler. George was saying to Marie, “I told you both to stay indoors. You remember that, don’t you?”

  The girl was in tears. “I will not go outside. I promise you, monsieur! But I cannot tell Peter what he must do.”

  “Damn it, you could have told Madame that he was going out! Couldn’t you?”

  “But it was for the logs only. Not more than ten meters from the door. I will not go myself, but it is different for him, a man …”

  “How long?” Marie looked at him, dazed and uncomprehending. “How long since he went outside?”

  “I … I am not sure. Perhaps half an hour. I went upstairs.”

  George whirled from her to Selby and Douglas. “We’ll have to go and look for him. But I’m taking that shotgun. Wait here.”

  Mandy said, while they waited, “He does wander off sometimes. He’s a bit odd in his ways.”

  She was flushed, and her speech, while not exactly slurred, lacked precision. It crossed Jane’s mind that she might have been drinking. She chided herself for the thought: have charity. Cooking and looking after the house and guests with only two servants were enough to make anyone seem confused, even without the present attendant circumstances.

  Elizabeth came down with George, and the women, grouped together by the door, watched the three men go out into the mist. George warned them, before they went, to keep the door closed, bolted, until their return. Mandy pushed the bolt home, and they went to the store room, which had a window looking out. The figures of the men were disappearing into the mist, and in a moment had gone. They watched the meaningless curve and heave of gray.

  Mandy said suddenly, “Steve?”

  “Diana’s with him,” Elizabeth said.

  “One gets on edge,” Mandy said. She looked flustered. “I must run upstairs and see how lunch is coming.” Elizabeth, when she had gone, said, “How long has he been missing?”

  “About half an hour, according to Marie,” Jane said.

  “It may be all right, then.”

  “Yes.”

  But waiting, and staring at the mist, were fraying her nerve ends. It was her ears, she realized, that were attentive rather than her straining eyes: she was listening for a sound. For a gunshot, in fact. The discovery was shattering: that she had accepted that there was a real menace outside there, an enemy. The thought made her feel sick. Not only through fear, although she was, at this moment, afraid. There was a revulsion, also. To see danger in others was to be involved with them.

  Elizabeth said, “Do you know if anyone has had a weather forecast from the wireless?”

  “Not that I know of. George is keeping the wireless off as much as possible. The battery’s getting low.”

  “Yes, I suppose it would be.” She stared through the window. “It doesn’t look much like change out there.”

  They fell silent. It seemed a long time before the figures of the three men rematerialized outside, but, looking at her watch, Jane saw that they had not been gone much more than ten minutes. Three, not four. So they had not found Peter. She went around with Elizabeth, and they opened the door to let them in.

  Douglas and Selby were both shivering with cold. Selby said, “I shall be ready for my lunch. And something to warm me up first.”

  George slammed the bolt back into place, and turned the heavy iron key in the lock. He straightened up and looked at them.

  “A spot of exercise will do the trick,” he said. “What did you have in mind?” Selby asked.

  “Nailing planks over the windows down here.” Douglas said, “Do you think that’s necessary?”

  Selby said slowly, “Yes, I think you’ve got something there. Right away, do you think?”

  “Do no harm.”

  The fear again, and the revulsion. Jane said, “Is this turning into a siege, or something?”

  Elizabeth said, “You saw no sign of him? Or them?”

  Selby shook his head. “Not that you can see more than half a dozen paces in front of you. But he’s not anywhere n
ear the wood stacks; and I don’t think he’s near the house. We went all round.”

  “So they’ve got him,” Elizabeth said.

  Her remark fell into a silence. Then George said briskly, “Luckily we’ve got all that half-inch wood that we were going to use for a new shed. Some of the short lengths will do as they are. We’ll slam them across on the diagonal—shouldn’t need too many.”

  Selby said, “Except that any gap left must be too small for a small boy to wriggle through. We’re wasting our time otherwise.”

  George looked at him grimly. “Yes. We are, aren’t we? I’ll show you where the hammer and nails are, and you and Douglas can get started, while I saw some of the long ones.”

  She went upstairs, but the noise of sawing and hammering followed her. The writing pad was lying, where she had left it, on the table near the window. She sat down, and looked at it. “Old Peter, the handyman, has disappeared now. It looks as though he’s gone mad, too, so that there are four of them wandering around in the mist. So now the men are barricading the basement, in case they try to break in . . No, there was nothing to say, nothing to communicate. Except … I am beginning to be afraid. And lonely. She thought of Mandy, struggling with the preparations for lunch, and decided she would go and ask her if there was any way in which she could help.

  Mandy was alone in the kitchen. As Jane came in, she was using the small steps to arrange something on one of the shelves. She turned quickly, putting a hand to her breast, and for a moment was in danger of losing her balance.

  “Oh . . She smiled nervously. “You scared me, I guess.”

  There were jars on the shelf, some with preserves, a couple apparently full of sugar. Jane said, “I’m sorry, Mandy. I wondered if I could help in any way.”

  “Why, thank you, Jane. I think we’re managing all right, though.”

  She moved the steps from where they were to a position under the window, for no apparent reason. Jane said, “Will they want to bar this window, as well?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “If they’re worried about someone breaking in. It’s the ground floor on this side.”

  “There’s always someone about here.”

  “During the day. But at night…”

  “Dear God!” Mandy said. “Barring windows against them—the Deepings—the boy—and old Peter …”

  Jane said dispiritedly, “Yes. Though I suppose there’s nothing to stop them coming to the door, if they want to come back.”

  “It’s Andy,” she said. “He might want just to creep in … I can’t believe that he could do anything bad, a little boy like that. And to think of him being out there —cold and hungry—it’s terrible.”

  George, coming through the door from the hall, said, “What’s terrible?”

  “Andy out there.”

  Hammering still came from below. George said, “Yes. Selby and Douglas are finishing off. I’ve asked them to come up to the salon after that.” He looked at Jane. “Can you round the others up? It’s nearly lunchtime, anyway.” When they were together, George said, “I don’t want to labor things unnecessarily, but there are one or two items we might get straight. In the first place, I don’t think there’s anything we really need to worry about, provided we use our common sense. If Peter has—gone over, there are three of them out there. And eight of us here.” Selby said, “Three, and the boy.”

  “And Steve to cancel things out. I wasn’t counting the boys. The point is that we outnumber them by a lot. It’s only as individuals that we could be in danger.”

  Elizabeth had her arm around Stephen’s waist. She said, “Do you need Steve and me for this little chat? If there’s anything important, you could tell me afterwards.”

  “I think Steve ought to stay,” George said. “We can’t go in for niceties. We’ve probably been a bit lucky over Peter.”

  Elizabeth said, “Lucky!”

  “That he was noticed as being missing. Look, this change, whatever it is—we don’t know how long it takes, but not long. I mean, Leonard had already been changed by the time he came down to Douglas’s room. And Ruth had almost certainly been changed when we found her out there with the boy—and she couldn’t have been out there much more than half an hour. If Peter had just come back … we shouldn’t have spotted anything, probably. Marie would have kept quiet about his going outside. Or he would have quietened her.”

  He looked round their faces, bleakly and intently.

  “Peter would have been in the house. One of them, and none of us suspecting it.”

  Mandy said, “You think maybe he would have come back? Then might he Hot still?”

  “It’s unlikely. Even if they weren’t aware of us tramping around looking for him, they will see the bars across the windows and realize we know what’s happened.”

  Douglas said, “We could have left the windows till later, surely. He might have come back, and we could have grabbed him.”

  “I don’t think so,” George said. “I don’t think they are taking any chances. And we mustn’t take any. None of us must. That means you, too, Steve. You follow that?”

  Stephen nodded. “If I see any of them, I’ll come and tell you.”

  “And if they are somewhere they can reach you, yell. Yell hard. That’s what we grownups are going to do, so you see if you can yell louder than we can. It’s not really your mother and father and Andy out there at all.”

  “I know. They’re sick.”

  “Sick,” George agreed, “and they can hurt you. We must all of us keep together as much as possible. Especially don’t go down to the basement alone. And no one must go outside under any circumstances except by agreement.”

  Diana said restlessly, “How long do we have to keep this up?”

  “We don’t know. Not long, I hope.”

  She stared toward the window. “If only this mist would clear …”

  Selby said, “It will.” He spoke with confidence. “Tomorrow, if not today. And they will probably send a helicopter up from the valley, and we’ll be all right. But meanwhile, as George says, we’re in a pretty strong position as long as we behave sensibly. We’ve got food and shelter, and the advantage of numbers. We only have to sit things out.”

  Diana said, “But this sickness, whatever it is … There was an edge to her voice, a nervousness not too far from hysteria. “They may have left germs in the house!”

  “It’s not that kind of sickness,” Selby said.

  “But you don’t know! You said you didn’t know what it was.”

  “I know what it isn’t.” He went to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and shook her gently, affectionately rather than chidingly. “We are all right, all of us, as long as we stay together. Or keep our distance from them. And we’ve fixed things so that no one can get into the basement without making a lot of noise, and this afternoon we’ll do the same for the back of the house on this floor. And after that we sit tight and wait.” He glanced at George. “And we do as George tells us.”

  There was a relief, Jane thought, in having things spelled out, and in the realization that the men had stopped bickering and would co-operate. Selby released Diana, and Jane moved closer to her. She had a rare feeling of protectiveness toward her.

  George said, “Stay in the house, and keep together as much as possible. That’s all.” He looked at Mandy. “Lunch nearly ready?”

  “In ten minutes.”

  The afternoon dragged its way into an evening marked only by the draining of what little light there was from the gray mist that surrounded them. The lamps were lit, making the darkness press closer against the windows. Nothing had happened out of the ordinary; there had been neither sight nor sound of those outside. Mandy was in the kitchen with Marie. George had opened the bar, and Selby and Elizabeth and Diana were with him. Stephen, too. It had been agreed that he should stay up and have supper with the grownups. Jane, not wishing to drink, settled by the fire in the salon, and Douglas joined her there. The fire was warm and coz
y, and curtains had been drawn to keep out the night, and whatever lurked in its shadow. She had a book—Walpole’s Rogue Herries in a scratched leather binding—but did not feel much like reading it. She was not quite sure how she felt. The disturbance and fear of earlier had subsided but had left her restless, somehow drained. In part, she wished she could be alone; in part, she was glad of Douglas’s company.

  She had an impression that he was restless, too, although he did not show it physically—he sat in the armchair opposite her, staring into the fire and saying nothing. It was she, in fact, who spoke first. She put the book down, and said, “What has been decided about standing guard tonight?”

  He said, not looking up, “I expect George and Selby and I will share it. Though perhaps George and I will take it between us. Selby did his bit last night.”

  “We could all take a turn. Except Mandy and the maid. They have enough to do during the day.”

  “I don’t think George would agree to that.”

  “That’s ridiculous. This is not the time for gallantry.”

  “I don’t know that it would be. Gallantry, that is.”

  The center of the fire collapsed, leaving a hole, and Jane stooped down and put another log on it. She said, “George is a pretty solid type. Protective and simple with women.”

  “Do men fall into types, as far as women are concerned?”

  “I think so.”

  There was a silence, and then he started talking. She realized, with a qualm, that she was beginning to receive confidences and about, of all things, an unhappy love affair. She wondered what had brought him out in this; she did not think he was the kind of man who would normally talk about his private concerns to someone who was no more than an acquaintance. The circumstances, probably. The tension they were all under might, she supposed, compel him to find some discharge for another, different tension. And she had no choice but to listen.

  It was all very ordinary, although to him, of course, it must seem unique. She said, at the appropriate moment, “These things can be hellish. But, in a way, there must be a feeling of relief as well. After all, there wasn’t much future to it.”