The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  Chapter

  ​2

  It’s still early,” Molly said.

  “It’s really not.”

  She checked her watch. I’d done the same thing, less than a minute before. And a few minutes before that. “It’s not eight yet. Your slot’s until half past.”

  “Tell me, Moll. Have you observed the ebb and flow during the last hour, and been able to come to any conclusions regarding changes in the population density of customers in this retail establishment over time?”

  “It’s…less busy than it was?”

  “There are exactly three people here, not including the comatose clerk at the register or the one hiding in the cooking section.” I turned in his direction. “I know you’re there,” I said, loudly.

  Molly swatted me. “Shh, Nolan.”

  “Two customers wandered past without glancing at my book. The third picked up a copy and had a long, hard look, before putting it back as though worried about contagion. He’s currently browsing the photography section, presumably in quest of artsy pictures of naked ladies. If I get any more bored I’m going to go give him the good news about the invention of the internet.”

  Molly made a face. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I hate to embarrass you, that’s all,” I said. “I know you pulled a favor to even get me in here.”

  Posters on the walls showed that Bookshop Santa Cruz’s events generally featured literary A-listers, bestselling genre scribes, or winsome-looking people who’d written one achingly awesome short story and won a shit-ton of awards for it. I am none of those things. Normally their events involved an audience and a Q&A and wine. I’d been given a table behind the local history section from seven until eight-thirty, which on a drizzly Wednesday evening in late October is the bookstore equivalent of exile to a labor camp in Siberia.

  Molly grew up in Santa Cruz and knew somebody in the store. Perhaps anticipating that my event might not lead to a long line of excited customers snaking away down the street, she’d volunteered to come along for the ride on the pretext of hooking up with some old friends.

  “I’m not in the least embarrassed,” she said. “People are stupid. Come on, nuts to this. Let’s go get a drink.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “Wait though. Didn’t she buy a copy earlier?”

  A young woman had come back in the store from the street, and was headed our way. “The copy, yes.”

  I smiled when she got to us, reaching for my pen. “Decided you’d like it signed after all?”

  “Well no, actually,” the girl said, looking awkward. “It was for my boyfriend. He’s really into unsolved mysteries and stuff? But I just gave it to him and he said he only likes to read things by actual experts, sorry.”

  She held the book out to me diffidently.

  “You’d like a refund?”

  “If that’s okay.”

  “And he sent you back to do this?” Molly asked.

  The girl shrugged.

  “You’ll have to take it to the register and deal with them,” Molly said. “Oh, and FYI? Your boyfriend’s a dick.”

  The girl backed warily away.

  Molly helped me put the books back in the box and then in my car, after which we went and got pretty drunk.

  Or I did, anyway.

  Molly had a single beer and then went for a late dinner with her friends. I kept meaning to leave the bar and kept failing to follow through. I remembered after a while that I’d got drunk in the same establishment, years ago, when passing through town after visiting my parents up in Berkeley. The bar hadn’t changed much. Neither, it appeared, have I.

  Eventually I managed to go, and eleven o’clock found me on a lounger by the tiny swimming pool of my motel, smoking in front of the no-smoking sign and drinking from a large bottle of local beer that I seemed to have purchased along the way. The drizzle had stopped but it was pretty cold. The motel was called the Bayview, despite not having one and in reality being situated a brisk five-minute walk from the ocean.

  I was sufficiently inebriated by that point to find this glumly metaphoric for something or other.

  Hi. My name’s Nolan Moore. You may have heard of me from…

  Who am I kidding. Of course you haven’t. Unless you ran across me in my previous life as a journeyman screenwriter in LA, my sole claim to fame is being the host of a very slightly popular YouTube show called The Anomaly Files, which investigates unsolved mysteries. The problem being that though it briefly looked like we were going to move up to cable, it fell apart for extremely complicated reasons that I won’t get into right now, and so we’re back on YouTube.

  The problem with that is people who’re interested in the subjects we cover don’t go to YouTube, because it’s the province of youngsters who want to watch other young people jabbering on about their inconsequential days. I’m aware that makes me sound old. I don’t care. My point is most people go to the site to see their pre-existing worldview reflected safely back, not to have their eyes opened to new things, or be shown what’s going on in the shadows.

  And this, as my producer/director/friend Ken has pointed out, more than once, is why our business model sucks.

  In an attempt to generate PR for the show (and to bump my income to the level where I could continue to pay for the apartment in Santa Monica that had been home since I separated from my wife) I’d written up some of our previous shows. These had just come out in a large-format book from a real publisher, and that’s what I’d been trying to sell tonight. The net result—after the reversal with the girl with the shitty boyfriend—had been zero (0) sales.

  There were a dispiriting amount of zeros in the book’s sales ranking on Amazon, too. I honestly hadn’t realized there were that many books in the world. It seemed altogether possible that books that didn’t even exist had sold more copies than mine. After spending a few confused minutes trying to figure out whether asking the publisher to withdraw the book from sale might push me higher up the bestseller list, I realized I’d drunk more than enough and should call it a night, especially if I was hoping to drive Molly and me the six-plus hours back to LA tomorrow.

  I dislodged my phone from my jeans pocket during the process of standing, but managed to catch it before it crashed to the floor, somehow also avoiding flipping it into the pool. Buoyed by this evidence that I was in fact totally at the top of my game, I noticed I’d missed a call.

  It was from Kristy. My ex-wife. Or, as it hadn’t quite got to that point (and we’d recently been cautiously experimenting with walking back from the split) the woman from whom I was presently separated.

  Our current policy of playing it cool meant neither of us expected the other to leap straight onto calling back. We’d had a few good evenings together in the last couple months, including one when we’d added each other back to the Find Your Friends app, as a cocktail-fueled declaration of…I don’t know. Openness to a future. Or something. The fact that I’d not felt drawn to use the information, however, nor entitled to, showed there was still distance to cross.

  It was late. I could have left it until I got back to Los Angeles. But I didn’t. Despite the hour, and having been no stranger to alcohol, I went up to my room, made some very bad coffee, and called Kristy back.

  Mistake.

  Chapter

  ​3

  I wasn’t worried about waking her. Kristy switched to no-ring mode when she was done with the day. Not worried, either, that the delay in her picking up (necessarily) meant she was electing not to take my call. Kristy makes a point of leaving her phone on the other side of the room, usually somewhere precarious, to show how non-addicted she is. I’ve pointed out this shows she’s thinking too much about her phone, but my wisdom fell upon unresponsive ears, as it so often does.

  I waited patiently, picturing how she would lever herself up out of her chair and pad quietly across whatever space she was in, tucking her hair behind her ear in readiness. It’s weird how someone not-answering their
phone can remind you how much you know about them.

  “Hey,” she said, eventually.

  “New phone, who dis?”

  “Nolan, that doesn’t work. You called me.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s funny.”

  “Pretty experimental use of the word funny, but let’s move on. How did the booksigning go?”

  “Really badly.”

  “I did warn you it might.”

  “I know. But I wasn’t sure whether that was genuine concern or merely you being mean to me for sport.”

  “Bit of both, if I’m honest. Well, that’s disappointing.”

  “I’ll survive. So, what?”

  “Huh?”

  “Before I called you, you called me, remember? Where are you anyway?”

  “Town called Birchlake. Forty miles from Shasta.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  She didn’t answer, and in that pause I heard an echo of previous pauses. Most of them good—the everyday beats of silence in a relationship that’s past (or before) the “somebody has to be talking or it’s not working” phase. Others not so good, like the hesitation of a person choosing whether to tell the truth, and if not, which untruth—something that would be consistent with previous untruths. You never understand those pauses for what they are at the time. Only in retrospect. And once you’ve learned that bad things live in the gaps, and the world may not be as it seems, it can make you paranoid.

  “Ten days ago a girl called Alaina Hixon disappeared,” Kristy said, and I realized all she’d been doing was marshaling information. “Fourteen. From Birchlake.”

  “Name rings a bell,” I said. “The town, not the girl.” And it did, now I’d heard it a second time.

  “Can’t imagine why. It’s Nowheresville. Alaina lived a mile up the road. She and a couple of girlfriends went walking in the woods after school. It started getting dark and one of them turned to Alaina to suggest they head home. She wasn’t there. They called out and looked for her, but got freaked and bailed.”

  “Nice.”

  “They didn’t know what else to do, Nolan. And they went straight home and got their dad to call the police, so…The county sheriff and his guys were there fast. Then the Feds, and dogs. Nothing after five days of ground search. Nothing since. Nothing on social media. No contact with family or friends. Just plain gone.”

  “I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it.”

  “Bad timing. The day before she disappeared was that Walmart shooting in Chico. ‘Only’ four died, but—”

  “There was that huge manhunt, right. That I do remember.”

  “Exactly. Very bright and shiny. Took twenty-four hours until they pinned the guy down and blew his head off, then there were days of media analysis and handwringing after. Alaina missed her spot in the news cycle. She fell between the cracks.”

  I tried to imagine what it must be like to have your child disappear like that, and realized it was nowhere I wanted to go inside my head. “Don’t they say that…”

  “The first day is critical, yes. If a child turns up deceased, in three-quarters of cases death occurred within three hours. Movies are all about hidden cabins and the drawn-out playtimes of evil geniuses. In reality it’s a panicky act committed by someone who’s broken and vile, and it happens fast. But we shouldn’t leap to that anyway. About eight hundred thousand people are reported missing every year.”

  “Seriously?”

  “But eighty-five percent are under the age of eighteen, and the vast majority resolve quickly. People operate on a hair-trigger, understandably. Most of the time the kid’s just late, or at a friend’s, or goofing off. They come home, everybody shouts at each other, then someone calls for pizza and it’s have-you-done-your-homework.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Family cases are often custody-based and more likely to involve children under six. The probability of harm increases markedly from family to acquaintance to stranger, of course, but in the end only one in ten thousand missing children are not eventually found alive.”

  “Dying is not the only deeply shitty thing that can happen to missing kids.”

  “Of course. And those dangers are higher with acquaintance or stranger abductions, which also become more likely if the missing child is female. Like Alaina.”

  “But why are you on this? It’s terrible, of course. But you’re not a detective.”

  “I was researching a piece on cyberbullying.”

  “Hasn’t that been done?”

  “Yes, it’s been ‘done,’ Nolan. But, bizarrely, that didn’t make the problem instantly disappear. And it’s not only kids. Students do it to teachers, too—setting up sites to hassle them. It happens even more outside the school system. You don’t want to see my mentions on Twitter any time I write something a teeny bit critical of the patriarchy, or suggest not having so many assault rifles in circulation might be a cool experiment.”

  “Well, you know my theory about that.”

  “Remind me.”

  “People are assholes,” I said. I’d gotten to the end of the pot of coffee and couldn’t decide whether it would be a good idea to make another, especially as the first seemed to have stirred ominous harbingers of tomorrow’s hangover.

  Instead I left the room and lit a cigarette on the walkway, looking over the wet parking lot. A homeless guy lurched along the road outside, shouting vaguely at someone who wasn’t there. “So—is this girl’s disappearance related to cyberbullying?”

  “It wasn’t,” Kristy said. “Though I called the sheriff yesterday morning and suggested he look into it. Because, check this out.”

  My phone pinged. She’d texted me a picture. A pretty young girl. Pale skin. Long dark hair. Black jeans, black hoodie. She was standing in front of birch trees, with thicker forest behind. “That’s her?”

  “Yes,” Kristy said. “Keep looking.”

  The image she’d sent was a screen grab, much taller than it was wide. I scrolled past the image. It’d been posted by “htilil♥2005” and had received precisely one like. I did the math and worked out that 2005 would have been Alaina Hixon’s birth year. “What’s with the white space underneath?”

  “Somebody, or more likely two people, have posted comments. That’s what those random sets of letters on the left side signify. But the comments are blank.”

  “That’s a little strange. Unless it’s just some pointless thing the young folks are doing this month.”

  “Not that I’m aware. On her other account there are normal comments. I’ve traced those posters back to kids at her school. But these? No idea. And keep scrolling.”

  The blank lines of empty post went on for a couple of inches of screen space. I was finding it hard to see this as cyberbullying worth the name (or Kristy’s time), and was about to say so, when the comments changed. One of the same random-character accounts had posted a single word.

  Witch

  “Huh,” I said. I kept scrolling. Something—the cold and dark, or a more atavistic response—was making the hairs on the back of my neck stir.

  Witch

  Witch

  Witch

  Witch

  And then, at the bottom of the image, a final comment.

  Time to join your mother.

  “Okay, sure, that’s a little weird,” I said. “Any idea what the mother thing signifies?”

  “Alaina Hixon’s mother was in a car accident eighteen months ago. She’s dead.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. You should look into that.”

  Half an hour later I was at the tiny desk in my room. In the meantime I’d made and drunk more coffee and also—with the aid of the vast collection of notes I have stored on my phone—recalled in which context I’d previously encountered the general environs of Birchlake. I’d also had time to think about Kristy, and to wonder what she was really doing up there in the mountains, and why.

  I checked my watch. Quarter to one. Late. But you never know. I dialed a different
number. It rang for quite a while. I was about to bail when it finally picked up.

  “What,” Ken’s voice said, “the fuck do you want?”

  Ken is a late-fifty-something pug of an ex-Londoner, and at times somewhat brisk in his social interactions.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Well I am now, you twat.”

  “Good,” I said. “I think I’ve found our next show.”

  Chapter

  4

  After the call with Nolan, Kristy spent ten minutes tending her digital garden. There wasn’t much to do. She scheduled a couple of tweets promoting upcoming pieces and dealt with her mentions. And that was that. The outside world had been dealt with, leaving only the inner one.

  She wasn’t even sure why she’d called Nolan. Reassurance, probably. Grounding. But she still wasn’t sure it’d been worth coming all the way here.

  Or if it had been a good idea.

  She should go to bed. She didn’t feel like it. It was very late, though. One last cup of tea. Then bed.

  She put the kettle on the stove and a bag of chamomile tea in one of six identical mugs. There were six sets of silverware, six plates, and six bowls. None were chipped. All were perfect, patina-less, as if freshly minted. The distorted reflection of her face in the kettle showed Kristy’s own patina was coming along fine. Only those few lines around the eyes, as yet, and that one outlying gray hair. But age happens. Thirty-five is not the first draft of being a human. There are editorial marks in your margins.

  She turned off all the lights except for the lamp and sat in the chair by the window, cradling the hot cup in her hands, slowing her breathing, trying to feel her way toward sleepy, watching nothing much happening in the street.

  From up here she could see along it in both directions. An evening of drizzle had slicked the sidewalk into black, shiny pools, reflecting the streetlights. She considered taking an artsy picture of the scene for her loyal 120K Instagram followers. She’d left her phone right on the other side of the room, though. And she’d surely paid sufficient homage to the gods of social media for one night.