The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “What about Alaina’s friends?”

  “She hung out with Maddy and Nadja mainly. A couple others. She was never alone in the yard. Seemed to stay clear of the clique stuff, too.”

  “And you never saw evidence of bullying?”

  “Are you kidding? Any hint of that in the school and it would be a huge great deal with Dan. The principal. And honestly, I’d be surprised. It’s a small school and a small town, and everybody keeps an eye out for everybody else. Too much so, if anything. Why do you ask?”

  “Nothing else springs to mind, anything different about her before she disappeared?”

  “Only what I already told the investigators.”

  “Do you mind repeating it, in your own words?”

  “The last few weeks, she’d been…I don’t know. Distant. I spoke to a couple of the other teachers about it, but nobody else seemed to have noticed anything. I guess maybe I was more sensitive to it, because we’d always got on well before. But, like I said, she’s a teenager. They can be weird. It doesn’t always mean anything.”

  Kristy left the woman with her card. As she walked away, two things seemed clear. Kristy had interviewed enough people to have a sense when they were concealing guilt. She hadn’t gotten that vibe, though she had gotten the sense something was up with her. Odd for Gina not to ask to see ID, for example.

  As she turned into the side street that would take her to Shasta Avenue and her apartment, Kristy noticed somebody she recognized in the distance. He was approaching at a steady rate, as if he had somewhere to go. Kurt, aka the Crown Prince of Uselessness. He winked at her in passing.

  Kristy ran out of steam when she got back to the main street. Being here was dumb, and not helping anyone. Least of all herself. But then what? It was far too late to start the drive back to LA. She was stuck here another night.

  As she passed the Stone Mountain Tap she saw someone wave at her. Val, bussing a table in the window. She went inside. The place was empty in the dead zone between late lunchers and early drinkers.

  “How’s the exploring going?”

  “I’m done,” Kristy said.

  “I warned you that nobody comes here for the excitement. You’re booked three more days, though, right?”

  “I’ll let you know when I leave.”

  “Sounds good. Not gonna refund you, though.”

  Kristy smiled. “Fair enough. By the way. There was a strange noise last night.”

  Val glanced up from lining the table’s ketchup and hot sauces in a neat row. “Noise?”

  “Late. It might have been someone hammering on the front door.” Kristy had thought about it a lot since, however, and realized her first impression felt correct. “But sounded more like it had been an impact on the interior wall. Underneath.”

  “Huh,” Val said. She moved on to the next table, sweeping the cloth slowly and methodically over its surface.

  “No way anybody could have gotten in there?”

  “Nope,” Val said. “It’s locked up, front and back. I’m using it as storage. Bunch of furniture and old junk I need to figure out whether I can use for another reno, or should just take to the dump.”

  “Well, you might want to check if something fell over. It was kind of loud.”

  “I’ll do that,” Val said.

  Kristy went back out onto the street and walked toward the apartment. As she unlocked the door, she glanced along the street.

  Val was still standing in the window of the Tap. It looked like she was watching her.

  Chapter

  9

  The motel was an L shape on the edge of town opposite a two-pump gas station. Ken parked at random in the middle of the lot—he has a tendency to own a space—and we three guys stretched and looked around as Molly headed over to check us in. The parking lot featured a number of cracks through which tufts of grass grew, dropping away at the end to the cold river twenty feet below. There were no other cars. The motel was beat up and very brown and backed up against a forest that looked like it went on basically forever. The rusting coke machine had an OUT OF ORDER sign that might as well have been written in cuneiform.

  As Molly came back out of the office and returned to us, Ken shook his head. “I did my best,” he said. “I know you had such dreams. Such hopes for life. I’m sorry it turned out this way.”

  Molly frowned. “Who are you talking to?”

  “My younger self.”

  “Ha ha. The only other option was a snooty B&B where you and Nolan would have had to share a bed. And pay four hundred dollars a night for the privilege.”

  “I’d rather sleep standing up in this parking lot.”

  “Co-sign,” I said.

  It took two minutes to throw our bags into the rooms, five to walk to the center of “town” and find an establishment called the Stone Mountain Tap, and not much longer to get ourselves settled at the table in the window.

  I decided immediately that it was a good bar, despite the excessively self-confident young guy who declared himself our server for the night. He confided to us that his name was Kurt. I’ve never been sure why I’m supposed to care about that information, as it’s impossible to use without sounding either overly familiar or as if you’re trying to start a fight, which I seldom am. Once Ken had communicated to Kurt that what he required of a waitperson was not personality but speed, we spent a drink laying out a plan of attack for the next day.

  Ken had a map purchased from the gas station—which turned out to be under the purview of the same taciturn oldster who ran the motel. In the database on my phone I had rough diagrams of the positioning of (possibly) anomalous walls in the area, along with links to Google Maps overlays that would enable us to be more accurate when on the ground. The overlays had been compiled by amateur online enthusiasts, who claimed to have located only about thirty percent of the local walls, but it was a start.

  We agreed that a couple of small clusters fifteen miles up the road would be a good place to try, and I left Ken and Molly discussing whether we could be bothered to get permission from the landowners (or just hop over the fence and hope for the best) and went outside for a cigarette. A woman with short gray hair behind the bar winked at me, presumably spotting a fellow social pariah.

  It was, disappointingly, drizzling again, in that annoying spitty way that’s almost rain. The weather in California is famously good, but when it decides to be wet—especially in the north—it can take a while for it to get the impulse out of its system. It was chilly, too.

  I wandered along the street, wondering what it would be like to live in a place like Birchlake. Not exciting, but okay, probably. Small grocery store on the corner. Nice-looking coffee shop. But next to it something that had once been a large general store, windows now whitewashed—never a good look in the middle of a main street. There was a faint glow from a window on the upper floor. Somebody’s apartment, presumably. The rest of the street was dark apart from a liquor store up the end, with a guy standing weaving outside, steadfastly ignoring the NO LOITERING signs. As I passed he suddenly raised his head and shouted into thin air, then took a hurried step backward, as if someone or something had come right back at him—something bigger and scarier than he’d been banking on.

  When I was most of the way back to the bar I noticed something out of the corner of my eye, and looked back at the upper window of the former general store.

  A moment later I saw the shadow again, farther back into the room. Probably the inhabitant wondering why some guy was standing looking up at them. I waved to indicate that I was harmless (because I basically am) and walked on, meanwhile starting the phone call I knew I had to make.

  “New phone, who dis?” Kristy said, when she picked up.

  “Oh, so it’s funny when you do it?”

  “No,” she said. “This actually is a new phone. The old one blew up.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Something like that. So—to what do I owe the pleasure? Speaking to each other two days st
raight. People will talk.”

  “Let them,” I declared, crossing the main street toward the bar. “Just wondered if you’d made any progress on the missing girl thing.”

  “None whatsoever,” she said. “In fact I’m bailing tomorrow. I am bored and crave civilization.”

  “Oh.”

  “What? You sound weird.”

  “Well, I may have done something ill-advised.”

  “Plotting to overthrow the government again? We’ve talked about that. You’d be a dreadful dictator.”

  “No,” I said. “Not that.”

  There was a pause. “Oh, for God’s sake, Nolan.”

  I was now outside the Stone Mountain Tap. Confused, I looked up…and saw Kristy was sitting inside, at a booth in the back. She was staring at me, and looked exasperated.

  At the table just the other side of the window I saw Ken look at me, frown, half-stand to peer in the direction in which I was obviously staring, and then turn back.

  He looked pretty exasperated with me, too.

  It’s a good thing that I am fundamentally very lovable.

  A couple hours later Kristy and I left the bar. The others had departed for the motel a little while before.

  Ken and Kristy have met before and so merely exchanged “Nolan is an asshole” eye rolls when she joined our table. It was a first for Molly and Pierre (The Anomaly Files started after Kristy and I split up) but both have decent interpersonal skills and said hi and shuffled their chairs around to make room, managing to avoid asking, “Okay, we get that you guys used to be married or something, but WTF is she doing here now?”

  I explained to Kristy about the rock walls in the area. She acknowledged that was our kind of thing. And so then we all basically ate and drank and hung out.

  As I walked her along the street afterward, however, she stopped and turned to me. “Seriously, though.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you really here?”

  “Last night,” I said. “You sounded…quiet. I wasn’t far. I have been known to cheer people up.”

  “I recall such a thing, and that’s sweet of you. I’m leaving tomorrow, though. I’m already packed.”

  “You said. We’ll still go look at the walls. I should have warned you. I just hoped it’d be a nice surprise.”

  She smiled. “It is. And I’m booked here another few nights, so what the hey. Maybe I’ll try one more poke around tomorrow, then come and get drunk with you guys.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I noticed she was wearing a necklace I hadn’t seen before. A thin, plain chain, with a small silver cross on it. “Is that new?”

  “No. Old.” She saw I was still looking at it. “What?”

  “Not the kind of thing you normally wear, that’s all.”

  “I’ve had it since I was a teenager.”

  “Always useful to have something to hold up in the face of vampires. Because you just never know. So. How far is it to where you’re staying?”

  “We’re already here. Airbnb. That’s me.” She nodded toward the old department store. “I’d invite you up for coffee, except I’m not going to.”

  “Good. Saves me coming up with a polite way to decline. But wait.” I walked back a couple of paces, looking at the window on the upper story. “You’re staying up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s just the one apartment?”

  “A spacious getaway of approximately four hundred fifty square feet, if I recall the listing accurately. Why?”

  I hesitated, not knowing whether I should say, but figuring I had to. “Right before I called you earlier. I may be wrong, but I thought I saw somebody up there.”

  “In the apartment?”

  “A shadow. As if someone was back in the room, blocking a dim light. And you were in the bar at that point, as I discovered moments later. So it couldn’t have been you.”

  “Huh.”

  She opened a locked door, and I led the way up the side stairs. There was nobody in the apartment, and no sign that anybody had been there.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Hope I haven’t freaked you out. Just my imagination, I guess.”

  I walked into the lot of the motel to find Ken, hands in pockets, looking into the dark of the forest. He held out one fist with two meaty fingers extended. I put a cigarette between them, and one between my own lips, and lit both.

  We stood in silence for a few minutes before Ken asked the question. “So what’s the deal, monkey-boy?”

  “Honestly, partly that I think there could be a show for us in these walls.”

  “But also?”

  “A teenage girl disappeared ten days ago. Kristy came up here to look into it. She says it’s related to something she’s writing on cyberbullying.”

  “But you’re not sure that’s why she came, and so you thought why not be in the area, too. Partly because, despite what everybody says, you’re a half-decent bloke. Also you’re hoping it might make her take the idea of getting back together more seriously. Especially if you get her drunk.”

  “Sometimes I wonder why I bother saying things out loud to you.”

  “Me too.” He winked. “Maybe you should stop.”

  Chapter

  10

  We drove out of town at the crack of ten o’clock the next morning. Normally Ken has a tendency to insist we get started stupidly early, a legacy of his days directing movies but also related to a policy of getting the day’s work done as early as possible, so he can go to the bar. I’d slept badly and was already standing on the walkway at seven when he emerged from his room looking like a disheveled owl. We watched the rain for a while, then he muttered “Bollocks to that” and went back in his room.

  It was still raining when we eventually got on the road, though less heavily. Cloud cover remained dark and low, however, and with the forests looming on all sides, the drive along the main street felt like going through a tunnel. I glanced up toward Kristy’s apartment as we passed but couldn’t tell if she was there. We’d agreed I’d give her a call late afternoon. After the main drag petered out there were a couple more blocks of houses, a school, then forest. We followed the highway along the river for a few miles before Molly directed Ken off a side road.

  This forged higher still, at times through trees, at others with flat misty meadows either side, and would doubtless have been attractive if it hadn’t still been raining. It was due to stop within the hour, but the weather station providing that information was fifty miles away so we weren’t taking that as a guarantee. Ken’s confidence in the project was declining steadily, and he’d already begun asking me about backup mysterious phenomena in the region. There weren’t any. It was the walls or nothing.

  “Okay,” Molly said, eventually. “Well, we’re here.”

  “Here” presented as a stretch on the left that was bereft of trees. A low wooden fence divided it from the road. Other than that—and shrouded in mist—it looked pretty much exactly like everything else we’d seen.

  Ken pulled into the first available spot by the side of the road. “Go check,” he said, to me.

  “Check what?”

  “The wall.”

  “I say again, check what?”

  “That it’s actually here.”

  “It’s not here. This is the nearest we can get to it. Or to them. There’s more than one. But now we have to hike.”

  “It’s pissing down.”

  “It’s barely a heavy drizzle.”

  Ken turned in his seat. “Nolan, I’m from England. Just as the Eskimos or Inuit or whoever the fuck are said to have a hundred words for snow, we Brits are perfectly capable of describing rain. Some days we do little else. Regardless of how you’d rank the current conditions on the Nolan Moore Scale of Shit Weather, I’m not getting out of this car unless you’re sure there’s something worth pointing a camera at.”

  “I’ll come,” Pierre said. “We’ll want some start-of-the-expedition footage.”

  “And it’ll n
eed sound,” Molly said. “So I’ll come, too.”

  “Thank you both,” I said. “I’d just like to say it’s a pleasure dealing with true professionals.”

  “Likewise.” Molly grabbed her backpack and the boom mic. “Shame to muddle on without the decisive and visionary eye of the show’s director, though.”

  “I know,” I said, sadly. “But it is what it is.”

  “And what it is, is bollocks,” Ken muttered, wearily undoing his seatbelt. “God I hate Californians.”

  “Hey,” Molly and Pierre said, in unison.

  “Not you two,” he said. “Just him.”

  We walked together back to the middle of the wooden fence, and peered into the gloom.

  “All this mist will look pretty cool,” Pierre said. “If we actually find…”

  “Look, there are walls,” I said. “For fuck’s sake. And we will find them. Have I let you down before?”

  All three looked at me. “Well, yeah,” I admitted. “Okay. But for now, dare to believe.”

  “We’ll need some of the introductory crap you said in the car yesterday,” Ken said. “But let’s tape a heavily condensed and less boring version later, when and if the weather gets better. For now say something short, then let’s go look for these things. Oh—and coat off, Nolan.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The weather’s ‘fine.’ You assured me earlier.”

  I took off my coat, revealing the billowy off-white shirt that Ken insists I wear on camera, partly for continuity but mainly so he can make fun of it.

  I handed him the coat. He put it on. “Ooh, toasty.”

  I stood by the fence and Pierre raised his camera. He winced, but nobody asked if he was okay. We all knew he’d injured his shoulder on our last expedition, deep in the Grand Canyon, and that we all preferred to leave the events there in the back of our minds. Molly stood to the side and lifted the boom mic. Ken pointed at me, and Pierre nodded.