The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “So here we are,” I said, trying to look relaxed and committed and not at all freezing. “And if this isn’t technically the middle of nowhere, it’s certainly the back of beyond. We’re in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the last place that looked like a real town was Birchlake, which is”—I raised my hand and pointed—“thirty minutes back that way. That doesn’t mean this area’s always been remote, however. Humans introduce paths into the world. Sometimes in response to environmental features, like bridges across rivers or tracks along ridges. Others merely to join settlement A to settlement B. If those places stop being a big deal, or fade entirely, the paths can vanish, too. Our lives and landscapes are written by time, whose invisible hand in shaping our world is only evident in retrospect.”

  I saw Ken was frowning at me as though I’d started speaking Japanese, and decided to cut to the chase.

  “Nonetheless, this area has never been anywhere in particular. And that’s why what we’re about to show you…is rather mysterious. Follow me.”

  “Cut,” Ken said. “It’ll do. Just one tiny note for the next section, though, Nolan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Be better.”

  I got my coat back and clambered over the fence. The others followed. Funny thing about climbing a fence. Doesn’t matter how unimportant the structure is, how close to collapse, or if you’re miles from anywhere, going from one side of a fence to the other always feels like a trespass, which I guess it sometimes is—but also as though you’ve traveled farther than the tiny distance involved. You were over there, and then you’re here. You are somewhere different now.

  I considered saying something along these lines in the next to-camera chunk, but found it all too easy to imagine the irritably puzzled way in which Ken would stare at me.

  Molly got centered on her GPS unit, and we set off into the mist.

  Chapter

  ​11

  California is celebrated for beaches and surfing in the south. In the north are the epic redwoods—and in old growth areas these ancient and astonishing trees may have trunks wider than a car and growth rings laid down before the birth of Christ. It’s home to majestic mountains, too, as at Yosemite, and alpine water spots like Lake Tahoe, where—especially if on a terrace getting into your second cocktail—the beauty is arranged with such eerie perfection as to suggest you are not in a natural environment but instead spending your designated annual vacation in the carefully designed recreation sector of a vast starship, bound for the far side of the galaxy.

  It’s a big state, though. There are other parts. The endless extent of the Central Valley, with nothing to see for hour after hour except more of the same, and where in summer it’s so arid and hot that your only desire is to not be there anymore. There’s the California desert. And then there’s…

  “This is the most boring bit of California I’ve ever seen,” Ken said, after fifteen minutes.

  “Seriously?” Pierre said, who’d been filming for much of the time—clips of me striding manfully up and down minor hills and gullies, along with atmospheric shots of mist curling into the trees. “I think it’s great.”

  “It’s not ugly,” Ken admitted, gesturing vaguely. “There are trees doing that whole tree thing. Tons of the bastards. And there’s shrubs, or whatever they are. Bushes, whatever. I don’t care. And craggy rocks, and mountainy bits. But a little of all that goes a long way, and there’s a bugger of a lot of it. Are we there yet, is what I’m saying.”

  “Should be soon,” Molly said. “About a couple hundred yards, around the crag over there. I think.”

  We kept trudging onward. The drizzle had stopped, or at least become so fine that it was like walking through cold, wet air. The meadow eventually narrowed, trees pressing in on the left, a bare, rocky prominence on the right. I was beginning to worry the GPS overlays we were relying upon were either inaccurate or simply made up, when we turned a corner.

  “And there it is,” Molly said, quietly.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Ken said. “You have got to be joking.”

  I’ll admit that at first glance it wasn’t impressive. In all honesty, it didn’t become much more impressive after you’d spent ten minutes looking at it from all angles.

  Walking around the rock face had revealed a further extent of meadow. If you were to imagine a green/gray/beige blanket thrown over an unmade bed, with hills and depressions caused by hidden pillows underneath, that’s what the terrain looked like—assuming you’d also surrounded the bed with ranks of cold, silent pine trees, built to scale. Okay, forget the bed thing. It was a dumb comparison.

  But there, in the middle, was a wall. About forty feet long, less than three feet high, and basically straight.

  As we got closer, further detail became evident. It had been constructed by piling gray, lichen-covered rocks on top of one another, some large, others small, the latter used to plug gaps between the former. It was consistently about a foot thick along its length. The end closest to us was vertical: the other ran out over the course of a couple of yards, gradually getting lower, before stopping.

  Without needing to be instructed by Ken, Pierre and Molly followed me as I walked around the wall. I’d love to be able to say more about it than what I’ve already said, but there isn’t much to add. At the far end there was evidence the wall had originally extended further: scattered rocks in an approximate line, a couple of small pits in the ground where it seemed like large stones from a lower layer had once been bedded. The other end looked like it had always been designed to simply stop as it did.

  Aware that Ken was standing out of shot, waiting in a silent way that was nonetheless very loud, I stopped wandering around the wall and turned to camera. When Pierre looked locked and the light went on, I started to talk.

  “We purposefully brought you first to an unremarkable portion of wall,” I lied, “to give you a sense of what they’re like in isolation. You’ll note that no magical level of technology is involved. Let’s dismiss that idea right way. You see this kind of dry-stone wall all over the world. Rocks piled on top of other rocks. Some of the people who’ve tried to explain away the New England walls have claimed they are literally that: farmers dealing with a phenomenon called frost heave, where stones are raised to the surface by successive cycles of frost and thaw. The idea being that farmers dealt with their fields getting rockier by picking up the rocks and throwing them in a pile. But I don’t buy that.”

  I squatted down. Pierre smoothly mirrored my movement. His knees didn’t make cracking sounds, unlike mine.

  “Because, look,” I said, running my hand over the wall. “This isn’t haphazard. Bigger rocks form the bulk of the structure, but smaller stones have been used to ensure a fairly uniform surface. You don’t bother to do that if you’re throwing rocks out of the way. This is a wall, and designed as such.”

  I straightened and pointed over the wall at the nearest portion of forest. “Over there is the basis of another attempted explanation. The walls of New England are rarely mentioned until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. Some have speculated that excessive forestation in the early years made frost heave more and more of an issue, and that they simply ran out of wood to build enclosures. So they killed two birds with one stone…and built them out of rock.”

  I turned toward Pierre and used a below-frame hand signal to indicate I wanted to switch to a walk-to-you. He dutifully started backing away, as I ambled toward him.

  “We can’t wholly dismiss that idea. It’s possible some of the walls came about that way, and for those reasons. But then let me ask you this.”

  I stopped at the end that had a neat, vertical upright. “As you can see, the wall stops here. Back at the other end, there’s evidence it continued for some distance. Somebody, at some time, removed some rocks, perhaps to build something else. But not here. Almost as if there was supposed to be a gate. But there’s no evidence that a further stretch of wall ever started after a gap. This wall simply s
tops. Why?”

  I went around the end and started back in the other direction. “And if you look back along its stretch, you’ll see the top is exactly the same weathered gray color, and covered in lichen to the same extent, as the sides. It’s not proof, but it suggests the wall was never any higher than this. So what on earth is the point of it? To mark off one person’s land from another’s? Possibly, but look around—does that seem likely, in this mountain pasture, miles from anywhere? Every time you think you’ve answered something about these walls, it raises another question.”

  I stopped walking and looked straight to camera. “Questions that The Anomaly Files is going to try to answer.”

  “Cut,” Ken said. “Nolan—can I have a word?”

  We walked together toward the trees, leaving the others to go on ahead toward where there was supposed to be a small cluster of further walls.

  “What’s up?”

  “How,” he said. “That’s what’s up. Or that’s my point, anyway. How.”

  “How what?”

  “How the hell are you going to answer these questions? You’ve admitted, often enough that it’s becoming tedious, that nobody knows who built the walls, or why, or when.”

  “That’s why it’s a mystery, dude.”

  “I know. And mysteries are our business, for better or worse. But we’re not here to just say, ‘Weird, huh?’ Nobody’s going to watch an hour of that. I signed on for this wall idea because it’s less dangerous than the last thing we did, and it’s cheap. But cheap is no good if all we get is you peering at orderly piles of rock and shrugging. And don’t trot out your line about it not being important to find, only that we continue to seek. Finding is television. Seeking is just you twatting about in a wet field.”

  “I know,” I said. “Look. Half a mile from there there’s a couple of longer sections. Maybe we’ll find something to work with. If not, then you’re right. We might just have to bail on this idea and it be one of those things you give me endless grief about forever.”

  We rejoined the others and trekked farther into the wilderness. The walls weren’t where the overlays said they would be—my confidence in the maps was waning steadily—but only another quarter mile further. There were three. One much like the wall we’d already seen, albeit only two feet high, though easily a hundred feet long, adrift in the middle of open space. Both ends were straight, as though leaving space for a gate or door, without evidence of a continuation.

  The second wall was much shorter, only about twenty feet, but higher—about four feet. It went up a steep stretch of hill, close by some trees but running diagonally away from them in a way that was hard to fathom. It curved.

  The third wall was close to it, and the same height, and again curved, but in the opposite direction. They would have looked like a pair of brackets from above, where one had slipped lower than the other. Taken both in isolation and together, the walls made no sense. It was weird they were there. But that was about all that could be said.

  So I said it, to camera—finishing about two seconds before it suddenly started raining, hard.

  We ran together into the trees and took what shelter we could until it slackened, passing around a flask of coffee that Molly had thought to bring along, because she is awesome and basically should be president.

  Then we trudged back to the car.

  Chapter

  ​12

  At around the time we were filming the first wall, Kristy was walking to the Hixon house for a second time.

  She’d spent a couple hours exploring Birchlake—at first during her run, during which she circumnavigated it twice; then on foot, grid-walking the eight blocks of main drag along with side streets that were clean and well maintained and held a few decent Victorian houses and a small Safeway and a boarded-up Masonic hall. The local history museum was cozy and dull, apart from a room about the main street in previous eras, with photos of the old stores that had once lined it. Evidently the Tap had previously been called the Stumptown Saloon. The art gallery provided further evidence for Kristy’s theory that proximity to natural beauty is inversely proportional to the quality of the art it inspires.

  Wikipedia had meanwhile informed her the town was first mentioned in the early 1800s as a spot used as an occasional camp by passing trappers—the location previously having been known to local tribes for a thousand years (citation needed). The logging industry brought permanent settlement, then a further brief boom through being on a route to Gold Country, though it never incorporated. Gradual decline into the twentieth century, but currently holding steady.

  On the way to the Hixons’, before turning up the twisting side road that would take her to their drive, she took another look at the building on the side of the highway. Her time on the web had also turned up the information that Olsen’s Tavern had been built to take advantage of the logging boom in the early 1900s, on the previous site of a small old house. It had been extended over the years, but the original stone fireplace was preserved. It had a checkered history—the place to have the kinds of fun that best took place discreetly outside town, and often closed for long stretches after infractions of legal or moral kinds—before closing for good in the late 1990s.

  There was a story there, of a quiet sort: the settler family who’d built the original house by a mountain track along the river (why here, rather than in town?), the change to tavern (by the same family?). Some attempt to scratch out an existence after a previous occupation had dried up, or a brave leap into the unknown? Expansion. Rowdy, intermittent popularity. Eventual closure. Abandonment.

  Not Kristy’s kind of thing, though, and only interesting if read near where it happened, so you could feel how the human and geographical stories intermingled. The style of ill-punctuated memoir you’d find self-published in a local bookstore, if places had local bookstores anymore. Birchlake didn’t. It would have no resonance elsewhere and so would join the growing number of stories that had nowhere to be told. What some pop star ate for breakfast gets a billion likes on Instagram. Several generations of some non-famous family’s life? No market for it. Nobody cares.

  Kristy shook her head, surprised at her mood, and turned away from the dead building. It wasn’t her job to stand in mourning for it. Screw that building.

  She considered bailing back to Birchlake. She could have a bath or read or write and basically stay out of this dismal weather until Nolan called to say they were ready for dinner and drinks.

  But no. Without trying to talk to Alaina Hixon’s father she had nothing, not even enough to write an open-ended thinkpiece. And something she believed she’d taught Nolan was that you stick with a story until there’s undeniable evidence that you’re wasting your time.

  She walked up the road.

  She’d tried calling ahead, without success. A message had not been returned. The three oil drums were still in position near the top of the drive. After checking nobody was watching, Kristy opened the mailbox. It was empty. This increased the likelihood someone was in residence, but it was impossible to know by how much. A neighbor could be taking in the mail. Kristy wouldn’t blame Alaina’s father for not being able to bear sitting here while the probability that his daughter was dead slowly ticked up from 90 percent to 99.9.

  She walked past the drums and up the drive. It was covered in wet leaves and banked hard to the right. On the left, that old truck, once green, now faded, rusted wheels without tires, up on cinder blocks. It was quiet. The sky felt low and heavy.

  After another thirty feet the drive curved back left again, passing an old and overgrown set of yard furniture. A tire hanging from the branch of a tree on old, gray rope. The house had once been painted a cheerful yellow, now turning curdled cream and gray. A few boards had slipped.

  A sudden crashing sound on the right.

  Kristy jumped, and for a moment thought it had been made by a figure, coming rapidly toward her—but it was only a misleading shadow between two trees, set in motion by the real cause of the
sound. A doe and two younger deer emerged chaotically from the undergrowth.

  All turned their heads, blinking, assessing her, before walking stiff-legged in the other direction.

  “They’re allowed here,” said a voice. “You’re not.”

  A man was on the porch. Early forties, short hair and stubble, both starting to gray. He was sitting on a low, battered armchair, largely obscured behind the rail.

  She stopped a couple yards from the steps. “My name’s Kristy Reardon. I tried calling,” Kristy said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  Many people wouldn’t have led with this information, but Kristy had found that being upfront was the best policy. Bryan Hixon didn’t seem to have a response to the information. There was an overflowing ashtray on the table next to the ratty couch, and a glass half full of something that could have been iced tea, but probably wasn’t. The man’s eyes were bleary, rims pink from lack of sleep. In other circumstances he would have been handsome, with an evenness of features reflected in the pictures Kristy had seen of Alaina.

  “Can I come up?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Can I ask a couple questions from here?”

  “Is it going to help find my daughter?”

  “I’m a writer. Not a detective.”

  “Seems to me journalists aren’t good for much except stirring trouble and blowing their own horn.”

  “It’s a point of view. I don’t necessarily disagree.”

  “Where were you when Alaina disappeared? Chasing that psycho down in Chico? Going for the money shot?”

  “I’m not from here. I live in LA.”

  “So why are you on my property now?”

  “Can you think of any person who might have wanted to harm your daughter? And were you aware of any unusual interactions in the days before she disappeared? Things out of the ordinary? Things that might cause her to behave distantly toward people? A teacher, for example?”