The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “No, and no. So I guess we’re done.” He picked up his glass. He’d already dismissed her.

  “I guess,” Kristy said. “One other thing, though. I’ve been in town a couple days. The night I got here, a man came up to me in the street. An older guy. Late sixties. Tall, thin. Black hair. Ring any bells?”

  “Nope.”

  “He told me some people disappear for a reason,” Kristy persisted. “He implied I’d be better off leaving this be. Any idea why he might do that?”

  “None at all,” Hixon said. He raised the glass to his lips and slowly drained it. Then set it back on the side table and crossed his hands in his lap, still without looking at her. “I’d like you to leave now.”

  “Final question. What’s my name?”

  “You told me but I wasn’t listening.”

  “It’s Kristy Reardon. I’ve run out of cards but I’m easy to find online. I hope you find your daughter.”

  “She’s gone.” His voice was flat.

  “I truly hope not. But if so, all the more reason to hope you find her.”

  “You don’t get it,” he said. “Even if she comes back, she’ll never be the same.”

  Kristy stared at him. She tried to work out how to respond to the idea that, should Alaina get away from the person or people who’d abducted her and come home, she’d be beyond repair, damaged goods, not his daughter anymore.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Go,” he said. “And don’t come back.”

  Chapter

  ​13

  It was a soaked and bedraggled little gang of searchers after truth that returned to our motel. The plan was to get dry and thaw out before reconvening to check Pierre’s footage, then find somewhere for me to tape an outro. Preferably under cover, as the cloud was heavy and the rain didn’t look like it was going to let up any time soon.

  I ran a deep bath and lay in it, drinking coffee in the dim light while I waited for the tips of my fingers to return to their normal hue. The expedition felt done. Though the question of why the walls existed remained intellectually interesting—maybe, to a few people, or possibly only me—it was not visually arresting. One wall looks a lot like another, and as Ken kept pointing out, it wasn’t like I had an explanation ready to roll.

  Some stories are short stories. This one was barely a haiku. We’d spent money on a couple of airfares, two nights in a motel, day rates for Pierre and Molly, miscellaneous expenses (beer). We had stuff in the can from previous abortive ideas and could throw this into a bucket show of Things That Are Mildly Intriguing. It wasn’t the end of the world, and frankly I wouldn’t be unhappy to leave.

  I was allowing myself to doze off in the warmth of the water, believing there was no harm in catching up on last night’s patchy sleep, when the two dim bulbs either side of the mirror flickered. I ignored them. A minute or two later there was a strange and quite loud cracking noise from the main room. I ignored that, too.

  But then I heard the sound of dripping.

  I clambered out of the bath, wrapped a towel around myself, and padded out into the main room, shivering as I left the coziness of the bathroom. At first I couldn’t work out what had happened, and I was on the verge of heading back to the warmth when I saw that the glass pot on the coffee machine was lying in pieces around the hot plate.

  The coffee previously inside was pooling over the desk and dripping in large quantities off the edge onto the floor—directly into the bag that held my laptop.

  I hurried back into the bathroom to grab another towel.

  “One of those science things, I assume.”

  “I hate science,” Ken said. “It’s full of annoying shit like that. I was in a hotel room in Liverpool once that was freezing. Took a shower. When I came out, the warm air from the bathroom was hitting the cold front in the bedroom and it was literally raining in my hotel room.”

  Ken had determined that the motel rooms were “too cheesy, even by our standards” to tape my remaining sections, without coming in so tight as to seem like we were on the run from the police. We’d spent a few minutes trying to find somewhere photogenic around the motel exterior—achieving nothing but being stared at with suspicion by the gray-haired guy lurking behind the desk in the office—and so were now intrepidly heading into the woods behind.

  The forest was pretty thick, and after about a hundred yards the ranks of tall pines reduced the rain falling onto us to a negligible level. The floor was uneven, large boulders here and there, and it was gloomy and misty but still light enough to shoot if we got onto it quickly.

  Ken looked at me. “Sure,” I said. “And then, I guess?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, mate.”

  He called Molly, telling her to bring Pierre and his gear. While we waited we wandered around the wood.

  “Tell me to fuck off if you want,” Ken said, after a while. “But I’ve got to ask.”

  “Soon after Kristy and I got together,” I said, “she got overinvested in a missing person case down in LA. I mean, obsessed. Talking to friends of the family. Hassling the cops. Going way overboard for what was supposed to be a simple ‘the dangers to our kids’ piece for a free paper. So eventually I convinced her to back out. She’s steered clear of that kind of story since then, at least while we were together.”

  “Yet now, here she is.”

  “Hence me jumping on the walls as an expedition. But she texted me earlier: she talked to the missing girl’s father. Got nowhere, so she’s leaving tomorrow, too.”

  “Job done then, mate.”

  “I guess. Sorry there’s no show in it.”

  “Does leave us in kind of a hole. On the other hand nobody’s tried to kill us this time round, so I’m prepared to call it a win overall. Aha—here we go.”

  I turned to see Molly and Pierre coming toward us. “What do you think?”

  Pierre made a seesaw motion with his hand. “It’ll do,” he said. “Let me have a scout around, though. See if there’s something better nearby. Like a glade.”

  “A glade?”

  “Yeah. Or a glen.”

  “Just get on with it,” Ken said. “I am very ready for an adult beverage.”

  Pierre strode off into the gloom. I started putting together a form of words that would summarize the walls, a capper piece to consign them to the world of Things We May Never Understand.

  Meanwhile Ken was frowning at Molly. “You all right, love?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Dunno. You just look a bit something-or-other.”

  “I’m cold,” she said. “Previously I was wet. Then I was dry, and warm. Now I’m getting cold and wet again. This is a retrograde step, and it saddens me.”

  “This won’t take long,” I said. “Then the burgers and beer are on me.”

  “Hey, guys.” This was Pierre, shouting from some distance away. “You might want to come see this.”

  He’d gotten a couple hundred yards deeper into the forest, and it was clear what he was talking about before we’d got halfway to him. “Nolan,” Ken said. “You are a moron.”

  Pierre was standing by a wall.

  It was four feet high along its length, made of rock—much like the ones we’d seen earlier, except taller, and made of smaller stones, giving it a more finished quality. It was thirty yards long, though longer in extent, because rather than being straight, it undulated like a snake.

  There was no sign there had ever been a continuation. It was just a wavy wall, standing by itself, in a forest. I spent a few minutes walking around, looking for signs of further construction, but couldn’t see any.

  “So,” Ken said, when I rejoined the group. “Just to be clear, we spent half the fucking day traipsing about in the rain looking for walls miles away, when there was in fact one right behind our motel. And dare I say it, though I’m using the word loosely, a more interesting wall, at that.”

  “Not my fault,” I said.

  “Looking forward to hearing why. You’re the twat
with the map.”

  “And as I explained, nobody’s made an exhaustive catalog. A few segments were recorded on the ground years and years ago, but the majority were plotted using Google Maps—often by people who’ve never even been to California. And look up.”

  The three of them dutifully tilted back their heads. Old pines towered above, tiny scraps of dark gray sky beyond. “What?” Ken said.

  Pierre got it. “Online maps of wilderness use satellite imagery. In forests, they can’t see the ground. So nobody spotted this wall, or put it on a map.”

  “Which means they could be all over the place,” Molly said. “All around town. And nobody knows about them.”

  “The locals probably do,” I said. “But they’ve always been here. Nobody knows why, or cares.”

  “Well, on that, to be absolutely honest…” Ken said.

  “I hear you,” I said. “Okay, time to wrap. Props to Pierre for finding the perfect backdrop.”

  Pierre gave Ken a light to hold. I positioned myself at one end of the wandering wall, and when he nodded, started walking and talking toward him as Ken and Molly tracked alongside.

  “People always want to talk about the big mysteries,” I said. “Are the pyramids spaceships (no) or ancient power plants (also no)? Have we been visited by aliens? Maybe, but that guy in the Safeway lot who says he’s been abducted is still crazy. What happens to us when we die? Dig up a grave, there’s your answer. Actually don’t, because it’d be illegal and weird. But the fact is that the existence of heaven or hell is not something we’re ever going to know.” I stopped for a moment. “Or be able to evaluate on a YouTube show with a very limited budget.”

  I started walking again. “But that’s where the smaller, lesser-known mysteries are important. They evoke aspects of everyday human experience that are curious, or wonderful. They shed light on the real forces in our lives. Time does exist, regardless of what hip physicists and stoned people might claim. It’s how pyramids get built, and how they fall apart. It’s how people fall in love, how broken hearts heal and how things get forgotten and lost—much like the original purpose of these walls. A gulf of time is like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope, making everything strange, as the black and white photography of yesteryear makes it easy to believe that people back then dressed and dreamed in grayscale. That they were different from us.

  “But they weren’t. The past is not a foreign country. The past is close by, always. You simply have to be prepared to find the invisible path to get there—and it’s often the smaller mysteries that show the way. Thanks for taking another walk into the weird with The Anomaly Files.”

  I stopped talking. Ken nodded.

  “Not too shabby,” he said. “And now, I could not help but overhear, the drinks are on you.”

  We set off back the way we’d come, walking in silence, spread out among the trees. It was getting dark, and mist was thickening between the trunks. Pierre was soon lagging behind as he grabbed a few last artsy shots. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if this expedition got thrown into a bucket show, there wouldn’t be space.

  “Who’s that?” he said.

  In the distance, half shrouded in mist and shadows, someone was heading purposefully further into the trees. A fit-looking woman with short gray hair. She had a bag over her shoulder. From the way she was moving, it wasn’t light.

  Molly peered. “Doesn’t she work in the bar?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What the heck’s she doing out here?”

  “She could ask the same,” Ken said. “And I wouldn’t have a good answer. She’s probably looking for mushrooms or communing with tree spirits or some other hippie bollocks.”

  “What have you got against hippies?”

  “We really don’t have time for that, Moll.”

  The woman looked up and saw us. She raised her hand in a semi-wave designed to acknowledge our presence while making it clear that she had no desire to interact.

  I waved back, and we carried on toward the motel.

  Chapter

  ​14

  Birchlake on a Friday night was a little more like an actual place, as though there were a bunch of extra people kept in storage somewhere and only allowed out to play one night a week. Most of them seemed to have headed straight for the Stone Mountain Tap, but luckily Kristy got there early.

  She’d staked out a big table on the opposite side of the room from the bar. I pointed out what a tactical error this had been, but by then the place was too busy to move. Luckily the smarmy young bartender remembered Ken and checked in on our table frequently, initially at least.

  Ken, Molly, and I spent a while trying to thrash out an idea for a next show. Most of the options on our list would require a full week to shoot, and though I’d been sanguine about money while relaxing in the bath, the truth was the pot was nearly empty. “So we stay local,” I said.

  “We’ve done most of the obvious ones in LA,” Ken said. “And non-obvious ones. And no, we’re not doing the Subterranean City of Lizard People. Partly because it’s obviously a load of cock, and because if it’s not, you’re not getting me in a cave again any day soon. Or ever.”

  “Not leaping at the idea myself,” I admitted.

  Kristy meanwhile sat at the other end of the table, people watching. Though I’d been firmly instructed not to describe the event in its entirety, she knew the bones of what had happened in the Grand Canyon. Certainly enough to chip in with something like “And I wouldn’t let you!” and I found myself vaguely irritated that she did not. Which was dumb, I knew—but the end of an expedition, especially a failure, can leave you tired and grumpy.

  “My round,” Molly said.

  I stood to help—we hadn’t seen the Kurt guy in a while—glancing at Ken. He looked surprised too. Molly is generally the last person to force the pace of drinking.

  He raised one eyebrow a quarter inch, and I nodded.

  For a few minutes I focused on getting Molly into position at the bar. When we’d ordered, Molly turned to me. “Who’s driving tomorrow?”

  “Ken.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Hangovers only make him stronger.”

  “But we’re definitely leaving.”

  “I think we’re done here.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re not feeling it for Birchlake, I can tell. Any particular reason?”

  She hesitated, and in that moment I saw something over her shoulder, a glimpse across the crowded room to the window onto the dark and rainy street. The glass was fogged with condensation, but I saw something dark moving slowly across the view. Then it was gone.

  “Your coffee machine,” she said. “What exactly happened?”

  “I don’t know. I came out of the bathroom and the pot was in three pieces on the desk. Leaking everywhere.”

  “And your room door was shut.”

  “Well, obviously. And I always make sure it’s firmly locked when I’m getting naked. There was this one time at a hotel in…never mind. Why?”

  “So what made the pot break?”

  “Glass on a hot plate. Cold air. The former causes the inside of the glass to expand. The latter makes the outside contract. Enough differential between the two, and—”

  “Girls understand science too, Nolan. And it happened to me once when I was a kid, with my dad’s treasured whiskey tumbler. I washed it under boiling water, trying to be helpful, and it shattered. I thought being heavy would protect it. But he explained it takes thick glass to cause the effect. His glass had just had a bunch of ice in it. Bing. Cheap, thin glass is fine unless there’s an extreme temperature difference. Was it that cold in your room?”

  I shrugged, knowing I wasn’t capable of doing the math and also that the fate of my coffee pot wasn’t the issue here—hoping she’d get to saying whatever was on her mind. But then our drinks started arriving, and so we got to picking them up and carrying them to the others.

  Ken raised his eyebrow
again when we got back. I shook my head and sat next to Kristy. “The hell’s happened to that waiter?” I asked, for want of anything else to say.

  She was looking thoughtful. “Table behind you,” she said, quietly. “But be subtle about it.”

  I inclined my head. The table behind us held a couple in their thirties. A thickset, affable-looking guy attacking a large plate of food, chatting as he did so: looked like it was an infodump on his day, or possibly entire week, or year. The woman was listening with a rather fixed smile, a large glass of wine in her hand.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “I’m developing a theory. Tell you later.”

  “Does that mean I might be getting an invitation?”

  She shook her head. “I want to be on the road early. Speaking of which, I need to talk to Val.”

  “Who?”

  “The bar woman. It’s her Airbnb I’m staying in.”

  “Okay. Well, maybe now’s a good time.”

  She looked at me. “Everything okay?”

  “Sure,” I muttered. “I’m going for a cigarette.”

  Ken followed me out. We walked up the street and smoked in silence for a while, watching mist curling along the street.

  “The womenfolk are in odd moods tonight,” Ken said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “You didn’t ask Molly what’s up?”

  “I did. But she started obsessing about my coffee pot. I’ll try again, though I should try to figure out what the deal with Kristy is first.”

  “I’ll confess that the atmosphere between you two is not making me want to shout ‘Get a room.’”

  “And I have no idea what’s up with that. Since you engineered us re-meeting, we’ve hung out a dozen times. Plus regular texts, emails, some long calls. I honestly thought we were getting somewhere.”

  “Having an audience doesn’t help.”