The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  The girls nodded in unison.

  “So could you describe that? Exactly where you went?”

  “We left school,” Madeline said. “Dropped our bags on the porch here. Then walked down the street.”

  “The main street?”

  She looked at me as though I was being obtuse. “Well, obviously.”

  “To where?”

  Eyebrows raised now. “The…motel?”

  I sensed I was missing something. “Why?”

  Madeline turned the irony levels up to stun. “Because…that’s where we went into the woods?”

  Her sister was frowning. “If you’ve read the reports, how come you didn’t know that?”

  “They weren’t explicit about the exact location,” Ken said. I have no idea if this was true. “Which is why we’re glad to be talking to you, love. Exactly the kind of detail we need. Why’d you go into the woods down there?” He nodded out the window. “Why not behind your house, for example.”

  “They’re boring,” Madeline said, glancing out at the fence. Molly and Greg were ambling close to it. “I mean, okay, it’s all the same forest, but we know that part way too well. And it gets steep so you can’t really go anywhere.”

  “They’re the little woods,” Nadja added. “We wanted to go into the big woods. Well, Alaina did. She’d been all about the forest for weeks beforehand.”

  “Any idea why?”

  Maddy shook her head. “History,” Nadja said, however. “Principal Dan’s class? He went on and on about the forests, religion and stuff.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “It’s more boring than you can possibly imagine.”

  Maddy sniggered. “Dan’s a dork.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, the three of you walked through town. Did you stop anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “See anybody you knew?”

  Madeline had now decided my IQ must be in single figures. “Seriously? This place isn’t exactly Chico.”

  I managed not to smile. “Indeed. Or San Francisco, or New York. Okay, so it’s a small town and you’re bound to see people you know. Do you remember anybody in particular?”

  Nadja shrugged. “Just randos.”

  “We saw that dyke who works in the Tap,” her sister said.

  “Val, right. We did. Though she’s not a dyke. You’re not allowed to call someone a dyke unless you are one.”

  “Whatever,” Madeline said. “She does it with women, either way.”

  “You don’t know that,” Nadja said. She looked at me. “Val’s only been in town a couple years, keeps to herself, and has scandalously short hair. That has led some of the more parochial residents to leap to conclusions.”

  “Plus, she’s an actual lesbian,” Maddy said.

  “Great,” I said. “So you got down to the motel. And went into the woods behind there. What time? I know you’ll have been through this before, but I want to be precise.”

  “School finishes at three,” Madeline said. “We hung around, then walked…we thought around three thirty?”

  “Wait,” Nadja said. “I texted mom.” She pulled out her phone and started flicking through it. “Keep talking, I’ll find it. It’s a way back.”

  “Can you describe what happened? What you did while you were in the woods?”

  Maddy shrugged. “Just chatting. Goofing around, taking pictures for Insta. Wait.” She bent over her own phone.

  “Three twenty-six,” Nadja said, holding hers up. “I texted mom at 3:26, saying we’d be back for dinner. I was in the motel parking lot when I did it.”

  Maddy held her phone up, too—displaying a selfie of the three girls, grinning, on the edge of the same lot. “Taken at 3:28,” she said.

  “Mind if I take a copy?”

  She shrugged, and I took a picture of her screen. “Did you post anything once you were in there? I’m asking because it might help nail the later timings.”

  “No. Data signal sucks bad enough in town—it’s dead in the woods. We checked out the walls, stuff like that.”

  “The walls?”

  “Yeah, the stone walls. You must know about those.”

  “Of course,” I said. “We saw one yesterday. Kind of wavy.”

  “Right! That’s where we were. There, and then we went deeper. There’s more in there.”

  “So then what?”

  “We’d been like, maybe forty minutes,” Madeline said. “Alaina had wandered off to take pictures. But it was getting cold and we were kind of over it. So we went to where we thought she’d be, but she wasn’t there.”

  “How long had it been since you saw her? I know you’ll have answered that question before.”

  “About ten minutes.”

  “Or maybe fifteen,” Nadja said. The girls looked at each other, and Madeline nodded. “Could be, probably. It might even have been twenty.”

  Ten was the figure they’d given before. So here was an extra window. “And then what?”

  “We called. And looked around. And kept calling.”

  “I know it’s hard to be sure,” I said, “but for how long, approximately?”

  “Half an hour,” Nadja said. “We called, we looked. We waited. We called and looked some more.”

  “And then?”

  “Thirty minutes is a long time,” Madeline said, sounding defensive. “If you’re waiting for someone to come back.”

  “Hell yes,” Ken said. “I wouldn’t have stuck it that long.”

  “Even if it was me?” I asked.

  “Especially not,” he said. “Five minutes, max.”

  The girls laughed. Ken’s better at this stuff than me. “Well, okay, it was probably closer to twenty,” Madeline said. “But still long, and she just, you know, wasn’t there. And it was getting dark and starting to rain, and we couldn’t find her so…”

  “We freaked out,” Nadja said. Her voice was flat, and I guessed that if someone had asked these questions of Kristy twenty years ago, following days of people carefully not mentioning she was still here when her friend Helen was not, it would have sounded about the same way. “And we ran home and told Dad and he called the cops.”

  “Speaking of Dad,” Ken said. He nodded toward the window. Molly and Hardaker were heading toward the back door. “Looks like we’re out of time.”

  Everybody stood. “So when are you going to do the real video?” Madeline asked. “Because I am going to need new jeans for that.”

  “Very soon,” I said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  I shook her hand, and turned to do the same with her sister as Madeline and Ken left the room. Nadja was looking out of the window, however, toward the fence. She frowned.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She turned to me, looking confused, but then smiled brightly and shook my hand.

  We walked together back toward the main street.

  “Good work, Molly,” Ken said. “That was smooth.”

  “Did it help?”

  “Maybe,” I said. We’d talked on the way to the interview about her trying to get the girls’ father out of the room, in the hope they might be more relaxed—and leave space for them to diverge from previous accounts. “The gap was a little longer, the search a little shorter.”

  “But that’s basically what you suspected anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So did you actually learn anything?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay, what?” Molly said, irritably. “There’s something you two aren’t saying. Spill it.”

  “They’re lying,” Ken said.

  “About what?”

  “We don’t know yet,” I said.

  Chapter

  ​21

  At around the time Ken and I were talking to the Hardaker girls, Pierre was thinking he probably had enough film now and might as well go back. Before leaving the motel he’d reviewed what had been shot the day before, transferring the footage to his laptop. First, the material from the mountains in th
e morning. It was good and moody, and some of the stuff of the mist curling into the trees was genuinely pretty great.

  Then the to-camera section they’d done in the woods behind the motel: a little dark, but he’d worked with Nolan long enough to understand he was unlikely to respond positively to being asked for a redo unless absolutely necessary, and also to know the presenter’s first take was generally the best take. He made a note to check with Ken whether he thought they could grade it into acceptability, and backed it all up to one of the stack of portable hard drives he’d brought from LA. Reassured that he now had two copies, he erased the files from the camera’s drive.

  Then he went into the woods to see what he could see.

  He found the wavy wall where they’d done the outro, and he shot further clips of it from a variety of angles and distances as a safety measure: worst case, they could use these as intercuts under Nolan’s audio from the kinda dark sections. This wouldn’t have occurred to Pierre a year ago. It occurred to Ken as naturally as breathing, however, and picking up that kind of trick made working on The Anomaly Files worthwhile, despite barely being paid industry standard rates. And being shot in the shoulder on the last expedition.

  When he’d got everything they could possibly need, he lowered the camera and looked around. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to be doing. Yesterday, it’d seemed like they were bailing. Ken hadn’t explained if that had changed. He just said, see if there are more walls out there.

  So Pierre walked further into the woods.

  The terrain soon started to get steeper and more rugged, but for a while there was nothing to see except a lot more trees. His dad would know what they were called. Pierre’s childhood hikes had featured a constant stream of background facts, the comforting hubbub of parental observation. Some kids would have absorbed a portion of it. Pierre had not. He’d trusted his father to hold that information, with the result that he had taken none of it into himself.

  He was okay with that. He was about pictures, not words. It didn’t matter what the trees looming over him were called, nor the various types of damp moss that covered most of the ground and occasional fallen trunks. It mattered how they looked. What you see is the mind’s best attempt at making a picture out of the information it has. Nolan had said something like that once. Sometimes knowing too much prevented you from being able to see it properly.

  He walked another twenty minutes. Nolan had said the local area had been extensively logged a hundred years or so back, but you wouldn’t know it in here. Maybe this was an old growth section that avoided being felled. The trunks were thick and straight, a mix—though Pierre didn’t know, and wouldn’t have cared—of Douglas fir and sugar pines. Clumps of redwoods, too, though not the giant kind: they needed the fog found along the coast. That he did know.

  It was easy to find a path and enough light filtered down from above that it didn’t feel too gloomy. It was quiet, though. Very quiet. Pierre didn’t think this was just because his father wasn’t alongside, saying stuff. It was all just…very still. Suddenly he stopped walking.

  “Whoa,” he said, quietly.

  The wall closest to him was low, barely two feet high and mainly obscured behind the fallen trunk of a once-massive tree—which is how he hadn’t spotted it earlier. There was a bunch of rocks just in front.

  He switched on the camera and got a few shots, taking a moment to log the GPS coordinates. The upright part of the wall was about six feet long. It could have been as much as ten before the other rocks fell down.

  As he went back to walking, more slowly now, he came around the side of a thick knot of trees.

  He stopped again. “You’re going to want to—” he said, half-turning, before remembering he was alone. Which was weird. He always handed this kind of thing up the ladder.

  This second wall was much higher. Had to be close to four feet. Over a foot thick. And long, too—stretching seventy or eighty feet away into the woods, ignoring marked changes in terrain. Straight to start, then curving back hard on itself. From above it’d look like a fish-hook, but—Pierre established by looking up—you were never going to see it from above. And so it wasn’t going to be on Google Maps. Unless some of the locals knew about it, this was new. Nolan would like that. A lot.

  Pierre walked along the inside of the curve. He noted—and filmed—the fact that at the end, the part where the pointy bit would have been on a real fish-hook, it seemed again like stones had been dislodged. Then he went around and started filming the other side, though he stopped walking, and lowered the camera, when he saw there was another wall beyond.

  About two feet high again, but long, and this time completely straight—heading off into the trees like a single, wide train track, straight across a gulley, running straight into kind of a cliff. It had to be a hundred and fifty feet long. It looked bizarre.

  He took some more footage, but only a few quick shots. Nolan and Ken were going to want to see. So far as Pierre had been able to tell, all Nolan had to say about these walls is nobody knew what the heck they were. It didn’t seem likely that what he’d found changed that, but if your point is that something’s mysterious, then the more mysterious you can show it looking, the better, right?

  And these were mysterious, there was no doubt. Even to Pierre, whose tendency to reach for the unknown was less acute than most. Partly it was the fact they made zero sense either individually or together, and certainly not out in the woods like this. Also, they just seemed weird.

  The walls they’d filmed yesterday had seemed odd, sure. But there was something different about these.

  He checked his watch and was surprised to see he’d been out in the woods for well over an hour. Closer to two, in fact. He’d found enough. Time to go.

  He realized the light might not be as good when they came back, however, and decided to lay down a final piece of footage as a master shot they could cut against: taken standing on the spot and slowly turned in a circle, to show how the walls stood in relation to one another.

  He found the position where a panning shot would be least obscured by trees. As he found it, a bird floated hectically down from above and started arcing gracefully between the trees. Pierre quickly raised the camera, knowing this would kick the shot up straight to A+. He locked on the bird as it entered frame. Panned steadily across with it, ignoring its fluttering side diversions, tracing the overall arc of passage. Turning smoothly at the waist, legs balanced—

  He stopped, suddenly.

  The bird wasn’t in shot anymore.

  He turned back, trying to find where he’d lost track of it. Presumably it’d flipped upward, higher into the trees. But there was no sign, up or down or on either side.

  Had it gone deeper into the woods? He held position, ready to restart filming. The bird didn’t come back.

  Pierre lowered the camera, disappointed. That would have been awesome. Plus now he was going to have to do the whole thing again, without the bird.

  “I’m lost,” said a voice.

  Pierre turned.

  There was no one there. Nothing except trees and that higher wall, thirty feet from where he was standing. Dust, spinning languidly in shafts of light.

  The voice had sounded as though it was only a few feet behind. Perhaps closer. It was hard to believe somebody could have got out of sight in the time it’d taken him to turn around. No, it was impossible.

  So it hadn’t happened. Pierre decided that he hadn’t heard anything after all—at least, not outside his own head. That happens, sometimes. An unbidden thought bubbles up from deep inside, unexpectedly. So unexpectedly that its articulation may sound as though it was said out loud.

  Why “I’m lost,” though? He wasn’t lost.

  And why would his inner voice sound like a little girl?

  He decided that he didn’t need the panoramic shot right now after all. It’d actually be a lot better if Nolan himself was in the space when it was taken. It kind of summed up the whole walls thing
, and the presenter would provide a sense of scale, too.

  Yes. Good idea.

  Pierre started back the way he’d come. As he got closer to the higher wall, however, he heard the voice again.

  “Help me,” it said.

  Definitely a little girl. Pierre quickly covered the last of the distance to the wall. If some kid was out here by herself, hell yes he was going to help.

  But when he looked around the end of the wall, there was no one in sight.

  Then he heard another voice. Not loud. “I don’t trust her,” it said. An older voice this time, female.

  “She promised,” another replied. A man. “She made a deal. The stones are down. And some of us are already abroad.”

  These voices seemed to be coming from the other side of the wall. Pierre felt relieved. Obviously there was a family out here with him. He figured he ought to at least say hello, to avoid startling them as he passed by.

  He walked back to the end and poked his head around. “Hey,” he said. He was looking down into the curved area, toward the fish hook part.

  There was nobody there.

  He could hear something else now, though. Not voices. Music. It was very faint, as if coming from the other end of a long corridor. There was a slight echo on it, too. Pierre cocked his head. What was that song? He couldn’t quite recall.

  “You found me,” the little girl said.

  She sounded much closer. Right behind him.

  She tapped him lightly on the back. “Now I’m yours.”

  A sensation rolled down Pierre’s spine as though someone was tracing it with a fingernail, then seemed to sink into him. For a moment it was like that awkward, leaden feeling you get if you strain your back and it refers round into your stomach muscles. A kind of bloated anxiety.

  Then it was gone.

  He turned. Nobody there.

  No little girl. Nobody at all.

  Pierre decided firmly that he didn’t need to talk to these people after all.

  He walked quickly away, back through the trees toward the motel, as a soft, cold rain started to fall.