The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “I’ll go ask the manager or owner or whatever he is.”

  “He’s not going to be happy about it.”

  I walked to the office, Molly following. “You think something’s really wrong, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” I told her what I’d seen through the rear window. “Doesn’t prove anything. He could have knocked it over and not bothered to put it back.”

  “No,” Molly said. “I’ve seen how Pierre works a motel room. He keeps them shipshape. This is a guy who has been known to find someone to come back to them with him, as you know, and ladies do not wish to find dirty socks everywhere and the TV tuned to the porn channel.”

  “Right, but bear in mind he tried to start a fight tonight with a bartender, which is a long way from his standard MO, too.”

  The office was dark but had a sign with a number to call after hours. It turned out to connect to the apartment in back of the office—as we could tell from hearing the ring. After a while, a guy answered it. He wasn’t delighted at being woken after two in the morning, but I laid it on pretty thick about being worried about a friend.

  Five minutes later he emerged into the office wearing a bathrobe that looked even older than he did. I let Molly take point in the conversation, as she’s a lot better at that kind of thing. By which I mean talking to people.

  He came outside with us and along to Pierre’s room. He knocked. No response. So he unlocked and opened it.

  “Hello?”

  He stuck his head in, and stayed that way for a moment. Then he pushed the door wide before setting off back along the walkway toward his office.

  “I hope you boys brought your checkbook,” he said.

  For a while none of us said anything. Then Ken picked up the chair, and slid it into position under the desk. To be honest, that only made the rest of it look worse.

  “Jesus,” Molly said, eventually.

  All the lamps were broken. The bed had been turned on its side and leaned against the closet. In the process, both of the latter’s doors had gotten cracked.

  The armchair was upside down, one leg detached. The clock radio from the nightstand was a pile of wreckage in the corner. The motel notepad had been pulled apart, pages shredded, strewn all over the room like confetti.

  I went to the bathroom. One of the lights was broken. The other shed a weak glow upon a floor that was an inch deep in water, overflowing from the bath. I turned off the tap. When I got back Ken and Molly were each holding one of the scraps of paper from the floor. I picked up one too.

  Ken’s had a series of wavy lines drawn on it. Molly’s was much larger, nearly a whole sheet. Someone, presumably Pierre, had etched a design onto it. It had been gone over many times, at first calmly, and then with increased ferocity. Impossible to tell what it was supposed to be.

  “Okay,” Ken said. “We need to find Pierre, and we need to find him fast.”

  At that moment the phone in the room rang, scaring the crap out of us. Then I realized the phone in my pocket was vibrating, too. Molly cocked her head, and stepped over to the door, and then backed out into the parking lot.

  “Ken,” she said.

  We followed. From the lot you could hear that all of the phones in the motel were ringing. They rang five times, and then stopped.

  It was quiet for a moment. And then there was a sound, like thunder. It rolled toward us out of the woods, and slowly faded. Leaving a very loud silence.

  Chapter

  ​31

  It was not only the phones in the motel that rang. Most people in town slept through the event, but some did not.

  One of those who heard was Gina Wright.

  She’d already been awake. Lying, as always, on the right-hand side of their bed, listening to the gently snoring hump on the left side. The snoring wasn’t loud; she was used to it, and it wasn’t what had kept her staring up at the ceiling—nor what had her gazing unseeingly at the television after dinner, though Derek had been dozing on the couch and yes, gently snoring during that, too.

  When they’d come upstairs she’d slept for an hour, but then: bang, wide awake. She’d had this a few times over the last three months. Nights where she woke and thought, Oh God, what am I doing? Because it wasn’t like she didn’t love Derek. And she knew what she was doing was dumb and wrong, and while affairs can have one of several outcomes, few of them are good, and pretty much none of them are good when you’ve wound up having sex with someone purely on the grounds it might be fun—rather than any sense that it was a connection worth burning your life to the ground over. The OGWAID sessions lasted half an hour or so, after which she would eventually drift off. Now it felt like she might never sleep again.

  So she heard her phone ring downstairs.

  She left it charging in the kitchen each night, as her nightstand held a cute 1930s-style alarm clock Derek found for her a long time ago. It didn’t go with the rest of the décor in the room, but whatever. She’d said once she liked that kind of thing. He’d remembered. That’s the problem with attentive partners. You say something, they listen, and you find yourself receiving ceramic squirrels or amusing golf memorabilia every birthday for the rest of your life. They love you for who you are and encourage you to stay that way, tending that wall around you, even after you’ve come to suspect that you may have been someone else all along.

  Normally she’d figure the ringing was a wrong number and let it play out. Not tonight. The sound made her heart beat like a jackhammer. She slid out of bed and padded quickly down the stairs, but the phone had stopped by the time she got to it.

  There was a notification on screen but it didn’t relate to the call. Two people had liked her Instagram post.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, no no.”

  A new post, from an hour ago. When she’d been asleep. The same picture as before. She deleted it.

  Then realized that wasn’t enough and deleted the app from her phone, too. Then realized that didn’t go far enough either—whoever was posting wasn’t doing it from her phone, were they? All Gina had achieved through deleting the app was preventing herself from knowing if it happened again.

  She went to the kitchen table, opened her laptop, and prepared to delete her whole account, knowing she’d be losing pictures going back five or six years, some of which she loved, many of which she’d struggle to find backups for. She hesitated, but only for a moment. Pressed the button, pressed again for Yes, I’m sure.

  She got herself calm—or fairly so—and went back upstairs. Slipped back into bed. Derek remained oblivious to the seismic dangers unfolding, to the tectonic plates of utter catastrophe shifting beneath where he slept.

  Because there was Facebook, too, she realized.

  Now she’d cut off the Instagram route, what was to say whoever was doing this wouldn’t switch tracks? She’d only had thirty followers on Instagram, a couple friends (she was trying to avoid remembering which exact ones, because then she’d have to confront the idea that some might have seen the picture), but mainly strangers who liked artsy pictures.

  Facebook was different. Family. Old friends. Former colleagues. A whole network, including a couple of people who were supportive when she felt low. Still only three hundred people, but this wasn’t a numbers game.

  This was her entire life.

  She’d have to do it, though—if there was the slightest hint the attack could switch to there: though she knew well enough that all it might do is shift things into an even more serious arena. If they couldn’t harass her online, what’s to say they wouldn’t break it out into the real world?

  She had to find out who it was.

  Not Kurt. He was in the damned photo. Of course he could have got a buddy to take it, but why would he? And his response to her panicked DM earlier—he’d managed a single word, “fuck”—didn’t read that way. She’d responded by telling him to be calm, she’d fix it. Somehow. His response to that had been “ok cool.” Ironically, it had taken the clear and present danger of th
eir relationship becoming known to show Gina what a pointless little prick he was.

  Not the type to blackmail, though. She was sure of that. So, who?

  A thought dropped into her mind then as if it had dripped through the roof and fallen straight through her forehead.

  She closed her eyes. Visualized the picture she’d now stared at twice before deleting, twice. Saw it in her mind as clearly as she could. Focused in on the glimpse of upper body, in the doorway. She’d been wearing her teal shirt. The one thing she’d been able to find recently that she thought didn’t make her look overweight.

  Thursday, then? Yes. Definitely Thursday. The most recent time she’d seen Kurt. The memory connected with a feeling of jitteriness. More so than usual when he came around, because while she trusted him to be discreet, you just never knew—as the existence of the photo proved. Gina had been extra-jittery that day because, barely five minutes before, she’d let someone out of her house.

  That woman. She was with…actually, had she even said? No—and Gina had been too flustered (she’d hidden it, she believed, but yeah—she’d definitely been flustered) to check. The woman had asked questions about Alaina. Then gone—just in time. But…perhaps also in time to see Kurt wandering up the road toward Gina’s house.

  Maybe she’d happened to glance back, saw Kurt slowing pace as he approached. And maybe the kind of woman who’d come in someone’s house without saying who she was—taking advantage of a woman whose thoughts were elsewhere—could also be the person to pull out a phone, snap a picture.

  Gina lay thinking about this. Thinking also about the fact that the woman had previously talked to the principal. Gina knew Dan would not only have remembered her name, but made a note, filed it.

  Call Dan. First thing tomorrow. Establish who the woman is. From there it wouldn’t be hard to find out where she was staying in town. Gina could pay her a visit. And let her know that if she was behind the pictures, she was making a mistake.

  Then she remembered. The woman left a business card.

  Gina didn’t have to go through Dan. Where had she put it? She closed her eyes, trying to remember. It didn’t take long.

  She’d put it on the mantel, because she’d been standing right next to it. Hadn’t thought about it since. Derek wouldn’t have moved it. She didn’t have to go down and check now, tempted though she was.

  Gina eventually fell asleep comforted by thoughts of what she’d do to the woman—Christine? Something like that—if it was her posting the pictures. Images that were violent and bloody. Thoughts, Gina should have realized, that were nothing like anything she’d ever had before.

  Thoughts that might not even be hers.

  The rings were also heard by Greg Hardaker, up late in his home office, tweaking a pitch deck to present in San Jose on Monday, last step toward Series B funding. He knew the deck was fine already, but he’d found shifting the words around—even if they ultimately wound up in the same place they’d started—helped free the ideas, releasing them from a rigid verbal format, keeping him loose when he was in the room.

  He was almost done when he heard the phone in the living room. Ding-ding, ding-ding. It pretty much never rang. The whole family had cell phones, naturally. The house only had a landline at all because accepting one chipped five percent off the cost of the telecom package. Had to be one of those infuriating automated calls, screwing up the time zone.

  The ringing stopped, but he walked in there anyway, thinking he’d leave the handset off the hook in case the spambot dialed again and kept dialing. The phone was on the sideboard right inside the door. He was on the way back out before noticing someone standing in the room.

  He jumped, but managed to keep most of the movement inside. A slender figure over by the window. Wearing pajamas. Arms down by her sides.

  “Nadja?”

  She didn’t say anything. He walked over. “What are you doing down here?”

  She remained silent, looking out into the garden. “Phone wake you?” Greg knew that didn’t make sense. She must already have been here when it rang. It was a question to ask in the hope of provoking a response.

  It worked. She looked at him, frowning. “What phone?”

  “The phone. In here. It rang, like, a minute ago.”

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “You didn’t…Naddy, what’s up?”

  She turned her head back toward the window. “Look.”

  Hardaker looked into the garden. Didn’t get what she meant at first, then realized. “The door in the fence.”

  “I woke up. Heard a sound. A banging. Outside. I went to my window. Couldn’t see anything. But then it happened again. I came down. And when I got here, the door was open.”

  “Huh,” Greg said. “Okay. Stay here.”

  He went into the kitchen. His coat wasn’t hanging by the back door, which was annoying. Come to think, he hadn’t seen it for a few days. Whatever.

  He stepped out into the yard. It was cold. Raining. Windy. He flicked the switch for the garden lights. They didn’t do much but were enough to show there was nobody in the yard. Which was the main deal, after all.

  But still, the door in the fence.

  Bracing himself against the wet, he strode across the lawn. The back fence was seven feet high and sturdy, made of reinforced redwood. He knew because he’d had it built when they moved into the house, by Bryan Hixon. Before that the yard had been open to the forest beyond. Fine for the backwoods crowd. That wasn’t going to play for Greg, a former city dweller. Good fences, good neighbors, all that. He glanced back toward the house and saw Nadja had been joined by Madeline, also in PJs.

  He waved, smiled—both looked so grown-up these days, so much like young women, and sounded and acted that way, too, it was hard to remember they were still kids inside—and went to the door in the fence.

  It was halfway open. There was a bolt, though from time to time it remained unbolted when somebody forgot. The latch was pretty deep and there was no handle on the other side. Presumably whoever last closed it failed to make sure the metal arm was safely in place. The wind could have been enough to blow it open. Also enough, most likely, to blow a branch against the other side of the fence and make a knocking sound. Everything tidily explained. That was Greg’s job.

  He stepped through the gap to find the most likely branch and snap it off. No obvious culprit. Whatever. It was cold and wet and he wanted to be done with this.

  He turned back, fully outside the property for a moment, the other side of the fence. In the woods. Through the open door he could see the back of the house. And the window. And the three figures standing in a line.

  He froze.

  Then there were only two. His daughters. The figure in between had gone. It hadn’t been his wife, he knew that. Taller. Thin. Something told him it had been male.

  He moved his head to the side. The side of the bookcase in the back of the room moved into line of sight. That’s what it had been. That’s all.

  He shut the gate. Made sure the latch was down. By the time he turned back the window was empty. They’d gone upstairs, back to bed. It was time Greg did the same. Though he thought he might have a bourbon first.

  As he stood sipping it, looking out at the fence in the dark, he remembered something. When the phone line had been installed, Maddy had spent a while fiddling with the handset. She’d changed the ringtone. It didn’t go ding-ding.

  That was the phone in their previous house.

  Kurt heard his own rings as he packed his bags in his tiny room above the Tap. He waited them out, phone in hand. He knew it wouldn’t be her because she was in his contacts as G. No idea who else might be calling this late, because the phone wasn’t saying “contact unknown.” It said NO NUMBER. He wasn’t sure what that even meant. Nor why it wasn’t vibrating at the same time, as it normally did.

  Whatever. It stopped after five. He put his phone on the bag he’d already packed. Been a while since he visited mom up in Portland. She’d be ps
yched if he stopped by for a few days. Which would give whatever situation might be brewing with the teacher woman time to play out. If it went nuclear he’d simply head somewhere else. Getting bar jobs isn’t hard, and nobody needs that level of shit over a random MILF.

  He looked out of the window. It was still raining, but not super-hard. Maybe now was as good a time to leave as any.

  Ryder, the principal’s son, also heard the rings. He was up late on his laptop, half-listening to a Tomb Raider walkthrough while using Photoshop to patiently recreate a sweatshirt design for a band Maddy Hardaker liked. She wanted the shirt, but the official merch was hella expensive. He hoped maybe a knock-off version might do instead.

  The laptop binged to tell him a call was incoming, relaying the information from his phone. It binged four more times, then stopped. No notification came up on the screen, which was weird.

  He dismissed the event and bent once more over his work, soothed by the comforting sound of someone explaining in detail where to find all the munitions packs in level 5.

  And there were others. But most people slept.

  The only phone in Birchlake that did not ring was Kristy’s.

  Chapter

  ​32

  In the end, Ken and I gave up. We walked the main street and did a quick but thorough grid search of the others, walking one road apart in hope of halving the chance of missing him. Went up as far as the abandoned bar close to the Hixon house, getting wetter and wetter. Came back, skirting the edge of town, sticking close to the river. By the time we were on the main street again, walking past the Tap, I’d lost all feeling in my fingers and we were both soaked through.

  “This isn’t working,” Ken said. “We’re chasing a moving target.”

  “We can’t just leave him out here.”

  “I know, mate. But if he’s not answering his phone, what makes you think he’ll talk to us in person?”