The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  “Us,” I said. “We’re heavy.”

  I stood on the hatch. It felt weird, as if it was tilting, but I was pretty sure that was just in my head. Until I almost fell over. “What about her?” Val said.

  “Who?”

  “Kristy.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  The rapping all around the building was getting louder. Some sounded as if it was coming from inside the walls. Maybe that was merely my head trying to express the knowledge that bad things were getting closer and closer. Or perhaps something was in the actual walls. I sensed it was an increasingly unimportant distinction.

  Molly was helping Val move Kristy’s body into the storage room. “Val’s right. She’s not doing anything else.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said, angrily. “You’re not using Kristy as a…wait, what’s that?”

  A soft clonking noise—but not from the walls. I felt in Kristy’s pocket. Something metal. A padlock. God knows what it was doing there. “There we go.”

  The ring on the hatch was rusty and none too strong. But I put it on, and it was better than nothing—and better than my ex-wife being deployed as a human sandbag. “Ken—are you okay?”

  “No,” he said. He was half-sitting in the corridor. “I feel…unusual. Furious. Or sad. Can’t work it out. Fuck’s up with your eyes?”

  I was blinking again. Slowly. There was more darkness in my vision than the flicker-visions provided by Val shining her phone screen around. My right eye was entirely out of focus now, too, very blurred. And I was afraid. “I can’t see properly.”

  There was a soft thud from under the floor. “Something’s in the cellar,” Molly said glumly.

  I sat on the hatch. I felt very sad but also incredibly anxious. And I didn’t know what to do.

  “Is everything okay?” Ken said. He was now half sprawled in the corridor. “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Everything felt jagged and sharp and out of control. “I don’t think it ever was.”

  “Stop it, you two,” Molly shouted. “It’s bad enough without you freaking us out.”

  “How close are those guys?” Val asked Molly. “Nolan and Ken. I mean, as friends?”

  “Well, they’re guys. So I have no idea. Why?”

  The walls sounded as though they were full of ticking insects, but I still heard the noise of someone stepping onto the metal ladder below me. A metallic thung.

  Ken was blinking too now. Heavy, slow, up-and-downs of his lids. Val patted him on the cheek, quite hard. Then did the same to me. I could barely feel it.

  “They’re blowing out together,” Val said. Her voice had a flat echo on it—the same I’d heard in the street earlier. “Molly, we’re going to have to secure this place ourselves.”

  I stood up, unsteadily. Saw Ken trying to do the same. “No, I’m fine,” I said. “And so is…”

  The last thing I heard was something banging very heavily on the back wall of the building. Hard. Then everything went gray.

  Nolan and Ken collapsed at the same time. Molly tried to get to Nolan, but he collapsed into the side wall of shelves, crashing off it to fall to the ground.

  She rolled him onto his back. Nolan’s legs were moving, very slowly. His fingers were rubbing over the wooden floor, as if feeling the texture.

  “Are they okay?”

  Val didn’t answer. Molly looked up to see the other woman was by the boarded-over window in the corridor, face pushed up close to a gap between the planks. “Shh.”

  “What?”

  Val gestured. Molly went over, bent to look through the crack. The mist was thick outside. And somebody was standing there.

  A dozen feet away. Unconcerned about the pouring rain. As Molly and Val watched, he raised his head. Staring straight at the window.

  It was Pierre. But he didn’t look himself.

  He ran straight at them.

  Chapter

  52

  Kristy stood to look out through the front windows. The street outside was still thick with fog, but where before it had been shadowed and gloomy, now it seemed softly lit—as if by moonlight, though not from above.

  Alaina was in the middle of the road. A dark figure, head lowered, in a hoodie.

  “She’s going to hurt me,” Gina said.

  A swirl of fog obscured the girl, then revealed her again, making her look taller and thinner. Then back to Alaina. “I’m not sure that’s even her.”

  Gina stood too. “It is. She’s come for me.”

  Kristy went closer to the window. It was Alaina. But also not. The person out there was Bryan Hixon’s daughter. But more than that. Different. She looked far more three-dimensional than everything else. “Go talk to her.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I don’t think this can be my dream,” Kristy said. “It must be yours. Alaina has nothing on me.”

  “This is not a dream.”

  “Well, whatever the hell it is. Either way, I don’t give a damn about Alaina. But you do.”

  The windows at the front of the store shattered. The glass wasn’t blown inwards, however, but outwards—as if from pressure from the inside. Kristy glanced at Gina and saw she was shaking, hands trembling violently.

  But then the glass was back.

  The girl outside was closer to the windows now.

  Gina ran into the darkness at the back of the store. Kristy hesitated. Everything told her to stand her ground, but she was as scared as Gina. There were dark shapes moving in the mist behind Alaina. Huge dark shapes. And things coming in under the door. Small, like cockroaches—skittering into the room. Wholly black, scraps of shadows. They were as bad as the things outside, she knew—part of the same huge thing, as tiny ants are part of a single colony fifty miles wide.

  She hurried into the corridor, but it was empty. Kristy turned back, to see if Gina had somehow slipped back past her again. Couldn’t see her—just Alaina’s silhouette outside, now right in front of the door.

  Kristy heard a sound from the side room on the left. Gina was huddled in the corner. Eyes wide. “She’s going to get me.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Someone will. I’ve broken everything.”

  The skittering sound from the main room was loud now—one much bigger and louder sound, broken up into little bits, a thousand cuts.

  “Yeah,” Kristy said. “You did. So now what?”

  “I always fuck everything up.”

  “A few years ago I screwed up too, Gina. Really badly. And I believed that when something’s broken, it’s broken for good—that however well it’s fixed, breakage remains. And that’s true, but I was wrong about what it means. If you break something then sure, you can throw it away, feel hurt, betrayed, furious at yourself. Or you can gather up the pieces and glue the damned thing back together. There may be bits missing and of course it will never be the same. But it’ll still be there.”

  Before Kristy could get close, Gina suddenly darted around her, and out into the corridor. “I have to get out.”

  Kristy followed, to find the other woman tugging in vain at the door at the end. Turned out that here, wherever here was, the latch hadn’t been broken last night.

  “There’s no back-door escape,” Kristy said. “You can’t sneak out that way. You have to walk out the front.”

  Gina kept desperately yanking at the handle. “I don’t understand you. Stop saying things.”

  Kristy kept trying. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Gina. And I know that decision to not throw the broken thing away, but to repair and keep, to treasure it because of what it means, not because it’s perfect…that actually gives it more value, not less. Before, it was just a thing you had. Now it has you woven inside it—through the effort you gave to fixing it. You don’t own it anymore. You have joined with it. It’s not perfect. But nothing ever is.”

  Gina turned from the door. “So what—turn and face the monster? And it’s all suddenly fin
e?”

  “No,” Kristy said. “We’re both old enough to know that’s self-help bullshit. You’re the monster. I’m the monster. We’re all monsters, once in a while.”

  Another big thud from out in the street. “I’m scared,” Gina said.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  They stood together and looked along the corridor. The fog in the street was flashing now, as if lit from within by a strange kind of lightning—the muted flicker of overhead lighting about to fail.

  The shadow in the hoodie, right outside the door.

  “Say sorry,” Kristy said. “Then forgive yourself. Then move on. It’s all you can ever do.”

  Gina took Kristy’s hand.

  But after three steps Kristy realized Gina wasn’t there anymore.

  Outside, Alaina held up her hand. A ring with two keys on it dangled from her finger.

  Kristy took a step back. The girl opened the door and pushed it wide. “Where’d she go? Gina?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “I think you’ve done enough, Alaina.”

  The street behind the girl now looked like it should. Misty, rainy, but real. On the other side, shuttered stores. Further up, the Tap. The glow of lights in its windows. It looked warm, welcoming, the kind of place you’d hurry to on a night like this. Hunker down. Get a local beer and some nachos. Feel like you were part of somewhere for a while, even if in reality you were only listening to an echo. Over the course of an evening you might get a couple of glimpses of the actual place. The rest would only be in your interpretations. In your head.

  “How come it looks normal out there?”

  “I’m really here,” Alaina said. “You’re not.”

  “But how does that work?”

  Alaina shrugged. “Who cares?”

  “You don’t actually know, do you.”

  “No, I don’t, and so what. I spent ten days trying to figure it out and then thought—fuck, just roll with it.”

  “You’re going to make mistakes.”

  “Spare me,” Alaina said. “Old people, Jesus. You always think you know the score, that the world is the way you think. When you can’t even see it. You’ve been looking through stained glass so long you don’t even realize.”

  “And you see it clear?”

  Alaina took a step toward her. A fourteen-year-old. Taller than Kristy by an inch, nearly two. Bigger, taking up more physical space in the world, but still half a child. Both things true at once. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  “If this is real, how come you have a key?”

  “I was walking down the alley a month ago and they were hanging out the back door. Senior moment of Val’s, I guess.”

  “So why’d you take them?”

  “Wanted to see what she was doing in here.”

  “Did you mess them up? The rocks?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  The girl smiled. “Why not?”

  “Because it screwed everything up. Because sometimes you can do things that you can’t put back, and there’ll be no grown-up you can run to—because by then you’ll be the grown-up and it’s all on you. Sure you’re ready for that?”

  “It was going fine until you got here. You’re the problem, not me.”

  “Says who?”

  The girl turned her head. Someone was standing out there, down the street. Tall, thin. Old. Waiting. “He does.”

  Kristy felt cold all the way down her back, a feeling that moved down through her muscles and into her stomach, locking it. For a moment, as on her first night in town, there was a faint shadow of familiarity over the figure.

  “Who…is that?”

  “I have no idea. But here’s an idea: why don’t you let me build out my world, and you deal with yours.”

  “Fine by me. But leave Gina alone. She’s done with Kurt. He’s yours, if you want him.”

  “Want him? What are you talking about?”

  “Personally I’d run a mile, but that’s old person wisdom talking. Very bad idea at your age anyway. And super illegal. And he’s left town, FYI. For good.”

  Alaina stared at her. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, no, no,” Alaina wailed. “That’s not fair. He cannot be gone.”

  “Love is a…”

  “Love? Love? God, you’re stupid. I don’t love him. He’s an asshole. I want to pull his fucking head off.”

  Alaina turned suddenly and went running out into the street, vanishing into the mist. Leaving only the impression of a tall, thin man, face obscured, a black hole of nothingness. A void into which a life could disappear.

  “Oh no,” Kristy said, finally realizing who he might be, just as he disappeared.

  Chapter

  53

  It felt strange but familiar. For a moment all I could make out was a flat plane of undifferentiated gray, but it was the kind of space I knew. Also something I’d seen recently—maybe even thought I’d been in, however briefly.

  “Is that you?” Ken said.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  He came toward me out of the gloom. This helped me get a handle on the space, settling it into three dimensions. A long, wide area, fading off into blackness and shadows in all directions. Concrete all around, pillars every forty feet or so. Very dim, flickering fluorescent lighting above—or at least, the effect that kind of fixture would have: no lights were actually visible. “Is this…a parking lot?”

  “Looks like one. But hang on.” I bent down, felt the floor. “Feels like wood. We’re still in that storage room.”

  “So now what?”

  There was a sudden, piercing scream from the deep shadows off on the right. Not close, but also too close.

  “We could leave?”

  “I think that’s a solid plan. How, though? By which I mean, which way?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Nolan. But how about we start by going the opposite direction to the screaming?”

  “See, that’s why you’re the director and get the big bucks.” We started backing away together.

  “It’s barely bucks plural, mate.”

  “Not now, Ken. Wait—can you hear something?”

  “Music? Yeah. Head for that.”

  We kept backing, glancing over our shoulders to make sure we weren’t heading in the direction of something dangerous—and to avoid the concrete pillars. It was the same song I’d been hearing over the last day or so—in fact, pretty much since we’d been there in town. Which again made me wonder how long things had been bending, and why: and how much of the last three days had actually happened. I’m not one of those music nerds who can pick out a song from the first semiquaver, but I’m not bad. I could hear all the notes, and recognize them, but it was as if there was a barrier between them and the tune. It was a song that should have sounded sweet and wistful, I knew that much. But it didn’t. It sounded guilty and sad.

  “Ken.”

  “What?” he said.

  I stopped walking. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Nolan.”

  “I didn’t say your name.”

  “Ken.”

  We were looking at each other that time, and so it was very clear that neither of us had spoken. The voice had come from the left. A man’s voice. Conversational. Nonthreatening. Apart from the fact there was no one there.

  “Is that you?” The same voice. It now sounded as though it was coming from behind the nearest pillar.

  “Let’s go faster,” I suggested.

  “Right you are.”

  We turned and started walking quickly—still with no obvious sense of where to go. It was no longer clear whether the gray all around us was concrete or fog, though the fact it felt increasingly damp, as though we were hurrying through heavy drizzle, made it feel more like the latter. It got thicker as we tried to head for the music, but that faded in and out in no apparent relation to the direction we took.


  Footsteps over on the right.

  Nothing to see except mist. We kept walking, bearing away from the sound. Then we heard footsteps from the left, too. We stopped, and they stopped—but a beat later. It wasn’t an echo.

  “They’re herding us,” Ken said, as we started walking again, more slowly. “Which means…”

  “Yep. On three.”

  We kept walking for a moment, as Ken counted under his breath. Then we turned and ran in the opposite direction.

  Very soon it was clear we weren’t in a parking lot after all. We were in woods. The concrete pillars had really been trees. The mist was heavy, but swirled thick and thin by a strong wind, and it was still raining.

  “Nolan—where the fuck are we going?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused, whirled around on the spot—and thought I could discern a thinning in the forest on the right. “That way.”

  We ran in that direction, narrowly avoiding tumbling down an unexpected slope, and passing a long stretch of curving dry stone wall, and then—the highway.

  When we arrived on it we stopped, looking left and right. “Now what? Back to Olsen’s?”

  “It’s not going to be there,” I said. “This still isn’t real. Look.” I pointed at the road. Instead of the rough and cracked surface of the highway, it was a stretch of badly weathered tiles. “Are you seeing tiles?”

  “Yeah. But mate—things were attacking Olsen’s when we checked out. Moll and that woman are there. And Kristy.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure Val could kick my ass, so there’s no reason to think they can’t look after themselves. And don’t even think about splitting up.”

  “Nolan, as I’ve had cause to remind you…”

  “You…were a horror director. Right. Maybe that’s it.”

  We looked at each other. Ken frowned. “Are you saying…”

  “That we’re in your head? No. I don’t understand how that would work. But perhaps you’re coloring it somehow. The Undying Dead has that whole long sequence in an underground parking lot, right?”

  “Nolan—look.” He was pointing up the road toward town. “Is that what you saw earlier in the woods?”