This wasn’t residual smoke. The fire was still burning.
I heard a hacking cough from further inside the building. Hauled myself upright and stumbled into the corridor.
Ken had made it out of the storage room, coughing badly. “That really hurt,” he said. “You berk.” His leg was bleeding, but not too badly.
“Best idea I could think of.”
“Think a lot harder next time.”
He took Kristy’s feet and I got my arms under her shoulders. We got her outside the building and into the mist and drizzle. Then did the same with Molly, and finally Val. The fire had grown enough to be blackening the front of the bar. Part of me wondered whether it would be better to let the place burn down, but it wasn’t the building’s fault and that wasn’t my decision to make.
I kicked the fire, spreading the burning parts, stamping on them. Ken helped. But then held up a hand. “Something’s coming.”
“Christ, seriously?”
We retreated to where we’d laid Kristy, Molly, and Val. I was light-headed from the smoke, and my lungs and guts hurt. My hand was bleeding freely. I felt very, very tired. I honestly didn’t know how much fight I had left.
A glow was coming down the road, sparkling out in the drizzled mist. Two glows, in fact. Sallow yellow eyes. The eyes were pretty big.
“What are we going to do?”
“We can’t run, mate. Or I can’t. So I think we’re going to have to fight.”
It kept coming toward us, bringing a wet, slick sound. I couldn’t imagine what would make a noise like that. It seemed impossible that it could be anything good. “Fight with what?”
“Fire?”
“We put the fire out.”
“Oh. So we did.”
Then slowly the noise resolved. My mind had spent so long trying to make sense of the unknowable that something more prosaic had thrown it for a temporary loop.
It was the sound of tires on a wet road. And the yellow eyes were headlamps.
A truck. It braked rapidly, pulling to the side of the road. Bryan Hixon jumped out. “Is she in there?”
“Who?”
“Alaina,” he said. “I smelled the smoke from the house. Is my daughter in that building?”
“Why on earth would we have left someone in there?”
“Because people do,” he shouted. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “Sure, they’ll tolerate them when they need them. But then they forget. And then they burn them.”
“Nobody set fire to your wife.”
“Yeah they did.” Hixon got right up in my face. “Not literally. You’re not allowed to do that anymore, right? But you can whisper. Behind their backs. Treat them like they’ve a disease. Like there’s something not right about them. Better not have that woman or her child over for playdates. Or do more than quickly say hi in the street and then move on. Because we all know they do a job, but there’s something weird about them, and nobody wants to get contaminated. Right?”
“Did you know what you were getting into? When you married her?”
“Of course I did, you asshole. But I loved her. And this town killed her. They’re not killing my daughter.”
“You can’t protect her from what she is.”
“There is nobody here who gives a damn about her, except me. They’ll use her when they need her. The rest of the time, nobody cares.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “Val is in town specifically to protect your daughter.”
“Great,” he snarled. He pointed at Val’s unconscious body. “So how’s that going?”
“Not well,” I admitted. “But you should know that it seems like Alaina started this whole thing. Over a man she had a crush on.”
“Because she’s a teenager,” Hixon said. “Which is why she needs protecting.”
“She does,” I said. “But not just by you. It can’t just be you. It’s a time of big emotions, big mistakes. When kids do things that…” I faded off. “Shit.”
“What?” Ken asked.
“We have to find Kristy,” I said, finally understanding what was going on. “And Bryan, you’re just going to have to trust we’re on your side.”
Chapter
60
Alaina stood in the rain looking through the window of Gina’s house. They were inside. The teacher and her husband. Sitting on the couch together. But not close. Gina’s hair was wet and she’d been wrapped in a blanket. She was staring down at her hands as they twisted in her lap, over and over each other, like unhappy animals. He was sitting in silence. She was saying something. She was saying a lot of things. You could see the tears rolling down her cheeks, and Alaina felt terrible.
Gina looked up tentatively, after a few minutes, toward her husband. Saw Alaina outside. Her eyes opened wide. Alaina made a knocking sign with her hand, and headed for the front door.
But when it opened, it wasn’t Gina. Derek seemed very calm. “What do you want?”
“Has she told you?”
“We are talking right now. About something that’s none of your business.”
“Not my business?”
Derek smiled faintly. “That’s how it seems to me. Or were you sleeping with him, too? If so, that’s something the cops need to know. That’d be serious jail time for Kurt, and trust me—right now, I’m here for that.”
“No, I was not.”
Derek smiled. Alaina could see the remnants of shock in his eyes, and that he was trying to be nice. “I have to go back inside now. My wife needs to talk.”
“And you’re going to listen? After what she did?”
“Gina makes my life worthwhile, Alaina. She makes these walls a home. If anybody is at fault here, it’s me, for forgetting to remind her every day that’s not all she is. For hoping that coasting along would be enough. And that’s all you’re getting from me right now. You have no place in this conversation.”
“I have to say sorry. I didn’t mean…I didn’t want this to happen. I was trying to get at him. I just wanted to mess him up. I have to talk to her.”
“You really don’t. You can’t bust your way into other people’s lives. You have to build one. Out of real stuff. Otherwise it’s all just make-believe.”
“I can make you regret talking to me like that. I have power you don’t understand.”
Derek nodded, but not in agreement. “I’m sure you will, one day. Not yet. I know your world is very real to you, Alaina. But to be honest—I can barely see you.”
He gently closed the door.
Kristy was lost.
More lost than ever in her life. She’d run after where she thought the man had gone, run so far and so fast that she had no running left. For a long part of it she had run down streets with houses. Then along dirt tracks with shacks.
Now she stumbled, all out of running, around a large open space.
It felt like an island.
The river winding around it. Forest along the other side. Trees here too, but smaller, and more widely spread. Brush, small bushes. A path through the center. Not wide, not obvious. Only used at certain times of year, as part of a tribe’s seasonal wanderings. They had fished here, off the bluff that now formed one side of the park where Kristy talked with the principal on her first day, and also from the one that now formed the boundary of the motel parking lot. They ate their catch in the clearing at the center, under the stars, around fires, they talked long into the night. They stayed a few days and moved on.
But before they left, they did something else.
None of them knew why the walls existed. They only knew they were here, as they were in the woods for miles and miles around, and had been for all time. They were part of the world. The shapes meant nothing to them. Like the bend of the river that formed this place a million years before, like the form of the clouds that changed moment by moment, like the sounds and voices you heard sometimes deep in the woods, they simply were what they were.
And if something is, you respect it.
So before they moved on, higher into the mountains on their way to other spots they had always visited, on the long walk through winter in search of spring, they would tend the walls. Put back any stones that animals or the weather or people with less respect had dislodged. For hundreds, thousands of years they had done this. It was part of the ritual of being in this place. They did it because you do.
That short section, over there. The one that Kristy noticed when she arrived at the park to talk to Dan.
A longer, lower portion. Nobody now remembered that it had been incorporated unchanged into the foundations for the liquor store, and had been made safe that way, because people are always going to need beer and potato chips.
But then that bigger one, right in the center of the clearing at the middle of this semi-island.
Kristy wound up in front of this wall, trying to figure out where it would be now. She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think straight. All of us want to be alone sometimes, but being truly alone is a precarious state. Dangerous. It takes you out of the shared place. It throws you back on your own understanding, into your own lonely house. Your own memories. Your own self.
The things only you know.
A wind was building in the forest. Shifting the leaves, branches, whole trees. There was music in it, of course, that same old song.
Talking, too. A feeling of old recognition. A reality, a thing, that had been real and had very real consequences, that she alone knew. That she had revisited ten thousand times down the years, walking along a faint path only she could find, to that event, to a moment with a population of one.
She sat down by the wall. Closed her eyes and let the sounds build up around her. Conversation. Falling water.
The echoes of a fight.
Alaina meanwhile stood in the here and now, at the top of the main street, looking at the buildings and houses she’d known all her life. When she was small, her mom walked her down this street many times. They left their house. Walked past Olsen’s, situated carefully outside town: the spot where their family first lived, Alaina was told, before her grandfather built the bigger house, selling the land to a guy from out of town who’d built the bar—not realizing the whole reason they wanted to move was the scraps of things from the other side smeared inside it.
They’d walked down through town. Her mother would nod to people, and some would say hi. They’d pick up groceries and other things they needed. Get a sandwich and soda at the place that was now a hipster coffee shop. And wind up for at least a couple hours in the place that four years ago was renamed the Stone Mountain Tap.
Alaina’s memories of it were all warm, up until that last time. In the Tap, her mother seemed to relax. She’d talk more, get a little wild. The people in there seemed to treat her differently, too. Others in Birchlake would usually be reserved with Jenny Hixon, as if they didn’t want to get too close, or appear too friendly—and Alaina’s mother would mutter about that sometimes, saying sure, they’re that way now, but you watch, my girl, there will be nights when they’ll turn up at our door and they’ll be plenty polite then, you bet, and nervous, and bring gifts, because they want something from us that no one else can give.
Although you never get any thanks.
But in the bar the lights would be low and cozy and people would smile at them and bring snacks, and it often seemed that Alaina’s mother wound up with a few drinks she didn’t pay for: as if it were her due, and the people in here—people the more upstanding members of the community often didn’t take seriously—understood that. You don’t pay a witch with money. You pay in other ways.
As she got older Alaina’s mother would sometimes say the time was soon coming when she’d start to explain. Let Alaina know how things worked. The rules. The power that was coming. How to walk in the light and the dark.
But she only said those things when they were out alone together, so Alaina’s father wouldn’t hear. Then one night, after they’d made this walk together for what turned out to be the last time, Mom went out in the car and didn’t come back.
They’d fought hard that night, too. Over what? Homework. A piece of math homework that didn’t matter now and hadn’t even really mattered then.
And Alaina had not said goodbye.
The street was empty tonight—of people, anyhow. Alaina could feel the other things, catch glimpses of them in passing, like gleeful ghosts. Running along the street. Dancing on rooftops. Squatting on parked cars. Shouts, laughter. A full-scale invisible carnival. Because of her. Because she’d taken life into her own hands.
But it didn’t seem like these other things were in the business of giving thanks, either.
“Go,” she said, quietly. Then again, louder. “Go.”
Suddenly there was silence. They were still here, but knew the party was over. And she felt it then, felt it like she’d never felt it before. Like a tingling in her stomach. Like those days when you know you want to make something, create something, but you don’t know what.
Without Mom, how was she going to learn to do it right? How was she going to learn how to grow up?
She stopped outside the Tap. A few lights were on. No customers. Nobody behind the bar. Just an empty space littered with shadows and memories. She stood in front of the window and looked in, as she’d done many times over the last year and a half. Glancing toward the bar, in case he was working.
But not because she had a crush on him.
Because Kurt was the guy who’d kept letting her mother drink that last day. Who kept topping up her glass, time after time. The other bartender stopped after a while, even though he was usually generous with her mom. But Kurt kept them coming. And not, Alaina knew, because her mother had been giving him the idea that there was a chance of getting her to bed. Even though they argued, Mom had loved Dad fiercely. But Mom had been on a mission that night, drinking hard.
And something else had been going on.
Even back then Alaina’s sight had been coming upon her. And that afternoon, she believed, she’d seen something in the air around Kurt, a shadow guiding his pouring hand. Getting the sad witch drunk.
Too drunk.
She didn’t know for sure. Didn’t do anything for a year and a half.
But when, two weeks before she walked out into the forest, Alaina happened to catch a glimpse of Kurt slipping into Gina’s house in the late afternoon, she’d decided…yes. Kurt had bad things inside him. It was time for her to learn how to stop the bad things. To punish them. And him. Him most of all.
But she’d failed.
And hurt someone else instead.
Alaina tried the door to the Tap, wanting to go stand where her mother used to sit, to see if she could feel her one last time. Turned the handle, tugged at it, rattling it hard. It was locked. She couldn’t get in.
No getting back there, no more. She couldn’t get past that defense.
She turned away, let her back slide down the door until she was sitting on the cold, wet sidewalk. To stay there a while, and then walk back to the bridge again.
It was high and the water was deep.
Mom would understand.
Chapter
61
We loaded the others into the back of Hixon’s truck, using a strap to hold their bodies securely and covering them with a tarp. That felt weird, but I didn’t know what else to do. We couldn’t just leave them lying in the lot. Ken and I joined Hixon in the front of his truck.
As we entered the top end of town, he slowed. It seemed normal. Raining. Foggy. The road looked like road and the buildings were the ones that should be there.
“Just to be clear,” Ken said. “This is real now, yes?”
“I guess,” I said. “Or it’s the way we usually see things, anyway. I don’t know if that counts.”
Hixon didn’t ask us what we were talking about. I got the sense that he knew.
“So where have the things gone?”
“I don’t think they have,” I said. “Not all of them, anyway.”
“But most. Why?”
“You got me.”
Hixon slowed to a halt. He stayed that way, leaning on the steering wheel. “Last thing Jenny said,” he said, quietly, “before she drove off that night. ‘Take care of our baby.’ It came after a fight with Alaina, and I thought she meant…let it go tonight. Even if she’s being a pain in the ass. Later, when the police arrived at my door to tell me about the ‘accident,’ I realized she’d meant something else.”
“That must hurt like hell.”
“It did. But I couldn’t blame her,” Hixon said. “I saw how hard it was. How she struggled. A lot of days. I did what I could. She tried. But being that way breaks your mind sooner or later. And the one job she left me with was taking care of our girl. And I got it wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“You can’t keep them small. You can’t keep them from being who they’re going to be. You can’t protect them from the world. All you can do is try to point them in the right direction and then forever have their back. True for any kid. Ten times truer for Alaina. I fucked that up.”
“I would have done the same thing,” I said. “Fatherhood isn’t just about being the guy everybody whines to when the Wi-Fi goes down. Being a mom isn’t only saying, ‘Sure, honey, whatever you feel, here’s a snack.’ Sometimes you’re going to believe it’s your job to put yourself in the way of the bad things, even if it kills you. That you’re the one who’s got to be the…”
I stopped, mouth open. “What?” Hixon said.
“Wall.”
Ken pointed. “What the heck’s happening down there?”
A Subaru was parked along the street. A guy I didn’t recognize was leaning against it, smoking a cigarette like he felt he needed it.
Nadja and Maddy Hardaker were kneeling next to each other by the wall of the Tap, with their arms around someone.
Hixon covered the rest of the street in two seconds, slamming to a halt in the middle of the road. He jumped out of the truck and ran to his daughter, where she sat with her back to the wall, knees pulled up tight. The Hardaker kids moved aside. Alaina saw him coming and reached up her arms.
The Possession Page 31
