Possession

by Kat Richardson

  As she opened the front door, Lily Goss touched my arm in a hesitant fashion. “Umm . . . I’m sorry . . . about your eye.”

  “I’m sure it’s not a major injury and it was an accident.”

  “I’m not. Sure, that is. Julie’s been . . . unpredictable lately. She didn’t used to talk. Now she babbles like you heard today. And she’s never thrown anything before. I am—truly—sorry.”

  I wished she’d mentioned the talking and throwing things earlier, but I only said, “Nothing to be sorry for. I’m not quitting. I’ll be back.”

  She bit her lip and nodded, frowning and disbelieving me. But I would be back—I wanted to know what was going on with Julianne as much as she did. There were ghosts, and there was something guiding her actions—if not actually possessing her body, which I wasn’t quite sure of.

  I did, however, need to do something about my eye. The longer I let it go, the more the sting came back. Unlike another Greywalker I’d met, I had no desire to give up my sight—either Grey or normal. I’d gotten used to seeing the invisible, but it was not an adequate substitute for the normal view.

  My eyes were watering badly by the time I got in to see my doctor, who sent me to an ophthalmologist for some kind of chemical test, who in turn sent me back to Dr. Skelleher with the results—dealing with the labyrinth of health care and insurance can be a royal pain in the ass, not to mention the time it takes.

  Skelleher’s an odd young duck, but he understands my situation as much as any medical professional is ever likely to and he doesn’t believe there’s a pill for every problem. He gave my eyes a good looking-over and read through the ophthalmologist’s report. He always looked rumpled and sleepless, though a bit less so than usual today—his spiky hair might actually have been styled that way rather than having happened by accident. He had a small following of ghosts standing just behind him everywhere he went. They didn’t seem hostile and he was oblivious to them and any dampening effect they might have had; his aura was bright and colorful, shifting through gold and pink and shimmering, pale blue. Maybe he finally had a girlfriend—or a boyfriend; I had no idea what revved his engine. Whatever it was, he was tired, but pretty content with his life, which is something I rarely get to see.

  He plopped onto the backless stool and took a deep breath before giving me the news. “You have some chemical irritation to the lid and sclera. It’s fairly mild, but it’s going to feel uncomfortable and itchy for a few days and may cause you to have some minor vision problems—blurry vision, watering, and so on. Like the ophthalmologist, I’d advise you to rest your eyes as much as possible, but I know you’ll ignore that. Try anyhow. Dr. Michaels prescribed some drops for the pain and some ointment to clear up the irritation, which you need to use twice a day, as I’m sure he told you. If the irritation doesn’t clear up with these meds, I’ll have to insist on your going back to Dr. Michaels. And I know you don’t like to do that. Also, don’t rub your eye. At all. Use the drops and make sure you pat any excess or tears off with a tissue. No wiping with your fingertips or the corner of your shirt or stuff like that.

  “If you start seeing anything weird . . . Well, that’s pretty much normal for you, so let me rephrase that: If the irritation gets worse or you seem to be losing sight, seeing dark spots, having an unusual degree of tearing or blurring, bloody tears, literally seeing red, or the eyelid swells significantly, take yourself to Emergency. And I mean it. You do not want a major eye infection—at least the green pigment wasn’t radioactive, so you missed that complication. But I will bust your chops about it if you don’t do as you’ve been told.”

  “Whoa, Skelly! Nice bedside manner.”

  He shook his head. “Seriously. This is not something you can ignore. Chemical burns create conditions that can lead to severe infections and we don’t do eyeball transplants. And I shouldn’t have to remind you that your eyes are in your skull, very close to your brain, and you really don’t want massive infections anywhere near the blood/brain barrier.”

  “I’m sorry I sounded flippant. I understand the implications.” I didn’t have to pretend to be abashed. “And I know I’m a difficult patient.”

  “Actually, you’re not. But you are stubborn and prone to extraordinary accidents.”

  I couldn’t argue against that. After all, Skelly had treated me for monster bites, ribs broken by ghosts, and any number of more usual injuries from physical confrontations. Not to mention a small case of being dead once or twice.

  “I promise to do as instructed. I’ll go straight home and rest my eyes. But can I ask you a question first?”

  Skelly pushed his hands through his hair and gave me a tired smile. “Sure.”

  “What can you tell me about persistent vegetative states?”

  “PVS?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I have a case that touches on it.”

  “Ah. Well, I can’t talk about specific cases and I’m not a neurologist but I can give you a broad rundown. Do you know what a PVS is?”

  “It’s like a coma, isn’t it?”

  “No. It’s a separate thing. Coma is a short-term state that mimics very deep sleep—it only lasts hours to a few days while the cortex of the brain is severely traumatized. Then the patient either dies because the brain can’t survive the trauma, or they move on to a vegetative state where they may respond to some stimuli, may seem to be awake for a few minutes at a time, but they aren’t actually aware. Usually that state lasts a few days—a couple of weeks at most—while the brain heals from whatever trauma caused the initial coma, and after that the patient wakes up and resumes normal response to stimuli—or as much as they can.

  “This kind of thing happens in . . . say, meningitis cases or head trauma cases and usually resolves one way or the other very quickly. But if the patient’s state doesn’t change—if they don’t wake up and start responding to stimuli after four weeks—we call it a persistent vegetative state, or PVS. To most people it still looks like deep sleep, but the patient may seem to respond to some stimuli and to do things like sigh, laugh, or cry. It may seem like they’re aware, but it’s just autonomic function. They are actually nonresponsive because the brain stem is functioning but higher functions are shut down.”

  “So, is this common?”

  “Oh no. PVS is rare. Comas aren’t common, so the states that evolve from them are even less so, and most—as I said—resolve long before a persistent state occurs. I’ve never actually seen a case of coma or PVS in my career. Most non-neurologists don’t unless they work in emergency or trauma. And then there are fugue states, which are psychiatric cases of personality disassociation in which the patient has periods of amnesia and denies actions they undertook at that time—not just don’t remember, but actively deny doing them. Fugue states can be related to temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder,” he added, ticking them off on his fingers.

  I shook my head. “That’s not the situation here. The person in question is literally bedridden and seems to be asleep, but she keeps sitting up and painting compulsively. But I have to say, she doesn’t really seem to be ‘there’ when it happens.”

  Skelleher stared at me. “You saw this?”

  I nodded.

  “When?”

  “Today. That’s how I got paint in my eye—the patient flipped her brush at me while she was painting, but it was more like she was a puppet being operated by someone else because she didn’t actually open her eyes or seem to respond to anyone in the room. And then she started babbling and lay back down.”

  “That’s . . . that’s impossible. Not even in a minimally conscious state would that happen. It has to be a hoax.”

  “Unless the home care nurses are in on it, I don’t think so. I hear there may be other PVS patients in town who are doing similar things. . . .”

  Skelly seemed appalled. “Really? That’s freaky.”

  “You haven’t heard about them?”
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  “I’m a GP. When would I have time to hear about even the weirdest case that’s not on my ward or watch? I didn’t know there were any PVS patients in the city until you mentioned it. It’s really that rare. If they’re all doing strange things I’d expect the neurologists to be in a lather over it. I’m surprised they haven’t called a conference.”

  “Do you think I could talk to the other people involved with those cases . . . ?”

  “No. Not through me or any other medical professional. Patient confidentiality is sacrosanct. If you think it’s true and connected to whatever case you’re working, you’ll have to find another way.”

  He looked uncomfortable; I understood his position and didn’t push him. I shouldn’t have asked in the first place, but the coincidence of three rare cases that might all be doing the same impossible things set off every investigatory instinct I had, and I had to understand what was usual before I could reasonably judge what wasn’t. I’d have to find the others by myself somehow and determine what was going on, because one strange manifestation is just a case, but three could be, as Auric Goldfinger said, enemy action. And I didn’t have any living enemies that I knew of. Dead and restless ones . . . that I wasn’t so sure of.

  TWO

  I did get home all right, in spite of my eye. The itching, aching, watering aspects weren’t the worst of it; my left eye simply would not banish the Grey from sight, even when I was surrounded by the filtering effects of glass and steel in my truck. When I’d first become aware of the Grey it had, for a while, been persistently visible until I learned to filter it out. At the moment, no amount of trying would allow me to see without a flickering, color-tangled overlay of the ghost world so long as I had both eyes open. If I closed the injured eye, the vision merely changed intensity, but at least my eye was less raw. I hoped this wasn’t going to last too long. . . .

  I felt like a slacker coming home so early, but I wasn’t going to get anything done at the office or on the street with my eye objecting nonstop. As I opened the door to my condo, a furry little blur raced out, crossing my boot and streaking into the hall.

  “Ferret!” came a warning cry from inside. Apparently Quinton—my . . . “boyfriend” doesn’t quite cover it, but it’s close enough for most applications—had been hanging out at my place. He often did, but there had been some risky circumstances in his life recently and the frequency and duration of his companionship had become unpredictable.

  “Too late,” I called back, dropping my bag and spinning around, hoping to catch the fuzzy miscreant before she managed to get outside, underfoot, or into one of the neighbors’ homes. Visions of the Grey and the normal slid and tipped over each other, making me dizzy, and I wobbled, stumbling into the wall and sliding down to my knees.

  “Sneaky little carpet shark!” Quinton charged out and tripped over me, falling face-first onto the carpet outside my door. “Blast!” We both scrambled around, getting only semi-upright before lurching farther along the hall like a pair of gorillas as we tried to snatch the ferret from the floor.

  Chaos, the ferret, flipped around, dancing backward out of our grasp, chuckling and chattering at us as if we were the funniest show on earth. Until she backed into a door and her progress came to a sudden halt. For just a moment, her back end attempted to climb vertically up the door, but gravity was still operating and her butt slipped back down, piling into her middle. She sprang up, swiveling to face the new threat, and smacked her nose into the immovable object. With a chirp of surprise, she leapt away from the door, showing it her teeth by waving her open mouth in its direction, and backed straight into Quinton’s scooping hand.

  “Got ya! Victory is mine—because I have thumbs and you don’t!”

  The ferret stuck her head out of his fist and licked her nose as if this was all very boring.

  I put out my hands. “Do you want me to take her?”

  “Nope. It was my miscalculation that let her out and I’ll be the one to put her back.” He blinked at my face. “Umm . . . did you have one of those ‘interesting’ days today? Because you look like someone clocked you.”

  “Painted me in the eye actually. And yes—a little too interesting. I’ll tell you in a minute. Maybe over a drink.”

  Quinton raised his eyebrows.

  I nodded. “That kind of day. All right—you carry the furry offender back to ferret prison.”

  Chaos was not pleased to be returned to her cage so I could put my things away without tripping over her on my semi-blind side. Ferrets tend to want to dance right in your path and I didn’t want to fall down again or—worse—step on her. But she was tiny, warm, and fuzzy, which went a small distance to making me feel less annoyed.

  Quinton let me retire to the couch while he dug up a couple of beers as well as a cool, wet cloth to put on my irritated eye. I did my impression of a slug and slumped on the cushions as if my bones had dissolved, closing my eyes and letting the half-Grey effect of my injury reel forth in silver streamers against the darkness inside my eyelids. I heard Quinton bumping and rattling in the kitchen and saw a glowing energetic mist-shape moving in the persistent Grey that had invaded my mind’s eye. There were several other odd shapes floating about in the limited vision that played out behind my closed lids, but I couldn’t identify who or what they were—ghosts, neighbors, random knots of energy . . . ? They weren’t really doing anything that I could understand, just moving here and there. Only Quinton’s shape seemed to be operating with conscious intent. It drifted over and I felt him nudge my hand with something cool.

  “You said you’d like a drink.”

  I opened my eyes, finding that the lids seemed heavier than usual, and glanced first up at him, then down to the glass he was holding next to my hand. The small glass had half an inch of amber-gold liquid at the bottom. “Whiskey?”

  “It didn’t sound like a mystery beer sort of day,” he replied, alluding to his habit of accepting payment in beer for odd jobs done for various street people we knew around Pioneer Square.

  I took the glass. “Definitely not.” While the drink was welcome, I would rather have had the energy to ravish him. A warm sensation in my chest and a wicked glint in his eye gave me the impression he was thinking the same thing. Oh well . . .

  He sat next to me as I sipped and covered my free hand with his. “So, what about this day of yours?”

  “Well, a client’s sister flipped a blob of paint into my eye. Turns out oil paint has quite a few nasty things in it—before you start: I already saw the doctor—and I need to give the eye a little rest. But I also need to figure out what’s going on with the sister.”

  “In what way? She has a habit of flipping paint at people?”

  “No. This is kind of delicate ground since I’m breaking confidentiality to discuss it, but I don’t know how else I’m going to get to the bottom of this if I can’t talk to a few people about the case—or cases—but I’ll get to that bit in a minute.”

  “I won’t discuss it with anyone.”

  I nodded before going on. “OK. The sister is in some kind of vegetative state—kind of like a coma but not. Anyhow, she shouldn’t be doing much of anything beyond lying still, but in the past few months, she’s started sitting up and painting. Even more recently she started babbling. She doesn’t appear to be doing this on her own but rather seems to be either under someone else’s control or channeling a ghost or something that’s using her body for a few minutes at a time before it drops out or gets pushed out. I don’t know anything else yet, but the home care nurse let slip that there are two other cases like this—vegetative patients doing strange things—and Skelly was surprised to hear there were any vegetative patients at all in the area, since it’s very rare, much less that they were doing impossible things.” I paused to sip my drink, appreciating the warm sensation of the liquor making its way down and expanding the calm and security that spread from Quinton’s touch on my hand.

  “Now,” I continued, “you know me. I can’t swallow t
hat all of the rare cases in the area are exhibiting the same strange behaviors for unrelated reasons.”

  “Mathematically unlikely,” Quinton agreed.

  “So there has to be either a link or a related cause. And before I got paint in my eye, I could see that the room was pretty heavily haunted. Most of the ghosts weren’t of the willful variety—there were a lot of displaced repeaters there. I’d like to get in contact with the families of the other PVS patients and find out what’s been happening to them, maybe get to see them and evaluate the ghost situation. The client initially broached the subject as a possible spirit or demonic possession. She’s religious and apparently this is causing her more than the usual crisis experienced by the haunted. Her priest isn’t being very helpful—something about the limits of his role, which is frankly beyond my knowledge and probably not germane.”

  Quinton made a disgusted face. “Is he blaming her in some way? Making the situation out to be some kind of punishment for sin?”

  “I don’t get that sense, but apparently he, or the church in question, doesn’t support the Catholic idea of demonic possession and exorcism, so she’s mostly been told to sit tight and pray. Which hasn’t been helping, that the client can see. So she’s desperate and very upset and she’s hoping I can figure out what’s going on. What she expects to happen after that is anyone’s guess. I suppose she’ll want to get rid of the unwanted visitors, but she hasn’t said that or how she’d prefer to see it done. She has hired a medium to sit with her sister and try to converse with whoever or whatever is coming around, but the medium hasn’t had a lot of luck. The babbling appears to be the only communication they’re receiving and that seems to be in a foreign language.”

  “Wow. Does the sister know any foreign languages?”

  “I don’t know, but if so, I’m guessing either it’s not one her sister also knows or it’s not a language at all.” I took another sip of whiskey and sighed, closing my burning eyes again and tilting my head back against the sofa cushions. “The medium took a digital recording of today’s outburst and said he’d send it to me—”