The Possession

by Michael Rutger

  There was a staircase in the middle of the road.

  We walked toward it. By the time we were within fifty feet, the environment around it had changed. I could still see the tiled road and woods either side.

  But the staircase—simple, utilitarian, the edges of each step long ago painted a now scuffed white—led up to a doorway. A glow beyond. And once again, music, faintly, echoing as if against a hard surface. And for a moment I believed I caught a glimpse of someone up there. A woman.

  Ken and I looked at each other. Then we started up the stairs.

  Chapter

  54

  After Pierre ran at the back of Olsen’s the first time—crashing into the wall and bouncing back—he did it again, hard enough to make the wall shake.

  Molly and Val shrank back across the corridor. They braced for a third impact, but it didn’t come. After a minute, Molly crept back to the window. Peered through the crack. He wasn’t out there. “He’s gone.”

  “I doubt it,” Val said. “Or, not far.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Val looked at her. With both their phones off, the younger woman was little more than a deeper shadow in near darkness. And Val didn’t know what to tell her.

  This kind of event—whispered of, obliquely mentioned in old texts, sometimes even making it to general news—was one of the things that the Knack was supposed to help prevent. But you couldn’t tell where it would happen, or when—and so, often they failed. The Irish Fright in 1688, when villagers in parts of England and Wales armed themselves and tried to fight nonexistent groups of Irish soldiers. The Great Fear in Paris in 1789. Tales of Spring-Heeled Jack in London in the 1830s: a tall, thin specter who could leap from building to building—but for whom no piece of physical evidence was ever found. The nonexistent Halifax Slasher in 1938. The New England vampire panic of 1892. More recent mass attacks of fainting or hysteria or seeing things that aren’t there, everywhere from Tanganyika in 1962 to the West Bank in 1983 to Kosovo in 1990, including widespread claims of evil clown sightings in 2016: all attempts by the body or mind to frame things they had no way of encompassing. Usually they were one-offs, when barriers were breached accidently.

  This wasn’t. This was it happening again.

  Val had heard rumors from the oldest Birchlake locals as they sat at the bar (where, by all accounts, Alaina’s mother had spent more than a few afternoons in the years before she died) late at night and getting deep into the head-spinning local IPA. The rumors implied that something similar happened decades ago, when Alaina Hixon’s grandmother lost control of herself for a while and let wild things roam. A night nobody remembered clearly except for a sense that very bad things had happened, and a pervading sense of anxiety, a fear of the invisible. Only for a few hours, though, by the sound of it. And nothing like tonight.

  Val was unqualified to deal with the current situation and knew it. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  The building shifted around them. As if it stirred in its sleep—as if all large structures had only ever been drowsing animals, and at times like this they could awake. The wood in the walls and ceiling creaked, as though stretching, the sound of long-hidden things moving.

  They heard the front door being tried again. Then a muffled voice. “Molly—it’s me.”

  Pierre. He sounded afraid. “Ignore it,” Val said.

  “But he’s my friend.”

  “He just tried to smash his way into the building, through the wall. That the kind of thing he normally does?”

  “I can’t just leave him out there.”

  “Yeah, you can. That’s precisely what you should do. I’m sorry, Molly—but we have no idea what you’d be dealing with. Something’s gotten inside him. I don’t know what, exactly, but I can guarantee you it’s not a good kind of thing. And three of your other friends are lying in here. It’s our job to protect them.”

  A sudden burst of music from the bar area. Grotesquely loud, but scratchy—like a 45 played on a jukebox desperately in need of a service—distorted to the point where it was impossible to tell what it was.

  “That same goddamned song,” Val said. She felt worryingly close to losing it. The walls were creaking ever more loudly, as if wooden bones were close to breaking—as if the building was trying to break apart to expose them to what was outside. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. She was staring down the corridor toward the bar. Suddenly she shouted: “Go away!”

  The music stopped like a record scratch, changing to very loud, mean-sounding laughter.

  “Whatever it is,” Val said, trying to sound calm, “whatever you think you’re seeing, ignore it. It’s not there. It’s just how the things in the walls are making you feel.”

  Molly knew that. She knew the man she kept thinking she glimpsed in the shadows—the same person she thought she’d seen in her shower at the motel, and she’d fought that realization hard, but couldn’t any longer—could not be here.

  She knew that because the man’s name was Peter and he was dead.

  He’d thrown himself off Santa Monica pier after a three-month period of stalking Molly. He’d texted her half an hour before he killed himself, warning that he was going to do it, and she—despite the fact they’d never once gone out, and she’d never given him the slightest reason to believe there was something between them, despite Peter having scared the hell out of her by doing everything from sending two hundred emails a day to standing outside her apartment in the night, staring up at her window—had gotten down there as quickly as she could.

  But too late. She’d watched his body pulled out of the water, feeling hollow with a terrible guilt that no amount of rational thought since had been able to mute.

  So she knew it wasn’t him, but that only made it worse. Because it meant the horrible, bottomless sense of attack, of being under threat by something that felt it owned her, could only be coming from her own mind. It meant that feeling was already inside, bedded like a maggot burrowing in her soul. Peter buried it there and then fled reality and died.

  “We could run,” Val said. Molly just looked at her. “Yeah, I know. Just making sure we’re considering all options and making choices.”

  Molly began dragging Ken into the storage room. “Help me.”

  By the time they’d got him propped against the shelves next to Nolan, the noise around them was cacophonous. Banging, clanking in the pipes. What sounded like…

  “Jesus,” Val said, rearing back. In the space above the very lowest shelf on the left, a yard away from Ken, a hand had appeared. The fingers were moving, as if trying to grasp something. Its wrist disappeared into the wall.

  Molly scooted back along the floor. “Is it real?”

  “Real enough.” Val’s head hurt. She knew what the hand reminded her of. A hand that used to come creeping under the covers of her bed when she was small.

  Molly was blinking, slowly. She’d had enough too. “We’re going to have to—”

  A banging sound from underneath. Something or someone hammering so hard on the hatch to the cellar that Val bounced up and down. The D-ring attachment was already splintering. “Stop it,” Molly screamed.

  It stopped. The hammering on all the windows stopped too. Even the structure of the building stopped creaking. The silence was very loud.

  “Molly, it’s me. I’m okay.”

  The voice came from the cellar. Molly turned to look at it. Val shook her head, firmly, but found she couldn’t actually say anything. Her vision was blurring.

  “I was weird for a while,” Pierre said, earnestly. “I know that. But I’m okay now. There’s really freaky things out here, Moll. I need to come inside.”

  “Is it really you?”

  “Yes. I promise. It’s me. I’m fine now.”

  Val was still shaking her head, but her eyes were nearly closed now.

  “Pierre,” Molly said, crawling over to the hatch. “I want to believe you. But I don’t know.”


  Val’s head suddenly nodded forward, and she slumped down across the hatch. Molly was alone here now.

  “I’m scared, Moll.”

  Molly could barely see anymore. “But what if you hurt us?”

  “I’d never do that.”

  She pushed herself to her knees, started rolling Val off the hatch. “Okay. I’m doing it.”

  “Thank you. I’d never hurt you. I just want to be with you.”

  Molly froze. She knew those words.

  “Molly. Let me in. Please. I’ve been in the ocean. I’m so wet, and so cold. Let me in.”

  “No,” she whispered. “That’s not you.”

  Chapter

  55

  We came out of the top of the stairs into a corridor. There was no mist, no rain. It was just a corridor. Cream tiles. Gray walls. Light from panels in the ceiling, flickering. Double doors at the end, the kind with horizontal metal bars. They were shut.

  We walked up to them and listened. Music, and something else. A low, echoey hubbub. Hard to tell what it might be. I tried pushing one of the bars. The door was stiff. “I don’t think there’s any half measures here,” I said. “If we open this, we’re going in.”

  Ken answered by pushing on the other bar until the door opened, and walked straight through.

  I followed. We both stopped after a few feet.

  “What the hell is this?”

  We were back on Birchlake’s main street. That’s how it felt at first, at least—as if we’d just stepped out of the Tap. After that initial impression, however, it became clear that we weren’t. Or that we were, but…

  The light was low—lit with candles, dotted everywhere. The street was thronging with people: individuals, couples, families with children. Many were carrying baskets or bags. The cloud cover was low, and looked like the roof of a huge tent. People were talking, shouting, calling out. The loudest of these cries came from people working stalls crowded in front of buildings on both sides of the street.

  A place selling metal pans and earthenware pots. Another busy with livestock—and as we stood there, staring, people passed us with a live chicken or two in their bags—along with a row of strung-up rabbits, still with fur, and what looked like whole sides of pig, or boar.

  Further up on the right was a huge stall selling bolts of brightly colored cloth, though everybody around us was dressed in dark and muted hues. Behind us, we discovered, wasn’t the Tap—but a low, dark room where people lounged drinking coffee and dark tea from small glass cups. To one side of the room was a stall selling food—a young woman dolloping steaming spoonfuls of what looked like tagine into bowls.

  “I’ve been somewhere like this,” Ken said, as we stepped off the sidewalk and into the crowd. “Me and the wife went on holiday to Morocco years ago. It’s a souk. Or…something.”

  He was right, on both counts. It did feel like a Middle Eastern covered market, but the longer you looked the less that made sense. It was more like the idea of a souk than the reality. Everybody was white. No black or brown skins—making it seem more like a medieval square on market day, somewhere in Europe. But as we made our way through the people, unsure of what to do or where to go, I realized some of what I’d thought were candles providing the glowing spots of light were actually gas lamps. And some of the light was actually coming from long, horizontal candles hung from the arcing canvas a few feet above our heads. Candles that glowed along their entire lengths, a lot like fluorescent tubes.

  It was noisy. It was crowded. But. “There’s no smell.”

  Ken frowned. Despite all the food, the animals—someone walked past us leading a goat on a length of thick twine—the crush of men, women, and children, people grilling meats on open fires…there was no smell, apart from fresh rain and a hint of pine and fir. “You’re right.”

  A low howl came from down the street. I heard something sniggering behind me.

  “Also, these…aren’t people,” Ken said.

  I glanced back into the Tap. It was dark, full of muscular shadows. More than there had been before. Some were wearing tall hats. Others huddled together as if in secret conversation. I saw something slide out of the door, like a fat black sausage, two feet thick. Then it was gone. My mind was flickering like the spinning wheels on a slot machine, trying to find a temporary visual reference for things I knew were unpleasantly close, but unseeable.

  “And none of this is real?”

  “It’s real,” I said. “We spend half our lives in interior landscapes that can’t be seen or photographed.”

  “Yeah. Dreams. Memories. But—”

  “Something doesn’t have to be visible to be real. And there’s always more than one ‘real’ going on. We’ve just never been looking at this one before.”

  The faces in the shapes around us were changing. Even though I knew they weren’t actual faces—a woman hurrying past with a small child looked, for a moment, remarkably like a middle school teacher who gave me endless hell, and I realized the guy working a stall selling bottles of rose-colored ale looked a lot like one of the baristas in the Starbucks in Santa Monica, who suddenly wasn’t there one day, arrested after his girlfriend found a horrific stash of pornography on his laptop.

  “Christ, Nolan—over there.”

  He started pushing his way into the crowd before I’d seen what he meant. Then I saw it. Up at the crossroads, where previously there’d been a fountain, stood a statue. A huge cross, in battered and weathered stone, looming over the street and looking like it had done so for a thousand years. And there, on the other side, I spotted someone trying to shove through the crowd. A flash of color among clothing that was all gray or brown or dark and murky blue. A real face, that I recognized.

  Kristy.

  I followed in Ken’s wake, shouting her name. It was like trying to wade through a sea of molasses. Every now and then it felt as though something was paying attention to me, and that didn’t feel good—the rest of it coursed around us like heavy currents, with a sense of glee, of unconfinement.

  Soon I was right behind Ken, and we shoved forward together. I kept calling out, but Kristy either couldn’t hear or wasn’t listening. Resistance to our movement was getting stronger and stronger, the faces around us uglier. A man with both eyes sewn shut, a woman with a missing nose, a child with no lower jaw at all. No canvas awning above us any longer, just the low, dark sky, and it was raining once more, the ground turning to mud, tugging at my shoes.

  “Kristy!” I shouted, again.

  This time she heard, and stopped, and turned—and suddenly there was open space around us. “Nolan.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I thought it wasn’t you.” She looked impatient, anxious, unhappy to have been stopped from hurrying onward.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Him,” she said, pointing up the street. “Oh no.”

  The street disappeared into darkness. “Who, Kristy?”

  She was fidgeting from foot to foot, desperate to go. “The man I saw on my first night here. It had already started then and I didn’t even realize.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I have to talk to him. Dan was right.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, though I had no idea what she was talking about. “We’ll help.”

  “You can’t help. You don’t know. This is all about me.”

  Ken held up his hand. “Nolan…do you hear that?”

  All I could hear was the hubbub of all the “people” milling around further down the street. Though the road was clear on this side of the huge cross, it remained as crowded on the other.

  Then I heard Ken’s name being called.

  “Ignore it,” I said. “It’ll be like what we heard in the parking lot. Kristy—everything will be okay. Whatever it is, we can help.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “This is from before.”

  I thought she meant from before we’d met. “So what? Why would that matter?”

/>   “Because this,” she shouted, grabbing the cross on her necklace and holding it up. “Because that.” She jabbed a finger at the huge, crumbling cross at the crossroads.

  Another shout from the other side. My name this time—loud. Ken took a few steps back down the street.

  “Nolan, that sounds like it’s really them.”

  Kristy looked desperate, very young, like someone I hadn’t met yet. “Nolan, this is nothing to do with you, so just leave me alone. It’s nowhere out there.” She stabbed a finger at her forehead. “It’s only in here.”

  Someone shouted my name again. “Nolan,” Ken said, “that’s definitely Moll.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is,” Ken said. “She’s down there.”

  “Go,” Kristy told me. “Help her, Nolan.”

  “We are not splitting up again.”

  The noise from the other end of the street was getting louder and louder, less like the hubbub of people going about their business, and more like a mob. Shouts, chanting, harsh laughter.

  Then my name, and Ken’s, shouted together. But this time a scream. “Kristy,” I shouted, “come with—”

  But she was gone. She ran, taking advantage of my momentary inattention. I could hear footsteps running fast off down the side street. Off on her own.

  Another scream from down the street. “Ken!”

  Ken has faults. He’d be the first to admit this and happy to start listing them. Lack of loyalty isn’t one, however. “It’s up to you, mate,” he said, as he started trotting back toward the crossroads. “But Moll’s in trouble.”

  I went after him.

  The statue of the cross now had fountains around it again. The crowds were thicker still—and whereas they’d been shapes in passing before, people going about their business, they were far more boisterous now. Leers and cruel smiles, a sense of hectic cheer, as if a dark and exciting game had been announced. It felt much as I imagine it would have felt five hundred years ago, in a crowd that had been promised a public hanging. Or the burning of a witch.