Sole Possession

by Bryn Donovan

  Andi opened the can of varnish and hustled into the dining room. She squatted down to open the can then straightened up again and sloshed the varnish back and forth across the floor.

  Half done with this room, she told herself, and then, Almost there, keep moving, and then Okay, done. For a moment, she saw stars—the fumes made her dizzy. Oh well, they’d be out of here soon.

  A voice spoke in her head.

  I know what you’re doing.

  She staggered again, but not from the fumes. Her heart shuddered into overdrive as the horribly familiar evil enveloped her.

  Oh God. Oh God, he was here.

  “David!” she screamed.

  No answer.

  She wished desperately that Morty was with them. The psychic’s advice came to her: Keep your minds as clear and positive as possible.

  Positive. How could she be positive? The malevolent presence threatened to crush the breath from her lungs.

  She thought to herself, I am positive that I am going to end this bastard.

  She picked up her can of varnish as though picking up arms to go to battle.

  You won’t. You’ll fail.

  She felt rather than heard a cackle travel through the house, through her own shivering body.

  Oh, God. He was in her head.

  She tried to stop thinking, because he could hear that, too…and she didn’t want to give the evil undead asshole the satisfaction.

  “David!” she shouted. “David, he’s here!”

  OH YES. CALL HIM.

  She had to finish it. Finish it now before he did any more damage. She ran to the far wall and spilled varnish all over the floor. Her arms shook. It didn’t matter.

  Andi heard a sound like the clinking of giant ice cubes. She ducked, covered her head and screamed as the floor-to-ceiling window blasted in, sending hundreds of glass shards hurtling toward her. As she hunkered over, her arms stung in several places at once and the cold night air rushed in.

  “Andi!”

  David’s strong voice was like a lifeline. She raised her head cautiously.

  “Are you all right?” He reached her side in an instant.

  “It’s here! We have to finish!”

  David’s flashlight cast a circle of light on the floor, and when she happened to look down she took in a sharp breath.

  “What!” he barked.

  “In the floor.”

  The wood grain rippled and transformed itself into his face, huge, taking up half the room. The cavernous sockets of his eyes, flared nostrils, the mouth widening in an evil gash of a smile.

  Andi pointed. “Can you see it?”

  “No!” Nonetheless, David moved Andi aside, putting himself between her and where she pointed.

  The visage of the demon swirled up to David’s shoes and sucked up into him.

  Andi gasped. “Where did he go?” She swept her flashlight back and forth.

  David turned around to look at her.

  With soul-sickening terror, she raised her flashlight to him.

  His eyes were black open sockets.

  No! She wanted to shout, Come back to me! David, please…

  But she had known it would come to this. She’d known all along.

  Horror paralyzed her. Now she was going to die. Other souls leered from the sockets of those eyes. Irene’s killer. David’s not-father, Gordon Girard.

  David was no longer David. The demon had sole possession of him now.

  “Get away from me,” she said, her voice tiny and tight. She turned to run.

  He picked her up and threw her against the wall.

  Pain exploded through her skull and shoulder at the sickening crunch of the impact. A strangled cry tore from her throat as she crumpled to the floor. Had he broken her collarbone? It didn’t matter. No time. Get up, get up, she told herself and scrambled to her feet. Her legs trembled beneath her, and the agony in her shoulder made her gasp.

  The heat gun lay twenty paces away, the outlet not too much farther than that. If she could dump a little more varnish, if she could get it plugged in, if she could still get out of the house.

  But she would have to get David out, too.

  His hand lashed out and closed around her throat. She fought for air. The beads of the rosary bit into her neck—no protection at all.

  He could easily choke her to death. The only reason he didn’t, she knew, was that he enjoyed seeing her struggle.

  “You stupid bitch,” he said to her. “This is our son’s house.”

  “Not your son.” Her voice barely made it out.

  The grip on her throat lessened, ever so slightly. “What?”

  She raised her chin to help ease the pressure. “He’s not a Girard,” she spat at him.

  His face sagged in shock. Triumph welled inside her.

  Then the demon laughed a horrible laugh. In sing-song, he said to Andi, “He is now.”

  The faces of the past murderers in the empty eye sockets looked down at her and mocked her.

  She suddenly threw her head back and slipped out of the demon’s grasp. Her neck felt mangled and she covered it with both hands. “David!” she screamed, hoarse with the pain of her throat. “I know you’re in there!”

  The demon grabbed her by the hair and brought her face close to his. “Oh, do you want to talk to David?” he purred at her.

  Something cold tickled her cheek. A knife blade. David’s Swiss Army knife, the gardener knife. He had told Mr. Willingham he always had it with him.

  He dragged the blade along her cheek toward the corner of her mouth. “You like him, don’t you?” The lascivious tone in his voice disgusted her.

  “David!” she screamed again. She grabbed the medallion at the end of her rosary, hoping it might help yet. Not even knowing what she was doing, she tried to use her mind—with every bit of force it could muster—to push the thing out of David.

  The cavernous eyes flickered. For one moment, they were human; then they shifted back into demon sockets. And then they were human again.

  “Andi,” David said.

  * * *

  In his arms, she let out a sob of relief. “You have to fight it!”

  David reeled as if from a heavy blow. What just happened? Blurry memory, blurry vision. The effort of remaining aware of his surroundings filled his entire body with an unbelievable wracking pain like he had never felt before. It would be easier to slip away…

  He pushed her away from him. “Start the fire, get out!” He held on, fighting back the presence that pushed into him and made him feel like his skull might fly apart. Nausea threatened to make him retch. He tried to open his mouth to repeat the order. Why was she waiting? Had she lost her mind too?

  He couldn’t form the words. The entity violated more of his consciousness, his self. He struggled against it, but he was losing.

  It wanted him to kill Andi. It had always wanted him to kill her. She was getting between him and the house, trying to wrest it from the family.

  His hand raised the knife again.

  David’s own consciousness, barely hanging on, saw the blade rise.

  He had to stop it. He loved her. He’d said he would sooner die than hurt her, and he meant it.

  Gathering every fiber of his strength, he wrested control from the demon. As hard as he could, he plunged the knife into his own side.

  At first it felt like taking a punch. The blade went in to the hilt.

  The demon’s scream thrummed through his whole being to the roots of his hair.

  Then it left. It had no use for him if he was too injured to hurt anyone else.

  Pain seared through him. Blood gushed from his side. Almost done now, he thought.

  Andi screamed as he slouched forward, catching his shoulders. “Oh my God, David, he’s killed you.”

  “No,” he managed to say. “Got him out of me. He’s back in the house.”

  Another window blasted in, a brilliant shower of deadly ice.

  “Let’s finish it,” D
avid gasped, hanging onto Andi’s shoulder to get to his feet again.

  In the chaos that surrounded them, it took Andi a few moments to process what David said. The demon hadn’t plunged the knife into his side. David did it himself, to get the thing out of him…and to keep it from hurting her.

  “Get over to the door,” she said, guiding him to the back entrance, where he leaned against the doorframe.

  Another window exploded. Andi shrieked again and ducked. She darted to the last can of varnish and flung it all over the floor. Then she plugged in the heat gun and backed away.

  “I don’t even know if it’ll work,” she said as she reached David’s side.

  A tiny spark gleamed in the darkness.

  With a massive whoosh, the room blazed into flame.

  David grabbed her with one arm and his side with other. “Let’s go.” They staggered out of the house.

  Once they were a small distance away, Andi remembered that when Mr. Willingham had been injured, David had tied his shirt around the wound to stop the bleeding. “Wait here.” She gasped, her lungs taking in cool, clean night air, as she wrestled out of her denim shirt. She wore a tank top beneath, not that it mattered.

  Bending down, she tied the shirt tightly around David’s midsection. His drawn face looked strange in the eerie light of the fire. He almost glowed.

  Soon, he would be a pale ghost, too…

  No. “Come on, we need a hospital,” she said, pulling his arm around her shoulders. He sagged against her body. He was a big man, too heavy for her…

  She stiffened her spine and used all the strength in her legs to support him and hurry him to the car.

  “Give me your keys!” She dug in his jeans pocket and found them. With shaking hands, she unlocked and opened the car door. “Come on, get inside.” She ran around to get into the driver’s seat. Once she got in, she said, “You’re still you, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His eyes looked glassy, but they were still his beautiful green eyes.

  Andi peeled out of the driveway in an aggressive spray of gravel.

  “Is it burning?” David asked in a low voice. She glanced over again and saw his eyes were closed now, his head resting against the dashboard.

  She looked back as she sped away.

  Bright orange flames poured out of most of the windows on the right side of the house, shooting almost a story high. A large hunk of flaming debris fell out of one of the second story windows, and another window began to blaze.

  She took in all of this in a moment before turning her face back to the road, and then they turned the corner. Already speeding, she pressed the gas pedal harder. Everything still seemed unreal to her, as though she were coming to the end of a very long dream.

  “Yeah,” she told David. “It’s burning.”

  “Go ahead and burn, you bastard,” David muttered.

  She wasn’t sure if he was talking about the house itself or the demon who’d resided within it. They seemed to be almost one and the same. She wondered if the flames could hurt the evil spirit. She hoped so.

  They came close to the hospital. “Oh my God,” Andi said suddenly. “What are we going to tell them?” They would think she’d stabbed David! She would have to have a good explanation for this.

  For a few dizzying moments, her mind went blank. And then she said, “Listen, David! You and I had a fight. You got suicidal and stabbed yourself. I got you out but I left the heat gun on.”

  He said nothing.

  “Okay?”

  “Great,” David grunted. He leaned the side of his face against the car window. In the shifting light from the streetlights, his face looked calm and composed now.

  Fear crawled through her. How deep was the wound? How badly had he hurt himself?

  “We’re here,” she said as she pulled into the back entrance, where the ambulances were. “Please don’t bleed to death.”

  She put the car into park and jumped out.

  A man ambled toward her, saying, “Lady, you can’t park here.”

  “Help my boyfriend in the car!” she screamed at him. “He’s dying!”

  The man hollered to one of his companions and in no time, they eased him onto a gurney and rushed him into the hospital. A woman told Andi to go around to the front desk and sign in. Andi nodded and returned to the car. Her vision blurred and she heard something strange and realized that she was sobbing.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Andi huddled on a chair in the waiting room. “I can’t believe they still haven’t told me anything,” she said to her sister on the phone. “I’m losing my mind.”

  “It hasn’t actually been that long,” Lissa’s voice soothed. “You said he didn’t even get burned that badly.”

  “Yeah,” Andi said.

  She hadn’t leveled with her family about the specifics of David’s injuries. They knew there had been a fire, and they knew he was hurt. Beyond that, she’d kept the details pretty sketchy.

  Lissa said, “I wish I were there to sit with you.”

  “No, you don’t. These chairs suck.” There were all upholstered with purple scratchy material. No doubt they’d all been vomited upon at one point or another. Her shoulder throbbed. She hadn’t broken any bones, but she had some wicked bruises. “I think you’re probably having more fun where you are.”

  Lissa and Greg hadn’t taken a honeymoon immediately after the wedding, but now they were spending a weekend in New York City, where neither of them had been before. Her sister had told her that it really was beautiful before Christmas, just like everyone said.

  “We’ll be back Monday,” Lissa said. “Hopefully by then he’ll be out, right? But I’ll help out as much as I can.”

  “Hey, you’re a married lady now. I know you won’t have as much time to do stuff.”

  “You’re still my sister.” Andi heard her sigh over the phone. “You know what, I still feel really bad about how we argued the other week. I remembered what Mom said about Busha, and I was thinking, if you really do see things like this…that must have always been so hard on you. And none of us made it any easier.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Andi said. She could not even bring herself to worry about this. She was too busy worrying about David.

  “Well I just wanted you to know. Listen, I’ll keep praying for your boyfriend, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll call me as soon as you know anything?”

  “Yeah. Definitely.”

  After Andi hung up she looked down at the magazines on the table in front of her. An issue of a woman’s magazine advertised ten new cupcake recipes. How could anyone waiting around at a hospital think about baking cupcakes? An issue of People, almost a year old, advertised the World’s Sexiest Men. I already know the world’s sexiest man, she thought. Not to mention the world’s most amazing man. And it would just be nice to know he’s going to be okay.

  She could feel herself getting sniffly again, but she didn’t let herself give into it. Already she had a headache, like a hangover, from crying.

  Instead she got up to get yet another drink of water. The ends of her hair dipped into the fountain, and she supposed it was gross and unsanitary, but she didn’t even care. She kept feeling thirsty. Maybe shedding too many tears could actually leave you dehydrated.

  She sat back down in a horrible chair. Why had he hurt himself? There must have been another way to get the demon out of him…although, even after hours of thinking about it, she couldn’t think of another one.

  “Andi Petrowski?” a woman’s voice came from behind her.

  She turned around to look at the woman in a hospital uniform who held a clipboard. “Yes.”

  “Your friend’s in stable condition. He’s unconscious, but if you want, you can come in and see him now.”

  * * *

  David opened his eyes and saw Andi, balled up in a chair and staring out the window. He heard beeping machines and realized he was in the hospital. That surprised him because h
e thought he would be dead.

  She looked over at him and rushed over to his side, saying, “Oh my God, you’re awake.”

  “You’re all right,” he said. This fact made him deeply happy.

  “Yes! How are you?”

  He mulled the question over. “Good?” He felt pleasantly out of it. His nose itched, and when reached up to scratch, he found there were tubes in it. Oxygen. Another tube attached to his hand. Painkiller, he guessed. That explained the odd, floaty feeling.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” she said. She had dark circles under her eyes. “You had internal bleeding…you scared the hell out of me! They said you almost lost your pancreas!”

  David tried to remember if people absolutely needed a pancreas. He didn’t think it was one of the optional ones, like tonsils or an appendix, but his brain wasn’t working right. “Everything still in there?”

  “Yes. You were lucky.”

  He saw how shaken up she was and wished he could do something to help. Even lifting a hand to touch her was out of the question, for the moment.

  She said, “You lost all this blood and I didn’t know what was going on for a really long time. How could you do that to yourself?”

  “He hurt you.” The conversation was already exhausting David. “Had to get him out.”

  “I know. I know why you did it…but you could have died. How did you know that would work?”

  “I knew.” He closed his eyes.

  When he woke up again in the middle of the night, his side hurt like hell. Andi showed him how he could give himself more painkillers through the IV.

  Once he could think clearly, he pondered what must have happened in the hospital. “You told them I stabbed myself?”

  “Yeah,” she said. She got up and closed the door to the hospital room then came back and told him, “I didn’t know what else to say.”

  David thought this over. “That’s fine.”

  “At first they thought maybe I stabbed you,” Andi explained. “But you still had the knife on you. You put it back into your pocket.”

  “You’re kidding.” David couldn’t remember doing this. Moreover, he couldn’t believe he had done it, right in the middle of bleeding all over the place. But he had always carried the knife in his pocket. Some habits died hard, he guessed.